Boston, June 10, 1861
I am sorry to see what you say of the possibility of your demanding your passports. Stocks rose in New York on Saturday owing to the reported tenor of your despatches, which must however have been of a tone very different from your letter to me. Still I can’t help thinking that the tenor of the news from this country must create an improvement in England. Now, however, the feeling here is very bitter, and significant intimations fall from some of the leading papers that the July Congress, while it modifies the Morrill tariff so as to assist and help France to the utmost of our power, will indulge in no friendly legislation to England. This is the tone of the Evening Post, a free-trade journal. If England wants to break down the Morrill tariff, her only course is to take the back track and conciliate our good will. . . .
About this war business. A great change has come over my feelings since you left, as I have told you, and I now feel not only a strong inclination to go off, but a conviction that from many points of view I ought to do it. I am twenty-six years old and of course have a right to do as I choose; but I acknowledge, as I have done all along, that great regard is due in this matter to you and your feelings, and now, as heretofore, I shall not go without your consent; but I think you ought to give that consent, if, under certain circumstances, I ask for it. Undoubtedly a further levy will soon be demanded in this war and when it comes there will be an effort made in this state to send forth a model regiment, and already John Palfrey is spoken of as its colonel. I saw Governor Andrew the other evening and he promised me that, in that or any other regiment to be sent from Massachusetts, if I would apply, he would give me a company. Now if such a regiment is raised, I wish to go in it, and I think I have a right to almost demand your assent to my doing so. How does the case stand? I cannot see that in a business point of view I am very necessary to you. Your property and mine would be just as safe and probably better managed in the hands of a man of business, or Sam Frothingham under John’s supervision, than in mine; and of this you must be aware. So how is my presence here necessary to you, which is the only ground on which I think you ought to object? If you say it is, I will give up the idea still, but before saying so I earnestly hope you will consider the matter fairly. You will say there is small glory in a civil war, and this is generally true; but in the civil war in England or in the Revolution here, what should we now think of a man who, in the hour of greatest danger, sat at home reading the papers? For years our family has talked of slavery and of the South, and been most prominent in the contest of words, and now that it has come to blows, does it become us to stand aloof from the conflict? It is not as if I were an only son, though many such have gone; but your family is large and it seems to me almost disgraceful that in after years we should have it to say that of them all not one at this day stood in arms for that government with which our family history is so closely connected. I see all around me going, but I sit in my office and read the papers, for I have nothing else to do. I see great events going on, and a heroic spirit everywhere flashing out, and you ask me for no sufficient cause to stifle my own and, when sitting here at home, I am convinced of my failure as a lawyer, to quietly sink into a real estate agent. I hope you will let me go, for if you should and I return, it will make a man of me; and if I should not return – am I likely to live to a better purpose by going on as I have begun? Perhaps the occasion will not demand it. Perhaps no such regiment will be raised. If it should so happen, however, I earnestly hope for our own credit and that of our name, that you will make no objection to my taking this commission which now I have but to ask for, and going forth to sustain the government and to show that in this matter our family means what it says…