HEADQUARTERS 54TH REGT.
O. V. INF.,
MEMPHIS, July 23, 1862.
MY DEAR MOTHER:
I seize the briefest moment to advise you of my health and
well being.
We marched into Memphis day before yesterday; shall occupy
the city and probably remain for some time. This will be the new base of
operations. I found a heavy mail waiting me, and among my letters was overjoyed
to see one from you. You may well be sure it was the first I tore open to read,
and it was read before I had dismounted, though I had been in the saddle
without food or drink since two o'clock in the morning, and it was twelve meridian,
under as hot a sun as you can conceive it possible for one to exist under. The
mercury stood at 101° in the shade that morning at seven o'clock. The only evil
result of that day's march, however, so far as I am concerned, is the loss of
the skin of my nose, which was completely peeled off. I can't answer your
affectionate letter now, but will do so in a day or two, if I can get an hour's
leisure. I have been constantly on the go, our troops are not yet encamped, and
as Officer of the Day, my duties have been exceedingly onerous.
I should be glad to come home, but a furlough is a thing
impossible; Sherman won't listen to a request even from a sick or dying man;
certainly not from one who is at all useful in the service. Even if it could be
obtained, I should not like to take a furlough now for many reasons. I am in
for the war and the war will be a long one.
Memphis has been an opulent city, laid out in magnificent
proportions, containing superb houses, elegant grounds, etc. The people who are
left are almost all “Secesh.” The males between the ages of eighteen and
forty-five years are ordered off; to-morrow is their last day of grace;
consternation, of course, prevails. The headquarters are besieged with ladies
asking protection for themselves and families; a very large proportion of them
are wives of officers in the Confederate army. They are all bitter as
snakeroot, but nevertheless demand, not ask, that protection their natural
protectors were unable or unwilling to give.
Few of these can yet realize that war has now commenced in
right good earnest; that hereafter desolation and havoc will follow the wake of
our army. Heretofore we have preached peace, and sought with the inhabitants of
the country through which we have marched, even upon the battlefield, to
cultivate friendly relations, warring only with the men-at-arms, fighting
to-day with the owners of the property which we detail forces to protect
to-morrow. Our famishing and thirsty soldiers as they toiled under the burning
sun in the summer days' march have been prevented almost at the point of the
bayonet from assuaging their thirst at the roadside well, from pulling an onion
from the garden or seizing an apple from the bough on the premises of the men
armed and after their heart's best blood. Now this will all be changed. We
shall “burn, sink, and destroy!” We shall teach these ingrates that we can
punish with a rod of iron, that we can not only meet and vanquish them on the
field, but that we have the nerve and the will to sweep them and all they hold
dear clean off from the face of the earth.
I hear they are most thoroughly panic-stricken in
Cincinnati; that the enemy have been encamped at Florence, only nine miles in
front, and that they have some reasons to expect a raid.
SOURCE: Walter George Smith, Life and letters of
Thomas Kilby Smith, p. 231-2
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