An Artilleryman's Diary

Excerpt

Whatever value this publication may have, lies in the fact that it offers a typical case—a small cross section of the army that freed the slave and saved the Union.

The Editor of the Commission's publications has asked me to state briefly something about myself. I am one of the multitude of "hyphenated" Americans, born across the water but reared under the flag. I am a Cambro-American, proud of both designations, and with abundant heart, loyalty, and perhaps too much head pride in both. Introduced to this world in Llandyssul, Cardiganshire, Wales, November 14, 1843, I celebrated my first anniversary by landing at Castle Garden, in New York City. My parents were sturdy "come-outers" who, after the manner called "heresy", even among Protestants, worshipped the God of their fathers. They came from what in orthodox parlance was known as the "Smwtyn Du" the heretical "black-spot" in Wales. I am the third Jenkin Jones to preach that liberal interpretation of Christianity generally known as Unitarianism. The first Jenkin Jones preached his first heretical sermon in his mother's garden way back in 1726, ninety-three years before Channing preached his Baltimore sermon (1819), from which latter event American Unitarianism generally dates its beginning.

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....