ounty, Virginia, Captain
Bowyer, had recently been added to it. The four regiments, 6th, 7th,
8th, and 9th Louisiana, would average above eight hundred bayonets. Of
Wheat's battalion of "Tigers" and the 7th I have written. The 6th,
Colonel Seymour, recruited in New Orleans, was composed of Irishmen,
stout, hardy fellows, turbulent in camp and requiring a strong hand, but
responding to kindness and justice, and ready to follow their officers
to the death. The 9th, Colonel Stafford, was from North Louisiana.
Planters or sons of planters, many of them men of fortune, soldiering
was a hard task to which they only became reconciled by reflecting that
it was "niddering" in gentlemen to assume voluntarily the discharge of
duties and then shirk. The 8th, Colonel Kelly, was from the
Attakapas--"Acadians," the race of which Longfellow sings in
"Evangeline." A home-loving, simple people, few spoke English, fewer
still had ever before moved ten miles from their natal _cabanas_; and
the war to them was "a liberal education," as was the society of the
lady of quality to honest Dick Steele. They had all the light gayety of
the Gaul, and, after the manner of their ancestors, were born cooks. A
capital regimental band accompanied them, and whenever weather and
ground permitted, even after long marches, they would waltz and "polk"
in couples with as much zest as if their arms encircled the supple
waists of the Celestines and Melazies of their native Teche. The Valley
soldiers were largely of the Presbyterian faith, and of a solemn, pious
demeanor, and looked askant at the caperings of my Creoles, holding them
to be "devices and snares."

The brigade adjutant, Captain (afterward Colonel) Eustace Surget, who
remained with me until the war closed, was from Mississippi, where he
had large estates. Without the slightest military training, by study and
zeal, he soon made himself an accomplished staff officer. Of singular
coolness in battle, he never blundered, and, though much exposed, pulled
through without a scratch. My aide, Lieutenant Hamilton, grandson of
General Hamilton of South Carolina, was a cadet in his second year at
West Point when war was declared, upon which he returned to his State--a
gay, cheery lad, with all the pluck of his race.

At nightfall of the second day in this camp, an order came from General
Jackson to join him at Newmarket, twenty odd miles north; and it was
stated that my division commander, Ewell, had been appr