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chapter 4 Comrades, Cowards, and Survivors When he reached Atlanta and joined the 154th New York in the autumn of 1864, new recruit John Langhans immediately looked up an old friend from home, veteran soldier John Dicher. Two years had passed since they last saw each other, but they quickly rekindled their friendship. “John Disher and I visit each other qiet often,” Langhans wrote. “Our shantees are about 20 rods apart last night I was to his tent and we was talking about old times we enjoy our selfs verey well I have a grate deal better times than I ecspected so far.”1 Already bound by community, occupational, ethnic, and family ties, friendship came easily to the soldiers of the 154th and offered a fertile ground for the growth of esprit de corps. “We have as much fun as we did cutting oats on the hill when the spider crawled on Fathers pie,” Marcellus Darling informed his parents nine days after the regiment arrived in Virginia . “Some of the boys are home sick but they will get over that soon I am not I can say.” Friendship certainly helped to dispel homesickness, as was the case with Alva Merrill and his tent mate, Horace Howlett. “You better believe that I and Horace takes a lot of comfort together,” Alva informed his mother, Ruba. “If one gets any good thing the other has half I dont know what I should do without him I know I would be homesick if he was not here.”2 Tied by friendship, messmates became families, tents or log huts became homes, and company streets became neighborhoods in a regimental village. “I will describe to you how our new home looks inside this evening,” Barzilla Merrill wrote to Ruba from his winter hut near Stafford Court House in February 1863 as he offered a prose picture of himself and his tent mates, Calvin Johnson and Bornt Shelmadine, living in domestic harmony and peace: “I set on the foot of the bed . . . Calvin a little to my left loped over backwards on the bed and one foot up on the pile of night wood fast asleep. . . . Shelmadine is washing his cloths before the fire this makes our family our other tent mate [Hiram Vincent] is nursing to the hospital.” A visit Barzilla made 75 brothers one and all to some company comrades sounded much like a visit he and Ruba would have paid to neighbors back home in Dayton. “This evening our neighbors acrost the street gave me an invitation to come over and take supper with them and so I went,” he reported. “They had some sweet potatoes and I had a good supper. . . . They had good chees to so you see that I have some friends here.”3 In moments of introspection, the soldiers pondered the value of their friendships. “God has been verry merciful to me & has raised up many friends to me here,” Emory Sweetland wrote. He continued, “I do not know as I have an enemy in the company. . . . I have good bunk mates. the Burroughs boys [brothers Daniel L. and George W. Burroughs, both privates of Company B] are steady boys, although not professors [of religion].” Fifteen months later, Sweetland reiterated his appreciation of comradeship: “I have always since that I have been with the regiment been treated with much kindness.” Private Edwin R. Osgood of Company C, whose brothers Stephen and William W. Osgood were company mates, stated, “I do not think that i have got an enemy in the redgment thay are the best friends hear to me that i ever saw in my life evan the Curnal sed the other day that he shoud not like to have me go home for my folk Shoud not know me for i was as fat as a fooll.”4 Comrades could not forsake comrades. “I should like some of your sweet apple sauce here,” Marcellus Darling informed his family, “but [I] can not feel contented to come home & leave the rest of the boys yet.” Furthermore, comrades became friends for life. On February 10, 1865, after a day of foraging in South Carolina, Andrew Blood noted in his diary an agreement he had made with his tent mate, George Brown: “One year from to day if all is well, G. P. Brown and wife is to make me a visit For [a] supper [of] chicken pot pie, in case I have a wife.” Blood married five months after returning home at...

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