March 20, 1863

March 20, 1863

Letter from Chauncey Herbert Cooke, March 20, 1863
Dear mother: The six campanies of our Regt. ordered last week to Ft. Donaldson returned to Columbus last night after a week's stay at Cairo. Glad to get back to the top of the big bluff once more. We got here at midnight. There is an awful flood in the Ohio pouring into the Mississippi at Cairo from the melting snow above and the seething water is black as mud. The air of our camp is fine compared to the miasma of Cairo. A short time ago I read a letter in the Alma Journal purporting to be a dream by S. S. Cooke. It suited the boys to a dot. Some of them tho't it was a day dream with his senses and eyes wide open. It seems you are still having winter weather. Grass here is fine picking for cattle and there is a lazy summer like quietness in the air. The trees are leafing and the spring birds are here in force. I have seen several gray thrush in my strolls in the woods and strings of ducks and wild geese are passing north daily. Well if I was a wild goose I suppose I would go north too.

March 21st
After drill went out

in the edge of the woods. Its more peaceful and homelike than the racket of the camp. I can see the picket guard beyond me slowly pacing his beat. There is no enemy about but the discipline and regulations are just as rigid as they are in Georgia. No white man can come within the picket line except he has the pass word. A negro is allowed to come in. We are afraid that the whites may be spies, we know that the blacks are our friends. The health of the regiment is good save a few cases of bowel trouble. The boys call it the Kentucky Quick Step. There is more sickness among the poor lazy blacks. They are filling all the vacant houses and even sleeping under the trees, so anxious are they to get near de "Lincoln soldiers." They live on scraps and whatever they can pick up in camp and they will shine our shoes or do any camp work for an old shirt or cast off coat. They had a revival meeting at the foot of the bluff last night and such shouting and singing and moaning. It was Massa Lincoln was a savior that came after two hundred years of tribulation in the cotton field and cane. They had long known that something was going to happen because so many times their massa had visitors and they would tell the servants to stay in their cabins and not come to the "big house" until they was called. Then some of the house servants would creep round under the win dows and hear the white folks talking about the war and that the slaves were going to be free. And when the one that was sent to listen would come back and tell the others, they would get down on their knees and pray in whispers and give thanks to the Lord. Everthing with the darkies is Lord, Lord. Their faith that the Lord will help them was held out more than 200 years. I sometimes wonder if the Lord is not partial to the white race and rather puts it onto the black race because they are balck. We sometimes get terribly confused when we try to think of the law of Providence. This black race for instance, they can't talk ten words about slavery and old Massa and old Missus, but they get in something about "de blessed Lord and de lovely Jesus" and yet in this land of Washington, God has permitted them to be bought and sold like our cattle and our hogs in the stock yards, for more than 200 years. I listened for two hours this morning to the stories of a toothless old slave with one blind eye who had come up the river from near Memphis. He told me a lot of stuff. He said his master sold his wife and children to cotton planter in Alabama to pay his gambling debts, and when he told his master he couldn't stand it, he was tied to the whipping post stripped and given 40 lashes. The next night he ran to the swamps. The bloodhounds were put on his track and caught him and pulled him down. They bit him in the face and put out his eye and crushed one of his hands so he could not use it. He stripped down his pants and showed me a gash on one of his hips where one of the hounds hung onto him until he nearly bled to death. This happened in sight of Nashville, the Capitol of Tennessee. I told this to some of the boys and they said it was all bosh, that the niggers were lying to me. But this story was just like the ones in Uncle Tom's Cabin and I believe them. And father knows of things very much like this that are true.

I will write you again soon.

Your son,

CHAUNCEY.