in him.

M.T.

(1) Sidgwick, Greek Prose Composition, page 116

MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN

You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war; is
it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who started
out to do something in it, but didn't? Thousands entered the war, got
just a taste of it, and then stepped out again, permanently. These, by
their very numbers, are respectable, and are therefore entitled to a
sort of voice--not a loud one, but a modest one; not a boastful one, but
an apologetic one. They ought not to be allowed much space among better
people--people who did something--I grant that; but they ought at least
to be allowed to state why they didn't do anything, and also to explain
the process by which they didn't do anything. Surely this kind of light
must have a sort of value.

Out West there was a good deal of confusion in men's minds during the
first months of the great trouble--a good deal of unsettledness, of
leaning first this way, then that, then the other way. It was hard
for us to get our bearings. I call to mind an instance of this. I was
piloting on the Mississippi when the news came that South Carolina had
gone out of the Union on December 20, 1860. My pilot-mate was a New
Yorker. He was strong for the Union; so was I. But he would not listen
to me with any patience; my loyalty was smirched, to his eye, because my
father had owned slaves. I said, in palliation of this dark fact, that
I had heard my father say, some years before he died, that slavery was a
great wrong, and that he would free the solitary Negro he then owned if
he could think it right to give away the property of the family when
he was so straitened in means. My mate retorted that a mere impulse was
nothing--anybody could pretend to a good impulse; and went on decrying
my Unionism and libelling my ancestry. A month later the secession
atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi, and I
became a rebel; so did he. We were together in New Orleans, January 26,
when Louisiana went out of the Union. He did his full share of the rebel
shouting, but was bitterly opposed to letting me do mine. He said that I
came of bad stock--of a father who had been willing to set slaves free.
In the following summer he was piloting a Federal gun-boat and shouting
for the Union again, and I was in the Confederate army. I held his note
for some borrowed money. He was one of the most upright m