A. J. Bennett, private , First Massachusetts Light Battery, The story of the First Massachusetts Light Battery , attached to the Sixth Army Corps : glance at events in the armies of the Potomac and Shenandoah, from the summer of 1861 to the autumn of 1864.

[25] the northern and southern sides, were the company and headquarters; each detachment had a bell tent, which might shelter fifteen men; this was provided with a little box stove, which the boys took turns in supplying with wood.

The park was without the enclosure on the north side, and our sentry walking his beat therein, when he reached the eastern limits, would be but a few feet from the sentry in the park of Company D. Water for the two batteries, and we believe for the Sixteenth New York, was obtained from a well on the north side of the pike, on the farm of one Going, a tpyical North Virginian, long, lank, and sandy, perhaps sixty years old, who dwelt in a small and somewhat dilapidated house hard by; his family consisted of his wife, three stalwart sons,—one of them living with his family in a cot near by, one being up at Manassas Junction in the Confederate ranks,—and a daughter. Owing to the proximity of this family to our camp, we had a prime opportunity to observe and study the characteristics of the grade of population of which these people were representatives, and which formed, we dare affirm, the largest part of the rank and file of the Confederate army in the East.

Reviewing now the results of our observations in those days, and setting over against their defects and deficiencies certain sterling traits that they undoubtedly evinced, we find a very considerable balance in their favor. A few incidents of our meetings and conversation with them may not be uninteresting.

Sometimes, while eating in their kitchen the sweet potato pie which these women seemed to be adepts in making and by means of which they turned a penny, we would be questioned by the mother as to our homes in the North, how we lived,—why we left them. ‘Poor little boys,’ the old dame would say; ‘you should go home to your mothers.’ Then she would bring from a bureau in the adjacent bedroom a daguerrotype of a bright looking youth clad in Confederate gray, show it to us, and weep.

The daughter was a strapping girl of nineteen, a stanchly loyal Virginian from the Confederate standpoint. One day the mother remarked to some of us, that C., of the——th——, was going to be married to an Alexandria girl that evening. ‘She'll be a Union gal then,’ said the old lady. ‘White-washed Union,’ retorted her daughter. ‘Why! why! are n't you a Union gal?’