PREFACE
Table of Contents In the multitude of books written about the Civil War, very little is said of the enlisted man. His bravery and his loyalty are admitted and that is about all. Of his everyday life, the very thing his family and friends cared most to know about, there is hardly anything said.
It is to remedy this omission in some degree that the following pages are published. They were written by an enlisted man and are mostly about enlisted men. They are filled with details that history has no room for, and for that reason may have an interest quite their own.
They were written at different times, in different places, and under a great variety of circumstances and conditions. Some were written as the line halted for rest while marching from place to place, some while waiting for trains or other modes of transportation, but the most were written by the light of a candle or a smoldering camp-fire while my comrades, no more weary than I, were sleeping about me. All were written amid scenes of more or less confusion, and many times of great excitement. They were written because of a promise made to my parents that I would make notes of my wanderings and of the adventures I met with.
At first I found it an irksome task, taking time I really needed for rest; but as time went on the habit became fixed, and I did not consider the day's work done until I had written in my diary of the events that came with it.
The diary was kept in small pocket notebooks, of a size convenient to carry in my pocket, and be ever ready for use. There was never a lack of subjects to write about. Events crowded upon each other so fast that each day furnished plenty of material for the time I could give it. I had never been far from home. The sights I saw were new and strange to me and made deep impressions. These, as best I could, I transferred to the pages of my diary, so the friends at home could, in a way, see the sights I saw and that seemed so wonderful to me. When pages enough were written for a letter, I cut them out and sent them home to be read by any who cared to, after which they were strung together on a string and saved for me to read again, should I ever return to do it. When I did return I found the leaves had so accumulated as to make a large bundle. There was no need for me to read them at that time, for the story they told was burned too deep in my memory to be easily forgotten.
So I tied them in a bundle and put them away in an unused drawer of my desk, where they lay, unread and undisturbed for the next forty-five years.
But while the old diary lay hidden in my desk a new generation had crept upon the stage. We no longer occupied the center of it. One by one we had been crowded off, and our ranks were getting so thin we had to feel around for the touch of a comrade's elbow. Every year there were more comrades' graves to decorate, and every year there were fewer of us left to decorate them. At last we had met an enemy we could not even hope to conquer. With sadness we saw first one and then another called out, and they did not return. They had answered the last roll call, and it was only a question of a little time when the last name would be called, and the muster-out rolls be folded up and filed away.
It was with a feeling of ever-increasing loneliness that I untied the bundle and began to read the long-forgotten diary. In a little while I was a boy again, one of that great company that helped to make history read as it does. Almost half a century had suddenly rolled back and I was with Company B-"Bostwick's Tigers" we were called, not altogether on account of our fighting qualities, but because of the noise we sometimes made. I was having my share of the fun that was going, and was taking my share of the hard knocks as well.
I was never so absorbedly interested. I even forgot my meals. For weeks I thought of little else and did little else than read and copy those dim old pages. I read from them to any who would listen, and wondered why it did not stir their blood as it did my own.
But the reason is plain. To the listener it was hearsay. To me it was real. So it may be with the diary now it is printed. In the nature of things it cannot be to others what it is to me. It is a part of my life. My blood would not tingle as it does at the reading of another man's life. It is what historians had neither time nor space to write, the everyday life of an enlisted man in time of war.
L. V. A.
October, 1910.
CHAPTER I
The Recruiting Camp
Table of Contents First steps as a Soldier-The five-day furlough.
August 19, 1862.
Table of Contents Hudson Camp Grounds. I have enlisted! Joined the Army of Uncle Sam for three years, or the war, whichever may end first. Thirteen dollars per month, board, clothes and traveling expenses thrown in. That's on the part of my Uncle. For my part, I am to do, I hardly know what, but in a general way understand I am to kill or capture such part of the Rebel Army as comes in my way.
I wonder what sort of a soldier I will make; to be honest about it, I don't feel much of that eagerness for the fray I am hearing so much of about me.
It seems to me it is a serious sort of business I have engaged in. I was a long time making up my mind about it. This one could go, and that one, and they ought to, but with me, some way it was different. There was so much I had planned to do, and to be. I was needed at home, etc., etc. So I would settle the question for a time, only to have it come up to be reasoned away again, and each time my reasons for not taking my part in the job seemed less reasonable. Finally I did the only thing I could respect myself for doing,-went to Millerton, the nearest recruiting station, and enlisted.
I then threw down my unfinished castles, went around and bid my friends good-bye, and had a general settling up of my affairs, which, by the way, took but little time. But I never before knew I had so many friends. Everyone seemed to be my friend. A few spoke encouragingly, but the most of them spoke and acted about as I would expect them to, if I were on my way to the gallows. Pity was so plainly shown that when I had gone the rounds, and reached home again, I felt as if I had been attending my own funeral. Poor old father and mother! They had expected it, but now that it had come they felt it, and though they tried hard, they could not hide from me that they felt it might be the last they would see of their baby.
Then came the leaving it all behind. I cannot describe that. The good-byes and the good wishes ring in my ears yet. I am not myself. I am some other person. My surroundings are new, the sights and sounds about me are new, my aims and ambitions are new;-that is if I have any. I seem to have reached the end. I can look backwards, but when I try to look ahead it is all a blank. Right here let me say, God bless the man who wrote "Robert Dawson," and God bless the man who gave me the book. "Only a few drops at a time, Robert." The days are made of minutes, and I am only sure of the one I am now living in. Take good care of that and cross no bridges until you come to them.
I have promised to keep a diary, and I am doing it. I have also promised that it should be a truthful account of what I saw and what I did. I have crawled off by myself and have been scribbling away for some time, and upon reading what I have written I find it reads as if I was the only one. But I am not. There are hundreds and perhaps thousands here, and I suppose all could, if they cared to, write just such an experience as I have. But no one else seems foolish enough to do it. I will let this stand as a preface to my diary, and go on to say that we, the first installment of recruits from our neighborhood, gathered at Amenia, where we had a farewell dinner, and a final handshake, after which we boarded the train and were soon at Ghent, where we changed from the Harlem to the Hudson & Berkshire R. R., which landed us opposite the gates of the Hudson Fair Grounds, about 4 P. M. on the 14th. We were made to form in line and were then marched inside, where we found a lot of rough board shanties, such as are usually seen on country fair grounds, and which are now used as offices, and are full of bustle and confusion. After a wash-up, we were taken to a building which proved to be a kitchen and dining room combined. Long pine tables, with benches on each side, filled the greater part of it, and at these we took seats and were served with good bread and fair coffee, our first meal at Uncle Sam's table, and at his expense. After supper we scattered, and the Amenia crowd brought up at the Miller House in Hudson. We took in some of the sights of the city and then put up for the night.
The next morning we had breakfast and then reported at the camp grounds ready for the next move, whatever that might be. We found crowds of people there, men, women and children, which were fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts, brothers and sisters of the men who have enlisted from all over Dutchess and Columbia counties. Squads of men were marching on the race track, trying to keep step with an officer who kept calling out "Left, Left, Left," as his left foot hit the ground, from which I judged he meant everyone else should put his left foot down with his. We found these men had gone a step further than we. They had been examined and accepted, but just what that meant none of us exactly knew. We soon found out, however. Every few minutes a chap came out from a certain building and read from a book, in a loud voice, the names of two men. These would follow him in, be gone a little while and come out, when the same performance...
