HEADQUARTERS 54TH REGT.
O.V. INF.,
CAMP “JUPITER AMMON,” July
11, 1862.
MY DEAR WIFE:
I am here at an important point on the State line of
Mississippi and Tennessee at what is called “Ammon's Bridge.” I have a separate
command of infantry, artillery, and cavalry under my sole control, so that for
the present I feel pretty independent. I conduct my camp as I please and scout
and patrol the country to suit myself. I came down for an engagement with a detachment
of cavalry, known as “Jackson's Cavalry,” but they would not stay for me. It has
been my constant ill fortune always to fail in getting an engagement when I
have been alone in command. I have been in plenty of skirmishes, but never in
one on my own hook.
The first opportunity I ever had for distinction, was when I
made the march through the swamp to “Gauss” just two days before the battle of
Shiloh and of which I gave you description. I went down alone with my regiment
to trap a body of cavalry, passing at night six miles beyond our own lines and
within one half mile of the enemies' camp. We lay in sight of their camp fires
all night and could hear them talking. I was balked in my manoeuvre, however,
by delay on the part of the 5th Ohio Cavalry, who had been detailed to act in
concert with me, but who failed in keeping time, and my quarry made its escape
by another ford. I feel anxious to fight one battle of my own. All this is
uninteresting to you, of course. I am encamped now at a very pretty place. The
woods right on the banks of Wolf River that abounds with fish; and it is a swift-running
stream with sandy bottom. I have also a remarkably fine cold spring, giving
abundance of delicious water, and here I expect to stay for some days. I hope
to recuperate, for I have been much troubled with diarrhoea, which I fear has
become chronic. I have never been relieved even for a day since the affair at
Shiloh; save this trouble, my health is fair. The weather is becoming very
warm, we can only make marches early in the morning or late in the evening. Our
horses wilt down — nothing but negroes and slaves can stand labor in this
climate. On my last march to Holly Springs, I was encamped for four days just
on the edge of a large cotton field. In that vicinity cotton has been the great
crop, but this year there as elsewhere the cotton fields have mostly been
planted with corn. The corn here is very large, tasseled out, roasting ears,
almost ripe. Blue grass, herd grass, clover, or timothy won't grow here. Oats
and wheat hardly worth gathering, but potatoes, corn, cotton, sweet potatoes
and fruits of all kinds, particularly peaches and apples, thrive wonderfully. I
never saw such blackberries as I have seen here, growing on vines twenty feet
or more high, so high that the topmost branches could not be reached by a man
on horseback, and the berry almost fabulous in size, an inch and a half long,
perfectly sweet and without core. A man could easily pick half a bushel in an
hour, and I suppose we had twenty bushels a day brought into camp while near
the patch. Almost all our Northern fruits, I doubt not, would grow with equal
profusion if properly cultivated here. Most of the people I meet here are well
bred, but not always well educated. They are invariably and persistently secession
in their politics, but generally opposed to the war. It is absurd to think of
conquering an union, and I believe that an attempt to subjugate these people
will be equally futile. There is a bitterness, a rancor of hostility,
particularly on the part of their women and children, of which you can have no
conception. I have never for one moment changed my views in this regard, so
often expressed to you, and in your hearing, before the breaking out of
hostilities. The war will teach them to respect the courage of the North, but
it has made two peoples, and millions of lives must be sacrificed before its
termination. Governor Tod has appealed to the people of Ohio for five thousand.
He had better go to drafting. Ohio must contribute fifty thousand, and those
right speedily. The resources of this country have always been underrated; this
is another absurdity. Their people live far better than we in Ohio out of the
cities. I know this to be a fact, for I am daily an eye-witness. A man here
with twelve or fifteen hundred acres is a prince. His slaves fare better than
our working farmers. His soil is more kindly, his climate better, and better
than all, he understands the science of living. He enjoys life more than we do,
and so do his wife and children; and they all know this. They are determined to
be independent, and they will be. There is no house I go to but where I find
the spinning wheel and loom at work. Their hills are covered with sheep and
cattle, their valleys literally seas of corn. As long as the Northerner's foot
is on the soil just so long there will be some one to dispute its possession,
inch by inch, and meanwhile they will find resources for themselves in food and
raiment. It is a magnificent country, such timber I never saw. The white oaks
would gladden the eyes of the Coleraine coopers. I have noticed many a one
eight, perhaps nine feet in diameter at the base, straight, rifted, and running
up without catface or flaw, sixty, seventy, eighty feet to the first limb;
beeches, hickory, holly, chestnut, all in the same proportions; and that most
gorgeous and beautiful tree, the magnolia, in all its pride of blossom, each
bloom perfect in beauty, velvety in leaf and blossom and fragrant as the spicy
gales from Araby, or a pond lily or attar of roses, or a fresh pineapple, any
or all combined, the tree graceful and majestic, proud in bearing so lovely a
bloom. The flora of the country is truly beautiful. I am not enough of a
botanist to know, nor have I the memory to bear in mind the name of the plants
I do know, that are made to bloom in our greenhouses, and here grow wild; but
through the woods and along the roadside many and many a one I see growing in
wild and splendid luxuriance, wasting their blushes and “fragrance on the
desert air,” that a prince might envy and covet for his garden. I do not
remember whether I made mention to you of the azalias that were just bursting
into bloom on the 6th and 7th of April, and that while sore pressed in the heat
of battle, I was absurd enough to gather a handful of them; but so it was. The
whole woods at a certain part of the battlefield were bedecked with them and
the whole air laden with their perfume. Col. Tom Worthington got off a very
pretty poem about the subject.
Kiss all my dear little ones and read them my letters, that
is, if you can manage to decipher the pencil. Some day, perhaps, if God spares
our lives, I shall be able to entertain them with stories of my campaign in the
sunny South, tell them of the beautiful singing birds, the wonderful
butterflies and gorgeous beetles, of the planter's life and of the flocks of
little niggers all quite naked, that run to the fences and gaze on us as we
march by, and of the wenches in the cotton field that throw down the shovel and
the hoe and begin to dance like Tam O' Shanter witches, if our band strikes up;
and of the beautiful broad piazzas and cool wide-spreading lawns of the rich
planters' houses. Some day we'll have a heap to talk about.
I have no very late news from Richmond, but what we have got
has had a tendency to depress our spirits a good deal. We feel McClellan will
be outgeneralled after all. If he does not succeed in taking Richmond, we are
in for a ten years' war at least. Some of those poor people in the South are
heartily sick of it, while we shall plant their soil thick with graves of our
own dead.
SOURCE: Walter George Smith, Life and letters of
Thomas Kilby Smith, p. 221-4
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