“Petersburg, June, 1811.

“Dear sir:  I believe we have very little village news to give you, nor do I know what would please you in that way.  Of myself—­that person who has so large a space in every man’s own imagination, and so small a one in the imagination of every other—­I can say but little; perhaps less would please you more.  Since my return to Virginia my time has been passed in easy transitions from pleasure, to study, from study to pleasure; in my gayety forgetting the student, in the student forgetting my gayety.[A] I have generally been in the office of my friend Mr. Leigh, though not unmindful of the studies connected with my present profession; but you will easily conceive my military ardor has suffered abatement.  Indeed, it is my design, as soon as circumstances will permit, to throw the feather out of my cap and resume it in my hand.  Yet, should war come at last, my enthusiasm will be rekindled, and then who knows but that I may yet write my history with my sword?

    “Yours truly,

    “Winfield Scott.”

[Footnote A:  “If idle, be not solitary; if solitary, be not idle.”  An apothegm of Burton paraphrased by Johnson, “My Motto.”]

Scott rejoined the army at Baton Rouge, La., in 1811, and was soon appointed Judge Advocate on the trial of a colonel charged with gross negligence in discipline and administration.  By dilatory pleas this officer had several times escaped justice, but on this trial he was found guilty and censured.  In the winter of 1811-’12 Scott was frequently on staff duty with General Wade Hampton at New Orleans, and while there saw the first steam vessel that ever floated on the Mississippi.

On May 20, 1812, Captain Scott embarked at New Orleans for Washington via Baltimore, accompanying General Hampton and Lieutenant Charles K. Gardner.  As the vessel on which they had taken passage entered near the Capes of Virginia it passed a British frigate lying off the bar.  In a short time they met a Hampton pilot boat going out to sea.  This was on June 29th, and this pilot boat bore dispatches to Mr. Mansfield, the British Minister at Washington, announcing that Congress had two days before declared war against Great Britain.  The vessel bearing Captain Scott and his companions went aground about sixteen miles from Baltimore, and he and some others undertook the remainder of the journey on foot.  At the end of the fourth mile they passed an enthusiastic militia meeting which had just received a copy of the declaration of war.  Scott, having on a uniform, was made the hero of the occasion, and was chosen to read the declaration to the meeting.  He was here offered a seat in a double gig to Baltimore, but the driver, who had become intoxicated, overturned the gig twice, when Scott took the reins and drove the latter part of the journey.  On his arrival at Baltimore he received the pleasing intelligence that he had been appointed a lieutenant colonel in the United States army.  He was then in his twenty-sixth year.