Some time after, a blockade-runner, passing the lines took a letter from me to my cousin, Robert Fisher, in Baltimore, a friend also of Tillinghast. It was on other matters, but I let him know that Tillinghast's body had been recognized on the field, had received decent burial, and the spot marked. I described the location and then the matter passed out of my mind.
After peace came I was with Fisher in Baltimore and learned from him that my letter had been received and the information as to Captain Tillinghast considerately conveyed to his family. Fisher was answered soon after with thanks, "but there was some mistake," Captain Tillinghast was buried by his old classmate Samuel Jones, a Confederate brigadier-general, in a different part of the field and his body later removed to the family vault. Astonishing! If they got a body from a spot not where I had laid him they got the wrong husband. Sam Jones quite likely saw Tillinghast, but he had no hand in our burial of him. Stranger things, however, have happened.
Here are some trifles of talk remembered as coming from the famous war correspondent, Sir William Howard Russell, whose letters from the Crimea broke the Aberdeen Ministry and made him one of the leading men of the Kingdom. He was not long ago knighted at great age for his service all over the world in that field of letters. I met him several years ago in New York, in the train of the notorious Colonel North, the Chilean nitrate king. Russell had always some good stories on hand, and laughed at his chase from Bull Run battlefield, whither he had gone with the Federal army to write up their victory pictures. It gave him the name of "Bull Run Russell," which stuck to him. He admitted being very far to the rear, but said there were some generals and colonels who outstripped him to Washington! Some years after the war he met in Europe General McDowell, who said, "Russell, do you know what day this is?" "No, I don't recall any special occurrence." "It is," said McDowell, "the 21st of July, and had I succeeded on that day in '61 I should have been the greatest man in America and you the most popular."
Russell also had something about the French princes come to join McClellan's army. The two young men, Comte de Paris and Duc de Chartres, were under the care and tutelage of their uncle, the Prince de Joinville, who did not follow them to the army. On landing they received their commissions as captains, and quickly equipped themselves with handsome regulation uniforms and military appointments.