At Milwaukee I went up to see the Wisconsin volunteers, who were then encamped on open ground in the close vicinity of the town.  Of Wisconsin I had heard before—­and have heard the same opinion repeated since—­that it was more backward in its volunteering than its neighbor States in the West.  Wisconsin has 760,000 inhabitants, and its tenth thousand of volunteers was not then made up; whereas Indiana, with less than double its number, had already sent out thirty-six thousand.  Iowa, with a hundred thousand less of inhabitants, had then made up fifteen thousand.  But nevertheless to me it seemed that Wisconsin was quite alive to its presumed duty in that respect.  Wisconsin, with its three-quarters of a million of people, is as large as England.  Every acre of it may be made productive, but as yet it is not half cleared.  Of such a country its young men are its heart’s blood.  Ten thousand men, fit to bear arms, carried away from such a land to the horrors of civil war, is a sight as full of sadness as any on which the eye can rest.  Ah me, when will they return, and with what altered hopes!  It is, I fear, easier to turn the sickle into the sword than to recast the sword back again into the sickle!

We found a completed regiment at Wisconsin consisting entirely of Germans.  A thousand Germans had been collected in that State and brought together in one regiment, and I was informed by an officer on the ground that there are many Germans in sundry other of the Wisconsin regiments.  It may be well to mention here that the number of Germans through all these Western States is very great.  Their number and well-being were to me astonishing.  That they form a great portion of the population of New York, making the German quarter of that city the third largest German town in the world, I have long known; but I had no previous idea of their expansion westward.  In Detroit nearly every third shop bore a German name, and the same remark was to be made at Milwaukee; and on all hands I heard praises of their morals, of their thrift, and of their new patriotism.  I was continually told how far they exceeded the Irish settlers.  To me in all parts of the world an Irishman is dear.  When handled tenderly he becomes a creature most lovable.  But with all my judgment in the Irishman’s favor, and with my prejudices leaning the same way, I feel myself bound to state what I heard and what I saw as to the Germans.

But this regiment of Germans, and another not completed regiment, called from the State generally, were as yet without arms, accouterments, or clothing.  There was the raw material of the regiment, but there was nothing else.  Winter was coming on—­winter in which the mercury is commonly twenty degrees below zero—­and the men were in tents with no provision against the cold.  These tents held each two men, and were just large enough for two to lie.  The canvas of which they were made seemed to me to be thin, but was, I think, always double.