Warren, Aug. 5, '61.
I am expecting daily to get official notice to enlist for
three years instead of five — had I had
this three weeks ago, I could ere this have filled my company, which
unfortunately is now only half filled. I hope to receive orders to move my
rendezvous at the same time.
You seem to feel worse about the Bull Run defeat than I do.
To me, the most discouraging part of the whole is the way in which company
officers have too many of them behaved since the affair — skulking about
Washington, at Willard's or elsewhere, letting their names go home in the lists
of killed or missing, eating and sleeping and entirely ignoring the commands of
their superiors, and the moral and physical needs of their men. I regard it as
a proof of something worse than loose discipline — as a proof that those
officers, at least, have no sense of the situation and no sentiment for their
cause: if there are to be many such, we are whipped from the outset. Fancy Jim
or Willy behaving so! I know that my Southern classmates in the Rebel ranks
would never have treated their companies of poor white trash so contemptuously:
they respect them too much as means for a great end.
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 216-7
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