SOURCES OF CHARACTER—RESULTS—1860

To sum up the foregoing from the outset (and, of course, far, far more unrecorded), I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps to my own character, now solidified for good or bad, and its subsequent literary and other outgrowth—the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for one (doubtless the best)—the subterranean tenacity and central bony structure (obstinacy, willfulness) which I get from my paternal English elements, for another—and the combination of my Long Island birth-spot, seashores, childhood’s scenes, absorptions, with teeming Brooklyn and New York—with, I suppose, my experiences afterward in the secession outbreak, for the third.

For, in 1862, startled by news that my brother George, an officer in the 51^st New York volunteers, had been seriously wounded (first Fredericksburg battle, December 13^th), I hurriedly went down to the field of war in Virginia. But I must go back a little.