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[49]
upon the study of law in the city of New York when the war began.
Thus torn away by the inexorable demands of conscience and of loyalty to the South, from a focal point of intense intellectual life and purpose, one of my keenest regrets was that I was bidding a long good-by to congenial surroundings and companionships.
To my surprise and delight, around the camp fires of the First Company, Richmond Howitzers, I found throbbing an intellectual life as high and brilliant and intense as any I had ever known.
The Howitzer Glee Club, trained and led by Frederick Nicholls Crouch, author of “Kathleen Mavoureen,” was the very best I ever heard, and rendered music at once scientific and enjoyable.
No law school in the land ever had more brilliant or powerful moot court discussions than graced the mock trials of the Howitzer Law Club.
I have known the burial of a tame crow to be witnessed not only by the entire command, but by scores, perhaps hundreds, of intelligent people from a neighboring town, and to be dignified not only by salvos of artillery, but also by an English speech, a Latin oration, and a Greek ode, which would have done honor to any literary or memorial occasion at old Yale.
There was a private soldier in the battery — not the poet of the crow's death either — a Grecian of such finished skill that I have known him keep, for months together, a diary of the movements of the battery, in modern Greek; and have watched him-wondering if there was anywhere to be found another man of scholarship and scholarly enthusiasm so great — as he dodged the persistently pursuing smoke of a camp fire and by its wretched, flickering light, with painstaking care, jotted down his exquisite, clear Greek lettering that looked like the most perfect output of the most perfect Greek press in Germany.
So much for the intellectual life of our camp and march.
What now of the essential spirit of these young volunteers?
Why did they volunteer?
For what did they give their lives?
We can never appreciate the story of their deeds as soldiers until we answer this question correctly.
Surely it was not for slavery they fought.
The great majority of them had never owned a slave and had little or
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