Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: growth. Here ensued one of the most important acts in the history of the Tenth, for it was on this day and place that the Regiment was brigaded with the Seventh Massachusetts, Second Rhode Island and the Thirty-Sixth New York, thus beginning intimate relations to continue as long as the several organizations remained in the service, and in which each regiment had an ever increasing respect for the loyalty and bravery of the other. Absence of water rendered the place an unfit one for a camp. Thursday, the 8th, the first inspection was had by Gen. D. N. Couch, a Massachusetts man, first Colonel of the Seventh, and now the Brigadier in command. The inspection, though tiresome, was not particularly impressive. BRIGHTWOOD On account of the undesirable location of the camp, a new one was sought on the 9th, and as early at 3.30 a. m. the reveille sounded; at 4.00 o'clock battalion line was formed, camp was broken and the men were off, halting at last at Brightwood, a beautiful spot, somewhat south of the residence of Francis P. Blair, St., father of the Postmaster General. The place was to become famous three years later in that from the parapet of the fort which the Tenth was to erect, Abraham Lincoln would witness the assault on the Nation’s Capital, largely protected by the future toil of these men from Massachusetts. The Tenth was the furthest regiment out, and pickets were stationed on the road towards the city till those of the next regiment were met. The attack of measles from which the Regiment had suffered in Springfield did not end there for here in Brightwood the disease was again prevalent. It would seem that a change in original intentions had come over the minds of the authorities, for while the Tenth and other regiments did not know it, they were to be held in thi…
