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of loyal men. Banners were streaming from windows, floating over housetops, and fluttering from rude poles by the waysides.
Little children waved them with tiny huzzas, as our train passed by, crowded to its utmost capacity with young men hastening to enroll themselves for the great Union Army then forming.
Cincinnati was fairly iridescent with the Red, White, and Blue.
From the point of the spire of white cut stone of the Roman Catholic Cathedral, two hundred and twenty-five feet in the air, the loyal Archbishop Purcell had caused to be unfurled, with “imposing ceremonies,” it was said, a magnificent National flag, ninety feet in length ;1 and on the day of our visit, it seemed as if the whole population were on the streets, cheering the soldiers
as they passed through the city.
2 There was no sign of doubt or lukewarmness.
The
Queen City gave ample tokens that the mighty Northwest, whose soil had been consecrated to freedom forever by a solemn act of the
Congress of the old Confederation,
3 was fully aroused to a sense of the perils that threatened the
Republic, and was sternly determined to defend it at all hazards.
How lavishly that great Northwest poured out its blood and treasure for the preservation of the
Union will be observed hereafter.
As we journeyed eastward through Ohio, by way of Columbus, Newark, and Steubenville, to Pittsburg, the magnitude and significance of the great
