been under drill only a fortnight, and a part only two days. They have
all been slaves, and very few are even mulattoes.


December 4, 1862.

"Dwelling in tents, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." This condition is
certainly mine,--and with a multitude of patriarchs beside, not to
mention Caesar and Pompey, Hercules and Bacchus.

A moving life, tented at night, this experience has been mine in civil
society, if society be civil before the luxurious forest fires of Maine
and the Adirondack, or upon the lonely prairies of Kansas. But a
stationary tent life, deliberately going to housekeeping under canvas, I
have never had before, though in our barrack life at "Camp Wool" I often
wished for it.

The accommodations here are about as liberal as my quarters there, two
wall-tents being placed end to end, for office and bedroom, and
separated at will by a "fly" of canvas. There is a good board floor and
mop-board, effectually excluding dampness and draughts, and everything
but sand, which on windy days penetrates everywhere. The office
furniture consists of a good desk or secretary, a very clumsy and
disastrous settee, and a remarkable chair. The desk is a bequest of the
slaveholders, and the settee of the slaves, being ecclesiastical in its
origin, and appertaining to the little old church or "praise-house," now
used for commissary purposes. The chair is a composite structure: I
found a cane seat on a dust-heap, which a black sergeant combined with
two legs from a broken bedstead and two more from an oak-bough. I sit on
it with a pride of conscious invention, mitigated by profound