Constance Fenimore Woolson.
Part of the same plot was the draft riot which broke out in New York City on July 13, 1863. It lasted four days, and four hundred people were killed by the rioters. The draft was temporarily suspended, but was quietly resumed in August.
THE DRAFT RIOT
IN THE UNIVERSITY TOWER: NEW YORK, July, 1863
Is it the wind, the many-tongued, the weird,
That cries in sharp distress about the eaves?
Is it the wind whose gathering shout is heard
With voice of peoples myriad like the leaves?
Is it the wind? Fly to the casement, quick,
And when the roar comes thick,
Fling wide the sash,
Await the crash!
Nothing. Some various solitary cries,—
Some sauntering woman's short hard laugh,
Or honester, a dog's bark,—these arise
From lamplit street up to this free flagstaff:
Nothing remains of that low threatening sound;
The wind raves not the eaves around.
Clasp casement to,—
You heard not true.
Hark there again! a roar that holds a shriek!
But not without—no, from below it comes:
What pulses up from solid earth to wreck
A vengeful word on towers and lofty domes?
What angry booming doth the trembling ear,
Glued to the stone wall, hear—
So deep, no air
Its weight can bear?
Grieve! 'tis the voice of ignorance and vice,—
The rage of slaves who fancy they are free:
Men who would keep men slaves at any price,
Too blind their own black manacles to see.
Grieve! 'tis that grisly spectre with a torch,
Riot—that bloodies every porch,
Hurls justice down
And burns the town.
Charles de Kay.
On November 19, 1863, a portion of the battle-field of Gettysburg was consecrated as a national military cemetery. It was there that President Lincoln's famous Gettysburg address, prepared almost on the spur of the moment, was delivered. He said:—
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us;—that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion;—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."