The war for the Union, with all its majestic pageantry, is a thing of the distant past. But its events have plucked the shining years they gilded, even from this wondrous century, and molded them into a beacon for ages yet to come. Let veterans rejoice in their honorable relation to those events, and cherish with pride their sacred recollections. Among these recollections is that of the contracted habitation, grander in its humility than a palace imperial, which domiciled a patriotism that was stainless and a heroism that was sublime, the useful, modest, unappreciated Shelter Tent. It went with the heroes of the war for the Union, through all their vivid experiences, as they marched and camped and fought and conquered. They were the heroes of the war, the heroes of the age.
They marched through deep wildernesses and across rough mountain ranges; through stony paths that grilled their ankle bones, and freezing creeks that chilled their shoulder blades with a glacial emulsion; through fruiting farmsteads with broad avenues of maple, beech and oak; through beckoning orchards reddened for the clutch of hungry hands.
They marched through burning sands or stifling limedust white as shredded alkali; through shoreless mud, black, yellow, red or gray, tough, tender, slushy or plastic, but always tenacious as Arabic gums.
They marched through settlements of frowning, hostile, alienated countrymen, with a dagger in each frown and a stab in every stare, toward the embattled hosts of a rebellious confederacy fiercely armed for the conflict against right and light. They marched through ignorance and barbarism and instruments of cruel bondage; through the snap of the lash and the sizz of the branding iron; through writhing iniquities and paths piled high with iron chains; through city streets and country roads; through horrid prison pens, o'er bloody battle-fields, past pyramids of skulls,—up to the shining heights of fame.
They camped in cottonfield and canebrake; in groves of magnolia and myrtle; in still forests where jack-pots were juicy; in flowering suburbs where sweet hams blossomed in the smoke-house and fat turkeys ripened in the open air; on the levees of murmuring rivers and the shores of the tossing sea.
They camped on plantations and left them desolate, where their devouring camp-fires and their patriotic appetites wrought piteous ruin through wide landscapes of fertile plenteousness.
They camped in shelter tents of microcosmic cut and altruistic design; in huts composite, whereof logs, brush, mud, boards and straw in varying proportions furnish the picturesque materials; or, tentless, hutless, houseless, lay exposed to visits from alleged pearly dew and so-called crystal raindrops, winked at all through the long night-watches by the shimmering stars.
They camped in barracks grimed with the smoke and smear of previous occupants, who departing left behind them sociable swarms of their closest friends, ready to extend from every crack and crevice an incisive welcome; in bastioned forts, constantly exposed to imminent explosions from burrowing enemies, hilarious in undiscoverable tunnels far below. They camped with controversial comrades loaded on all topics from justification by faith to the cremation of garbage; with comrades wearing periodically the outward and visible signs of an inward and spirituous exhilaration, to whom all paths of glory lead but to the grass, and whose nocturnal slumbers yield a resonance with terror-smiting combination of college yell and Indian war-whoop.
They camped unwelcome amid prejudices and hatreds inveterate; amid revilings incessant and intense; exposed to sneers in which the curled lip of beauty impinged against a nose sniffing with scorn; but they camped to stay, and they dispensed with welcome, as with other comforts and luxuries multifold. The swelling chorus of their war songs rent the sky, like the long, loud shout of jubilee which rises when sundry millions of citizens, who have not dined regularly under a revenue tariff regime, have tardily come to their senses, and voted for three square meals a day.
Their morning drum-beat belted the continent from the Atlantic to the Rocky mountains with one continuous strain of joyous reveille. Their evening dress parades were a spectacular divertisement, impressing on daily thronging thousands enlarged views of the power and dignity of invincible America.