INTRODUCTION
Actual military life is rarely described by a woman, and this is especially true of a woman whose place was in the ranks, as the wife of a soldier and herself a regimental laundress. No such description has ever been given, I am sure, by one thus connected with a colored regiment; so that the nearly 200,000 black soldiers (178,975) of our Civil War have never before been delineated from the woman’s point of view. All this gives peculiar interest to this little volume, relating wholly to the career of the very earliest of these regiments,—the one described by myself, from a wholly different point of view, in my volume “Army Life in a Black Regiment,” long since translated into French by the Comtesse de Gasparin under the title “Vie Militaire dans un Régiment Noir.”
The writer of the present book was very exceptional among the colored laundresses, in that she could read and write and had taught children to do the same; and her whole life and career were most estimable, both during the war and in the later period during which she has lived in Boston and has made many friends. I may add that I did not see the book until the sheets were in print, and have left it wholly untouched, except as to a few errors in proper names. I commend the narrative to those who love the plain record of simple lives, led in stormy periods.
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON,
Former Colonel 1st S. C. Volunteers
(afterwards 33d U. S. Colored Infantry).
Cambridge, Mass.,
November 3, 1902.