HEADQUARTERS 54TH REGT.
O. V. INF.,
CORINTH, MISS., May 31,
1862.
Well, the long agony is over, and Corinth is ours. Long before
this letter reaches you, will your mind and heart have been set at ease in
respect to my safety. You will be gratified to learn that my regiment was the
first to drive in the enemy's pickets, the first to enter, and the first to
unfurl the national flag at Corinth. That I am now Commandant of the Post, and
that Major Fisher of my command is Provost Marshal of the city. How long I
shall be stationed here I do not know, and how soon I shall be relieved of the
command of the Post. I hope, however, they will leave me time enough to give me
a little rest; until to-day I had not had trousers or boots off for seven days
and seven nights. But to-day Master Stephen provided me with a bucket of clean
cold water and some clean linen, and you may be sure I went through the
luxuries of a thorough ablution. I am now living in a fine cottage house, which
was yesterday occupied by General Bragg, and which he evacuated in my favor;
such are the fortunes of war, the wheel of which rapidly turns; to-morrow it
may be my fate. The enemy leaving, destroyed an immense amount of property, ten
thousand bushels of wheat were burned in one pile ; beans, flour, all sorts of
comestibles shared the same fate; tents, quartermaster's stores, baggage of
officers, arms, and ammunition were all ruthlessly sacrificed. They must have
left in a terrible panic. I do not know what the country will say, but I regard
the evacuation as a complete victory, and although a bloodless victory, none
the less important on that account. They never could have stood before us had
our batteries once opened, carnage must have raged. I suppose their policy now
will be to give our troops the possession of the larger cities, thinking
thereby to weaken us, and afterwards by contracting their forces, to cut us off
in detail. We are not yet advised where they are gone. There were probably from
one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five thousand troops here, and they seem
to have left by three different routes. Those I was in pursuit of yesterday
numbered, judging from the accounts of prisoners and deserters, some thirty
thousand. We rushed them four miles beyond Corinth until we were stopped by a
burning bridge. My regiment was ordered back, but to-day cavalry and artillery,
together with infantry, are in hot pursuit. I have no news since last evening,
and am writing in hot haste lest I should miss the opportunity to write at all.
My own health is pretty fair, considering all things. The
weather is very hot, but as long as I can stay here I shall be but little
exposed, and the water here is good. The troops have suffered intensely for
want of water. We shall undoubtedly have a protracted war, and a Southern
campaign seems for me inevitable, so the sooner I get used to it the better.
There is a rumor prevalent that we are under marching orders, and that our
destination is Washington City. I have received no official communication yet,
however, and am in the dark. It is astonishing how soon one gets used to this
nomadic course of life, here to-day and gone to-morrow.
For the present I am really living “en Prince.” I have three
grooms and six guards in constant attendance upon my horses; and such horses!
In one respect at least, I 'm the “young Lochinvar” of the army ; Halleck, nor
Thomas, Sherman, none of them can begin to show with me. My “Bell” is the very
king of horses, and realizes to the very full, if any horse ever did, Job's
description. Then I have one groom of the chambers, and my high chamberlain is
Stephen Davis, vulgarly called “Kernel,” a name which he despises as altogether
beneath his dignity. Truth to say, he looks down upon me latterly a good deal,
and I should really feel reproached, if I had not learned early in life “that
no man is a hero to his valet de chambre.”
Then I have six guards for my chamber door and hall, and
twelve guards for my entrance hall, and as I have pressed into the service as
contraband of war a “neat-handed Phyllis” of the African persuasion, who boils
coffee to perfection, and by intuition knows the nature of a dodger and its
congener, light biscuit, you need have no fears that as a modern Corinthian, I
shall go under for lack of creature comforts. As I before remarked, I hope they
will let me remain a little while to enable me to recuperate, but if they do
put me on the march for Washington I shall not have much to regret, for I swear
I would not take Tennessee and Mississippi, from what I have seen of either
soil, climate, water, herds, flocks, men or women, for a swine pasture if they
both together came as precious gift. As for this city of Corinth, to which I
have come not as Paul to that other Corinth (they call this Corinth, by
the way, with the strongest possible emphasis on the “rinth”), that for which
it is the most remarkable is flies, not tent flies, nor the insect spoken of in
Scripture, the wicked flea, though the wicked did flee from here; but flies,
the same veritable, old, brown-coated curse that I used to chase over the
windowpane when I was a baby, impale on a pin when I got a little older; put up
in cages to mourn over when Sally Tinney stepped on them, and which finally
have come back to me multiplied as the sands of the sea, at morning, at noon,
and at night as thick as the leaves of Vallambrosa. Damn the flies! they remind
you of home, and you miss them in the woods; they are eminently fond of houses
and cities, scorning “green fields beyond the swelling flood” — and this city
being the fungus growth of railroads, three of which concentrate, and the only
business of each being the transportation of sugar and molasses, here they most
do congregate, and I only wish that in their congregations they would chew
sugar and eschew me.
SOURCE: Walter George Smith, Life and letters of
Thomas Kilby Smith, p. 209-12
