Camp On Flat Top, Virginia, June 12, 1862.
Dearest: — I
began a letter to you yesterday intending to finish it after the mail came in;
I can't find it. No loss. I recollect I told you to [give] Mrs. Sergeant
McKinley ten dollars on account of the sergeant, which please to do. I probably
also said that up on this mountain the weather is colder than Nova Zembla, and
that since the enemy left us we have been in a state of preparation to go ahead
— which means do-nothingness, so far as soldiers are concerned. I have now an
expedition out under Major Comly, not important enough for a regimental
commander, so I am here in inglorious idleness.
A day's life runs about thus: — At 5 A. M., one or the other
of our two Giles County contrabands, Calvin or Samuel, comes in hesitatingly and
in a modest tone suggests, “Gentlemen, it is ’most breakfast time.” About ten
minutes later, finding no results from his first summons, he repeats, perhaps
with some slight variation. This is kept up until we get up to breakfast, that
is to say, sometimes cold biscuits, cooked at the hospital, sometimes army
bread, tea and coffee, sugar, sometimes milk, fried pork, sometimes beef, and any
“pison” or fraudulent truck in the way of sauce or pickles or preserves (!)
(good peaches sometimes), which the sutler may chance to have. After breakfast
there is a little to be done; then a visit of half an hour to brigade
headquarters, Colonel Scammon's; then a visit to division ditto, General Cox's,
where we gossip over the news, foreign and domestic (all outside of our camps
being foreign, the residue domestic), then home again, and novel reading is the
chief thing till dinner. I have read "Ivanhoe," "Bride of
Lammermoor," and [one] of Dickens' and one of Fielding's the last ten
days.
P. M., generally ride with Avery from five to ten miles; and
as my high-spirited horse has no other exercise, and as Carrington (Company C
boy) is a good forager and feeds him tip-top, the way we go it is
locomotive-like in speed. After this, more novel reading until the telegraphic
news and mails, both of which come about the same hour, 5:30 P. M. Then gossip
on the news and reading newspapers until bedtime — early bedtime, 9 P. M. We
have music, company drills, — no room for battalion drills in these mountains,
— and target practice with other little diversions and excitements, and so “wags
the world away.”
We get Cincinnati papers in from four to six days. My Commercial
is running again. Keep it going. Write as often as you can. I think of you
often and with so much happiness; then I run over the boys in my mind — Birt,
Webb, Ruddy. The other little fellow I hardly feel acquainted with yet, but the
other three fill a large place in my heart.
Keep up good heart. It is all coming out right. There will
be checks and disappointments, no doubt, but the work goes forwards. We are
much better off than I thought a year ago we should be. — A year ago! Then we
were swearing the men in at Camp Chase. Well, we think better of each other
than we did then, and are very jolly and friendly.
“I love you s'much.” Love to all.
Affectionately,
R.
Since writing this we have heard of Fremont's battle the
other side of the Alleghanies in the Valley of Virginia. It will probably set
us a-going again southward. — R.
Mrs. Hayes.
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and
Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 288-90
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