Jesse Hough, Our Country’s Mission, or The Present Suffering of the Nation Justified by its Future Glory. A Discourse Preached at Williston, Vermont, on the Day of the National Fast, August 4th, 1864 (Burlington, VT: Free Press Printing, 1864).

Upon a summer evening, in 1855, a young man sat on the verandah of the school house, beneath the China trees, in southern Mississippi. It is characteristic of human nature, and especially of American human nature, to take its tone and color its feeling from the events which are at the moment passing. If the army is in motion, the masses are hopeful, even though it be marching towards some Bull Run, or Chancellorsville. An American vessel engages an English ship, armed with the best English guns, and manned by trained English seamen, and sinks her easily in seventy minutes; and a party of French officers, viewing the half dozen grim monsters on her deck, that did the fearful work, declare that ‘there’s not a gun in the French navy worth a rush.’ To revolutionize war is only the by-play of American mechanical genius.