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[80] related to the writer at different times; but it is not his province to do so in this chronicle.1 Yet there is one incident, related by Professor Stoever, as coming under his own observation, which so vividly illustrates the character of a true man and Christian soldier, that it should not be left unrecorded, and is here given. When orders were issued for the army to pursue Lee,2 General O. O. Howard, commanding the Sixth Corps, hastened to the bedside of Captain Griffith, one of his beloved staff-officers, who had received a mortal wound. After a few words, the General opened his New Testament, read the 14th chapter of John, and then, kneeling, commended his dying friend to God. An embrace and a hurried farewell followed, and so the friends parted, never to meet again on the earth. That night Captain Griffith died, and Howard, in pursuit of Lee, bivouacked in a drenching rain near the base of the South Mountain range.

Soon after the Battle of Gettysburg the State of Pennsylvania purchased seventeen acres of land adjoining the Evergreen Cemetery, on Cemetery Hill, near that village, for the purpose of a burial-place for all the Union soldiers who fell in that battle. On the 19th of November following, the ground was consecrated, with appropriate ceremonies, in the presence of the President of the United States, members of his cabinet, the governors of several States, generals of the army, and a vast concourse of other citizens.. Edward Everett delivered an oration, and President Lincoln a brief but remarkable and touching dedicatory address.3

1 After the Battle of Gettysburg, the body of a Union soldier was found in a secluded spot, partly reclining. In his cold hand was an ambrotype likeness of three little children, upon which his open, but then rayless eye had evidently been gazing at the last moment of his life. A notice of the fact was given in a Philadelphia paper. Public curiosity was excited, for there was no clew to the name of the soldier. Copies of the ambrotype were made. The touching story found its way through numerous newspapers, with a description of the soldier and the faces of the three children. By this means the widowed mother was informed of the fate of the husband and father. The soldier proved to be Sergeant Hunniston, of Portville, in Western New York, and to his afflicted family Dr. J. F. Bourns, of Philadelphia, conveyed the precious ambrotype, and some substantial presents from citizens of Philadelphia, early in January, 1864.

2 See page 74.

3 The following is a copy of Mr. Lincoln's remarks:--

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, an 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 are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of 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 power to add or detract. The world will little note or 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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom; and governments of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

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