Unusual events experienced during impressionable years can leave indelible memories. Aged people may have sharper recollections of their youth than of their later years. This dictum seems to be undergoing re-evaluation. Not until 1927 did he finally write down his recollections of the war.Ī commonplace among historians, of course, holds that the longer the eyewitness to past events waits to record his or her impressions, the less faithful to those events they are apt to be. When he left the navy fifteen months later (his discharge papers were three months late in reaching him), Kemp was a seasoned sailor who had participated on the broad river itself in two expeditions against Vicksburg, taken part on the Arkansas River in the foray against Fort Hindman, seen action near the mouth of the Red River against Confederate guerrillas, and survived the war’s only instance of an ironclad vessel sunk solely by gunfire.īack in Buffalo, Kemp, like many a veteran, meant to write his memoirs of those times in the service but also in common with many others, he found himself too busy earning a living. That service at once sent him west to join the freshwater flotilla which in cooperation with the Army was working its way down the Mississippi River. Kemp of Buffalo, New York, immediately wanted to enlist but not until late summer of the next year, sometime after his eighteenth birthday, did Kemp’s parents consent to his signing up for a one-year hitch in the United States Navy.

When in April of 1861 he first learned that the Confederate States of America had forced Federal troops to evacuate Fort Sumter, seventeen-year-old Daniel F.

Us navy civil war ferryboat gunboat