Yesterday was a fine, warm, spring-like day. This month has
been generally good weather. We are getting our camp in good condition.
Yesterday General Ewing received orders to “go South” (as General Banks said)
with the Thirtieth and Thirty-seventh Ohio and the Fourth and Eighth Virginia.
This breaks up our brigade. We were not very well suited with it. General Ewing
has many good qualities but thinks so well of his old regiment (the Thirtieth)
that he can do no sort of justice to its rival, the Twenty-third. We are glad
also to have no longer any connection with the Thirtieth. The brigade now
consists of the Twenty-third, Eighty-ninth, and Ninety-second. Two new
regiments with ours. Colonel Nelson H. Van Vorhes will command the brigade. He
is a gentleman of character and capacity without any military experience.
I can't help feeling the injustice in that point of view of
putting him over me; but as he is my senior as colonel of a new regiment, it is
according to rule and I shall cheerfully submit. Yet it looks hard that he
shall get the credit or glory of what Comly, myself, and my regiment may do.
For in any emergency it would be to us that all would look for action and
advice. But “such is war,” and I am here to do my duty wherever I may be placed
— and I mean to do it fully and cheerfully, wherever the credit may go. My
impressions of Colonel Van Vorhes are favorable. I have yet to make his
acquaintance. General Ewing, it is said, goes down the Mississippi. Good-bye,
Thirtieth! We have been with them since they joined us at Sutton, September 8,
1861 — a year and a quarter ago.
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and
Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 382
