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the day. Someone purchased or TOOK a duck. We had a most delicious meal
in the shape of a stew. Potatoes, onions and such like, were boiled with
it, until the whole substance was a tender mush. I know that after that
meal the feasters were almost too full for utterance.

At this time the little Sixty-first regiment was commanded by Colonel
Barlow and Lieut. Col. Miles. For field purposes the regiment was
divided into three companies. First, the company commanded by Capt.
Angel and Lieut. Keech, in which was my Company C. (Capt. Broady was at
this time away on sick leave.) Second company was commanded by Capt.
Walter H. Maze and the third by Capt. Geo. D. H. Watts. There were about
35 men to the company. In other words, there were but one hundred and
five muskets for all of these officers to direct. I have often remarked
on what I deemed to be a very idiotic policy pursued by the authorities
of the State of New York at this time, and I have believed that Gov.
Morgan was equally to blame with Seymour. What I refer to is this. When
troops were to be furnished by the State of New York, these governors
would, as I understand it, organize new regiments of raw men, when there
were scores of veteran organizations in the field with the rank and file
greatly depleted. The Sixty-first was not the only skeleton New York
regiment in the field. This regiment always had enough officers to have
commanded in battle five hundred men, and, by experience in battle, they
had come to know how to handle them. It would have been an immense
saving to have filled up and made these weak regiments strong by sending
to them from rendezvous camps recruits by the fifties. The new men would
have rapidly taken up and learned their duties in the field from contact
with the men who had learned what they knew from actual service. Then,
the officers in these old regiments had got weeded out. The cowards and
weaklings had, generally, been discharged, and their places filled by
SOLDIERS who had come from the ranks. I was never informed why this
common sense plan was not adopted. I imagine that the powers were not so
much for the good of the cause, as to make themselves strong politically
throughout the state from the appointment of a great number of officers.
In state politics it was as powerful as in national politics to have the
appointment of a horde of civil and military officers. If a governor was
influenced by such considerations and understood how de