Extract from the Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson Coolidge

Wednesday, December 4. We have the President’s message, a conservative, sensible document in much better English than his former one. The reports of the Secretary of the Navy and of the Army are also very interesting; the former showing that from a navy of five hundred guns, last spring much scattered and out of repair, we now have twenty-five hundred efficient guns; the latter recommending the employment of slaves belonging to disloyal masters, cutting out of Virginia a loyal State to be called West Virginia, and lastly stating that we have under arms the enormous force of six hundred and sixty thousand men, of which about twenty thousand are regulars, the balance volunteers.

Published in The Autobiography of T. Jefferson Coolidge, 1831–1920 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923), 35.