Thursday, November 1, 2012

1862 November 2 Camp Stetson, Washington, D.C.


[The stationery is headed with an engraving in red, white and blue of company of soldiers led by an officer on horseback.  Under the engraving is printed the following:]
We are coming, Father Abraham,
     Six hundred thousand more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream,
     And from New England’s shore.
We leave our ploughs and workshops,
     Our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance,
     With but a silent tear.
We will not look behind us,
     But steadfastly before,
We are coming, Father Abraham,
     Six hundred thousand more!

Nov    the 2   the 1862
          Washington D C
                  Camp Stetson
            Dear Brother
     this being a very plesant
day i thought that i would
take this my time to
write you a fiew lines   we
are all well as common
this place that i am in
now is one of the prettist
places that you ever saw
i am sitting in the top of

[page 2]
Of a very large oak tree
that was chopped yesterday morning
[letter lined out] and there is a stream of watter
that runs below me and a very
high hill on each side of me
and it is the prettist place
for a camp meeting that i
ever saw   there is no under brush
here and the trees are all
very large oak and they
are so far apart that you
could drive a team through
them any where and the

[page 3]
hills is jut steep enough to
build seats one above the other
there is a meeting in this grove
this after noon and i am going
after i finnish this letter   there
will be one here every Sunday
that it does not storm untill
we leave here and i don’t know
how long that will be be fore we
will go to our winter quartors
and i don’t know where that
will bee nor no body else knows
yet   there is 50 men of us
now at work a building a
magazene one of the highist
hills on this side of the
potomac and [-] to build
a batery there and set a gun
on there that will a carrey
a hundred pound ball besides

[page 4]
   We have sat one just a short
distance from this that carreys
the same size ball   I and
amb [Ambrose ?] is at work with the rest
of them and i like that – well
from this place that we are
at work we can se all along
the potomac for some distance
and acrost on the other side and
the camps are so thick that
they look like fields of
snow all along the sides of
potomac – the land is very rough
on the other side   it seems
almost inposable to get a
road through there – to stand
on this side and look a
crost on the other side – this
is a splended country here
but still i could not
live here for nothing in the [-]

[This letter is not signed.  However, the handwriting is very similar to the handwriting of James Huntley.]

James and Ambrose Huntley were in the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery

[transcript by Mary Roy Dawson Edwards]

MSS 828

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