April 4.
Tomorrow I hear we
are to pull up stakes and go on picket duty. This is not easy work, but work of
any kind is preferable to inactivity. Dr. Minor is down with intermittent
fever. I scarcely know how to spare him. I was obliged to send John Quincy to
the Beaufort Hospital.
. . . Mrs. General
Lander1 drew up her splendid steed before my tent door this
afternoon and assured me she would do all in her power for our General Hospital
for colored soldiers, now being established in Beaufort.
It is yet undecided
who the surgeon will be and I am somewhat solicitous about it. Very few
surgeons will do precisely the same for blacks as they would for whites, and I
know of no people more susceptible to the benign influence of kind words than
these long-suffering blacks.
Mrs. Lander told me
that the sixth Connecticut boys were full of praises of the bravery of our
regiment.
1 Jean Margaret Davenport, widow of Major-Gen.
Frederick William Lander.
