This text is part of:
[107] on arriving that his mother, through the absence of his brothers Simon and George, who had already joined the army, would be left entirely by herself. It was a sad disappointment to him to surrender his commission; but he saw his duty clearly, and beheld with regret the Second pass on its way in the path of duty and honor which he so fervently yearned to tread with them. A summer passed, and at its close his old commander. and friend Colonel Stevenson began to raise the Twenty-fourth Regiment. Affairs at home were changed, and Barstow was one of the first applicants for a commission, and was (September 2, 1861) appointed Second Lieutenant in Company C, then commanded by his friend Captain Robert H. Stevenson, afterwards Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment. During the recruiting season Lieutenant Barstow was chiefly in the western portion of the State, where he had lived and studied, and whence he brought many good men into the ranks of the regiment. After his company was filled, it was sent with three others to Fort Warren to guard prisoners of war. There it remained until the early days of December, when, with the rest of the regiment, it took the field, and was encamped at Annapolis with the other regiments of what was afterwards known as the ‘Burnside Expedition.’ While the Twenty-fourth was at Annapolis, Barstow's old friend Lieutenant Tom Robeson of the Second Massachusetts, then an officer of the Signal Corps, was sent thither for the purpose of instructing certain officers of the Burnside expedition in the duties of that corps. Two officers were required of the Twenty-fourth. A quick wit, a retentive memory, and a ready command of language were requisite. All these Lieutenant Barstow possessed in an eminent degree. There was something fascinating, too, in the new system of communicating by the waving of colored flags, imparted only under solemn oath of secrecy. There were the best and swiftest horses supplied by the government to carry the messages of the generals; the two orderlies, with their bundies
Sever and Francis, 1866.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.