Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

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[106] earnest of future success at the bar. He was thus occupied when the war broke out,—not twenty-two years of age, in many ways young even for those years, but full of promise for the future.

Barstow's temperament was not easily fired by the promptings of ambition or the dreams of military glory. He coolly reasoned to himself with that clear logical habit of mind which had always marked him,—a boy in so many other respects,—that it was a part of his duty as a citizen of the Republic to defend those principles which were now assailed. ‘I go,’ he said to his mother, ‘of my own free will, not because I am ashamed to stay at home, but others have gone to defend my rights, and I think I ought to go.’ His sole military education had been a month's garrison duty at Fort Independence that spring, in the Fourth Battalion of Massachusetts Infantry, commanded by Major Thomas G. Stevenson, who afterwards was Colonel of the Twenty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, and fell a Brigadier-General in the battle of the Wilderness.

Serving with Barstow at the fort were many of those who were afterwards among the bravest and brightest soldiers whom their State or their College produced. Among them were some of his most intimate friends and classmates,— names whose fuller history in this volume forbids more than a mention in this place. There were his classmates Henry Abbott, Charles Mudge, Henry Russell, and Caspar Crowninshield, his dear friend Tom Robeson, Wendell Holmes, and a host of others. Living together in this little fort, hearing the daily beat of drums and rattle of arms within, and the rumors of war from without, each one's thought found a quick response in some other breast. Many, eagerly grasping at the first opportunity for duty, came up to town, while the battalion was still at the fort, and joined the Second Massachusetts. Among them Barstow would fain have been. He would gladly have followed his friends Mudge and Robeson. He even obtained the promise of a commission, and came to Boston for the purpose of joining them, but found