Excerpt from
|
The silver-haired colonel, who was twice the age of the average enlisted man, was affectionately known in the regiment as "the old man. " A stickeymour was like a stern but loving father to his men, known for his occasional use of a small rod or switch to mete out punishment to errant soldiers. Once when a drummer beat out the wrong call in camp the "old man" rushed out of his tent, grabbed a youthful fellow he thought was the drummer, and gave him a good whipping. When he returned to his tent, he found his orderly grinning and barely suppressing laughter. When Seymour asked what was so funny, the orderly told him that he had just beat a sergeant of Company F who looked like the drummer. The surprised colonel went looking for the fellow to apologize and invited him into his tent, where he treated him to an apple toddy. When the youth departed, the orderly again began snickering. Seymour demanded to know the reason for his renewed mirth. "You treated the drummer to an apple toddy," replied the orderly. "He looks so much like the Sergeant of Company F you whipped awhile ago." For many of the Irish immigrants of the 6th Louisiana, the early days in camp compared favorably to their lives as laborers in New Orleans. "My health was never better in my life," Pvt. Nicholas Herron wrote in early July to his New Orleans cousin. "Climate is fine and cool except a few hours at noon the sun comes out as hot as it is in New Orleans. We only drill in the morning and evening."
|
Though hunger would be their curse later in the war, many of the regiment ate better now than they had at home. "This is the poorest part of Virginia yet we enjoy ourselves very well, " wrote Herron, a 21-year-old Irish-born bricklayer from New Orleans. "The farmer around here brings in milk and dried, fresh meat but they sell them very dear. We get very good rations here. ...We have a suttler here that supplies us in everything we want in the way of clothing to be deducted from our $11 per month. ..." The men were fit, rested and ready for action. "We are in fine trim for a good fight," Herron boasted. Southerners were confident that when the fight came, Confederate troops were certain to defeat the Northerners. In a dispatch written from Fairfax Station on June 24, 1861, the war correspondent of the Daily True Delta informed New Orleans readers that "all Virginia is now on a formidable footing of war. " The sprawling Confederate army camp around Manassas seemed "bewildering," he wrote. "The whole country around seems a continuous camp. Fortifications bristle up in every direction," The 6th Louisiana was posted closer to the enemy than any other regiment, the newspaperman wrote. "Col. Seymour's Louisiana Sixth regiment has the post of honor, being in the nearest proximity to the foe. I do not say the post of danger, for, judging from the specimens of 'Federal fighting' heretofore exhibited, there is nothing to be feared from them, while with much men as are in the Sixth regiment, there is no such word as fail. " Captains Monaghan and Joseph Hanlon, leading the two Irish Brigade companies, led a small scouting party out in advance of the Confederate lines and chased "two suspicious characters" who escaped, the correspondent added, "which shows perhaps one thing, that in the quality of running, the Lincolnites are too much for our friends in the Irish Brigade."
|
