Their names to the sweet lyre. The historic muse
Proud of her charge, marches with it down
To latest time: and sculpture, in her turn,
Gives bond, in stone and ever-during brass,
To guard and immortalize her trust.”
At Bladensburg we went into camp, and remained until June 10. Marched to Washington at 8 P. M., and embarked on the cars of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad and steamed away homeward, bound to Parkersburg by way of Grafton, West Virginia, thence by boat to Louisville, Kentucky; moved five miles into the country, where we remained until the 13th day of July, when we were mustered out. Repairing to Camp Taylor, near Cleveland, Ohio, we were paid off and formally discharged from the service on the 22d and 23d days of July, 1865.
We have now followed the regiment through nearly four years of the most arduous service which ever fell to the lot of any organization of this character, marching and fighting through most of the States in rebellion, its pathway marked by the graves of our comrades who fell. In the interim, hundreds of the brave 1540 who were upon its rolls, pass under the charge of the worse than fiends of hell, who presided at Libby, Belle Isle, Andersonville, and other courts of death, by courtesy called rebel prisons, where, after being robbed of all they possessed, and even stripped of necessary clothing, they were subjected to a systematic course of starvation (and that, too, under the immediate supervision of that foul blot upon humanity, Jeff Davis) until their brave spirits went out to the God who gave them. In the army of the East, with the army of the West, with Sherman in the glorious march to the sea, and the brilliant campaign of the Carolinas—where there was danger and death—shone the “white star” of the Twenty-ninth. The skirmish line and the advance became so nearly the normal condition of the regiment that assignment to positions less dangerous elicited exclamations of surprise from the “boys.”
At length the last ditch, so frequently referred to by the braggart rebels, was reached—chivalrous Jeff Davis in hoc and crinoline begged that mercy be shown to “woman and children.” The bubble secessia burst, and the command, now reduced to a mere handful, turn sadly northward, its columns “gaping from the havoc of shot and shell, and the disease of the camp, and prison pen, its colors ragged and torn, but proud and defiant as ever—one grand ovation to the living, a sad wailing requiem for the dead,” and “good byes” are said in the beautiful Forest city, as each departed for their homes to assume the peaceful avocations of four years before.
Gradually they have drifted away—some to a quiet nook in the country church yard, and others to the east, west, and south, until now they may be found in nearly every State and Territory in this vast Union. Annually they come together in re-union at some convenient point in Puritan Western Reserve, and
“Fight their battles o’er again.”