ly two months, I rarely left the camp, and
got occasional leisure moments for a fragmentary journal, to send home,
recording the many odd or novel aspects of the new experience. Camp-life
was a wonderfully strange sensation to almost all volunteer officers,
and mine lay among eight hundred men suddenly transformed from slaves
into soldiers, and representing a race affectionate, enthusiastic,
grotesque, and dramatic beyond all others. Being such, they naturally
gave material for description. There is nothing like a diary for
freshness, at least so I think, and I shall keep to the diary through
the days of camp-life, and throw the later experience into another form.
Indeed, that matter takes care of itself; diaries and letter-writing
stop when field-service begins.

I am under pretty heavy bonds to tell the truth, and only the truth; for
those who look back to the newspaper correspondence of that period
will see that this particular regiment lived for months in a glare of
publicity, such as tests any regiment severely, and certainly prevents
all subsequent romancing in its historian. As the scene of the only
effort on the Atlantic coast to arm the negro, our camp attracted a
continuous stream of visitors, military and civil. A battalion of black
soldiers, a spectacle since so common, seemed then the most daring of
innovations, and the whole demeanor of this particular regiment was
watched with microscopic scrutiny by friends and foes. I felt sometimes
as if we were a plant trying to take root, but constantly pulled up to
see if we were growing. The slightest camp incidents sometimes came
back to us, magnified and distorted, in letters of anxious inquiry from
remote parts of the Union. It was no pleasant thing to live under such
constant surveillance; but it guaranteed the honesty of any success,
while fearfully multiplying the penalties had there been a failure.
A single mutiny, such as has happened in the infancy of a hundred
regiments, a single miniature Bull Run, a stampede of desertions, and it
would have been all over with us; the party of distrust would have got
the upper hand, and there might not have been, during the whole contest,
another effort to arm the negro.

I may now proceed, without farther preparation to the Diary.

Chapter 2. Camp Diary

CAMP SAXTON, near Beaufort, S. C., November 24, 1862.

Yesterday afternoon we were steaming over a summer sea, the deck level
as a parlor-floor, no land in