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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [Firs [1], ( Lines —— 0.0 —— Norm PgEn [1], ( introduction  Joseph Hopkins Twichell was just two years out of Yale and studying for the clergy when he enlisted as chaplain of the Jackson Regiment of Daniel Sickles’s Excelsior Brigade in Lower Manhattan. The irony of a small-town New England Congregationalist minister-in-training shepherding the souls of tough Irish Catholics from the brickyards and tanneries of this neighborhood was not lost on Twichell. He wrote to his father on 22 April 1861: “If you ask why I fixed upon this particular regiment, composed as it is of rough, wicked men, I answer, that was the very reason. I saw that the companies of the better class of citizens were all attended by Chaplains, but nothing was said about these. There, I thought, is a place for me. . . . I should not expect a revival, but I should expect to make some good impressions, by treating with kindness a class of men who are little used to it.” Twichell consequently accompanied the regiment through three years of war—through the Peninsula Campaign, the Second Bull Run Campaign, Fredericksburg , Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, and the Wilderness. Almost 150 years after the event, the letters he wrote back home describing the three years of his wartime experience are both powerful and emotive, carrying the present-day reader back to the actions, thoughts, and feelings of that troubled but momentous time. Twichell’s letters, unlike those of many soldiers (and indeed of a good number of chaplains), are written in the style of an educated young man of the era and describe battles, hospitals, the religious life of the troops, internal regimental politics, national politics, and issues of slavery and race. They are highly literate and descriptively vivid. But they also use a variety of other devices to convey their meaning and message effectively, including plain speaking (“so far as slavery is concerned, nothing could deepen my hatred of it”), homely but striking simile (“regiments . . . as plenty as blackberries ”), and forceful vernacular expressions (“the Army is boss of this job”; “I can no more supply advice . . . than I could teach a horse to knit”). If at times Twichell gives way to the overrhetorical verbal flourish, at others his use of heightened language works to genuine emotional effect, as when he looks down from a raised position on a battle below to describe how “I . . . felt all free America beating in my one heart, as I saw our standards plunged 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [2], ( Lines —— 0.0 —— Norm PgEn [2], ( in the smoke of battle, rising and falling, advancing and borne backward with its mighty tide.” Similarly, near Williamsburg on 9 May 1862, he writes of his first encounter with the aftermath of fight: By-and-by we encountered a dead horse with a hideous wound in his side, then another, then four or five lying together, all mangled by shot or shell. . . . A rod or two further on, and our horses shied at a rebel corpse, lying stark and stiff, the hands clutched above the head, while the open bosom showed a ghastly wound— then another and another. It was horrible and my brain almost reeled. . . . [T]here I saw sights that can never fade from my memory. “Sin entered into the world and death through sin” kept ringing through my brain as I wandered among the slain unburied. Although his descriptions of battle have been partially quoted in several published sources—Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Harry W. Pfanz’s Gettysburg: The Second Day, and Kenneth M. Andrews’s Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle—the vast bulk of the letters have remained unknown until now. It is the present volume’s task, and the editors’ pleasure, to bring them before a wider audience. The Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twichell was one of Mark Twain’s closest friends. He was also a well-known figure in the religious and cultural life of New England and New York in the late nineteenth century. The frequency of...

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