They all sang that.  They were very jolly, just as though they were going to a picnic.  Some of them came back that way a few years later and they were not so jolly.  And some there were who never came back at all.

Freight-trains passed southward, blue with men in the cars, and on top of the cars, and in the caboose, and on the cowcatcher, always going south and never north.  For “Down South” were many Rebels, and all along the way south were Copperheads, and they all wanted to come north and kill us, so soldiers had to go down there and fight them.

And I marveled much that if God hated Copperheads, as our preacher said He did, why He didn’t send lightning and kill them, just in a second, as He had Si Johnson.  And then all that would have to be done would be to send for a doctor to see that they were surely dead, and a preacher to pray, and the neighbors would dress them in their best Sunday suits of black, folding their hands very carefully across their breasts, then we would bury them deep, filling in the dirt and heaping it up, patting it all down very carefully with the back of a spade, and then go away and leave them until Judgment-Day.

Copperheads were simply men who hated Lincoln.  The name came from copperhead-snakes, which are worse than rattlers, for rattlers rattle and give warning.  A rattler is an open enemy, but you never know that a copperhead is around until he strikes.  He lies low in the swale and watches his chance.  “He is the worstest snake that am.”

It was Abe Lincoln of Springfield who was fighting the Rebels that were trying to wreck the country and spread red ruin.  The Copperheads were wicked folks at the North who sided with the Rebels.  Society was divided into two classes:  those who favored Abe Lincoln, and those who told lies about him.  All the people I knew and loved, loved Abe Lincoln.

I was born at Bloomington, Illinois, through no choosing of my own, and Bloomington is further famous as being the birthplace of the Republican party.  When a year old I persuaded my parents to move seven miles north to the village of Hudson, that then had five houses, a church, a store and a blacksmith-shop.  Many of the people I knew, knew Lincoln, for he used to come to Bloomington several times a year “on the circuit” to try cases, and at various times made speeches there.  When he came he would tell stories at the Ashley House, and when he was gone these stories would be repeated by everybody.  Some of these stories must have been peculiar, for I once heard my mother caution my father not to tell any more “Lincoln stories” at the dinner-table when we had company.

And once Lincoln gave a lecture at the Presbyterian Church on the “Progress of Man,” when no one was there but the preacher, my Aunt Hannah and the sexton.

My Uncle Elihu and Aunt Hannah knew Abe Lincoln well.  So did Jesse Fell, James C. Conklin, Judge Davis, General Orme, Leonard Swett, Dick Yates and lots of others I knew.  They never called him “Mister Lincoln,” but it was always Abe, or Old Abe, or just plain Abe Lincoln.  In that newly settled country you always called folks by their first names, especially when you liked them.  And when they spoke the name, “Abe Lincoln,” there was something in the voice that told of confidence, respect and affection.