Saturday. This morning all the companies of the Regt. marched down to the railroad & brought up the tents, cooking utensils, & other baggage, & then pitched the tents on the ground we occupied last night. Got the cook’s things out of the boxes & got a warm meal for the men, the first “regular meal” they have had since Monday. Had dress parade at 5 o’clock.
The weather this weak has been the most delightful we have experienced since we have been in the state. The sky has been entirely cloudless nearly all the time, the sun was out but not oppressive, & a gentle breeze from the West most of the time, while the evenings made light by the full moon, and just cool enough for comfort in our ordinary clothes, have been charming indeed. I am almost reconciled to the country, & were it a land of freedom, of free schools, free speech, free churches, & live, industrious, enterprising, moral & intelligent New Englanders, and were all the near friends I have comfortably settled here, I don’t know but I would consent to fix my own residence even here in this land of cotton & cane!! It is certainly a wonderful country in its natural features, cut up & traversed by “bayous” without number that appear to be navigable at the present stage of water almost everywhere, & giving a steamboat landing to almost every plantation. Boats can stop opposite every house on either side of the Lafourche Bayou from Donaldsonville to Thibodaux a distance of thirty miles, & probably the same is true between T. & the Gulf, thus affording cheap & ready transportation from the heaviest as well as the most bulky products of the district while goods from New Orleans can be brought to the very doors of the consumers. What could not a live Yankee do in such a country! Why, with all the canals & railroads of the West, the facilities for travel & transportation are far less than nature has given to this great Delta of the “Father of Waters.”
Commenced a letter to Pamelia this evening, but did not make much progress on it.
Diary of Isaac Winslow Case [Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection]