He was a superb horseman--as all the older Illinoisans are and, for all his two-score years and ten, he recognized few superiors for strength and activity in the Battalion.

A radical, uncompromising Abolitionist, he had frequently asserted that he would rather die than yield to a Rebel, and he kept his word in this as in everything else.
As for him, it was probably the way he desired to die.

No one believed more ardently than he that Whether on the scaffold high, Or in the battle's van; The fittest place for man to die, Is where he dies for man.
Among the many who had lost chums and friends was Ned Johnson, of Company K.

Ned was a young Englishman, with much of the suggestiveness of the bull-dog common to the lower class of that nation.

His fist was readier than his tongue.