Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

[316] relied upon in any emergency. On the afternoon when the news of the fall of Fort Sumter came, the young men got to the club late, and all were talking over the news very excitedly; but Mr. Savage was calm and quiet, and seemed the least affected of any, yet he was the first to apply for a commission.

In conjunction with his friends, Wilder Dwight (who after wards fell at the battle of Antietam) and Greeley S. Curtis (eventually Colonel of the First Massachusetts Cavalry), a plan was formed to organize a regiment of infantry to be offered to the United States. It was anxiously discussed at his home in Temple Place. In order to give it a high military character, two graduates of West Point, Messrs. Gordon and Andrews, who had formerly resigned their commissions in the army, were induced to take the highest appointments. Mr. Dwight undertook to get permission to raise the regiment as well as to secure funds for arming and equipping the men; while Curtis and Savage were to carry forward the organization and recruiting. Their efforts resulted in the formation of the Second Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, in which Dwight was commissioned as Major, and Curtis and Savage were Captains. It will be admitted by all that this regiment has been unsurpassed for discipline, for efficiency, and probably for its fearful losses of officers and men on the battle-field.

From the beginning of the enterprise James manifested a new impulse of life. The romantic feelings of his childhood had been absorbed by the military histories of former times, and the interest that bound his thoughts with never-wearied attention to the old battle-fields of England and Spain was now gathered in living power to the real strife, the actual war of his own people in a cause worthy of all sacrifice. His health improved, and, however much he suffered from indigestion, his old enemy, dyspepsia, never prostrated him. Camp life agreed with him, and he learned to laugh over the impunity with which he dined on hard bread and salt pork,—a dinner which formerly would have been to him impossible of digestion. From the day he received his appointment as Captain he worked diligently to recruit and drill his men. His company