“He remembered those glorious months, punctuated by ceremonial firings of the Bigelow Rifle, when triple shifts of workmen kept the furnaces going full blast night and day to manufacture the cannon barrels that were to be the salvation of the Union. His father, in that prime of his life, seemed not to sleep at all, and the furnaces were pillars of smoke by day and pillars of fire by night whose soaring sparks illuminated every corner of Beecher’s Bridge like an endless Fourth of July. The biblic...al allusion to those pillars was fixed in young Amos’s mind by the sermon of the Congregational minister, delivered on the town green to all who would come, wherein he yielded to patriotic sentiment and announced that it would be more pleasing to God for this work to continue through all seasons of the year until His victory was won, through fire and flood if need be, and even on the day of rest. The priest of the other church could not be seen to be less patriotic than a Protestant, and he too found divine sanction for breaking the Sabbath.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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