Chapin’s Farm, Va.,
November 9, 1864.
Dear Sister L.:—
My position in the quartermaster’s department does not afford the leisure I used to have when my business was to blow “Dan! Dan! Butterfield,” or even when I was in the company with the captain there. There is forage to haul and rations to issue. The colonel wants me to go to Bermuda Hundred for axes; the colonel wants logs hauled to build him a house, and he wants this and that, and the status of the poor quartermaster may be graphically described as “on the bob” from morning till night, and his letter writing must be put in edge-wise to all this work.
My experience is that there is a difference between navigating a ship on the ocean and guiding a mule team through Virginia woods and over Virginia roads, and the difference is in favor of the ship. There is a significance in the “Ya-a-a-e mool” and “Now git” of the American teamsters of African descent, that to a novice is unintelligible, but the animals with the ears seem to understand the animals with the gum and ivory, and from the mutual understanding results much good to the animals with the muskets.
I have a very limited idea of what is going on over at the Weldon railroad, but in this part of the army everybody is going into winter quarters. To be sure they are under the old orders to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, and line of battle is formed every morning an hour before light, but log houses continue to grow like mushrooms on a damp night. Generals and “two rows of buttons” generally are demolishing the residences of the “F. F. Vs.” and working them in with logs into cozy quarters. There is no certainty of their being occupied any length of time, but there is a possibility of it, and so they are built. Lieutenant Burrows and myself have been putting up a log stable for the brigade teams one hundred and eighty feet long, with two wings of forty feet each. It would not be considered in Broadway an imposing edifice, but it will impose an amount of comfort on the poor mules that they never dreamed of in connection with their fate in the army as “means of transportation.”
My health is not what it used to be. I am not sick abed any of the time, but I feel weak and lack energy. Any unusual exertion tires me out. My stay in the hospital did not seem to do me much good.
To-day I suppose there is almost as much excitement as yesterday. The returns from elections will be known, and at telegraph stations they will have the news—of Abraham’s election. We believe it here, but it will be vastly consolatory to have our belief confirmed.
I may have mentioned to you that I was trying to get Alf Ayres into the Eighth as second lieutenant. If he is as competent as I think he is, I could get him appointed on sight, if he could only come over and see our colonel. The colonel’s recommendation would secure his promotion, and I would like to see him in the regiment.
