Monday, May 26, 2014

Colonel Thomas Kilby Smith to His Daughters, October 23, 1862


Camp Near Memphis, Oct. 23, 1862.
My Dear Daughters:

I must address you together as I would talk to you. Would to God that I could see you and talk to you; yet, perhaps, it is better I should not. I should love you too well and you would be taken away from me, or the petty cares of every day would make me appear less tender in my manner than I am in heart. You will always love me, I know, whatever distance or time separates.

I am in very great trouble and grief this morning, and cannot write as cheerfully as I could wish. My favorite horse “Bell” was stolen from me two days ago and to me his loss is irreparable. He is the best and handsomest horse I ever saw. In all my experience of horses, whether belonging to others or myself, I have never known his equal. He had improved very much the past year, even amid the vicissitudes of the campaign, and had become thoroughly trained in all his duties. He was the horse par excellence of the army, in whom all officers and men alike of all the different regiments and brigades took equal pride. No one seemed to grudge or envy me the ownership of him. He was a creature of beauty that seems to be a joy to all. He knew me and loved me like a child, and would always neigh and stretch out his neck to be fondled whenever I approached him, and rejoiced when I mounted him. He carried me through both days at Shiloh and many a skirmish since over the long marches under the burning summer sun, always with high courage, gallant and enduring, never complaining for food or water, though often deprived of both. I have slept many and many a night under a tree with his bridle in my hand. I believe under God's mercy I owe my life to him. Money could not have bought him from me, nor friendship parted us, and now to lose him in this pitiful way is almost more than I can bear. If he had fallen in battle I would have accepted his loss as the fate of war, but to be stolen, disfigured, branded, passed from hand to hand like a common pad, I could almost cry like a very baby when I think of it. He was never sold, his owner kept him from a foal till he came to my possession and he would recognize no one but me for his master. One day during a lull in the storm of battle (it was at Russell House, the last engagement I was in) I had a presentiment he would be killed. Shot and shell had fallen around us, and partly for that presentiment, partly in abstraction and rest, I pulled some hairs from his mane and plaited them to keep as a memento, if he should go under. That little braid is all I have left of the proudest game horse in America.1 Do you see, my dear daughters, I am not in the vein to write you a very pleasant letter to-day, though the weather is delightful, the air balmy, the woods still green, though the leaves are falling, ripened but not frosted. It is Indian summer, but without the tints that gild the forest in Ohio. There is a little smoky haze in the atmosphere and a peculiar rustle of the leaves and grass, that tells the autumn is well-nigh over, yet I am told that warm weather here runs nearly into Christmas.
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1 He was subsequently recovered.

SOURCE: Walter George Smith, Life and letters of Thomas Kilby Smith, p. 245-6

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