Mr. Lincoln’s call for 300,000 more troops was being answered. All over the country camps were being formed and boys drilled in all the pleasant villages of the land. Mother and all of us went to rest awhile, after Charley and G. came home, in Litchfield, and watched the drilling and recruiting.
Abby Howland Woolsey to H. G.
Litchfield, Sept. 3, 1862.
My dear Hatty ( Gilman): I should like you to see the beautiful camp of the 19th C. V. here before it is all broken up. We are to have a flag presentation from Mr. Wm. Curtis Noyes, and a religious farewell service was appointed to be held to-day in the Congregational Church. Good Dr. Vail will pray, I dare say, as he did on Sunday: ” God bless our 19th Regiment, the colonel and his staff, the captains, and all the rank and file.” . . .
The calm air, the physical comfort and peace we have here, make mental peace easier I suppose. We cannot be too thankful, we say to each other, that we are not in New York, heated and tired and despondent. It is infinitely sad, all this desperate fighting and struggling; this piecemeal destruction of our precious troops, only to keep the wolves at bay. But how well the country is going to bear it! I suppose these poor, innocent, confident new lives will be in the thickest of the fight at once. They will have their wish! be put to the immediate use for which they enlisted. . . . I grow stony and tearless over such a mass of human grief. I am lost in wonder, too, at the generalship, the daring and endurance of the Southern army. We are to fight it out now, even if it becomes extermination for us and them. . . .