FRANK'S CAMPAIGN

FRANK'S CAMPAIGN



CHAPTER I. THE WAR MEETING

The Town Hall in Rossville stands on a moderate elevation overlooking
the principal street. It is generally open only when a meeting has been
called by the Selectmen to transact town business, or occasionally in
the evening when a lecture on temperance or a political address is to be
delivered. Rossville is not large enough to sustain a course of lyceum
lectures, and the townspeople are obliged to depend for intellectual
nutriment upon such chance occasions as these. The majority of the
inhabitants being engaged in agricultural pursuits, the population is
somewhat scattered, and the houses, with the exception of a few grouped
around the stores, stand at respectable distances, each encamped on a
farm of its own.

One Wednesday afternoon, toward the close of September, 1862, a group of
men and boys might have been seen standing on the steps and in the
entry of the Town House. Why they had met will best appear from a large
placard, which had been posted up on barns and fences and inside the
village store and postoffice.

It ran as follows:

WAR MEETING!

The citizens of Rossville are invited to meet at the Town Hall, on
Wednesday, September 24, at 3 P. M. to decide what measures shall be
taken toward raising the town's quota of twenty-five men, under the
recent call of the President of the United States. All patriotic
citizens, who are in favor of sustaining the free institutions
transmitted to us by our fathers, are urgently invited to be present.

The Hon. Solomon Stoddard is expected to address the meeting.

Come one, come all.


At the appointed hour one hundred and fifty men had assembled in the
hall. They stood in groups, discussing the recent call and the general
management of the war with that spirit of independent criticism which
so eminently characterizes the little democracies which make up our New
England States.