Journal of Surgeon Alfred L. Castleman.

14th.–Have just received an order from Division Commander S—, to see that every regiment in my Brigade has a wagon set aside for the exclusive use of the hospital, to take steps at once to see that all of my regiments are amply supplied with every thing necessary for the comfort of the sick and wounded, and to report the sanitary condition of my Brigade early in the morning. This indicates a forward movement, and although a change of weather, or a variety of other circumstances may alter the plans, I doubt not the present intention is to go forward during the week. I am quite recovered from my sickness, and although I sleep in the hot and in the open air, generally, I never enjoyed better health. Visited Warwick Court House to-day, and spent much of the afternoon in musing over the musty records of two hundred years ago. Jamestown must have been a small affair then, and it has wonderfully “held its own.” The date of these records runs back to within a very few years of the organization of the first government in Virginia, when the blue laws of Connecticut were recognized as patterns of wisdom, even here, and tobacco was a legal tender. Brought away a few sheets, over which I expect to while away many otherwise lonely hours. This country presents subjects of study and reflection, as well for the moral as for the physical historian. Compare its age with its progress, its appearance with that of other districts differently conditioned. The face of the country presents large tracts of low, wet land, intersected by extensive ridges of rich rolling timber–if in a proper state of cultivation, a beautiful farming country. It is surrounded on all sides by the finest navigable waters, with one of the finest climates in the world; nearer to markets, both foreign and domestic, than any country of the same extent on the continent, and though it has been settled for two hundred and fifty years, we may travel for miles through an almost unbroken forest; or, if we chance to find an opening made by the work of man, it is some insignificant field worn out by the culture of tobacco till it would produce no more; then, like an old horse, turned over to fate. This little field perhaps will have in its midst an old house, after the fashion of the peasantry of George the Second, which will exhibit to the eye the same broken panes which disfigured it a hundred years ago, and grate upon the ear the same harsh sound of rusty, broken hinges, which answered on the swinging of the door to admit the tax-gatherer of England’s king, two centuries before. Oh, Slavery! if these be thy doings, and thou art doomed now, all the sufferings of widows and orphans, all the sins of this wicked world will be atoned in thy crucifiction. Aye, this war is but one of the links in the great chain of events wrought by Providence countless centuries ago, to draw forward the car of progress to its final goal.