Fanny McCoullogh letter

[David Lockmiller]

(07-15-2013 12:24 PM)LincolnMan Wrote:  Thanks David. I can see the use of the document with my patients who are veterans. I have veteran patients that have served in WW II- all the way to the current conflicts.

The words were meant for everyone.

"This extraordinary war in which we are engaged falls heavily upon all classes of people, but the most heavily upon the soldier. For it has been said, all that a man hath will he give for his life . . . . Ninety-two percent of Union soldiers were volunteers."

I was drafted at the end of the Viet Nam war. I was against the war, but I served as an accountant in Okinawa because of my college education. Many of the young black men with whom I shared basic training probably went to Viet Nam as infantrymen and a few probably died or were wounded. I did not volunteer; they did not volunteer.

"Ninety-two percent of Union soldiers [in the Civil War for the preservation of the Union and democracy] were volunteers." It was much more likely that a volunteer for the Union cause in the Civil War would be wounded or killed. It was a very hard life even for those that lived and were not wounded in battle. And, yet all volunteered and risked their lives for a cause in which they believed strongly at great potential sacrifice to themselves and their family and friends. How noble!

The great leader of the Union cause in the American Civil War, who himself suffered very greatly, was President Abraham Lincoln and he once said: "It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him." August 14, 1862.

Altogether, the life of Abraham Lincoln, and especially his Presidency during the American Civil War, should be inspirational to the most depressed of persons.