THE
BY
EDWARD HENRY CLEMENT
CAMBRIDGE
JOHN WILSON AND SON
University Press
1909
From the
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society
for March, 1909.
A little paper written years ago by a lately deceased brother of mine[1] describing the rout of the battle of Bull Run as he saw it with the eyes of a boy and a boy's love of the marvellous seems to me to possess some value historically for the intimate, unconscious picturing, along with it, of the state of the public mind on the eve of the so-called "great uprising." It seems to illustrate well the truth that the great Civil War, as a war, was really a surprise—to the people of the North at least; that the idea persisting up to the day of the battle of Bull Run at the back of the mind of everybody was that in some way the war-cloud would blow over, that the actual shock of contending armies and the pouring out of blood of citizens in civil war would be prevented or in some way avoided. The occasion of the trip to Washington, to carry dainties to a soldier brother, the occasion of the extension of the partly sight-seeing journey to the first battle-field of the great war, the commission from the horror-struck authorities at home to find and bring back from Virginia the body of the first Massachusetts soldier to fall—all prove the naïveté of the popular conceptions at that time of what it was to enter upon war. This Chelsea boy,[2] in that regiment had confessed to me when I was visiting him at the assembling and training camp at Readville and the new army wagons in their fresh blue paint and white canvas arrived on the scene in long array. "It looks as though we were really going," he remarked ruefully.