could not before.  On the Wednesday of that very week the Battle of Antietam was fought, and on the Friday morning we opened our papers and read President Lincoln’s first Proclamation of Emancipation.  The great deed was done; the night was over; the morning had dawned.  From that day onward our cause, under God, was saved; but that proclamation saved the Union.  No foreign power dared to oppose us after that, and Gettysburg sealed the righteous act of Lincoln, the Liberator, and decided the victory.

At the beginning of this chapter I described the thrilling scenes at the opening of the conflict; let me now narrate a still more thrilling one at its termination.  The war began by the surrender of Fort Sumter by Major Anderson, April 13, 1861; the war virtually ended by the restoration of the national flag by the same hand in the same Fort, on April 14, 1865.

I joined an excursion party from New York, on the steamer Oceanus, and we went down to witness the impressive ceremonies in Sumter.  We found Charleston a scene of wretched desolation, and General Sherman, who had once resided there, said he had never realized the horrors of war until he had seen the terrible ruins of that once beautiful city.  At the time of my writing, now, Charleston is crowded every day with visitors to its industrial Exposition, and the President is received with ovations by its people.

Our party went over to Fort Sumter in a steamer commanded by a negro, who was an emancipated slave, but very soon became a member of Congress.  The broken walls of Sumter, brown, battered and lonely in the quiet waves were hopelessly scarred, and all around it on the narrow beach lay a stratum of bullets and broken iron several inches deep.

The Fort that day was crowded with an immense assemblage.  Among them were the Hon. Henry Wilson, afterwards Vice-President, and Attorney-General Holt, Judge Hoxie, of New York, William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson, the famous member of the English Parliament, who had once been mobbed for his anti-slavery speech in this country.  General S.L.  Woodford was in command for the day.  Dr. Richard S. Storrs offered an impressive prayer, and the oration was delivered by direction of the Government, by Henry Ward Beecher.  When the speech was completed, Major Anderson drew out from a mail bag the identical bunting that he had lowered four years before, and attached the flag to the halyards, and when it began to ascend, General Gilmore grasped the rope behind him, and, as it came along to our part of the platform several of us grasped it also.  Mr. Thompson shouted, “Give John Bull a hold of that rope.”  When the dear old flag reached the summit of the staff, and its starry eyes looked out over the broad harbor, such a volley of cannon from ship and shore burst forth that one might imagine the old battle of the Monitors was being fought over again.

The frantic scene inside the Fort beggars description.  We grasped hands and shouted and my irrepressible old friend, Hoxie, of New York, with tears in his eyes, embraced one after another, exclaiming:  “This is the greatest day of my life!” In the rainbow of those stars and stripes we read that day the covenant that the deluge of blood was ended, and that the ark of freedom had rested at length upon its Ararat.