8 Brevoort Place, Friday, May 10, 1861.
I am sure you will like to hear what we are all about in these times of terrible excitement, though it seems almost impertinent to write just now. Everything is either too big or too little to put in a letter. Then one can’t help remembering sometimes that you are that august being, a “Tribune’s Own,” and as unapproachable on your professional pinnacle as the ornament of the Calendar whom Georgy will persist in calling Saint Simeon Stalactites. But the dampest damper to enthusiastic correspondents on this side is the reflection that what they write as radiant truth today may be “unaccountably turned into a lie” by the time it crosses the “big water.” So it will be best perhaps not to try to give you any of my own “views” except, indeed, such views of war as one may get out of a parlor window. Not, in passing, that I haven’t any! We all have views now, men, women and little boys,
from the modestly patriotic citizen who wears a postage stamp on his hat to the woman who walks in Broadway in that fearful object of contemplation, a “Union bonnet,” composed of alternate layers of red, white and blue, with streaming ribbons “of the first.” We all have our views of the war question and our plans of the coming campaign. An acquaintance the other day took her little child on some charitable errand through a dingy alley into a dirty, noisy, squalid tenement house. “Mamma,” said he, “isn’t this South Carolina?”
Inside the parlor windows the atmosphere has been very fluffy, since Sumter, with lint-making and the tearing of endless lengths of flannel and cotton bandages and cutting out of innumerable garments. How long it is since Sumter! I suppose it is because so much intense emotion has been crowded into the last two or three weeks, that the “time before Sumter” seems to belong to some dim antiquity. It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now. How could we ever have laughed at Fourth-of-Julys? Outside the parlor windows the city is gay and brilliant with excited crowds, the incessant movement and music of marching regiments and all the thousands of flags, big and little, which suddenly came fluttering out of every window and door and leaped from every church tower, house-top, staff and ship-mast. It seemed as if everyone had in mind to try and make some amends to it for those late grievous and bitter insults. You have heard how the enthusiasm has been deepening and widening from that time.
A friend asked an Ohio man the other day how the West was taking it. “The West? “ he said, “ the West is all one great Eagle-scream!” A New England man told us that at Concord the bells were rung and the President’s call read aloud on the village common. On the day but one after that reading, the Concord Regiment was marching into Fanueil Hall. Somebody in Washington asked a Massachusetts soldier: “How many more men of your state are coming?” “All of us,” was the answer. One of the wounded Lowell men crawled into a machine shop in Baltimore. An anti-Gorilla ¹ citizen, seeing how young he was, asked, “What brought you here fighting, so far away from your home, my poor boy?” “It was the stars and stripes,” the dying voice said. Hundreds of such stories are told. Everybody knows one. You read many of them in the papers. In our own little circle of friends one mother has sent away an idolized son; another, two; another, four. One boy, just getting over diphtheria, jumps out of bed and buckles his knapsack on. One throws up his passage to Europe and takes up his “enfield.” One sweet young wife is packing a regulation valise for her husband today, and doesn’t let him see her cry. Another young wife is looking fearfully for news from Harper’s Ferry, where her husband is ordered. He told me a month ago, before Sumter, that no Northman could be found to fight against the South. One or two of our soldier friends are surgeons or officers, but most of them are in the ranks, and think no work too hard or too mean, so it is for The Flag. Captain Schuyler Hamilton was an aid of General Scott’s in Mexico, and saw service there, but he shouldered his musket and marched as a private with the Seventh. They wanted an officer when he got down there, and took him out of the ranks, but it was all the same to him; and so on, indefinitely.
The color is all taken out of the “Italian Question.” Garibaldi indeed! “Deliverer of Italy!” Every mother’s son of us is a “Deliverer.” We women regretfully “sit at home at ease” and only appease ourselves by doing the little we can with sewing machines and patent bandage-rollers. Georgy, Miss Sarah Woolsey and half a dozen other friends earnestly wish to join the Nurse Corps, but are under the required age. The rules are stringent, no doubt wisely so, and society just now presents the unprecedented spectacle of many women trying to make it believed that they are over thirty!
The Vermont boys passed through this morning, with the “strength of the hills” in their marching and the green sprigs in their button-holes. The other day I saw some companies they told me were from Maine. They looked like it – sun-browned swingers of great axes, horn-handed “breakers of the glebe,” used to wintering in the woods and getting frost-bitten and having their feet chopped off and conveying huge fleets of logs down spring-tide rivers in the snow and in the floods.– The sound of the drum is never out of our ears.
Never fancy that we are fearful or gloomy. We think we feel thoroughly that war is dreadful, especially war with the excitement off and the chill on, but there are so many worse things than gun-shot wounds! And among the worst is a hateful and hollow peace with such a crew as the “Montgomery mutineers.” There was a dark time just after the Baltimore murders, when communication with Washington was cut off and the people in power seemed to be doing nothing to re-establish it. It cleared up, however, in a few days, and now we don’t feel that the “social fabric”– I believe that is what it is called –is “falling to pieces” at all, but that it is getting gloriously mended. So, “Republicanism will wash”– is washed already in the water and the fire of this fresh baptism, “clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,” and has a new name, which is Patriotism.
¹ That was the newspaper’s way of spelling “Guerilla.”