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