GOING TO THE FRONT.

RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE-I. BY WARREN LEE GOSS.

BEFORE I reached the point of enlisting, I had read and been "enthused" by General Dix's famous "shoot him on the spot" dispatch; I had attended flag-raising, and had heard orators declaim of "undying devotion to the Union." One speaker to whom I listened declared that "human life must be cheapened"; but I never learned that he helped on the work experimentally. When men by the hundred walked soberly to the front and signed the enlistment papers, he was not one of them. As I came out of the hall, with conflicting emotions, feeling as though I should have to go finally or forfeit my birthright as an American citizen, one of the orators who stood at the door, glowing with enthusiasm and patriotism, and shaking hands effusively with those who enlisted, said to me:

"Did you enlist?" "No," I said. "Did, you?"

"No; they won't take me. I have got a lame leg and a widowed mother to take care of."

I remember another enthusiast who was eager to enlist others. He declared that the family of no man who went to the front should suffer. After

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*January 18th, 1861, three days after he had entered on his duties as Secretary of the Treasury to President Buchanan, General Dix sent W. Hemphill Jones, chief clerk of one of the Treasury bureaus, to the South, for the purpose of saving the revenue-cutters at New Orleans, Mobie, and Galveston. January 29th, Mr. Jones telegraphed from new Orleans that the captain of the revenue-cutter McClelland refused to obey the Secretary's orders. It was seven in the evening when the dispatch was received. Immediately, Secretary Dix wrote the following reply: "Treasury Department, January 29, 1861. Tell Lieutenant Caldwell to arrest Captain Breshwood, assume command of the cutter, and obey the order I gave through you. If Captain Breshwood, after arrest, undertakes to interfere with the command of the cutter, tell Lieutenant Caldwell to consider him as a mutineer, and treat him accordingly. If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot. JOHN A. DIX, Secretary of the Treasury."-EDITORS.
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