CONTENTS.
| [CHAPTER I.] | ||
| The “Raw Recruit” enlists and goes into camp | [1] | |
| [CHAPTER II.] | ||
| Off for the seat of war—The knapsacks | [11] | |
| [CHAPTER III.] | ||
| At Miner’s Hill—First death—The “long roll” | [18] | |
| [CHAPTER IV.] | ||
| The Convalescent Camp—Scenes grave and gay | [27] | |
| [CHAPTER V.] | ||
| At “the front”—Norfolk and Suffolk | [34] | |
| [CHAPTER VI.] | ||
| Pastimes in camp—Religious services | [40] | |
| [CHAPTER VII.] | ||
| Baked beans—The deacon’s advice—Steamed oysters | [46] | |
| [CHAPTER VIII.] | ||
| The Eleventh loses two colonels | [51] | |
| [CHAPTER IX.] | ||
| Yorktown—Home again—Mustered out | [57] | |
| [CHAPTER X.] | ||
| “Honor to whom honor is due” | [61] | |
A Raw Recruit’s War Experiences.
Chapter I.
During the winter preceding the firing upon Sumter, I was one of a group of young fellows of about my own age who regularly assembled evenings at the corner grocery of the village where we lived, to listen to older persons discuss the affairs of the nation and all other matters, moral, intellectual and social, as is the nightly custom in country groceries, and particularly the probabilities of war between the North and the South, which, I will say in passing, every day grew more probable. Each several barrel-head in that grocery seemed to know its own occupant, and for any one else to have appropriated it to his own use, especially had he been a young man, would, I am sure, have been deemed an unpardonable breach of courtesy. The grocer himself was the acknowledged spokesman of the company, and never allowed himself to be “switched off” from the subject in hand, however pressing the demands of his waiting customers. He did not believe there would be any war; but in the event that the South should “kick in the traces,” as he expressed it, “our boys would only have to arm themselves with brooms and go down there and give ’em a thrashing.” This sweeping assertion was received with liberal applause by all of his hearers, the impatient customers not excepted.
I hope I shall not detract from your favorable estimate of the grocer’s patriotism when I add that, being a dealer in brooms himself, he remarked that he “would like nothing better than a contract to supply the government with them.” I hardly need mention the fact that the grocer was a genuine specimen of the Yankee, and always kept an anchor to the windward and his eyes wide open for the main chance. “They all did it”—in war times.
I only mention this incident in illustration of the opinion which our northern people generally had in the winter of ’60 and ’61 as to the likelihood of a war with the South, and their estimate as to what would be necessary to suppress a rebellion against the government in that section of the country if, unfortunately, one should break out.