Free Republic

After conferring with General William Sooy Smith, commanding at La Grange, Grierson issued orders for "light rations" to his brigade, which now consisted of the Sixth and Seventh Illinois, and the second Iowa. On the beautiful spring morning of April 17, Grierson led the long column of seventeen hundred officers and men out of La Grange and headed south. Grierson himself, carried a small-scale map of plantations and Confederate storehouses, and a jew's harp in his blouse. The command met no opposition on the first day, traveling an easy thirty miles to halt just short of Ripley, Mississippi at the...

In the 20th century, we dealt with the disgrace of human abortion becoming sanctified by national law, and this continues today. But abortion has for ages been a dark struggle for humanity, especially deep in the hearts of women. The correspondence of a Civil War Army wife sheds some light on this. In December 1871, Alice Kirk Grierson wrote to her husband, Colonel Benjamin Henry Grierson, a letter in which she reflected upon the challenges of childbearing during the war years. “I think it is desirable that the parents of every unborn human being, should, from the first hour of...