Scope and Contents West discusses military preferment, and the regiment's need for drill. Fears the Emancipation Proclamation will lengthen the war, because it will make many Southerners "still more furious and full of fight." As for emancipation itself: "I wish . . . that every human being on the Earth had the utmost possible extent of liberty—if that would add to the sum total of his happiness and the happiness of his fellow men . . . . But come down here and see with your own eyes the 'poor, oppressed,...