Personal Recollections of the War of 1861: As Private, Sergeant and Lieutenant in the Sixty-First Regiment, New York Volunteer Infantry

Opening chapter - 


March 1st, 1861, I started for Cleveland, Ohio, to enter the law office of Boardman & Ingersoll as a law student. I was in that city at the time of the inauguration of President Lincoln.

After Sumpter was fired on I was anxious to enlist and go to the front with the “Cleveland Grays,” but trouble with my eyes induced me to postpone my enlistment. After the President issued his call for 300,000 additional troops, I learned that Lieut. K. Oscar Broady, a recent graduate of Madison University, who had seen some military service in Sweden, his native country, was raising a Company for the War, in which many Hamilton and Sherburne men were enrolled. Isaac Plumb, one of my most-thought-of friends, was in the number; there were others—Edgar Willey, Israel O. Foote, Fred Ames, and more whose names I do not now recall. I decided to wait no longer, but seek the enemy with the men of this Company.