The Project Gutenberg eBook, Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862, by Adam Gurowski
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Title: Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862
Release Date: May 22, 2009 [eBook #28926]
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIARY FROM MARCH 4, 1861, TO NOVEMBER 12, 1862
***E-text prepared by David Edwards, Christine P. Travers, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from digital material generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
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Obvious printer's errors have been corrected. Hyphenation and accentuation have been standardised. All other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has been retained.
DIARY, FROM MARCH 4, 1861, TO NOVEMBER 12, 1862.
Boston: Lee and Shepard, Successors to Phillips, Sampson & Co. 1862.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by Lee and Shepard, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
THE WIDOWED WIVES, THE BEREAVED MOTHERS, SISTERS,
_On doit à son pays sa fortune, sa vie, mais avant tout la Vérité._
In this Diary I recorded what I heard and saw myself, and what I heard from others, on whose veracity I can implicitly rely.
I recorded impressions as immediately as I felt them. A life almost wholly spent in the tempests and among the breakers of our times has taught me that the first impressions are the purest and the best.
If they ever peruse these pages, my friends and acquaintances will find therein what, during these horrible national trials, was a subject of our confidential conversations and discussions, what in letters and by mouth was a subject of repeated forebodings and warnings. Perhaps these pages may in some way explain a phenomenon almost unexampled in history,--that twenty millions of people, brave, highly intelligent, and mastering all the wealth of modern civilization, were, if not virtually overpowered, at least so long kept at bay by about five millions of rebels.