"We are getting along very pleasantly in camp; everything passes off
quietly; the men are making a commendable degree of progress in the
drill, and take to soldiering very readily. Thus far I have had no
difficulty in controlling the men. I never saw a regiment more easily
governed. This comes in part from its personnel. Being called upon
for only one hundred days of service, many business and professional
men, who could not well afford to give up their business entirely, can
arrange to go into the army for so short a time; and as a result the
lower officers and the men are many of them among our best citizens.
Besides, the service is easy. We have none of the hard marches and
exposures described by me in the campaigning of the Twenty-fifth and
Sixty-fifth Indiana. As a private in one of the Evansville companies,
was my younger brother James H., who left the senior class at the
Indiana University before graduating to serve his country."
This letter also relates an event which brings out the terrible
consequences of war in dividing families, especially in the border
State of Kentucky:--
"I wrote you some time since that a brother of Major Hynes (of our One
Hundred and Thirty-sixth) was in the rebel army and had been at home
at Bardstown, Kentucky. Hynes received a letter this evening from his
father telling him that his brother had been killed in trying to get
back through our lines to the Southern army. He was shot in the woods
and lay in the bushes two weeks before his father found the body."
Referring to the rebel cavalry raids which were just then threatening
Washington and Baltimore, I wrote:--
"Even if Washington is burnt the rebels can't hold it, and it would
be the means, I hope, of raising up the North to renewed efforts, and
then there would be a good opportunity to remove the Capital to the
West, where it ought to be. We have not suffered enough in the North
yet to make the people see that there is to be no peace with the rebels
except by their complete overthrow. Otherwise we are disgraced, ruined,
forever destroyed as a nation. We must and will in the end put down
this wicked rebellion. The ways of Providence are inscrutable. 'God
moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform,' but He is a God
of Justice and Right, and we will triumph in the end. Had I been an
infidel or a weak believer in the righteousness of God, long since I
would have been discouraged, but I am not. Let us pray for our country,
for the triumph of right, of truth, of freedom, and that God may in His
wisdom hasten the end of this bloody war and the return of peace; and
that we may together live to enjoy our family and Christian privileges
under it."