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                           Transcriber’s Note

Italic text has been surrounded by _underscores_. Some corrections have
been made to the original text. They are listed in a second
transcriber’s note at the end of the book.




                             RECOLLECTIONS

                                   OF

                             THE CIVIL WAR

                      FROM A CHILD’S POINT OF VIEW




PRICE 50 CENTS

[Illustration: 1862]




                             RECOLLECTIONS

                                   OF

                             THE CIVIL WAR

                                   BY

                             MAUD E. MORROW

                             --------------

                             LOCKLAND, OHIO
                             JOHN C. MORROW
                                  1901




                                  _To
                          The 43d O. V. I. and
                        to all who were engaged
                    in the battle of Corinth, and to
                      every boy who wore the blue,
                            these pages are
                     respectfully and patriotically
                            dedicated by the
                                Author._




                           PREFACE OR APOLOGY


When one writes a book, a preface is in order. Mine shall be by way of
explanation. The only apology I have to offer for writing this little
personal pronoun “I” story is the very simple one that it is true. It
has been said that “we never talk so well as when talking of ourselves.”
Be that as it may, in telling my own story, I can tell it only in the
first person. It is a story that is very dear to me, probably much more
so than it will ever be to any one else. In writing it I have lived it
all over, and it has been so real to me that I have seemed to be again
within hospital walls, peopled by those whom I have called up from the
shadows of the past. In fancy, my mother, whose name is interwoven as a
golden thread throughout the fabric of the story, has been with me, and
I have almost felt the “touch of a vanished hand” and heard the “sound
of a voice that is still.” Page after page has been written beneath her
picture on the wall, and as I have lifted my tear-blinded eyes with
yearning gaze to her sweet face, the brown eyes have looked lovingly
down upon me as though smiling approval upon my work. Oh, that I had
undertaken it while she was yet with me!

It may be questioned that I have written from memory—or it may be a
matter of surprise that I have remembered so well. While my mother lived
this period in our lives was often talked of and its memory kept green.
My father, being ill in the second story of the hospital, knew little or
nothing of the experiences I underwent at Corinth, but was more familiar
with what took place at Jackson. Five or six letters written by my
mother to friends in the North have been carefully preserved. They were
mostly hurriedly written and contain only brief allusions to our doings,
but from them I have gathered dates and hours of arrival and departure,
and by them my memory has been refreshed on several points. But for the
most part I have been entirely dependent upon my own memory. I have
written only of scenes and events that I remember best. Many of them are
as clear to me as the happenings of yesterday, while some half-faded
memories have struggled vainly for utterence and have necessarily been
forever consigned to oblivion. There is a possibility that I may be
mistaken in a few of my statements, but it must be remembered that it is
a long and dusty bridge over which I have traveled to reach and gather
them up.

As this is not a story of fiction, I have given the names of all that I
remember who were in any way connected with it, in the hope that there
are yet some of the number living who will read my little narrative and
recognize their own part in it. Should such be the case, my joy at
hearing from any or all of them could not be expressed. I have written,
that there might be a record of the facts, that my sister and brothers
might become familiar with them, and because I love to dwell upon the
incidents of my “army life,” as I sometimes term it. Lastly, I have
written that it might be as a memorial to my brave, courageous mother,
who, with her own hands, ministered so tenderly to the sick and wounded
with whom she was brought in close contact. Whether this ever reaches
the public eye is a question. Should it be so fortunate, I ask the
public to read with kindly criticism, remembering that it is the story
of the child told in the language of the adult.




                              INTRODUCTORY


1862-1899. The line between the dates represents a bridge as it were of
thirty-seven planks, and each plank a year. It takes but a single stroke
of the pen to make the little bridge of ink representing the years; but
can I measure the smiles and tears, the joys and sorrows, that are
crowded into each year? Can I retrace my steps, passing on the way the
graves that have opened and closed on some of earth’s best and dearest
treasures, and gather from the past a few memories that the corroding
cares of life and the ever onward-rushing “flood of years” have not
wholly obliterated from my mind? I can but try, and in so doing I feel
constrained to cry out,

           “Backward, turn backward, O, time in your flight,
             Make me a child again just for tonight.”

But alas! this and my hungry heart-cry of

             “Mother, come back from that echoless shore,”

are alike vainly uttered. Having long had this in mind, I now for the
first time give to the world a simple little story of the early part of
my life. It is a story of the war without much war in it. My first
recollections of the Civil War (which I always thought very uncivil) are
of the days of ’61, after Sumter had been fired upon, when each night
one of the neighbors would come into our home, and she and my parents
would discuss the prospects of war, which at first though a cloud no
bigger than a man’s hand, was even then lowering darkly upon us. We
didn’t get the newspapers daily then as we do now, but whenever one
could be obtained, my mother would read the news aloud, while I lay in
my trundle bed, listening and cowering with fear. Who shall say that
children do not enter into the spirit of current events? I had all a
child’s fear of war, and that fear hung over me, for a time, as a dark
cloud, for I thought