On the thirteenth of April, 1861, the day when the news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked, my father wrote the Governor:
“Since they will have it so, in the name of God, Amen. Now let all the governors and chief men of the people see to it that war shall not cease until Emancipation is secure. If I can be of any use, anywhere, in any capacity (save that of spy), command me.”
I remember the thrill of horror that shook my small person on hearing my father say:
“The Rebels have sent a box of live copperheads and rattlesnakes to Andrew, but fortunately there was something suspicious looking about the box, and no harm is done!”
On another occasion I was shocked at hearing of a case of clothing or bedding, infected with yellow-fever germs, that had been sent to Mr. Lincoln at the White House. Libby Prison seemed very real to us when Alexander MacDonald, D.D.’s son, came home an exchanged prisoner, a shadow of himself, wasted to a skeleton, and with a cough which soon proved fatal. He brought with him a napkin ring made from a piece of meat bone by one of his fellow prisoners. I took this in my hands with a sense of awe; it seemed like a relic.
The Governor took full advantage of my father’s offer of service, and during the next four years he was constantly going back and forth between Boston and Washington. Among his many labors of that time was the work of the Sanitary Commission, of which he was one of the founders and most earnest workers.
His own experience as a young man, when he fought with the hardy mountaineers of Crete in the campaign for Greek independence, fitted him particularly well for the work. It made him, also, rather impatient at the well-meant efforts of the Boston people who, in the kindness of their hearts, sent cargoes of superfluities to the embarrassment of the ill-prepared commissariat department. He writes to Andrew from Washington, soon after the departure of the first Massachusetts regiments:
“You may depend upon it that when our boys come back, they will laugh heartily at the recital of the fears and sorrows excited among their papas and mamas by the stories of their privations and sufferings on their first march to Washington. The invoice of articles, sent by the Cambridge and other vessels for our troops, contains articles hardly dreamed of even by general officers in actual wars. Hundreds of chests of Oolong tea, tons of white crushed sugar, and then a whole cargo of ice! Many of these things will have to be left behind when the troops go into the field. Their principal value (which is priceless) is as a testimony of the patriotism, zeal, and generosity of the men and women, who felt that they must do something for the cause.”
In speaking of the health of the troops, he writes:
“There is more need of a health officer than of a chaplain; but the U. S. knows no such officer. Soap! Soap! Soap! I cry but none heed. I wish some provision could be made for army washerwomen; they are more needed than nurses.”