Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[259] to the North and live much as before. This solicitude was at the foundation of all their enthusiasm; and besides this there was their religious feeling, which was genuine and ardent, making them almost fatalists in action, and giving their very amusements that half-pious, half-dramatic character which filled the camp every evening with those stirring songs that I was perhaps the first person to put in print, and that have reached so many hearts when sung by the Hampton singers and others. Riding towards the camp, just after dark, I could hear, when within a half-mile or thereabouts, the chorus of the song and the rhythmical clapping of hands; and as I drew nearer, the gleam of the camp-fires on the dusky faces made the whole scene look more like an encampment of Bedouin Arabs than like anything on the Atlantic shores.

Before I had joined the regiment, detachments of recruits had been sent down the coast of South Carolina and Georgia to destroy saltworks and bring away lumber; and after it had grown to fuller size, there occurred several expeditions into the interior, under my command, with or without naval escort. We went by ourselves up the St. Mary's River, where the men were for the first time actively under fire, and acquitted themselves well. The river