Boston, December 10, 1861
Yours of the 23d of last month reached me yesterday… If we are going to have such a storm as you intimate, I should have to go, so anyhow, and if indeed “all that remains is to drop gracefully,” it will not do me or any one else any good for me to anxiously hang on here a few days longer. Yet it does make me feel terribly. We have blundered all summer long and now we have capstoned our blunders by blundering into a war with England. So be it. While there’s life there’s hope; but I go into the army with a bitter feeling against those under whose lead we have come to this pass, and amid all the shattered idols of my whole life I don’t feel as if I cared much when my turn came. I suppose now I shall go into the field against a foreign enemy and I ought to rejoice at that. Still, I don’t. Against the rebels I could fight with a will and in earnest. They are traitors, they war for a lie, they are the enemies of morals, of government, and of man. In them we fight against a great wrong — but against England, we shall have forced her into war when she only asked for peace; we shall have made that a cause of quarrel which a few soft words might have turned away. It will be a wicked and causeless war wantonly brought about by us and one in which I most unwillingly would go to my death.
As for Seward I cannot comprehend his policy and so I cannot judge of it, and most slowly and reluctantly will I surrender my faith in him. His policy has been to keep a firm front, and in this it was wise; but I think he might have made himself less offensive to foreign powers in doing it, and I somewhat doubt the expediency of bragging yourself out of the game, as you tell me he has done. Still we have made our bed and now we must lie on it.
I shall probably have joined my regiment this week or early next. You will be surprised to hear that I shall probably regularly enlist and make my debut as a simple sergeant in Caspar Crowninshield’s company. The truth is they have so backed and filled, and hesitated and delayed, that, having determined to go, I have lost my patience, and have signified to them that I am ready to wait in the ranks until they are ready to give me a commission. Caspar got his company as a promotion for his behavior at Balls Bluff, and I shall get mine, I suppose, at some indefinite future period, when Sargent ceases to be a gas-bag and Williams feels the regiment under his thumb. Meanwhile I shall rough and fight it out with the rest, sleep fifteen in a tent with stable-boys, groom horses, feed like a hog and never wash, and such is my future! Well, it is better than my present, for I shall at least, by going into the army, get rid of the war.
Your last letter, and your statement that there was nothing left but a suspension of relations with England, came peculiarly unpleasantly just now. I had again begun to hope. Our blockade has become so effective and we are developing such enormous strength, that in spite of blunders, the confederates seemed likely to be crushed by brute force and starved to death, while we are really more prosperous than we have been for a year, and our poor more comfortable than they have been for four years. The confederates already, before winter begins, are regulating by law the profit on “articles of prime necessity,” and what would it have been before spring? I had begun to hope yet to see this rebellion collapse. Of course a war with England exactly reverses positions. It will be short and desperate, and end in the establishment of a confederate government, I suppose. However, a glorious indifference is coming over me. I can live on my pay, the world will not come to an end this time, and if I do, I shall doubtless be very comfortable in my grave. But I do hate to be blundered out of existence and, before a foreign war just as we were getting the whip-hand. Even Balls Bluff will hide a diminished head; it will stand forth in all history as the Koh-i-noor of blunders. . . .
