An Artilleryman's Diary Part 1

An Artilleryman's Diary.

by Jenkin Lloyd Jones.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

Whatever value this publication may have, lies in the fact that it offers a typical case--a small cross section of the army that freed the slave and saved the Union.

The Editor of the Commission's publications has asked me to state briefly something about myself. I am one of the mult.i.tude of "hyphenated" Americans, born across the water but reared under the flag.

I am a Cambro-American, proud of both designations, and with abundant heart, loyalty, and perhaps too much head pride in both. Introduced to this world in Llandyssul, Cardigans.h.i.+re, Wales, November 14, 1843, I celebrated my first anniversary by landing at Castle Garden, in New York City. My parents were st.u.r.dy "come-outers" who, after the manner called "heresy", even among Protestants, wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.d of their fathers.

They came from what in orthodox parlance was known as the "Smwtyn Du"

the heretical "black-spot" in Wales. I am the third Jenkin Jones to preach that liberal interpretation of Christianity generally known as Unitarianism. The first Jenkin Jones preached his first heretical sermon in his mother's garden way back in 1726, ninety-three years before Channing preached his Baltimore sermon (1819), from which latter event American Unitarianism generally dates its beginning.

My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer--making hats for the local markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm during the summer time. My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages. The long sea voyage of six weeks in a sailing vessel, interrupted by a dismantling storm which compelled the s.h.i.+p to return for repairs after two weeks sailing, brought them into the teeth of winter, too late in the season to reach their objective point in the West. So the journey was suspended and the first winter spent in a Welsh settlement near Steuben, New York.

May, 1845, found us in the then territory of Wisconsin. The broad, fertile, and hospitable open prairie country in southern Wisconsin was visited and shunned as a desert land, "a country so poor that it would not grow a horse-switch." And so, three "forties" of government land were entered in the heavy woods of Rock River valley, forty miles west of Milwaukee, midway between Oconomowoc and Watertown, which then were pioneer villages. The land was bought at $1.20 an acre, then were purchased a yoke of oxen and two cows; and when these were paid for, there remained one gold sovereign ($5) to start life with--father, mother, and six children.

Trees were felled for the log house which for the first six months was roofed with ba.s.swood bark, for the s.h.i.+ngles had not only to be made, but the art of making them had to be acquired. In this log house were spent the first twelve remembered years of my life. In it four more children were born. In the log school-house, built in the middle of the road because it was built before the road was there--we had arrived before the surveyor--I learned to speak, read, and love the English language.

My first teacher was a Cambro-American who could by her bi-lingual accomplishment ease the way of the little Welsh immigrant children into English. I think I can remember crying when the teacher would speak to me in the then unintelligible English.

In 1856, my thirteenth year, the family began to realize that they had chosen a hard place in which to make a home. The battle would have been a grim one, with the tall trees and their stumps, the "hardhead"

boulders, the marshes, the mosquitoes, and the semi-annual attack of ague, had it not been lightened with the blind hopes and the inspirations that bring to frontier lives the consolations and encouragements of the pioneer. So the home in Ixonia, that had welcomed the coming of the first plank-road and witnessed the approach of the La Crosse & Milwaukee Railroad as far as Oconomowoc, was sold, and in 1855 we moved to a farm of 400 acres in Sauk County.

The next year this was reached by the old Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad and the village of Spring Green was established, adjoining the farm. Here I worked on the farm in the summer time, and during the winter time grew with the growing village school in Spring Green. During the spring term of school, in 1861, the boys were organized into the Spring Green Guards. "Billy" Hamilton, a clerk in George Pound's store, was excused by his employer during the noon hour and the recesses, to come over to drill us. The tresses, black or golden, were sacrificed.

Our hair was "s.h.i.+ngled" and we wore cadet caps. Of course the boys had been stirred when they heard of the humiliation preceding the inauguration of Lincoln, of the firing on Sumter; and in the autumn all of the Spring Green Guards who were ripe enough heard and heeded the call of Father Abraham. Captain "Billy" Hamilton went out as sergeant in the 6th Wisconsin Battery, and four years later came back as colonel at the head of the 36th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry.

I was too young to go out in 1861. I cannot say that I panted for the fray. I dreaded the coming of the dire moment when conscience, not the government, would deliver me into a service that had no charm for me.

Another winter's schooling in the Spring Green Academy, another sowing and harvest time, then leaving unstacked the hay that I had mown, and in the shocks the oats that I had cradled, I obeyed this "stern daughter of the voice of G.o.d"--to use Wordsworth's phrase--and turned my face to the South. I joined my old comrades of the Spring Green Guards in the 6th Wisconsin Battery, nine months or so after their first enlistment.

I was a "mother's boy", and with the exception of three months'

district schooling at an aunt's house in Watertown, when a little lad, had never been away from home over night. I had not then and have not since, owned a firearm of any description. As I approach my three-score-and-ten, I can say that I have never sighted a gun, or pulled the trigger on anything smaller than a cannon, and that only when ordered.

It seems necessary for me to state further, that throughout the three years of camp life, as through all the succeeding years, I have been a total abstainer from all forms of liquor and tobacco. The strictures throughout the Diary concerning the over-use of intoxicants were written from this standpoint, and perhaps were over stated. At least truth requires that I should at this distance testify that the bulk of the Union Army, so largely made up of boys, was of stern stuff, with their lives rooted in seriousness and committed to sobriety, as the subsequent careers of those who were allowed to return amply prove. Many things set forth in this Diary were necessarily untrue to fact, but there is nothing but what was true to the thought and feeling of the writer at the time. The simplicity of the narrative and the lapse of time, will, I hope, take all the barbs out of any random shafts that may have been fired by a battery boy.

The monotonous story of this battery boy is told in long metre in the Diary here published. The only remarkable thing about the record is, that it exists and is still available fifty years after the writing. Of course every soldier lad started to keep a diary. Very few persisted to the end; rare is the private who did not outlast his own diary. And then again, the vicissitudes of the camp, the hopeless carelessness of the American people to contemporary history, have carried to oblivion most of such records. These ten little memorandum books would doubtless have suffered a like fate, were it not for the vigilance of the home folk, to whose care the successive volumes were promptly consigned. And then many years after, there was the loving, unsolicited persistency of a faithful amanuensis, who, unbeknown to me, in the "cracks of time,"

patiently and faithfully transcribed the entire story, which was fast becoming illegible in the original camp- and battle-stained little books, to the clear, typewritten sheets which made them available to the Wisconsin History Commission. To Miss Minnie Burroughs, now Mrs. Herbert Turner of Berkeley, California, belongs therefore the basic credit for this publication.

Further acknowledgment is due to the Editor of the Commission, and to several of his able a.s.sistants on the editorial staff of the Wisconsin Historical Society. They have with great painstaking verified every word of the transcription with my original gnarled ma.n.u.script, have corrected (so far as possible by the official rolls) the names of the persons whom I have mentioned in the Diary, have read the proof, and in general have put the book through the press. This has involved an amount of labor which under the circ.u.mstances I could not have given, and without which the publication would have been inexcusable. It is the Editor's intelligent hand also that furnished most of the geographical date-lines, the paragraphing, the folio headings, the sub-heads, and the countless other editorial embellishments so essential to a presentable publication. * * * Technical work of this sort is entirely lost on the reader, of course, but it is profoundly appreciated by at least the present grateful author.

The post-bellum story of this journalizing private of the 6th Wisconsin Battery does not belong in this book. Should anyone be curious to connect the soldier in uniform with the militant citizen, who, with more pacific weapons, has continued his contentions for freedom, justice, and union, let the following suffice. There was a year's work on the new farm in Iowa County; then a winter of teaching the common school at Arena, Wisconsin, with ninety children, ranging from the little German child grappling with her English A. B. C.'s, to students in algebra and geometry. During one year there was an honest attempt to accept the path apparently laid out for me--that of an honest, hard-working farmer. And then the hunger for books, the blind push on thought lines, the half-unrecognized leadings towards another career, broke beyond control, and I left the farm. Then came four years' study at the Theological Seminary at Meadville, Pennsylvania; a pastorate of a year at Winnetka, Illinois; nearly ten years of similar work at Janesville, Wisconsin, and lastly a thirty-two years' ministry in All Souls Church, Chicago, which I organized and in which I continue to work. For the last eight years I have been head resident of the Abraham Lincoln Centre, which I founded and which I still direct. For thirty-two years I have been Editor of _Unity_, a weekly independent religious magazine, devoted to "Freedom, Fellows.h.i.+p, and Character in Religion."

In 1890 I secured possession of a tract of land which was once the site of the prosperous early Wisconsin village of Helena, on the banks of the Wisconsin River in Iowa County, where in 1863 ex-Governor C. C. Washburn and C. C. Woodman, two young men, founded a shot-making manufactory. The old shot tower gave name to the summer encampment known as Tower Hill, where, in connection with the little farm adjoining, I have found vacation rest and renewal for the last twenty years.

Two graves have touched me with peculiar tenderness, and suggest the unwritten and too often cruelly-neglected pathos in the life of the immigrant pioneer, much of which I have seen, a part of which I have been. A little sister, two years my senior, a fair blossom, wilted on the journey and the little body was left in a roadside grave in Utica, New York. I was too young to remember her, but through all the succeeding years that unmarked and unvisited grave has left a hallowed touch of tenderness in the home, and given to the missing one a potency perhaps greater than abides with the unburied that remain.

Scarce a year had elapsed after the arrival in the "big woods" when the fatherly uncle, the bachelor-partner whose name I bear, fell before the relentless attack of fever--so easily controlled now, but so fatal then.

He died in a saw-mill at Oconomowoc, and the first grave in the settlement was hollowed by the hands of his brother at the foot of a great tree in the deep forest. The father and brother, who was "priest unto his own household," read and prayed and woke the forest echoes with his own voice, as he sang a sustaining old Welsh hymn. Perhaps this devout tradition lying back of my memory has had much to do with what faithfulness may have characterized the services of the private whose Diary is here recorded, and the ministry whose career was bargained for, to a degree that cannot be estimated in the sombre forest and the tented field.

Perhaps another word may be pardoned. On the way to Camp Randall, the tears which had scarcely dried from the heart-break that followed a mother's last embrace, started afresh at the sight of the dome of the old University building at Madison. For the months preceding the enlistment, the struggle had been not choosing between home and camp.

No! not even between danger and safety, life and death, but what seemed the final choice between a country to save and an education to acquire.

For in the dim haze of the farmer boy's horoscope, the University outline was shaping itself. In choosing his country's cause it seemed to him that he was relinquis.h.i.+ng forever the hope of the education of which he dreamed. Forty-seven years after the campus was dimmed with his tears, the University of Wisconsin invested this private of the 6th Wisconsin Battery with the degree of LL. D.

A great thing was done for humanity in America, between 1861 and 1865.

If it could not have been done otherwise, it was worth all it cost. And if this same dire predicament were to come again, I would do my past all over again. But Oh! it was such a wrong way of doing the right thing! May the clumsy sentences of a boy's diary, so lacking in perspective, so inadequate in expression, contribute a few sentences to the Gospel of Peace.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Signature "Jenkin Lloyd Jones"]

Tower Hill, Wisconsin, September 9, 1913.

THE DIARY OF AN ARTILLERY PRIVATE

_A Journal of daily events during my campaign in the war to crush the rebellion in 1861. If in the battle I may fall, or die away from the withering hand of disease in the hospital, this favor may I ask, to send this and what may accompany it to my aged parents. Addressed to R. Ll.

Jones, Lone Rock, Richland Co._

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Spring Green, Wis., Thursday, Aug. 14, 1862. I enlisted under Lieutenant Fancher for the 6th Battery, Wisconsin Artillery.

Madison, Wis., Monday, Aug. 25. I bade good-bye to friends, relatives and companions most dear, and at 8 o'clock embarked for Madison to begin my soldier's life. Arrived at camp at 12 M. and slept my first night on the lap of mother earth with Uncle Sam's blanket for a coverlid and a few rough boards raised about four feet in the center for a roof. I laid down; my eyelids were heavy and demanded sleep but the mind wandered and the stars shone bright and it was long ere sleep threw her curtain over the scene.

Madison, Tuesday, Aug. 26. I got partially rested by my short sleep, but I was awake long ere the rising of the sun. I awoke to a different scene to which had hitherto been my lot. Instead of the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep, was the rattle of the drum and the "hooray" of the volunteers. To-day we were examined by the surgeon and went up-town for the purpose of drawing our bounty money, but the press of business was too large, and we were put off till the next day. In the evening I had to bid good-bye to my brother John, who had accompanied me to camp.

It was a difficult task--my constant companion in labor, my adviser and counsel in everything. I had to part. It seemed as if I was like a s.h.i.+p on sea without a compa.s.s, without other safeguard than my own firmness and weight.

Madison, Wednesday, Aug. 27. I had to pa.s.s through the regular scramble-game for my rations, and drew the bounty in the afternoon, went around town and bought my outfit, ready to leave.

Enroute, Thursday, Aug. 28. To-day we were informed that we were to be sent on in the evening. I wrote my first letter home and in the evening we started for "Dixie" at 10 P. M. It was dark and we could not see anything to attract our attention so our minds had free scope to wander home to loved ones, and it was a saddening thought that we were to leave all of these, to meet at best a very uncertain fate. We pa.s.sed on to Milton where our car was uncoupled and taken up by the Janesville R. R., and off we rocked for another four or five hours' ride, half asleep, and by this time somewhat fatigued. At Janesville we changed cars for Chicago, it being about 1 A. M.

Enroute, Friday, Aug. 29. The day dawned just in time to see the suburbs (Chicago). We being about five miles from town received a magnificent view of the Western metropolis. The immense clouds of smoke issuing from the ma.s.sive stacks of manufacture, and the countless rigging of the vessels lying at the dock were great sights to my country eyes. We arrived at the end of the line at 6:30 A. M. We were immediately formed in line, and forward march to the depot of the I[llinois] C[entral] R.

R. about a mile distant. We were no sooner there than the shrill whistle told us we were again on a ride of three hundred and sixty-five miles to Cairo, without intermission. We crossed an arm of Lake Michigan having a fine view of the lake. Of our travel across the almost boundless prairies of Illinois I will not try to describe, but suffice it to say, we arrived at Cairo at 4 A. M.

Cairo, Ill., Sat.u.r.day, Aug. 30. We were astir early to catch the first sight of the far-famed city of Cairo (Ill.), and certainly an unhappy surprise we found it; the combined medley of filth and disorder, the streets rough, the sidewalks torn and tattered, rendering it dangerous to travel, lest they should throw one headlong to the ditch.

Rienzi, Miss., Tuesday, Sept. 2. We went out in the morning to drill on the field but did not see much into the wild scampering way. I wrote to Sp[ring] Gr[een]. Had no time to write home before mail went out. Was drilled on foot by Corporal Sweet in the evening.

[Sidenote: 1862 Camp Routine]