"We are getting along very pleasantly in camp; everything passes off quietly; the men are making a commendable degree of progress in the drill, and take to soldiering very readily. Thus far I have had no difficulty in controlling the men. I never saw a regiment more easily governed. This comes in part from its personnel. Being called upon for only one hundred days of service, many business and professional men, who could not well afford to give up their business entirely, can arrange to go into the army for so short a time; and as a result the lower officers and the men are many of them among our best citizens. Besides, the service is easy. We have none of the hard marches and exposures described by me in the campaigning of the Twenty-fifth and Sixty-fifth Indiana. As a private in one of the Evansville companies, was my younger brother James H., who left the senior class at the Indiana University before graduating to serve his country."
This letter also relates an event which brings out the terrible consequences of war in dividing families, especially in the border State of Kentucky:—
"I wrote you some time since that a brother of Major Hynes (of our One Hundred and Thirty-sixth) was in the rebel army and had been at home at Bardstown, Kentucky. Hynes received a letter this evening from his father telling him that his brother had been killed in trying to get back through our lines to the Southern army. He was shot in the woods and lay in the bushes two weeks before his father found the body."
Referring to the rebel cavalry raids which were just then threatening Washington and Baltimore, I wrote:—
"Even if Washington is burnt the rebels can't hold it, and it would be the means, I hope, of raising up the North to renewed efforts, and then there would be a good opportunity to remove the Capital to the West, where it ought to be. We have not suffered enough in the North yet to make the people see that there is to be no peace with the rebels except by their complete overthrow. Otherwise we are disgraced, ruined, forever destroyed as a nation. We must and will in the end put down this wicked rebellion. The ways of Providence are inscrutable. 'God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform,' but He is a God of Justice and Right, and we will triumph in the end. Had I been an infidel or a weak believer in the righteousness of God, long since I would have been discouraged, but I am not. Let us pray for our country, for the triumph of right, of truth, of freedom, and that God may in His wisdom hasten the end of this bloody war and the return of peace; and that we may together live to enjoy our family and Christian privileges under it."
On July 16 I report:—
"General Van Cleve has been called temporarily to Tullahoma, which leaves me in command of the post and brigade here, including Fortress Rosecrans. The change will probably be only for a few days or a week. I would much rather be with the regiment, as I am interested in the drill and instruction of the regiment, and can spend the time pleasantly with them.
"I am now at headquarters of the post very comfortably situated; have a room for myself carpeted and well furnished. Captain Otis, General Van Cleve's adjutant-general, a very competent officer, is left here, and he has his wife with him. It looks quite homelike to sit down at a table with a lady to preside, and also to nurse the baby. It was reported that the rebels were crossing the Tennessee River yesterday at Claysville, intending to make a raid on the railroad, but I hardly believe it."