Nestor on Old Bards

Isaac R. Sherwood, enlisted as a private in the U. S. Army in April, 1861, mustered out as Brigadier General in October, 1865, the Nestor of the House of Representatives, rose before his colleagues in council: "In all the 60 years that have elapsed since the war there has not been one great dramatic poem written, one lyric equal to the soldiers' songs sung during that war, nor one of high moral import. We are living in a utilitarian age, and the spirit that actuated that great war appears to have gone. "What have we now? Yes, We Have No Bananas, Take Us To the Land of Jazz, Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here--songs of the vulgar type. "The most dramatic and the most pathetic and most plaintive of all the war songs sung on both sides was Tenting Tonight On the Old Camp Ground. That song was written by Walter Kittridge of the Second New Hampshire Infantry. He was returning to the old camp along the marshes of the Chickahominy River in Virginia.

"It was a chill November night and raining. The commissary had not come up, and young Kittridge, a private soldier-musician, was lonesome. He had a letter from his girl that night; and of all the homesickness in the world the worst is the homesickness of a soldier who yearns to get back home to see his girl. He sat around the bivouac fire and on a piece of brown paper wrote that immortal song.

"Let us hope that in a nearby day some great, prescient genius will arise and sing the songs of that great epoch, linking Gettysburg with Chicamauga and Nashville with Franklin in one grand epic poem!"