Washington, June 7, '61.
I am down for a Captaincy of Cavalry and have good hopes of
being put upon N. P. Banks's staff: but I cannot say I take any great pleasure
in the contemplation of the future. I fancy you feel much as I do about the
profitableness of a soldier's life, and would not think of trying it, were it
not for a muddled and twisted idea that somehow or other this fight was going
to be one in which decent men ought to engage for the sake of humanity, —
I use the word in its ordinary sense. It seems to me that within a year the
Slavery question will again take a prominent place, and that many cases will
arise where we may get fearfully in the wrong if we put our cause wholly in the
hands of fighting men and Foreign Legions.
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 210-1
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