Headquarters Second Brigade, Second Division,
Fifteenth Army Corps, March 1, 1863.
My Dear Mother:
You speak of my name not appearing in the Commercial; if
our official reports were published by that sheet it would appear. I have sent
you copies of both reports, of my immediate commanders, of the recent battles.
I believe my name is sufficiently conspicuous in both; it is equally
conspicuous in the report of General Sherman. Flattery is contemptible to both
parties; all but flattery I think my commanders have given me. That my name
does not appear in the public prints is simply because I will not resort to the
usual means and appliances to place it there. If I was a merchant or an
inventor of quack medicines, I would advertise to fill my purse, but I cannot,
I do not know how to advertise my honor, and I am almost ashamed to seek for
that preferment which I should be accorded without the asking. Even in the
seeking, if I know myself, I am unselfish in intent, for I think, nay, know,
that I can serve my country better in the position I want to have guaranteed to
me — the one I now hold — than as the commanding officer of a regiment
literally hacked and hewed to pieces in battle, to say nothing of accident or
disease on the long and tiring march, the loathsome transport, the unhealthy
camp. There are but few left of the brave hearts that followed me to the field.
The graves of their dead are land-marks on eighteen hundred weary miles that
their survivors are away — away from homes on the banks of the Miamies and the
Sandusky, and the Scioto, and the Muskingum, from the farm and the village,
from the workshop and the college, the railroad and the factory, all the way
from the Ohio River to the shores of Erie. The whole State of Ohio,
emphatically almost every county in it, was represented by my regiment, and
such a regiment her borders will never raise again; leal hearts and hardy
frames, young, joyous, full of fire and enterprise and patriotism ; and, God
help me, how many are gone! Their bones bleach — bleach, that 's the word, for
graves were shallow and coffins they had none at “Shiloh” — their graves dot
Tennessee from Corinth to Memphis. Unshrouded and unanealed their ghastly
corpses gibber in the moonlight on the banks of the Yazoo ; and at Arkansas
Post the rude head boards tell where the dead braves of the “54th” rest. A
handful are left — less than three hundred all told.
In respect to General Sherman and the press, I have written
at some length in a former letter that you doubtless have before this received.
Not the press, but the infernal scoundrels who prostitute it by making it a
medium for their base designs upon individuals, the public, and the nation,
does he propose not only to muzzle but destroy. General Sherman will live in
history, and in the hearts of his countrymen when these wretched myrmidons
shall have passed to infamy and eternal death. The reaction in his favor is
sure to come. No man ever lived who, possessing his talents and energy, and
purity of life and heart and purposes, failed to make his mark upon the times;
and as sure as he now lives, he will illustrate his position, and cause his
name to shine brightly on the page of history. His father-in-law, Mr. Ewing,
quoted from Macaulay, and applied most appositely to him the sentence “fierce
denunciation and high panegyric make up what men call glory”; both the former
has General Sherman had in no stinted measure, but his true glory is in his
native excellence; his full power has not yet been shown. O, Mother! if you had
seen that man as I have seen him, if you could have sat by his side as I have
sat, amid death and destruction, when the fate of a nation seemed to hang and .
. . in my opinion did then hang on his word; had you watched him as I watched,
and noted him exalted above materiality, towering above and beyond the sense of
pain and fear of death ; had you scanned his eagle eye flashing and blazing
with the fire of intellect, and in its comprehensive glance taking in and
weighing the fate of thousands; had you known him as I knew him, win a great, a
glorious battle, great as Waterloo, and which ought to have been decisive, and
that would, within twenty-four hours of its close, have been decisive of the
fate of the Republic had he been alone in command, you would spurn the
lucubrations of the miserable drivellers, who like mousing owls are hawking at
the eagle towering in his pride of place, as utterly unworthy a second thought.
Have you ever known me deceived in my judgment of men so far as intellect is
concerned? Where to-day are the friends and companions of my early youth and
young manhood? Some are dead, but the good was not interred with their bones;
they still live. One (you well know whom I mean) has made his opinions in the
jurisprudence of Ohio classical; his faults, his vices, if you please, are
forgotten; his graces, the strength of his glorious intellect, still illumines.
Sherman is greater than he, and oh! far better, and trust me, when lesser
lights go out or feebly glimmer in obscurity, his will shine out a bright
particular star in the political firmament, a guiding star to those who come
after him. If I could only approach him in example, you would have a son to be proud
of. To me it is a matter of great pride that I have had the inestimable
privilege of almost intimate association with him for a year past, by day and
by night, in the peril of the field and the pleasures of the social board. I
have never heard him utter a word that would bring the blush to the cheek of
maiden purity. I have never known him insult his God; he is invariable in his
just respect for the rights of others, and though he rarely smiles, though to
the vast responsibilities with which he has been clothed, all the amenities of
life with him have been sacrificed; still, with a cheering amiability of heart,
he has been foremost in strewing the few flowers that give fragrance to the
thorny pathway of the soldier.
As respects Vicksburg, I cannot, ought not, to write you
much — time alone can tell what will be the result of our enterprise. All that
men can do will be performed; the rest is with the God of battles, who holds in
His hands the fate of nations. I send a little sketch which may serve to give
you some faint idea of the topography of the country. By the bye, I have
learned that the name “Yazoo,” in the Indian tongue, signifies death — “Yazoo
River,” the river of death — and truly its waters are most abominable, dealing
death to almost all who drank freely of them, while its stream ran red with the
blood of those slain on its banks. You will note its course, the position of
the bayous, and where our troops fought. The celebrated “Haines Bluff” and our
present position toward Vicksburg.
I have written to you that I enjoyed a soldier's life, and
indeed I do notwithstanding its privations and discomforts, and in this, that
it is a life of excitement and free from the care that has heretofore been my
portion. With you I mourn that I did not enter the military academy when I had
the opportunity, and fit myself while young for a brilliant military career,
for I feel that it might have been made brilliant. Youth wasted! well, why look
back? That “might have been” weighs often upon me like an incubus. If I could
only keep fresh my youthful feelings.
Colonel Spooner has probably been detained in his own State
partly by family bereavement and partly by business. I shall hope he will be
able to see you all before he returns. He is in my command, and can tell you a
great deal about me. I am glad you were pleased with Major Fisher; he is a
favorite of mine and I have always kept him near my person. He is possessed of
a fine and cultivated mind, is amiable in character, but cool and brave in
action. Was educated in his profession, of which he is a master, by General
Rosecrans, and was promoted to his majority for his gallantry at Carnifex Ferry
in Virginia, and assigned to my regiment. In case I am promoted, I design he
shall command it. He met with a great affliction in the loss of his wife, a
most lovely girl, and her child, within a year of his marriage, and his life
has been clouded and embittered in consequence. I believe he is most sincerely
attached to me, indeed I have been fortunate in making many friends in the
service, and I doubt not an equal number of enemies.
SOURCE: Walter George Smith, Life and letters of
Thomas Kilby Smith, p. 274-8
