Camp Ewing, Mountain Cove, Six Miles Above
Gauley Bridge, Wednesday, October 9, 1861.
Dearest: —
Captain Zimmerman and I have just returned from a long stroll up a most
romantic mountain gorge with its rushing mountain stream. A lovely October sun,
bright and genial, but not at all oppressive. We found the scattered fragments
of a mill that had been swept away in some freshet last winter, and following
up came to the broken dam, and near by a deserted home — hastily deserted
lately. Books, the cradle, and child's chair, tables, clock, chairs, etc., etc.
Our conjecture is they fled from the army of Floyd about the time of [the]
Carnifax fight. We each picked up a low, well-made, split-bottom chair and
clambered up a steep cliff to our camp. I now sit in the chair. We both
moralized on this touching proof of the sorrows of war and I reached my tent a
little saddened to find on my lounge in my tidy comfortable quarters your good
letter of October 1, directed in the familiar hand of my old friend [Herron].
Love to him and Harriet. How happy it makes me to read this letter.
Tell Mother Webb not to give up. In the Revolution they saw
darker days — far darker. We shall be a better, stronger nation than ever in
any event. A great disaster would strengthen us, and a victory, we all feel,
will bring us out to daylight.
No, I don't leave the Twenty-third. I have been with them
all the time except six days. I am privileged. In the Twenty-third I am excused
from duty as major being judge-advocate general. On the staff I am free to come
and go as major of the Twenty-third. This of course will not relieve me from
labor, but it makes me more independent than any other officer I know of.
Dr. Clendenin and Joe tent together and mess with us. Dr.
Clendenin's connection with us is permanent. We are in General Schenck's
brigade. He lives in our regiment and we like him.
We are now in easy two days' ride of Cincinnati by
steamboat, all but thirty or forty miles. We shall stay at this place ten days
at least. We are building an entrenched camp for permanently holding this
gateway of the Kanawha Valley. . . .
I feel as you do about the Twenty-third, only more so. There
are several regiments whose music and appearance I can recognize at a great
distance over the hills, as the Tenth, Ninth, and so on, but the Twenty-third I
know by instinct. I was sitting in the court-house at Buckhannon one hot
afternoon, with windows up, a number of officers present, when we heard music
at a distance. No one expected any regiment at that time. I never dreamed of
the Twenty-third being on the road, but the music struck me like words from
home. “That is the band of my regiment,” was my confident assertion. True, of
course.
We have lost by death about six, by desertion four, by
dismissal three, by honorable discharge about twenty-five to thirty. About two
hundred are too sick to do duty, of whom about one-fifth will never be able to
serve.
I was called to command parade this evening while writing
this sheet. The line is much shorter than in Camp Chase, but so brown and firm
and wiry, that I suspect our six hundred would do more service than twice their
number could have done four months ago. . . .
You need not get any shirts or anything. We get them on this
line, very good and very cheap. I bought two on the top of Mount Sewell for two
dollars and forty cents for the two — excellent ones. I am now wearing one of
them.
One of the charms of this life is its perpetual change.
Yesterday morning we were in the most uncomfortable condition possible at Camp
Lookout. Before night I was in a lovely spot with most capital company at
headquarters. . . .
[R]
Mrs. Hayes.
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and
Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 111-2
