honest-hearted boys; the sterling products of our Northern home-life, and Northern Common Schools, and that grand stalwart Northern blood, the yeoman blood of sturdy middle class freemen—­the blood of the race which has conquered on every field since the Roman Empire went down under its sinewy blows.  They prated little of honor, and knew nothing of “chivalry” except in its repulsive travesty in the South.  As citizens at home, no honest labor had been regarded by them as too humble to be followed with manly pride in its success; as soldiers in the field, they did their duty with a calm defiance of danger and death, that the world has not seen equaled in the six thousand years that men have followed the trade of war.  In the prison their conduct was marked by the same unostentatious but unflinching heroism.  Death stared them in the face constantly.  They could read their own fate in that of the loathsome, unburied dead all around them.  Insolent enemies mocked their sufferings, and sneered at their devotion to a Government which they asserted had abandoned them, but the simple faith, the ingrained honesty of these plain-mannered, plain-spoken boys rose superior to every trial.  Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all, says in his grandest flight: 

          Set honor in one eye and death in the other,
          And I will look on both indifferently.

They did not say this:  they did it.  They never questioned their duty; no repinings, no murmurings against their Government escaped their lips, they took the dread fortunes brought to them as calmly, as unshrinkingly as they had those in the field; they quailed not, nor wavered in their faith before the worst the Rebels could do.  The finest epitaph ever inscribed above a soldier’s grave was that graven on the stone which marked the resting-place of the deathless three hundred who fell at Thermopylae: 

          Go, stranger, to Lacedaemon,—­
          And tell Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her laws.

They who lie in the shallow graves of Andersonville, Belle Isle, Florence and Salisbury, lie there in obedience to the precepts and maxims inculcated into their minds in the churches and Common Schools of the North; precepts which impressed upon them the duty of manliness and honor in all the relations and exigencies of life; not the “chivalric” prate of their enemies, but the calm steadfastness which endureth to the end.  The highest tribute that can be paid them is to say they did full credit to their teachings, and they died as every American should when duty bids him.  No richer heritage was ever bequeathed to posterity.