I can hardly explain to myself how it has happened that I shld so long have delayed writing, but so it is, and I find there is not a very distant prospect of my entering into another year without a line sent to acknowledge yr. last kind favours. All that I can plead is that I have been unusually...

The Sixteenth Regular Infantry, about 500 strong, under command of Major Sidney Coolidge; and the 18th, about 1200 strong, under Col. Carrington, left Columbus, Ohio, a few days ago, for Louisville, Ky.

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...

Wednesday, October 17. I rode and our party drove twenty-six miles along the Maryland line to General Banks’s headquarters. Gordon’s regiment, the Massachusetts Second, was encamped close by. Towards evening on to General Stone’s headquarters to visit the Twentieth Massachusetts Regiment, at...

October 16. I rode to the farthest outpost of the army at Lewinsville, where we found a captain and twenty men. About two rifle-shots from us was a wood where the enemy’s pickets were placed. On our right we could see ten or twenty men approaching the wood. The captain informed us that they were...

May 14. Mr. Appleton reached home, and left for Washington to take his seat in the extra session of Congress called for July fourth. Lord John Russell and the English sympathize with the South and talk of treating their pirates as belligerents, etc. The English have always been guided by their...

April 19. The Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, which came from Lowell and Lawrence, was fired upon and stoned by the mob in Baltimore. The last company appears to have been the only one attacked; the report is that they had two men killed and some wounded, and shot down some ten of the assailants....

April 15. President Lincoln called out seventy-five thousand militia to suppress the rebellion, defend the capital, and retake the forts, mints, etc., seized by the insurgents. Two thousand men have been called from Massachusetts. Immense enthusiasm here to defend the flag and the Government. The...

February 18. Jefferson Davis has been chosen President and Stephens Vice-President of the Confederacy. In the meantime Lincoln, having been duly recognized as President on Ash Wednesday, the thirteenth, has left Springfield for Washington. He seems to talk everywhere to everybody.

I have had a little photograph taken which they tell me is not much uglier than I am myself, and I enclose one in this letter for Sally & yourself. I cannot tell you how unhappy I am in the present conflict between the North & South. The idea of Civil war makes all the blood in my body...