The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85,
November, 1864, by Various

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864

Author: Various

Release Date: March 21, 2008 [EBook #24885]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, NOVEMBER 1864 ***

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIV.--NOVEMBER, 1864.--NO. LXXXV.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.

LEAVES FROM AN OFFICER'S JOURNAL.

I.

[I wish to record, as truthfully as I may, the beginnings of a momentous
experiment, which, by proving the aptitude of the freed slaves for
military drill and discipline, their ardent loyalty, their courage under
fire, and their self-control in success, contributed somewhat towards
solving the problem of the war, and towards remoulding the destinies of
two races on this continent.

During a civil war events succeed each other so rapidly that these
earlier incidents are long since overshadowed. The colored soldiery are
now numbered no longer by hundreds, but by tens of thousands. Yet there
was a period when the whole enterprise seemed the most daring of
innovations, and during those months the demeanor of this particular
regiment, the First South Carolina, was watched with microscopic
scrutiny by friends and foes. Its officers had reason to know this,
since the slightest camp-incidents sometimes came back to them,
magnified and distorted, in anxious letters of inquiry from remote parts
of the Union. It was no pleasant thing to live in this glare of
criticism; but it guarantied the honesty of any success, while fearfully
multiplying the penalties, ha