DECEMBER 18, 1861:
Captain
William Moore of Company G, 10th Wisconsin Infantry serving in Kentucky, tells
a sad story in his diary:
“Here I learned from
a citizen the history of a family who present a sad picture of the deplorable
effects of civil war. The Father and two sons, each feeling a desire to do
something for their country according to their individual notions of right,
enlisted; the two sons in the Union army, and the Father in the Rebel army. The
two sons expostulated with the Father, but to no purpose, when one of the sons
addressed his father in the following language.
‘Father, if we meet
in battle and you get your gun to your face to shoot, and find that you got
sight on one [of us], don't take it down untill you have pulled the trigger.
For as I live, I shall know no man as a friend who is an enemy to my country,
and the cause I am fighting for.’
Shaking hands they
parted, to meet perhaps in the deadly conflict. Such are the deplorable
consequences of one Brother going to war with another.”
The American Civil War has been given many names, but
perhaps the most fitting is “The Brothers’ War” for its history is filled with
the stories of families divided by their loyalties to both the Union and the
Confederacy.
Divided loyalties were felt
even in the White House, for four of President Abraham Lincoln's brothers-in-law
served the Confederate cause. One of them, Ben Harden Helm, turned down a
personal offer from Lincoln of a commission in the Union Army and was later
killed as Confederate general in the Battle of Chickamauga.
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