The citizens of New Orleans, men and women, pressed forward to tender every aid to their suffering enemies. By private subscription, the citizens supplied mattresses and pillows, lint and old linen; all of which articles were then exceedingly scarce in the city. Women-nurses cared for the British, and watched at their bedsides night and day. Several of the officers, who were grievously wounded, were taken to private residences and there provided with every comfort.
Such acts as these ennoble humanity, and soften the horrors of war.
James Parton (Retold)
APRIL 13
THOMAS JEFFERSON
THE FRAMER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
All honour to Jefferson—to the man, who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for National Independence by a single People, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times; and so to embalm it there, that to-day and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
Abraham Lincoln
THE FOURTH OF JULY
1826
“Is it the Fourth?” “No, not yet,” they answered, “but ’t will soon be early morn.
We will wake you, if you slumber, when the day begins to dawn.”
Then the statesman left the present, lived again amid the past,
Saw, perhaps, the peopled Future, lived again amid the Past,
Till the flashes of the morning lit the far horizon low,
And the sun’s rays, o’er the forest in the East, began to glow.
. . . . . . . . . .
Evening, in majestic shadows, fell upon the fortress’ walls;
Sweetly were the last bells ringing on the James and on the Charles.
’Mid the choruses of Freedom, two departed victors lay,
One beside the blue Rivanna, one by Massachusetts Bay.