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Assistant Quarter Master's Office, Head Quarters 2d Div., 6th Corps.
August 4th, 1863.
Dear Mother:
How do you all do, in Vt. this very hot weather? [underline]Hot[/underline] is hardly the expression, for it here, [underline]Anywhere? every where: in[/underline] the tent or [underline]out:[/underline] in the [underline]shade[/underline], or in the [underline]sun: ho-o-o-t!![/underline]
As good[underline]luck or Meade[/underline], or [underline]Lee[/underline], or some other person in authority, will have it our Corps, so far as the Troops are concerned, is at rest now, but the men I [know?] of the G.M. Dept. must be as busy as ever, and now that we are fourteen ms. from our base of Supplies, Warrenton Junction "tis tuff".
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I have given up all hope of seeing many conscripts here for the present. The most I regret is, that I was not sent home for them, not that I would promise to do better than those who went, but I should not feel that hurry for them to get back, that I do now.
I have no news to write so had best close.
Please write often.
As ever
W. B. Stevens
To R. B. Stevens
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many of the men gave out before we came to a halt, here and all are well worn down. I am very well still, and further than the discomfort of the great heat, enjoy it well. We are six miles from Warrenton, near the bank of the Rappahannock, in some such a country as it is around Plainfield Springs, and we are near the famous "Sulphur Springs" of Va. which I intend to visit some day, if we stay here long enough. Inhabitants are very scattering here now and what there are here, and at Warrenton, too, are open Secessionists. I have not spoken with a single white who was an exception. The Negros, so far as they dare be are for the Union and droves of them
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come into camp every day & are forwarded to Alexandria and Washington. Three fourths of them will wish themselves back with "Ole Missus" within three weeks of getting to those places. Carrying off Negros will never close the war and from what I learned of them in Washington and from what I see of them in [underline]Slavery[/underline] I think they are better off for the present, in the [underline]latter[/underline]. I am not indeed ProSlavery and I am not Ultra Abolitionist, either, but until we can make them [underline]better off[/underline], by freeing them, instead of [underline]worse[/underline], as we have thus far done, we had best let them alone.
We do not get many papers now and I do not know what is going on, any where.
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Here then is a cause for clamor. "Lee has escaped" at least from Md. How [underline]far[/underline] he may succeed in going now, the future must show.
Is there reason to say of Meade, that he is inefficient, because Lee is not "bagged?" or to say Lee has done that which our Army would never dare to do? Let me look at this last clause! Three times within the last eight months our Army has, other things being equal, made more successful & less disastrous crossings into rebel territory and this, not by going to some distant and [underline]unguarded[/underlne] point, but directly in the face of the [Flower?] of the rebel Army, massed behind Fortifications and in entrenchments, almost impregnable. At each of these several times we have been compelled to retire but never with that disaster which [charachrizes?] Lee's return from Md. Now if reports are true, [underline]we[/underline] have obtained an advantage over him by gaining the shorter rout to his former & if I am not mistaken, his intended future base of operations on the river.
