Camp, May 27, 1863.
Did I tell you what
an interest the black fellows at my barber's (under Willard's) take in me
because I am a Massachusetts Colonel, — they are so pleased at the
Fifty-Fourth, and at its being the Fifty-Fourth and not the First Massachusetts
Coloured Regiment (as it is in the District and in most other States), — and I
told them all I could about it, without boasting how near an interest I felt in
its Colonel, — wasn't that magnanimous? Had I said the word, I believe they
would have pressed all the offices of their trade upon me, willy-nilly, and
instead of my short bristles, I should have left with a curled wig perfumed and
oiled. Governor Andrew's argument about officers seemed to satisfy them (that
he wanted the best officers he could get for this Regiment, and they were every
one white), and they felt (as I do more and more, the more I learn of regiments
raised and raising elsewhere) that it is a great thing to have the experiment
in one case tried fairly.
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 248
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