Lincoln
and the Sleeping Sentinel

I

HE truth is always and everywhere attractive. The child loves, and never outgrows its love, for a real true story. The story of this young soldier, as it was presented to me, so touchingly reveals some of the kindlier qualities of the President’s character that it seldom fails to charm those to whom it is related. I shall give its facts as I understood them, and I think I can guarantee their general accuracy.

On a dark September morning in 1861, when I reached my office I found waiting there a party of soldiers, none of whom I personally knew. They were greatly excited, all speaking at the same time, and consequently unintelligible. One of them wore the bars of a captain. I said to them pleasantly: “Boys, I cannot understand you. Pray, let your captain say what you want and what I can do for you.” They complied, and the captain put me in possession of the following facts:

They belonged to the Third Vermont Regiment, raised, with the exception of one company, on the eastern slope of the Green Mountains, and mustered into service while the battle of Bull Run was progressing. They were immediately sent to Washington, and since their arrival, during the last days of July, had been stationed at the Chain Bridge, some three miles above Georgetown. Company K, to which most of them belonged, was largely made up of farmer boys, many of them still in their minority.

The sterile flanks of the mountains of Vermont have, to some extent, been abandoned for the more fertile regions of the West, and are now open to immigration from the more barren soils of Scandinavia and the Alps. Fifty years ago these Vermont mountains reared men who have since left their impress upon the enterprise of the world. The hard conditions of life in these mountains then required the most unbroken regularity in the continuous struggle for existence. To rise and retire with the sun, working through all the hours of daylight, sleeping through all the hours of night, was the universal rule. Such industry, practised from childhood, united to a thrift and economy no longer known in the republic, enabled the Vermonter to pay his taxes and train up his family in obedience to the laws of God and his country. Nowhere under the sun were charity, benevolence, mutual help, and similar virtues more finely developed or universally practised than among these hard-handed, kind-hearted mountaineers.

The story which I extracted from the “boys” was, in substance, this: William Scott, one of these mountain boys, just of age, had enlisted in Company K. Accustomed to his regular sound and healthy sleep, not yet inured to the life of the camp, he had volunteered to take the place of a sick comrade who had been detailed for picket duty, and had passed the night as a sentinel on guard. The next day he was himself detailed for the same duty, and undertook its performance. But he found it impossible to keep awake for two nights in succession, and had been found by the relief sound asleep on his post. For this offence he had been tried by a court-martial, found guilty, and sentenced to be shot within twenty-four hours after his trial, and on the second morning after his offence was committed.

Scott’s comrades had set about saving him in a characteristic way. They had called a meeting, appointed a committee, with power to use all the resources of the regiment in his behalf. Strangers in Washington, the committee had resolved to call on me for advice, because I was a Vermonter, and they had already marched from the camp to my office since daylight that morning.

The captain took all the blame from Scott upon himself. Scott’s mother opposed his enlistment on the ground of his inexperience, and had only consented on the captain’s promise to look after him as if he were his own son. This he had wholly failed to do. He must have been asleep or stupid himself, he said, when he paid no attention to the boy’s statement that he had fallen asleep during the day, and feared he could not keep awake the second night on picket. Instead of sending some one, or going himself in Scott’s place, as he should, he had let him go to his death. He alone was guilty—“if any one ought to be shot, I am the fellow, and everybody at home would have the right to say so. There must be some way to save him, Judge!” (They all called me Judge.) “He is as good a boy as there is in the army, and he ain’t to blame. You will help us, now, won’t you?” he said, almost with tears.