The March of the New York Seventh Regiment—Ingenuity of the Massachusetts Eighth—Comparison Between Massachusetts and New York Volunteers.
The New York Times has a long account of the trip of the famous Seventh N. Y. Regiment, from New York to Washington, written by Fitz James O’Brien, the accomplished literattuer, author of “The Diamond Lens,” etc., who is himself a member of the Regiment. We copy the following:
“Gen. Scott has stated, as I have been informed, that the march that we performed from Annapolis to the Junction is one of the most remarkable on record. I know that I felt it the most fatiguing, and some of our officers have told me that it was the most perilous. The secessionists of Maryland had sworn that they would cut to pieces that regiment, and it was actually telegraphed all over the South that the threat had been accomplished. We marched the first eight miles under a burning sun, in heavy marching order, in less than three hours; and it is well known that, placing all elementary considerations out of the way, marching on a railroad track is the most harassing. We started at about 7 o’clock A. M., and for the first time, saw the town of Annapolis, which, without any disrespect to that place, I may say, looked very much as if some celestial school boy, with a box of toys under his arm, had dropped a few houses and men as he was going home from school, and that the accidental settlement was called Annapolis. Through the town we marched, the people unsympathizing, but afraid. They saw the Seventh for the first time, and for the first time they realized the men that they had threatened.
The tracks had been torn up between Annapolis and the Junction, and here it was the wonderful qualities of the Massachusetts Eighth Regiment came out. The locomotives had been taken to pieces by the inhabitants in order to prevent our travel. In steps a Massachusetts volunteer, looks at the piece-meal engine, takes up a flange, and says cooly, “I made this engine, and I can put it together again.” Engineers were wanted when the engine was ready. Nineteen stepped out of the ranks. The rails were torn up. Practical railroad makers out of the Regiment aid them again, and all this, mind you, without care or food. These brave boys, I say, were starving while they were doing all this good work. What their Colonel was doing I can’t say. As we marched along the track that they had laid, they greeted us with ranks of smiling but hungry faces. One boy told me, with a laugh on his young lips, that he had not ate anything for thirty hours. There was not, thank God, a haversack in our Regiment that was not emptied into the hands of these ill-treated heroes, not a flask that was not at their disposal. I am glad to pay them tribute here, and mentally doff my cap.
There was one peculiar difference that I noticed existing between the Massachusetts Regiment that we met in Philadelphia and our men. The Massachusetts men—to whom all honor be given for the splendid manner in which they afterwards acted in a most trying situation—presented a singular moral contrast to the members of the Seventh. They were earnest, grim, determined. Badly equipped, haggard, unshorn, they yet had a manhood in their look that hardships could not kill. They were evidently thinking all the time of the contest into which they were about to enter. Their grey, eager eyes seemed to be looking for the heights of Virginia. With us, it was somewhat different. Our men were gay and careless, confident of being at any moment capable of performing, and more than performing, their duty. They looked battle in the face with a smile, and were ready to hob knob with an enemy and kill him afterwards. The one was courage in the rough; the other courage burnished. The steel was the same in both, but the last was a little more polished.”
Daily Ohio Statesman, Columbus, OH