March 5, 1863

March 5, 1863

Letter from Chauncey Herbert Cooke, March 5, 1863
Dear folks at home: I sent you a letter a day or two ago and maybe I will hear from you soon. I hope I shall. I am well and we are hearing and seeing things and the days are not so heavy as at Madison. The weather is fine most of the time warm and clear.

We drill every day, do police work cleaning round the camp, and take a stroll now and then back in the country, far as the pickets will let us. We are really in the "sunny south." The slaves, contrabands, we call them, are flocking into Columbus by the hundred. General Thomas of the regular army is here enlisting them for war. All the old buildings in the edge of the town are more than full. You never meet one but he jerks his hat off and bows and shows the whitest teeth. I never saw a bunch of them together but I could pick out an Uncle Tom, a Quimbo, a Sambo, a Chloe, a Eliza or any other character in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The women take in a lot of dimes washing for the soldiers, and the men around picking up odd jobs. I like to talk with them. They are funny enough, and the stories they tell of slave life are stories never to be forgotten. Ask any of them how he feels and the answer nearly always will be, "Sah, I feels mighty good sah," or "God bress you massa, I'se so proud I'se a free man." Some are leaving daily on up river boats for Cairo and up the Ohio river. The Ohio has always been the river Jorden to the slave. It has been the dream of his life even to look upon the Ohio river.

The government transports returning from down river points where they had been with troops or supplies, would pick up free men on every landing and deliver them free of charge at places along the Ohio and upper Mississippi points.

The slaves are not all black as we in the north are apt to suppose. Some of them are quite light. Those used as house servants seem to have some education and don't talk so broad. A real pretty yellow girl
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about 18 was delivering some washing to the boys yesterday. She left her master and mistress in December and came to Columbus. In answer to the questions of the boys she said she left home because her mistress was cross to her and all other servants since Lincoln's emancipation. She said her mother came with her. One of the boys asked her why her father did not come with her. She said, "My father haint no colored man, he's a white man." When the boys began to laugh she picked up her two bushel baskets of clothes, balanced it on her head and went her way. That girl must have made fifty stops among the tents leaving her basket of clothes. I wonder if she heard the same dirty talk in each of them. The talk wasen't clean, but some of us who thot so just let it pass and kept still.

The talk now is our regiment will be divided, half sent up the Ohio to Ft. Donoldson the other half down the river. But this may be but one of many like rumors. There is always something in the air. Say but the picture before me as I write this is fine. I am sitting on the rampart of the Fort 200 feet above the river. The river, turbid and swollen from melting snows in Ohio and Indiana boils and swirls as its mighty current strikes the bluff almost directly below where I sit. A regiment of calvary has just landed from a government boat, and are climbing the bluff in a long winding column. Their horses are fresh and they come prancing along, the swords of their riders jingling, as if they were proud of their part in the scene. They don't know where they are going but doubtless to garrison some post farther south in the state. wrote Ben Gardner some time ago, am afraid he has fallen or taken prisoner. He has always been prompt to answer. His regiment is south of Memphis.

I am afraid you will think me given to much to frequent and long letters, but I remember fathers advice never to limit postage or letter paper expenses.

I should have mentioned that while the health of the boys is good in the main, we have some 20 in regimental hospital. Nathan Mann of our company and Orlando Adams of Mondovi are not expected to live. These poor fellows are victims of the measels and were sick with me in the hospital at St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Direct as before to Columbus.

Your son,

CHAUNCEY.