A Raw Recruit's War Experiences

Excerpt

Chapter I.

During the winter preceding the firing upon Sumter, I was one of a group of young fellows of about my own age who regularly assembled evenings at the corner grocery of the village where we lived, to listen to older persons discuss the affairs of the nation and all other matters, moral, intellectual and social, as is the nightly custom in country groceries, and particularly the probabilities of war between the North and the South, which, I will say in passing, every day grew more probable. Each several barrel-head in that grocery seemed to know its own occupant, and for any one else to have appropriated it to his own use, especially had he been a young man, would, I am sure, have been deemed an unpardonable breach of courtesy. The grocer himself was the acknowledged spokesman of the company, and never allowed himself to be “switched off” from the subject in hand, however pressing the demands of his waiting customers. He did not believe there would be any war; but in the event that the South should “kick in the traces,” as he expressed it, “our boys would only have to arm themselves with brooms and go down there and give ’em a thrashing.” This sweeping assertion was received with liberal applause by all of his hearers, the impatient customers not excepted.

I hope I shall not detract from your favorable estimate of the grocer’s patriotism when I add that, being a dealer in brooms himself, he remarked that he “would like nothing better than a contract to supply the government with them.” I hardly need mention the fact that the grocer was a genuine specimen of the Yankee, and always kept an anchor to the windward and his eyes wide open for the main chance. “They all did it”—in war times.

I only mention this incident in illustration of the opinion which our northern people generally had in the winter of ’60 and ’61 as to the likelihood of a war with the South, and their estimate as to what would be necessary to suppress a rebellion against the government in that section of the country if, unfortunately, one should break out.

But, as we all know, the groceryman proved a false prophet. When the news of the attack upon Fort Sumter came, it found me setting type in the “Gazette and Chronicle” printing office in Pawtucket, where I had been regularly employed as apprentice and journeyman since 1846. “All work and no play” had made Jack a pretty dull boy indeed, and the war promised a vacation, temporary or permanent, which I had long been seeking, and which I at once made up my mind that I would avail myself of at the earliest possible opportunity. As the war news became more and more interesting, filling the paper nearly full every week to the exclusion of less important matters, I became more and more determined to give the country the benefit of my services. Very many of my associates had enlisted and gone “to the front,” and I could not satisfy myself with any good reason for longer remaining at home when men were so much needed to defend the honor of the old flag and assist in upholding the integrity of the government in its day of greatest peril....