Opening
A PICTURE OF THE DESOLATED STATES; and the work of RESTORATION. 1865–1868
BY J. T. TROWBRIDGE.
AUTHOR OF “NEIGHBOR JACKWOOD,” “CUDJO’S CAVE,” ETC.
HARTFORD, CONN.
PUBLISHED BY L. STEBBINS.
1868.
Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1868,
BY L. STEBBINS,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of Connecticut.
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Preface
In the summer of 1865, and in the following winter, I made two visits to the South, spending four months in eight of the principal States which had lately been in rebellion. I saw the most noted battle-fields of the war. I made acquaintance with officers and soldiers of both sides. I followed in the track of the destroying armies. I travelled by railroad, by steamboat, by stage-coach, and by private conveyance; meeting and conversing with all sorts of people, from high State officials to “low-down” whites and negroes; endeavoring, at all times and in all places, to receive correct impressions of the country, of its inhabitants, of the great contest of arms just closed, and of the still greater contest of principles not yet terminated.
This book is the result. It is a record of actual observations and conversations, free from fictitious coloring. Such stories as were told me of the war and its depredations would have been spoiled by embellishment; pictures of existing conditions, to be valuable, must be faithful; and what is now most desirable, is not hypothesis or declamation, but the light of plain facts upon the momentous question of the hour, which must be settled, not according to any political or sectional bias, but upon broad grounds of Truth and Eternal Right.
I have accordingly made my narrative as ample and as literally faithful as the limits of these pages, and of my own opportunities, would allow. Whenever practicable, I have stepped aside and let the people I met speak for themselves. Notes taken on the spot, and under all sorts of circumstances,—on horseback, in jolting wagons, by the firelight of a farm-house, or negro camp, sometimes in the dark, or in the rain,—have enabled me to do this in many cases with absolute fidelity. Conversations which could not be reported in this way, were written out as soon as possible after they took place, and while yet fresh in my memory. Idiomatic peculiarities, which are often so expressive of character, I have reproduced without exaggeration. To intelligent and candid men it was my habit to state frankly my intention to publish an account of my journey, and then, with their permission, to jot down such views and facts as they saw fit to impart. Sometimes I was requested not to report certain statements of an important nature, made in the glow of conversation; these, not without regret, I have suppressed; and I trust that in no instance have I violated a confidence that was reposed in me.
I may add that the conversations recorded are generally of a representative character, being selected from among hundreds of such; and that if I have given seemingly undue prominence to any subject, it has been because I found it an absorbing and universal topic of discussion.
MAY, 1866.
I. THE START
Harrisburg.—First Indications of War.—Reminiscences of Lee’s Invasion.—On to Gettysburg.—The Town and its Inhabitants.—The Hero of Gettysburg. Page 15
II. THE FIELD OF GETTYSBURG
Cemetery Hill.—Pivot of the Battle and of the War.—Culp’s Hill.—Rock Creek.—Cemetery at Sunset.—John Burns.—The Peach Orchard.—Devil’s Den and Little Round Top.—Round Top.—Meade’s Head-Quarters.—Woman’s Heroism and Humanity.—A Soldier and his Benefactor.—Harvest of Bullets. 18
III. A REMINISCENCE OF CHAMBERSBURG
Quiet Country.—Ruins of Chambersburg.—Burning of the Town.—Flight of the Inhabitants.—Escape of the Raiders.—Death of Three Rebels.—Homeless Inhabitants.—State Appropriation for their Relief.—No Loss without Gain. 34
IV. SOUTH MOUNTAIN
Hagerstown.—Valley of the Antietam.—Boonsboro’.—The Rebels in Maryland.—View of the Mountain.—The Ascent.—Scene of General Reno’s Death.—Rebels buried in a Well.—A Mountaineer’s Story.—View of Catoctin Valley.—Strong Rebel Position.—Patriot Graves.—Antietam Valley at Sunset. 40
V. THE FIELD OF ANTIETAM
Rebel Line of Retreat.—Keedysville.—Brick Church Hospital.—Porter and his Reserves.—Banks of the Antietam.—Scenes at the Straw-Stacks.—Unfortunate Farmers.—Hospital Cemetery.—The Corn Field.—The Old Ploughman.—A Lesson for Vanity.—A Soldier’s Name.—The Dunker Church.—Sharpsburg.—Shelter from the Rain.—Southern Pronunciation.—Burnside’s Bridge.—Ancient and Modern Heroes.—Antietam National Cemetery.—The Battle. 44
VI. DOWN THE RIVER TO HARPER’S FERRY
Search for a Vehicle.—“Mr. Bennerhalls.”—Mr. Benner without the “halls.”—Leaving Sharpsburg.—Mountain Scenery.—Capt. Speaker’s Narrative.—Surrender of Harper’s Ferry.—Escape of Twenty-two Hundred Cavalry.—Capture of Rebel Wagon Train.—Morning in Greencastle.—Arrival at the Ferry. 57
VII. AROUND HARPER’S FERRY
River and Mountain Scenery.—Maryland Heights.—John Brown’s Engine-House.—Reminiscence of John Brown.—Political Inconsistency.—Negro from Shenandoah Valley.—Folly of Secession. 64
VIII. A TRIP TO CHARLESTOWN
Railroad Passengers.—A Desolated Country.—Farmers and Land.—A Dilapidated Town.—Meeting an Acquaintance.—Boarding-House Fare.—People and the Government Policy.—Charlestown Jail and Court-House.—John Brown’s Trial.—“His Soul Marching On.”—A One-armed Confederate.—John Brown’s Gallows.—Scene from the Scaffold.—The Church and its Uses. 69
IX. A SCENE AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington.—A Crowd of Pardon-Seekers.—President’s Reception. 75
X. BULL RUN
From Alexandria to Manassas.—Manassas Junction.—“Overpowered,” but not Whipped.—Ambulance Wagon.—The Driver and the Roads.—Scene of the First Bull Run.—Soldiers’ Monument.—Luncheon in the Woods.—Scene of the Second Bull Run.—The Monument.—Groverton.—The two Battles and their Lessons.—The Stone House.—Miscegenated Cider.—Virginia Negroes. 81
XI. VISIT TO MOUNT VERNON
Down the Potomac.—Landing at Mt. Vernon.—A Throng of Pilgrims.—Tomb of Washington.—Character of Washington.—Mansion and Out-houses.—Girl at the Wash-tub.—Washington’s Well.—Shade-Trees.—Within the Mansion.—Relics.—The Portico.—Washington’s Love of Home.—Thunder-storm. 91
XII. “STATE PRIDE.”
Acquia Creek.—Railroad and Stage-Coaches.—View of Fredericksburg.—Crossing the Rappahannock.—Ruins of the Town—“A Son of Virginia.”—“State Pride” and “Self-Conceit.”—Virginia and South Carolina.—Back in the Union.—Down at the Hotel.—Another Name for State Pride. 100
XIII. THE FIELD OF FREDERICKSBURG
The Situation.—The Stone Wall of History.—A Rebel Eye-witness.—Stripping the Dead.—Strange Breastworks.—Fidelity of a Dog.—Gen. Lee’s “Humanity.”—Private Cemetery.—The Marye House.—Negro who didn’t see the Fight.—Southern Consistency.—Dissolution of the Rebel Army.—The Buried Dead.—House of Washington’s Mother.—Mary Washington’s Monument.—The Lacy House.—Scene from the Windows.—Storming of Fredericksburg. 106
XIV. TO CHANCELLORSVILLE
’Lijah and his Buggy.—A Three-Dollar Horse.—Trade in Soldiers’ Clothing.—Small Farmers.—Right Ignorant but Right Sharp.—Sedgwick’s Retreat.—Farms and Crops.—Views of Emancipation.—Poor Whites and Niggers.—The Man that killed Harrow.—Along the Plank-Road.—Tales of the Old Times.—Chancellorsville Farm.—What was under the Weeds.—Bones for the Bone-Factory.—Chancellorsville Burying-Ground.—Death of Stonewall Jackson. 114
XV. THE WILDERNESS
Days of Anxiety.—Inflexible Spirit of the People.—Locust Grove.—The Wilderness Church.—Relics of the Battle.—Skeletons above Ground.—Wilderness Cemetery.—A Summer Shower.—The Wounded in the Fire.—The Rainbow. 123
XVI. SPOTTSYLVANIA COURT-HOUSE
Elijah “Cut.”—Richard “H.” Hicks.—Poor Whites and the War.—Dead Men’s Clothes.—A “Heavy Coon Dog.”—Traces of the Battle.—View of the Court-House.—Grant’s Breastworks.—County Clerk.—Whites and Blacks in the County.—Ignorance of the Lower Classes.—The Negro “Fated.” 129
XVII. THE FIELD OF SPOTTSYLVANIA
The Tavern-Keeper’s Relics.—A Union Officer’s Opinions.—The Landlord’s Cornfield.—Rebel and Yankee Troops.—Scene of the Decisive Conflict.—Graves of Spottsylvania.—Women “Chincapinnin.”—Leaves from a Soldier’s Testament. 137
XVIII. “ON TO RICHMOND.”
A Bubble Vanished.—Desolate Scenery.—Virginia and Massachusetts.—Ashton.—Suburbs.—Northern Men in Richmond.—Appearance of the City. 143
XIX. THE BURNT DISTRICT
Ruins of Richmond.—Why the Rebels burnt the City.—Panic of the Inhabitants.—Origin of the Fire.—Conflicting Opinions.—Fire of December, 1811.—Rebuilding.—Negroes at Work.—Colored Laborer.—Hasty Reconstruction. 147
XX. LIBBY, CASTLE THUNDER, AND BELLE ISLE
Libby Prison.—Castle Thunder.—James River.—Manchester Bridge.—Negroes with Bundles.—Old Negro’s Story.—Belle Island.—Talk with a Boatman.—Hatred of the Confederacy.—Skiff to Brown’s Island.—Father and Daughter. 153
XXI. FEEDING THE DESTITUTE
Destitute Ration Tickets.—White and Black Mendicants.—Spirit of Rapacity.—Certificates.—Spurious Cases.—American Union Commission. 161
XXII. THE UNION MEN OF RICHMOND
One of the Twenty-one.—His Account of Confederate Times.—Rebel Fast Days.—Insurrection of Women.—Mr. L——’s Story.—Colonel Dahlgren’s Body.—Night Work for Union Men.—Story of Mr. W——.—In Salisbury Prison.—Union Women.—Minor Prisons.—“One Honest Yankee.”—Books for the Prisoners.—White and his Mule Cart.—Scene in a Prison Yard.—The Premises by Moonlight.—Not a “Love Affair.”—Escape of Two Prisoners.—A Halter Case.—Running the Lines to Butler.—Partiality to Traitors.—Union League. 166
XXIII. MARKETS AND FARMING
Mixed Population of Richmond.—Market Carts.—Scene at the Stalls.—Vegetable Gardens.—Experience of a Jersey Farmer.—Farms for Sale. 178
XXIV. IN AND AROUND RICHMOND
St. John’s Church and Patrick Henry.—St. Paul’s and Jeff. Davis.—State and Confederate Capitol.—Negro Auction-Rooms.—Hollywood and Oakwood Cemeteries.—General Lee’s Head-Quarters Wagon.—Rebel Conscript Camp.—A Champion of Slavery.—A Rebel.—Secesh Song. 182
XXV. PEOPLE AND POLITICS
A Conservative Union Man.—A Confederate Soldier’s Opinions.—Female Secessionists.—Confederate Soldiers and the Ladies.—“Bomb-proof” Situations.—Governor Pierpoint.—Advantages to Northern Business Men.—State Debt and Finances.—Virginia Enterprise.—Coal Mines on the James.—Speech of a Played-Out Politician.—A Rival Candidate.—Political Views.—New Men. 187
XXVI. FORTIFICATIONS.—DUTCH GAP.—FAIR OAKS
Ride with Major K——.—Forts and Earthworks.—Winter Quarters of the Army of the James.—Affair at Laurel Hill.—At New-Market Heights.—Gallop across the Country.—Butler’s Canal.—Origin of the Name “Dutch Gap.”—Cox’s House.—Out on the Nine-Mile Road.—Fair Oaks Station.—Seven Pines.—Charge of Sickles’s Brigade.—Savage’s Station.—Two Sundays. 198
XXVII. IN AND ABOUT PETERSBURG
From Richmond to the “Cockade City.”—Evening with Judge ——.—Story of Two Brothers.—Shelling of Petersburg.—Black Population.—Ride with Colonel E——.—The “Crater.”—Forts Hell and Damnation.—Forts Morton and Stedman.—“Petersburg Express.”—A Beautiful but Silent City.—Signal Tower. 205
XXVIII. JAMES RIVER AND FORTRESS MONROE
City Point.—Landmarks of Famous Events.—Hotel under the Fortress.—Jeff. Davis’s Private Residence.—Circuit of the Ramparts.—Pardoned Rebel. 215
XXIX. ABOUT HAMPTON
Burning of Hampton.—Freedmen’s Settlements.—Visits to the Freedmen. 219
XXX. A GENERAL VIEW OF VIRGINIA
Fertility.—Natural Advantages.—Old Fields.—Hills and Valleys.—Products.—Value of Land.—Manufactures.—Oysters.—Common Schools.—Freedmen’s Schools.—Negro Population.—Old Prejudice.—Wages.—Negroes in Tobacco Factories.—Freedmen’s Bureau.—Secession.—Railroads.—Finances.—Prospects. 224
XXXI. THE “SWITZERLAND OF AMERICA.”
East Tennessee.—Home of President Johnson.—Knoxville.—An Old Nigger-Dealer.—Table-Talk.—East Tennesseeans and Niggers.—Neighborhood Feuds.—Persecution and Retaliation.—Story of a Loyal Refugee. 237
XXXII. EAST TENNESSEE FARMERS
Description of the People.—“Domestic.”—School-Fund and Schools.—Sects.—Farming.—Horses and Mules.—Grazing.—Want of a Market.—Products.—Mines. 243
XXXIII. IN AND ABOUT CHATTANOOGA
View from Cameron Hill.—Mixed Population.—Post School.—Freedmen’s Schools.—Freedmen.—Contraband Village.—Parade of a Colored Regiment. 248
XXXIV. LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN
A Bag of Grist.—Ascent of the Mountain.—The General’s Orderly.—View from Point Lookout.—“Battle in the Clouds.”—“Old Man of the Mountain.” 255
XXXV. THE SOLDIERS’ CEMETERY
National Cemetery of Chattanooga.—The Cave.—Interring the Dead. 260
XXXVI. MISSION RIDGE AND CHICKAMAUGA
Storming the Ridge.—Rossville Gap.—A Dreary Scene.—The “Deadenings.”—Dyer Farm.—Camp of Colored Soldiers.—African Superstition.—Disinterring the Dead.—The Blunder of Chickamauga.—General Thomas’s Fight. 263
XXXVII. FROM CHATTANOOGA TO MURFREESBORO’
Traces of Military Operations.—“Union Men.”—Passing the Cumberland Mountains.—The Country.—Story of Two Brothers.—“Little Johnny Reb.”—Railroad Travel.—General Hazen’s Head-Quarters.—Rebel Persecutions. 270
XXXVIII. STONE RIVER
Fortress Rosecrans.—Rebel and Union Lines.—McCook Surprised.—Round Forest.—Cemetery of Hazen’s Brigade.—New National Cemetery. 275
XXXIX. THE HEART OF TENNESSEE
Nashville.—Cotton and Cotton Seed.—Battle of Nashville.—Legislature and Politics.—Governor Brownlow.—Major-General Thomas.—On Freedmen.—Freedmen’s Bureau.—Black and White Industry.—Freedmen’s Schools. 279
XL. BY RAILROAD TO CORINTH
Condition of Railroad.—Battle-Ground of Franklin.—Crossing the River at Decatur.—A Young South Carolinian.—Whipping a Negro.—A Night in the Cars.—Morning in Corinth.—“Mighty Particular.”—The Corinthian Style.—Game.—Mr. M——’s Family and Servants.—Fate of a “Respectable Citizen.” 290
XLI. ON HORSEBACK FROM CORINTH
Winter Morning in the Woods.—Stop at a Log-House.—An Old Lady’s Misfortunes.—Old Lee’s Story.—A Roadside Encounter. 297
XLII. ZEEK
Talk by the Way.—Mistletoe.—Farm-Houses.—Route of the Armies.—Beauregard’s Bivouac.—Across Owl Creek.—Zeek’s Home. 303
XLIII. ZEEK’S FAMILY
A Tennessee Farm-House.—The Farmer.—The Kitchen.—Too well Ventilated by Half.—The Farmyard.—Mule-Pen and Out-Buildings. 306
XLIV. A NIGHT IN A TENNESSEE FARM-HOUSE
Concerning Doors.—Talk by the Firelight.—Depredations of the Two Armies.—Hunting Conscripts.—Origin of the Name “Owl Creek.”—Reminiscences of the Battle.—Smart Son-in-law.—Zeek Retires.—The Bridal Chamber. 312
XLV. THE FIELD OF SHILOH
Departure.—Bridal Home.—Before and After the Battle.—Hildebrand’s Picket Line.—Graves in the Woods.—Shiloh Church.—Skeletons Rooted up by Swine.—Romance of the Widow Ray House.—Romance of a Bale of Hay.—Members of One Family.—Sheep Pasture.—The “Long Avenue.”—Trenches of the Dead.—Pittsburg Landing.—General Prentiss’s Disaster. 321
XLVI. WAITING FOR THE TRAIN AT MIDNIGHT
Mrs. M—— on Slavery.—Hunting for the Railroad.—Negro Encampment. 328
XLVII. FROM CORINTH TO MEMPHIS
West Tennessee.—Two Sides to the Picture.—Commerce of Memphis. 332
XLVIII. FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS AND THE FREEDMEN’S BUREAU
Freedmen in Memphis.—Colored Benevolent Societies.—Schools.—Officers of the Bureau.—Old Wrongs Righted.—Summary Justice.—Milly Wilson’s Story.—Cases from Mississippi.—Business of the Bureau.—Suppressed Wills. 336
XLIX. DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI
A Mississippi Steamboat.—Passengers.—Supper.—Evening Amusements.—Steamboat Race.—River and Shores.—Landings.—Captain and Colored Gentleman.—An Awful Thought.—Helena.—A Colored Soldier’s Return.—Condition of the Levees.—Freshets.—Best Protected Plantations.—Negro Insurrections. 347
L. IN AND ABOUT VICKSBURG
Sight of the Town.—Yankee Canal.—Hills of Vicksburg.—Caves.—An Under-Ground Residence.—Bombardment.—Famine.—Ride to the Fortifications.—Grant and Pemberton Monument.—Sherman’s Unsuccessful Assault.—Chickasaw Bayou.—Indian Mounds.—Fortifications below Vicksburg.—“Will the Freedmen Work?”. 356
LI. FREE LABOR IN MISSISSIPPI
Laborers defrauded of their Hire.—“Honesty” of a Planter.—Northern and Southern Master.—Freedmen and Planters.—Furnishing Supplies.—Slave Labor on Mr. P——’s Plantation.—Overseers and Negroes.—Change at Christmas. 362
LII. A RECONSTRUCTED STATE
Ignorance of the Free-Labor System.—Serf Code.—Freedmen in Civil Courts.—Convention and Legislature.—State Militia.—White and Black Offenders.—Persecution of Union Men.—A Pardoned Rebel.—Freedmen’s Schools. 369
LIII. A FEW WORDS ABOUT COTTON
Best Cotton Lands.—Anxiety of the Planter.—Fascination of the Culture.—Northern Planters.—Estimate of Cost and Profits.—Prospect of Crop. 379
LIV. DAVIS’S BEND.—GRAND GULF.—NATCHEZ
Home of Jeff. Davis.—Colony of Paupers.—Other Farms on the Peninsula.—Success of the Freedmen.—Colored Courts.—Village of Grand Gulf.—The “Gulf.”—Situation of Natchez.—Cargoes of Cotton.—Talk with an Overseer. 383
LV. THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI
Used-up Deck Hands.—Toilsome Work and Brutal Treatment.—French Custom.—Steamboat Acquaintances.—Pay for Slaves.—Jim B—— and his Niggers.—“A Mountain Spout of a Woman.”—Talk with an Arkansas Planter.—Louisiana Planters.—Deck Passengers.—Black Woman’s Story.—French Inhabitants.—Creoles and Slaves.—Villages and Plantations.—Levees.—The River flowing on a Ridge.—Unavailable Swamps.—River Water.—River runs Up Hill. 388
LVI. THE CRESCENT CITY
Midwinter at New Orleans.—French Quarter.—Anomalous Third Class.—Style of Building.—Levee.—Where the Cotton goes.—Shipment of Cotton during the War and since.—Freight of a Liverpool Steamer.—St. Charles Rotunda.—One of the Crowd.—His Scheme for making a Fortune.—His Opinion of the Planters.—Northern Men in Louisiana.—Planters and Niggers.—Hard Overseers.—General Phil. Sheridan.—Military Division of the Gulf.—Troops in Texas.—The Mexican Question.—The South to be Northernized.—Sheridan’s Personal Appearance.—Governor Wells.—Deeds and Professions.—Mayor Kennedy.—On the Future of New Orleans and the South.—Street Railroads.—Property owned by People of Color.—A Black and White Strike. 397
LVII. POLITICS, FREE LABOR, AND SUGAR
Radical Union Men.—On the President’s Policy.—On General Banks.—Gentleman who had no Vote.—Newspapers.—General T. W. Sherman.—Rebel Militia.—Colored “Cavalry” Drilling.—Capital and Labor.—Louisiana Serf Code.—Planters and the Bureau.—Dependence of the Negroes.—Defrauded by Whites.—Independent Homes for the Freedmen.—Colored Schools.—Northern Men.—A Sugar Plantation.—Abandoned Parishes.—Sugar and Cotton.—Cane Planting.—Field of Cane in June.—A Sugar-Mill.—Sugar Crop.—White Laborer. 406
LVIII. THE BATTLE OF MOBILE BAY
Lake Ponchartrain.—Capture of the “Water Witch.”—Morning in the Gulf.—Entering Mobile Bay.—Scene of Farragut’s Fight.—A Poet in the Battle. 415
LIX. MOBILE
The Merchant Fleet.—Harbors on the Gulf.—Spanish Fort.—Obstructions in the Channel.—Up Spanish River.—The City.—The Great Explosion.—Business. 420
LX. ALABAMA PLANTERS
River Steamers.—Character of Alabamians.—One of the Despairing Class.—Mr. J——’s Experience.—Mr. G——’s Opinions.—Mr. H—— of Lowndes County.—Planters’ Justice.—One of the Hopeful Class.—Agricultural Associations. 423
LXI. WILSON’S RAID
Shores of the Alabama.—Plantation Ploughs.—Author’s Ignorance Enlightened.—Selma.—Ruins of the Town.—Chain-Gang.—Battle of Selma.—A Freedman’s Story.—Loyalty and Fidelity.—Negro Boy Arthur.—Raiders in Lowndes County.—Planter’s Wife and the Wine.—Track of Wilson’s Cavalry. 433
LXII. NOTES ON ALABAMA
Montgomery.—The Capitol.—Where the Confederate Egg was Hatched.—Men of the Back Country.—Small Farmers in the Legislature.—Original Secessionists and Union Men.—Young Man of Chambers County.—A Prisoner at Harrisburg.—Life among the Yankees.—Return Home.—Disloyalty of the People.—Newspapers and Churches.—Northern and Southern Alabama.—Union Men of Randolph County.—Great Destitution.—Service of the Freedmen’s Bureau.—Negro in Civil Courts.—Freedmen’s Schools.—Cotton Stealing.—Prospect of Cotton Crop.—How to Hire the Freedmen.—All Sorts of Contracts.—Northern Men in Alabama.—Topography.—Tree Moss.—Best Cotton Lands.—Disadvantages.—Artesian Wells.—Region of Small Farms.—Climate.—Common Schools.—First Cotton Crop.—Indian War.—Railroads. 441
LXIII. IN AND ABOUT ATLANTA
Closing Battles of the War.—The Yankees at West Point.—Foggy Night at Atlanta.—City by Daylight.—Colored Soldier’s Widow.—Property Destroyed.—Religion a Nuisance.—Rebuilding.—Rents.—White and Black Refugees.—Accounts by Citizens.—Negro’s Horse.—Jesse Wade, the Poor White; on Sherman’s Strategy; on Schools; on Reconstruction.—Nigger versus White Man.—Out-door Convention of Freed People.—Georgia Railroads and Banks. 452
LXIV. DOWN IN MIDDLE GEORGIA
Last View of Atlanta.—Negro Emigration.—Indigent Negroes.—Niggers’ best Friends.—Railroad to Macon.—The Country.—City of Refuge.—Colored Population.—Murders and Shootings.—Need of Cavalry.—Georgia and the War.—Freedmen’s Bureau and the People.—Negro of Middle Georgia.—Infraction of Contracts.—Control of Bureau Funds.—Macon Freedmen’s Schools.—Union Men in Georgia.—An Old Settler’s Story.—“No Party” Cry.—Confederates and Yankees. 460
LXV. ANDERSONVILLE
Yankee Prison at Macon.—“Death’s Acre.”—Trial of Captain Wirz.—His Personal Appearance.—Scene of his Crimes.—Name of the Town.—Present Appearance.—The Stockade.—Double Walls.—The Dead Line.—Prisoners’ Caves.—Huts and Barrack Sheds.—Out-Buildings.—Cemetery.—Death Record.—Inscriptions.—Rebel Owner’s Claim.—Testimony of Georgians. 468
LXVI. SHERMAN IN MIDDLE GEORGIA
Tradition regarding General Sherman’s Gloves.—Confederate General’s Testimony.—Criticisms and Anecdotes.—“The Great Robber” in Jones County.—Confederate Stockings.—Yankee Soldiers and Rebel Dogs.—Sherman’s Field Orders.—Pillagers.—Shooting Horses and Stock.—Army and its Stragglers.—Negro and the Trunk.—Persuasion of a Rope.—The “Great Robber” in Putnam County.—Not a Raid.—Movement of the Army.—Panic of the People.—Flight from Milledgeville.—Masters and Slaves. 475
LXVII. PLANTATION GLIMPSES
Worn-out Plantations.—Houses on Props.—A Northern Man’s Experience.—Men and Women Ploughing.—Home Manufactures.—A Planter’s House.—Old Master and Young Master.—A Georgia Woman and the Yankees. 482
LXVIII. POLITICS AND FREE LABOR IN GEORGIA
Milledgeville.—State Legislature.—Repudiation.—Complaints of Confederate Despotism.—Value of Slave Property; to be Paid for by the Government.—Common-School System.—Freedmen’s Schools.—Negro with the Small-Pox.—Georgia Planter and Niggers.—Kinder than the Yankees.—Poor Whites in New York and Massachusetts.—Abuse of the Yankees; of Freedmen’s Bureau.—Mr. C—— of Oglethorpe County; why he damned the Yankees.—Tax on Color.—Southern Methods.—State Commissioner of the Bureau.—Planters’ Profits.—Meanness of the Georgians.—Sending Negroes out of the State.—Ignorance of the Freed People.—Tendency to Idleness.—Bribes Offered.—Cruelties to Freedmen.—Public Sentiment on the Subject.—Cotton Crop. 488
LXIX. SHERMAN IN EASTERN GEORGIA
Sherman and the Railroads.—Condition of the Tracks.—General Grant on Sherman’s “Hair Pins.”—Machinery for Destroying Track.—Condition of the Bent Iron.—Railroad Buildings.—One Glove off.—The “Bummers” in Burke County.—People Stripped of Everything.—Sherman and the Old Woman.—Buried Gold and Silver.—Shrewdness of Planter’s Wife.—A “Sorry” Watch.—Experience of a Northern Man.—Running off Goods and Stock.—Hiding Place in the Bushes.—Coming of the Soldiers.—Stopped by Yankee Cavalry.—Why the Women screamed.—Pursuit of a Horse.—Luck of a Poor Planter.—Reduced to Corn-Meal Bran.—By Stage to Scarborough.—By Rail to Savannah.—Comments of the Passengers.—By the Ogeechee River.—Importation of Hay. 501
LXX. A GLANCE AT SAVANNAH
Sherman at Savannah.—Conference with Secretary Stanton.—Issuing of General Orders No. 15.—Aspect of the City.—Situation.—Inhabitants.—Trade.—Colored Schools.—Bonaventure Cemetery. 508
LXXI. CHARLESTON AND THE WAR
Charleston and Savannah Railroad.—Steamboats.—Morning in Charleston Harbor.—Objects in the Mist.—Historic Water.—Charleston and the Old Flag.—Early Walk in the City.—Turkey Buzzards.—People and Houses.—Great Fire of 1861.—Its Origin.—Picturesque Ruins.—Damage done by Shells.—Spite against Firemen.—Panic and Flight of the Inhabitants.—A Northern Man’s Experience.—Nineteen Months’ Bombardment.—Not a Joyful Anniversary.—Evacuation by the Rebels.—Fire and Explosion.—The City isolated. 511
LXXII. A VISIT TO FORT SUMTER
Harbor Obstructions.—Destructive Water Worm.—Palmetto Wharves.—Fort Sumter from without.—A Mass of Ruins.—Effect of Bombardment.—Section of the Old Wall.—Landing at the Fort.—Inside View.—The Old Flag again.—Situation of the Fort.—Old Iron under the Walls.—Cost of United States Forts.—Garrison.—Beauregard’s Bombardment.—Major Anderson’s Fame.—Fame not so cheap since.—Military Duty and Common Sense.—Policy of the Government.—The Fort from Morris Island. 517
LXXIII. A PRISON AND A PRISONER
General S——’s Visits to Charleston.—Taken Prisoner.—Jumping from the Cars.—Circular Perambulation.—The Man with the Bag of Corn.—Pine-leaves and Tobacco.—Chased by Blood-hounds.—What he lived on.—Visit to a lone Widow.—Night in a Canebrake.—A Man on Horseback.—Proffer of a Canteen.—A Friend in Need.—Night in a Gin-House.—Parting in the Morning.—Entangled among Streams.—Taken for a Spy.—Recognized.—How he got his Clothes again.—Sent to Macon.—Tunnelling the Ground under the Stockade.—Betrayed.—Sent to Charleston.—The Work-house.—Jail and Hospitals.—Entrance to the Work-house, Rooms, and Cells.—Prisoners’ Bunks.—Visited by a Shell.—Watching the Shells by Night.—A Taste of the pure Air.—Negro Whippings.—Tower of Observation.—Mountain of Offal.—“Kindness” to Prisoners.—Plans of Escape.—Exploring the Cistern.—Tunnelling the Walls.—Betrayed again.—Grand Scheme to Capture and Fire the City.—Exchanged. 521
LXXIV. THE SEA-ISLANDS
Negro of Cotton States and Border States.—Causes of Difference.—Slaves and Slavery in South Carolina.—Labor Disorganized.—Negro Instincts.—Emigration to the Coast.—Settlements under Sherman’s Order.—No more Allotments.—General Howard’s Visit.—President’s Theory.—Conflict of Authority.—Of Claims.—Nothing Settled.—Freedmen’s Crops.—Gun and Fishing-Rod.—Discouragement.—Difficult Question. 532
LXXV. A VISIT TO JAMES ISLAND
Stroll along the Wharves.—Negroes under Coal-Sheds.—Misery.—Boats to James Island.—Planters and their Freedmen.—Taciturn Boatman.—Previous Visits.—Captured by Negroes.—Third Visit.—Our Reception.—Number of Freedmen.—House of Three Orphans.—Conversation with their Guardian.—An Unreasonable Complaint.—A Northern Man’s Fortunes.—Negro from St. John.—“Faithful Old Family Servant.”—Colored Guard.—Women “Listing.”—Our Guard takes Notes.—Negroes Farming.—Attachment to their Homes.—Children going to School.—Shade-Trees used for Fences.—Extent of the Island.—Freedmen their own Driver. 537
LXXVI. SHERMAN IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Destruction by the Army.—A South Side View.—In Orangeburg District.—A Lady’s Account.—Discipline of the Army.—Fidelity of an Old Cook.—Warned by a Dream.—Behavior of the Negroes.—Firing Houses.—Foragers.—Yankee Officers.—Soldiers’ Fun and Mischief.—Behavior.—Destructiveness.—Three Nights in the Chimney Corner.—White Lie by a Black Boy.—White Officers and Black Girls.—Robbed of everything.—The Negroes afterwards.—Few White Men left in the Country.—Cut off from Charleston. 546
LXXVII. THE BURNING OF COLUMBIA
The Fall of Pride.—Infatuation of the People.—Scenes of Panic.—Citizen Plunderers.—General Sherman’s Promise.—Origin of the Fires.—Accounts by Responsible Citizens.—Rocket Signals.—Fire-Balls thrown into Houses.—Stories of Federal Guards.—Skill at finding Treasures.—“Divining Rods.”—The Fire in the Distance.—Dismay and Terror.—Thirty Millions of Property Destroyed.—Sacking of the Churches; of Masonic and Odd-Fellow Lodges.—Drunkenness.—Discipline.—Robberies.—Many Guards faithful.—Curious Incidents.—Funeral of a Lapdog.—Popular Jokes in the Army.—Mrs. Minegault’s Bracelet.—Destitution.—Doing as we would have been done by.—War and Institutions of Learning.—Horrors left behind.—Ruins. 553
LXXVIII. NOTES ON SOUTH CAROLINA
Free Labor in the Eastern District.—West of the Wateree.—Planters and the Crop they depended on.—Cotton and Corn.—Crops during the Confederacy.—Rice Culture.—Railroads.—Finances.—United States Taxes.—Prevalence of Crime.—Dishonest Treasury Agents; their Modes of Operating.—Animosity against the Government.—Progressive Class.—Governor Orr on Negro Suffrage.—Story of a Negro Carpenter.—Freedmen’s Schools. 565
LXXIX. THE RIDE TO WINNSBORO’
By Stage from Columbia.—Destruction of the Railroad Track.—The Yankees Dissected.—A Skeleton at the Banquet.—Stage-Coach Conversation.—Negro Suffrage and Free Labor.—Spirit of the People.—Outrages on Negroes.—A Candid Confession.—Sherman’s “Bummers” at Winnsboro’. 571
LXXX. A GLIMPSE OF THE OLD NORTH STATE
Change of Scene.—North Carolina Legislature.—Business at Raleigh.—Impoverishment of the State.—Effects of Repudiation.—Stay Laws.—Rice Culture.—North Carolina Farmers.—Freedmen and Freedmen’s Schools.—Governor Worth on Sherman’s “Bummers”. 578
LXXXI. CONCLUSIONS
Return Home.—Summing Up.—Condition of the South.—Demand for Capital and Labor.—Recovery of Agriculture and Business.—A Hint to Emigrants.—Loyalty of the People.—Union Men at the Close of Hostilities.—A Change for the Worse.—Talk for the Talk’s sake.—Enough of War.—Danger of Unarmed Rebellion.—Aims of Southern Leaders.—Security needed.—How to punish Treason.—Plans of Reconstruction.—Southern Plan.—Southern Representatives and the Test Oath.—The Rule of Justice.—Principles of the Declaration of Independence.—Impartial Suffrage.—History of Progressive Ideas.—Time for the Sowing of the New Seed.—Are the Blacks prepared for the Franchise?—The Basis of Representation.—Prospects. 583
LXXXII. THE WORK OF RESTORATION
A Year later.—Hopes disappointed.—Position of the Whites of the South.—Treatment of Southern Unionists, Black and White.—Sections where the Hostility was most intense.—Honorable and Noble Exceptions to this State of Feeling.—The most Noisy Supporters of the Lost Cause.—The Effect of President Johnson’s Course in stimulating this Hostility.—Review of his Course so far as it relates to Reconstruction.—Interviews with Southern Men.—Organization of Provisional Governments.—Specimens of the Men appointed by him as Governors.—Defiance of Congress in Advance.—Assurances to South Carolina.—Democratic Conventions indorsing the President’s Policy.—The Message of December, 1865.—Opposition to Congress.—His “White-washing Message.”—Veto of the First Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.—The 22d of February Speech.—Veto of the Civil Rights Bill.—Its Passage over the Veto.—Provisions of the Bill.—The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.—What it was.—Veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.—Passage over the Veto.—Its Provisions.—Admission of Tennessee.—Mr. Johnson signs the Resolution, but protests.—The Memphis Riot.—The New Orleans Massacre.—Mr. Johnson responsible for them.—General Sheridan’s Account of it.—The Philadelphia Convention.—Its Tears.—It proves a Failure.—Mr. Johnson weeps.—Mr. Johnson’s Speeches.—Reply to the Philadelphia Committee.—“Congress hanging on the Verge of the Government.”—“Swinging round the Circle.”—Disgraceful Conduct of Mr. Johnson.—Billingsgate in his Speeches.—Wearisome Platitudes.—The Effect they had on the Elections of 1866. 591
LXXXIII. RECONSTRUCTION
Condition of the Republican and Democratic Parties in Congress in December, 1866.—The District of Columbia Elective Franchise Bill passed: Its Provisions.—Mr. Johnson vetoes it, but it is passed over the Veto.—Territorial Franchise Bill passed.—Admission of Nebraska as a State, with the Elective Franchise Proviso.—Difficulties in Maturing satisfactorily the Reconstruction Act.—The Provisions of the House Bill.—It is materially changed in the Senate.—Further Modification in the House Provisions of the Bill as finally passed.—Necessity for the Tenure of Office Act: Its Provisions.—Effect of the Passage of the District of Columbia Franchise Bill on Tennessee.—Decision of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.—The First Supplementary Reconstruction Act of the Fortieth Congress.—It is vetoed, and re-passed: Its Provisions.—Arrangement for the Call of a Summer Session.—Mr. Stanbery’s Exposition of the Reconstruction Acts.—The Summer Session of 1867.—The Second Supplementary Reconstruction Act: Its Provisions.—Appropriations for Carrying out the Reconstruction Acts.—The President’s Communication.—The Resolution of the House in Reply.—Sharp Talk.—The Completion of Congressional Legislation on the Subject in 1867.—Condition of the Desolated States in 1867. 605
LXXXIV. THE WORK OF RESTORATION
Votes on the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment.—The New States and Reconstructed States likely to vote for it.—Action of the Commanders of the Military Districts.—The Fifth District.—Measures adopted by General Sheridan.—His Reasons for them.—Further Action of General Sheridan.—Governor Wells removed, and Governor Flanders appointed.—Incidents in Charleston: The Railroad Cars; The Flag at the Charleston Fire Parade.—General Sickles’ Order No. 10: Its Provisions.—Attorney-General Stanbery’s Objections to it.—Other Orders of General Sickles.—He asks to be relieved of his Command.—Troubles in General Pope’s District.—Insubordination of Governor Jenkins: General Pope asks that he be removed; General Grant’s Indorsement.—Riot in Mobile.—In Richmond.—Registration, and Powers of Military Commanders.—The Interference of the Attorney-General.—His Written Opinions.—General Grant decides that they are not Mandatory.—General Sheridan’s Opinion of them.—Removal of Throckmorton.—Sheridan’s Complaint of Rousseau.—The Removal of Secretary Stanton determined upon, and of General Sheridan also.—The President’s Letter to Stanton.—Stanton’s Reply.—General Grant’s Private Letter to the President.—Stanton suspended, and Grant appointed Secretary of War ad interim.—The Order for Sheridan’s Removal.—General Grant’s Protest.—The President’s Reply.—Thomas appointed to the Fifth District, but declines on account of his Health.—Hancock appointed.—General Griffin’s Death.—General Sickles’ Removal.—Generals Canby and Mower’s Orders.—The President’s two Proclamations.—Who are to be amnestied.—The President’s Pardons.—General Hancock’s Special Order.—The President’s delight with it.—He proposes that Congress shall make a Public Recognition of the General’s Patriotism.—Congress “don’t see it.”—Measures of General Hancock.—General Grant revokes his Orders.—Hancock asks to be relieved, and is appointed by the President to the Command of the New Department of Washington.—The New Constitutions.—Alabama: The Measures of the Rebels to prevent the adoption of the Constitution.—The Constitutions of the other States adopted.—Vote on Convention and Constitution. 624
LXXXV. SOCIAL CONDITION
Suffering at the South among the Freedmen and Loyal Whites.—Causes.—The Discharge of the Freedmen by their Employers for Voting.—Good Conduct of the Freedmen.—Description of the Scenes at the Polls in Montgomery, Ala.—Negro Suffrage, North and South.—Reasons why it was indispensable that the Freedmen should have the Ballot.—Testimony to the Good Conduct of the Negroes at the South.—Southern White Loyalty.—The Competency of the Negro for the exercise of Suffrage equal to that of the Poor Whites.—Eloquence of a Negro in Arkansas, a recent Slave.—The Destitution at the South.—Wrongs Inflicted on the Freedmen.—Laziness of the Rebel Whites.—The Advance in Education at the South.—Benevolent Associations.—Freedmen’s Bureau.—Mr. Peabody’s Munificent Gift.—Higher Education.—The Educational Provisions in the New Constitutions.—The Results which must flow from this in the Future. 651
LXXXVI. IMPEACHMENT
Foreshadowings of Impeachment.—Action on the subject in the XXXIXth Congress.—Mr. Ashley’s Motion.—Its defeat.—The resolutions of Messrs. Loan and Kelso.—Mr. Ashley’s resolution.—Report of the Impeachment Committee.—Postponement to XLth Congress.—The Committee renewed.—Their report.—Impeachment killed for the time.—Conduct of the President.—Reinstatement of Secretary Stanton.—The President’s quarrel with General Grant.—The reason why.—His attempts to prevent any communication with Secretary Stanton.—His attempt to remove Stanton and appoint General Thomas Secretary ad interim.—Stanton refuses obedience and appeals to congress.—The excitement.—Impeachment resolutions moved immediately.—Report of committee on reconstruction.—The vote on Impeachment—The announcement to the Senate.—Its reception.—Preparation of the Articles of Impeachment.—The managers elected.—The articles.—The Senate organized as a High Court of Impeachment.—The progress of the trial.—The speeches.—The Secret Session of the Court.—The delay of the vote.—The first vote on the eleventh article.—Defeat of Impeachment by a single vote.—The vote.—Probable effect on the President.—The vote on the second and third articles.—Mr. Stanton’s resignation.—The National Convention at Chicago.—Nomination of Grant and Colfax.—The ballots for Vice President.—The Platform.—Certainty of success.—The glorious future. 669
THE SOUTH.
I. THE START
In the month of August, 1865, I set out to visit some of the scenes of the great conflict through which the country had lately passed.
On the twelfth I reached Harrisburg,—a plain, prosaic town of brick and wood, with nothing especially attractive about it except its broad-sheeted, shining river, flowing down from the Blue Ridge, around wooded islands, and between pleasant shores.
It is in this region that the traveller from the North first meets with indications of recent actual war. The Susquehanna, on the eastern shore of which the city stands, forms the northern limit of Rebel military operations. The “high-water mark of the Rebellion” is here: along these banks its uttermost ripples died. The bluffs opposite the town are still crested with the hastily constructed breastworks, on which the citizens worked night and day in the pleasant month of June, 1863, throwing up, as it were, a dike against the tide of invasion. These defences were of no practical value. They were unfinished when the Rebels appeared in force in the vicinity: Harrisburg might easily have been taken, and a way opened into the heart of the North. But a Power greater than man’s ruled the event. The Power that lifted these azure hills, and spread out the green valleys, and hollowed a passage for the stream, appointed to treason also a limit and a term. “Thus far and no farther.”
The surrounding country is full of lively reminiscences of those terrible times. Panic-stricken populations flying at the approach of the enemy; whole families fugitive from homes none thought of defending; flocks and herds, horses, wagon-loads of promiscuously heaped household stuffs and farm produce,—men, women, children, riding, walking, running, driving or leading their bewildered four-footed chattels,—all rushing forward with clamor and alarm under clouds of dust, crowding every road to the river, and thundering across the long bridges, regardless of the “five-dollars-fine” notice, (though it is to be hoped that the toll-takers did their duty;)—such were the scenes which occurred to render the Rebel invasion memorable. The thrifty Dutch farmers of the lower counties did not gain much credit either for courage or patriotism at that time. It was a panic, however, to which almost any community would have been liable. Stuart’s famous raid of the previous year was well remembered. If a small cavalry force had swept from their track through a circuit of about sixty miles over two thousand horses, what was to be expected from Lee’s whole army? Resistance to the formidable advance of one hundred thousand disciplined troops was of course out of the question. The slowness, however, with which the people responded to the State’s almost frantic calls for volunteers was in singular contrast with the alacrity each man showed to run off his horses and get his goods out of Rebel reach.
From Harrisburg I went, by the way of York and Hanover, to Gettysburg. Having hastily secured a room at a hotel in the Square, (the citizens call it the “Di’mond,”) I inquired the way to the battle-ground.
“You are on it now,” said the landlord, with proud satisfaction,—for it is not every man that lives, much less keeps a tavern, on the field of a world-famous fight. “I tell you the truth,” said he; and, in proof of his words, (as if the fact were too wonderful to be believed without proof,) he showed me a Rebel shell imbedded in the brick wall of a house close by. (N. B. The battle-field was put into the bill.)
Gettysburg is the capital of Adams County: a town of about three thousand souls,—or fifteen hundred, according to John Burns, who assured me that half the population were Copperheads, and that they had no souls. It is pleasantly situated on the swells of a fine undulating country, drained by the head-waters of the Monocacy. It has no especial natural advantages; owing its existence, probably, to the mere fact that several important roads found it convenient to meet at this point, to which accident also is due its historical renown. The circumstance which made it a burg made it likewise a battle-field.
About the town itself there is nothing very interesting. It consists chiefly of two-story houses of wood and brick, in dull rows, with thresholds but little elevated above the street. Rarely a front yard or blooming garden-plot relieves the dreary monotony. Occasionally there is a three-story house, comfortable, no doubt, and sufficiently expensive, about which the one thing remarkable is the total absence of taste in its construction. In this respect Gettysburg is but a fair sample of a large class of American towns, the builders of which seem never once to have been conscious that there exists such a thing as beauty.
John Burns, known as the “hero of Gettysburg,” was almost the first person whose acquaintance I made. He was sitting under the thick shade of an English elm in front of the tavern. The landlord introduced him as “the old man who took his gun and went into the first day’s fight.” He rose to his feet and received me with sturdy politeness; his evident delight in the celebrity he enjoys twinkling through the veil of a naturally modest demeanor.
“John will go with you and show you the different parts of the battle-ground,” said the landlord. “Will you, John?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll go,” said John, quite readily; and we set out.
II. THE FIELD OF GETTYSBURG
A mile south of the town is Cemetery Hill, the head and front of an important ridge, running two miles farther south to Round Top,—the ridge held by General Meade’s army during the great battles. The Rebels attacked on three sides,—on the west, on the north, and on the east; breaking their forces in vain upon this tremendous wedge, of which Cemetery Hill may be considered the point. A portion of Ewell’s Corps had passed through the town several days before, and neglected to secure that very commanding position. Was it mere accident, or something more, which thus gave the key to the country into our hands, and led the invaders, alarmed by Meade’s vigorous pursuit, to fall back and fight the decisive battle here?
With the old “hero” at my side pointing out the various points of interest, I ascended Cemetery Hill. The view from the top is beautiful and striking. On the north and east is spread a finely variegated farm country; on the west, with woods and valleys and sunny slopes between, rise the summits of the Blue Ridge.
It was a soft and peaceful summer day. There was scarce a sound to break the stillness, save the shrill note of the locust, and the perpetual click-click of the stone-cutters at work upon the granite headstones of the soldiers’ cemetery. There was nothing to indicate to a stranger that so tranquil a spot had ever been a scene of strife. We were walking in the time-hallowed place of the dead, by whose side the martyr-soldiers who fought so bravely and so well on those terrible first days of July, slept as sweetly and securely as they.
“It don’t look here as it did after the battle,” said John Burns. “Sad work was made with the tombstones. The ground was all covered with dead horses, and broken wagons, and pieces of shells, and battered muskets, and everything of that kind, not to speak of the heaps of dead.” But now the tombstones have been replaced, the neat iron fences have been mostly repaired, and scarcely a vestige of the fight remains. Only the burial-places of the slain are there. Thirty-five hundred and sixty slaughtered Union soldiers lie on the field of Gettysburg. This number does not include those whose bodies have been claimed by friends and removed.
The new cemetery, devoted to the patriot slain, and dedicated with fitting ceremonies on the 19th of November, 1863, adjoins the old one. In the centre is the spot reserved for the monument, the corner-stone of which was laid on the 4th of July, 1865. The cemetery is semicircular, in the form of an amphitheatre, except that the slope is reversed, the monument occupying the highest place. The granite headstones resemble rows of semicircular seats. Side by side, with two feet of ground allotted to each, and with their heads towards the monument, rest the three thousand five hundred and sixty. The name of each, when it could be ascertained, together with the number of the company and regiment in which he served, is lettered on the granite at his head. But the barbarous practice of stripping such of our dead as fell into their hands, in which the Rebels indulged here as elsewhere, rendered it impossible to identify large numbers. The headstones of these are lettered “Unknown.” At the time when I visited the cemetery, the sections containing most of the unknown had not yet received their headstones, and their resting-places were indicated by a forest of stakes. I have seen few sadder sights.
The spectacle of so large a field crowded with the graves of the slain brings home to the heart an overpowering sense of the horror and wickedness of war. Yet, as I have said, not all our dead are here. None of the Rebel dead are here. Not one of those who fell on other fields, or died in hospitals and prisons in those States where the war was chiefly waged,—not one out of those innumerable martyred hosts lies on this pleasant hill. The bodies of once living and brave men, slowly mouldering to dust in this sanctified soil, form but a small, a single sheaf from that great recent harvest reaped by Death with the sickle of war.
Once living and brave! How full of life, how full of unflinching courage and fiery zeal they marched up hither to fight the great fight, and to give their lives! And each man had his history; each soldier resting here had his interests, his loves, his darling hopes, the same as you or I. All were laid down with his life. It was no trifle to him: it was as great a thing to him as it would be to you, thus to be cut off from all things dear in this world, and to drop at once into a vague eternity. Grown accustomed to the waste of life through years of war, we learn to think too lightly of such sacrifices. “So many killed,”—with that brief sentence we glide over the unimaginably fearful fact, and pass on to other details. We indulge in pious commonplaces,—“They have gone to a better world; they have their reward,” and the like. No doubt this is true; if not, then life is a mockery, and hope a lie. But the future, with all our faith, is vague and uncertain. It lies before us like one of those unidentified heroes, hidden from sight, deep-buried, mysterious, its headstone lettered “Unknown.” Will it ever rise? Through trouble, toils, and privations,—not insensible to danger, but braving it,—these men—and not these only, but the uncounted thousands represented by these—confronted, for their country’s sake, that awful uncertainty. Did they believe in your better world? Whether they did or not, this world was a reality, and dear to them.
I looked into one of the trenches, in which workmen were laying foundations for the headstones, and saw the ends of the coffins protruding. It was silent and dark down there. Side by side the soldiers slept, as side by side they fought. I chose out one coffin from among the rest, and thought of him whose dust it contained,—your brother and mine, although we never knew him. I thought of him as a child, tenderly reared up—for this. I thought of his home, his heart-life:—
“Had he a father? Had he a mother? Had he a sister? Had he a brother? Or was there a nearer one Still, and a dearer one Yet, than all other?”
I could not know; in this world, none will ever know. He sleeps with the undistinguishable multitude, and his headstone is lettered “Unknown.”
Eighteen loyal States are represented by the tenants of these graves. New York has the greatest number,—upwards of eight hundred; Pennsylvania comes next in order, having upwards of five hundred. Tall men from Maine, young braves from Wisconsin, heroes from every State between, met here to defend their country and their homes. Sons of Massachusetts fought for Massachusetts on Pennsylvania soil. If they had not fought, or if our armies had been annihilated here, the whole North would have been at the mercy of Lee’s victorious legions. As Cemetery Hill was the pivot on which turned the fortunes of the battle, so Gettysburg itself was the pivot on which turned the destiny of the nation. Here the power of aggressive treason culminated; and from that memorable Fourth of July, when the Rebel invaders, beaten in the three days’ previous fight, stole away down the valleys and behind the mountains on their ignominious retreat,—from that day, signalized also by the fall of Vicksburg in the West, it waned and waned, until it was swept from the earth.
Cemetery Hill should be first visited by the tourist of the battle-ground. Here a view of the entire field, and a clear understanding of the military operations of the three days, are best obtained. Looking north, away on your left lies Seminary Ridge, the scene of the first day’s fight, in which the gallant Reynolds fell, and from which our troops were driven back in confusion through the town by overwhelming numbers in the afternoon. Farther south spread the beautiful woods and vales that swarmed with Rebels on the second and third day, and from which they made such desperate charges upon our lines. On the right as you stand is Culp’s Hill, the scene of Ewell’s furious but futile attempts to flank us there. You are in the focus of a half-circle, from all points of which was poured in upon this now silent hill such an artillery fire as has seldom been concentrated upon one point of an open field in any of the great battles upon this planet. From this spot extend your observations as you please.
Guided by the sturdy old man, I proceeded first to Culp’s Hill, following a line of breastworks into the woods. Here are seen some of the soldiers’ devices, hastily adopted for defence. A rude embankment of stakes and logs and stones, covered with earth, forms the principal work; aside from which you meet with little private breastworks, as it were, consisting of rocks heaped up by the trunk of a tree, or beside a larger rock, or across a cleft in the rocks, where some sharpshooter stood and exercised his skill at his ease.
The woods are of oak chiefly, but with a liberal sprinkling of chestnut, black-walnut, hickory, and other common forest-trees. Very beautiful they were that day, with their great, silent trunks, all so friendly, their clear vistas and sun-spotted spaces. Beneath reposed huge, sleepy ledges and boulders, their broad backs covered with lichens and old moss. A more fitting spot for a picnic, one would say, than for a battle.
Yet here remain more astonishing evidences of fierce fighting than anywhere else about Gettysburg. The trees in certain localities are all scarred, disfigured, and literally dying or dead from their wounds. The marks of balls in some of the trunks are countless. Here are limbs, and yonder are whole tree-tops, cut off by shells. Many of these trees have been hacked for lead, and chips containing bullets have been carried away for relics.
Past the foot of the hill runs Rock Creek, a muddy, sluggish stream, “great for eels,” said John Burns. Big boulders and blocks of stone lie scattered along its bed. Its low shores are covered with thin grass, shaded by the forest-trees. Plenty of Rebel knapsacks and haversacks lie rotting upon the ground; and there are Rebel graves near by in the woods. By these I was inclined to pause longer than John Burns thought it worth the while. I felt a pity for these unhappy men, which he could not understand. To him they were dead Rebels, and nothing more; and he spoke with great disgust of an effort which had been made by certain “Copperheads” of the town to have all the buried Rebels now scattered about in the woods and fields gathered together in a cemetery near that dedicated to our own dead.
“Yet consider, my friend,” I said, “though they were altogether in the wrong, and their cause was infernal, these, too, were brave men; and, under different circumstances, with no better hearts than they had, they might have been lying in honored graves up yonder, instead of being buried in heaps, like dead cattle, down here.”
Is there not a better future for these men also? The time will come when we shall at least cease to hate them.
The cicada was singing, insects were humming in the air, crows were cawing in the tree-tops, the sunshine slept on the boughs or nestled in the beds of brown leaves on the ground,—all so pleasant and so pensive, I could have passed the day there. But John reminded me that night was approaching, and we returned to Gettysburg.
That evening I walked alone to Cemetery Hill, to see the sun set behind the Blue Ridge. A quiet prevailed there still more profound than during the day. The stone-cutters had finished their day’s work and gone home. The katydids were singing, and the shrill, sad chirp of the crickets welcomed the cool shades. The sun went down, and the stars came out and shone upon the graves,—the same stars which were no doubt shining even then upon many a vacant home and mourning heart left lonely by the husbands, the fathers, the dear brothers and sons, who fell at Gettysburg.
The next morning, according to agreement, I went to call on the old hero. I found him living in the upper part of a little whitewashed two-story house, on the corner of two streets west of the town. A flight of wooden steps outside took me to his door. He was there to welcome me. John Burns is a stoutish, slightly bent, hale old man, with a light-blue eye, a long, aggressive nose, a firm-set mouth expressive of determination of character, and a choleric temperament. His hair, originally dark-brown, is considerably bleached with age; and his beard, once sandy, covers his face (shaved once or twice a week) with a fine crop of silver stubble. A short, massy kind of man; about five feet four or five inches in height, I should judge. He was never measured but once in his life. That was when he enlisted in the War of 1812. He was then nineteen years old, and stood five feet in his shoes. “But I’ve growed a heap since,” said John.
At my request he told his story.
On the morning of the first day’s fight he sent his wife away, telling her that he would take care of the house. The firing was near by, over Seminary Ridge. Soon a wounded soldier came into the town and stopped at an old house on the opposite corner. Burns saw the poor fellow lay down his musket, and the inspiration to go into the battle seems then first to have seized him. He went over and demanded the gun.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked the soldier.
“I’m going to shoot some of the damned Rebels!” replied John.
He is not a swearing man, and the strong adjective is to be taken in a strictly literal, not a profane, sense.
Having obtained the gun, he pushed out on the Chambersburg Pike, and was soon in the thick of the skirmish.
“I wore a high-crowned hat and a long-tailed blue; and I was seventy year old.”
The sight of so old a man, in such costume, rushing fearlessly forward to get a shot in the very front of the battle, of course attracted attention. He fought with the Seventh Wisconsin Regiment; the Colonel of which ordered him back, and questioned him, and finally, seeing the old man’s patriotic determination, gave him a good rifle in place of the musket he had brought with him.
“Are you a good shot?”
“Tolerable good,” said John, who is an old fox-hunter.
“Do you see that Rebel riding yonder?”
“I do.”
“Can you fetch him?”
“I can try.”
The old man took deliberate aim and fired. He does not say he killed the Rebel, but simply that his shot was cheered by the Wisconsin boys, and that afterwards the horse the Rebel rode was seen galloping with an empty saddle.
“That’s all I know about it.”
He fought until our forces were driven back in the afternoon. He had already received two slight wounds, and a third one through the arm, to which he paid little attention; “only the blood running down my hand bothered me a heap.” Then, as he was slowly falling back with the rest, he received a final shot through the leg. “Down I went, and the whole Rebel army run over me.” Helpless, nearly bleeding to death from his wounds, he lay upon the field all night. “About sun-up, next morning, I crawled to a neighbor’s house, and found it full of wounded Rebels.” The neighbor afterwards took him to his own house, which had also been turned into a Rebel hospital. A Rebel surgeon dressed his wounds; and he says he received decent treatment at the hands of the enemy, until a Copperhead woman living opposite “told on him.”
“That’s the old man who said he was going out to shoot some of the damned Rebels!”
Some officers came and questioned him, endeavoring to convict him of bushwhacking. But the old man gave them little satisfaction. This was on Friday, the third day of the battle; and he was alone with his wife in the upper part of the house. The Rebels left; and soon after two shots were fired. One bullet entered the window, passed over Burns’s head, and penetrated the wall behind the lounge on which he was lying. The other shot fell lower, passing through a door. Burns is certain that the design was to assassinate him. That the shots were fired by the Rebels there can be no doubt; and as they were fired from their own side, towards the town, of which they held possession at the time, John’s theory seems the true one. The hole in the window, and the bullet-marks in the door and wall, remain.
Burns went with me over the ground where the first day’s fight took place. He showed me the scene of his hot day’s work,—pointed out two trees behind which he and one of the Wisconsin boys stood and “picked off every Rebel that showed his head,” and the spot where he fell and lay all night under the stars and dew.
This act of daring on the part of so aged a citizen, and his subsequent sufferings from wounds, naturally called out a great deal of sympathy, and caused him to be looked upon as a hero. But a hero, like a prophet, has not all honor in his own country. There is a wide-spread, violent prejudice against Burns among that class of the townspeople termed “Copperheads.” The young men especially, who did not take their guns and go into the fight as this old man did, but who ran, when running was possible, in the opposite direction, dislike Burns; some averring that he did not have a gun in his hand that day, but that he was wounded by accident, happening to get between the two lines.
Of his going into the fight and fighting, there is no doubt whatever. Of his bravery, amounting even to rashness, there can be no reasonable question. He is a patriot of the most zealous sort; a hot, impulsive man, who meant what he said when he started with the gun to go and shoot some of the Rebels qualified with the strong adjective. A thoroughly honest man, too, I think; although some of his remarks are to be taken with considerable allowance. His temper causes him to form immoderate opinions and to make strong statements. “He always goes beyant,” said my landlord.
Burns is a sagacious observer of men and things, and makes occasionally such shrewd remarks as this:
“Whenever you see the marks of shells and bullets on a house all covered up, and painted and plastered over, that’s the house of a Rebel sympathizer. But when you see them all preserved and kept in sight, as something to be proud of, that’s the house of a true Union man!”
Well, whatever is said or thought of the old hero, he is what he is, and has satisfaction in that, and not in other people’s opinions; for so it must finally be with all. Character is the one thing valuable. Reputation, which is a mere shadow of the man, what his character is reputed to be, is, in the long run, of infinitely less importance.
I am happy to add that the old man has been awarded a pension.
The next day I mounted a hard-trotting horse and rode to Round Top. On the way I stopped at the historical peach-orchard, known as Sherfy’s, where Sickles’s Corps was repulsed, after a terrific conflict, on Thursday, the second day of the battle. The peaches were green on the trees then; but they were ripe now, and the branches were breaking down with them. One of Mr. Sherfy’s girls—the youngest she told me—was in the orchard. She had in her basket rareripes to sell. They were large and juicy and sweet,—all the redder, no doubt, for the blood of the brave that had drenched the sod. So calm and impassive is Nature, silently turning all things to use. The carcass of a mule, or the godlike shape of a warrior cut down in the hour of glory,—she knows no difference between them, but straightway proceeds to convert both alike into new forms of life and beauty.
Between fields made memorable by hard fighting I rode, eastward, and, entering a pleasant wood, ascended Little Round Top. The eastern slope of this rugged knob is covered with timber. The western side is steep, and wild with rocks and bushes. Near by is the Devil’s Den, a dark cavity in the rocks, interesting henceforth on account of the fight that took place here for the possession of these heights. A photographic view, taken the Sunday morning after the battle, shows eight dead Rebels tumbled headlong, with their guns, among the rocks below the Den.
A little farther on is Round Top itself, a craggy tusk of the rock-jawed earth pushed up there towards the azure. It is covered all over with broken ledges, boulders, and fields of stones. Among these the forest-trees have taken root,—thrifty Nature making the most of things even here. The serene leafy tops of ancient oaks tower aloft in the bluish-golden air. It is a natural fortress, which our boys strengthened still further by throwing up the loose stones into handy breastworks.
Returning, I rode the whole length of the ridge held by our troops, realizing more and more the importance of that extraordinary position. It is like a shoe, of which Round Top represents the heel, and Cemetery Hill the toe. Here all our forces were concentrated on Thursday and Friday, within a space of two miles. Movements from one part to another of this compact field could be made with celerity. Lee’s forces, on the other hand, extended over a circle of seven miles or more around, in a country where all their movements could be watched by us and anticipated.
At a point well forward on the foot of this shoe, Meade had his head-quarters. I tied my horse at the gate, and entered the little square box of a house which enjoys that historical celebrity. It is scarcely more than a hut, having but two little rooms on the ground-floor, and I know not what narrow, low-roofed chambers above. Two small girls, with brown German faces, were paring wormy apples under the porch; and a round-shouldered, bareheaded, and barefooted woman, also with a German face and a strong German accent, was drawing water at the well. I asked her for drink, which she kindly gave me, and invited me into the house.
The little box was whitewashed outside and in, except the floor and ceilings and inside doors, which were neatly scoured. The woman sat down to some mending, and entered freely into conversation. She was a widow, and the mother of six children. The two girls cutting wormy apples at the door were the youngest, and the only ones left to her. A son in the army was expected home in a few days. She did not know how old her children were; she did not know how old she was herself, “she was so forgetful.”
She ran away at the time of the fight, but was sorry afterwards she did not stay at home. “She lost a heap.” The house was robbed of almost everything; “coverlids and sheets, and some of our own clo’es, all carried away. They got about two ton of hay from me. I owed a little on my land yit, and thought I’d put in two lots of wheat that year, and it was all trampled down, and I didn’t git nothing from it. I had seven pieces of meat yit, and them was all took. All I had when I got back was jist a little bit of flour yit. The fences was all tore down, so that there wa’n’t one standing, and the rails was burnt up. One shell come into the house and knocked a bedstead all to pieces for me. One come in under the roof and knocked out a rafter for me. The porch was all knocked down. There was seventeen dead horses on my land. They burnt five of ’em around my best peach-tree, and killed it; so I ha’n’t no peaches this year. They broke down all my young apple-trees for me. The dead horses sp’iled my spring, so I had to have my well dug.”
I inquired if she had ever got anything for the damage.
“Not much. I jist sold the bones of the dead horses. I couldn’t do it till this year, for the meat hadn’t rotted off yit. I got fifty cents a hundred. There was seven hundred and fifty pounds. You can reckon up what they come to. That’s all I got.”
Not much, indeed!
This poor woman’s entire interest in the great battle was, I found, centred in her own losses. What the country lost or gained, she did not know nor care, never having once thought of that side of the question.
The town is full of similar reminiscences; and it is a subject which everybody except the “Copperheads” likes to talk with you about. There were heroic women here, too. On the evening of Wednesday, as our forces were retreating, an exhausted Union soldier came to Mr. Culp’s house, near Culp’s Hill, and said, as he sank down,—
“If I can’t have a drink of water, I must die.”
Mrs. Culp, who had taken refuge in the cellar,—for the house was now between the two fires,—said,—
“I will go to the spring and get you some water.”
It was then nearly dark. As she was returning with the water, a bullet whizzed past her. It was fired by a sharpshooter on our own side, who had mistaken her for one of the advancing Rebels. Greatly frightened, she hurried home, bringing the water safely. One poor soldier was made eternally grateful by this courageous, womanly deed. A few days later the sharpshooter came to the house and learned that it was a ministering angel in the guise of a woman he had shot at. Great, also, must have been his gratitude for the veil of darkness which caused him to miss his aim.
Shortly after the battle, sad tales were told of the cruel inhospitality shown to the wounded Union troops by the people of Gettysburg. Many of these stories were doubtless true; but they were true only of the more brutal of the Rebel sympathizers. The Union men threw open their hearts and their houses to the wounded. One afternoon I met a soldier on Cemetery Hill, who was in the battle; and who, being at Harrisburg for a few days, had taken advantage of an excursion train to come over and revisit the scene of that terrible experience. Getting into conversation, we walked down the hill together. As we were approaching a double house with high wooden steps, he pointed out the farther one, and said,—
“Saturday morning, after the fight, I got a piece of bread at that house. A man stood on the steps and gave each of our fellows a piece. We were hungry as bears, and it was a godsend. I should like to see that man and thank him.”
Just then the man himself appeared at the door. We went over, and I introduced the soldier, who, with tears in his eyes, expressed his gratitude for that act of Christian charity.
“Yes,” said the man, when reminded of the circumstance, “we did what we could. We baked bread here night and day to give to every hungry soldier who wanted it. We sent away our own children, to make room for the wounded soldiers, and for days our house was a hospital.”
Instances of this kind are not few. Let them be remembered to the honor of Gettysburg.
Of the magnitude of a battle fought so desperately during three days, by armies numbering not far from two hundred thousand men, no adequate conception can be formed. One or two facts may help to give a faint idea of it. Mr. Culp’s meadow, below Cemetery Hill,—a lot of near twenty acres,—was so thickly strown with Rebel dead, that Mr. Culp declared he “could have walked across it without putting foot upon the ground.” Upwards of three hundred Confederates were buried in that fair field in one hole. On Mr. Gwynn’s farm, below Round Top, near five hundred sons of the South lie promiscuously heaped in one huge sepulchre. Of the quantities of iron, of the wagon-loads of arms, knapsacks, haversacks, and clothing, which strewed the country, no estimate can be made. Government set a guard over these, and for weeks officials were busy in gathering together all the more valuable spoils. The harvest of bullets was left for the citizens to glean. Many of the poorer people did a thriving business picking up these missiles of death, and selling them to dealers; two of whom alone sent to Baltimore fifty tons of lead collected in this way from the battle-field.
III. A REMINISCENCE OF CHAMBERSBURG
Friday afternoon, August 18th, I left Gettysburg for Chambersburg, by stage, over a rough turnpike, which had been broken to pieces by Lee’s artillery and army wagons two years before, and had not since been repaired.
We traversed a sleepy-looking wheat and corn country,
“Wherein it seemèd always afternoon,”
so little stir was there, so few signs of life and enterprise were visible. Crossing the Blue Ridge, we passed through a more busy land later in the day, and entered the pleasant suburbs of Chambersburg at sunset.
The few scattered residences east of the railroad were soon passed, however, and we came upon scenes which quickly reminded us that we had entered a doomed and desolated place. On every side were the skeletons of houses burned by the Rebels but a little more than a year before. We looked across their roofless and broken walls, and through the sightless windows, at the red sunset sky. They stared at us with their empty eye-sockets, and yawned at us with their fanged and jagged jaws. Dead shade-trees stood solemn in the dusk beside the dead, deserted streets. In places, the work of rebuilding had been vigorously commenced; and the streets were to be traversed only by narrow paths between piles of old brick saved from the ruins, stacks of new brick, beds of mortar, and heaps of sand.
Our driver took us to a new hotel erected on the ruins of an old one. The landlord, eager to talk upon the exciting subject, told me his story while supper was preparing.
“I had jeest bought the hotel that stood where this does, and paid eight thousand dollars for it. I had laid out two thousand dollars fitting it up. All the rooms had been new papered and furnished, and there was three hundred dollars’ worth of carpets in the house not put down yet, when the Rebels they jeest come in and burnt it all up.”
This was spoken with a look and tone which showed what a real and terrible thing the disaster was to this man, far different from the trifle it appears on paper. I found everybody full of talk on this great and absorbing topic. On the night of July 29th, 1864, the Rebel cavalry appeared before the town. Some artillery boys went out with a field-piece to frighten them, and fired a few shots. That kept the raiders at bay till morning; for they had come, not to fight, but to destroy; and it was ticklish advancing in the dark, with the suggestive field-piece flashing at them. The next morning, however, quite early, before the alarmed inhabitants had thought of breakfast, they entered,—the field-piece keeping judiciously out of sight. They had come with General Early’s orders to burn the town, in retaliation for General Hunter’s spoliation of the Shenandoah Valley. That they would commit so great a crime was hardly to be credited; for what Hunter had done towards destroying that granary of the Confederacy had been done as a military necessity, and there was no such excuse for burning Chambersburg. It seemed a folly as well as a crime; for, with our armies occupying the South, and continually acquiring new districts and cities, it was in their power, had they been equally barbarous, to take up and carry on this game of retaliation until the whole South should have become as Sodom.
Chambersburg had suffered from repeated Rebel raids, but it had escaped serious damage, and the people were inclined to jeer at those neighboring towns which had been terrified into paying heavy ransoms to the marauders. But now its time had come. The Confederate leaders demanded of the authorities one hundred thousand dollars in gold, or five hundred thousand dollars in United States currency; promising that if the money was not forthcoming in fifteen minutes, the torch would be applied. I know not whether it was possible to raise so great a sum in so short a time. At all events, it was not raised.
Then suddenly from all parts of the town went up a cry of horror and dismay. The infernal work had begun. The town was fired in a hundred places at once. A house was entered, a can of kerosene emptied on a bed, and in an instant up went a burst of flame. Extensive plundering was done. Citizens were told that if they would give their money their houses would be spared. The money was in many instances promptly given, when their houses were as promptly fired.
Such a wail of women and children, fleeing for life from their flaming houses, has been seldom heard. Down the hardened cheeks of old men who could scarce remember that they had ever wept, the tears ran in streams. In the terrible confusion nothing was saved. In many houses money, which had been carefully put away, was abandoned and burned. The heat of the flames was fearful. Citizens who described those scenes to me considered it miraculous that in the midst of so great terror and excitement, with the town in flames on all sides at once, not a life was lost.
The part of the town east of the railroad is said to have been saved by the presence of mind and greatness of spirit of a heroic lady. As her house was about to be fired, she appealed to a cavalry captain, and, showing him the throngs of weeping and wailing women and children seeking refuge in the cut through which the railroad passes, said to him, with solemn emphasis,—
“In the day of judgment, sir, you will see that sight again; then, sir, you will have this to answer for!”
The captain was touched. “It is contrary to orders,” said he, “but this thing shall be stopped.” And he stationed a guard along the track to prevent further destruction of the city in that direction.
The homeless citizens crowded to a hill and watched from its summit the completion of the diabolical work. The whirlwind of fire and smoke that went roaring up into the calm, blue heavens, soon over-canopied by one vast cloud, was indescribably appalling. Fortunately the day was still, otherwise not a house would have been left standing. As it was, three hundred and forty houses were burned, comprising about two thirds of the entire town.
The raiders were evidently afraid of being caught at the work. The smoke, which could be seen thirty or forty miles away, would doubtless prove a pillar of cloud to guide our cavalry to the spot. Having hastily accomplished their task, therefore, with equal haste they decamped.
Three of their number, however, paid the penalty of the crime on the spot. Two, plundering a cellar, were shot by a redoubtable apothecary,—a choleric but conscientious man, who was much troubled in his mind afterwards for what he had done; for it is an awful thing to take human life even under circumstances the most justifiable. “He was down-hearted all the next day about it,” said one. In the meanwhile the dead marauders were roasted and broiled, and reduced to indistinguishable ashes, in the pyre they had themselves prepared.
A major of the party, who had become intoxicated plundering the liquor-shops, lingered behind his companions. He was surrounded by the incensed populace and ordered to surrender. Refusing, and drawing his sword with maudlin threats, he was shot down. He was then buried to his breast outside of the town, and left with just his shoulders protruding from the ground, with his horrible lolling head drooping over them. Having been exhibited in this state to the multitude, many of whom, no doubt, found some comfort in the sight, he was granted a more thorough sepulture. A few weeks before my visit to the place, a gentle-faced female from the South came to claim his body; for he, too, was a human being, and no mere monster, as many supposed, and there were those that did love him.
The distress and suffering of the burnt-out inhabitants of Chambersburg can never be told. “For six weeks they were jeest kept alive by the provisions sent by other towns, which we dealt out here to every one that asked,” said my landlord. “And I declare to fortune,” he added, “there was scoundrels from the outside that hadn’t lost a thing, that would come in here and share with our starving people.” These scoundrels, he said, were Germans, and he was very severe upon them, although he himself had a German name, and a German accent which three generations of his race in this country had not entirely eradicated.
Besides the charity of the towns, the State granted one hundred thousand dollars for the relief of the sufferers. This was but as a drop to them. Those who had property remaining got nothing. The appropriation was intended for those who had lost everything,—and there were hundreds of such; some of whom had been stopped in the streets and robbed even of their shoes, after their houses had been fired.
“This was jeest how it worked. Some got more than they had before the fire. A boarding-house girl that had lost say eight dollars, would come and say she had lost fifty, and she’d get fifty. But men like me, that happened to have a little property outside, never got a cent.”
It will always remain a matter of astonishment that the great and prosperous State of Pennsylvania did not make a more generous appropriation. The tax necessary for the purpose would scarcely have been felt by any one, while it would have been but a just indemnification to those who had suffered in a cause which the whole loyal North was bound to uphold. Families enjoying a small competency had been at once reduced to poverty; men doing a modest and comfortable business were unable to resume it. Those who could obtain credit before could now obtain none. Insurance was void. Householders were unable to rebuild, and at the time of my visit many were still living in shanties. Nearly all the rebuilding that was in progress was done on borrowed capital.
But there is no loss without gain. Chambersburg will in the end be greatly benefited by the fire, inasmuch as the old two-story buildings, of which the town was originally composed, are being replaced by three-story houses, much finer and more commodious. So let it be with our country; fearful as our loss has been, we shall build better anew.
IV. SOUTH MOUNTAIN
The next day I took the cars for Hagerstown; passed Sunday in that slow and ancient burg; and early on Monday morning set out by stage for Boonsboro’.
Our course lay down the valley of the Antietam. We crossed the stream at Funk’s Town, a little over two miles from Hagerstown. “Stop at two miles and you won’t be here,” said the driver. The morning was fine; the air fresh and inspiring; and the fact that the country through which we passed had been fought over repeatedly during the war, added interest to the ride. A fertile valley: on each side were fields of tall and stalwart corn. Lusty milkweeds stood by the fences; the driver called them “wild cotton.” And here the Jamestown-weed, with its pointed leaves, and flower resembling the bell of a morning-glory, became abundant. “That’s jimson,” said the driver; and he proceeded to extol its medicinal qualities. “Makes a good sa’v’. Rub that over a hoss, and I bet ye no fly lights on him!”
At Boonsboro’ some time was consumed in finding a conveyance and a guide to take me over the battle-fields. At length I encountered Lewy Smith, light and jaunty Lewy Smith, with his light and jaunty covered carryall,—whom I would recommend to travellers. I engaged him for the afternoon of that day and for the day following; and immediately after dinner he was at the tavern-door, snapping his whip.
The traveller’s most pleasant experience of Boonsboro’ is leaving it. The town contains about nine hundred inhabitants; and the wonder is how so many human souls can rest content to live in such a mouldy, lonesome place. But once outside of it, you find Nature as busy in making the world beautiful, as man inside has been in making it as ugly as possible. A country village carries with it the idea of something pleasant, shady, green; therefore do not think of Boonsboro’ as a country village. Leave it behind you as soon as convenient, and turn your face to the mountain.
That is the famed South Mountain, where the prologue to the Antietam fight was enacted. “I never heard it called South Mountain till after the battle,” said Lewy Smith. “It was always the Blue Ridge with us.” He had never heard of Turner’s Gap, or Frog Gap, either. “We always called it just the gap in the mountain.” The road to the gap runs southeast from Boonsboro’, then turns easterly up the hills. It stretched long and pleasant before us. “The night before the battle,” said Lewy Smith, “this road was lined with Rebels, I tell ye! Both sides were covered with them about as thick as they could lie. It was a great sight to see so many soldiers; and it didn’t seem to us there were men enough in the Union army to fight them. We thought the Rebels had got possession of Maryland, sure. They just went into our stores and took what they pleased, and paid in Confederate money; they had come to stay, they said, and their money would be better than ours in a little while. Some who got plenty of it did well; for when the Rebels slaughtered a drove of cattle, they would sell the hides and take their own currency for pay.”
The mountain rose before us, leopard-colored, spotted with sun and cloud. A few mean log houses were scattered along the road, near the summit of which we came to the Mountain House, a place of summer resort. Here again man had done his best to defeat the aim of Nature; the house and everything about it looked dreary and forbidding, while all around lay the beautiful mountain in its wild forest-shades.
Lewy left his horse at the stable, and we entered the woods, pursuing a mountain-road which runs south along the crest. A tramp of twenty minutes brought us to the scene of General Reno’s brilliant achievement and heroic death. A rude stone set up in the field, near a spreading chestnut, marks the spot where he fell. A few rods north of this, running east and west, is the mountain-road, with a stone wall on each side of it, where the Rebels fought furiously, until driven out from their defences by our boys coming up through the woods. The few wayside trees are riddled with bullets. A little higher up the crest is a log house, and a well in which fifty-seven dead Rebels are buried. “The owner of the house was offered a dollar a head for burying them. The easiest way he could do was to pitch them into the well. But he don’t like to own up to having done it now.”
It was a sunny, breezy field. “Up yer’s a heap of air sturrin’,” said a mountaineer, whom we met coming up the road. We sat down and talked with him by the stone wall; and he told us of his tribulations and mishaps on the day of the battle, attempting to fly south over the mountain with his family; overloading his wagon, and breaking down just as the shells began to explode around him; doing everything “wrong-eend fust, he was so skeered.”
We pushed along through the woods to the eastern brow of the crest, in order to obtain a general view of the field. Emerging from among the trees, a superb scene opened before us,—Catoctin Valley, like a poem in blue and gold, with its patches of hazy woods, sunlit misty fields, and the Catoctin Mountains rolling up ethereal beyond.
The bridge across Catoctin Creek, half a mile west of Middletown, where the fighting began on that memorable Sunday, September 14th, 1862, could be seen half hidden and far away below. There our troops came up with the rear-guard of the invading army. Driven back from the Creek, the Rebels massed their forces and formed their line of battle, two miles in extent, on this mountain-side, in positions of formidable strength. Standing on the brow of the commanding crest, you would say that ten thousand men, rightly posted, might here check the advance of ten times their number, hold the gap on the left there, and prevent the steep mountain-sides from being scaled.
In a barren pasture above the slope climbed by Reno’s men in face of the Rebel fire, we came upon a little row of graves under some locust-trees. I took note of a few names lettered on the humble head-boards. “John Dunn;” “T. G. Dixon, Co. C, 23d Regt. O. V. I.;” several more were of the 23d Ohio,—the impetuous regiment that had that day its famous hand-to-hand conflict with the 23d South Carolina, in which each man fought as though the honor of the nation depended upon his individual arm. Here lay the victorious fallen. A few had been removed from their rude graves. The head-boards of others had been knocked down by cows. We set them up again, and left the field to the pensive sound of the cow-bells and the teasing song of the locust.
Walking back to the road through the gap, and surveying the crests flanking and commanding it, which were held by the Rebels, but carried with irresistible impetuosity by the men of Burnside’s and Hooker’s corps, one is still more astonished by the successful issue of that terrible day’s work. All along these heights rebel and loyal dead lie buried in graves scarcely distinguishable from each other. Long after the battle, explorers of the woods were accustomed to find, in hollows and behind logs, the remains of some poor fellow, generally a Rebel, who, wounded in the fight, or on the retreat, had dragged himself to such shelter as he could find, and died there, alone, uncared for, in the gloomy and silent wilderness.
Crampton’s Gap, six miles farther south, stormed and carried that same Sabbath day by the men of Franklin’s corps, I did not visit. The sun was setting as we turned our faces westward; and all the way down the mountain we had the Antietam valley before us, darkening and darkening under a sky full of the softest twilight tints and tranquillity.
V. THE FIELD OF ANTIETAM
At seven o’clock the next morning, light and jaunty Lewy Smith was snapping his whip again at the tavern-door; and I was soon riding out of the village by his side.
Our course lay along the line of the Rebel retreat and of the advance of the right wing of our army. A pleasant road, under the edge of woods still wet with recent rain, brought us to Keedysville, a little cluster of brick and log houses, all of which, Lewy told me, were turned into hospitals after the great battle. At the farther end of the town is a brick church. “That was a hospital too. Many an arm, a leg, a hand, was left there by our boys. There’s a pit behind the church, five feet long, five feet deep, and two feet wide, just full of legs and arms.”
We rode on until we obtained a view of the pleasant hill-sides where Porter lay with his reserves, while the other army-corps did the fighting, on the day of Antietam; then turned to the right down a little stream, and past a dam, the waters of which glided still and shadowy under fringed banks; and soon came in sight of the fields where the great fight began. There they lay, over the farther bank of the Antietam, some green, some ploughed, the latter turning up yellow as ripe grain in the morning light.
“We used to could drive all over this country where we pleased. The fences were laid down, and it was all trampled and cut up with the wagons, and soldiers, and artillery.” But the fences had been replaced, and now Lewy was obliged to keep the open road.
At a turn we came to a farm-house, near which were a number of dilapidated barns and other outbuildings, and some old straw stacks. “It was a sight to behold, passing yer after the battle!” said Lewy Smith, shaking his head sadly at the reminiscence. “All in and around these yer buildings, all around the hay-stacks, and under the fences, it was just nothing but groaning, wounded men!”
Crossing the yellow-flowing Antietam, we turned up the right bank, with its wooded shores on our right, and on our left a large cornfield containing not less than forty or fifty acres. “There was right smart o’ corn all through yer time of the battle. Good for the armies, but not for the farmers. Come to a cornfield like this, they just turned their horses and cattle right into it, and let ’em eat.” You fortunate farmers of the North and West, so proud and so careful of your well-tilled fields never yet broken into in this ruinous fashion, have you fully realized what war is?
Leaving the course of the creek, and crossing the fields where the fighting on our extreme right began, we reached a still and shady grove, beside which, fenced in from a field, was a little oblong burying-ground of something like half an acre. In the centre was a plain wooden monument constructed of boards painted white; the pedestal bearing this inscription:—
“Let no man desecrate this burial-place of our dead;”
And the side of the shaft, towards the fence, these words:
“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
This was the hospital cemetery. The graves were close together in little rows running across the narrow field. They were all overgrown with grass and weeds. Each was marked by a small rounded head-board, painted white, and bearing the name of the soldier sleeping below. Here is one out of the number:—
As I wrote down this name, the hens in the farm-yard near by were cackling jubilantly. The clouds broke also; a shaft of sunlight fell upon the glistening foliage of the grove, and slanted down through its beautiful vistas. I looked up from the sad rows of patriot graves, and saw the earth around me, all around and above the silent mouldering bodies of the slain, smiling sweetly through her misty veil. For Nature will not mourn. Nature, serene, majestic, full of faith, makes haste to cover the wounds in the Earth’s fair bosom, and to smile upon them. The graves in our hearts also, which we deemed forever desolate, she clothes with the tender verdure of reviving hope before we are aware, and gilds them with the sunshine of a new love and joy. Blessed be our provident mother for this sweet law, but for which the homes in the land, bereft by these countless deaths in hospitals and on bloody fields, would lie draped in endless mourning.
Near the monument, in the midst of the level burying-place, grew a loftily nodding poke-weed, the monarch of his tribe. It was more like a tree than a weed. With its roots down among the graves, and its hundred hands stretched on high, it stood like another monument, holding up to heaven, for a sign, its berries of dark blood.
Pursuing a road along the ridge in a southwesterly direction, Lewy at length reined up his horse in another peaceful little grove. Without a word he pointed to the rotting knapsacks and haversacks on the ground, and to the scarred trees. I knew the spot; it was the boundary of the bloody “cornfield.” We had approached from the side on which our boys advanced to that frightful conflict, driving the Rebels before them, and being driven back in turn, in horrible seesaw, until superior Northern pluck and endurance finally prevailed.
In a field beside the grove we saw a man ploughing, with three horses abreast, and a young lad for escort. We noticed loose head-boards, overturned by the plough, on the edge of the grove, and lying half imbedded in the furrows. This man was ploughing over graves!
Adjoining the field was the historic cornfield. I walked to the edge of it, and waited there for the man to turn his long slow furrow down that way. I sat upon the fence, near which was a trench filled with unnumbered Rebel dead.
“A power of ’em in this yer field!” said the ploughman, coming up and looking over as I questioned him. “A heap of Union soldiers too, layin’ all about yer. I always skip a Union grave when I know it, but sometimes I don’t see ’em, and I plough ’em up. Eight or ten thousand lays on this farm, Rebels and Union together.”
Finding him honest and communicative, I wished him to go over the ground with me.
“I would willingly, stranger, but I must keep the team go’n’.”
I suggested that the boy was big enough to do that.
“Wal, he kin. Plough round onct,”—to the boy,—“or let ’em blow, tain’t go’n’ to hurt ’em none.”
So he concluded to accompany me. We got over into the “cornfield,” late a hog-pasture, and presently stopped at a heap of whitening bones.
“What’s this?” I said.
“This yer was a grave. The hogs have rooted it up. I tol’ the ol’ man he oughtn’t to turn the hogs in yer, but he said he’d no other place to put ’em, and he had to do it.”
I picked up a skull lying loose on the ground like a cobblestone. It was that of a young man; the teeth were all splendid and sound. How hideously they grinned at me! and the eye-sockets were filled with dirt. He was a tall man too, if that long thigh-bone was his.
Torn rags strewed the ground. The old ploughman picked up a fragment.
“This yer was a Union soldier. You may know by the blue cloth. But then that ain’t always a sign, for the Rebels got into our uniform when they had a chance, and got killed in it too.”
I turned the skull in my hand, half regretting that I could not carry it away with me. My first shuddering aversion to the grim relic was soon past. I felt a strange curiosity to know who had been its hapless owner, carrying it safely through twenty or more years of life to lose it here. Perhaps he was even then looking over my shoulder and smiling at it; no longer a perishable mortal, but a spirit imperishable, having no more use for such clumsy physical mechanism. The fancy came so suddenly, and was for an instant so vivid, that I looked up, half expecting that my eyes would meet the mild benignant eyes of the soldier. And these words came into my mind: “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.”
Let him who has never thought seriously of life look at it through the vacant eye-sockets of a human skull. Then let him consider that he himself carries just such a thing around with him, useful here a little while, then to be cast aside.
“Every face, however full, Padded round with flesh and fat, Is but modelled on a skull.”
Take the lesson to heart, O Vanity! It is but a little time, at the longest, that the immortal soul thou art will animate this bone; but the hour comes quickly when to have been a good soldier of the truth on any field, whether resounding with arms, or silent with the calm strong struggle of love and patience, and to have given thy life to the cause, will be sweeter to thee than the fatness of the earth and length of days. No, heroic soldier! you I do not pity, though your mortal part lies here neglected and at the mercy of swine.
The cornfield, and another field from which it was separated by a fence at the time of the battle, are now thrown together, forming a lot of about fifty acres. The upper part was dotted with little dry brown cocks of seed-clover. No hogs were on it at the time; they had been turned out, to save the clover-seed, I presume, for that was of some consequence.
We found plenty more bones and skulls of Union soldiers rooted up and exposed, as we ascended the ridge. Beside some lay their head-boards. I noted the names of a few: “Sergt. Mahaffey, Co. C, 9th Regt. P. R. C.,” for one.
“The Rebs had all the fence down ’cept a strip by the pike,” said the ploughman. “That was jist like a sifter. Some of the rails have been cut up and carried away for the bullet-holes.”
He showed me marks still remaining on the fence. Some of our soldiers had cut their names upon it; and on one post some pious Roman Catholic had carved the sacred initials:—
“I. H. S.”
“I reckon that was a soldier’s name too,” said my honest ploughman. And so indeed it was,—Jesus Hominum Salvator.
Beyond the pike, between it and the woods, was a narrow belt of newly ploughed ground.
“You see them green spots over yon’ covered with weeds? Them are graves that I skipped.” In the edge of the woods beyond lay two unexploded shells which relic-hunters had not yet picked up.
Whilst I was exploring the fields with my good-natured ploughman, Lewy Smith brought his horse around by the roads. He was waiting for me on the pike. “The last time I drove by yer,” he said, “there was a nigger ploughing in that field, and every time he came to a grave he would just reach over his plough, jerk up the head-board, and stick it down behind him again as he ploughed along; and all the time he never stopped whistling his tune.”
We drove on to the Dunker church, sometimes called “the Schoolhouse,”—a square, plain, whitewashed, one-story brick building, without steeple, situated in the edge of the woods. No one, from its appearance, would take it to be a church; and I find that soldiers who fought here still speak of it as “the Schoolhouse.”
“The Dunkers are a sect of plain people,” said one of the old Dutch settlers. “They don’t believe in any wanities. They don’t believe in war and fighting.”
But their church had got pretty seriously into the fight on that occasion. “It was well smashed to pieces; all made like a riddle; you could just look in and out where you pleased,” said Lewy Smith. It had been patched up with brick and whitewash, however, and the plain people, who “did not believe in wanities,” once more held their quiet meetings there. I thought much of them as we rode on. A serious, unshaven thrifty class of citizens, they know well how to get a living, and they bear an excellent reputation for honest industry throughout the country. Their chief fault seems to be that they persist in killing one of man’s divinest faculties,—as if the sweet and refining sense of beauty would have been given us but for a beneficent purpose. At the same time they do believe sincerely in solid worldly goods,—as if they too were not, after all, quite as much one of the “wanities”! Think of it, my solemn long-bearded friend; you buy land, lay out your dollar in perishable dust, or you expend it in the cultivation of those gifts and graces which, if heaven is what I take it to be, you will find use for when you get there. Now which do you suppose will prove the better investment? All of religion does not consist in psalm-singing and sedate behavior. But I do wrong to criticise so worthy and unoffending a sect of Christians, who are no doubt nearer the kingdom than the most we call such; and I merely set out to say this: while we are in the world, all its interests, all its great struggles, concern us. We cannot sit indifferent. Non-intervention is unknown to the awakened soul. Help the good cause we must, and resist the evil; if we cannot fight, we can pray; and to think of keeping out of the conflict that is raging around us is the vainest thing of all, as yonder well-riddled plain people’s church amply testifies.
As it was beginning to rain, Lewy Smith carried me on to Sharpsburg, and there left me. A more lonesome place even than Boonsboro’; the battle alone renders it in the least interesting; a tossed and broken sort of place, that looks as if the solid ground-swell of the earth had moved on and jostled it since the foundations were laid. As you go up and down the hilly streets, the pavements, composed of fragments of limestone slabs, thrust up such abrupt fangs and angles at you, that it is necessary to tread with exceeding caution. As Sharpsburg was in the thick of the fight, the battle-scars it still carries add to its dilapidated appearance. On the side of the town fronting the Federal line of battle, every house bears its marks; and indeed I do not know that any altogether escaped. Many were well peppered with bullets, shot and shell. The thousand inhabitants of the place had mostly fled to the river, where they would have been in a sad plight if McClellan had followed up the Rebels on their defeat, and done his duty by them. Imagine a bent bow, with the string drawn. The bow is the river, and the string is the Confederate line after the battle. At the angle of the string is Sharpsburg; and between the string and the bow were the fugitives. Fortunately for them, as for the enemy, McClellan did not do his duty.
After dinner I started to walk to the bridge, known henceforth and for all time as “Burnside’s Bridge,” just as the road his corps cut for itself through the forests over the mountain, on his way hither from the Sunday fight, is known to everybody as “Burnside’s Road.”
A shower coming up by the way, I sought shelter under the porch of a stone house, situated on a rising bank near the edge of the town. I had scarcely mounted the steps when a woman appeared, and with cordial hospitality urged me to enter the sitting-room. Although the porch was the pleasanter place,—overlooking the hills and mountains on the east, and affording a comfortable wooden bench, where I had thought to sit and enjoy the rain,—I accepted her invitation, having found by experience that every dweller on a battle-field has something interesting to tell.
She and her neighbors fled from their homes on Tuesday before the battle, and did not return until Friday. She, like nearly every person I talked with who had acted a similar part, was sorry she did not remain in the cellar of the house.
“When we came back, all I could do was jist to set right down and cry.” The house had been plundered, their provisions, and the household comforts they had been slowly getting together for years, had been swept away by the all-devouring armies. “Them that stayed at home did not lose anything; but if the soldiers found a house deserted, that they robbed.”
I inquired which plundered the most, our men or the Rebels.
“That I can’t say, stranger. The Rebels took; but the Yankees took right smart. We left the house full, and when we got home we hadn’t a thing to eat. Some wounded men had been fetched in, and they had got all the bedding that was left, and all our clothing had been torn up for bandages. It was a right hard time, stranger!”—spoken earnestly and with tears. “I haven’t got well over it yet. It killed my old father; he overworked getting the fences up again, and it wore on him so he died within a year. We are jist getting things a little to rights again now, but the place a’n’t what it was, and never will be again, in my day.”
She showed me, in an adjoining room, a looking-glass hanging within an inch or two of a large patched space in the wall.
“That glass was hanging on that nail, jist as it hangs now, when a shell come in yer and smashed a bedstead to pieces for me on that side of the room, and the glass wasn’t so much as moved.”
Suspecting that I might be keeping her from her work, I urged her to return to it, and found she had indeed quitted some important household task, because “it didn’t seem right to leave a stranger sitting alone.” I arose at once, on making that discovery, telling her I would rest under the porch until the rain was over. She appeared for a moment quite distressed, fearing lest the subtle law of politeness should somehow suffer from her neglect. This woman’s sense of hospitality was very strong, her whole manner carrying with it an earnest desire to make me comfortable and keep me entertained while in her house. Although troubled about her kitchen affairs, she seemed far more anxious about her duty to me,—as if the accident of my being stopped by the rain at her gate had placed her under sacred obligations. At last she thought of a happy solution of the difficulty.
“I’ll get some pears and treat ye!” I begged her not to take that trouble for me; but she insisted, repeating with pleased eagerness, “Yes, I’ll get some pears and treat ye!”
She brought a dish of fruit, and afterwards sent two little girls, her nieces, to keep me company while I ate. They were pretty, intelligent, well-dressed misses of ten and twelve; the eldest of whom opened the conversation by saying,—
“Right smart o’ fruit cher.” A phrase which I suspect every stranger might not have understood, notwithstanding her prettily persuasive smile. South of the Maryland and Pennsylvania line, and indeed in the southern counties of Pennsylvania, one ceases to hear of a plenty or a good deal; it is always a “heap,” or “right smart.” The word here, along the borders, is pronounced in various ways: here, rarely; yer, commonly; hyer, which is simply yer with an aspirate before it; jer, when the preceding word ends with the sound of d, and cher after a final t. “Rough road jer,” is the southern for “Rough road here”; “out cher,” means, similarly, “out here”; the final d and t blending with the y of yer, and forming j and ch, just as we hear “would jew” for “would you,” and “can’t chew” for “can’t you,” everywhere.
The little girls played their hospitable part very charmingly, and I was sorry to leave them; but the rain ceasing, I felt obliged to walk on. They took me to their aunt, whom I wished to thank for her kindness. Finding that I had not filled my pockets with the pears, as she had invited me to do, she brought some grapes and gave me. I bore the purple bunches in my hand, and ate them as I walked away from the house. They were sweet as the remembered grace of hospitality.
The bridge was a mile farther on. The road strikes the creek, and runs several rods along the right bank before crossing it. If the tourist is surprised at the strength of the positions on South Mountain, from which the Rebels were dislodged, he will be no less amazed at the contemplation of Burnside’s achievement here. Above the road as it approaches the bridge, and above the creek below the bridge, rises a high steep bank, like a bluff. To approach from the opposite side, exposed to a concentrated infantry and artillery fire flashing all along this crest,—to carry the bridge, and drive back the enemy from their vantage-ground,—one would say was a feat for the heroes of the age of fable. But the truth is, though men are slow to receive it, there never was any age, called “of fable,” or another, better than this,—none that ever produced a more heroic race of men. We have worshipped the past long enough; it is time now to look a little into the merits of the present. Troy, and Greece, and Rome were admirable in their day, and the men of Israel did some doughty deeds; but the men of New England, of the great Middle States, and of the vast North-West, what have they done? The Homeric heroes and demigods are in no way superior, except in brag, to the hilarious lads of Illinois, or the more serious boys of Massachusetts. Of materials such as these the poet would have made a more resounding Iliad.
That Burnside’s command could ever have crossed this bridge, from the high banks on the other side to the steep banks on this, in the face of superior numbers pouring their deadly volleys upon them, that is what astonishes you; and what grieves you is this: that reinforcements were not sent to enable him to hold what he gained. If Porter, who had the reserves, had been a man of right courage and patriotism, or anything but a pet of the commanding general, he would have gone into the fight when needed,—for reserves were not invented merely to be kept nice and choice,—and the results of that day would have been very different.
I spent some hours about the bridge, the Antietam Creek singing all the while its liquid accompaniment to my thoughts. It sang the same song that day, but its peaceful music was drowned by the roar and clash of the conflict. I sat down on a rock and watched a flock of buzzards perched on the limbs of a dead tree, looking melancholy,—resembling, to my mind, greedy camp-followers and army speculators, who remembered with pensive regret the spoils of the good old war-days.
The bridge is narrow, affording space for only one vehicle at a time. It is built of stone, and rests on two solid butments and two rounded piers. There are woods on both sides of the stream. On the left bank they stand a little back from it; on the right, they cover the side of the bluff below the bridge. The trees all along here were well scarred with shot. Half a mile below the bridge the creek makes a bold turn to the right, and doubles back upon itself, forming a loop, then sweeps away to the south, between a wooded hill on the west and a magnificent growth of willows massing their delicate green and drooping foliage along the low opposite shore.
Returning to the village, I visited the spot chosen as a national cemetery for the slain. The ground had been purchased, but work upon it had not yet commenced. As Pennsylvania gave the soil for the Gettysburg Cemetery, so Maryland gives the soil for this; while each State will defray its portion of future expenses. In the Antietam cemetery it is understood that the Rebel dead are to be included. Many object to this; but I do not. Skeletons, rooted up by hogs, and blanching in the open fields, are a sight not becoming a country that calls itself Christian. Be they the bones of Patriots or Rebels, let them be carefully gathered up and decently interred without delay.
The Antietam National Burying-Ground also adjoins an old town cemetery. It is situated on the right hand, at the summit of the road, as you go up out of Sharpsburg towards Boonsboro’. Here let them rest together, they of the good cause, and they of the evil; I shall be content. For neither was the one cause altogether good, nor was the other altogether bad: the holier being clouded by much ignorance and selfishness, and the darker one brightened here and there with glorious flashes of self-devotion. It was not, rightly speaking, these brothers that were at war. The conflict was waged between two great principles,—one looking towards liberty and human advancement, the other madly drawing the world back to barbarism and the dark ages. America was the chessboard on which the stupendous game was played, and those we name Patriots and Rebels were but as the pawns.
Great was the day of Antietam. Three thousand of the enemy were buried on the field. We had two thousand killed, upwards of nine thousand four hundred wounded, and more than a thousand missing. Between the sweet dawn and the bloody dusk of that dread day there fell TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND MEN! Can the imagination conceive of such slaughter?
And, after all, the striking fact about Antietam is this,—that it was a great opportunity lost. The premature surrender of Harper’s Ferry, which set free the force besieging it, and enabled the enemy to outnumber us on the field,—for Stonewall Jackson was as anxious to get into the fight as Fitz John Porter was to keep out of it,—and the subsequent inertia of the General commanding the United States forces; these two causes combined to save the Confederate army from annihilation. No such opportunity for crushing the Rebellion at a blow had been offered, nor was any such again offered,—not even at Gettysburg, for the enemy there had no coiling river in their rear to entangle them, and we had no fresh troops to launch upon them,—nor at any period afterwards, until Grant consummated that long-desired object; God’s good time having not yet come.
VI. DOWN THE RIVER TO HARPER’S FERRY
Sharpsburg is not a promising place to spend the night in, and I determined to leave it that evening. In search of a private conveyance, I entered a confectioner’s shop, and asked a young lady behind the counter if she knew any person who would take me to Harper’s Ferry.
“Yes; Mr. Bennerhalls,” she replied; “I reckon ye can get him.”
She gave me particular directions for finding his house, and I went up one of the broken pavements “fanged with murderous stones,” in search of him. To my surprise I was told that Mr. Bennerhalls did not live on that street; further, that no person of that name was known in Sharpsburg. I returned to the confectioner’s shop.
“You said Mr. Bennerhalls?”
“Yes, sir; Mr. Bennerhalls, and Mr. Cramerhalls, and Mr. Joneshalls; I should think you might get one of them.”
I fancy the young lady must have seen a smile on my countenance just then. Bennerhalls, Cramerhalls, Joneshalls,—what outlandish cognomens were these? Did half the family names in Sharpsburg rejoice in the termination halls?
“I know Mr. Joneshalls,” said the young lady, as I stood solving the doubt, probably with an amused expression which she mistook for sarcastic incredulity.
“Joneshalls” I had never heard of. But I had heard of Jones. Thanks to that somewhat familiar name, I had found a clue to the mystery. “Jones hauls,” thought I, that is to say, Jones hauls people over the road in his wagon.
And the first-mentioned individual was not Bennerhalls at all, but one Benner who hauled.
I thanked the young lady for her courtesy,—and I am sure she must have thought me a very pleasant man,—and went to find Mr. Benner without the halls.
No difficulty this time. He was sitting on a doorstep, where he had perhaps heard me before inquiring up and down for Mr. Bennerhalls, and scratched his head over the odd patronymic.
“Yes, I have hosses, and I haul sometimes, but I can’t put one on ’em over that road to Harper’s Ferry, stranger, nohow!”
I got no more satisfaction out of Cramer, and still less out of Jones, who informed me that not only he would not go, but he didn’t believe there was a man in Sharpsburg that would.
I returned to the tavern, and appealed to the landlord, a pleasant and very obliging man, although not so well versed as some in the art of keeping a hotel. To my surprise, after what Jones had told me, he said, “if I could find no one else to haul me, he would.”
At five P. M. we left Sharpsburg in an open buggy under a sky that threatened rain. Black clouds and thunder-gusts were all around us. The mountains were wonderful to behold the nearer slopes lying in shadow, sombre almost to blackness, while beyond, rendered all the more glorious by that contrast, rose the loveliest sun-smitten summits, basking in the peace of paradise. Beyond these still were black-capped peaks, about which played uncertain waves of light, belts and bars of softest indescribable colors, perpetually shifting, brightening, and vanishing in mist. It was like a momentary glimpse of heaven through the stormy portals of the world. Then down came the deluging rack and enveloped all.
Through occasional spatters of rain, angrily spitting squalls, we whipped on. It was a fleet horse my friend drove. He was pleased to hear me praise him.
“That’s a North-Carolina horse. I brought him home with me.”
“You have been in the army then?”
And out came the interesting fact that I was riding with Captain Speaker of the First Maryland Cavalry, a man who had seen service, and had things to tell.
Everybody remembers, in connection with the shameful surrender of Harper’s Ferry just before the battle of Antietam, the brilliant episode of twenty-two hundred Federal cavalry cutting their way out, and capturing a part of one of Longstreet’s trains on their escape. Captain Speaker was the leader of that expedition.
“I was second lieutenant of the First Maryland Cavalry at the time. I knew Colonel Davis very well; and when I heard Harper’s Ferry was to be surrendered, I remarked to him that I would not be surrendered with it alive. He asked what I would do. ‘Cut my way out,’ said I. When he asked what I meant, I told him I believed I could not only get out myself, but that I could pilot out with safety any number of cavalry that would take the same risk and go with me. I had lived in the country all my life, and knew every part of it. Colonel Davis saw that I was in earnest, and knew what I was talking about. The idea just suited him, and he applied to Colonel Miles for permission to put it into execution. Colonel Miles was not a man to think much of such projects, and he was inclined to laugh at it. ‘Who is this Lieutenant Speaker,’ said he, ‘who is so courageous?’ Colonel Davis said he knew me, and had confidence in my plan. ‘It’s all talk,’ said Miles; ‘put him to the test, and he’ll back down.’
“Just try him,” said Davis.
“So Miles wrote on a piece of paper,—
“Lieutenant Speaker, will you take charge of a cavalry force and lead it through the enemy’s lines?”
“I just wrote under it, on the same piece of paper, ‘Yes, with pleasure;’ signed my name, and sent it back to him.”
At ten o’clock the same night they started. It was Sunday, the 14th of September, the day of the battle of South Mountain. The party consisted of twenty-two hundred cavalry and a number of mounted civilians who took advantage of the expedition to escape from the town before it was surrendered. Lieutenant Speaker and Colonel Davis rode side by side at the head of the column. They crossed on the pontoon bridge, which formed the military connection between Harper’s Ferry and Maryland Heights, and turned up the road which runs between the canal and the Heights, riding at full charge along the left bank of the Potomac. It was a wild road; the night was dark; only the camp-fires on the mountain were visible; and there was no sound but the swift clatter of thousands of galloping hoofs, and the solitary rush of the Potomac waters.
Near a church, four miles from the Ferry, Speaker and Davis, who were riding ahead of the party, were challenged by the Rebel pickets.
“Who goes there?”
“Friends to the guard.”
“What command?”
“Second Virginia Cavalry,” said Colonel Davis,—which was true, the Second Virginia Union Cavalry being of the party, while the Second Virginia Rebel Cavalry was also in the vicinity. “Who are you?”
“Louisiana Tigers.”
“All right. We are out scouting.”
“All right,” said the pickets.
The leaders rode back, formed their party at a short distance, gave the word, and charged. They went through the Rebel line like an express-train. A few shots were fired at them by the astonished pickets, but they got through almost without loss. Three horses were killed and three men dismounted, but the latter escaped up the mountain side, and afterwards made their way safely into the Union lines.
They galloped on to Sharpsburg, keeping the same road all the way by which Captain Speaker was now conveying me to the Ferry. The enemy held Sharpsburg. Fortunately in every street and by-road Speaker was at home; He called up a well-known Union citizen, from whom he obtained important information. “The Rebels are in strong force on the Hagerstown Road. They have heavy batteries, too, posted on the Williamsport Pike.” There was then but one thing to do. “Down with the fences and take to the fields,” said the pilot of the party.
This they accordingly did;—tramp, tramp, in the darkness, by cross-roads and through fields and woods.
“We struck the pike between Hagerstown and Williamsport about two o’clock. We came to a halt pretty quick, though, for there was a Rebel wagon-train several miles in length, passing along the pike. There were no fences; and the woods were clear and beautiful for our purpose. Our line was formed along by the pike, extending some three-quarters of a mile. Then we charged. The first the guards and drivers knew, there were sabres at their heads; and all they had to do was to turn their wagons right about and go with us. We captured over seventy wagons, all the rear of the train. They had to travel a little faster in the other direction than they had been going, so that some of the wagons broke down by the way; but the rest we got safely off.”
It was just daylight when they arrived at Greencastle and turned the wagons over to the Federal quartermaster there. “Then you should have seen each fellow tumble himself off his horse! Remember, we had been fighting at the Ferry, and this was the third night we had had no sleep. Each man just took a turn of the bridle around his wrist, and dropped down on the pavement in the street, anywhere, and in three minutes was fast asleep.
“Colonel Davis and I found a cellar-door, softer than stones, to lie on, and there we dropped. I was asleep as soon as my head struck the board. But it couldn’t have been five minutes before I was woke up by somebody pulling the bridle from my wrist.
“’What do you want?’
“’Want your horse; want you; want to give you some breakfast.’
“I got my eyes open; it was broad day then; and it was a beautiful sight! Everybody in Greencastle was crowding to see the cavalry fellows that had cut their way through the Rebel lines. The Colonel and I were surrounded with ladies bringing us breakfast. I tell you, it was beautiful!” And the Captain’s eyes glistened at the remembrance.
“We were hungry enough! But I said, ‘Just give my horse here something to eat first; then I’ll eat.’ ‘Certainly.’ And they were going to take him away from me, to some stable. ‘Never mind about that,’ said I. ‘Just bring your oats and empty them down here anywhere; he’s used to eating off the ground.’ The oats were not slow coming; and Colonel Davis and I and our horses had breakfast together, with the ladies looking on. I tell you, it was beautiful!”
It is eleven miles from Sharpsburg to Harper’s Ferry. After striking the Potomac, we continued on down its left bank, with the canal between us and the river on one side, and Maryland Heights, rising even more and more rugged and abrupt, on the other; until, as we approached the bridge at the Ferry, we looked up through the stormy dusk at mountain crags rising precipitous several hundred feet above our heads. Crossing the new iron bridge, near the ruins of the old one destroyed by the Rebels, Captain Speaker landed me near the end of it on the Virginia side.
“Where is the hotel?” I asked, looking round with some dismay at the dismal prospect.
“That is it, the only hotel at Harper’s Ferry now,”—showing me a new, unpainted, four-story wooden building, which looked more like soldiers’ barracks than a hotel. There was not a window-blind or shutter to be seen. The main entrance from the street was through a bar-room where merry men were clicking glasses, and sucking dark-colored stuff through straws. And this was a “first-class hotel kept on the European plan.” I mention it as one of the results of war,—as an illustration of the mushroom style of building which springs up in the track of desolation, to fill temporarily the place of the old that has been swept away and of the better growth to come.
One thing, however, consoled me. The hotel stood on the banks of the Potomac, and I thought if I could get a room overlooking the river and commanding a view of the crags opposite, all would be well; for often the mere sight of a mountain and a stream proves a solace for saddest things.
After supper a “room” was shown me, which turned out to be a mere bin to stow guests in. There was no paper on the walls, no carpet on the rough board floor, and not so much as a nail to hang a hat on. The bed was furnished with sheets which came down just below a man’s knees, and a mattress which had the appearance of being stuffed with shingles. Finding it impossible, by dint of shouting and pounding, (for there was no bell,) or even by visiting the office, to bring a servant to my assistance, I went on a marauding expedition through the unoccupied rooms, and carried off a chair, a dressing-table, and another bed entire. This I placed on my mattress, hoping thereby to improve the feeling of it,—a fruitless experiment, however: it was only adding a few more shingles. Luckily I had a shawl with me. Never,—let me caution thee, O fellow-traveller,—never set out on a long journey without a good stout shawl. Such an appendage answers many purposes: a garment on a raw and gusty day, a blanket by night, a cushion for the seat, a pillow for the head,—to these and many like comfortable uses it is speedily applied by its grateful possessor. Mine helped to soften the asperities of my bed that night, and the next day served as a window-curtain.
Yet no devices availed to render the Shenandoah House a place favorable to sleep. On the river-side, close by the door, ran the track of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. How often during the night the trains passed I cannot now compute; each approaching and departing with clatter and clang, and shouts of men and bell-ringing and sudden glares of light, and the voice of the steam-whistle projecting its shrill shriek into the ear of horrified night, and setting the giant mountains to tossing and retossing the echo like a ball.
The next morning I was up at dawn refreshing my eyesight with the natural beauties of the place. It was hard to believe that those beauties had been lying latent around me during all the long, wearisome night. But so it is ever; we see so little of God’s great plan! The dull life we live, close and dark and narrow as it seems, is surrounded by invisible realities, waiting only for the rays of a spiritual dawn to light them up into grandeur and glory.
VII. AROUND HARPER’S FERRY
At Harper’s Ferry the Potomac and Shenandoah unite their waters and flow through an enormous gap in the Blue Ridge. The angle of land thus formed is a sort of promontory; around the base of which, just where the rivers meet, the curious little old town is built. Higher up the promontory lie Bolivar Heights. On the north, just across the Potomac from the Ferry, rise Maryland Heights; while on the east, across the Shenandoah, are Loudon Heights, an equally precipitous and lofty crag. With sublime rocky fronts these two mountains stand gazing at each other across the river which has evidently forced its way through them here. Just where the streams are united the once happily wedded mountains are divorced. No doubt there was once a stupendous cataract here, pouring its shining sheet towards the morning sun, from a vast inland sea; for the tourist still finds, far up the steep face of the mountains, dimples which in past ages ceaselessly whirling water-eddies made. In some of these scooped places sand and smooth-worn pebbles still remain. But the mountain-wall has long since been sundered, and the inland sea drained off; the river forcing a way not only for itself but for the turnpike, railroad, and canal, fore-ordained in the beginning to appear in the ripeness of time and follow the river’s course.
Thus the town, as you perceive, is situated in the midst of scenery which should make it a favorite place of summer resort. The cliffs are picturesquely tufted, and tasselled, and draped with foliage, boughs of trees, and festoons of wild vines, through which here and there upshoot the perpendicular columns of some bold crag, softened into beauty by the many-colored lichens that stud its sides. I count an evening walk under Loudon Heights, with the broad, sprawling river hoarsely babbling over its rocky bed on one side, and the still precipices soaring to heaven on the other,—and the narrow stony road cut round their base lying before me, untrodden at that hour by any human foot save my own,—I count that lonely walk amid the cool, dewy scents stealing out of the undergrowth, and the colors of the evening sky gilding the cliffs, as one of the pleasantest of my life. What is there, as you look up at those soaring summits and the low clouds sailing silently over them, that fills the heart so full?
The morning after my arrival I climbed Maryland Heights by the winding military road which owes its existence to the war. I have seen nothing since the view from Mount Washington to be compared with the panorama which unrolled itself around me as I ascended. Pictures of two States were there, indescribably tinted in the early morning light,—beautiful Maryland, still more beautiful Virginia, with the green Potomac valley marking the boundary between. On the Maryland side were the little valleys of the Monocacy and the Antietam. Opposite lay the valley of the Shenandoah, dotted with trees, its green fields spotted with the darker green of groves, a vast tract stretching away into a realm of hazy light, belted with sun and mist, and bounded by faint outlines of mountains so soft they seemed built of ether but a little more condensed than the blue of the sky.
Yet it was war and not beauty which led man to these heights. The timber which once covered them was cut away when the forts were constructed, in order to afford free range for the guns; and a thick undergrowth now takes its place. There are strong works on the summit, the sight of which kindles anew one’s indignation at the imbecility which surrendered them, with Harper’s Ferry and a small army, at a time when such an act was sufficient to prolong the war perhaps for years.
It is a steep mile and more by the road from the Ferry to the top of the cliffs: a mile which richly repays the travel. Yet one need not go so far nor climb so high to see the beauties of the place. Whichever way you turn, river, or rock, or wild woods charm the eye. The Potomac comes down from its verdant bowers gurgling among its innumerable rocky islets. On one side is the canal, on the other the race which feeds the government works, each tumbling its yeasty super-flux over waste-weir walls into the river. With the noise of those snowy cascades sweetly blends the note of the boatman’s bugle approaching the locks. The eye ranges from the river to the crags a thousand feet above, and all along the mountain side, gracefully adorned with sparse timber, feathery boughs and trees loaded down with vines, and is never weary of the picture. At evening, you sit watching the sunset colors fade, until the softened gray and dusky-brown tints of the cliffs deepen into darkness, and the moon comes out and silvers them.
But while the region presents such features of beauty and grandeur, the town is the reverse of agreeable. It is said to have been a pleasant and picturesque place formerly. The streets were well graded, and the hill-sides above were graced with terraces and trees. But war has changed all. Freshets tear down the centre of the streets, and the dreary hill-sides present only ragged growths of weeds. The town itself lies half in ruins. The government works were duly destroyed by the Rebels; of the extensive buildings which comprised the armory, rolling-mills, foundry, and machine-shops, you see but little more than the burnt-out, empty shells. Of the bridge across the Shenandoah only the ruined piers are left; still less remains of the old bridge over the Potomac. And all about the town are rubbish, and filth, and stench.
Almost alone of the government buildings, John Brown’s “Engine-house” has escaped destruction. It has come out of the ordeal of war terribly bruised and battered, it is true, its windows blackened and patched like the eyes of a pugilist; but there it still stands, with its brown brick walls and little wooden belfry, like a monument which no Rebel hands were permitted to demolish. It is now used as a storehouse for arms.
The first time I visited this scene of the first blood shed in the great civil war, which, although so few dreamed of it, was even then beginning,—for John Brown’s flaming deed was as a torch flung into the ready-heaped combustibles of the rebellion,—while I stood viewing the spot with an interest which must have betrayed itself, a genial old gentleman, coming out of the government repair-shop close by, accosted me. We soon fell into conversation, and he told me the story of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.
“So they took the old man and hung him; and all the time the men that did it were plotting treason and murder by the wholesale. They did it in a hurry, because if they delayed, they wouldn’t have been able to hang him at all. A strong current of public feeling was turning in his favor. Such a sacrifice of himself set many to thinking on the subject who never thought before; many who had to acknowledge in their hearts that slavery was wrong and that old John Brown was right. I speak what I know, for I was here at the time. I have lived in Harper’s Ferry fifteen years. I was born and bred in a slave State, but I never let my love of the institution blind me to everything else. Slavery has been the curse of this country, and she is now beginning to bless the day she was delivered from it.”
“Are there many people here who think as you do?”
“Enough to carry the day at the polls. The most of them are coming round to right views of negro suffrage, too. That is the only justice for the blacks, and it is the only safety for us. The idea of allowing the loyal colored population to be represented by the whites, the most of whom were traitors,—of letting a Rebel just out of the Confederate army vote, and telling a colored man just out of the Union army that he has no vote,—the idea is so perfectly absurd that the Rebels themselves must acknowledge it.”
I was hardly less interested in the conversation of an intelligent colored waiter at the hotel. He had formerly been held as a slave in the vicinity of Staunton. At the close of the war he came to the Ferry to find employment.
“There wasn’t much chance for me up there. Besides, I came near losing my life before I got away. You see, the masters, soon as they found out they couldn’t keep their slaves, began to treat them about as bad as could be. Then, because I made use of this remark, that I didn’t think we colored folks ought to be blamed for what wasn’t our fault, for we didn’t make the war, and neither did we declare ourselves free,—just because I said that, not in a saucy way, but as I say it to you now, one man put a pistol to my head, and was going to shoot me. I got away from him, and left. A great many came away at the same time, for it wasn’t possible for us to stay there.
“Now tell me candidly,” said I, “how the colored people themselves behaved.”
“Well, just tolerable. They were like a bird let out of a cage. You know how a bird that has been long in a cage will act when the door is opened; he makes a curious fluttering for a little while. It was just so with the colored people. They didn’t know at first what to do with themselves. But they got sobered pretty soon, and they are behaving very decent now.”
Harper’s Ferry affords a striking illustration of the folly of secession. The government works here gave subsistence to several hundred souls, and were the life of the place. The attempt to overturn the government failed; but the government works, together with their own prosperity, the mad fanatics of Harper’s Ferry succeeded easily enough in destroying. “The place never will be anything again,” said Mr. B., of the repair-shop, “unless the government decides to rebuild the armory,—and it is doubtful if that is ever done.”
Yet, with the grandeur of its scenery, the tremendous water-power afforded by its two rushing rivers, and the natural advantage it enjoys as the key to the fertile Shenandoah Valley, Harper’s Ferry, redeemed from slavery, and opened to Northern enterprise, should become a beautiful and busy town.
VIII. A TRIP TO CHARLESTOWN
One morning I took the train up the Valley to Charlestown, distant from Harper’s Ferry eight miles.
The railroad was still in the hands of the government. There were military guards on the platforms, and about an equal mixture of Loyalists and Rebels within the cars. Furloughed soldiers, returning to their regiments at Winchester or Staunton, occupied seats with Confederate officers just out of their uniforms. The strong, dark, defiant, self-satisfied face typical of the second-rate “chivalry,” and the good-natured, shrewd, inquisitive physiognomy of the Yankee speculator going to look at Southern lands, were to be seen side by side, in curious contrast. There also rode the well-dressed wealthy planter, who had been to Washington to solicit pardon for his treasonable acts, and the humble freedman returning to the home from which he had been driven by violence, when the war closed and left him free. Mothers and daughters of the first families of Virginia sat serene and uncomplaining in the atmosphere of mothers and daughters of the despised race, late their slaves or their neighbors’, but now citizens like themselves, free to go and come, and as clearly entitled to places in the government train as the proudest dames of the land.
We passed through a region of country stamped all over by the devastating heel of war. For miles not a fence or cultivated field was visible.
“It is just like this all the way up the Shenandoah Valley,” said a gentleman at my side, a Union man from Winchester. “The wealthiest people with us are now the poorest. With hundreds of acres they can’t raise a dollar. Their slaves have left them, and they have no money, even if they have the disposition, to hire the freed people.”
I suggested that farms, under such circumstances, should be for sale at low rates.
“They should be; but your Southern aristocrat is a monomaniac on the subject of owning land. He will part with his acres about as willingly as he will part with his life. If the Valley had not been the best part of Virginia, it would long ago have been spoiled by the ruinous system of agriculture in use here. Instead of tilling thoroughly a small farm, a man fancies he is doing a wise thing by half tilling a large one. Slave labor is always slovenly and unprofitable. But everything is being revolutionized now. Northern men and northern methods are coming into this Valley as sure as water runs down-hill. It is the greatest corn, wheat, and grass country in the world. The only objection to it is that in spots the limestone crops out a good deal. There was scarcely anything raised this season except grass; you could see hundreds of acres of that waving breast-high without a fence.”
At the end of a long hour’s ride we arrived at Charlestown, chiefly interesting to me as the place of John Brown’s martyrdom. We alighted from the train on the edge of boundless unfenced fields, into whose melancholy solitudes the desolate streets emptied themselves—rivers to that ocean of weeds. The town resembled to my eye some unprotected female sitting sorrowful on the wayside, in tattered and faded apparel, with unkempt tresses fallen negligently about features which might once have been attractive.
On the steps of a boarding-house I found an acquaintance whose countenance gleamed with pleasure “at sight,” as he said, “of a single loyal face in that nest of secession.” He had been two or three days in the place, waiting for luggage which had been miscarried.
“They are all Rebels here,—all Rebels!” he exclaimed, as he took his cane and walked with me. “They are a pitiably poverty-stricken set; there is no money in the place, and scarcely anything to eat. We have for breakfast salt-fish, fried potatoes, and treason. Fried potatoes, treason, and salt-fish for dinner. At supper the fare is slightly varied, and we have treason, salt-fish, fried potatoes, and a little more treason. My landlady’s daughter is Southern fire incarnate; and she illustrates Southern politeness by abusing Northern people and the government from morning till night, for my especial edification. Sometimes I venture to answer her, when she flies at me, figuratively speaking, like a cat. The women are not the only outspoken Rebels, although they are the worst. The men don’t hesitate to declare their sentiments, in season and out of season.” My friend concluded with this figure: “The war-feeling here is like a burning bush with a wet blanket wrapped around it. Looked at from the outside, the fire seems quenched. But just peep under the blanket, and there it is, all alive, and eating, eating in. The wet blanket is the present government policy; and every act of conciliation shown the Rebels is just letting in so much air to feed the fire.”
A short walk up into the centre of the town took us to the scene of John Brown’s trial. It was a consolation to see that the jail had been laid in ashes, and that the court-house, where that mockery of justice was performed, was a ruin abandoned to rats and toads. Four massy white brick pillars, still standing, supported a riddled roof, through which God’s blue sky and gracious sunshine smiled. The main portion of the building had been literally torn to pieces. In the floorless hall of justice rank weeds were growing. Names of Union soldiers were scrawled along the walls. No torch had been applied to the wood-work, but the work of destruction had been performed by the hands of hilarious soldier-boys ripping up floors and pulling down laths and joists to the tune of “John Brown,”—the swelling melody of the song, and the accompaniment of crashing partitions, reminding the citizens, who thought to have destroyed the old hero, that his soul was marching on.
It was also a consolation to know that the court-house and jail would probably never be rebuilt, the county-seat having been removed from Charlestown to Shepherdstown—“forever,” say the resolute loyal citizens of Jefferson County, who refuse to vote it back again.
As we were taking comfort, reflecting how unexpectedly at last justice had been done in that court-house, the townspeople passed on the sidewalk, “daughters and sons of beauty,” for they were mostly a fine-looking, spirited class; one of whom, at a question which I put to him, stopped quite willingly and talked with us. I have seldom seen a handsomer young face, a steadier eye, or more decided poise and aplomb; neither have I ever seen the outward garment of courtesy so plumply filled out with the spirit of arrogance. His brief replies, spoken with a pleasant countenance, yet with short, sharp, downward inflections, were like pistol-shots. Very evidently the death of John Brown, and the war that came swooping down in the old man’s path to avenge him, and to accomplish the work wherein he failed, were not pleasing subjects to this young southern blood. And no wonder. His coat had an empty sleeve. The arm which should have been there had been lost fighting against his country. His almost savage answers did not move me; but all the while I looked with compassion at his fine young face, and that pendent idle sleeve. He had fought against his country; his country had won; and he was of those who had lost, not arms and legs only, but all they had been madly fighting for, and more,—prosperity, prestige, power. His beautiful South was devastated, and her soil drenched with the best blood of her young men. Whether regarded as a crime or a virtue, the folly of making war upon the mighty North was now demonstrated, and the despised Yankees had proved conquerors of the chivalry of the South. “Well may your thoughts be bitter,” my heart said, as I thanked him for his information.
To my surprise he appeared mollified, his answers losing their explosive quality and sharp downward inflection. He even seemed inclined to continue the conversation; and as we passed on, we left him on the sidewalk looking after us wistfully, as if the spirit working within him had still some word to say different from any he had yet spoken. What his secret thoughts were, standing there with his dangling sleeve, it would be interesting to know.
Walking on through the town, we came to other barren and open fields on the farther side. Here we engaged a bright young colored girl to guide us to the spot where John Brown’s gallows stood. She led us into the wilderness of weeds, waist-high to her as she tramped on, parting them before her with her hands. The country all around us lay utterly desolate, without enclosures, and without cultivation. We seemed to be striking out into the rolling prairies of the West, except that these fields of ripening and fading weeds had not the summer freshness of the prairie-grass. A few scattering groves skirted them; and here and there a fenceless road drew its winding, dusty line away over the arid hills.
“This is about where it was,” said the girl, after searching some time among the tall weeds. “Nobody knows now just where the gallows stood. There was a tree here, but that has been cut down and carried away, stump and roots and all, by folks that wanted something to remember John Brown by. Every soldier took a piece of it, if ’twas only a little chip.” So widely and deeply had the dying old hero impressed his spirit upon his countrymen; affording the last great illustration of the power of Truth to render even the gallows venerable, and to glorify an ignominious death.
I stood long on the spot the girl pointed out to us, amid the gracefully drooping golden-rods, and looked at the same sky old John Brown looked his last upon, and the same groves, and the distant Blue Ridge, the sight of whose cerulean summits, clad in Sabbath tranquillity and softest heavenly light, must have conveyed a sweet assurance to his soul.
Then I turned and looked at the town, out of which flocked the curious crowds to witness his death. Over the heads of the spectators, over the heads of the soldiery surrounding him, his eye ranged until arrested by one strangely prominent object. There it still stands on the outskirts of the town, between it and the fields,—a church, pointing its silent finger to heaven, and recalling to the earnest heart those texts of Scripture from which John Brown drew his inspiration, and for the truth of which he willingly gave his life.
I had the curiosity to stop at this church on our way back to the town. The hand of ruin had smitten it. Only the brick walls and zinc-covered spire remained uninjured. The belfry had been broken open, the windows demolished. The doors were gone. Within, you saw a hollow thing, symbolical. Two huge naked beams extended from end to end of the empty walls, which were scribbled over with soldiers’ names, and with patriotic mottoes interesting for proud Virginians to read. The floors had been torn up and consumed in cooking soldiers’ rations; and the foul and trampled interior showed plainly what use it had served. The church, which overlooked John Brown’s martyrdom, and under whose roof his executioners assembled afterwards to worship, not the God of the poor and the oppressed, but the God of the slaveholder and the aristocrat, had been converted into a stable.
IX. A SCENE AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Late in the evening of the twenty-ninth of August I reached Washington.
Nearly every reader, I suppose, is familiar with descriptions of the national capital;—its superb situation on the left bank of the Potomac; the broad streets, the still more spacious avenues crossing them diagonally, and the sweeping undulations of the plain on which it is built, giving to the city its “magnificent distances”; and those grand public buildings of which any country might be proud,—the Capitol especially, with its cloudlike whiteness and beauty, which would be as imposing as it is elegant, were it not that its windows are too many and too small.
The manner in which the streets are built up, with here and there a fine residence surrounded by buildings of an inferior character, often with mere huts adjacent, and many an open space, giving to the metropolis an accidental and heterogeneous character,—the dust in summer, the mud in winter, the fetor, the rubbish, the garbage; and the corresponding character of the population, the most heterogeneous to be found in any American city, comprising all classes strangely mixed and fluctuating, the highest beside the lowest, the grandest and broadest human traits jostled by the meanest and foulest,—one half the people preying upon the other half, which preys upon the government;—all this has been too often outlined by others to be dwelt upon by me.
I noticed one novel feature in the city, however. At the hotel where I stopped, at the Attorney-General’s office which I had occasion to visit, and again at the White House, where I went to call on the President’s military secretary, I met, repeatedly, throngs of the same or similar strange faces.
It happened to be one of the President’s reception days; and the east room, the staircases, the lower and upper halls of the White House, were crowded. The upper hall especially, and the ladies’ parlor adjacent to the President’s room, were densely thronged. Some were walking to and fro, singly or in pairs; some were conversing in groups; others were lounging on chairs, tables, window-seats, or whatever offered a support to limbs weary of long waiting. One was paring his nails; another was fanning himself with his hat; a third was asleep, with his head resting much cramped in a corner of the walls; a fourth was sitting in a window, spitting tobacco-juice at an urn three yards off. When he took pains, he hit the urn with remarkable precision, showing long and careful practice. But he did not always take pains, for the extreme heat and closeness of the apartments were not favorable to exertion; and, indeed, what was the use of aiming always at the urn, when nearly every man was chewing tobacco as industriously as he, and generally spitting on the floors,—which had already become the most convincing argument against the habit of tobacco-chewing of which it is possible for the nauseated imagination to conceive.
Faces of old men and young men were there,—some weary and anxious, a few persistently jocose, and nearly all betraying the unmistakable Southern type. It was, on the whole, a well-dressed crowd, for one so abominably filthy.
“Nineteen out of twenty of all these people,” I was told by the President’s secretary, “are pardon-seeking Rebels. The most of them are twenty-thousand-dollar men, anxious to save their estates from confiscation.”
As the President’s doors were expected soon to be opened, and as I wished to observe his manner of dealing with those men, I remained after finishing my business with the secretary, and mingled with the crowd. The fumes of heated bodies, in the ill-ventilated halls, were far from agreeable; and as the time dragged heavily, and the doors of the President’s room continued closed, except when some favored individual, who had sent in his card, perhaps hours before, was admitted, I was more than once on the point of abandoning my object for a breath of fresh out-door air.
The conversation of my Southern friends, however, proved sufficiently interesting to detain me. One gay and jaunty old man was particularly diverting in his remarks. He laughed at the melancholy ones for their long faces, pretending that he could tell by each man’s looks which clause of the exceptions, in the President’s amnesty proclamation, his case came under.
“You were a civil officer under the Confederate government. Am I right? Of course I am. Your face shows it. My other friend here comes under No. 3,—he was an officer in the army. That sad old gentleman yonder, with a standing collar, looks to me like one of those who left their homes within the jurisdiction of the United States to aid the Rebellion. He’s a number ten-er. And I reckon we are all thirteen-ers,”—that is to say, persons of the thirteenth excepted class, the value of whose taxable property exceeded twenty thousand dollars.
“Well, which clause do you come under?” asked one.
“I am happy to say, I come under three different clauses. Mine’s a particularly beautiful case. I’ve been here every day for a week waiting on the President, and I expect to have the pleasure of standing at this door many a day to come. Take example by me, and never despair.” And the merry old man frisked away, with his cap slightly on one side, covering gray hairs. His gay spirits, in that not very hilarious throng, attracted a good deal of attention: but his was not the mirth of an inwardly happy mind.
“You are not a Southern man?” said one, singling me out.
“No,” said I; “I am a Yankee.”
“You are not after a pardon, then. Lucky for you!”
“What have you done to be pardoned for?” I asked.
“I am worth over twenty thousand dollars; that’s my difficulty.”
“And you aided the Rebellion?”
“Of course,”—laughing. “Look here!”—his manner changed, and his bright dark eye looked at me keenly,—“what do you Northerners, you Massachusetts men particularly, expect to do now with the niggers?”
“We intend to make useful and industrious citizens of them.”
“You can’t!” “You never can do that!” “That’s an absurdity!” exclaimed three or four voices; and immediately I found myself surrounded by a group eager to discuss that question.
“The nigger, once he’s free, won’t work!”
“No,” said another; “he’ll steal, but he won’t work.”
“I pity the poor niggers, after what you’ve done for him,” said a third. “They can’t take care of themselves; they’ll starve before they’ll work, unless driven to it; and in a little while they’ll be exterminated, just like the Indians.”
“I don’t think so,” said I. “The negro is very much like the rest of us, in many respects. He won’t work unless he is obliged to. Neither will you. So don’t blame him. But when he finds work a necessity, that will drive him to it more surely than any master.”
“You Northerners know nothing of the negro; you should see him on our plantations!”
“I intend to do so. In the mean time you should see him in our Northern cities, where he takes care of himself very well, supports his family, and proves an average good citizen. You should look into the affairs of the Freedmen’s Bureau, here in Washington. There are in this city and its vicinity upwards of thirty thousand colored people. The majority have been suddenly swept into the department from their homes by the chances of war. You would consequently expect to find a vast number of paupers among them. But, on the contrary, nearly all are industrious and self-supporting; only about three hundred of the number receiving partial support from the government. Now take my advice: give your negroes a chance, and see what they will do.”
“We do give them all the chance they can have. And it’s for our interest to induce them to work. We are dependent on labor; we are going to ruin as fast as possible for want of it. In the course of eight or ten years, maybe, they will begin to find out that everything in creation don’t belong to them now they are free, and that they can’t live by stealing. But by that time, where will we be? Where will the negro be?”
Of these men, one was from Georgia, one from North Carolina, and others from Florida and Virginia; yet they all concurred in the opinion, which no argument could shake, that the freedmen would die, but not work.
Our conversation was interrupted by the opening of the President’s room. A strong tide instantly set towards it, resulting in a violent jam at the door. I was carried in by the crowd, but got out of it as soon as possible, and placed myself in a corner where I could observe the proceedings of the reception.
President Johnson was standing behind a barrier which extended the whole length of the room, separating him from the crowd. One by one they were admitted to him; each man presenting his card as he passed the barrier. Those who were without cards were refused admission, until they had provided themselves with those little conveniences at a desk in the hall.
I should scarcely have recognized the President from any of his published pictures. He appeared to me a man rather below the medium height, sufficiently stout, with a massy, well-developed head, strong features, dark, iron-gray hair, a thick, dark complexion, deep-sunk eyes, with a peculiarly wrinkled, care-worn look about them, and a weary expression generally. His voice was mild and subdued, and his manner kindly. He shook hands with none. To each applicant for pardon he put a question or two, sometimes only one, and dispatched him, with a word of promise or advice. No one was permitted to occupy more than a minute or two of his time, while some were disposed of in as many seconds. On the whole, it was an interesting but sad scene; and I still carry in my memory the President’s weary look, and the disappointed faces of the applicants, who, after long waiting, and perhaps going through with this same ceremony day after day, received no intimation that the object of their hopes was near its accomplishment.
X. BULL RUN
Taking the train at Washington, and crossing the long railroad bridge which spans the Potomac, I entered again a portion of Virginia rendered celebrated and desolate by war.
Running down to Alexandria, and making a short stop there, we rattled on towards Manassas. All the names throughout that region are historical, stamped and re-stamped upon the memory of America by the burning brand of war. The brakeman bawls in at the door of the car words which start you with a thrill of recollection. The mind goes back through four fiery years of conflict to the campaign of ’61, until it grows bewildered, in doubt whether that contest or this journey is unreal,—for surely one must be a dream! That first season of disaster and dismay, which associated the names of Fairfax Court House, Centreville, Bull Run, Manassas, with something infinitely horrible and fatal, had passed away like a cloud; the storm of the subsequent year, still more terrible, except that we had grown accustomed to such, had also passed, dissolving in thin vapor of history; and one would never have guessed that such things had been, but for the marks of the wrath of heaven, which had left the country scathed as with hailstones and coals of fire.
Yes, those skirmishes and dire contests were realities; and now this quiet journey, this commonplace mode of travel into what was then the “enemy’s country,” with hot-blooded Virginians (now looking cool enough) sitting upon the seats next us, and conversing tamely and even pleasantly with us when we accosted them,—no murderous masked batteries in front, no guerrillas in the woods waiting to attack the train; in short, no danger threatening but the vulgar one of railroad disasters, of late become so common; this too was a reality no less wonderful, contrasted with the late rampant days of Rebel defiance.
From Alexandria to Manassas Junction it is twenty-seven miles. Through all that distance we saw no signs of human industry, save here and there a sickly, half-cultivated cornfield, which looked as if it had been put in late, and left to pine in solitude. There were a few wood-lots still left standing; but the country for the most part consisted of fenceless fields abandoned to weeds, stump-lots, and undergrowths.
“Manassas Junction!” announced the brakeman; and we alighted. A more forbidding locality can scarcely be imagined. I believe there were a number of houses and shops there before the war, but they were destroyed, and two or three rum-shanties had lately sprung up in their place. A row of black bottles, ranged on a shelf under a rudely constructed shed, were the first signs I saw of a reviving civilization. Near by a new tavern was building, of so fragile and thin a shell, it seemed as if the first high wind must blow it down. I also noticed some negroes digging a well; for such are the needs of an advancing civilization: first rum, then a little water to put into it. All around was a desolate plain, slightly relieved from its dreary monotony by two or three Rebel forts overgrown with weeds.
A tall young member of the Western press accompanied me. I went to a stable to secure a conveyance to the battle-field; and, returning, found him seated on the steps of one of the “Refreshment Saloons,” engaged in lively conversation with a red-faced and excitable young stranger. The latter was speaking boastingly of “our army.”
“Which army do you mean? for there were two, you know,” said my friend.
“I mean the Confederate army, the best and bravest army that ever was!” said he of the red face, emphatically.
“It seems to me,” remarked my friend, “the best and bravest army that ever was got pretty badly whipped.”
“The Confederate army never was whipped! We were overpowered.”
“I see you Southern gentlemen have a new word. With us, when a man goes into a fight and comes out second best, the condition he is in is vulgarly called whipped.”
“We were overpowered by numbers!” ejaculated the Rebel. “Your army was three times as big as ours.”
“That’s nothing, for you know one Southerner was equal to five Yankees.”
“And so he is, and always will be! But you had to get the niggers to help you.”
“What are a few niggers? They would always run, you know, at sight of their masters, while of course such a thing was never known as their masters running from them!”
The unhappy member of the “overpowered” party flushed and fumed a while, not knowing what answer to make, then burst forth,—
“It was the foreigners! You never would have beaten us if it hadn’t been for the foreigners that made up your armies!”
“What!” said my friend, “you, an American, acknowledge yourself beaten by foreigners! I am ashamed of you!”
And the wagon arriving, he jumped into it with a laugh, leaving the Southerner, not whipped of course, but decidedly “overpowered” in this little contest of wit. It was quite evident that he was not equal to five Yankees with his tongue.
“That young fellow you was talking with,” said our driver, “was one of Mosby’s guerrillas. There are plenty of them around here. They are terrible at talking, but that is about all.”
The wagon was an ambulance which had cost the government two hundred and fifty dollars a few months before. The springs proving inferior, it was condemned, and sold at auction for twenty-four dollars. “I paid a hundred and twenty-five for it the next day,” said the driver; “and it’s well worth the money.” It was a strong, heavy, well-built vehicle, well suited to his business. “I was down here with my regiment when I got my discharge, and it struck me something might be made by taking visitors out to the battle-fields. But I haven’t saved a cent at it yet; passengers are few, and it’s mighty hard business, the roads are so awful bad.”
Worse roads are not often seen in a civilized country. “It makes me mad to see people drive over and around these bad places, month after month, and never think of mending ’em! A little work with a shovel would save no end of lost time, and wear and tear, and broken wagons; but it’s never done.”
The original country roads had passed into disuse; and, the fences being destroyed, only the curious parallel lines of straggling bushes and trees that grew beside them remained to mark their course. Necessity and convenience had struck out new roads winding at will over the fenceless farms. We crossed thinly wooded barrens, skirted old orchards, and passed now and then a standing chimney that marked the site of some ruined homestead; up-hill and down-hill, rocking, rattling, jolting, and more than once nearly upsetting. I remember not more than three or four inhabited houses on our route. In a wild field near the shelter of some woods was a village of half-ruined huts, interesting as having served in wartime as Rebel winter-quarters. At last, eight miles north from the Junction, we reached the scene of the first battle of Bull Run.
This was the plateau, from which our almost victorious forces had driven and re-driven the enemy, when Johnston’s reinforcements, arriving by the railroad which runs obliquely towards the Junction on the west, changed what was so nearly a triumph for our arms into a frightful disaster. The ground is well described in Beauregard’s official report. “It is enclosed on three sides by small watercourses which empty into Bull Run within a few rods of each other, half a mile to the south of Stone Bridge. Rising to an elevation of quite one hundred feet above Bull Run at the bridge, it falls off on three sides to the level of the enclosing streams in gentle slopes, but which are furrowed by ravines of irregular direction and length, and studded with clumps and patches of young pines and oaks.”... “Completely surrounding the two houses before mentioned are small open fields of irregular outline, and exceeding one hundred and fifty acres in extent. The houses, occupied at the time, the one by Widow Henry, the other by the free negro Robinson, are small wooden buildings densely embowered in trees and environed by a double row of fences on two sides. Around the eastern and southern brow of the plateau an almost unbroken fringe of second growth of pines gave excellent shelter for our marksmen, who availed themselves of it with the most satisfactory skill. To the west, adjoining the fields, a broad belt of oaks extends directly across the crest, on both sides of the Sudley road, in which, during the battle, regiments of both armies met and contended for the mastery. From the open ground of this plateau the view embraces a wide expanse of woods and gently undulating open country of broad grass and grain fields in all directions.”
Such was the appearance of the battle-field on that memorable twenty-first of July, four years before my visit. In its external features I found it greatly changed. Many of the trees had been cut away. Every fence had disappeared. Where had waved the fields of grass and grain, extended one vast, neglected, barren tract of country. The widow’s humble abode had been swept away. The widow herself was killed by a chance shot on the day of the battle. A little picket fence surrounding her grave was the only enclosure visible to us in all that region. Close by were the foundations of her house, a small square space run up to tallest weeds. Some of the poor woman’s hollyhocks still survived, together with a few scattered and lonesome-looking peach-trees cut with balls. The hollyhocks were in bloom, and the peaches were ripe: a touching sight to me, who could see the haunting figure of the poor widow looking at the favorite blossoms from her door, or returning from the trees to the house with her apron full of the fruit, which appeared duly year after year to comfort her, until at last she was no longer there needing earthly comfort. We were not past that material necessity, however; and the poor woman’s peaches comforted us this year.
Within a few yards of the spot where her house was, on the summit of the eminence, stands a pyramidal monument of rough red sandstone, bearing this inscription:—
IN MEMORY OF THE PATRIOTS WHO FELL AT BULL RUN JULY 21st, 1861.
This shaft, another inscription tells us, was erected June 10th, 1865. There it stands on the “sacred soil,” recalling to the proud sons of Virginia many things. To them, and to all Americans, it has a grand and deep significance beyond anything words can convey. There it stands, a silent preacher, with its breast of stone, and its austere face of stone, preaching inaudible stern lessons. Bull Run may be called the Bunker Hill of the last revolution. It was the prologue of disaster to the far-off final triumph. Well fought at first, we had almost won the day, when, fresh troops pressing us, came the crushing defeat and horrible panic which filled the whole loyal North with dismay and the whole rebel South with exultation. Then how many a patriot heart fell sick with despair, and doubtingly murmured, “Does God still live? and is there after all an overruling Power?”
Look at that monument to-day. Where now is the triumph of the dark cause? Where now is the haughty slave empire whose eternal foundations were deemed established by that victory? Where is the banner of Freedom trailed so low, all torn and blood-stained, in the dust? God lives! There is an overruling Power that never sleeps; patient, foreseeing what we cannot see, and, in sublime knowledge of the end, tolerating the wrath of the unrighteous and the arrogance of the unjust. The day of victory for freedom had not yet come; for triumph then would have been but half triumph. Temporary success to the bad cause was necessary to draw it irretrievably into the currents of destruction.
Moreover, struggle and long agony were needful to this nation. Frivolous, worldly, imitating other nations; nourishing in the very bosom of the Republic the serpent of a barbarous despotism; in our heedlessness and hurry giving no ear to the cries of the oppressed; we needed the baptism of blood and the awful lessons of loss to bring us back to sanity and soberness. The furnace of civil war was indispensable to fuse conflicting elements, and to pour the molten materials of the diverse States into the single mould of one mighty and masterful Nation. In order that it might take the lead of all the proud banners on the globe, our flag must first be humbled, and win its way through dust and battle-smoke to the eminence above all eminences of earthly power, where it is destined at last to float.
There seems to have been something fatal to our armies in the mere name of Bull Run. The visitor to the scene of the first disaster is already on the field of the second. The battles of the subsequent year, fought on a more stupendous scale, and sweeping over a vast area, included within their scope the hills on which we were standing.
To reach the scene of the principal contest in 1862, however, an advance of a mile or two had to be made. We rode on to a piece of woods, in the shade of which we halted, surrounded by marks of shot and shell in the timber, and by soldiers’ graves lying lonely among the trees, with many a whitened bone scattered about or protruding. There, it being mid-day, we partook of luncheon sauced with Widow Henry’s peaches.
On the west of us was a large stony field sloping up to a wood-crowned height,—a field strown thick with dead in those sanguinary days of ’62. The woods in which we were, extended around the north side of it also, forming a connection with the woods beyond. Making the circuit of this shady boundary, we reached the crest, which, strengthened greatly by an unfinished railroad track cut through it, afforded the enemy their most formidable position during the second Bull Run battle.
At the summit of the open field stands another monument, similar to that we had first seen, dedicated to the “Memory of the Patriots who fell at Groverton, August 28th, 29th, and 30th, 1862.” This inscription had been mutilated by some Rebel hand, and made to read “Confederate Patriots”; but my tall friend, arming himself with a stone, stepped upon the pedestal, amid the black rows of shells surrounding it, and resolutely ground the offensive word out of the tablet.
Groverton, which has given the field its name, is a little cluster of three or four buildings lying out west of it on the turnpike.
There are two or three points of striking resemblance between the first and second battles of Bull Run. At one time almost a victory, this also proved at last a defeat; and again the North was filled with consternation at seeing the barrier of its armies broken, and the country laid open to the foe. After the first Bull Run, the Rebels might have entered Washington almost without opposition. After the second, they did invade Maryland, getting as far as Antietam. It is also a circumstance worthy of note, that in each fight the victory might have been rendered complete, but for the failure of an important command to perform the part assigned it. General Patterson remained inert at Winchester, while Johnston, whom it was his business to look after, hastened to reinforce Beauregard and turn the scale of battle. At the second Bull Run, General Porter’s neglect to obey the orders of General Pope wrought incalculable mischief, and contributed similarly to change the opening successes into final discomfiture.
Lastly the lesson taught by both disasters is the same: that the triumph of a bad cause is but illusory and transient; while for the cause which moves duly in the divine currents of human progress there can be no failure, for, though tossed and buffeted, and seemingly wrecked, its keel is in the eternal waters, the winds of heaven fill its sails, and the hand of the Great Pilot is at the helm.
Returning, we stopped at the “stone house” near the first battle-field, in hopes of getting some personal information from the inhabitants. They were present during the fight, and the outer walls show enduring marks of the destructive visits of cannon-shot. The house was formerly a tavern, and the man who kept it was one of those two-faced farmers, Secessionists at heart, but always loyal to the winning side. By working well his political weathercock, he had managed to get his house through the storm, although in a somewhat dismantled condition. The bar-room was as barren as the intellect of the owner. The only thing memorable we obtained there was some most extraordinary cider. This the proprietor was too proud to sell, or else the pretence that it belonged to the “old nigger” was nearer the truth than my tall friend was willing to admit. At all events, the “old nigger” brought it in, and received pay for it besides, evidently contrary to his expectations, and to the disappointment of the landlord.
“Uncle, what sort of cider is this? how did you make it?” For neither of us had ever tasted anything resembling it before, nor did we wish ever to taste its like again.
Uncle, standing in the door, with one foot on the threshold, ducking and grinning, one hand holding his old cap, and the other his knee, after earnest urging, told us the secret.
“Dat cidah, sah, I made out o’ peaches and apples mixed, ’bout half and half. Dat’s what makes it taste cur’us.”
“Oh, but that’s not all, uncle; you put water in it! You meant to cheat us, I see, with your miscegenated cider and water!”
Uncle did not exactly understand the nature of this charge, but evidently thought it something serious.
“No, no, gentlemen, I didn’t do it for roguishness! I put in de peaches ’case dar wasn’t apples enough. I pounded ’em up wid a pestle in a barrel. Den I put a stake under de house corner wid rocks on to it for a press. I put de water in to make de juice come easier, it was so dry!”
Having learned his method of manufacturing cider, we inquired his opinion of the war.
“Didn’t you think, Uncle, the white folks were great fools to kill each other the way they did?” said my friend.
“’Twouldn’t do for me to say so; dey was old enough, and ageable enough, to know best; but I couldn’t help tink’n sah!”
Returning to the Junction, I saw a very different type of the Virginia negro: an old man of seventy, who conversed intelligently, but in a strangely quiet and subdued tone, which bespoke long suffering and great patience. He had been a free man seven years, he told me; but he had a brother who still served the man he belonged to.
“But he, too, is free now,” I said. “Don’t he receive wages?”
The old man shook his head sadly. “There’s nothing said about wages to any of our people in this part of the country. They don’t dare to ask for them, and their owners will hold them as they used to as long as they can. They are very sharp with us now. If a man of my color dared to say what he thought, it would be all his life was worth!”
XI. A VISIT TO MOUNT VERNON
On a day of exceeding sultriness (it was the fourth of September) I left the dusty, stifled streets of Washington, and went on board the excursion steamer Wawaset, bound for Mount Vernon.
Ten o’clock, the hour of starting, had nearly arrived. No breath of air was stirring. The sun beat down with torrid fervor upon the boat’s awnings, which seemed scarce a protection against it, and upon the glassy water, which reflected it with equal intensity from below. Then suddenly the bell rang, the boat swung out in the river, the strong paddles rushed, and almost instantly a magical change took place. A delightful breeze appeared to have sprung up, increasing as the steamer’s speed increased. I sat upon a stool by the wheelhouse, drinking in all the deliciousness of that cooling motion through the air, and watching compassionately the schooners with heavy and languid sails lying becalmed in the channel,—indolent fellows, drifting with the tide, and dependent on influences from without to push them,—while our steamer, with flashing wake, flag gayly flying, and decks swept by wholesome, animating winds, resembled one of your energetic, original men, cutting the sluggish current, and overcoming the sultriness and stagnation of life by a refreshing activity.
On we sped, leaving far behind the Virginia long-boats, with their pointed sails on great poles swung aslant across the masts,—sails dingy in color and irregular in shape, looking, a little way off, like huge sweet potatoes. Our course was southward, leaving far on our right the Arlington estate embowered in foliage on the Virginia shore; and on our left the Navy Yard and Arsenal, and the Insane Asylum standing like a stern castle, half hidden by trees, on the high banks back from the river. As we departed from the wharves, a view of the city opened behind us, with its two prominent objects,—the unfinished Washington Monument, resembling in the distance a tall, square, pallid sail; and the many-pillared, beautiful Capitol, rising amid masses of foliage, with that marvellous bubble, its white and airy dome, soaring superbly in the sun.
Before us, straight in our course, was Alexandria, quaint old city, with its scanty fringe of straight and slender spars, and its few anchored ships suspended in a glassy atmosphere, as it seemed, where the river reflected the sky. We ran in to the wharves, and took on board a number of passengers; then steamed on again, down the wide Potomac, until, around a bend, high on a wooded shore, a dim red roof and a portico of slender white pillars appeared visible through the trees.
It was Mount Vernon, the home of Washington. The shores here, on both the Maryland and Virginia sides, are picturesquely hilly and green with groves. The river between flows considerably more than a mile wide: a handsome sheet, reflecting the woods and the shining summer clouds sailing in the azure over them, although broad belts of river-grass, growing between the channel and the banks like strips of inundated prairie, detract from its beauty.
As we drew near, the helmsman tolled the boat’s bell slowly. “Before the war,” said he, “no boat ever passed Mount Vernon without tolling its bell, if it had one. The war kind of broke into that custom, as it did into most everything else; but it is coming up again now.”
We did not make directly for the landing, but kept due on down the channel until we had left Mount Vernon half a mile away on our right. Then suddenly the steamer changed her course, steering into the tract of river-grass, which waved and tossed heavily as the ripple from the bows shook it from its drowsy languor. The tide rises here some four feet. It was low tide then, and the circuit we had made was necessary to avoid grounding on the bar. We were entering shallow water. We touched and drew hard for a few minutes over the yielding sand. The dense grass seemed almost as serious an impediment as the bar itself. Down among its dark heaving masses we had occasional glimpses of the bottom, and saw hundreds of fishes darting away, and sometimes leaping sheer from the surface, in terror of the great, gliding, paddling monster, invading, in that strange fashion, their peaceful domain.
Drawing a well-defined line half a mile long through that submerged prairie, we reached the old wooden pier, built out into it from the Mount Vernon shore. I did not land immediately, but remained on deck, watching the long line of pilgrims going up from the boat along the climbing path and disappearing in the woods. There were, perhaps, a hundred and fifty in the procession, men and women and children, some carrying baskets, with intent to enjoy a nice little picnic under the old Washington trees. It was a pleasing sight, rendered interesting by the historical associations of the place, but slightly dashed with the ludicrous, it must be owned, by a solemn tipsy wight bringing up the rear, singing, or rather bawling, the good old tune of Greenville, with maudlin nasal twang, and beating time with profound gravity and a big stick.
As the singer, as well as his tune, was tediously slow, I passed him on the way, ascended the long slope through the grove, and found my procession halted under the trees on the edge of it. Facing them, with an old decayed orchard behind it, was a broad, low brick structure, with an arched entrance and an iron-grated gate. Two marble shafts flanked the approach to it on the right and left. Passing these, I paused, and read on a marble slab over the Gothic gateway the words,—
“WITHIN THIS ENCLOSURE REST THE REMAINS OF GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON.”
The throng of pilgrims, awed into silence, were beginning to draw back a little from the tomb. I approached, and leaning against the iron bars, looked through into the still, damp chamber. Within, a little to the right of the centre of the vault, stands a massive and richly sculptured marble sarcophagus, bearing the name of “Washington.” By its side, of equal dimensions, but of simpler style, is another, bearing the inscription, “Martha, the consort of Washington.”
It is a sequestered spot, half enclosed by the trees of the grove on the south side,—cedars, sycamores, and black-walnuts, heavily hung with vines, sheltering the entrance from the mid-day sun. Woodpeckers flitted and screamed from trunk to trunk of the ancient orchard beyond. Eager chickens were catching grasshoppers under the honey-locusts, along by the old wooden fence. And, humming harmlessly in and out over the heads of the pilgrims, I noticed a colony of wasps, whose mud-built nests stuccoed profusely the yellowish ceiling of the vault.
There rest the ashes of the great chieftain, and of Martha his wife. I did not like the word “consort.” It is too fine a term for a tombstone. There is something lofty and romantic about it; but “wife” is simple, tender, near to the heart, steeped in the divine atmosphere of home,—
“A something not too bright and good For human nature’s daily food.”
She was the wife of Washington: a true, deep-hearted woman, the blessing and comfort, not of the Commander-in-chief, not of the first President, but of the MAN. And Washington, the MAN, was not the cold, majestic, sculptured figure which has been placed on the pedestal of history. There was nothing marble about him but the artistic and spotless finish of his public career. Majestic he truly was, as simple greatness must be; and cold he seemed to many;—nor was it fitting that the sacred chambers of that august personality should be thrown open to the vulgar feet and gaze of the multitude. It is littleness and vanity that are loose of tongue and unseasonably familiar.
“Yet shine forever virgin minds, Beloved by stars and purest winds, Which, o’er passion throned sedate, Have not hazarded their state; Disconcert the searching spy, Rendering, to the curious eye, The durance of a granite ledge To those who gaze from the sea’s edge.”
Of these virgin minds was Washington. The world saw him through a veil of reserve, as habitual to him as the sceptre of self-control. Yet beneath that veil throbbed a fiery nature, which on a few rare occasions is known to have flamed forth into terrible wrath. Anecdotes, recording those instances of volcanic eruption from the core of this serene and lofty character, are refreshing and precious to us, as showing that the ice and snow were only on the summit, while beneath burned those fountains of glowing life which are reservoirs of power to the virtue and will that know how to control them. A man of pure, strong, constant affections, his love of tranquil domestic enjoyments was as remarkable as his self-sacrificing patriotism. I know not Washington’s “consort”; but to me a very sweet, beautiful, and touching name is that of “Martha, Washington’s wife.”
Quitting the tomb, I walked along by the old board fence which bounds the corner of the orchard, and turned up the locust-shaded avenue leading to the mansion. On one side was a wooden shed, on the other an old-fashioned brick barn. Passing these, you seem to be entering a little village. The out-houses are numerous; I noticed the wash-house, the meat-house, and the kitchen, the butler’s house, and the gardener’s house,—neat white buildings, ranged around the end of the lawn, among which the mansion stands the principal figure.
Looking in at the wash-house, I saw a pretty-looking colored girl industriously scrubbing over a tub. She told me that she was twenty years old, that her husband worked on the place, and that a bright little fellow, four years old, running around the door, handsome as polished bronze, was her son. She formerly belonged to John A. Washington, who made haste to carry her off to Richmond, with the money the Ladies’ Mount Vernon Association had paid him, on the breaking out of the war. She was born on the place, but had never worked for John A. Washington. “He kept me hired out; for I s’pose he could make more by me that way.” She laughed pleasantly as she spoke, and rubbed away at the wet clothes in the tub.
I looked at her, so intelligent and cheerful, a woman and a mother, though so young; and wondered at the man who could pretend to own such a creature, hire her out to other masters, and live upon her wages! I have heard people scoff at John A. Washington for selling the inherited bones of the great,—for surely the two hundred thousand dollars, paid by the Ladies’ Association for the Mount Vernon estate, was not the price merely of that old mansion, these out-houses, since repaired, and two hundred acres of land,—but I do not scoff at him for that. Why should not one, who dealt in living human flesh and blood, also traffic a little in the ashes of the dead?
“After the war was over, the Ladies’ Association sent for me from Richmond, and I work for them now,” said the girl, merrily scrubbing.
“What wages do you get?”
“I gits seven dollars a month, and that’s a heap better ’n no wages at all!” laughing again with pleasure. “The sweat I drap into this yer tub is my own; but befo’e, it belonged to John A. Washington.” As I did not understand her at first, she added, “You know, the Bible says every one must live by the sweat of his own eyebrow. But John A. Washington, he lived by the sweat of my eyebrow. I alluz had a will’n mind to work, and I have now; but I don’t work as I used to; for then it was work to-day and work to-morrow, and no stop.”
Beside the kitchen was a well-house, where I stopped and drank a delicious draught out of an “old oaken bucket,” or rather a new one, which came up brimming from its cold depths. This well was dug in General Washington’s time, the cook told me; and as I drank, and looked down, down into the dark shaft at the faintly glimmering water,—for the well was deep,—I thought how often the old General had probably come up thither from the field, taken off his hat in the shade, and solaced his thirst with a drink from the dripping bucket.
Passing between the kitchen and the butler’s house, you come upon a small plateau, a level green lawn, nearly surrounded by a circle of large shade-trees. The shape of this pleasant esplanade is oblong: at the farther end, away on the left, is the ancient entrance to the grounds; close by on the right, at the end nearest the river, is the mansion.
Among the shade-trees, of which there are a great variety, I noticed a fine sugar-maple, said to be the only individual of the species in all that region. It was planted by General Washington, “who wished to see what trees would grow in that climate,” the gardener told me. It has for neighbors, among many others, a tulip-tree, a Kentucky coffee-tree, and a magnolia set out by Washington’s own hand. I looked at the last with peculiar interest, thinking it a type of our country, the perennial roots of which were about the same time laid carefully in the bosom of the eternal mother, covered and nursed and watered by the same illustrious hand,—a little tree then, feeble, and by no means sure to live; but now I looked up, thrilling with pride at the glory of its spreading branches, its storm-defying tops, and its mighty trunk which not even the axe of treason could sever.
I approached the mansion. It was needless to lift the great brass knocker, for the door was open. The house was full of guests thronging the rooms and examining the relics; among which were conspicuous these: hanging in a little brass-framed glass case in the hall, the key of the Bastile, presented to Washington by Lafayette; in the dining-hall, a very old-fashioned harpsichord that had entirely lost its voice, but which is still cherished as a wedding-gift from Washington to his adopted daughter; in the same room, holsters and a part of the Commander-in-chief’s camp-equipage, very dilapidated; and, in a square bedroom up-stairs, the bedstead on which Washington slept, and on which he died. There is no sight more touching than this bedstead, surrounded by its holy associations, to be seen at Mount Vernon.
From the house I went out on the side opposite that on which I had entered, and found myself standing under the portico we had seen when coming down the river. A noble portico, lofty as the eaves of the house, and extending the whole length of the mansion,—fifteen feet in width and ninety-six in length, says the Guide-Book. The square pillars supporting it are not so slender, either; but it was their height which made them appear so when we first saw them miles off up the Potomac.
What a portico for a statesman to walk under,—so lofty, so spacious, and affording such views of the river and its shores, and the sky over all! Once more I saw the venerable figure of him, the first in war and the first in peace, pacing to and fro on those pavements of flat stone, solitary, rapt in thought, glancing ever and anon up the Potomac towards the site of the now great capital bearing his name, contemplating the revolution accomplished, and dreaming of his country’s future. There was one great danger he feared: the separation of the States. But well for him, O, well for the great-hearted and wise chieftain, that the appalling blackness of the storm, destined so soon to deluge the land with blood for rain-drops, was hidden from his eyes, or appeared far in the dim horizon no bigger than a man’s hand!
Saved from the sordid hands of a degenerate posterity, saved from the desolation of unsparing civil war, Mount Vernon still remains to us with its antique mansion and its delightful shades. I took all the more pleasure in the place, remembering how dear it was to its illustrious owner. There is no trait in Washington’s character with which I sympathize so strongly as with his love for his home. True, that home was surrounded with all the comforts and elegancies which fortune and taste could command. But had Mount Vernon been as humble as it was beautiful, Washington would have loved it scarcely less. It was dear to him, not as a fine estate, but as the home of his heart. A simply great and truly wise man, free from foolish vanity and ambition, he served his country with a willing spirit; yet he knew well that happiness does not subsist upon worldly honors nor dwell in high places, but that her favorite haunt is by the pure waters of domestic tranquillity.
There came up a sudden thunder-shower while we were at the house. The dreadful peals rolled and rattled from wing to wing of the black cloud that overshadowed the river, and the rain fell in torrents. Umbrellas were scarce, and I am sorry to say the portico leaked badly. But the storm passed as suddenly as it came; the rifted clouds floated away with sunlit edges glittering like silver fire, and all the wet leafage of the trees twinkled and laughed in the fresh golden light. I did not return to the boat with the crowd by the way we came, but descended the steep banks through the drenched woods in front of the mansion, to the low sandy shore of the Potomac, then walked along the water’s edge, under the dripping boughs, to the steamer, and so took my leave of Mount Vernon.