My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer—making hats for the local markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm during the summer time. My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages. The long sea voyage of six weeks in a sailing vessel, interrupted by a dismantling storm which compelled the ship to return for repairs after two weeks sailing, brought them into the teeth of winter, too late in the season to reach their objective point in the West. So the journey was suspended and the first winter spent in a Welsh settlement near Steuben, New York.
May, 1845, found us in the then territory of Wisconsin. The broad, fertile, and hospitable open prairie country in southern Wisconsin was visited and shunned as a desert land, "a country so poor that it would not grow a horse-switch." And so, three "forties" of government land were entered in the heavy woods of Rock River valley, forty miles west of Milwaukee, midway between Oconomowoc and Watertown, which then were pioneer villages. The land was bought at $1.20 an acre, then were purchased a yoke of oxen and two cows; and when these were paid for, there remained one gold sovereign ($5) to start life with—father, mother, and six children.
Trees were felled for the log house which for the first six months was roofed with basswood bark, for the shingles had not only to be made, but the art of making them had to be acquired. In this log house were spent the first twelve remembered years of my life. In it four more children were born. In the log school-house, built in the middle of the road because it was built before the road was there—we had arrived before the surveyor—I learned to speak, read, and love the English language. My first teacher was a Cambro-American who could by her bi-lingual accomplishment ease the way of the little Welsh immigrant children into English. I think I can remember crying when the teacher would speak to me in the then unintelligible English.
In 1856, my thirteenth year, the family began to realize that they had chosen a hard place in which to make a home. The battle would have been a grim one, with the tall trees and their stumps, the "hardhead" boulders, the marshes, the mosquitoes, and the semi-annual attack of ague, had it not been lightened with the blind hopes and the inspirations that bring to frontier lives the consolations and encouragements of the pioneer. So the home in Ixonia, that had welcomed the coming of the first plank-road and witnessed the approach of the La Crosse & Milwaukee Railroad as far as Oconomowoc, was sold, and in 1855 we moved to a farm of 400 acres in Sauk County.
The next year this was reached by the old Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad and the village of Spring Green was established, adjoining the farm. Here I worked on the farm in the summer time, and during the winter time grew with the growing village school in Spring Green. During the spring term of school, in 1861, the boys were organized into the Spring Green Guards. "Billy" Hamilton, a clerk in George Pound's store, was excused by his employer during the noon hour and the recesses, to come over to drill us. The tresses, black or golden, were sacrificed. Our hair was "shingled" and we wore cadet caps. Of course the boys had been stirred when they heard of the humiliation preceding the inauguration of Lincoln, of the firing on Sumter; and in the autumn all of the Spring Green Guards who were ripe enough heard and heeded the call of Father Abraham. Captain "Billy" Hamilton went out as sergeant in the 6th Wisconsin Battery, and four years later came back as colonel at the head of the 36th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry.
I was too young to go out in 1861. I cannot say that I panted for the fray. I dreaded the coming of the dire moment when conscience, not the government, would deliver me into a service that had no charm for me. Another winter's schooling in the Spring Green Academy, another sowing and harvest time, then leaving unstacked the hay that I had mown, and in the shocks the oats that I had cradled, I obeyed this "stern daughter of the voice of God"—to use Wordsworth's phrase—and turned my face to the South. I joined my old comrades of the Spring Green Guards in the 6th Wisconsin Battery, nine months or so after their first enlistment.
I was a "mother's boy", and with the exception of three months' district schooling at an aunt's house in Watertown, when a little lad, had never been away from home over night. I had not then and have not since, owned a firearm of any description. As I approach my three-score-and-ten, I can say that I have never sighted a gun, or pulled the trigger on anything smaller than a cannon, and that only when ordered.
It seems necessary for me to state further, that throughout the three years of camp life, as through all the succeeding years, I have been a total abstainer from all forms of liquor and tobacco. The strictures throughout the Diary concerning the over-use of intoxicants were written from this standpoint, and perhaps were over stated. At least truth requires that I should at this distance testify that the bulk of the Union Army, so largely made up of boys, was of stern stuff, with their lives rooted in seriousness and committed to sobriety, as the subsequent careers of those who were allowed to return amply prove. Many things set forth in this Diary were necessarily untrue to fact, but there is nothing but what was true to the thought and feeling of the writer at the time. The simplicity of the narrative and the lapse of time, will, I hope, take all the barbs out of any random shafts that may have been fired by a battery boy.
The monotonous story of this battery boy is told in long metre in the Diary here published. The only remarkable thing about the record is, that it exists and is still available fifty years after the writing. Of course every soldier lad started to keep a diary. Very few persisted to the end; rare is the private who did not outlast his own diary. And then again, the vicissitudes of the camp, the hopeless carelessness of the American people to contemporary history, have carried to oblivion most of such records. These ten little memorandum books would doubtless have suffered a like fate, were it not for the vigilance of the home folk, to whose care the successive volumes were promptly consigned. And then many years after, there was the loving, unsolicited persistency of a faithful amanuensis, who, unbeknown to me, in the "cracks of time," patiently and faithfully transcribed the entire story, which was fast becoming illegible in the original camp- and battle-stained little books, to the clear, typewritten sheets which made them available to the Wisconsin History Commission. To Miss Minnie Burroughs, now Mrs. Herbert Turner of Berkeley, California, belongs therefore the basic credit for this publication.