Further acknowledgment is due to the Editor of the Commission, and to several of his able assistants on the editorial staff of the Wisconsin Historical Society. They have with great painstaking verified every word of the transcription with my original gnarled manuscript, have corrected (so far as possible by the official rolls) the names of the persons whom I have mentioned in the Diary, have read the proof, and in general have put the book through the press. This has involved an amount of labor which under the circumstances I could not have given, and without which the publication would have been inexcusable. It is the Editor's intelligent hand also that furnished most of the geographical date-lines, the paragraphing, the folio headings, the sub-heads, and the countless other editorial embellishments so essential to a presentable publication. * * * Technical work of this sort is entirely lost on the reader, of course, but it is profoundly appreciated by at least the present grateful author.
The post-bellum story of this journalizing private of the 6th Wisconsin Battery does not belong in this book. Should anyone be curious to connect the soldier in uniform with the militant citizen, who, with more pacific weapons, has continued his contentions for freedom, justice, and union, let the following suffice. There was a year's work on the new farm in Iowa County; then a winter of teaching the common school at Arena, Wisconsin, with ninety children, ranging from the little German child grappling with her English A. B. C.'s, to students in algebra and geometry. During one year there was an honest attempt to accept the path apparently laid out for me—that of an honest, hard-working farmer. And then the hunger for books, the blind push on thought lines, the half-unrecognized leadings towards another career, broke beyond control, and I left the farm. Then came four years' study at the Theological Seminary at Meadville, Pennsylvania; a pastorate of a year at Winnetka, Illinois; nearly ten years of similar work at Janesville, Wisconsin, and lastly a thirty-two years' ministry in All Souls Church, Chicago, which I organized and in which I continue to work. For the last eight years I have been head resident of the Abraham Lincoln Centre, which I founded and which I still direct. For thirty-two years I have been Editor of Unity, a weekly independent religious magazine, devoted to "Freedom, Fellowship, and Character in Religion."
In 1890 I secured possession of a tract of land which was once the site of the prosperous early Wisconsin village of Helena, on the banks of the Wisconsin River in Iowa County, where in 1863 ex-Governor C. C. Washburn and C. C. Woodman, two young men, founded a shot-making manufactory. The old shot tower gave name to the summer encampment known as Tower Hill, where, in connection with the little farm adjoining, I have found vacation rest and renewal for the last twenty years.
Two graves have touched me with peculiar tenderness, and suggest the unwritten and too often cruelly-neglected pathos in the life of the immigrant pioneer, much of which I have seen, a part of which I have been. A little sister, two years my senior, a fair blossom, wilted on the journey and the little body was left in a roadside grave in Utica, New York. I was too young to remember her, but through all the succeeding years that unmarked and unvisited grave has left a hallowed touch of tenderness in the home, and given to the missing one a potency perhaps greater than abides with the unburied that remain.
Scarce a year had elapsed after the arrival in the "big woods" when the fatherly uncle, the bachelor-partner whose name I bear, fell before the relentless attack of fever—so easily controlled now, but so fatal then. He died in a saw-mill at Oconomowoc, and the first grave in the settlement was hollowed by the hands of his brother at the foot of a great tree in the deep forest. The father and brother, who was "priest unto his own household," read and prayed and woke the forest echoes with his own voice, as he sang a sustaining old Welsh hymn. Perhaps this devout tradition lying back of my memory has had much to do with what faithfulness may have characterized the services of the private whose Diary is here recorded, and the ministry whose career was bargained for, to a degree that cannot be estimated in the sombre forest and the tented field.
Perhaps another word may be pardoned. On the way to Camp Randall, the tears which had scarcely dried from the heart-break that followed a mother's last embrace, started afresh at the sight of the dome of the old University building at Madison. For the months preceding the enlistment, the struggle had been not choosing between home and camp. No! not even between danger and safety, life and death, but what seemed the final choice between a country to save and an education to acquire. For in the dim haze of the farmer boy's horoscope, the University outline was shaping itself. In choosing his country's cause it seemed to him that he was relinquishing forever the hope of the education of which he dreamed. Forty-seven years after the campus was dimmed with his tears, the University of Wisconsin invested this private of the 6th Wisconsin Battery with the degree of LL. D.
A great thing was done for humanity in America, between 1861 and 1865. If it could not have been done otherwise, it was worth all it cost. And if this same dire predicament were to come again, I would do my past all over again. But Oh! it was such a wrong way of doing the right thing! May the clumsy sentences of a boy's diary, so lacking in perspective, so inadequate in expression, contribute a few sentences to the Gospel of Peace.
Tower Hill, Wisconsin, September 9, 1913.