Hope you will proceed at once and open and preserve
communication between you and myself." This letter was dated April 22.
Under the same date the Governor wrote to President Lincoln:
"Ex-Governor Boutwell has been appointed Agent of the commonwealth to
proceed to Washington to confer with you in regard to the forts in
Massachusetts and the militia." I was instructed also to see General
Wool in New York. I received a package of letters, the contents of
which were disclosed to me, one hundred dollars in gold, and a small
revolver loaded.* I took with me a young man named Augustus Bixby,
who then lived in Groton, but who had seen something of the world,
and was not daunted by the uncertainties of life. He was afterwards
a cavalry officer. During the war I one day read in the papers that
Bixby had been promoted for gallantry in an affair in the Shenandoah
Valley. Within a few days after I met him in Washington on a crutch,
or walking with the help of a cane. He had been wounded in the
contest. I said:
"Bixby, what did you do?" He replied:
"I don't know, except I sailed in."
At New York I telegraphed Vice-President Hamlin, then in Maine, that
he should come as far South as New York, that he might be in a
situation to act in case of the death or capture of Mr. Lincoln, of
whom we then knew nothing.
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