There is, however, an exception in history which may perhaps serve to prove the rule. The Puritans who colonized New England were frontier men, and were, I think, in general scrupulously honest.
They had their faults. They were stern, austere men, tyrannical at the backbone when power came in their way, as are all pioneers, hard upon vices for which they who made the laws had themselves no minds; but they were not dishonest.
At Milwaukee I went up to see the Wisconsin volunteers, who were then encamped on open ground in the close vicinity of the town. Of Wisconsin I had heard before--and have heard the same opinion repeated since--that it was more backward in its volunteering than its neighbor States in the West. Wisconsin has 760,000inhabitants, and its tenth thousand of volunteers was not then made up; whereas Indiana, with less than double its number, had already sent out thirty-six thousand. Iowa, with a hundred thousand less of inhabitants, had then made up fifteen thousand. But neverthless to me it seemed that Wisconsin was quite alive to its presumed duty in that respect. Wisconsin, with its three-quarters of a million of people, is as large as England. Every acre of it may be made productive, but as yet it is not half cleared. Of such a country its young men are its heart's blood. Ten thousand men, fit to bear arms, carried away from such a land to the horrors of civil war, is a sight as full of sadness as any on which the eye can rest. Ah me, when will they return, and with what altered hopes! It is, Ifear, easier to turn the sickle into the sword than to recast the sword back again into the sickle!
We found a completed regiment at Wisconsin consisting entirely of Germans. A thousand Germans had been collected in that State and brought together in one regiment, and I was informed by an officer on the ground that there are many Germans in sundry other of the Wisconsin regiments. It may be well to mention here that the number of Germans through all these Western States is very great.
Their number and well-being were to me astonishing. That they form a great portion of the population of New York, making the German quarter of that city the third largest German town in the world, Ihave long known; but I had no previous idea of their expansion westward. In Detroit nearly every third shop bore a German name, and the same remark was to be made at Milwaukee; and on all hands Iheard praises of their morals, of their thrift, and of their new patriotism. I was continually told how far they exceeded the Irish settlers. To me in all parts of the world an Irishman is dear.
When handled tenderly he becomes a creature most lovable. But with all my judgment in the Irishman's favor, and with my prejudices leaning the same way, I feel myself bound to state what I heard and what I saw as to the Germans.
But this regiment of Germans, and another not completed regiment, called from the State generally, were as yet without arms, accouterments, or clothing. There was the raw material of the regiment, but there was nothing else. Winter was coming on--winter in which the mercury is commonly twenty degrees below zero--and the men were in tents with no provision against the cold. These tents held each two men, and were just large enough for two to lie. The canvas of which they were made seemed to me to be thin, but was, Ithink, always double. At this camp there was a house in which the men took their meals, but I visited other camps in which there was no such accommodation. I saw the German regiment called to its supper by tuck of drum, and the men marched in gallantly, armed each with a knife and spoon. I managed to make my way in at the door after them, and can testify to the excellence of the provisions of which their supper consisted. A poor diet never enters into any combination of circumstances contemplated by an American. Let him be where he will, animal food is with him the first necessary of life, and he is always provided accordingly. As to those Wisconsin men whom I saw, it was probable that they might be marched off, down South to Washington, or to the doubtful glories of the Western campaign under Fremont, before the winter commenced. The same might have been said of any special regiment.
But taking the whole mass of men who were collected under canvas at the end of the autumn of 1861, and who were so collected without arms or military clothing, and without protection from the weather, it did seem that the task taken in hand by the Commissariat of the Northern army was one not devoid of difficulty.
The view from Milwaukee over Lake Michigan is very pleasing. One looks upon a vast expanse of water to which the eye finds no bounds, and therefore there are none of the common attributes of lake beauty; but the color of the lake is bright, and within a walk of the city the traveler comes to the bluffs or low round-topped hills, from which we can look down upon the shores. These bluffs form the beauty of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and relieve the eye after the flat level of Michigan. Round Detroit there is no rising ground, and therefore, perhaps, it is that Detroit is uninteresting.