Going To the Front
From the diary of a newly recruited Union soldier
Recollections of a Newly Recruited Union Private, by Warren Lee Goss 1861, from his personal diary pages. Warren enlisted on November 19, 1861 at twenty years of age. He was imprisoned, April 20, 1864, at Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. By the war’s end, Warren L. Goss advanced to Sergeant in the 2nd Regiment, Massachusetts Heavy Artillery.
Spelling and vocabulary are written as it was from Union soldier, Private, Warren Lee Goss’s diary. I am certain that if a new recruitment in the Confederate Army was to write a diary, we could see the same similarities as in Private Goss’s initial thoughts of being a new recruit.
…It was the news that the 6th Massachusetts regiment had been mobbed by roughs on their passages through Baltimore which gave me the war fever. And yet when I read Governor John A. Andrew’s instructions to have the hero martyrs “preserved in ice and tenderly sent forward,” somehow though I felt the pathos of it, I could not reconcile myself to the ice. Ice in connection to patriotism did not give me agreeable impressions of war, and when I came to think of it, the stoning of the heroic “Sixth” didn’t suit me; it detracted from my desire to die a soldier’s death.
I lay awake at night thinking the matter over, with the “ice” and “brick-bats” before my mind. However, the fever culminated that night, and I resolved to enlist.
“Cold chills” ran up and down my back as I got out of bed after the sleepless night, and shaved preparatory to other deeds of valor. I was twenty years of age, and when anything unusual was to be done, like fighting or courting, I shaved.
With a nervous tremor convulsing my system, and my heart thumping like muffled drumbeats, I stood before the door of the recruiting-office, and, before turning the knob to enter, read and re-read the advertisement for recruits posted thereon, until I knew all its peculiarities. The promised chances for “travel and promotion” seemed good, and I thought I may have made a mistake in considering war so serious after all. “Chances for travel!” I must confess now, four years after soldiering, that the “chances for travel” were no myth; but “promotion” was a little uncertain and slow.
I was in no hurry to open the door. Though determined to enlist, I was half inclined to put it off awhile; I had a fluctuation of desires; I was faint-hearted and brave; I wanted to enlist, and yet—here I turn the knob, and was relieved. I had been more prompt, with all my hesitation, than the officer in his duty; he was n’t in. Finally, he came and said: “What do you want, my boy?” “I want to enlist,” I responded blushing deeply with upwelling patriotism and bashfulness. Then the surgeon came to strip me and examine me. In justice to myself, it must be stated that I signed the rolls without a tremor. It is common to most of humanity, I believe, that, when confronted with actual danger, men have less fear than in its contemplation. I will, however, make one exception in favor of the first shell I heard uttering its blood curdling hisses, as though a steam locomotive were traveling the air. With this exception I have found the actual dangers of war always less terrible face to face than on the night before the battle.
My uniform was a bad fit; my trousers were too long by three or four inches; the flannel shirt was coarse and unpleasant, too large at the neck and too short elsewhere. The forage cap was an ungainly bag with pasteboard top and leather visor; the blouse was the only part which seemed decent; while the overcoat made me feel like a little nubbin of corn in a large preponderance of husk. Nothing except “Virginia mud” ever took down my ideas of military pomp quite so low.
After enlisting I did not seem to have so much consequence as I had expected. There was not so much excitement on account of my military appearance as I deemed justly my due. I was taught my facings, and at the time I thought the drillmaster needlessly fussy about shouldering, ordering, and presenting arms. At this time men were often drilled in company and regimental evolutions long before they learned the manual of arms, because of the difficulty of obtaining muskets. These we obtained at an early day, but we would be willingly have resigned them after carrying them for a few hours. The musket, after an hour’s drill, seemed heavier and less ornamental than it had looked to be. The first day I went out to drill, getting tired of doing the same things over and over, I said to the drill-sergeant: “Let’s stop this fooling and go over to the grocery.” His only reply was to a corporal: “Corporal, take this man out and drill him like hell”; and the corporal did! I found that suggestions were not so well appreciated in the army as in private life, and that no wisdom was equal to a drillmaster’s “Right face,” “Left wheel,” and “Right, oblique, march.” It takes a raw recruit some time to learn that he is not to think or suggest, but obey. Some never do learn. I acquired it at last, in humility and mud, but it was tough. Yet I doubt if my patriotism, during my first three weeks’ drill, was quite knee-high. Drilling looks easy to the spectator, but it is n’t. Old soldiers who read this will remember their green recruithood and smile assent. After a time, I had cut down my uniform so that I could see out of it and had conquered the drill sufficiently to see through it. Then the word came: “On to Washington!”
Our company was quartered at a large hotel near the railway station in the town in which it had been recruited. Bunks had been fitted up within a part of the hotel, but little used. We took our meals at the public table and found fault with the style. Six months later we would have considered ourselves aristocratic to have slept in the hotel stables with the meal-bin for a dining table. One morning there was a great excitement at the report that we were going to be sent to the front. Most of us obtained a limited pass and went to see our friends for the last time, returning that same night. Many of our schoolmates came in tears to say goodby. We took leave of them all with heavy hearts, for, lightly as I may seem to treat the subject, it was no light thing for a boy of twenty to start out for three years into the unknown dangers of the civil war. Our mothers—God bless them!—had brought us something good to eat—pies, cakes, doughnuts, and jellies. It was one way in which a mother’s heart found utterance. The young ladies (sisters, of course) brought an invention, usually made of leather or cloth, containing needles, pins, threads, buttons, and scissors, so that nearly every recruit had an embryo tailor’s shop, with a goose outside. One old lady, in the innocence of her heart, brought her son an umbrella. We did not see anything particularly laughable about it at the time, but our old drill sergeant did. Finally we were ready to move; our tears were wiped away, our buttons were polished, and our muskets were as bright as emery paper could make them.
“Wad” Rider, a member of our company, had come from a neighboring State to enlist with us. He was about eighteen years of age, red-headed, freckled-faced, good-natured, and rough, with a wonder aptitude for crying or laughing from sympathy. Another comrade, whom I will call Jack, was honored with a call from his mother, a little woman, hardly reaching up to his shoulder, with a sweet motherly, care-worn face. At the last moment, though she had tried hard to preserve her composure, as is the habit of New England people, she threw her arms around her boy’s neck, and with an outburst of sobbing and crying said: “My dear boy, my dear boy, what will your poor old mother do without you? You are going to fight for your country. Don’t forget your mother, Jack; God bless you, God bless you!” We felt as if the mother’s tears and blessing were a benediction over all of us. There was a touch of nature in her homely sorrow and solicitude over her big boy, which drew tears of sympathy from my eyes as I thought of my own sorrowing mother at home. The sympathetic Wad Rider burst into tears and sobs. His eyes refused, as he expressed it, to “dry up,” until, as we were moving off, Jack’s mother, rushing toward him with a bindle tied like a wheat sheaf, called out in a most pathetic voice, “Jack! Jack! You’ve forgotten to take your pennyroyal.” We all laughed, and so did Jack, and I think the laugh helped him more than the cry did. Everybody had said his last word, and the cars were off. Handkerchiefs were waved at us from all the houses we passed; we cheered till we were hoarse and then settled back and swung our handkerchiefs. Just here let me name over the contents of my knapsack, as a fair sample of what all the volunteers started with. There were in it a pair of trousers, two pairs of drawers, a pair of thick boots, four pair of stockings, four flannel shirts, a blouse, a looking-glass, a can of peaches, a bottle of cough mixture, a button-stick, chalk, razor and strop, the “tailor’s shop” spoken above, a Bible, a small volume of Shakespeare, and writing utensils. To its top was strapped a double woolen blanket and a rubber one. Many other things were left behind because of lack of room in or about the knapsack.
On our arrival in Boston, we were marched through the streets—the first march of any consequence we had taken with our knapsacks and equipments. Our dress consisted of a belt about the body, which held a cartridge box and bayonet, a cross belt, also a haversack and a tin drinking cup, a canteen, and last but not least, the knapsack strapped to the back. The straps ran over, around, about one, in confusion most perplexing to our unsophisticated shoulders, the knapsack constantly giving the wearer the feeling he was being pulled over backward. My canteen banged against my bayonet, both tin cup and bayonet badly interfered with the butt of my musket, while my cartridge box and haversack were constantly flopping up and down—the whole time jangling like a loose harness and chains on a runaway horse. As we marched into Boston Common, I involuntarily cast my eye about for a bench. But for a former experience in offering advice, I should have proposed to the captain to “chip in” and hire a team to carry our equipment. Such was my first experience in war harness. Afterward, with hardened muscles rendered athletic by long marches and invigorated by hardships, I could look back upon those days and smile, while carrying a knapsack as lightly as my heart. That morning my heart was as heavy as my knapsack. At last the welcome orders came: “Prepare to open ranks! Rear, open order, march! Right dress! Front! Order arms! Fix bayonets! Stack arms! Unslings knapsacks! In place, rest!”
The tendency of raw soldiers at first is to overload themselves. On the first long march the reactions sets in, and the recruit goes to the opposite extreme, not carrying enough, and thereby becoming dependent upon his comrades. Old soldiers preserve a happy medium. I have seen a new regiment start out with a lot of indescribable material, including sheet iron stoves, and come back after a long march covered with more mud than baggage, stripped of everything except blankets, haversacks, canteens, muskets, and cartridge boxes.
During that afternoon in Boston, after marching and countermarching, or, as one of our farmer boy recruits expressed it, after “hawing and geeing” about the streets, we were sent to Fort Independence for the night for safe keeping. A company of regulars held the fort, and the guards walked their posts with an uprightness that was astonishing. Our first impression of them was that there was a needless amount of “wheel about and turnabout, and walk just so,” and of saluting and presenting arms. We were all marched to our quarters within the fort, where we unslung our knapsacks. After the first day’s struggle with a knapsack, the general verdict was, “got too much of it.” At supper time were marched to the dining barracks, where our bill of fare was beefsteak, coffee, wheat bread, and potatoes, but not a sign of milk or butter. It struck me as queer when I heard that the army was never provided with butter and milk.
The next day we started for Washington, by rail. We marched through New York’s crowded streets without awakening the enthusiasm we thought our due; for we had read of the exciting scenes attending the departure of the New York 7th for Washington, on the day the 6th Massachusetts was mobbed in Baltimore…We arrived in Baltimore late at night, and we marched through its deserted streets unmolested…
What a great find! It's fascinating to read this. It seems like it could easily have been written last week.
It is remarkable to have this view of a soldier’s inner thoughts from so long ago. Thanks.