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 1 “We Are All War” Ap r i l – J u l y 1 8 6 1 “Let the Dogs of War Be Loosed” On a warm autumn morning in 1861, a group of nine young men hiked south the few miles from the hamlet of Kingsville, Ashtabula County, Ohio, to the village of Jefferson. They passed through the village and out the few blocks to the fairgrounds. The Kingsville squad had come to be soldiers in a new regiment, the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, that was camped within the oval of the racetrack . Present in this happy group was Nathan Parmater, age twenty-five. Most recently, he had been a teacher in the country schools of the neighborhood and had used his earnings to pay for his tuition at the Kingsville Academy. He had been close to finishing his studies when he heard a regiment was taking shape just down the road, and he and a few others—including his best friend, Alonzo Sterrett, whom Parmater called Chum—decided to put their schoolbooks aside and go to be Union soldiers. Settled in his tent that first night, Parmater folded back the stiff, red-morocco cover of a new diary book and on its first page wrote: September 23— Started from Kingsville with eight others to join Co. E. 29th Regt. at Jefferson. The weather being fine we all enjoyed the trip well. Co. E is from K. and surrounding towns and is commanded by Capt. Luce. We arrived at camp about two o’clock p.m. with a good appetite to relish the bread and beef which the boys had prepared for us. After dinner we pitched a tent and prepared to camp for the night.1 He promised to write in it every day as long as the war lasted, but after a few days, he gave it up and would not write in it again until the day the regiment was packing to leave this place. To explain the lapse he wrote, “I quit writing in this Diary until now for the want of a change in country, and now the Regt. has got orders to march tomorrow I will go on again.”2 After that, he would write in it faithfully every day, even on those days he had to be propped up in a hospital bed to do it. There seemed more than enough blank diary pages for him to record the full details of the brief war they all expected, with pages left over. Unknown to him, the war would require that he fill this volume and several more like it. The places he would visit, and the things he would do or would see others do, no one could foresee. One of the boys in this camp would survive what they would pass through, and as an old man he would look back to this innocent time and conclude that the new soldier’s most valuable asset had been his inability to see into the future. Another boy had come into this camp with an Akron company of soldiers a few days before Parmater . Before he became a private in Company D, Benjamin Franklin Pontius had been a wagonmaker, 12 “We Are All War” talented in the fashioning of wood and iron. His widowed mother did not want him to go off to war. He was her only son, and keeping their poor farm afloat was plenty hard enough even with his help. But he wore down her objections, and she finally gave her permission. One day he dug out a paper and pencil and walked to the top of a low rise. He wanted to show his mother the importance of what he had come here to be part of, which was something he could not likely put into words. He could see in his mind’s eye what Camp Giddings looked like to a bird flying over it, and he made a drawing of the camp, complete down to the shakes on the cook room roof.3 He got the perfect outline made by the track that enclosed the lines of the company streets just so, and along the lines of the company streets he drew evenly spaced dark triangles to show the tents in which the soldiers lived. Camp Giddings was little more than a few weeks old when these two young men first saw it. But in its perfect arrangement, already fixed military rituals, and a population double...

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