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March 6.—I HAVE been up to look at the dance and supper-rooms, for the inauguration ball at the Patent office; and I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view a while since, fill’d with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the...

May 26–7.—THE STREETS, the public buildings and grounds of Washington, still swarm with soldiers from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, and all the Western States. I am continually meeting and talking with them. They often speak to me first, and always ...

AS I have look’d over the proof-sheets of the preceding pages, I have once or twice fear’d that my diary would prove, at best, but a batch of convulsively written reminiscences. Well, be it so. They are but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and exci...

EVEN the typical soldiers I have been personally intimate with,—it seems to me if I were to make a list of them it would be like a city directory. Some few only have I mention’d in the foregoing pages—most are dead—a few yet living. There is Reuben Farwell, of...

October 3.—THERE are two army hospitals now remaining. I went to the largest of these (Douglas) and spent the afternoon and evening. There are many sad cases, old wounds, incurable sickness, and some of the wounded from the March and April battles before Richm...

IN one of the hospital tents for special cases, as I sat to-day tending a new amputation, I heard a couple of neighboring soldiers talking to each other from their cots. One down with fever, but improving, had come up belated from Charleston not long before. T...

May 31.—JAMES H. WILLIAMS, aged 21, 3d Virginia cavalry.—About as mark’d a case of a strong man brought low by a complication of diseases, (laryngitis, fever, debility and diarrhœa,) as I have ever seen—has superb physique, remains swarthy yet, and flushed and...

May 28–9.—I STAID to-night a long time by the bedside of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, aged about 19 years, W. S. P., (2d Maryland, southern,) very feeble, right leg amputated, can’t sleep hardly at all—has taken a great deal of morphine, which, as usual...

May 28.—AS I sat by the beside of a sick Michigan soldier in hospital to-day, a convalescent from the adjoining bed rose and came to me, and presently we began talking, He was a middle-aged man, belonged to the 2d Virginia regiment, but lived in Racine, Ohio, ...

FOR two days now the broad spaces of Pennsylvania avenue along to Treasury hill, and so by detour around to the President’s house, and so up to Georgetown, and across the aqueduct bridge, have been alive with a magnificent sight, the returning armies. In their...

I MUST mention a strange scene at the capitol, the hall of Representatives, the morning of Saturday last, (March 4th.) The day just dawn’d, but in half-darkness, everything dim, leaden, and soaking. In that dim light, the members nervous from long drawn duty, ...

May 7.—Sunday.—TO-DAY as I was walking a mile or two south of Alexandria, I fell in with several large squads of the returning Western army, (Sherman’s men as they call’d themselves) about a thousand in all, the largest portion of them half sick, some convales...

Frank H. Irwin, company E, 93d Pennsylvania—died May I, ’65—My letter to his mother.—DEAR MADAM: No doubt you and Frank’s friends have heard the sad fact of his death in hospital here, through his uncle, or the lady from Baltimore, who took his things. (I have...

THE RELEAS’D prisoners of war are now coming up from the southern prisons. I have seen a number of them. The sight is worse than any sight of battle-fields, or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest. There was, (as a sample,) one large boat load, of sev...

PROBABLY the reader has seen physiognomies (often old farmers, sea-captains, and such) that, ;behind their homeliness, or even ugliness, held superior points so subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as a wi...

WHEN Sherman’s armies, (long after they left Atlanta,) were marching through South and North Carolina—after leaving Savannah, the news of Lee’s capitulation having been receiv’d—the men never mov’d a mile without from some part of the line sending up continued...

April 16, ’65.—I FIND in my notes of the time, this passage on the death of Abraham Lincoln: He leaves for America’s history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence—he leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artis...

THE WAR is over, but the hospitals are fuller than ever, from former and current cases. A large majority of the wounds are in the arms and legs. But there is every kind of wound, in every part of the body. I should say of the sick, from my observation, that th...

March 27, 1865.—SERGEANT CALVIN F. HARLOWE, company C, 29th Massachusetts, 3d brigade, 1st division, Ninth corps—a mark’d sample of heroism and death, (some may say bravado, but I say heroism, of grandest, oldest order)—in the late attack by the rebel troops, ...

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was...