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much literary work while in camp.
He wrote to his wife:—
Perhaps Hooker's victories will give that cheerfulness to the public mind which J. T. Fields thinks favorable to book publishing; and thus do great events link on to small ones and affect literary Colonels.
It was a great satisfaction to
Colonel Higginson, as time went on, to know that the peculiar responsibility which he had felt as commander of the first regiment of freedmen was diminishing, owing to the rapid multiplication of Negro regiments.
‘Any disaster,’ he wrote to his mother on May 18, 1863,
or failure on our part would now do little harm . . . .There is no doubt that for many months the fate of the whole movement for colored soldiers rested on the behavior of this one regiment.
A mutiny, an extensive desertion, an act of severe discipline, a Bull Run panic, a simple defeat, might have blasted the whole movement for arming the blacks.
. . . Col. Littlefield (30 regiment S. C.V. in future) says that Secretary Chase told him the Cabinet at Washington kept their whole action in regard to enlisting colored troops waiting to hear from us in Florida, and when the capture of Jacksonville was known, the whole question was regarded as settled, the policy avowed, and Adjutant General Thomas sent out on his mission.
This is, I think, the best expression of the importance of our action that has yet occurred.
