[4]
This morning I received a package from Boston, which I found contained a handsome sword and sword-belt from my classmates. The note which accompanied it informed me that four of my Class are already in active service. They will all receive the like present to mine.Just before the return of the regiment, at the close of the three months campaign, he says: ‘All our talk at present is about going home. . . . . There is not a man in our whole regiment whose heart will not leap for joy when he sets foot in Massachusetts.’ Yet when this great joy had come to him, he lingered not long amidst home delights. Arriving in Salem on the 1st of August, he enlisted on the 3d of the same month in the Nineteenth Massachusetts Regiment, under Colonel Hinks, with whom he had already served, and Lieutenant-Colonel Devereux, his former Captain, for whom he had the warmest esteem. On joining his regiment at Lynnfield, he enjoyed the pleasant surprise of finding a friend in another superior officer,—Major How of the Class of 1859. He spent but three weeks with his friends before leaving Massachusetts, and devoted much of that time to the enlistment of recruits for Company C, of the Nineteenth Regiment, in which he was commissioned First Lieutenant. Upon receiving his commission, he spoke of his connection with the privates of his company, expressing his determination to attend to their comfort and welfare. ‘I know that I shall be kind to them,’ said he. ‘I used to pity the poor fellows sadly who received punishment when we were out before. It seemed hard enough that they should be obliged to leave their comfortable homes for the hard service, without the addition of this discipline, and yet I knew that it was a necessary one.’ His regiment left Lynnfield for the seat of war on the 28th of August, and we must now gather from his letters, and from the testimony of officers and soldiers, the history of his short military career. In a letter dated October 30, not long after arriving in Maryland, he writes:—
