Burridge agreed most enthusiastically.  Going to the local congressman, he at once began a campaign, but because of the feeling against him two years passed without anything being done.  Later he took up the matter in his own G.A.R.  Post, but there also failing to find the measure of his own enthusiasm, he went finally direct to one of the senators of the State and laying the matter before him had the records examined by Congress and the dead colonel honorably discharged.

One day thereafter in the local G.A.R. he commented unfavorably upon the indifference which he deemed had been shown.

“There wouldn’t have been half so much delay if the man hadn’t been a deserter,” said one of his enemies—­one who was a foreman in Palmer’s shipyard.

Instantly Burridge was upon his feet, his eyes aflame with feeling.  Always an orator, with a strangely declamatory style he launched into a detailed account of the late colonel’s life and services, his wounds, his long sufferings and final death in poverty, winding up with a vivid word picture of a battle (Antietam), in which the colonel had gallantly captured a rebel flag and come by his injury.

When he was through there was great excitement in the Post and much feeling in his favor, but he rather weakened the effect by at once demanding that the traitorous words be withdrawn, and failing to compel this, preferred charges against the man who had uttered them and attempted to have him court-martialed.

So great was the bitterness engendered by this that the Post was now practically divided, and being unable to compel what he considered justice he finally resigned.  Subsequently he took issue with his former fellow-soldiers in various ways, commenting satirically on their church regularity and professed Christianity, as opposed to their indifference to the late colonel, and denouncing in various public conversations the double-mindedness and sharp dealings of the “little gods,” as he termed those who ran the G.A.R.  Post, the church, and the shipyards.

Not long after his religious affairs reached a climax when the minister, once a good friend of his, following the lead of the dominant star, Mr. Palmer, publicly denounced him from the pulpit one Sunday as an enemy of the church and of true Christianity!

“There is a man in this congregation,” he exclaimed in a burst of impassioned oratory, “who poses as a Christian and a Baptist, who is in his heart’s depth the church’s worst enemy.  Hell and all its devils could have no worse feelings of evil against the faith than he, and he doesn’t sell tobacco, either!”