The placid Neuse river was a glad sight when at last they reached its mouth and steamed up to Newberne, North Carolina.  General Burnside had already captured the town and Company F began army duties in earnest with garrison work in the little Southern city, with its long dull lines of earthworks, its white tents, its fleet of gunboats floating lazily on the river.  The constant tramp of soldiers’ feet echoed along the side-walks of this erstwhile quiet, Southern town.  Sentries stood on the corners challenging passers-by, wharves creaked under the loads of ordnance and quartermasters’ stores.  Army wagons and ambulances were constantly passing in the street, all strange and novel at first to the Mountain Boys but soon familiar.  Drilling and guard duty filled their days.  Morning and afternoon they drilled, and the actual possession of the enemies’ country, the warlike aspect of everything about them, made drilling a far more real and important matter than it had seemed at home.  Captain Conwell felt his responsibility and threw himself into the work with an earnestness that infected his men.  They would rather drill with him two hours than with any other officer a half hour.  They not only caught the contagion of his enthusiasm, but he changed the dull, monotonous drudgery of it, into real, fascinating work by marching them into seemingly hopeless situations and then in some unexpected and surprising way, extricating them.  Nor did he spare himself any of the unpleasant phases of the work.  One day, the Colonel, while drilling the regiment, noticed that many of the men of Company F marched far out of their places to avoid a mudhole in the road.  He marched and countermarched them over the same ground to compel the men to keep their rank and file regardless of the mud.  Captain Conwell saw his object, and himself plunged into the mire, his men followed, and were thus saved the reprimand which threatened.

During these days, Captain Conwell kept up with the law studies abandoned at Yale.  Every spare minute, he devoted to his books and committed to memory, one whole volume of Blackstone during the term of his first enlistment Not many of the soldiers so used their hours off duty.  But it is this turning of every minute to account that has enabled Dr. Conwell to accomplish so much.  He has made his life count for a half dozen of most person’s by never wasting a moment.

The monotony of garrison duty was broken first by a small fight at Batchelor’s Creek, seven miles above Newbern, but only four companies were engaged.  The Mountain Boys saw the first blood spilled at Kingston and gained there the first glimpse of the horrors of war.  Nearly the entire marching force was sent into the interior on this expedition, known as the Goldsboro expedition, the object being to cut the Weldon railroad at Goldsboro, North Carolina.  It was a hard march with short and uncertain halts and occasional cavalry skirmishes.  At Kingston, they met the enemy in force.  The Confederates were massed about the bridge over the Neuse river and held it bravely till the charge of the 9th New Jersey and 10th Connecticut drove them from their position and left the woods and a little open field covered with the dead and dying.  The 46th Massachusetts followed the retreating army and had that first experience with the grim, bloody side of war that always makes such a strong impression on the green soldier.