Fairfax Stations Virginia,

Sunday, March 1st, 1863

Dear Parents,

The weeks are flying rapidly, and each one is supposed to have a Sunday, and lately the Sundays are all of them rainy enough to kill knapsack inspection, though the rain has not saved me from duty, even this Sunday. I have had to work on the muster rolls all day, as Levi Moore is not able to work, and it is necessary to have them done by a certain time....It is expected that we are to be paid off again soon, and it is thought that this time we will receive four months' pay which will bring us up to the first of March.

The Rebs are trying their hand again in making some small raids on their old favorite playground about Bull Run, Centerville, etc., and today we judge by the sound there has been skirmishing somewhere. If firmly held, Centerville will be hard to take, as the 11th Mass. battery have their guns mounted upon the old Rob redoubts, and Mud is still King to an extent that will prevent anybody-either Reb or Unions from moving with heavy forces, but their Cavalry might dash in and keep ours busy.

It must be hard indeed for David Sawyer to get as far as Washington and then find that he had not money enough to get Elwin's body home. What regiment is he in? Is it the 10th? You speak of seeing Tyler Coolidge. Where is he, what is he about, and why don't he write to me? I am not Quartermaster's clerk yet, though I heard by way of Vermont that I was; nor yet Captain's, though I have had some of his work to do. Where was Warren Leslie wounded? Was it at Fredericksburg, and how badly was he hurt? I believe the health of the regiment is steadily improving. I have not seen M. A. Ives for some little time before he left for Philadelphia, if I remember rightly. He never seemed to like it, and so it didn't seem to agree with him. You can understand the fact of my having quarters one day and duty the next as a difference in the "feelings" of Assistant Surgeon Spafford, nothing more.

It is almost time for roll call, and MPB is by my side finishing up a letter for the morning mail. We have never got our tent fairly fitted out yet. The day we came here we got a little timber and put up a slight stockade and got boards enough to make us a floor, and so we stayed, but had always meant to make them into bunks, when it came handy, and that happened to be the time.

I do not of course know exactly what they want us to have new guns for, but presume it is because the new ones look a little better, and are a little prettier to handle than the old ones, as the old ones will shoot about as well as the new. We have not had anything particularly exciting for a long time, so long indeed that it might possibly do us good to rouse up a little..... H.G. Day

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Contributed by Linda M. Welch, Dartmouth College, Windsor County researcher.

Return to the Index of Hezron's letters..

See also Hezron's biography, and his memoir of the Gettysburg Campaign.