{"id":11625,"date":"2021-05-10T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2021-05-10T15:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dotcw.com\/?p=1924"},"modified":"2021-05-08T19:42:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-09T00:42:48","slug":"how-long-it-is-since-sumter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/how-long-it-is-since-sumter\/","title":{"rendered":"How long it is since Sumter"},"content":{"rendered":"
Jane Stuart Woolsey to a Friend in Paris.<\/em><\/address>\n

8 Brevoort Place, Friday, May 10, 1861.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t help remembering sometimes that you are that august being, a \u201cTribune\u2019s Own,\u201d and as unapproachable on your professional pinnacle as the ornament of the Calendar whom Georgy will<\/em> 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 \u201cunaccountably turned into a lie\u201d by the time it crosses the \u201cbig water.\u201d So it will be best perhaps not to try to give you any of my own \u201cviews\u201d except, indeed, such views of war as one may get out of a parlor window. Not, in passing, that I haven\u2019t any! We all have views now, men, women and little boys,\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cChildren with drums<\/div>\n
Strapped round them by the fond paternal ass,<\/div>\n
Peripatetics with a blade of grass<\/div>\n
Betwixt their thumbs,\u201d\u2013<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

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 \u201cUnion bonnet,\u201d composed of alternate layers of red, white and blue, with streaming ribbons \u201cof the first.\u201d 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. \u201cMamma,\u201d said he, \u201cisn\u2019t this South Carolina?\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201ctime before Sumter\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

A friend asked an Ohio man the other day how the West was taking it. \u201cThe West? \u201c he said, \u201c the West is all one great Eagle-scream!\u201d A New England man told us that at Concord the bells were rung and the President\u2019s 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: \u201cHow many more men of your state are coming?\u201d \u201cAll of us,\u201d was the answer. One of the wounded Lowell men crawled into a machine shop in Baltimore. An anti-Gorilla \u00b9 citizen, seeing how young he was, asked, \u201cWhat brought you here fighting, so far away from your home, my poor boy?\u201d \u201cIt was the stars and stripes,\u201d 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 \u201cenfield.\u201d One sweet young wife is packing a regulation valise for her husband today, and doesn\u2019t let him see her cry. Another young wife is looking fearfully for news from Harper\u2019s Ferry, where her husband is ordered. He told me a month ago, before Sumter<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The color is all taken out of the \u201cItalian Question.\u201d Garibaldi indeed! \u201cDeliverer of Italy!\u201d Every mother\u2019s son of us is a \u201cDeliverer.\u201d We women regretfully \u201csit at home at ease\u201d 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!<\/p>\n

The Vermont boys passed through this morning, with the \u201cstrength of the hills\u201d 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 \u2013 sun-browned swingers of great axes, horn-handed \u201cbreakers of the glebe,\u201d 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.\u2013 The sound of the drum is never out of our ears.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cMontgomery mutineers.\u201d 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\u2019t feel that the \u201csocial fabric\u201d\u2013 I believe that is what it is called \u2013is \u201cfalling to pieces\u201d at all, but that it is getting gloriously mended. So, \u201cRepublicanism will wash\u201d\u2013 is<\/em> washed already in the water and the fire of this fresh baptism, \u201cclothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,\u201d and has a new name, which is Patriotism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00b9 That was the newspaper\u2019s way of spelling \u201cGuerilla.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jane Stuart Woolsey to a Friend in Paris. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":69113,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11625","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-letters-of-a-family-during-the-war-for-the-union"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Jane-Stewart-Woolsey.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cw-chronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}