William Schouler, A history of Massachusetts in the Civil War: Volume 1

[48] alarms and the strifes of battle. The common schools of Massachusetts were their Alma Mater. In their homes by the shores of the sea, and in the pleasant fields and valleys of the interior, they had been nurtured in Christian morals and the ways of God. They had beheld with anxiety, but without fear, the dark clouds of war settling upon the face of the nation, which they knew must be met and dispelled, or it would remain no longer a nation to them. Through the long and anxious years of the war, they never hesitated, doubted, or wavered in their faith that the Union would stand the shock which menaced it; and that, through the sacrifice of noble lives and the baptism of precious blood, it would emerge from the smoke and fire of civil war with unsubdued strength, and with garments glittering all over with the rays of Liberty. It was to be a contest between right and wrong, law and anarchy, freedom and despotism. He who could doubt the issue of such a war could have no abiding faith in the immortality of American progress, or the eternal justice of Christian civilization.

On the 15th day of April, 1861, Governor Andrew received a telegram from Washington to send forward at once fifteen hundred men. The drum-beat of the long roll had been struck,