CHAPTER I.

I was born Aug. 28, 1847, so when Sumter was fired on I was thirteen years old. My interest in national matters had begun five years before, when I attended ratification-meetings in behalf of Fremont and Dayton. I remember I felt personally imperilled with the country when Buchanan and Breckenridge were elected; which did not prevent my going up the street to see an illumination given by one of the few democrats in Fitchburg. One of the transparencies read, "John C. has gone up Salt river". The banner I remember best on my own side read, "We'll give 'em Jessie"; but we didn't.

All my associations in Fitchburg, Mass., at home, at school, at church, were ultra abolition; and at Randolph, Vt., where I lived more than half the time after I was ten years old in the family of John B. Mead, afterward candidate for governor, I read not only the weekly New York Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly but most of the anti-slavery pamphlets of the day. I knew the "Key" to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as thoroughly as the book itself, and its more sombre successor "Dred", a dismal tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. We had Helper's "Impending Crisis" as soon as it was published, and I read it with avidity: to this day I can remember the definitions of abolish, abolition, and abolitionist, and the financial arguments for abolition. How queer the author's plan for abolition would seem now.

I need not say that I was deeply interested in the John Brown raid. I really

ENLISTMENT

hoped he would succeed in his purpose, and when he was captured and tried and hanged I read every word about it I could find. I was less excited over the 1860 campaign than over that of 1856, because I was so certain Lincoln would win. I remember that West Randolph was one of the places through which Stephen A. Douglas passed on his tour, "in search of his mother his mother" as his opponents sneered. I went to the station, as did most of the country around. I forget whether he made a speech, but I remember his looks as he stood on the back platform of the train, a little man in a dapper light brown suit.

When rumors of secession arose I became of course alarmed, and was always ready to express my political views to any one who would listen. One of the experiments with me was to send me up to live with a farmer named Sheldon in Peterboro, N. H., who came to Fitchburg to drive me home with him. He was so much impressed by my political harangues that he stopped one or two neighbors and set me going so that they could see what a ready tongue a boy could have. He either got tired of it or thought I was not adapted to tending sheep, for after a few days he got me into his wagon again and drove me back to Fitchburg.

So when Sumter was fired on April 12, 1861, I was excited. I remember walking up and down the sitting room, puffing out my breast as though the responsibility rested on my poor little shoulders, shaking my fist at the south, and threatening her

INFLICTING CALAMITIES MYSELF

with dire calamities which I thought some of inflicting on her myself. I joined the military company at the Orange country grammar school and took fencing lessons. As men began to enlist I wished I were older. I don't know why I did not happen to think of getting in as a drummer boy; perhaps because I didn't know how to drum or have any means of learning, though as I afterward discovered, that was no obstacle.

At last there came a possible chance. Captain John F. Appleton, of the 12th Maine in the brigade Gen. Butler was recruiting to the distress of Gov. Andrew*, was a cousin of my mother's second husband and promised to try to enlist me in his company. So on Dec. 3, 1861, I went to Lowell, and was taken by the captain to Gen. Butler's tent. "This boy is rather young," the captain said, "but he is healthy and strong and intelligent, and I should like to have him in my company."

*See Schouler's "A History of Massachusetts in the Civil War", Boston, 1868, pp. 252-282.

GEN. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BUTLER, 1818-93

Gen. Butler was writing at a table and did not look up till just as the captain finished. One squinting glance was enough. "Take the damned little snipe away," he said; "we've got babies enough in this brigade already."

When I publish my "Men I have known" I shall have to record this as my only interview with Cock-eyed Ben. After the war I met him on Broadway in smug civilian's clothes, but I did not think our

acquaintance warranted me in accosting him. In 1902 I happened to be in the Massachusetts legislature with my daughter when they were discussing whether to erect a statue to Gen. Butler, and the opposition had the floor. My daughter wanted me to get up and tell my experience, but nobody asked me to speak and I thought best not to intrude. Thackeray remarks more than once on the slighting notice he received when introduced to the Duke of Marlborough, and speculates on how different the author might have made that warrior figure in his stories had he been thought worthy of notice. With all of us our judgment of others is affected by the personal equation; when Gen. Butler was accused in New Orleans of stealing spoons I read of it with equanimity.

But six months later I had better luck. A second cousin of mine was sent home from the front as a recruiting sergeant, and I

went down to Boston to see him. He arranged the matter for me at once, and said I could learn to drum after I was enlisted. He even tried to enter me as a private to be detailed as a drummer, so that I could draw thirteen dollars a month instead of twelve. I had to undergo a medical inspection which I thought rather severe, taking off all my clothes and having among other tests to jump, to be sure I was sound in wind and limb; but I passed it, and on July 21, 1862, I became a Massachusetts soldier, assigned as musician to Co. D of the 1st Massachusetts infantry.

By this time my readers are wondering how my family allowed me to enter the army at so early an age, while I still would go off alone and cry if anybody spoke harshly to me, as may be judged from this

FOURTEEN YEARS OLD

picture, reproduced from a tin-type I sent to my mother as soon as I was in uniform. During the Spanish war I came home rather late one night, and found my daughters leaning over the banisters to hear what reply I would send to this message from my younger son:

"Telegraph consent to enter company Yale Light Artillery, great chance. Norman"

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They were reassured to have me telephone without delay this telegram:

"Decidedly no: wait for better cause and better climate."

we

But circumstances were different: were fond of Norman and could not have him with us too much. It was not so at my home. My father had died when I was eleven years old, my mother had married again very happily, and I was always a disturbing element. I was conceited, boastful, self-willed, disobedient, saucy, not lazy but always wanting to do something else than the duty of the moment, absurdly scrupulous in some things yet in others not above what the modern child psychologist would I suppose define as haziness in discrimination between the concepts of the memory and those of the imagination: in those harsh days folks. called it lying. The adolescent period had not then become interesting as a subject of study, so I was wholly disagreeable.

I had been expelled from the Orange county grammar school because the principal was impudent to me, and my last recollection of the Fitchburg high school is being told by Miss Anna Haskell, rather maliciously I thought at the time, that I had not passed in geometry. I had even run away from home once, gone to Boston, bought of William V. Spencer on credit some portraits of war generals, and worked my way on foot to Randolph, Vt., selling these pictures and a few little Yankee notions and sleeping at farm houses along the way. On one occasion my mother had got ready to take me to the reform school at Westboro, and I remember standing by the table in the sitting-room waiting for her to start with me, fingering a gold dollar in my pocket and planning how to

elude her in Worcester and get to Boston and go to sea. She relented and did not take me, but I can see how it was a relief to her to have me really in the army, under authority that could control me, with the responsibility off her mind.

I was sent first to Camp Cameron, in North Cambridge, five miles from Boston, afterward named Camp Day. Here I drew my first uniform, and uncomfortable enough the coarse wool was to my unaccustomed skin. The first nights were almost torture. Still wearing my day's thick woolen shirt, I slept between coarse woolen blankets in a bunk filled so closely with soldiers one could hardly turn over.

I borrowed a drum from the quartermaster, and used to go over to the hill between the camp and Tufts college to practise. I had no one to teach me and probably began wrong, for I think I have never succeeded in anything less than in learning to drum. My sense of rhythm was keen and I could keep time, but I could never get an even roll. This is done by making a double stroke with each hand. That double stroke I never mastered. It was partly because a drum was so awkward to carry on the march that I soon sent for a fife and learned to play that, and in December got transferred from drummer to fifer, but I was glad enough to turn in an instrument that I played so poorly.

I was soon set to carrying the mail, a few letters coming from Porter station, but most of them from Cambridge. I used to buy postage stamps by the hundred, too, and retail them out to the men. The postmaster at Porter's asked me one day to mail my letters there and buy these stamps of him, as his salary depended on the amount of business he did, while it would make no difference to the postmaster at Cambridge.

Always ready to oblige, I did so for a time, but the Cambridge postmaster soon noticed it and complained to those in authority; so I was ordered to do my mailing and buy my postage stamps thereafter at the end of my route.

I ran into one little speculation at Camp Cameron. One of the men took his knapsack to a painter in Cambridge and had the company and regiment stencilled in. white on the back, for which he paid twenty-five cents. I was going to do the same, when I happened to think a good many would want it done and I might as well do it for them. So I went into Boston, bought a set of stencils and some green paint (I always had a weakness for colors), and for some days was kept busy stencilling knapsacks at a quarter apiece; I even sent to Fitchburg for my brother, three years younger, to come down to help me. I remember that I began to stencil "U. S. A." for United States Army, but learned that the letters should be "M. V. M.", Massachusetts Volunteer Militia.

It was while I was still in camp that there began to be a premium on gold and silver. There were two or three days when you could give a car conductor a dollar-bill, and take the ninety-five cents he gave you to a broker and get a dollar-bill for it. Of course that could not last, and postage stamps began to come into use for change. What a sticky, inconvenient currency they It was at Baltimore on my way to the front that I saw the first postal shinplasters, prettier in the beginning when they had pictures of the postage stamps they represented than afterwards. I remember at the Baltimore station giving a silver ten-cent piece for a ten-cent shinplaster; afterward that ten-cent piece would have bought a twenty-five cent shinplaster.

were.

August, 1862]

I remember going into Boston one day to get a present of a havelock and, if I remember aright, a filter, which Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis gave to every soldier who would come for them. The havelock I never wore and I think I made little use of the filter. Often while marching I

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drank water out of the mud of the road where the troops were treading, and was glad to get it. If chocolate had been made of most of the water we drank while marching in Virginia it would not have changed the color. I don't remember that we ever examined water very closely if it was wet.