At Milwaukee I Went Up To See The Wisconsin Volunteers, Who Were
Then Encamped On Open Ground In The Close Vicinity Of The Town.
Of
Wisconsin I had heard before - and have heard the same opinion
repeated since - that it was more backward in its volunteering than
its neighbor States in the West.
Wisconsin has 760,000
inhabitants, and its tenth thousand of volunteers was not then made
up; whereas Indiana, with less than double its number, had already
sent out thirty-six thousand. Iowa, with a hundred thousand less
of inhabitants, had then made up fifteen thousand. But neverthless
to me it seemed that Wisconsin was quite alive to its presumed duty
in that respect. Wisconsin, with its three-quarters of a million
of people, is as large as England. Every acre of it may be made
productive, but as yet it is not half cleared. Of such a country
its young men are its heart's blood. Ten thousand men, fit to bear
arms, carried away from such a land to the horrors of civil war, is
a sight as full of sadness as any on which the eye can rest. Ah
me, when will they return, and with what altered hopes! It is, I
fear, easier to turn the sickle into the sword than to recast the
sword back again into the sickle!
We found a completed regiment at Wisconsin consisting entirely of
Germans. A thousand Germans had been collected in that State and
brought together in one regiment, and I was informed by an officer
on the ground that there are many Germans in sundry other of the
Wisconsin regiments.
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