XII. “STATE PRIDE.”…

XII. “STATE PRIDE.”

Leaving Washington by steamer again, early on the morning of the twelfth of September, a breezy sail of three hours down the Potomac brought us to Acquia Creek.

The creek was still there, debouching broad and placid into the river, for, luckily, destroying armies cannot consume the everlasting streams. The forests, which densely covered all that region before the war, had been cut away. Not a building of any kind was to be seen; and only the blackened ruins of half-burnt wharves, extending out into the river, remained to indicate that here had been an important depot of supplies.

Taking the cars near an extemporized landing, we traversed a country of shaggy hills, completely clad in thick undergrowths which had sprung up where the ancient forests stood. At the end of two hours’ slow travel, through a tract almost exclusively of this character, we arrived at a hiatus in the railroad. The bridge over the Rappahannock not having been rebuilt since the war, it was necessary to cross to Fredericksburg by another conveyance than the cars. A long line of coaches was in waiting for the train. I climbed the topmost seat of the foremost coach, which was soon leading the rumbling, dusty procession over the hills toward the city.

From a barren summit we obtained a view of Fredericksburg, pleasantly situated on the farther bank of the river, with the high ridge behind it which Burnside endeavored in vain to take. We crossed the brick-colored Rappahannock (not a lovely stream to look upon) by a pontoon bridge, and ascending the opposite shore, rode through the half-ruined city.

Fredericksburg had not yet begun to recover from the effects of Burnside’s shells. Scarcely a house in the burnt portions had been rebuilt. Many houses were entirely destroyed, and only the solitary chimney-stacks remained. Of others, you saw no vestige but broken brick walls, and foundations overgrown with Jamestown-weeds, sumachs, and thistles. Farther up from the river the town had been less badly used; but we passed even there many a dwelling with a broken chimney, and with great awkward holes in walls and roofs. Some were windowless and deserted; but others had been patched up and rendered inhabitable again. High over the city soar the church-spires, which, standing between two artillery fires on the day of the battle, received the ironical compliments of both. The zinc sheathing of one of these steeples is well riddled and ripped, and the tipsy vane leans at an angle of forty-five degrees from its original perpendicular.

Sitting next me on the stage-top was a vivacious young expressman, who was in the battle, and who volunteered to give me some account of it. No doubt his description was beautifully clear, but as he spoke only of “our army,” without calling it by name, it was long before I could decide which army was meant. Sometimes it seemed to be one, then it was more likely the other; so that, before his account of its movements was ended, my mind was in a delightful state of confusion. A certain delicacy on my part, which was quite superfluous, had prevented me from asking him plainly at first on which side he was fighting. At last, by inference and indirection, I got at the fact;—“our army” was the Rebel army.

“I am a son of Virginia!” he told me afterwards, his whole manner expressing a proud satisfaction. “I was opposed to secession at first, but afterwards I went into it with my whole heart and soul. Do you want to know what carried me in? State pride, sir! nothing else in the world. I’d give more for Virginia than for all the rest of the Union put together; and I was bound to go with my State.”

This was spoken with emphasis, and a certain rapture, as a lover might speak of his mistress. I think I never before realized so fully what “State pride” was. In New England and the West, you find very little of it. However deep it may lie in the hearts of the people, it is not their habit to rant about it. You never hear a Vermonter or an Indianian exclaim, “I believe my State is worth all the rest of the Union!” with excited countenance, lip curved, and eye in fine frenzy rolling. Their patriotism is too large and inclusive to be stopped by narrow State boundaries. Besides, in communities where equality prevails there is little of that peculiar pride which the existence of caste engenders. Accustomed to look down upon slaves and poor whites, the aristocratic classes soon learn to believe that they are the people, and that wisdom will die with them.

In the case of Virginians, I think that the mere name of the State has also something to do with their pride in her. To hear one of them enunciate the euphonious syllables when asked to what portion of the Union he belongs, is wonderfully edifying; it is as good as eating a peach. “V-i-r-g-i-n-i-a,” he tells you, dwelling with rich intonations on the luscious vowels and consonants,—in his mind doubtless the choicest in the alphabet; and he seems proudly conscious, as he utters them, of having spoken a charm which enwraps him in an atmosphere of romance. Thenceforth he is unapproachable on that verdurous ground, the envy and despair of all who are so unfortunate as to have been born elsewhere. Thus a rich word surrounds itself with rich associations. But suppose a different name: instead of Virginia, Stubland, for example. It might indeed be the best State of all, yet, believe me, Stubland would have in all its borders no soil fertile enough to grow the fine plant of State pride.

“I believe,” said I, “there is but one State as proud as Virginia, and that is the fiery little State of South Carolina.”

“I have less respect for South Carolina,” said he, “than for any other State in the Union. South Carolina troops were the worst troops in the Confederate army. It was South Carolina’s self-conceit and bluster that caused the war.”

(So, State pride in another State than Virginia was only “self-conceit.”)

“Yes,” said I, “South Carolina began the war; but Virginia carried it on. If Virginia had thrown the weight of her very great power in the Union against secession, resort to arms would never have been necessary. She held a position which she has forfeited forever, because she was not true to it. By seceding she lost wealth, influence, slavery, and the blood of her bravest sons; and what has she gained? I wonder, sir, how your State pride can hold out so well.”

“Virginia,” he replied, with another gleam, his eyes doing the fine frenzy again, “Virginia made the gallantest fight that ever was; and I am prouder of her to-day than I ever was in my life!”

“But you are glad she is back in the Union again?”

“To tell the truth, I am. I think more of the Union, too, than I ever did before. It was a square, stand-up fight; we got beaten, and I suppose it is all for the best. The very hottest Secessionists are now the first to come back and offer support to the government.” He tapped a little tin trunk he carried. “I have fifty pardons here, which I am carrying from Washington to Richmond, for men who, a year ago, you would have said would drown themselves sooner than take the oath of allegiance to the United States. It was a rich sight to see these very men crowding to take the oath. It was a bitter pill to some, and they made wry faces at it; but the rest were glad enough to get back into the old Union. It was like going home.”

“What astonishes me,” said I, “after all the Southern people’s violent talk about the last ditch,—about carrying on an endless guerrilla warfare after their armies were broken up, and fighting in swamps and mountains till the last man was exterminated,—what astonishes me is, that they take so sensible a view of their situation, and accept it so frankly; and that you, a Rebel, and I, a Yankee, are sitting on this stage talking over the bloody business so good-naturedly!”

“Well, it is astonishing, when you think of it! Southern men and Northern men ride together in the trains, and stop at the same hotels, as if we were all one people,—as indeed we are: one nation now,” he added, “as we never were before, and never could have been without the war.”

I got down at the hotel, washed and brushed away the dust of travel, and went out to the dining-room. There the first thing that met my eye was a pair of large wooden fans, covered with damask cloth which afforded an ample flap to each, suspended over the table, and set in motion by means of a rope dropped from a pulley by the door. At the end of the rope was a shining negro-boy about ten years old, pulling as if it were the rope of a fire-bell, and the whole town were in flames. The fans swayed to and fro, a fine breeze blew all up and down the table, and not a fly was to be seen. I noticed before long, however, that the little darkey’s industry was of an intermittent sort; for at times he would cease pulling altogether, until the landlady passed that way, when he would seem to hear the cries of fire again, and once more fall to ringing his silent alarm-bell in the most violent manner.

The landlady was the manager of the house; and I naturally took her to be a widow until her husband was pointed out to me,—a mere tavern lounger, of no account any way. It is quite common to find Virginia hotels kept in this manner. The wife does the work; the husband takes his ease in his inn. The business goes in her name;—he is the sleeping partner.

After dinner I went out to view the town. As I stood looking at the empty walls of the gutted court-house, a sturdy old man approached. He stopped to answer my questions, and pointing at the havoc made by shells, exclaimed,—

“You see the result of the vanity of Virginia!”

“Are you a Virginian!”

“I am; but that is no reason why I should be blind to the faults of my State. It was the vanity of Virginia, and nothing else, that caused all our trouble.”

(Here was another name for “State pride.”)

“You were not very much in favor of secession, I take it?”

“In favor of it!” he exclaimed, kindling. “Didn’t they have me in jail here nine weeks because I would not vote for it? If I hadn’t been an old man, they would have hung me. Ah, I told them how it would be, from the first; but they wouldn’t believe me. Now they see! Look at this ruined city! Look at the farms and plantations laid waste! Look at the complete paralysis of business; the rich reduced to poverty; the men and boys with one arm, one leg, or one hand; the tens of thousands of graves; the broken families;—it is all the result of vanity! vanity!”

He showed me the road to the Heights, and we parted on the corner.

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XIII. THE FIELD OF FREDERICKSBURG

Fredericksburg stands upon a ridge on the right bank of the river. Behind the town is a plain, with a still more elevated ridge beyond. From the summit of the last you obtain an excellent view of the battle-field; the plain below the town where Hooker fought; the heights on the opposite side of the river manned by our batteries; the fields on the left; and the plain between the ridge and the town, where the frightfullest slaughter was.

Along by the foot of the crest, just where it slopes off to the plain, runs a road with a wall of heavy quarried stones on each side. In this road the Rebels lay concealed when the first attempt was made to storm the Heights. The wall on the lower side, towards the town, is the “stone wall” of history. It was a perfect breastwork, of great strength, and in the very best position that could have been chosen. The earth from the fields is more or less banked up against it; and this, together with the weeds and bushes which grew there, served to conceal it from our men. The sudden cruel volley of flame and lead which poured over it into their very faces, scarce a dozen paces distant, as they charged, was the first intimation they received of any enemy below the crest. No troops could stand that near and deadly fire. They broke, and leaving the ground strown with the fallen, retreated to the “ravine,”—a deep ditch with a little stream flowing through it, in the midst of the plain.

“Just when they turned to run, that was the worst time for them!” said a young Rebel I met on the Heights. “Then our men had nothing to fear; but they just rose right up and let ’em have it! Every charge your troops made afterwards, it was the same. The infantry in the road, and the artillery on these Heights, just mowed them down in swaths! You never saw anything look as that plain did after the battle. Saturday morning, before the fight, it was brown; Sunday it was all blue; Monday it was white, and Tuesday it was red.”

I asked him to explain this seeming riddle.

“Don’t you see? Before the fight there was just the field. Next it was covered all over with your fellows in blue clothes. Saturday night the blue clothes were stripped off, and only their white under-clothes left. Monday night these were stripped off, and Tuesday they lay all in their naked skins.”

“Who stripped the dead in that way?”

“It was mostly done by the North Carolinians. They are the triflin’est set of men!”

“What do you mean by triflin’est?”

“They ha’n’t got no sense. They’ll stoop to anything. They’re more like savages than civilized men. They say ‘we ’uns’ and ‘you ’uns,’ and all such outlandish phrases. They’ve got a great long tone to their voice, like something wild.”

“Were you in the battle?”

“Yes, I was in all of Saturday’s fight. My regiment was stationed on the hill down on the right there. We could see everything. Your men piled up their dead for breastworks. It was an awful sight when the shells struck them, and exploded! The air, for a minute, would be just full of legs and arms and pieces of trunks. Down by the road there we dug out a wagon-load of muskets. They had been piled up by your fellows, and dirt thrown over them, for a breastwork. But the worst sight I saw was three days afterwards. I didn’t mind the heaps of dead, nor nothing. But just a starving dog sitting by a corpse, which he wouldn’t let anybody come near, and which he never left night nor day;—by George, that just made me cry! We finally had to shoot the dog to get at the man to bury him.”

The young Rebel thought our army might have been easily destroyed after Saturday’s battle,—at least that portion of it which occupied Fredericksburg. “We had guns on that point that could have cut your pontoon bridge in two; and then our artillery could have blown Burnside all to pieces, or have compelled his surrender.”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

“Because General Lee was too humane. He didn’t want to kill so many men.”

A foolish reason, but it was the best the young man could offer. The truth is, however, Burnside’s army was in a position of extreme danger, after its failure to carry the Heights, and had not Lee been diligently expecting another attack, instead of a retreat, he might have subjected it to infinite discomfiture. It was to do us more injury, and not less, that he delayed to destroy the pontoon bridge and shell the town while our troops were in it.

The young man gloried in that great victory.

“But,” said I, “what did you gain? It was all the worse for you that you succeeded then. That victory only prolonged the war, and involved greater loss. We do not look at those transient triumphs; we look at the grand result. The Confederacy was finally swept out, and we are perfectly satisfied.”

“Well, so am I,” he replied, looking me frankly in the face. “I tell you, if we had succeeded in establishing a separate government, this would have been the worst country, for a poor man, under the sun.”

“How so?”

“There would have been no chance for white labor. Every rich man would have owned his nigger mason, his nigger carpenter, his nigger blacksmith; and the white mechanic, as well as the white farm-laborer, would have been crushed out.”

“You think, then, the South will be better off without slavery?”

“Certainly, I do. So does every white man that has to work for a living, if he isn’t a fool.”

“Then why did you fight for it?”

“We wasn’t fighting for slavery; we was fighting for our independence. That’s the way the most of us understood it; though we soon found out it was the rich man’s war, and not the pore man’s. We was fighting against our own interests, that’s shore!”

There is a private cemetery on the crest, surrounded by a brick wall. Burnside’s artillery had not spared it. I looked over the wall, which was badly smashed in places, and saw the overthrown monuments and broken tombstones lying on the ground. The heights all around were covered with weeds, and scarred by Rebel intrenchments; here and there was an old apple-tree; and I marked the ruins of two or three small brick houses.

On the brow of the hill, overlooking the town, is the Marye estate, one of the finest about Fredericksburg before the blast of battle struck it. The house was large and elegant, occupying a beautiful site, and surrounded by terraces and shady lawns. Now if you would witness the results of artillery and infantry firing, visit that house. The pillars of the porch, built of brick, and covered with a cement of lime and white sand, were speckled with the marks of bullets. Shells and solid shot had made sad havoc with the walls and the wood-work inside. The windows were shivered, the partitions torn to pieces, and the doors perforated.

I found a gigantic negro at work at a carpenter’s bench in one of the lower rooms. He seemed glad to receive company, and took me from the basement to the zinc-covered roof, showing me all the more remarkable shot-holes.

“De Rebel sharpshooters was in de house; dat’s what made de Yankees shell it so.”

“Where were the people who lived here?”

“Dey all lef’ but me. I stopped to see de fight. I tell ye, I wouldn’t stop to see anoder one! I thought I was go’n’ to have fine fun, and tell all about it. I heerd de fight, but I didn’t see it!”

“Were you frightened?”

“Hoo!” flinging up his hands with a ludicrous expression. “Don’t talk about skeered! I never was so skeered since I was bo’n! I stood hyer by dis sher winder; I ’spected to see de whole of it; I know I was green! I was look’n’ to see de fir’n’ down below dar, when a bullet come by me, h’t! quick as dat. ‘Time fo’ me to be away f’om hyer!’ and I started; but I’d no sooner turned about, when de bullets begun to strike de house jes’ like dat!” drumming with his fingers. “I went down-stars, and out dis sher house, quicker ’n any man o’ my size ever went out a house befo’e! Come, and I’ll show you whar I was hid.”

It was in the cellar of a little dairy-house, of which nothing was left but the walls.

“I got in thar wid anoder cullud man. I thought I was as skeered as anybody could be; but whew! he was twicet as skeered as I was. B-r-r-r-r! b-r-r-r-r! de fir’n’ kep’ up a reg’lar noise like dat, all day long. Every time a shell struck anywhar near, I knowed de next would kill me. ‘Jim,’ says I, ‘now de next shot will be our own!’ Dem’s de on’y wu’ds I spoke; but he was so skeered he never spoke at all.”

“Were you here at the fight the year after?”

“Dat was when Shedwick [Sedgwick] come. I thought if dar was go’n’ to be any fight’n’, I’d leave dat time, shore. I hitched up my oxen, think’n’ I’d put out, but waited fo’ de mo’nin’ to see. Dat was Sunday mo’nin’. I hadn’t slep’ none, so I jest thought I’d put my head on my hand a minute till it growed light. I hadn’t mo’e ’n drapped asleep; I’d nodded oncet or twicet: so;” illustrating; “no longer ’n dat; when—c-r-r-r-r,—I looked up,—all de wu’ld was fir’n’! Shedwick’s men dey run up de road, got behind de batteries on dis sher hill, captured every one; and I never knowed how dey done it so quick. Dat was enough fo’ me. If dar’s go’n’ to be any mo’e fight’n’, I go whar da’ an’t no wa’!”

“A big fellow like you tell about being skeered!” said the young Rebel.

“I knowed de bigger a man was, de bigger de mark fo’ de balls. I weighs two hundred and fifty-two pounds.”

“Where is your master?” I asked.

“I ha’n’t got no master now; Mr. Marye was my master. He’s over de mountain. I was sold at auction in Fredericksburg oncet, and he bought me fo’ twelve hundred dolla’s. Now he pays me wages,—thirty dolla’s a month. I wo’ked in de mill while de wa’ lasted. Men brought me co’n to grind. Some brought a gallon; some brought two qua’ts; it was a big load if anybody brought half a bushel. Dat’s de way folks lived. Now he’s got anoder man in de mill, and he pays me for tak’n’ keer o’ dis sher place and fitt’n’ it up a little.”

“Are you a carpenter?”

“Somethin’ of a carpenter; I kin do whatever I turns my hand to.”

The young Rebel afterwards corroborated this statement. Although he did not like niggers generally, and wished they were all out of the country, he said Charles (for that was the giant’s name) was an exception; and he gave him high praise for the fidelity and sagacity he had shown in saving his master’s property from destruction.

While we were sitting under the portico, a woman came up the hill, and began to talk and jest in a familiar manner with Charles. I noticed that my Rebel acquaintance looked exceedingly disgusted.

“That woman,” said he to me, “has got a nigger husband. That’s what makes her talk that way. White folks won’t associate with her, and she goes with the darkies. We used to have lynch law for them cases. Such things wa’n’t allowed. A nigger had better have been dead than be caught living with a white woman. The house would get torn down over their heads some night, and nobody would know who did it.”

“Are you sure such things were not allowed? Five out of six of your colored population have white blood in their veins. How do you account for it?”

“O, that comes from white fathers!”

“And slave mothers,” said I. “That I suppose was all right; but to a stranger it doesn’t look very consistent. You would lynch a poor black man for living in wedlock with a white woman, and receive into the best society white men who were raising up illegitimate slave children by their colored mistresses.”

“Yes, that’s just what was done; there’s no use denying it. I’ve seen children sold at auction in Fredericksburg by their own fathers. But nobody ever thought it was just right. It always happened when the masters was in debt, and their property had to be taken.”

The field below the stone wall belonged to this young man’s mother. It was now a cornfield; a sturdy crop was growing where the dead had lain in heaps.

“Soon as Richmond fell I came home; and ’Lijah and I went to work and put in that piece of corn. I didn’t wait for Lee’s surrender. Thousands did the same. We knew that if Richmond fell, the war would be removed from Virginia, and we had no notion of going to fight in other States. The Confederate army melted away just like frost in the sun, so that only a small part of it remained to be surrendered.”

He invited me to go through the cornfield and see where the dead were buried. Near the middle of the piece a strip some fifteen yards long and four wide had been left uncultivated. “There’s a thousand of your men buried in this hole; that’s the reason we didn’t plant here.” Some distance below the cornfield was the cellar of an ice-house, in which five hundred Union soldiers were buried. And yet these were but a portion of the slain; all the surrounding fields were scarred with graves.

Returning to Fredericksburg, I visited the plain northwest of the town, also memorable for much hard fighting on that red day of December. I found a pack of government wagons there, an encampment of teamsters, and a few Yankee soldiers, who told me they were tired of doing nothing, and “three times as fast for going home” as they were before the war closed.

In the midst of this plain, shaded by a pleasant grove, stands a brown brick mansion said to have been built by George Washington for his mother’s family. Not far off is a monument erected to Mary, the mother of Washington, whose mortal remains rest here. It is of marble, measuring some nine feet square and fifteen in height, unfinished, capped with a mat of weeds, and bearing no inscription but the names of visitors who should have blushed to desecrate the tomb of the venerated dead. The monument has in other ways been sadly misused; in the first place, by balls which nicked and chipped it during the battle; and afterwards by relic-hunters, who, in their rage for carrying away some fragment of it, have left scarce a corner of cornice or pilaster unbroken.

I had afterwards many walks about Fredericksburg, the most noteworthy of which was a morning-visit to the Lacy House, where Burnside had his head-quarters. Crossing the Rappahannock on the pontoon bridge, I climbed the stone steps leading from terrace to terrace, and reached the long-neglected grounds and the old-fashioned Virginia mansion. It was entirely deserted. The doors were wide open, or broken from their hinges, the windows smashed, the floors covered with rubbish, and the walls with the names of soldiers and regiments, or pictures cut from the illustrated newspapers.

The windows command a view of Fredericksburg and the battle-field; and there I stood, and saw in imagination the fight reënacted,—the pontoniers at their work in the misty morning, the sharpshooters in rifle-pits and houses opposite driving them from it with their murderous fire, the shelling of the town, the troops crossing, the terrible roaring battle, the spouting flames, the smoke, the charging parties, and the horrible slaughter;—I saw and heard it all again, and fancied for a time that I was the commanding general, whose eyes beheld, and whose wrung heart felt, what he would gladly have given his own life to prevent or retrieve.

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XIV. TO CHANCELLORSVILLE

In conversation with my Rebel acquaintance at the Marye House, I had learned that his friend “’Lijah” sometimes conveyed travellers over the more distant battle-fields. Him, therefore, I sent to engage with his horse and buggy for the following day.

Breakfast was scarcely over the next morning, when, as I chanced to look from my hotel-window, I saw a thin-faced countryman drive up to the door in an old one-horse wagon with two seats, and a box half filled with corn-stalks. I was admiring the anatomy of the horse, every prominent bone of which could be counted through his skin, when I heard the man inquiring for me. It was “’Lijah,” with his “horse and buggy.”

I was inclined to criticise the establishment, which was not altogether what I had been led to expect.

“I allow he a’n’t a fust-class hoss,” said Elijah. “Only give three dollars for him. Feed is skurce and high. But let him rest this winter, and git some meal in him, and he’ll make a plough crack next spring.”

“What are you going to do with those corn-stalks?”

“Fodder for the hoss. They’re all the fodder he’ll git till night; for we’re go’n’ into a country whar thar’s noth’n’ mo’e for an animal to eat than thar is on the palm of my hand.”

I took a seat beside him, and made use of the stalks by placing a couple of bundles between my back and the sharp board which travellers were expected to lean against. Elijah cracked his whip, the horse frisked his tail, and struck into a cow-trot which pleased him.

“You see, he’ll snake us over the ground right peart!”

He proceeded to tantalize me by telling what a mule he had, and what a little mare he had, at home.

“She certainly goes over the ground! I believe she can run ekal to anything in this country for about a mile. But she’s got a set of legs under her jest like a sheep’s legs.”

He could not say enough in praise of the mule.

“Paid eight hundred dollars for him in Confederate money. He earned a living for the whole family last winter. I used to go reg’lar up to Chancellorsville and the Wilderness, buy up a box of clothing, and go down in Essex and trade it off for corn.”

“What sort of clothing?”

“Soldiers’ clothes from the battle-fields. Some was flung away, and some, I suppose, was stripped off the dead. Any number of families jest lived on what they got from the Union armies in that way. They’d pick up what garments they could lay hands on, wash ’em up and sell ’em. I’d take a blanket, and git half a bushel of meal for it down in Essex. Then I’d bring the meal back, and git maybe two blankets, or a blanket and a coat, for it. All with that little mule. He’ll haul a load for ye! He’ll stick to the ground go’n’ up hill jest like a dry-land tarrapin! But I take the mare when I’m in a hurry; she makes them feet rattle ag’in the ground!”

We took the plank-road to Chancellorsville, passing through a waste country of weeds or undergrowth, like every other part of Virginia which I had yet seen.

“All this region through yer,” said Elijah, “used to be grow’d up to corn and as beautiful clover as ever you see. But since the wa’, it’s all turned out to bushes and briers and hog-weeds. It’s gitt’n’ a start ag’in now. I’ll show ’em how to do it. If we git in a crap o’ wheat this fall, which I don’t know if we sha’n’t, we kin start three big teams, and whirl up twenty acres of land directly. That mule,” etc.

Elijah praised the small farmers.

“People in ordinary sarcumstances along yer are a mighty industrious people. It’s the rich that keep this country down. The way it generally is, a few own too much, and the rest own noth’n’. I know hundreds of thousands of acres of land put to no uset, which, if it was cut up into little farms, would make the country look thrifty. This is mighty good land; clay bottom; holds manure jest like a chany bowl does water. But the rich ones jest scratched over a little on’t with their slave labor, and let the rest go. They wouldn’t sell; let a young man go to ’em to buy, and they’d say they didn’t want no poo’ whites around ’em; they wouldn’t have one, if they could keep shet of ’em. And what was the result? Young men would go off to the West, if they was enterpris’n’, and leave them that wa’n’t enterpris’n’ hyer to home. Then as the old heads died off, the farms would run down. The young women would marry the lazy young men, and raise up families of lazy children.”

The country all about Fredericksburg was very unhealthy. Elijah, on making inquiries, could hear of scarcely a family on the road exempt from sickness.

“It was never so till sence the wa’. Now we have chills and fever, jest like they do in a new country. It’s owin’ to the land all comin’ up to weeds; the dew settles in ’em and they rot, and that fills the air with the ager. I’ve had the ager myself till about a fortnight ago; then soon as I got shet of that, the colic took me. Eat too much on a big appetite, I suppose. I like to live well; like to see plenty of everything on the table, and then I like to see every man eat a heap.”

I commended Elijah’s practical sense; upon which he replied,—

“The old man is right ignorant; can’t read the fust letter; never went to school a day; but the old man is right sharp!”

He was fond of speaking of himself in this way. He thought education a good thing, but allowed that all the education in the world could not give a man sense. He was fifty years old, and had got along thus far in life very well.

“I reckon thar’s go’n’ to be a better chance for the poo’ man after this. The Union bein’ held together was the greatest thing that could have happened for us.”

“And yet you fought against it.”

“I was in the Confederate army two year and a half. I was opposed to secession; but I got my head a little turned after the State went out, and I enlisted. Then, when I had time to reconsider it all over, I diskivered we was wrong. I told the boys so.

“’Boys,’ says I, ‘when my time’s up, I’m go’n’ out of the army, and you won’t see me in ag’in.’

“’You can’t help that, old man,’ says they; ‘fo’ by that time the conscript law’ll be changed so’s to go over the heads of older men than you.’

“’Then,’ says I, ‘the fust chance presents itself, I fling down my musket and go spang No’th.’

“They had me put under arrest for that, and kep’ me in the guard-house seven months. I liked that well enough. I was saved a deal of hard march’n’ and lay’n’ out in the cold, that winter.

“’Why don’t ye come in boys,’ says I, ‘and have a warm?’

“I knowed what I was about! The old man was right ignorant, but the old man was right sharp!”

We passed the line of Sedgwick’s retreat a few miles from Fredericksburg.

“Shedrick’s men was in line acrost the road hyer, extendin’ into the woods on both sides; they had jest butchered their meat, and was ishyin’ rations and beginnin’ to cook their suppers, when Magruder struck ’em on the left flank.” (Elijah was wrong; it was not Magruder, but McLaws. These local guides make many such mistakes, and it is necessary to be on one’s guard against them.) “They jest got right up and skedaddled! The whole line jest faced to the right, and put for Banks’s Ford. Thar’s the road they went. They left it piled so full of wagons, Magruder couldn’t follah, but his artillery jest run around by another road I’ll show ye, hard as ever they could lay their feet to the ground, wheeled their guns in position on the bluffs by the time Shedrick got cleverly to crossin’, and played away. The way they heaped up Shedrick’s men was awful!”

Every mile or two we came to a small farm-house, commonly of logs, near which there was usually a small crop of corn growing.

“Every man after he got home, after the fall of Richmond, put in to raise a little somethin’ to eat. Some o’ the corn looks poo’ly, but it beats no corn at all, all to pieces.”

We came to one field which Elijah pronounced a “monstrous fine crap.” But he added,—

“I’ve got thirty acres to home not a bit sorrier ’n that. Ye see, that mule of mine,” etc.

I noticed—what I never saw in the latitude of New England—that the fodder had been pulled below the ears and tied in little bundles on the stalks to cure. Ingenious shifts for fences had been resorted to by the farmers. In some places the planks of the worn-out plank-road had been staked and lashed together to form a temporary enclosure. But the most common fence was what Elijah called “bresh wattlin’.” Stakes were first driven into the ground, then pine or cedar brush bent in between them and beaten down with a maul.

“Ye kin build a wattlin’ fence that way so tight a rabbit can’t git through.”

On making inquiries, I found that farms of fine land could be had all through this region for ten dollars an acre.

Elijah hoped that men from the North would come in and settle.

“But,” said he, “’t would be dangerous for any one to take possession of a confiscated farm. He wouldn’t live a month.”

The larger land-owners are now more willing to sell.

“Right smart o’ their property was in niggers; they’re pore now, and have to raise money.

“The emancipation of slavery,” added Elijah, “is wo’kin’ right for the country mo’e ways ’an one. The’ a’n’t two men in twenty, in middlin’ sarcumstances, but that’s beginnin’ to see it. I’m no friend to the niggers, though. They ought all to be druv out of the country. They won’t wo’k as long as they can steal. I have my little crap o’ corn, and wheat, and po’k. When night comes, I must sleep; then the niggers come and steal all I’ve got.”

I pressed him to give an instance of the negroes’ stealing his property. He could not say that they had taken anything from him lately, but they “used to” rob his cornfields and hen-roosts, and “they would again.” Had he ever caught them at it? No, he could not say that he ever had. Then how did he know that the thieves were negroes? He knew it, because “niggers would steal.”

“Won’t white folks steal too, sometimes?”

“Yes,” said Elijah, “some o’ the poo’ whites are a durned sight wus’n the niggers!”

“Then why not drive them out of the country too? You see,” said I, “your charges against the negroes are vague, and amount to nothing.”

“I own,” he replied, “thar’s now and then one that’s ekal to any white man. Thar’s one a-comin’ thar.”

A load of wood was approaching, drawn by two horses abreast and a mule for leader. A white-haired old negro was riding the mule.

“He is the greatest man!” said Elijah, after we had passed. “He’s been the support of his master’s family for twenty year and over. He kin manage a heap better’n his master kin. The’ a’n’t a farmer in the country kin beat him. He keeps right on jest the same now he’s free; though I suppose he gits wages.”

“You acknowledge, then, that some of the negroes are superior men?”

“Yes, thar’s about ten in a hundred, honest and smart as anybody.”

“That,” said I, “is a good many. Do you suppose you could say more of the white race, if it had just come out of slavery?”

“I don’t believe,” said Elijah, “that ye could say as much!”

We passed the remains of the house “whar Harrow was shot.” It had been burned to the ground.

“You’ve heerd about Harrow; he was Confederate commissary; he stole mo’e hosses f’om the people, and po’ed the money down his own throat, than would have paid fo’ fo’ty men like him, if he was black.”

A mile or two farther on, we came to another house.

“Hyer’s whar the man lives that killed Harrow. He was in the army, and because he objected to some of Harrow’s doin’s, Harrow had him arrested, and treated him very much amiss. That ground into his conscience and feelin’s, and he deserted fo’ no other puppose than to shoot him. He’s a mighty smart fellah! He’ll strike a man side the head, and soon ’s his fist leaves it, his foot’s thar. He shot Harrow in that house you see burnt to the ground, and then went spang to Washington. O, he was sharp!”

On our return we met the slayer of Harrow riding home from Fredericksburg on a mule,—a fine-looking young fellow, of blonde complexion, a pleasant countenance, finely chiselled nose and lips, and an eye full of sunshine. “Jest the best-hearted, nicest young fellah in the we’ld, till ye git him mad; then look out!” I think it is often the most attractive persons, of fine temperaments, who are capable of the most terrible wrath when roused.

The plank-road was in such a ruined condition that nobody thought of driving on it, although the dirt road beside it was in places scarcely better. The back of the seat was cruel, notwithstanding the corn-stalks. But by means of much persuasion, enforced by a good whip, Elijah kept the old horse jogging on. Oak-trees, loaded with acorns, grew beside the road. Black-walnuts, already beginning to lose their leaves, hung their delicate balls in the clear light over our heads. Poke-weeds, dark with ripening berries, wild grapes festooning bush and tree, sumachs thrusting up through the foliage their sanguinary spears, persimmon-trees, gum-trees, red cedars, with their bluish-green clusters, chestnut-oaks, and chincapins, adorned the wild wayside.

So we approached Chancellorsville, twelve miles from Fredericksburg. Elijah was raised in that region, and knew everybody.

“Many a frolic have I had runnin’ the deer through these woods! Soon as the dogs started one, he’d put fo’ the river, cross, take a turn on t’other side, and it wouldn’t be an hour ’fo’e he’d be back ag’in. Man I lived with used to have a mare that was trained to hunt; if she was in the field and heard the dogs, she’d whirl her tail up on her back, lope the fences, and go spang to the United States Ford, git thar ’fo’e the dogs would, and hunt as well without a rider as with one.”

But since then a far different kind of hunting, a richer blood than the deer’s, and other sounds than the exciting yelp of the dogs, had rendered that region famous.

“Hyer we come to the Chancellorsville farm. Many a poo’ soldier’s knapsack was emptied of his clothes, after the battle, along this road!” said Elijah, remembering last winter’s business with his mule.

The road runs through a large open field bounded by woods. The marks of hard fighting were visible from afar off. A growth of saplings edging the woods on the south had been killed by volleys of musketry: they looked like thickets of bean-poles. The ground everywhere, in the field and in the woods, was strewed with mementos of the battle,—rotting knapsacks and haversacks, battered canteens and tin cups, and fragments of clothing which Elijah’s customers had not deemed it worth the while to pick up. On each side of the road were breastworks and rifle-pits extending into the woods. The clearing, once a well-fenced farm of grain-fields and clover-lots, was now a dreary and deserted common. Of the Chancellorsville House, formerly a large brick tavern, only the half-fallen walls and chimney-stacks remained. Here General Hooker had his head-quarters until the wave of battle on Sunday morning rolled so hot and so near that he was compelled to withdraw. The house was soon after fired by a Rebel shell, when full of wounded men, and burned.

“Every place ye see these big bunches of weeds, that’s whar tha’ was hosses or men buried,” said Elijah. “These holes are whar the bones have been dug up for the bone-factory at Fredericksburg.”

It was easy for the bone-seekers to determine where to dig. The common was comparatively barren, except where grew those gigantic clumps of weeds. I asked Elijah if he thought many human bones went to the factory.

“Not unless by mistake. But people a’n’t always very partic’lar about mistakes thar’s money to be made by.”

Seeing a small enclosure midway between the road and the woods on the south, we walked to it, and found it a burying-ground ridged with unknown graves. Not a head-board, not an inscription, indicated who were the tenants of that little lonely field. And Elijah knew nothing of its history; it had been set apart, and the scattered dead had been gathered together and buried there, since he passed that way.

We found breastworks thrown up all along by the plank-road west of the farm,—the old worn planks having been put to good service in their construction. The tree-trunks pierced by balls, the boughs lopped off by shells, the strips of timber cut to pieces by artillery and musketry fire, showed how desperate the struggle on that side had been. The endeavors of the Confederates to follow up with an overwhelming victory Jackson’s swift and telling blows on our right, and the equally determined efforts of our men to retrieve that disaster, rendered this the scene of a furious encounter.

Elijah thought that if Jackson had not been killed by his own men after delivering that thunderstroke, Hooker would have been annihilated. “Stonewall” was undoubtedly the enemy’s best fighting General. His death was to them equal to the loss of many brigades. With regard to the manner of his death there can be no longer any doubt. I have conversed with Confederate officers who were in the battle, all of whom agree as to the main fact. General Jackson, after shattering our right wing, posted his pickets at night with directions to fire upon any man or body of men that might approach. He afterwards rode forward to reconnoitre, returned inadvertently by the same road, and was shot by his own orders.

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XV. THE WILDERNESS

The Battle of Bull Run in 1861, Pope’s campaign, and Burnside’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, and, lastly, Hooker’s unsuccessful attempt at Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863, had shown how hard a road to Richmond this was to travel. Repeatedly, as we tried it and failed, the hopes of the Confederacy rose exultant; the heart of the North sank as often, heavy with despair. McClellan’s Peninsular route had resulted still more fatally. We all remember the anguish and anxiety of those days. But the heart of the North shook off its despair, listened to no timid counsels; it was growing fierce and obdurate. We no longer received the news of defeat with cries of dismay, but with teeth close-set, a smile upon the quivering lips, and a burning fire within. Had the Rebels triumphed again? Then so much the worse for them! Had we been once more repulsed with slaughter from their strong line of defences? Was the precious blood poured out before them all in vain? At last it should not be in vain! Though it should cost a new thirty years’ war and a generation of lives, the red work we had begun must be completed; ultimate failure was impossible, ultimate triumph certain.

This inflexible spirit found its embodiment in the leader of the final campaigns against the Rebel capital. It was the deep spirit of humanity itself, ready to make the richest sacrifices, calm, determined, inexorable, moving steadily towards the great object to be achieved. It has been said that General Grant did not consider the lives of his men. Then the people did not consider them. But the truth lies here: precious as were those lives, something lay beyond far more precious, and they were the needful price paid for it. We had learned the dread price, we had duly weighed the worth of the object to be purchased; what then was the use of hesitating and higgling?

We were approaching the scene of Grant’s first great blow aimed at the gates of the Rebel capital. On the field of Chancellorsville you already tread the borders of the field of the Wilderness,—if that can be called a field which is a mere interminable forest, slashed here and there with roads.

Passing straight along the plank-road, we came to a large farm-house, which had been gutted by soldiers, and but recently reoccupied. It was still in a scarcely habitable condition. However, we managed to obtain, what we stood greatly in need of, a cup of cold water. I observed that it tasted strongly of iron.

“The reason of that is, we took twelve camp-kettles out of the well,” said the man of the house, “and nobody knows how many more there are down there.”

The place is known as Locust Grove. In the edge of the forest, but a little farther on, is the Wilderness Church,—a square-framed building, which showed marks of such usage as every uninhabited house receives at the hands of a wild soldiery. Red Mars has little respect for the temples of the Prince of Peace.

“Many a time have I been to meet’n’ in that shell, and sot on hard benches, and heard long sermons!” said Elijah. “But I reckon it’ll be a long while befo’e them doo’s are darkened by a congregation ag’in. Thar a’n’t the population through hyer thar used to be. Oncet we’d have met a hundred wagons on this road go’n’ to market; but I count we ha’n’t met mo’e ’n a dozen to-day.”

Not far beyond the church we approached two tall guide-posts erected where the road forks. The one on the right pointed the way to the “Wilderness National Cemetery, No. 1, 4 miles,” by the Orange Court-House turnpike. The other indicated the “Wilderness National Cemetery, No. 2,” by the plank-road.

“All this has been done sence I was this way,” said Elijah.

We kept the plank-road,—or rather the clay road beside it, which stretched before us dim in the hollows, and red as brick on the hill-sides. We passed some old fields, and entered the great Wilderness,—a high and dry country, thickly overgrown with dwarfish timber, chiefly scrub oaks, pines, and cedars. Poles lashed to trees for tent-supports indicated where our regiments had encamped; and soon we came upon abundant evidences of a great battle. Heavy breastworks thrown up on Brock’s cross-road, planks from the plank-road piled up and lashed against trees in the woods, to form a shelter for our pickets, knapsacks, haversacks, pieces of clothing, fragments of harness, tin plates, canteens, some pierced with balls, fragments of shells, with here and there a round-shot, or a shell unexploded, straps, buckles, cartridge-boxes, socks, old shoes, rotting letters, desolate tracts of perforated and broken trees,—all these signs, and others sadder still, remained to tell their silent story of the great fight of the Wilderness.

A cloud passed over the sun: all the scene became sombre, and hushed with a strange brooding stillness, broken only by the noise of twigs crackling under my feet, and distant growls of thunder. A shadow fell upon my heart also, as from the wing of the Death-Angel, as I wandered through the woods, meditating upon what I saw. Where were the feet that wore those empty shoes? Where was he whose proud waist was buckled in that belt? Some soldier’s heart was made happy by that poor, soiled, tattered, illegible letter, which rain and mildew have not spared; some mother’s, sister’s, wife’s, or sweetheart’s hand, doubtless, penned it; it is the broken end of a thread which unwinds a whole life-history, could we but follow it rightly. Where is that soldier now? Did he fall in the fight, and does his home know him no more? Has the poor wife or stricken mother waited long for the answer to that letter, which never came, and will never come? And this cap, cut in two by a shot, and stiff with a strange incrustation,—a small cap, a mere boy’s, it seems,—where now the fair head and wavy hair that wore it? Oh, mother and sisters at home, do you still mourn for your drummer-boy? Has the story reached you,—how he went into the fight to carry off his wounded comrades, and so lost his life for their sakes?—for so I imagine the tale which will never be told.

And what more appalling spectacle is this? In the cover of thick woods, the unburied remains of two soldiers,—two skeletons side by side, two skulls almost touching each other, like the cheeks of sleepers! I came upon them unawares as I picked my way among the scrub oaks. I knew that scores of such sights could be seen here a few weeks before; but the United States Government had sent to have its unburied dead collected together in the two national cemeteries of the Wilderness; and I had hoped the work was faithfully done.

“They was No’th-Carolinians; that’s why they didn’t bury ’em,” said Elijah, after a careful examination of the buttons fallen from the rotted clothing.

The ground where they lay had been fought over repeatedly, and the dead of both sides had fallen there. The buttons may, therefore, have told a true story: North-Carolinians they may have been; yet I could not believe that the true reason why they had not been decently interred. It must have been that these bodies, and others we found afterwards, were overlooked by the party sent to construct the cemeteries. It was shameful negligence, to say the least.

The cemetery was near by,—a little clearing in the woods by the roadside, thirty yards square, surrounded by a picket fence, and comprising seventy trenches, each containing the remains of I know not how many dead. Each trench was marked with a head-board inscribed with the invariable words:

“Unknown United States soldiers, killed May, 1864.”

Elijah, to whom I read the inscription, said, pertinently, that the words United States soldiers indicated plainly that it had not been the intention to bury Rebels there. No doubt: but these might at least have been buried in the woods where they fell.

As a grim sarcasm on this neglect, somebody had flung three human skulls, picked up in the woods, over the paling into the cemetery, where they lay blanching among the graves.

Close by the southeast corner of the fence were three or four Rebel graves with old head-boards. Elijah called my attention to them, and wished me to read what the head-boards said. The main fact indicated was, that those buried there were North-Carolinians. Elijah considered this somehow corroborative of his theory derived from the buttons. The graves were shallow, and the settling of the earth over the bodies had left the feet of one of the poor fellows sticking out.

The shadows which darkened the woods, and the ominous thunder-growls, culminated in a shower. Elijah crawled under his wagon; I sought the shelter of a tree; the horse champed his fodder, and we ate our luncheon. How quietly upon the leaves, how softly upon the graves of the cemetery, fell the perpendicular rain! The clouds parted, and a burst of sunlight smote the Wilderness; the rain still poured, but every drop was illumined, and I seemed standing in a shower of silver meteors.

The rain over, and luncheon finished, I looked about for some solace to my palate after the dry sandwiches moistened only by the drippings from the tree,—seeking a dessert in the Wilderness. Summer grapes hung their just ripened clusters from the vine-laden saplings, and the chincapin bushes were starred with opening burrs. I followed a woodland path embowered with the glistening boughs, and plucked, and ate, and mused. The ground was level, and singularly free from the accumulations of twigs, branches, and old leaves with which forests usually abound. I noticed, however, many charred sticks and half-burnt roots and logs. Then the terrible recollection overtook me: these were the woods that were on fire during the battle. I called Elijah.

“Yes, all this was a flame of fire while the fight was go’n’ on. It was full of dead and wounded men. Cook and Stevens, farmers over hyer, men I know, heard the screams of the poor fellahs burnin’ up, and come and dragged many a one out of the fire, and laid ’em in the road.”

The woods were full of Rebel graves, with here and there a heap of half-covered bones, where several of the dead had been hurriedly buried together.

I had seen enough. We returned to the cemetery. Elijah hitched up his horse, and we drove back along the plank-road, cheered by a rainbow which spanned the Wilderness and moved its bright arch onward over Chancellorsville towards Fredericksburg, brightening and fading, and brightening still again, like the hope which gladdened the nation’s eye after Grant’s victory.

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XVI. SPOTTSYLVANIA COURT-HOUSE

Elijah wished to drive me the next day to Spottsylvania Court-House, and, as an inducement for me to employ him, promised to tackle up his mare. He also proposed various devices for softening the seats of his wagon. No ingenuity of plan, however, sufficed to cajole me. There was a livery-stable in Fredericksburg, and I had conceived a strong prejudice in its favor.

The next morning, accordingly, there might have been seen wheeling up to the tavern-door a shining vehicle,—a bran-new buggy with the virgin gloss upon it,—drawn by a prancing iron-gray in a splendid new harness. The sarcastic stable-man had witnessed my yesterday’s departure and return, and had evidently exhausted the resources of his establishment to furnish forth a dazzling contrast to Elijah’s sorry outfit. The driver was a youth who wore his cap rakishly over his left eyebrow. I took a seat by his side on a cushion of the softest, and presently might have been seen riding out of Fredericksburg in that brilliant style,—nay, was seen, by one certainly, who was cut to the heart. We drove by the “stonewall” road under the Heights, and passed a house by the corner of which a thin-visaged “old man” of fifty was watering a sad little beast at a well. The beast was “that mare”; and the old man was Elijah. I shall never forget the look he gave me. I bade him a cheerful good-morning; but his voice stuck in his throat; he could not say “good-morning.” Our twinkling wheels almost grazed the hubs of the old wagon standing in the road as we passed.

That I might have nothing to regret, the stable-keeper had given me a driver who was in the Spottsylvania battle.

“You cannot have seen much service, at your age,” I said, examining his boyish features.

“I was four year in de army, anyhow,” he replied, spitting tobacco-juice with an air of old experience. “I enlisted when I was thirteen. I was under de quartermaster at fust; but de last two year I was in de artillery.”

I observed that he used de for the almost invariably, with many other peculiarities of expression which betrayed early association with negroes.

“What is your name?”

“Richard H. Hicks.”

“What is your middle name?”

“I ha’n’t got no middle name.”

“What does the H stand for?”

“H stands for Hicks: Richard H. Hicks; dat’s what dey tell me.”

“Can’t you read?”

“No, I can’t read. I never went to school, and never had no chance to learn.”

Somehow this confession touched me with a sadness I had not felt even at the sight of the dead men in the woods. He, young, active, naturally intelligent, was dead to a world without which this world would seem to us a blank,—the world of literature. To him the page of a book, the column of a newspaper, was meaningless. Had he been an old man, or black, or stupid, I should not have been so much surprised. I thought of Shakspeare, David, the prophets, the poets, the romancers; and as my mind glanced from name to name on the glittering entablatures, I seemed to be standing in a glorious temple, with a blind youth at my side.

“Did you ever hear of Sir Walter Scott?”

“No, I never heerd of that Scott. But I know a William Scott.”

“Did you ever hear of Longfellow?”

“No, I never heerd of him?”

“Did you never hear of a great English poet called Lord Byron?”

“No, sir, I never knowed dar was such a man.”

What a gulf betwixt his mind and mine! Sitting side by side there, we were yet as far apart as the great globe’s poles.

“Do you mean to go through life in such ignorance?”

“I don’t know; I’d learn to read if I had de chance.”

“Find a chance! make a chance! Even the little negro boys are getting the start of you.”

“I reckon I’ll go to school some dis winter,” said he. “Dar’s go’n’ to be a better chance fo’ schools now; dat’s what dey say.”

“Why now?” I asked.

“I don’t know; on’y dey say so.”

“You think, then, it was a good thing that the Confederacy got used up and slavery abolished?”

“It mought be a good thing. All I know is, it’s so, and it can’t be ho’ped” (helped). “It suits me well enough. I’ve been gitt’n’ thirty dollars a month dis summer, and that’s twicet mo’e ’n I ever got befo’e.”

I could not discover that this youth of seventeen had ever given the great questions involving the welfare of his country a serious thought. However, the vague belief he had imbibed regarding better times coming in consequence of emancipation, interested me as a still further evidence of the convictions entertained by the poorer classes on this subject.

As we rode over the hills behind Fredericksburg, a young fellow came galloping after us on a mule.

“Whar ye go’n’, Dick?”

“I’m go’n’ to de battle-field wi’ dis gentleman.”

“He’s from the No’th, then,” said the young fellow.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because no South’n man ever goes to the battle-fields: we’ve seen enough of ’em.” He became very sociable as we rode along. “Ye see that apple-tree? I got a right good pair o’ pants off one o’ your soldier’s under that tree once.”

“Was he dead?”

“Yes. He was one of Sedgwick’s men; he was killed when Sedgwick took the Heights. Shot through the head. The pants wa’n’t hurt none.” And putting spurs to his mule, he galloped ahead.

I noticed that he and Richard, like many of the young men, white and black, I had seen about Fredericksburg, wore United States army trousers.

“Dey was all we could git one while,” said Richard. “I reckon half our boys ’u’d have had to go widout pants if it had n’t been for de Union army. Dar was right smart o’ trad’n’ done in Yankee clothes, last years o’ de wa’.”

“Did you rob a dead soldier of those you have on?”

“No; I bought dese in Fredericksburg. I never robbed a dead man.”

“But how did you know they were not taken from a corpse?”

“Mought be; but it couldn’t be ho’ped. A poo’ man can’t be choice.”

Richard expressed great contempt—inspired by envy, I thought—of the young chap riding the mule.

“United States gov’ment give away a hundred and fifty old wore-out mules in Fredericksburg, not long ago; so now every lazy fellow ye see can straddle his mule! He a’n’t nobody, though he thinks he’s a heavy coon-dog!”

“What do you mean by a heavy coon-dog?”

“Why, ye see, when a man owns a big plantation, and a heap o’ darkeys, and carries a heavy pocket, or if he’s do’n’ a big thing, den we call him a heavy coon-dog. Jeff Davis was a heavy coon-dog; but he’s a light coon-dog now!”

Our route lay through a rough, hilly country, never more than very thinly inhabited, and now scarcely that. About every two miles we passed a poor log house in the woods, or on the edge of overgrown fields,—sometimes tenantless, but oftener occupied by a pale, poverty-smitten family afflicted with the chills. I do not remember more than two or three framed houses on the road, and they looked scarcely less disconsolate than their log neighbors.

It is twelve miles from Fredericksburg to Spottsylvania Court-House. At the end of nine or ten miles we began to meet with signs of military operations,—skirmish-lines, rifle-pits, and graves by the roadside.

Rising a gentle ascent, we had a view of the Court-House, and of the surrounding country,—barren, hilly fields, with here and there a scattered tree, or clump of trees, commonly pines, and boundaries of heavier timber beyond. There were breastworks running in various directions,—along by the road, across the road, and diagonally over the crests. The country was all cut up with them; and I found the Rebel works strangely mixed up with our own. As our army advanced, it had possessed itself of the enemy’s rifle-pits, skirmish-line, and still more important intrenchments, and converted them to its own use.

Grant’s main line of breastworks, very heavy, constructed of rails and stakes and earth, crosses the road at nearly right angles, and stretches away out of sight on either side over the hills and into the woods. I was reminded of what Elijah had told me the day before at Brock’s Road, in the Wilderness. “Grant’s breastworks run thirty miles through the country, from near Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan, spang past Spottsylvany Court-House and the Mattapony River.”

The road to the Court-House runs south. On the left was Beverly’s house, and a shattered empty house on the right. Richard pointed out the hill on which his battery was stationed early in the battle. “We had to git away f’om dar, though. Your batteries drove us.”

We rode on to the Court-House: a goodly-brick building, with heavy pillars in front, one of which had been broken off by a shell, leaving a corner of the portico hanging in the air. There were but six other buildings of any importance in the place,—one jail, one tavern, (no school-house,) one private dwelling, and three churches; all of brick, and all more or less battered by artillery.

Entering the Court-House amid heaps of rubbish which littered the yard about the doors, I had the good fortune to find the county clerk at his desk. He received me politely, and offered to show me about the building. It had been well riddled by shot and shell; but masons and carpenters were at work repairing damages; so that there was a prospect of the county, in a few months, having a court-house again.

“What is most to be regretted,” the clerk said, “is the destruction of documents which can’t be restored. All the records and papers of the court were destroyed by the Union soldiers after they got possession.” And he showed me a room heaped with the fragments. It looked like a room in a rag-man’s warehouse.

Returning to his office, he invited me to sit down, and commenced talking freely of the condition and prospects of the country. The area of corn-land planted was small; but the soil had been resting two or three years, the season had been favorable, and the result was an excellent crop. “We shall probably have a surplus to dispose of for other necessaries.” The county had not one third the number of horses, nor one tenth the amount of stock, it had before the war. Many families were utterly destitute. They had nothing whatever to live upon until the corn-harvest; and many would have nothing then. The government had been feeding as many as fifteen hundred persons at one time.

“How many of these were blacks?”

“Perhaps one fifth.”

“How large a proportion of the population of the county are blacks?”

“Not quite one half.”

“The colored population require proportionately less assistance, then, than the white?” He admitted the fact. “How happens it?” I inquired; for he had previously told me the old hackneyed tale, that the negroes would not work, and that in consequence they were destined to perish like the Indians.

“They’ll steal,” said he; and he made use of this expression, which he said was proverbial: “An honest nigger is as rare as a lock of har on the palm of my hand.”

“But,” I objected, “it seems hardly possible for one class of people to live by stealing in a country you describe as so destitute.”

“A nigger will live on almost nothing,” he replied. “It isn’t to be denied, however, but that some of them work.”

He criticised severely the government’s system of feeding the destitute. “Hundreds are obtaining assistance who are not entitled to any. They have only to go to the overseers of the poor appointed by government, put up a poor mug, and ask for a certificate in a weak voice; they get it, and come and draw their rations. Some draw rations both here and at Fredericksburg, thus obtaining a double support, while they are well able to work and earn their living, if left to themselves. The system encourages idleness, and does more harm than good. All these evils could be remedied, and more than half the expense saved the government, if it would intrust the entire management of the matter in the hands of citizens.”

“Is it the whites, or the blacks, who abuse the government’s bounty?”

“The whites.”

“It appears, then, that they have the same faults you ascribe to the blacks: they are not over-honest, and they will not work unless obliged to.”

“Yes, there are shiftless whites to be sure. There’s a place eight miles west from here, known as Texas, inhabited by a class of poor whites steeped in vice, ignorance, and crime of every description. They have no comforts, and no energy to work and obtain them. They have no books, no morality, no religion; they go clothed like savages, half sheltered, and half fed,—except that government is now supporting them.”

“Do the whites we are feeding come mostly from that region?”

“O, no; they come from all over the county. Some walk as far as twenty miles to draw their fortnight’s or three weeks’ rations. Some were in good circumstances before the war; and some are tolerably well off now. A general impression prevails that this support comes from a tax on the county; so every man, whether he needs it or not, rushes in for a share. It is impossible to convince the country people that it is the United States government that is feeding them. Why, sir, there are men in the back districts who will not yet believe that the war is over, and slavery at an end!”

“It appears,” said I, “that ignorance is not confined to the region you call Texas; and that, considering all things, the whites are even more degraded than the blacks. Why doesn’t some prophet of evil arise and predict that the white race, too, will die out because it is vicious and will not work?”

“The whites are a different race, sir,—a different race,” was the emphatic, but not very satisfactory reply. “The negro cannot live without the care and protection of a master.”

“You think, then, the abolition of slavery a great misfortune?”

“A great misfortune to the negroes, certainly; but not to the whites: we shall be better off without them.”

“It is singular that the negroes have no fear of the fate you predict for them. They say, on the contrary, ‘We have been supporting our masters and their families all our lives, and now it is a pity if we cannot earn a living for ourselves.’”

“Well, I hope they will succeed!”

This is the reply the emancipated slave-owners almost invariably make to the above argument; sometimes sarcastically, sometimes gravely, sometimes commiseratingly, but always incredulously. “The negro is fated;” this is the real or pretended belief; and this they repeat, often with an ill-concealed spirit of vindictiveness, an “I-told-you-so!” air of triumph, until one is forced to the conclusion that their prophecy is their desire.

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XVII. THE FIELD OF SPOTTSYLVANIA

I walked on to the tavern where Richard H. Hicks was baiting his horse. The landlord took me to a lumber-room where he kept, carefully locked up, a very remarkable curiosity. It was the stump of a tree, eleven inches in diameter, which had been cut off by bullets—not by cannon-shot, but by leaden bullets—in the Spottsylvania fight. It looked like a colossal scrub-broom. “I had a stump twice as big as this, cut off by bullets in the same way, only much smoother; but some Federal officers took it from me and sent it to the War Department at Washington.”

He had many battle-scars about his house to show; one of which I remember: “A shell come in through the wall thar, wrapped itself up in a bed that stood hyer, and busted in five pieces.”

In one of the rooms I found a Union officer lying on a lounge, sick with the prevailing fever. He seemed glad to see a Northern face, and urged me to be seated.

“It is fearfully lonesome here; and just now I have no companion but the ague.”

Learning that he had been some time in command of the post, I inquired the reason why the citizens appeared so eager to save the government expense in feeding their poor.

“It is very simple: they wish to get control of the business in order to cut off the negroes. They had rather have the assistance the government affords withdrawn altogether, than that the freedmen should come in for a share. It is their policy to keep the blacks entirely dependent upon their former masters, and consequently as much slaves as before.”

“You of course hear many complaints that the blacks will not work?”

“Yes, and they are true in certain cases: they will not work for such wages as their late owners are willing to give; in other words, they will not work for less than nothing. But when they have encouragement they work very well, in their fashion,—which is not the Yankee fashion, certainly, but the fashion which slavery has bred them up to. They have not yet learned to appreciate, however, the binding character of a contract. It is a new thing to them. Besides, the master too often sets them bad examples by failing to keep his own engagements. He has been in the habit of breaking his promises to them at his convenience; and now he finds fault that they do not keep theirs any better. The masters have not yet learned how to treat their old servants under the new conditions. They cannot learn that they are no longer slaves. That is one great source of trouble. On the other hand, where the freedman receives rational, just, and kind treatment, he behaves well and works well, almost without exception. I expect a good deal of difficulty soon. The negroes have in many places made contracts to work for a part of the crop; now when the corn comes to be divided, their ideas and their master’s, with regard to what ‘a part’ of the crop is, will be found to differ considerably. I was not an anti-slavery man at home,” he added; “and I give you simply the results of my observation since I have been in the South.”

“What do you think would be the effect if our troops were withdrawn?”

“I hardly know; but I should expect one of two things: either that the freedmen would be reduced to a worse condition than they were ever in before, or that they would rise in insurrection.”

The landlord wished me to go and look at his corn. It was certainly a noble crop. The tops of the monstrous ears towered six or eight feet from the ground; the tops of the stalks at least twelve or fourteen feet. He maintained that it would average fifty bushels (of shelled corn) to the acre. I thought the estimate too high.

“Good corn,” said he, “measures finely; sorry corn porely. And consider, not a spoonful of manure has been put on this ground fo’ fou’ years.”

“But the ground has been resting; and that is as good as manure.”

“Yes; but it’s mighty good soil that will do as well as this. Now tell your people, if they want to buy good land cheap, hyer’s their chance. I’ve got a thousand acres; and I’ll sell off seven hundred acres, claired or timber land, to suit purchasers. It’s well wo’th twenty dollars an acre; I’ll sell for ten. It a’n’t fur from market; and thar’s noth’n’ ye can’t raise on this yer land.”

Of all his thousand acres he had only about fifteen under cultivation. His cornfield was not as large as it appeared; for, running through the centre of it, like a titanic furrow, were Lee’s tremendous intrenchments. These few acres were all the old man had been able to enclose. There was not another fence on his farm. “I had over ten thousand panels of fence burnt up for me during the wa’; over eighty thousand rails.”

“By which army?”

“Both: fust one, and then the other. Our own troops were as bad as the Yankees.”

Afterwards, as we rode away from the tavern, Richard H. Hicks gave me the following succinct account of the landlord:

“He used to be a heavy coon-dog. He had fifty head o’ darkeys. He wouldn’t hire ’em, and dey lef’. Now he has nobody to wo’k de land, he’s got a light pocket, and so he’s a mind to sell.”

Riding west from the Court-House, and striking across the fields on the right, we passed McCool’s house, in a pleasant shady place, and reached the scene where the eight days’ fighting culminated. Of the woods, thinned and despoiled by the storm of iron and lead, only a ghostly grove of dead trunks and dreary dry limbs remained. Keeping around the western edge of these, we came to a strange medley of intrenchments, which it would have required an engineer to unravel and understand. Here Grant’s works had been pushed up against Lee’s, swallowing them as one wave swallows another. Nowhere else have I seen evidences of such close and desperate fighting. For eight days Grant had been thundering at the gates of the Confederacy; slowly, with fearful loss, he had been pressing back the enemy and breaking through the obstructions; until here at last he concentrated all his strength. Each army fought as if the gods had decreed that the issue of the war depended upon that struggle. And so indeed they had: the way to Richmond by this route, so long attempted in vain, was here opened. The grand result proclaimed that the eight days’ battles were victories; that the enemy, for the first time on his own chosen ground, had met with ominous defeat. Inconceivable was the slaughter. Here two red rivers met and spilled themselves into the ground. Swift currents from the great West, tributaries from the Atlantic States and from the Lake States, priceless rills, precious drops, from almost every community and family in the Union, swelled the northern stream which burst its living banks and perished here. Every state, every community, every family mourned.

But behind this curtain of woe was the chiselled awful form, the terrible front and sublime eyes, of the statue of Fate, the nation’s unalterable Will. Contemplating that, we were silenced, if not consoled. Every breast—that of the father going to search for the body of his dead son, that of the mother reading the brief despatch that pierced her as the bullet pierced her dear boy, that of the pale wife hastening to the cot-side of her dying husband, nay, the bleeding breasts of the wounded and dying, while yet they felt a throb of life—thrilled responsive to Grant’s simple, significant announcement—

“I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”

It took all summer, indeed, and all winter too; but the result had been decided at Spottsylvania.

The Rebel armies had invaded the North and been driven ingloriously back. Many times we had started for Richmond and been repulsed. But at length we were not repulsed: the overwhelming wave poured over the embankments.

Such thoughts—or rather deep emotions, of which such thoughts are but the feeble expression—possess the serious tourist, who stands upon that field furrowed and ridged with earthworks and with graves,—beside that grove of shattered and shrivelled trees. A conscious solemnity seems brooding in the air. If the intrenchments could speak, what a history could they disclose! But those sphinx-like lips of the earth are rigid and still. Even the winds seem to hush their whispers about that scene of desolation. All is silence; and the heart of the visitor is constrained to silence also.

Upon a hacked and barkless trunk at the angle of the woods, in the midst of the graves, was nailed aloft a board bearing these lines:

“On Fame’s eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And glory guards with solemn round The bivouac of the dead.”

A thick undergrowth had sprung up in the woods. I noticed, stooping among the bushes along by the breastworks, an old woman and two young girls.

“Dey ’re chincapinnin’,” said Richard.

But I observed that they gathered the nuts, not from the bushes, but from the ground. Curiosity impelled me to follow them. The woman had a haversack slung at her side; one of the girls carried an open pail. They passed along the intrenchments, searching intently, and occasionally picking something out of the dirt. Pressing into the bushes, I accosted them. They scarcely deigned to look at me, but continued their strange occupation. I questioned them about the battle; but their answers were as vague and stupid as if they then heard of it for the first time. Meanwhile I obtained a glance at the open mouth of the heavily freighted haversack and the half-filled pail, and saw not chincapins, but several quarts of old bullets.

Wandering along by the intrenchments, I observed the half-rotted fragments of a book on the ground. They were leaves from a German pocket Testament, which doubtless some soldier had carried into the fight. I picked them up, and glanced my eye over the mildewed pages. By whom were they last perused? What poor immigrant’s heart, fighting here the battles of his adopted country, had drawn consolation from those words of life, which lose not their vitality in any language? What was the fate of that soldier? Was he now telling the story of his campaigns to his bearded comrades, wife and children; or was that tongue forever silent in the dust of the graves that surrounded me? While I pondered, these words caught my eye:—

“Die du mir gegeben hast, die habe ich bewahret, und ist keiner von ihnen verloren.”—“Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost.”

I looked round upon the graves; I thought of the patriot hosts that had fallen on these fearful battle-fields,—of the households bereft, of the husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, who went down to the Wilderness and were never heard of more; and peace and solace, sweet as the winds of Paradise, came to me in these words, as I repeated them,—

“None of them is lost, none of them is lost!”

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XVIII. “ON TO RICHMOND.”

At mid-day, on the fifteenth of September, I took the train at Fredericksburg for Richmond, expecting to make in three hours the journey which our armies were more than as many years in accomplishing.

“On to Richmond! On to Richmond!” clattered the cars; while my mind recalled the horrors and anxieties of those years, so strangely in contrast with the swiftness and safety of our present speed. Where now were the opposing Rebel hosts? Where the long lines of bristling musketry, the swarms of cavalry, and the terrible artillery? Where the great Slave Empire, the defiant Confederacy itself?

“The earth hath bubbles as the water has, And these were of them.”

We passed amid the same desolate scenes which I had everywhere observed since I set foot upon the soil of Virginia,—old fields and undergrowths, with signs of human life so feeble and so few, that one began to wonder where the country population of the Old Dominion was to be found. All the region between Fredericksburg and Richmond seems not only almost uninhabited now, but always to have been so,—at least to the eye familiar with New-England farms and villages. But one must forget the thriving and energetic North when he enters a country stamped with the dark seal of slavery. Large and fertile Virginia, with eight times the area of Massachusetts, scarcely equals in population that barren little State. The result is, that, where Southern State pride sees prosperous settlements, the travelling Yankee discovers little more than uncultivated wastes.

Ashton, sixteen miles from Richmond, was the first really civilized-looking place we passed. Farther on I looked for the suburbs of the capital. But Richmond has no suburbs. The pleasant villages and market-gardens that spread smilingly for miles around our large Northern towns, are altogether wanting here. Suddenly the melancholy waste of the country disappears, and you enter the outskirts of the city.

And is this indeed Richmond into which the train glides so smoothly along its polished rails? Is this the fort-encircled capital whose gates refused so long to open to our loudly knocking armies?—and have we entered with so little ado? Is the “Rome of the Confederacy” sitting proudly on her seven hills, aware that here are detestable Yankees within her walls? Will she cast us into Libby? or starve us on Belle Island? or forward us to Wirtz at Andersonville?—for such we know was the fate of Northern men who did get into Richmond during the past four years! You think of what they suffered, as you walk unmolested the pavements of the conquered capital; and something swells within you, which is not exultation, nor rage, nor grief, but a strange mingling of all these.

“Time the Avenger! unto thee I lift My hands and eyes and heart!”

for what a change has been wrought since those days of horror and crime! Now no Rebel guard is at hand to march you quickly and silently through the streets; but friendly faces throng to welcome you, to offer you seats in carriages, and to invite you to the hospitalities of hotels. And these people, meeting or passing you, or seated before their doors in the warm September afternoon, are no longer enemies, but tamed complacent citizens of the United States like yourself.

I was surprised to find that the storm of war had left Richmond so beautiful a city; although she appeared to be mourning for her sins at the time in dust and ashes,—dust which every wind whirled up from the unwatered streets, and the ashes of the Burnt District.

Here are no such palatial residences as dazzle the eye in New York, Chicago, and other Northern cities; but in their place you see handsome rows of houses, mostly of brick, shaded by trees, and with a certain air of comfort and elegance about them which is very inviting. The streets are sufficiently spacious, and regularly laid out, many of them being thrown up into long, sweeping lines of beauty by the hills on which they are built. The hills indeed are the charm of Richmond, overlooking the falls of the James, on the left bank of which it stands; giving you shining glimpses of the winding river up and down,—commanding views of the verdant valley and of the hilly country around,—and here, at the end of some pleasant street, falling off abruptly into the wild slopes of some romantic ravine.

In size, Richmond strikes one as very insignificant, after all the noise it has made in the world. Although the largest city of Virginia, and ranking among Southern cities of the second magnitude, either of our great Northern towns could swallow it, as one pickerel swallows a lesser, and scarcely feel the morsel in its belly. In 1860 it had a population of not quite thirty-eight thousand,—less than that of Troy or New Haven, and but a little larger than that of Lowell.

I had already secured a not very satisfactory room at a crowded hotel, when, going out for an afternoon ramble, I came by chance to Capitol Square. Although a small park, containing only about eight acres, I found in its shady walks and by its twinkling fountains a delightful retirement after the heat and dust of the streets. It is situated on the side of a hill sloping down to the burnt district which lies between it and the river. On the brow of the slope, at an imposing elevation, its pillared front looking towards the western sun, stands the State Capitol, which was also the capitol of the Confederacy. Near by is Crawford’s equestrian statue of Washington, which first astonishes the beholder by its vast proportions, and does not soon cease to be a wonder to his eyes.

Coming out of the Park, at the corner nearest the monument, I noticed, on the street-corner opposite, a hotel, whose range of front rooms overlooking the square, made me think ruefully of the lodgings I had engaged elsewhere. To exchange a view of back yards and kitchen-roofs from an upper story for a sight from those commanding windows, entered my brain as an exciting possibility. I went in. The clerk had two or three back rooms to show, but no front room, until he saw that nothing else would suffice, when he obligingly sent me to the very room I wished. Throwing open the shutters, I looked out upon the Park, the Capitol, the colossal Washington soaring above the trees, and the far-off shining James. I caught glimpses, through the foliage, of the spray of one of the fountains, and could hear its ceaseless murmur mingle with the noise of the streets.

I took possession at once, sent for my luggage, slept that night in my new lodgings, and was awakened at dawn the next morning by a sound as of a dish of beans dashed into a ringing brass kettle. This was repeated at irregular intervals, and with increasing frequency, as the day advanced, breaking in upon the plashy monotone of the fountain, and the rising hum of the city, with its resounding rattle. Stung with curiosity, I arose and looked from my open window. Few white citizens were astir, but I saw a thin, ceaseless stream of negroes, who “would not work,” going cheerfully to their daily tasks. The most of them took their way towards the burnt district; some crossed Capitol Square to shorten their route; and the sounds I had heard were occasioned by the slamming of the iron gates of the Park.

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XIX. THE BURNT DISTRICT

Again that morning I visited the burnt district, of which I had taken but a cursory view the evening before.

All up and down, as far as the eye could reach, the business portion of the city bordering on the river lay in ruins. Beds of cinders, cellars half filled with bricks and rubbish, broken and blackened walls, impassable streets deluged with débris, here a granite front still standing, and there the iron fragments of crushed machinery,—such was the scene which extended over thirty entire squares and parts of other squares.

I was reminded of Chambersburg; but here was ruin on a more tremendous scale. Instead of small one- and two-story buildings, like those of the modest Pennsylvania town, tall blocks, great factories, flour-mills, rolling-mills, foundries, machine-shops, warehouses, banks, railroad, freight, and engine houses, two railroad bridges, and one other bridge spanning on high piers the broad river, were destroyed by the desperate Rebel leaders on the morning of the evacuation.

“They meant to burn us all out of our homes,” said a citizen whom I met on the butment of the Petersburg railroad bridge. “It was the wickedest thing that ever was done in this world! You are a stranger; you don’t know; but the people of Richmond know, if they will only speak their minds.”

“But,” said I, “what was their object in burning their own city, the city of their friends?”

“The devil only knows, for he set ’em on to do it! It was spite, I reckon. If they couldn’t hold the city, they determined nobody else should. They kept us here four years under the worst tyranny under the sun; then when they found they couldn’t keep us any longer, they just meant to burn us up. That’s the principle they went on from the beginning.”

I had already conversed with other citizens on the subject of the fire, some of whom maintained that it was never the design of the Confederate leaders to burn anything but the railroad bridges and public stores. But this man laughed at the idea.

“That’s what they pretend; but I know better. What was the water stopped from the reservoirs for? So that we should have none to put out the fire with!”

“But they say the water was shut off in order to make repairs.”

“It’s all a lie! I tell ye, stranger, it was the intention to burn Richmond, and it’s a miracle that any part of it was saved. As luck would have it, there was no wind to spread the fire; then the Federals came in, let on the water, and went to work with the engines, and put it out.”

“Why didn’t the citizens do that?”

“I don’t know. Everybody was paralyzed. It was a perfect panic. The Yankees coming! the city burning! our army on a retreat!—you’ve no idea of what it was. Nobody seemed to know what to do. God save us from another such time! It was bad enough Sunday. If the world had been coming to an end, there couldn’t have been more fright and confusion. I was watchman on this railroad bridge,—when there was a bridge here. I was off duty at midnight, and I went home and went to bed. But along towards morning my daughter woke me. ‘Father,’ says she, ‘the city’s afire!’ I knew right away what was the matter. The night was all lit up, and I could hear the roar of something besides the river. I run out and started for the bridge, but I’d got quite near enough, when the ammunition in the tobacco-warehouses begun to go off. Crack!—crack!—crack, crack, crack! One piece of shell whirred past my head like a pa’tridge. I didn’t want to hear another. I put home and went to getting my truck together, such as I could tote, ready to leave if my house went.”

Subsequently I conversed with citizens of every grade upon this exciting topic, and found opinions regarding it as various as the political views of their authors. Those aristocrats who went in for the war but kept out of the fight, and who favored the Davis government because it favored them, had no word of censure for the incendiaries.

“The burning of the city was purely accidental,” one blandly informed me.

“No considerable portion of it would have been destroyed if it hadn’t been for private marauding parties,” said another. “The city was full of such desperate characters. They set fires for the purpose of plundering. It was they, and nobody else, who shut off the water from the reservoirs.”

The laboring class, on the other hand, generally denounced the Confederate leaders as the sole authors of the calamity. It was true that desperadoes aided in the work, but it was after the fugitive government had set them the example.

Here is the opinion of a Confederate officer, Colonel D——, whom I saw daily at the table of the hotel, and with whom I had many interesting conversations.

“It is not fair to lay the whole blame on the Confederate government, although, Heaven knows, it was bad enough to do anything! The plan of burning the city had been discussed beforehand: Lee and the more humane of his officers opposed it; Early and others favored it; and Breckinridge took the responsibility of putting it into execution.”

Amid all these conflicting opinions there was one thing certain—the fact of the fire; although, had it not been written out there before our eyes in black characters and lines of desolation, I should have expected to hear some unblushing apologist of the Davis despotism deny even that.

And, whoever may have been personally responsible for the crime, there is also a truth concerning it which I hold to be undeniable. Like the assassination of Lincoln, like the systematic murder of Union prisoners at Andersonville and elsewhere,—like these and countless other barbarous acts which have branded the Rebel cause with infamy,—this too was inspired by the spirit of slavery, and performed in the interest of slavery. That spirit, destructive of liberty and law, and self-destructive at last, was the father of the rebellion and of all the worst crimes of its adherents. As I walked among the ruins, pondering these thoughts, I must own that my heart swelled with pride when I remembered how the fire was extinguished. It was by no mere chance that the panic-stricken inhabitants were found powerless to save their own city. That task was reserved for the Union army, that a great truth might be symbolized. The war, on the part of the North, was waged neither for ambition nor revenge; its design was not destructive, but conservative. Through all our cloudy mistakes and misdeeds shone the spirit of Liberty; and the work she gave us to do was to quench the national flames which anarchy had kindled, and to save a rebellious people from the consequences of their own folly.

Richmond had already one terrible reminiscence of a fire. On the night of the 26th of December, 1811, its theatre was burned, with an appalling catastrophe: upward of seventy spectators, including the Governor of the State, perishing in the flames. The fire of the 3d of April, 1865, will be as long remembered.

The work of rebuilding the burnt district had commenced, and was progressing in places quite vigorously. Here I had the satisfaction of seeing the negroes, who “would not work,” actually at their tasks. Here, as everywhere else in Richmond, and indeed in every part of Virginia I visited, colored laborers were largely in the majority. They drove the teams, made the mortar, carried the hods, excavated the old cellars or dug new ones, and, sitting down amid the ruins, broke the mortar from the old bricks and put them up in neat piles ready for use. There were also colored masons and carpenters employed on the new buildings. I could not see but that these people worked just as industriously as the white laborers. And yet, with this scene before our very eyes, I was once more informed by a cynical citizen that the negro, now that he was free, would rob, steal, or starve, before he would work.

I conversed with one of the laborers going home to his dinner. He was a stalwart young black, twenty-one years old, married, and the father of two children. He was earning a dollar and a half a day.

“Can you manage to live on that, and support your family?”

“It’s right hard, these times,—everything costs so high. I have to pay fifteen dollars a month rent, and only two little rooms. But my wife takes in washing and goes out to work; and so we get along.”

“But,” said I, “were not your people better off in slavery?”.

“Oh no, sir!” he replied, with a bright smile. “We’re a heap better off now. We haven’t got our rights yet, but I expect we’re go’n’ to have ’em soon.”

“What rights?”

“I don’t know, sir. But I reckon government will do something for us. My master has had me ever since I was seven years old, and never give me nothing. I worked for him twelve years, and I think something is due me.”

He was waiting to see what the government would do for his people. He rather expected the lands of their Rebel masters would be given them, insisting that they ought to have some reward for all their years of unrequited toil. Of course I endeavored to dissuade him from cherishing any such hope.

“What you ask for may be nothing but justice; but we must not expect justice even in this world. We must be thankful for what we can get. You have your freedom, and you ought to consider yourself lucky.”

His features shone with satisfaction as he replied,—

“That ought to be enough, if we don’t get no mo’e. We’re men now, but when our masters had us we was only change in their pockets.”

Unlike what I saw in Chambersburg, the new blocks springing up in the burnt district did not promise to be an improvement on the old ones. Everywhere were visible the results of want of capital and of the hurry of rebuilding. The thinness of the walls was alarming; and I was not surprised to learn that some of them had recently been blown down on a windy night. Heaven save our country, thought I, from such hasty and imperfect reconstruction!

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XX. LIBBY, CASTLE THUNDER, AND BELLE ISLE

Strolling along a street near the river, below the burnt district, I looked up from the dirty pavements, and from the little ink-colored stream creeping along the gutter, (for Richmond abounds in these villanous rills,) and saw before me a sign nailed to the corner of a large, gloomy brick building, and bearing in great black letters the inscription,—

LIBBY PRISON.

Passing the sentinel at the door, I entered. The ground-floor was partitioned off into offices and store-rooms, and presented few objects of interest. A large cellar room below, paved with cobble-stones, was used as a cookhouse by our soldiers then occupying the building. Adjoining this, but separated from it by a wall, was the cellar which is said to have been mined for the purpose of blowing up Libby with its inmates, in case the city had at one time been taken.

Ascending a flight of stairs from the ground-floor, I found myself in a single, large, oblong, whitewashed, barren room. Two rows of stout wooden posts supported the ceiling. The windows were iron-grated, those of the front looking out upon the street, and those of the rear commanding a view of the canal close by, the river just beyond it, and the opposite shore.

There was an immense garret above, likewise embracing the entire area of the floor. These were the prison-rooms of the infamous Libby. I found them occupied by a regiment of colored troops, some sitting in Turkish fashion on the floor, (for there was not a stool or bench,) some resting their backs against the posts or whitewashed walls, and others lying at length on the hard planks, with their heads pillowed on their knapsacks.

But the comfortable colored regiment faded from sight as I ascended and descended the stairs, and walked from end to end of the dreary chambers. A far different picture rose before me,—the diseased and haggard men crowded together there, dragging out their weary days, deeming themselves oftentimes forgotten by their country and their friends,—men who mounted those dungeon-stairs, not as I mounted them, but to enter a den of misery, starvation, and death.

On the opposite side of the same street, a little farther up, was Castle Thunder,—a very commonplace brick block, considering its formidable name. It was still used as a prison; but it had passed into the hands of the United States military authorities. At the iron-barred windows of the lower story, and behind tin wooden-barred windows above, could be seen the faces of soldiers and citizens imprisoned for various offences.

Belle Island I had already seen from the heights of Richmond,—a pleasant hill rising out of the river above the town, near the farther shore. The river itself is very beautiful there, with its many green islets, its tumbling rapids sweeping down among rocks and foaming over ledges, and its side-dams thrown out like arms to draw the waters into their tranquil embrace. My eye, ranging over this scene, rested on that fair hill; and I thought that, surely, no pleasanter or more healthful spot could have been selected for an encampment of prisoners; But it is unsafe to trust the enchantment of distance; and after seeing Libby and Castle Thunder, I set out to visit Belle Island.

I crossed over to Manchester by a bridge which had been constructed since the fire. As both the Richmond and Danville, and the Richmond and Petersburg railroad bridges were destroyed, an extraordinary amount of business and travel was thrown upon this bridge. It was shaken with omnibuses and freight-wagons, and enveloped in clouds of dust. Loads of cotton and tobacco, the former in bales, the latter in hogsheads, were coming into the city, and throngs of pedestrians were passing to and fro. Among these I noticed a number of negroes with little bundles on their backs. One of them, a very old man, was leaning against the railing to rest.

“Well, uncle, how are you getting along?”

“Tolerable, mahster; only tolerable.” And he lifted his tattered cap from his white old head with a grace of politeness which a courtier might have envied.

“Where are you going?”

“I’s go’n’ to Richmond, mahster.”

“What do you expect to do in Richmond?”

“I don’t know right well. I thought I couldn’t be no wus off than whar I was; and I hadn’t no place to go.”

“How so, uncle?”

“You see, mahster, thar a’n’t no chance fo’ people o’ my color in the country I come from.”

“Where is that?”

“Dinwiddie County.”

“You have walked all the way from Dinwiddie County?” “Yes, mahster; I’se walked over fo’ty mile. But I don’t mind that.”

“You’re very old, uncle.”

“Yes, I’ve a right good age, mahster. It’s hard fo’ a man o’ my years to be turned out of his home. I don’t know what I shall do; but I reckon the Lord will take keer of me.”

The tone of patience and cheerfulness in which he spoke was very touching. I leaned on the bridge beside him, and drew out from him by degrees his story. His late master refused to give wages to the freedmen on his lands, and the result was that all the able-bodied men and women left him. Enraged at this, he had sworn that the rest should go too, and had accordingly driven off the aged and the sick, this old man among them.

“He said he’d no use fo’ old wore-out niggers. I knowed I was old and wore-out, but I growed so in his service. I served him and his father befo’e nigh on to sixty year; and he never give me a dollar. He’s had my life, and now I’m old and wore-out I must leave. It’s right hard, mahster!”

“Not all the planters in your county are like him, I hope?”

“Some of ’em is very good to their people, I believe. But none of ’em is will’n’ to pay wages a man can live by. Them that pays at all, offers only five dollars a month, and we must pay fo’ ou’ own clothes and doctor’s bills, and suppo’t ou’ families.’

“It seems you were better off when in slavery,” I suggested.

“I don’t say that, mahster. I’d sooner be as I is to-day.” And cheerfully shouldering his bundle, the old African tramped on towards Richmond. What was to become of him there?

I kept on to Manchester, passed the great humming mills by the river-side, and turning to the right, up the Danville railroad, reached Belle Island bridge after a brisk fifteen minutes’ walk. Crossing over, I entered the yard of a nail-factory, where some men were breaking up heavy old iron, cannons, mortars, and car-wheels, by means of a four-hundred pound shot dropped from a derrick forty feet high. Beyond the factory rose the pleasant hill I had viewed from the city. I climbed its southern side, and found myself in the midst of a scene not less fair than I had anticipated. Behind me was a cornfield, covering the summit; below rushed the river among its green and rocky islands; while Richmond rose beyond, picturesquely beautiful on its hills, and rosy in the flush of sunset.

But where had been the prisoners’ camp? I saw no trace of it on that slope. Alas, that slope was never trodden by their feet, and its air they never breathed. At the foot of it is a flat, spreading out into the stream, and almost level with it at high water. Already the night-fog was beginning to creep over it. This flat, which was described to me as a marsh in the rainy season, and covered with snow and slush and ice in winter, was the “Belle Isle” of our prisoners. Yet they were not allowed the range even of that. A trench and embankment enclosing an oblong space of less than six acres formed the dead-line which it was fatal to pass. Within this as many as twelve thousand men were at times crowded, with no shelter but a few tattered tents.

As I was examining the spot, a throng of begrimed laborers crossed the flat, carrying oars, and embarking in boats on the low shore looking towards the city. They were workmen from the nail-factory returning to their homes. One of them, passing alone after his companions, stopped to talk with me at the dead-line, and afterwards offered me a place in his boat. It was a leaky little skiff: I perched myself upon a seat in the bow; and he, standing in the stern, propelled it across with a pole.

“Where were the dead buried?” I asked.

“The dead Yankees? They buried a good many thar in the sand-bar. But they might about as well have flung ’em into the river. A freshet washed out a hundred and twenty bodies at one time.”

“Did you see the prisoners when they were here?”

“I wasn’t on the Island. But from Richmond anybody could see their tents hyer, and see them walking around. I was away most of the time.”

“In the army?”

“Yes, sir; I was in the army. I enlisted fo’ three months, and they kept me in fou’ years,” he said, as men speak of deep and unforgiven wrongs. “The wa’ was the cruelest thing, and the wust thing fo’ the South that could have been. What do you think they’ll do with Jeff Davis?”

“I don’t know,” I replied; “what do you think?”

“I know what I’d like to do with him: I’d hang him as quick as I would a mad dog! Him and about fo’ty others: old Buchanan along with ’em.”

“Why, what has Buchanan done?”

“He was in cohoot with ’em, and as bad as the baddest. If we had had an honest President in his place, thar never’d have been wa’.”

From the day I entered Virginia it was a matter of continual astonishment to me to hear the common people express views similar to those, and denounce the Davis despotism. They were all the more bitter against it because it had deceived them with lies and false promises so long. Throughout the loyal North, the feeling against the secession leaders was naturally strong; but it was mild as candle-light compared with the fierce furnace-heat of hatred which I found kindled in many a Southern breast.

The passage of the river was delightful, in the fading sunset light. On a bluff opposite Belle Island was Hollywood, the fashionable cemetery of Richmond, green-wooded, and beautiful at that hour in its cool and tranquil tints. As we glided down the river, and I took my last view of the Island, I thought how often our sick and weary soldiers there must have cast longing eyes across at that lovely hill, and wished themselves quietly laid away in its still shades. Nor could I help thinking of the good people of Richmond, the Christian citizens of Richmond, taking their pleasant walks and drives to that verdant height, and looking down on the camp of prisoners dying from exposure and starvation under their very eyes. How did these good people, these Christian citizens, feel about it, I wonder?

Avoiding the currents sweeping towards the Falls, my man pushed into the smooth waters of a dam that fed a race, and landed me close under the walls of his own house.

“This yer is Brown’s Island,” he told me. “You’ve heerd of the laboratory, whar they made ammunition fo’ the army?” He showed me the deserted buildings, and described an explosion which took place there, blowing up the works, and killing, scalding, and maiming many of the operatives.

Passing over a bridge to the main land, and crossing the canal which winds along the river-bank, I was hastening towards the city, when I met, emerging from the sombre ruins of the burnt district, a man who resembled more a wild creature than a human being. His hands, arms, and face were blackened with cinders, his clothes hung upon him in tatters, and the expression of his countenance was fierce and haggard. He looked so much like a brigand that I was not a little startled when, with a sweeping gesture of his long lean arm and claw-like fingers, he clutched my shoulder.

“Come back with me,” said he, “and I’ll tell ye all about it; I’ll tell ye all about it, stranger.”

“About what?”

“The explosion,—the explosion of the laboratory thar!”

Dragging me towards Brown’s Island with one hand, and gesticulating violently with the other, he proceeded to jabber incoherently about that dire event.

“Wait, wait,” said he, “till I tell you!”—like the Ancient Mariner with skinny hand holding his unwilling auditor. “My daughter was work’n’ thar at the time; and she was blowed all to pieces! all to pieces! My God, my God, it was horrible! Come to my house, and you shall see her; if you don’t believe me, you shall see her! Blowed all to pieces, all to pieces, my God!”

His house was close by, and the daughter, who was “blowed all to pieces,” was to be seen standing miraculously at the door, in a remarkable state of preservation, considering the circumstances. She seemed to be looking anxiously at the old man and the stranger he was bringing home with him. She came to the wicket to meet us; and then I saw that her hands and face were covered with cruel scars.

“Look!” said he, clutching her with one hand, while he still held me with the other. “All to pieces, as I told you!”

“Don’t, don’t, pa!” said the girl, coaxingly. “You mustn’t mind him,” she whispered to me. “He is a little out of his head. Oh, pa! don’t act so!”

“He has been telling me how you were blown up in the laboratory. You must have suffered fearfully from those Wounds!”

“Oh, yes; there was five weeks nobody thought I would live. But I didn’t mind it,” she added with a smile, “for it was in a good cause.”

“A good cause!” almost shrieked the old man; and he burst forth with a stream of execrations against the Confederate government which made my blood chill.

But the daughter smilingly repeated, “It was a good cause, and I don’t regret it. You mustn’t mind what he says.”

I helped her get him inside the wicket, and made my escape, wondering, as I left them, which was the more insane of the two.

But she was not insane; she was a woman. A man may be reasoned and beaten out of a false opinion, but a woman never. She will not yield to logic, not even to the logic of events. Thus it happens that, while the male secessionists at the South have frankly given up their cause, the female secessionists still cling to it with provoking tenacity. To appeal to their intelligence is idle; but they are vulnerable on the side of the sentiments; and many a one has been authentically converted from the heresy of state rights by some handsome Federal officer, who judiciously mingled love with loyalty in his speech, and pleaded for the union of hands as well as the union of States.

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XXI. FEEDING THE DESTITUTE

As I was passing Castle Thunder, I observed, besieging the doors of the United States Commissary, on the opposite side of the street, a hungry-looking, haggard crowd,—sickly-faced women, jaundiced old men, and children in rags; with here and there a seedy gentleman who had seen better days, or a stately female in faded apparel, which, like her refined manners, betrayed the aristocratic lady whom the war had reduced to want.

These were the destitute of the city, thronging to receive alms from the government. The regular rations, issued at a counter to which each was admitted in his or her turn, consisted of salt-fish and hard-tack; but I noticed that to some tea and sugar were dealt out. All were provided with tickets previously issued to them by the Relief Commission. One tall, sallow woman requested me to read her ticket, and tell her if it was a “No. 2.”

“They telled me it was, whar I got it, but I like to be shore.”

I assured her that it was truly a “No. 2,” and asked why it was preferable to another.

“This is the kind they ishy to sick folks; it allows tea and sugar,” she replied, wrapping it around her skinny finger.

Colored people were not permitted to draw “destitute rations” for themselves at the same place with the whites. There were a good many colored servants in the crowd, however, drawing for their mistresses, who remained at home, too ill or too proud to come in person and present their tickets.

At the place where “destitute rations” were issued to the blacks, business appeared very dull. I inquired the reason of it, and learned this astonishing fact.

The colored population crowded into Richmond at that time equalled the white population; being estimated by some as high as twenty-five thousand. Of the whites, over TWO THOUSAND were at that time receiving support from the government. The number of blacks receiving such support was less than two hundred.

How is this discrepancy to be accounted for?

Of the freedmen’s willingness to work under right conditions there can be no question. It is true, they do not show a disposition to continue to serve their former masters for nothing, or at starvation prices. And many of them had a notion that lands were to be given them; for lands had been promised them. At the same time, where they have a show of a chance for themselves, they generally go to work, and manifest a commendable pride in supporting themselves and their families. Until he does that, the negro does not consider that he is fully free. He has no prejudice against labor, as so many of the whites have. We must give slavery the credit of having done thus much for him: it has bred him up to habits of temperance and industry. Notwithstanding the example of the superior race, which he naturally emulates, he has not yet taken to drink; and his industry, instead of being checked, has received an impulse by emancipation. Now that he has inducements to exert himself, he proceeds to his task with an alacrity which he never showed when driven to it by the whip.

Another thing must be taken into account. His feeling for those who have liberated him is that of unbounded gratitude. He is ashamed to ask alms of the government which has already done so much for him. No case was known in Richmond of his obtaining destitute rations under false pretences; but in many instances, as I learned, he had preferred to suffer want rather than apply for aid.

The reverse of all this may be said of a large class of whites. Many, despising labor, would not work if they could. Others, reared amid the influences of wealth, which had now been stripped from them, could not work if they would. Towards the United States Government they entertained no such feeling of gratitude as animated the freedmen. On the contrary, they seemed to think that they were entitled to support from it during the remainder of their lives.

“You ought to do something for us, for you’ve took away our niggers,” whined a well-dressed woman one day in my hearing. To the force of the objection, that the South owed the loss of its slaves to its own folly, she appeared singularly insensible; and she showed marked resentment because nothing was done for her, although obliged to confess that she owned the house she lived in, and another for which two colored families were paying rent.

I was sitting in one of the tents of the Relief Commission one morning, when a woman came to complain that a ticket issued to her there had drawn but fifteen rations, instead of twenty-one, as she had expected.

“I didn’t think it was you all’s fault,” she said, with an apologetic grimace; “but I knowed I’d been powerfully cheated.”

This was the spirit manifested by very many, both of the rich and the poor. They felt that they had a sacred right to prey upon the government, and any curtailment of that privilege they regarded as a wrong and a fraud. So notorious was their rapacity, that they were satirically represented as saying to the government,—

“We have done our best to break you up, and now we are doing our best to eat you up.”

Where such a spirit existed, it was not possible to prevent hundreds from obtaining government aid who were not entitled to it. It was the design of the Relief Commission to feed only indigent women and children. No rations were issued by the Commissary except to those presenting tickets; and tickets were issued for the benefit only of those whose destitute condition was attested by certificates signed by a clergyman or physician.[1] To secure these certificates, however, was not difficult, even for those who stood in no need of government charity. Clergymen and physicians were not all honest. Many of them believed with the people that the government was a fit object for good secessionists to prey upon. Some were faithful in the performance of their duty; but if one physician refused to sign a false statement, it was easy to dismiss him, and call in another less scrupulous.

“I have just exposed two spurious cases of destitution,” said an officer of the Relief Commission, one day as I entered his tent. “Mrs. A——, on Fourth Street, has been doing a thriving business all summer, by selling the rations she has drawn for a fictitious family. Mrs. B—— has been getting support for herself, and two sick daughters, that turn out to be two great lazy sons, who take her hard-tack and salt-fish, and exchange them for whiskey, get drunk every night, and lie abed till noon every day.”

“What do you do with such cases?”

“Cut them off; that is all we can do. This whole business of feeding the poor of Richmond,” he added, “is a humbug. Richmond is a wealthy city still; it is very well able to take care of its own poor, and should be taxed for the purpose.” I found this to be the opinion of many intelligent unbiased observers.

Besides the Relief Commission, and the Freedmen’s Commission, both maintained by the government, I found an agency of the American Union Commission established in Richmond. This Commission, supported by private benevolence, was organized for the purpose of aiding the people of the South, “in the restoration of their civil and social condition, upon the basis of industry, education, freedom, and Christian morality.” In Richmond, it was doing a useful work. To the small farmers about the city it issued ploughs, spades, shovels, and other much needed implements,—for the war had beaten pitchforks into bayonets, and cast ploughshares into cannon. Earlier in the season it had distributed many thousand papers of garden-seeds to applicants from all parts of the State,—a still greater benefit to the impoverished people, with whom it was a common saying, that “good seed ran out under the Confederacy.” It had established a free school for poor whites. I also found Mr. C. the Commission’s Richmond agent, indefatigable in assisting other associations in the establishment of schools for the Freedmen.

The Union Commission performed likewise an indispensable part in feeding the poor. Those clergymen and physicians who were so prompt to grant certificates to secessionists not entitled to them, were equally prompt to refuse them to persons known as entertaining Union sentiments. To the few genuine Union people of Richmond, therefore, the Commission came, and was welcomed as an angel of mercy. But it did not confine its favors to them; having divided the city into twelve districts, and appointed inspectors for each, it extended its aid to such of the needy as the Relief Commission had been unable to reach.

-----

Footnote 1:

Form of certificate:—

RICHMOND, VA., ............... 1865.

I CERTIFY, on honor, that I am well acquainted with Mrs. Jane Smith, and that she is the owner of no real estate or personal property, or effects of any kind; and that she has no male member of her family who is the owner of real estate or personal property or effects of any kind, upon which there can be realized sufficient money for the maintenance of her family; and that she has no means of support, and is a proper object of charity; and that her family consists of four females and five children.

Given under my hand, this 17th day of September, 1865.

JEFFERSON JONES, M. D.

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XXII. THE UNION MEN OF RICHMOND

At the tent of the Union Commission, pitched near a fountain on Capitol Square, I met a quiet little man in laborer’s clothes, whom the agent introduced to me as “Mr. H——,” adding, “There were two votes cast against the ordinance of secession in this city: one of those votes was cast by Mr. H——. He is one of the twenty-one Union men of Richmond.”

He looked to be near fifty years of age; but he told me he was only thirty-two. “I’ve been through such things as make a man look old!” He showed me his gray hair, which he said was raven black, without a silver streak, before the war.

“I was four times taken to the conscript camp, but never sent off to fight. I worked in a foundery, and my employer got out exemption papers for me. The Confederates, when they wanted more men, would declare any time that all the exemption papers then out were void, and go to picking us up in the street and sending us off to camp before we knew it. Some would buy themselves off, and a few would get off as I did,—because they could do work nobody else could do.”

He was a man of intuitive ideas and originality of character. Although bred up under the influence of the peculiar institution, poor, and uneducated, he had early formed clear and strong convictions on the subject of slavery. “I was an Abolitionist before I ever heard the word abolitionist.” He believed in true religion, but not in the religion of traitors.

“I never hesitated to tell ’em what I thought. ‘God has no more to do with you all,’ says I, ‘than he has with last year’s rain. I’d as lieves go to a gambling-house, as to go and hear a minister pray that God would drive back the armies of the North. You are on your knees mocking at God, and He laughs at you!’ Events proved that what I said was true. After every Fast, the Rebels lost some important point. There was a Fast-day just before Fort Donelson; another before New Orleans was taken; another before Gettysburg and Vicksburg; another before Atlanta fell; and another before the evacuation of Richmond. That was the way God answered their prayers.”

He corroborated the worst accounts I had heard concerning the state of society in Richmond during the war.

“It seemed as though there was nothing but thieving and robbery going on. The worst robbers were Hood’s men, set to guard the city. They’d halt a man, and shoot him right down if he wouldn’t stop. They’d ask a man the time, and snatch his watch. They went to steal some chickens of a man I knew, and as he tried to prevent them, they killed him. At last the women got to stealing. We had an insurrection of women here, you know. I never saw such a sight. They looked like flocks of old buzzards, picked geese, and cranes; dressed in all sorts of odd rigs; armed with hatchets, knives, axes,—anything they could lay their hands on. They collected together on the Square, and Governor Letcher made ’em a speech from the Monument. They hooted at him. Then Jeff Davis made a speech; they hooted at him too; they didn’t want speeches, they said; they wanted bread. Then they begun to plunder the stores. They’d just go in and carry off what they pleased. I saw three women put a bag of potatoes, and a barrel of flour, and a firkin of butter in a dray; then they ordered the darkey to drive off, with two women for a guard.”

Another of the faithful twenty-one was Mr. L——, whom I found at a restaurant kept by him near the old market. It was he who carried off Col. Dahlgren’s body, after it had been buried by the Rebels at Oak Wood.

“I found a negro who knew the spot, and hired him to go with me one dark night, and dig up the body. We carried it to Mr. Rowlett’s house [Mr. Rowlett was another of the faithful], and afterwards took it through the Confederate lines, in broad daylight, hid under a load of peach-trees, and buried it in a metallic case. It lay there until after the evacuation, when it was dug up and sent home to Admiral Dahlgren’s family.”

Mr. L—— devoted much of his time and means during the war to feeding Union prisoners, and helping Union men through the lines. “I was usually at work that way all night; so the next day I’d be looking sick and sleepy; and that way,—with a little money to bribe the doctors,—I kept out of the Rebel army.” In January, 1865, he was arrested for sending information through the lines to General Butler, and lay in prison until the evacuation.

One of the most interesting evenings in my Richmond experience I passed at the house of Mr. W——, on Twenty-fifth Street. A Northern man by birth and education, he had remained true to his nativity at a time when so many from the Free States living at the South had proved renegades and apostates. Arrested early in the war for “disloyalty,” he had suffered six months in Salisbury Prison because he would not take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate Government.

“I could have got my liberty any day by taking that oath. But I never would, and never did. As good and true men as ever trod the earth died there because they would not take it. Mr. Buck, of Kentucky, was one. Almost his last words were, ‘Tell my wife I would be glad to go home, but I’d rather die here than take an oath that will perjure my soul.’ He was happy; he died. Dying was not the worst part of it, by any means; our sufferings every day were worse than death.”

Liberated at last, through the intercession of his wife, Mr. W—— came home, and devoted himself to feeding and rescuing Union prisoners, and to serving his country in other perilous ways.

He corroborated what had been told me with regard to the number of Union men in Richmond.

“You will find men enough now, who claim to have been Union men from the first. But of those whose loyalty stood the test of persecution in every shape, there are just twenty-one,—no more, and no less. I’ve watched them all through, and if there’s a Union man I don’t know, I should like to see him. Those men of influence, who opposed secession in the beginning, and afterwards voted for it, but who pretend now to have been in favor of the Union all the while, were the most mischievous traitors of all, for they carried the lukewarm with them.”

There were Union women, however, who worked and suffered as heroically for the cause as the men. “One lady was nine months in prison here for sending information through the lines to our armies. She was very ill at one time, and wished to see a minister. They sent her Jeff Davis’s minister. ‘Miserable wretch!’ said he, ‘I suppose I must pray with you, but I don’t see how I can!’”

“When my husband was in prison,” said Mrs. W——, “we suffered greatly for the necessaries of life. We had a little money in the savings-bank; and he sent us an order for it: ‘Please pay to my little son,’ and so forth. Payment was refused, because he had not taken the oath of allegiance, and the money was confiscated.”

Of the labors, perils, sacrifices, and anxieties which the Union men of Richmond underwent, in giving secret aid to the good cause, no adequate account has ever been published, nor ever will be published. “I did no other business at the time. I gave my whole life to it, and all my means. I nearly went crazy. Besides Libby and Castle Thunder, there were several smaller prisons in Richmond. There was one next door to us here. There was another on the opposite side, a little farther up the street. We had the prisoners under our very eyes, and couldn’t help doing something for them. We could see their haggard faces and imploring eyes looking out at us from the windows,—or from behind the windows,—for it wasn’t safe for them to come too near. One day I saw one approach a little nearer than usual,—his head was perhaps a foot from the window,—when the guard deliberately put up his gun and blew out his brains. He was immediately carried away in a cart; and as a little red stream trickled along the ground, a boy ran after it, shouting, ‘Thar’s some Yankee blood; bring a cup and ketch it!’ The papers next day boasted that in an hour the dead man was under the sod.”

A fund was secretly collected for the benefit of the prisoners. One of the first contributors towards it was an illiterate poor man named White. He put in five dollars. Mr. W—— told him that was too much for a man in his circumstances. “No,” said White, “I’s got two fives, and I reckon the least I can do is to go halves.” From that small beginning the fund grew to the handsome sum of thirteen thousand dollars.

White, concealing his Union sentiments from the authorities, got permission to sell milk and other things to the prisoners, which they paid for often with money he smuggled in to them. With small bribes he managed to secure the good-will of the guard. He played his part admirably, higgling with his customers, and complaining of hard times and small profits, while he gave them milk and money, and carried letters for them. One day a prisoner was observed to slip something into his can. To divert suspicion, White pretended great surprise, and, appearing to fish out a dime, held it up to the light as if to assure himself that it was real. “I’s durned if there a’n’t one honest Yankee!” said he, with a grin of satisfaction.

Mrs. W—— obtained permission to send some books to the prisoners; very few reached them, however,—the greater part being appropriated by the Rebels. Donations of clothing and other necessaries met with a similar fate. In this state of things, White’s ancient mule-cart and honest face proved invaluable. He carried a pass-book, in which exchanged prisoners were credited with sums subscribed for the benefit of their late companions. Many of these subscriptions were purely fictitious,—the money coming from the Union-men’s fund. On the strength of one fabulous contribution, set down at fifty dollars, he had given the prisoners over a hundred dollars’ worth of provisions, when a Rebel surgeon stopped him.

“Haven’t you paid up that everlasting fifty dollars yet?”

“Doctor,” said White, producing his pass-book, “I’s an honest man, I is; and if you say I can’t put in no more on this yer score, you jest write your name hyer.”

The surgeon declining to assume the responsibility, White managed to take in to the prisoners, on the same imaginary account, milk and eggs to the amount of fifty dollars more.

“I told you there were only twenty-one Union men in Richmond,” said Mr. W——. “I meant white Union men. Some of the colored people were as ready to give their means and risk their lives for the cause as anybody. One poor negro woman, who did washing for Confederate officers, spent her earnings to buy flour and bake bread, which she got in to the prisoners through a hole under the jail-yard fence; knowing all the while she’d be shot, if caught at it.”

Mr. W—— assisted over twenty Union prisoners to escape. Among other adventures, he related to me the following:—

“From our windows we could look right over into the prison-yard adjoining us here. Every day we could see the dead carried out. In the evening they carried out those who had died since morning, and every morning they carried out those that had died over night. Once we counted seventeen dead men lying together in the yard, all stripped of their clothes, ready for burial; so terrible was the mortality in these prisons. The dead-house was in a corner of the yard. A negro woman occupied another house outside of the guard-line, and close to my garden fence.”

He took me to visit the premises. We entered by a heavy wooden gate from the street, and stood within the silent enclosure. It was a clear, beautiful evening, and the moonlight lay white and peaceful upon the gable of the warehouse that had served as a prison, upon the old buildings and fences, and upon the ground the weary feet of the sick prisoners had trodden, and where the outstretched corpses had lain.

“Every day some of the prisoners would be marched down to the medical department, a few blocks below, to be examined. A colored girl who lived with us, used to go out with bread hid under her apron, and slip it into their hands, if she had a chance, as she met them coming back. One morning she brought home a note, which one of them, Capt. ——, had given her. It was a letter of thanks ‘to his unknown benefactors.’ Miss H——, who was visiting us at the time, proposed to answer it. It was much less dangerous for her to do so, than it would have been for me, for I was a suspected man; I had already been six months in a Rebel prison. But if she was discovered writing to a Yankee, her family would be prepared to express great surprise and indignation at the circumstance, and denounce it as a ‘love affair.’” (The H——s are one of the Union families of Richmond; and Miss H—— was a young girl of nerve and spirit.)

“In this way we got into communication with the Captain. It wasn’t long, of course, before he made proposals to Miss H——; not of the usual sort, however, but of a kind we expected. He and another of the prisoners, a surgeon, had resolved to attempt an escape, and they wanted our assistance. After several notes on the subject had passed,—some through the hands of the colored girl, some through a crack in the fence,—everything was arranged for a certain evening.

“Citizens’ clothes were all ready for them; and I obtained a promise from G——, a good Union man, to conceal them in his house until they could be got away. To avoid the very thing that happened, he was not to tell his wife; but she suspected mischief,—for it’s hard for a man to hide what he feels, when he knows his life is at stake,—and she gave him no peace until he let her into the secret. She declared that the men should never be brought into their house.

“’We’ve just got shet of one boarder,’ says she, meaning a prisoner they had harbored, ‘and I never’ll have another.’

“I couldn’t blame her much; for we were trifling with our lives. But G—— felt terribly about it. He came down to let me know. It was the very evening the men were to come out, and too late to get word to them. If their plans succeeded, they would be sure to come out; and what was to be done with them? They would not be safe with me an hour. My house would be the first one searched. G—— went off, for he could do nothing. Then, as it grew dark, we were expecting them every moment. There was nobody here but Miss H——, my wife, and myself. The colored girl was in the kitchen. It was dangerous to make any unusual movements, for the Rebel guard in the street was marching past every three minutes, and looking in. We sat quietly talking on indifferent subjects, with such sensations inside as nobody knows anything about who hasn’t been through such a scene. My clothes were wet through with perspiration. Every time after the guard had passed, we held our breath, until—tramp, tramp!—he came round again.

“At last in came the colored girl, rushing from the kitchen, in great fright, and gasped out in a hoarse whisper,—‘Lord Jesus, master! two Yankees done come right into our backyard!’

“’We have nothing to do with the Yankees,’ I said; ‘go about your work, and let ’em alone.’ And still we sat there, and talked, or pretended to read, while once more—tramp, tramp, tramp—the guard marched by the windows.”

“But there was a guard inside the prison-yard; how then had the Yankees managed to get out?”

“I’m coming to that now. I told you the dead were borne out every morning and evening. That evening there was an extra body. It was the Yankee Doctor. He had bribed the prisoners, who carried out the dead, to carry him out. The dead-house was outside of the guard. They laid him with the corpses, and returned to the prison. Poor fellows! there were four of them; they were sent to Andersonville for their share in the transaction, and there every one of them died.

“A little while after, as some prisoners were going in from the yard, they got into a fight near the door. The guard ran to interfere; and the Captain, who was waiting for this very chance,—for the scuffle was got up by his friends expressly for his benefit,—darted into the negro woman’s house, and ran up-stairs. From a window he jumped down into my garden. In the mean time the Doctor came to life, crawled out from among the dead men, pushed a board from the back side of the dead house, climbed the fence, and joined his friend the Captain, under our kitchen windows.

“Not a move was made by any of us. We kept on chatting, yawning, or pretending to read the newspaper; and all the while the guard in the street was going his rounds and peeping in. Everything—the freedom of these men, and my life—was hanging by a cobweb. One mistake, a single false step, would ruin us. But everything had been preärranged. They found the clothes ready for them, and we were waiting only to give them time to disguise themselves. So far, it could not be proved that I had anything to do with the business, but the time was coming for me to take it into my own hands.

“I showed you the alley running from the street to my backyard, and now you’ll see why I took you around there. The Captain and the Doctor after getting on their disguise, were to keep watch by the corner of the house at the end of the alley, and wait for the signal,—a gentleman going out of the house with a lady on his arm and a white handkerchief in his hand. They were to come out of the alley immediately, and follow at a respectful distance.

“Having given them plenty of time,—not very many minutes, however, though they seemed hours to us,—Miss H—— put on her bonnet, and I took my hat; I watched my opportunity, and just as the guard had passed, gave her my arm, and set out to escort her home. As we went out, I had occasion to use my handkerchief, which I flirted, and put back into my pocket. We didn’t look behind us once, but walked on, never knowing whether our men were following or not, until, after we had passed several corners, Miss H—— ventured to peep over her shoulder. Sure enough, there were two men coming along after us.

“We walked past Jeff Davis’s house, and stopped at her father’s door. There I took leave of her, and walked on alone. I had made up my mind what to do. G—— having failed us, I must try R——; an odd old man, but true as steel. It was a long walk to his house, and it was late when I got there. I hid my men in a barn, and knocked at the door.

“’Anything the matter?’ says Mrs. R——, from the window.

“’I want to speak with Mr. R—— a moment,’ I said. I saw she was frightened, when she found out who I was; but she made haste to let me in. Serious as my business was, I couldn’t help laughing when I found R——. He sleeps on a mattress, his wife sleeps on feathers; and both, occupy the same bed. They compromise their difference of taste in this way: they double up the feather-bed for Mrs. R——; that gives her a double portion, and makes room for R—— on the mattress. She sleeps on a mountain in the foreground; he, in the valley behind her.

“’W——,’ says he, looking up over the mountain, ‘there’s mischief ahead! You wouldn’t be coming here at this hour if there wasn’t. Is it a Castle Thunder case?’

“’No,’ I said, quietly as I could, for he was very much agitated.

“’I’m afraid of Castle Thunder!’ says he. ‘I’m afraid of you! If it isn’t a Castle Thunder case, I demand to know what it is.’

“’It’s a halter case,’ I said. And then I told him. He got up and pulled on his clothes. I took out fifty dollars in Rebel money, and offered him, for the feeding of the men till they could be got away.

“’You can’t get any of that stuff on to me!’ says he. ‘I’m afraid of it. We shall all lose our lives, this time, I’m sure. Why did you bring ’em here?’

“But though fully convinced he was to die for it, he finally consented to take in the fugitives. So I delivered them into his hands; but my work didn’t end there. They were nine days at his house. Meantime, through secret sources, by means of bribes, I got passes to take them through the lines. These cost me a hundred dollars in greenbacks; then, when everything was ready, all passes were revoked, and they were good for nothing. Finally Dennis Shane took the job of running them through the lines for five hundred dollars in Rebel money.

“He got them safely through; and just a month from that time one of those men came back for me. General Butler sent him: he wanted to talk with me about affairs in Richmond. I went out with a party of seven; and when near Williamsburg we were all captured by a band of Confederate soldiers.

“I determined not to be taken back to Richmond and identified, if I could help it. I got down at a spring to drink, crawled along under the bank a little way, as fast as I could, then jumped up, and ran for my life. I was shot at, and chased; they put dogs on my track; I was four days and nights without food; but I escaped, while all the rest were carried back. After that I ran the lines to Butler whenever he wanted to see me, until it wasn’t safe for me to go back to Richmond, where my operations had become known.

“After the war was over, and our troops had possession,” added Mr. W——, “then I came back, and saw what I had never expected to see in this world. I saw the very men who had robbed, persecuted, and imprisoned me, rewarded by our government. I came back to find that under the administration of our own generals, Ord and Patrick, it was in a man’s favor to be known as a secessionist, and against him to be known as a Union man. The Union men were insulted and bullied by them, the colored people were treated worse under their rule than they had ever been by the Rebels themselves, and the secessionists were coaxed and petted. A Rebel could obtain from government whatever he asked for; but a Union man could obtain nothing. When we were feeding and flattering them at a rate that made every loyal man sick at heart, I sent a request in writing for a little hay for my horse. I got a refusal in writing: I couldn’t have any hay. At the same time the government was feeding in its stables thirty horses for General Lee and his staff.”

A hundred similar instances of partiality shown to the Rebels by the Ord and Patrick administration were related to me by eye-witnesses; coupled with accounts of insults and outrages heaped upon loyal men and Freedmen. Happily Ord and Patrick and their pro-slavery rule had passed away; but there were still complaints that it was not the true Union men who had the ear of the government, but those whose unionism had been put on as a matter of policy and convenience. This was no fault of General Terry, although he was blamed for it. When I told him what I had heard, he said warmly,—

“Why don’t these men come to me? They are the very men I wish to see.”

“The truth is, General, they were snubbed so often by your predecessors that they have not the heart to come.”

“But I have not snubbed them. I have not shown partiality to traitors. Everybody that knows me knows that I have no love for slavery or treason, and that every pulse of my heart throbs with sympathy for these men and the cause in which they have suffered.”

One evening I met by appointment, at the tent of the Union Commission, a number of the dauntless twenty-one, and accompanied them to a meeting of the Union League. It was a beautiful night, and as we walked by the rainy fountain, under the still trees, one remarked,—

“Many an evening, when there was as pretty a moon as this, I have wished that I might die and be out of my misery. That was when I was in prison for being loyal to my country.”

At the rooms of the League I was surrounded by these men, nearly every one of whom had been exiled or imprisoned for that cause. I witnessed the initiation of new-comers; but in the midst of the impressive solemnities I could not but reflect, “How faint a symbol is this of the real League to which the twenty-one were sworn in their hearts! To belong to this is now safe and easy enough; but to have been a true member of that, under the reign of terror,—how very different!”

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XXIII. MARKETS AND FARMING

The negro population of Richmond gives to its streets a peculiarly picturesque and animated appearance. Colored faces predominate; but of these not more than one in five or six shows unmixed African blood; and you are reminded less of an American city than of some town of Southern Europe. More than once I could have fancied myself in Naples, but that I looked in vain for the crowds of importunate beggars, and the dark-skinned lazzaroni lying all day in the sunshine on the street corners. I saw no cases of mendicancy among the colored people of Richmond, and very little idleness. The people found at work everywhere belonged to the despised race; while the frequenters of bar-rooms, and loungers on tavern-steps, were white of skin. To get drunk, especially, appeared to be a prerogative of the chivalry.

The mules and curious vehicles one sees add to the picturesqueness of the streets. The market-carts are characteristically droll. A little way off you might fancy them dogcarts. Under their little ribbed canvas covers are carried little jags of such produce as the proprietor may have to sell,—a few cabbages, a few pecks of sweet potatoes, a pair of live chickens, tied together by the legs; a goose or a duck in a box, its head sticking out; with perhaps a few eggs and eggplants. These little carts, drawn by a mule or the poorest of ponies, have been driven perhaps a dozen or fifteen miles, bringing to market loads, a dozen of which would scarcely equal what a New-York farmer, or a New-England market-gardener often heaps upon a single wagon.

In the markets, business is transacted on the same petty scale. You see a great number of dealers, and extraordinary throngs of purchasers, considering the little that appears to be sold. Not every producer has so much even as an antiquated mule-cart. Many come to market with what they can carry on their backs or in their hands. Yonder is an old negro with a turkey, which he has walked five miles to dispose of here. That woman with a basket of eggs, whose rags and sallow complexion show her to be one of the poor whites whom respectable colored people look down upon, has travelled, it may be, quite as far. Here comes a mulatto boy, with a string of rock-fish caught in the James. This old man has hard peaches in his bag; and that other woman contributes a box of wild grapes.

People of all colors and all classes surround the sheds or press in throngs through the passages between the stalls. The fine lady, followed by her servant bearing a basket, has but little money; and although she endeavors to make it go as far as possible, it must be a small family that can subsist until Monday upon what she carries away. There is little money to be seen anywhere; in which respect these scenes are very different from those witnessed during the last years of Confederate rule, when it was said that people went to market with baskets to carry their money, and wallets to bring home what it would buy. The markets are not kept open during the evening, and as the hour for closing them arrives, the bargaining and loud talking grow more and more vivacious, while prices decline. I remember one fellow who jumped upon his table, and made a speech, designed to attract the patronage of the freedmen.

“Walk up hyer, and buy cheap!” he shouted. “I don’t say niggers; I say ladies and gentlemen. Niggers is played out; they’re colored people now, and as good as anybody.”

The markets indicate the agricultural enterprise of a community. Yet, even after seeing those of Richmond, I was amazed at the petty and shiftless system of farming I witnessed around the city. I was told that it was not much better before the war. The thrifty vegetable gardens of the North, producing two or three crops a year; the long rows of hot-beds by the fences, starting cucumbers and supplying the market with greens sometimes before the snow is gone,—such things are scarcely known in the capital of Virginia. “We have lettuce but a month or two in the year,” said a lady, who was surprised to learn how Northern gardeners managed to produce it in and out of season.

In one of my rides I passed the place of a Jersey farmer, about three miles from the city. It looked like an oasis in the desert. I took pains to make the proprietor’s acquaintance, and learn his experience.

“I came here and bought in ’59 one hundred and twenty-seven acres for four thousand dollars. The first thing I did was to build that barn. Everybody laughed at me. The most of the farms have no barns at all; and such a large one was a wonder,—it must have been built by a fool or a crazy man. This year I have that barn full to the rafters.

“I found the land worn out, like nearly all the land in the country. The way Virginia folks have spoilt their farms looks a good deal more like fools or crazy men than my barn. First, if there was timber, they burnt it off and put a good coat of ashes on the soil. Then they raised tobacco three or four years. Then corn, till the soil got run out and they couldn’t raise anything. Then they went to putting on guano, which was like giving rum to an exhausted man; it just stimulated the soil till all the strength there was left was burnt out. That was the condition of my farm when I came here.

“The first thing I did, I went to hauling out manure from Richmond. I was laughed at for that too. The way people do here, they throw away their manure. They like to have their farm-yards high and dry; so they place them on the side of a hill, where every rain washes them, and carries off into the streams the juices that ought to be saved for the land. They left their straw-stacks any number of years, then drew the straw out on the farms dry. I made my barn-yard in a hollow, and rotted the straw in it. Now I go to market every day with a big Jersey farm-wagon loaded down with stuff.”

He had been getting rich, notwithstanding the war. I asked what labor he employed.

“Negro labor mostly. It was hard to get any other here. I didn’t own slaves, but hired them of their masters. Only the poorest hands were usually hired out in that way; I could seldom get first-class hands; yet I always found that by kind treatment and encouragement I could make very good laborers of those I had. I get along still better with them now they are free.”

“Do you use horses?”

“No; mules altogether. Two mules are equal to three horses. Mules are not subject to half the diseases horses are. They eat less, and wear twice as long.”

I found farms of every description for sale, around Richmond. The best land on the James River Bottom could be bought at prices varying from forty to one hundred dollars an acre. I remember one very desirable estate, of eight hundred acres, lying on the river, three miles from the city, which was offered for sixty dollars. There were good buildings on it; and the owner was making fences of old telegraph wire, to replace those destroyed during the war.

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XXIV. IN AND AROUND RICHMOND

If temples are a token of godliness, Richmond should be a holy city. It has great pride in its churches; two of which are noteworthy.

The first is St. John’s Church, on Church Hill,—a large, square-looking wooden meeting-house, whose ancient walls and rafters once witnessed a famous scene, and reëchoed words that have become historical. Here was delivered Patrick Henry’s celebrated speech, since spouted by every schoolboy,—“Give me liberty or give me death!” Those shining sentences still hang like a necklace on the breast of American Liberty. The old meeting-house stands where it stood, overlooking the same earth and the same beautiful stream. But the men of that age lie buried in the dust of these old crowded church-yards; and of late one might almost have said that the wisdom of Virginia lay buried with them.

On the corner of Grace Street, opposite my hotel, I looked out every morning upon the composite columns and pilasters, and spire clean as a stiletto, of St. Paul’s Church, with which are connected very different associations. This is the church, and (if you enter) yonder is the pew, in which Jeff Davis sat on Sundays, and heard the gospel of Christ interpreted from the slave-owners’ point of view. Here he sat on that memorable Sabbath when Lee’s dispatch was handed in to him, saying that Richmond was lost. The same preacher who preached on that day, still propounds his doctrines from the desk. The same sexton who handed in the dispatch glances at you, and, if you are well dressed, offers you a seat in a good place. The same white congregation that arose then in confusion and dismay, on seeing the President go out, sit quietly once more in their seats; and the same colored congregation looks down from the nigger gallery. The seats are still bare,—the cushions that were carried to the Rebel hospitals, to serve as mattresses, having not yet been returned.

Within an arrow’s shot from St. Paul’s, in the State Capitol, on Capitol Square, were the halls of the late Confederate Congress. I visited them only once, and found them a scene of dust and confusion,—emblematical. The desks and seats had been ripped up, and workmen were engaged in sweeping out the last vestiges of Confederate rule. The furniture, as I learned, was already at an auction-room on Main Street, selling under the hammer. I reported the fact to Mr. C——, of the Union Commission, who was looking for furniture to be used in the freedmen’s schools; and he made haste to bid for the relics. I hope he got them; for I can fancy no finer stroke of poetical justice than the conversion of the seats on which sat the legislators of the great slave empire, and the desks on which they wrote, into seats and desks for little negro children learning to read.

It was interesting, by the light of recent events, and in company with one who knew Richmond of yore, to make the tour of the old negro auction-rooms. Davis & Co.’s Negro Bazaar was fitting up for a concert hall. We entered a grocery store,—a broad basement room, with a low, dark ceiling, supported by two stout wooden pillars. “I’ve seen many a black Samson sold, standing between those posts; and many a woman too, as white as you or I.” Now sugar and rice were sold there, but no more human flesh and blood. The store was kept by a Northern man, who did not even know what use the room had served in former years.

A short ride from the city are two cemeteries worth visiting. On one side, Hollywood, where lie buried President Monroe and his doctrine. On the other side, Oak Wood, a wild, uncultivated hill, half covered with timber and brush, shading numerous Confederate soldiers’ graves. Here, set apart from the rest by a rude fence, is the “Yankee Cemetery,” crowded with the graves of patriot soldiers, who fell in battle, or died of slow starvation and disease in Richmond prisons; a melancholy field, which I remember as I saw it one gusty September day, when wild winds swept it, and shook down over it whirling leaves from the reeling and roaring trees.

Lieut. M——, of the Freedmen’s Commission, having invited me to visit Camp Lee, about two miles from the city, came for me one afternoon in a fine large carryall, comfortably covered, cushioned, and carpeted.

“Perhaps you will not feel honored,” he remarked, as we rattled up Broad Street, “but you will be interested to know that this is General Robert E. Lee’s head-quarters’ wagon. You are riding on the seat he rode on through the campaigns of the last two years. Your feet are on a piece of carpet which one of the devoted secessionists of Richmond took up from his hall-floor expressly to line the General’s wagon-bottom,—little thinking Yankee boot-soles would ever desecrate it! After Lee’s surrender, this wagon was turned over to the quartermaster’s department, and the quartermaster turned it over to us.” I was interested, indeed; I was carried back to those sanguinary campaigns; and I fancied I could see the face of him sitting there where I sat, and read the thoughts of his mind, and the emotions of his heart, in those momentous nights and days. I imagined the plans he revolved in his brain, shut in by those dark curtains; what he felt after victory, and what after defeat; the weariness of body and soul; the misgivings, the remorse, when he remembered his treason and the folly of Virginia,—for he certainly remembered them in the latter gloomy periods, when he saw the black cloud of doom settling down upon a bad and failing cause.

Camp Lee, formerly a fair ground, was the conscript camp of the Confederacy. I had been told many sad stories of young men, and men of middle age, some of them loyal, seized by the conscript officers and sent thither, as it were to a reservoir of the people’s blood, whose stream was necessary to keep the machinery of despotism in motion. I paced the grounds where, with despairing hearts, they took their first lessons in the art by which they were to slay and be slain. I stood by the tree under which deserters were shot. Then I turned to a very different scene.

The old barrack buildings were now the happy homes of a village of freedmen. Groups of barefooted and woolly-headed negro children were at play before the doors, filling the air with their laughter, and showing all their ivory with grins of delight as I passed among them. The old men took off their caps to me, the wise old aunties welcomed me with dignified smiles, and the younger women looked up brightly from their ironing or cooking as I went by. The young men were all away at their work. It was, with few exceptions, a self-supporting community, only about a dozen old or infirm persons, out of three hundred, receiving aid from the government.

A little removed from the negro village was a cottage formerly occupied by Confederate officers.

“In that house,” said the Lieutenant, “is living a very remarkable character. You know him by reputation, ——, formerly one of the ablest writers on ‘De Bow’s Review,’ and considered the great champion of slavery in the South.”

“What! the author of ——?” a somewhat celebrated book in its day, and in the latitude for which it was written; designed to set forth the corrupt and perishable nature of free societies and progressive ideas, and to show that slavery was the one divine and enduring institution.

“The very man. He is now a pauper, living on the bounty of the government. The rent of that cottage is given him, and he draws rations of the Relief Commission. He will be glad to see you; and he has two accomplished daughters you will be glad to see.”

Accordingly we called upon him; but, declining to enter the house, we sat under the stoop, where we could look across the desolate country at the sunset sky.

Mr. ——, an emaciated, sallow, feeble old man, received us affably, and talked with us freely on his favorite topics. He had lived to see the one divine and enduring institution die; but civilization still survived; and the race that found its welfare and happiness only in bondage seemed pretty well off, and tolerably happy,—witness the negro village close by: and the world of progressive ideas still moved on. Yet this great champion of slavery did not appear to have learned the first lesson of the times. All his arguments were the old arguments; he knew nothing but the past, which was gone forever; and the future to him was chaos.

His two daughters, young and accomplished, came and sat with us in the twilight, together with a vivacious young lady from Richmond. On our return to the city, Miss —— accompanied us, with their visitor. The latter proved to be an audacious and incorrigible little Rebel, and regaled us with secesh songs. I remember a few lines.

“You can never win us back, Never, never, Though we perish in the track Of your endeavor!”

“You have no such noble blood For the shedding: In the veins of Cavaliers Was its heading! You have no such noble men In your abolition den, To march through fire and fen, Nothing dreading!”

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XXV. PEOPLE AND POLITICS

One day I dined at the house of a Union man of a different stamp from the twenty-one I have mentioned. He was one of the wealthy citizens of Richmond,—a man of timid disposition and conservative views, who had managed admirably to conceal his Union sentiments during the war. He had been on excellent terms with Jeff Davis and members of his cabinet; and he was now on excellent terms with the United States authorities. A prudent citizen, not wanting in kindness of heart; yet he could say of the Emancipation Act,—

“It will prove a good thing for the slave-owners; for it will be quite as cheap to hire our labor as to own it, and we shall now be rid of supporting the old and decrepit servants, such as were formerly left to die on our hands.”

On being asked if he considered that he owed nothing to those aged servants, he smoothed his chin, and looked thoughtful, but made no reply.

An anecdote will show of what stuff the Unionism of this class is composed. His name happened to be the same as that of one of our generals. During the war, a Confederate officer, visiting his house, said to him,—“I am told you are a near relative of General ——, of the Federal army.”

“It’s a slander!” was the indignant reply. “He is no kin of mine, and I would disown him if he was.”

After the occupation by our troops, Union officers were welcomed at his house; one of whom said to him,—

“Are you related to our famous General ——?”

“Very likely, very likely,” was the complacent answer; “the ——’s are all connected.”

Next to the uncompromising Union men, the most sincerely loyal Virginians I saw in Richmond, or elsewhere, were those who had been lately fighting against us. Only now and then a Confederate soldier had much of the spirit of the Rebellion left in him.

“The truth is,” said Colonel D——, “we have had the devil whipped out of us. It is only those who kept out of the fight that are in favor of continuing it. I fought you with all my might until we got whipped; then I gave it up as a bad job; and now there’s not a more loyal man in the United States than I am.” He had become thoroughly converted from the heresy of secession. “No nation can live that tolerates such a doctrine; and, if we had succeeded, the first thing we should have done would have been to repudiate it.”

I became acquainted with several officers of this class, who inspired me with confidence and sympathy. Yet when one of them told me he had been awarded a government place, with four thousand a year, I could not help saying,—

“What right have you to such a place? How many capable and worthy men, who have been all the while fighting for the government you have been fighting against, would be thankful for a situation with one half or one quarter the salary!”

The animus of the secessionists who kept out of the war, and especially of the women, still manifested itself spitefully on occasions.

“It is amusing,” said Mrs. W——, “to see the pains some of them take to avoid walking under the flag we keep flying over our door.”

Two female teachers of the freed people had, after much trouble, obtained board and lodgings in a private family, where the treatment they received was such as no sensitive person could endure. They were obliged to leave, and accept quarters in a Confederate government building not much better than a barn. Many Richmond families were glad enough to board army officers for their money; but few were prepared to receive and treat decently “nigger teachers,” at any price.

“Yet the people of Richmond are not what they were five years ago,” said General S——, who knew them well, being himself a Virginian. “Their faces have changed. They have a dazed look, like owls in a sudden light. To any one who used to see them in the old days of their pride and spirit, this is very striking. There never was such a downfall, and they have not yet recovered from the shock. They seem to be groping about, as if they had lost something, or were waiting for something. Whatever may be said of them, or whatever they may say of themselves, they feel that they are a conquered people.”

“They were a conquered people,” said the radical Union men. “There never was a rebellious class more thoroughly subdued. They expected no mercy from the government, for they deserved none. They were prepared to submit to everything, even to negro suffrage; for they supposed nothing less would be required of them. But the more lenient the government, the more arrogant they become.”

Of Confederate patriotism I did not hear very favorable accounts. It burst forth in a beautiful tall flame at the beginning of the war. There were soldiers’ aid societies, patronized by ladies whose hands were never before soiled by labor. Stockings were knit, shirts cut and sewed, and carpets converted into blankets, by these lovely hands. If a fine fellow appeared among them, more inclined to gallantry in the parlor than to gallantry in the field, these same lovely hands thrust him out, and he was told that “only ‘the brave deserve the fair.’” But Southern heat is flashy and intense; it does not hold out like the slow, deep fire of the north. The soldiers’ aid societies soon grew to be an old story, and the lovely ones contented themselves with cheering and waving their handkerchiefs when the “noble defenders of the south” marched through the streets.

The “noble defenders of the south” did not, I regret to say, appreciate the cheers and the handkerchiefs as they did the shirts and the blankets.

“Many a time,” said Mrs. H——, “I have heard them yell back at the ladies who cheered them, ‘Go to ——! If you care for us, come out of your fine clothes and help us!’ After the people stopped giving, the soldiers began to help themselves. I’ve seen them rush into stores as they passed, snatch whatever they wanted, and march on again, hooting, with loaves of bread and pieces of meat stuck on the points of their bayonets.”

The sons and brothers of influential families were kept out of the war by an ingenious system of details. Every man was conscripted; but, while the poor and friendless were hurried away to fight the battles of slavery, the favored aristocrat would get “detailed” to fill some “bomb-proof” situation, as it was called.

“These ‘bomb-proofs’ finally got to be a very great nuisance. Men were ‘detailed’ to fill every comfortable berth the government, directly or indirectly, had anything to do with; and as the government usurped, in one way or another, nearly all kinds of business, it soon became difficult for an old or infirm person to get any sort of light employment. A friend of mine, whom the war had ruined, came down from the country, thinking he could get something to do here. He saw able-bodied young men oiling the wheels of the cars. He was old and lame, but he felt himself well able to do that kind of work. So he applied for a situation, and found that the young men he saw were ‘detailed’ from the army. Others were ‘detailed’ to carry lanterns for them when they had occasion to oil the car-wheels at night. It was so with every situation the poor man could have filled.”

This was the testimony of a candid old gentleman, himself an aristocrat, at whose house I passed an evening.

I took an early opportunity to make the acquaintance of Governor Pierpoint, whom I found to be a plain, somewhat burly, exceedingly good-humored and sociable person. The executive mansion occupies pleasant grounds, enclosed from a corner of Capitol Square; and as it was not more than three minutes’ walk from my hotel, I found it often very agreeable to go over and spend a leisure hour or two in his library.

Once I remarked to him: “What Virginia needs is an influx of Northern ideas, Northern energy, Northern capital; what other way of salvation is open to her?”

“None; and she knows it. It is a mistake to suppose that Northern men and Northern capital are not welcome here. They are most heartily welcome; they are invited. Look at this.”

He showed me a beautiful piece of white clay, and a handsome pitcher made from it.

“Within eighty miles of Richmond, by railroad, there are beds of this clay from which might be manufactured pottery and porcelain sufficient to supply the entire South. Yet they have never been worked; and Virginia has imported all her fine crockery-ware. Now Northern energy will come in and coin fortunes out of that clay. Under the old labor system, Virginia never had any enterprise; and now she has no money. The advantages she offers to active business men were never surpassed. Richmond is surrounded with iron mines and coal-fields, wood-lands and farm-lands of excellent quality; and is destined from its very position, under the new order of things, to run up a population of two or three hundred thousand, within not many years.”

I inquired about the state finances.

“The Rebel State debt will, of course, never be paid. The old State debt, amounting to forty millions, will eventually be paid, although the present is a dark day for it. There is no live stock to eat the grass; the mills are destroyed; business is at a stand-still; there is no bank-stock to tax,—nothing to tax, I might almost say, but the bare land. We shall pay no interest on the debt this year; and it will probably be three years before the back interest is paid. We have twenty-two millions invested in railroads, and these will all be put in a living condition in a short time. Then I count upon the development of our natural resources. In mineral wealth and agricultural advantages Virginia is inconceivably rich, as a few years will amply testify.”

As an illustration of native enterprise, he told me that there was but one village containing fifty inhabitants on the canal between Richmond and Lynchburg, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles; and land lying upon it was worth no more to-day than it was before the canal was constructed. “Neither is there a village of any size on the James River, between Richmond and Norfolk. How long would it be before brick villages and manufacturing towns would spring up on such a canal and river in one of the free States? Wasn’t it about time,” he added, “for the old machine to break to pieces?”

At the hotel I used to meet a prosperous looking, liberal faced, wide-awake person, whom I at once set down as a Yankee. On making his acquaintance, I learned that he was at the head of a company of Northern men who had recently purchased extensive coal-fields near the James River, twelve miles above Richmond.

“The mines,” he said, “had been exhausted once, and abandoned, so we bought them cheap. These Virginians would dig a little pit and take out coal until water came in and interfered with their work; then they would go somewhere else and dig another little pit. So they worked over the surface of the fields, but left the great body of the coal undisturbed. They baled with a mule. Now we have come in with a few steam-pumps which will keep the shafts free from water as fast as we sink them; and we are taking out cargoes of as good anthracite as ever you saw. Here is some of it now,” pointing to a line of loaded carts coming up from the wharf, where the coal was landed.

I asked what labor he employed.

“Negro labor. There is none better. I have worked negroes all my life, and prefer them in my business to any other class of laborers. Treat a negro like a man, and you make a man of him.”

I also made the acquaintance of a New Yorker, who was working a gold mine in Orange County, Va., and whose testimony was the same with regard to native methods and negro labor. In short, wherever I went, I became, every day, more strongly convinced that the vast, beautiful, rich, torpid state of Virginia was to owe her regeneration to Northern ideas and free institutions.

Hearing loud laughter in the court-house one evening, I looked in, and saw a round, ruddy, white-haired, hale old man making a humorous speech to a mixed crowd of respectable citizens and rowdies. It was the Honorable Mr. P——, bidding for their votes. A played-out politician, he had disappeared from public view a quarter of a century before, but had now come up again, thinking there was once more a chance for himself in the paucity of able men, whom the barrier of the test-oath left eligible to Congress.

“As for that oath,” said he, with a solemn countenance, “I confess it is a bitter cup; and I have prayed that it might pass from me.”

Here he paused, and took a sip of brandy from a glass on the desk before him. Evidently that cup wasn’t so bitter, for he smacked his lips, and looked up with a decidedly refreshed expression.

“Fellow-citizens,” said he, “I am going to tell you a little story,”—clapping his cane under his arm, and peering under his gray eyebrows. “It will show you my position with regard to that abominable oath. In the good old Revolutionary times, there lived somewhere on the borders a pious Scotchman, whose farm was run over one day by the red-coats, and the next by the Continentals; so that it required the most delicate manœuvering on his part to keep so much as a pig or a sheep (to say nothing of his own valuable neck) safe from the two armies. Now what did this pious Scotchman do? In my opinion he did very wisely. When the red-coats caught him, he took the oath of allegiance to the Crown. The next day, when the Continentals picked him up, he took the same oath to the Continental Congress. Now, being a deacon of the Presbyterian Church, in good and regular standing, certain narrow-minded brethren saw fit to remonstrate with him, asking how he could reconcile his conscience to such a course.

“’My friends,’ said he, ‘I have thought over the matter, and I have prayed over it; and I have concluded that it is safer to trust my soul in the hands of a merciful God, than my property in the hands of those thieving rascals.’

“Fellow-citizens,” resumed the candidate, after a storm of laughter on the part of the crowd, and another a sip of the cup not bitter, on his part, “I have thought over it, and prayed over it, and I have concluded that I can conscientiously take that abominable test-oath; in other words, that it is safer to trust my soul in the hands of a merciful God, than my country in the hands of the Black Republicans.”

He then proceeded to malign the people of the North, and to misrepresent their motives, in a spirit of buffoonery and shameless mendacity, which amazed me. The more outrageous the lies he told, the louder the screams of applause from his delighted audience. I could not have helped laughing at the ludicrousness of his caricatures, had I not seen that they passed for true pictures with a majority of his hearers; or had I not remembered that it was such reckless political lying as this, which had so lately misled to their ruin the ignorant masses of the South.

Having finished his speech and his brandy, he sat down; and a rival candidate mounted the platform.

“B——! B——!” shrieked the ungrateful crowd, clapping and stamping as frantically for the new speaker as for him who had labored so long for their amusement. Thereupon, the Honorable Mr. P——, pitching his hat over his eyes, and brandishing his cane, advanced upon his rival.

B——, a much younger and more slender man, quietly stripped up his coat-sleeves, exposing his linen to the elbows, and showing himself prepared for emergencies; whereat the yells became deafening. A few words passed between the rival candidates; after which B—— folded his arms and permitted P—— to make an explanation. It appeared from this that P—— had written to B——, inviting him to become a candidate for Congress. B—— had declined. Then P—— came forward as a candidate; and then B——, changing his mind, said he would be a candidate too. Hence their quarrel.

Calmly, with his sleeves still up, or ready to come up, for P—— was continually advancing upon him with cane lifted and hat set fiercely on his head,—B—— replied, giving his version of the misunderstanding. He admitted that P—— had written him such a letter. “But his suggestion with regard to my becoming a candidate was very feeble, while the intimation which accompanied it, that he meant to run if I didn’t, was very strong; reminding me of the boarder at the hotel-table, who coveted a certain dish of cakes. ‘Here, waiter,’ said he, ‘see if any of the gentlemen will have these cakes, for if they won’t, I will.’ Of course I declined the cakes. But they have been passed to me by others in a very different spirit, and now I mean to have them if I can get them,—with all deference to the appetite of my venerable friend.”

The crowd hooted, shrieked, roared. “Venerable friend” grasped his glass savagely, but, finding it empty, dashed it down again, and sprang to his feet. Desperately puffed, red in the face, once more whirling his cane aloft and knocking his hat over his brows, I thought, if he did not first get a stroke of apoplexy, B—— would this time surely get a stroke of the stick. But B—— grimly stood his ground; and, after glaring at him a moment as if about to burst, P—— muttered, “Go to the devil, then!” buttoned his coat, gave his hat another knock, and stalked out of the house amid a tumult of merriment and derision.

Nearly always, on such occasions, the disputant who loses his temper, loses his cause. B—— now had everything his own way; and a very good speech he made. He was one of those original Union men who had at first opposed secession, but afterwards yielded to the storm that swept over the State. Sent to the Convention to oppose it there, he had ended by voting for it, under instructions from his constituency. He had kept aloof from war and politics during the Rebellion, and could take the test oath; that was no such bitter cup to him. He spoke very feelingly of the return of Virginia to her place in the Union; praised the government for its clemency and moderation, and advocated a forbearing policy towards the freedmen, whom the previous speaker wished to see driven out of the State; seasoning his speech for the vulgar with timely panegyrics on the heroism of the Confederate soldiers.

The election took place a few days later; and I thought it creditable to the good sense of the district that the younger candidate was chosen.

Of the political views of the people, or of the real sentiments of the speakers themselves, not much was to be learned at such a meeting. The heart of the South was boiling with thoughts and emotions which did not come openly to the surface. On the subject of the national debt, for example. Public speakers and public prints were ominously silent about it; and seldom could a discreet citizen be induced to speak of it with any degree of frankness. I was plainly told, however, by a gentleman of Richmond, that the question was often privately discussed, and that the secessionists would never, if they could help it, submit to be taxed to pay the expenses of their own subjugation.

“But how is it proposed to help it?”

“The first step is to resume their place in the Union. Until that is accomplished, they will remain silent on this and some other delicate subjects. They hope gradually to regain their old power in the nation, when they will unite with the Democratic party of the North, and repudiate the debt.”

If I could have been seriously alarmed by such a prospect, what I witnessed at political meetings and elsewhere, would have done much to dispel my apprehensions. I was strongly impressed by this important fact. The old trained politicians,—whom a common interest, slavery, banded together, and whom no consideration of reason or justice could turn from their purpose,—that formidable phalanx had been broken: nearly every man of them had taken an active part in the Rebellion, and could not therefore, without shameful recreancy and voluntary humiliation on the part of the North, be readmitted to the councils of the nation they had attempted to destroy. In their place we may for some years hope to see a very different class of men, whose youth, or modesty, or good fortune, or good sense, before kept them aloof from political life; men new to the Congressional arena, and therefore more susceptible to the regenerating influence of national ideas and institutions.

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XXVI. FORTIFICATIONS.—DUTCH GAP.—FAIR OAKS

At nine o’clock one fine morning, Major K——, the young Judge-Advocate of the Department of Virginia, called for me by appointment, accompanied by an orderly bringing a tall war-horse General Terry was so kind as to furnish for my use.

I was soon mounted, and riding out of the city by the Major’s side,—down the long, hilly street, past the Rocketts, by the left bank of the river, taking the New-Market Road. First we came to a circle of detached forts surrounding the city; a few minutes’ ride farther on brought us to a heavy continuous line of earthworks surrounding the first line. These were the original fortifications of Richmond. Crossing a desolate undulating country of weeds and undergrowth, we reached the works below Laurel Hill, of more recent construction, and of a more formidable character. The embankments were eighteen feet high from the bottom of the ditch. This was some six feet deep and twelve broad. There were two lines of bristling abatis. These, together with the wooden revetments of the works, had been levied upon by the inhabitants in search of firewood.

Three quarters of a mile beyond we came to the heavy intrenchments of the Army of the James. Between the two lines were the picket-lines of the opposing forces, in places no more than three hundred yards apart. Here the two armies lay and watched each other through the last weary Autumn and Winter of the war. The earth was blotched with “gopher holes,”—hasty excavations in which the veteran videttes proceeded at once to intrench themselves, on being sent out to a new post. “It was astonishing,” said the Major, “to see what a breastwork they would throw up in a few minutes, with no other tools than a bayonet and a tin-plate. The moment they were at their station, down they went, scratching and digging.”

We had previously stopped at Laurel Hill, to look across the broken country on the south, at Fort Gilmer, which the troops of General Foster’s division charged with such unfortunate results. The Major, then serving on Foster’s staff, participated in that affair. “I never can look upon this field,” said he, “without emotion. I lost some of my dearest friends in that assault.”

So it is in every battle: somebody loses his dearest friends.

We rode on past the Federal works into the winter-quarters of the army,—a city of huts, with streets regularly laid out, now deserted and in ruins. Here and there I noted an old-fashioned New-England well-sweep still standing. The line of works was semicircular, both ends resting on the river. Within that ox-bow was the encampment of the Army of the James.

We next visited New-Market Heights, where Butler’s colored regiments formed unflinchingly under fire, and made their gallant charge, wiping out with their own blood the insults that had been heaped upon them by the white troops. “The army saw that charge, and it never insulted a colored soldier after that,” said the Major.

We then galloped across the country, intending to strike Dutch Gap Canal. Not a habitation was in sight. Vast fields spread before us, and we rode through forests of weeds that overtopped our horses’ heads. We became entangled in earthworks, and had to retrace our course. More than once we were compelled to dismount and tear our way through abatis and chevaux-de-frise. The result was, we lost our bearings, and, after riding several miles quite blindly, struck the James at Deep Bottom. Then up the river we galloped, traversing pine woods and weedy plains, avoiding marsh and gully, and leaping ditches, past Aiken’s Landing, to a yellow elevation of earth across a narrow peninsula, which proved to be Dutch Gap.

The canal was there,—a short, deep channel connecting the river with the river again. The James here describes a long loop, seven miles in extent, doubling back upon itself, so that you may stand on this high bank, and throw a stone either into the southward-flowing or the northward-returning stream.

The canal, which cuts off these seven miles, is four hundred and eighty-six feet in length and fifty in depth from the summit of the bank. It is one hundred and twenty-two feet broad at the top, forty at the bottom, and sixty-five at the high-water level. On the lower side the channel is deep enough for ships. Not so at the upper end,—the head that was blown out having fallen back and filled up the canal. At high water, however, small vessels sometimes get through. The tide had just turned, and we found a considerable body of water pouring through the Gap.

Different accounts are given of the origin of the name of Dutch Gap. It is said that a Dutch company was once formed for digging a ship-canal at that place. But a better story is told of a Dutchman who made a bet with a Virginian, that he could beat him in a skiff-race between Richmond and City Point. The Virginian was ahead when they reached the Gap; what then was his astonishment, on arriving at City Point, to find the Dutchman there before him. The latter had saved the roundabout seven miles by dragging his canoe across the peninsula and launching it on the other side.

Riding up the Richmond road, we stopped at the first human habitation we had seen since leaving Laurel Hill. We had been several hours in the saddle, and stood greatly in need of refreshments. The sight of a calf and a churn gave us a promise of milk, and we tied our horses at the door. The house had been a goodly mansion in its day, but now everything about it showed the ruin and dilapidation of war. The windows were broken, and the garden, out-houses, and fences destroyed. This proved to be Cox’s house, and belonged to a plantation of twenty-three hundred acres which included Dutch Gap. Looking at the desolation which surrounded it, I could hardly believe that this had formerly been one of the finest farms in Virginia, worked by a hundred negroes, and furnished with reapers, threshers, a grist-mill, and saw-mill,—all of which had been swept away as if they had never been.

We found lying on a bed in a dilapidated room a poor man sick with the prevailing chills. He had some bread and milk brought for us, and gave us some useful hints about avoiding the torpedoes when we should reach Fort Harrison. He described to us the depredations committed on the place by “Old Butler”; and related how he himself was once taken prisoner by the Yankee marines on the river. “They gave me my choice,—to be carried before the admiral, or robbed of my horse and all the money I had about me. I preferred the robbing; so they cleared me out and set me free.”

I said, “If you had been taken before the admiral, you would have got your liberty and saved your property.”

His voice became deep and tremulous as he replied: “But I didn’t consider horse nor money; I considered my wife. I’d sooner anything than that she should be distressed. She knew I was a prisoner, and all I thought of was to hurry home to her with the news that I was safe.” Thus in every human breast, even though wrapped in rags, and guilty of crimes against country and kindred, abides the eternal spark of tenderness which atones in the sight of God for all.

Taking leave of the sick man, we paid a brief visit to the casemates of Fort Harrison, then spurred back to Richmond, which we reached at sunset, having been nine hours in the saddle and ridden upwards of forty miles.

* * * * *

Another morning, with two gentlemen of General Terry’s staff, and an orderly to take care of our horses, I rode out of the city on the Nine Mile Road, which crosses the Chickahominy at New Bridge; purposing to visit some of the scenes of McClellan’s Richmond campaign.

Passing the fortifications, and traversing a level, scarcely inhabited country, shorn of its forests by the sickle of war, we reached, by a cross-road, the line of the Richmond and York River Railroad. But no railroad was there; the iron of the track having been taken up to be used elsewhere.

Near by was Fair Oaks Station, surrounded by old fields, woods, and tracts of underbrush. Here was formerly a yard, in which stood a group of oaks, the lower trunks of which had been rendered conspicuous, if not beautiful, by whitewash: hence, “fair oaks.”

It was a wild, windy, dusty day. A tempest was roaring through the pines over our heads as we rode on to the scene of General Casey’s disaster. I asked an inhabitant why the place was called “Seven Pines.” “I don’t know, unless it’s because there’s about seven hundred.”

He was living in a little wooden house, close by a negro hut. “The Yankees took me up, and carried me away, and destroyed all I had. My place don’t look like it did before, and never will, I reckon. They come again last October; Old Butler’s devils; all colors; heap of black troops; they didn’t leave me anything.”

He spoke with no more respect of the Confederates. “We had in our own army some of the durn’dest scapegalluses! The difference ’twixt them and the Yankees was, the Yankees would steal before our eyes, and laugh at us; but the Rebels would steal behind our backs.”

On the south, we found the woods on fire, with a furious north wind fanning the flames. The only human being we saw was a man digging sweet potatoes. We rode eastward, along the lines of intrenchments thrown up by our troops after the battle; passed through a low, level tract of woods, on the borders of the Chickahominy swamps; and, pressing northward, struck the Williamsburg Road.

Colonel G——, of our party, was in the Fair Oaks’ fight. He came up with the victorious columns that turned back the tide of defeat.

“I never saw a handsomer sight than Sickles’s brigade advancing up that road, Sunday morning, the second day of the battle. The enemy fired upon them from these woods, but never a man flinched. They came up in column, magnificently, to that house yonder; then formed in line of battle across these fields, and went in with flags flying and bayonets shining, and drove the Rebels. After that we might have walked straight into Richmond, but McClellan had to stop and go to digging.”

We dismounted in a sheltered spot, to examine our maps, then passed through the woods by a cross-road to Savage’s Station, coming out upon a large undulating field. Of Savage’s house only the foundations were left, surrounded by a grove of locust-trees. My companions described to me the scene of McClellan’s retreat from this place,—the hurry, the confusion, the flames of government property abandoned and destroyed. Sutlers forsook their goods. Even the officers’ baggage was devoted to the torch. A single pile of hard tack, measuring forty cubic feet, was set on fire, and burned. Then came the battle of Savage’s Station, in which the corps of Franklin and Sumner, by determined fighting, saved our army from being overwhelmed by the entire Rebel force. This was Sunday again, the twenty-ninth of June: so great had been the change wrought by four short weeks! On that other Sunday the Rebels were routed, and the campaign, as some aver, might have been gloriously ended by the capture of Richmond. Now nothing was left for us but ignominious retreat and failure, which proved all the more humiliating, falling so suddenly upon the hopes with which real or fancied successes had inspired the nation.

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XXVII. IN AND ABOUT PETERSBURG

On Wednesday, September 27th, I left Richmond for Petersburg. The railroad bridge having been burned, I crossed the river in a coach, and took the cars at Manchester. A ride of twenty miles through tracts of weeds and undergrowth, pine barrens and oaken woods, passing occasionally a dreary-looking house and field of “sorry” corn, brought us within sight of the “Cockade City.”[2]

It was evening when I arrived. Having a letter from Governor Pierpoint to a prominent citizen, I sallied out by moonlight from my hotel, and picked my way, along the streets sloping up from the river bank, to his house.

Judge —— received me in his library, and kept me until a late hour listening to him. His conversation was of the war, and the condition in which it had left the country. He portrayed the ruin of the once proud and prosperous State, and the sufferings of the people. “Yet, when all is told,” said he, “you cannot realize their sufferings, more than if you had never heard of them.” His remarks touching the freedmen were refreshing, after the abundance of cant on the subject to which I had been treated. He thought they were destined to be crowded out of Virginia, which was adapted to white labor, but that they would occupy the more southern States, and become a useful class of citizens. Many were leaving their homes, with the idea that they must do so in order fully to assert their freedom; but the majority of them were still at work for their old masters. He was already convinced that the new system would prove more profitable to employers than the old one. Formerly he kept eight family servants; now he had but three, who, stimulated by wages, did the work of all.

One of his former servants, to whom he had granted many privileges, came to him, after the war closed, and said, “You a’n’t going to turn me away, I hope, master.”

“No, William,” said the Judge. “As long as I have a home, you have one. But I have no money to hire you.” William replied that he would like to stay, and work right along just as he had done hitherto. “And as for money, master, I reckon we can manage that.”

“How so, William?”

“You see, master, you’ve been so kind to me these past years I’ve done a good deal outside, and if you have no money now, I reckon I must lend you some.”

The faithful fellow brought out his little treasure, and offered it to his old master, who, however, had not the heart to accept it.

The Judge also told a story of a free negro to whom he had often loaned money without security before the war. Recently this negro had come to him again, and asked the old question, “Have you plenty of money, master?”

“Ah, James,” said the Judge, “I used to have plenty, and I always gave you what you wanted, but you must go to somebody else now, for I haven’t a dollar,”

“That’s what I was thinking,” said James. “I haven’t come to borrow this time, but to lend.” And, taking out a fifty-dollar note, with tears in his eyes he entreated the Judge to take it.

I noticed that the library had a new door, and that the walls around it were spotted with marks of repairs. “These are the effects of a shell that paid us a flying visit one morning, during the bombardment. Fortunately, no one was hurt.”

He accepted the results of the war in such a candid and loyal spirit as I had rarely seen manifested by the late governing class in Virginia. If such men could be placed in power, the sooner the State were fully restored to its place in the Union, the better; but, alas!—

Returning to the hotel, I missed my way, and seeing a light in a little grocery store, went in to make inquiries. I found two negroes talking over the bombardment. Finding me a stranger, and interested, they invited me to stop, and rehearsed the story for my benefit.

The shelling began on the first of July, 1864. It was most rapid on the third. Roofs and chimneys and walls were knocked to pieces. All the lower part of the town was deserted. Many of the inhabitants fled to the country; some remained there in camps, others got over their fright and returned. “We went up on Market Street, and got into a bomb-proof we made of cotton bales.” The bombardment was kept up until the first of October, and afterwards resumed at intervals. “Finally people got so they didn’t care anything about it. I saw two men killed by picking up shells and looking at them; they exploded in their hands.”

At the time of the evacuation the negroes “had to keep right dark” to avoid being carried away by their masters. Some went across the Appomattox, and had to swim back, the bridges being burned.

They described to me the beauty of the scene when the mortars were playing in the night, and the heavens were spanned with arches of fire.

“It was a right glad day for us when the Rebels went out and the Federals came in; and I don’t believe any of the people could say with conscientiousness they were sorry,—they had all suffered so much. The Rebels set all the tobacco-warehouses afire, and burned up the foundery and commissary stores. That was Sunday. Monday morning they went out, and the Federals came in, track after track, without an hour between them.”

These two negroes were brothers, and men of decided character and intelligence, although they had been slaves all their lives. They learned to read in a spelling-book when children by the firelight of their hut. “I noticed how white children called their letters; and afterwards I learned to write without any showing, by copying the writing-letters in the spelling-book. I learned to read in such a silent manner, it was a long time before I could make any head reading loud. I learned arithmetic by myself in the same way.”

If any person of white skin, who has risen to eminence, is known to have acquired the rudiments of education under such difficulties, much is made of the circumstance. But in the case of a poor black man, a slave, I suppose it is different.

The two addressed each other with great respect and affection. Their feeling of kinship and of family worth was very strong. “There were four brothers of us,” said the elder; “and I am the only one of them that ever went to the prison-house. After my old, kind master died, I had a difficulty with my mistress; she was very exasperating in her language to me, till I lost my temper, and said I could live in torment, but I couldn’t live with her, and wished she would sell me. She sent for an officer; and I said, ‘I am as willing to go to jail as I am to take a drink of water.’ When the sheriff saw me, he was very much surprised, and he said, ‘Why, John, why are you here?’ I told him I had parted with my temper, and said what no man ought to have said to a woman. He said, ‘What a pity! such a name as your master gave you, John!’ He interceded with my mistress, and the fourth day she had me taken out. I told her I had acknowledged my fault to my Maker, and I was willing to acknowledge it to her. She said she was wrong too; and we agreed very well after that. I was a very valuable servant to her. I could whitewash, mend a fence, put in glass, use tools, serve up a dinner, and then wait on it as gracefully as any man that ever walked around a table. Then I would hitch up the carriage, and drive her out. And I have never seen the day yet when she has given me five dollars.”

He had always thought deeply on the subject of his condition.

“But I never felt at liberty to speak my mind until they passed an act to put colored men into the army. That wrought upon my feelings so I couldn’t but cry;” and the tears were in his eyes again at the recollection. “They asked me if I would fight for my country. I said, ‘I have no country.’ They said I should light for my freedom. I said, ‘To gain my freedom, I must fight to keep my wife and children slaves.’ Then, after the war was over, they told us they had no more use for niggers. I said I thought it hard, after they’d lived by the sweat of our faces all our days, that now we must be banished from the country, because we were free.”

He spoke hopefully of his race. “If we can induce them to be united, and to feel the responsibility that rests upon them, they will get along very well. Many have bought themselves, and paid every dollar to their masters, and then been sold again, and been treated in this way till they have no longer any confidence in the promises a white man makes them. They won’t stay with their old masters on any terms. Then there are some that expect to live without work. There are some colored men, just as there are white men, that won’t work to save their lives. Others won’t stay, for this reason: The master takes their old daddy, and old mammy, and little children, and casts them out on the forks of the road, and tells them to go to the Court House, where the Yankees are, for he don’t want ’em; then of course the young men and young women go too.”

Early next morning, I went out to view the town. In size and importance Petersburg ranks as the second city in the State. In 1860 it had 18,275 inhabitants. It had fifty manufacturing establishments in operation, employing three thousand operatives, and consuming annually $2,000,000 worth of raw material. Twenty factories manufactured yearly 12,000,000 pounds of tobacco. The falls of the Appomattox afford an extensive water-power, and the river is navigable to this place.

I found the city changed greatly from its old prosperous condition. Its business was shattered. Its well-built, pleasant streets, rising upon the south bank of the Appomattox, were dirty and dilapidated. All the lower part of the town showed the ruinous effect of the shelling it had received. Tenantless and uninhabitable houses, with broken walls, roofless, or with roofs smashed and torn by missiles, bear silent witness to the havoc of war. In the ends of some buildings I counted more than twenty shot-holes. Many battered houses had been repaired,—bright spots of new bricks in the old walls showing where projectiles had entered.

The city was thronged by a superfluous black population crowding in from the country. I talked with some, and tried to persuade them to go back and remain at their old homes. But they assured me that they could not remain: their very lives had been in danger; and they told me of several murders perpetrated upon freedmen by the whites, in their neighborhoods, besides other atrocities. Yet it was evident many had come to town in the vague hope of finding happy adventures and bettering their condition.

I remember a gang of men, employed by the government, waiting for orders, with their teams, on the sunny side of a ruined street. Several, sitting on the ground, had spelling-books: one was teaching another his letters; a third was reading aloud to a wondering little audience; an old man, in spectacles, with gray hair, was slowly and painfully spelling words of two letters, which he followed closely with his heavy dark finger along the sunlit page,—altogether a singular and affecting sight.

Having letters to General Gibbon commanding the military district, I called on him at his head-quarters in a fine modern Virginia mansion, and through his courtesy obtained a valuable guide to the fortifications, in the person of Colonel E——, of his staff.

We drove out on the Jerusalem plank-road, leaving on our right the reservoir, which Kautz’s cavalry in their dash at the city mistook for a fort, and retired from with commendable discretion.

Leaving the plank-road, and striking across the open country, we found, in the midst of weedy fields, the famous “crater,”—scene of one of the most fearful tragedies of the war. It was a huge irregular oblong pit, perhaps a hundred feet in length and twenty in depth. From this spot, spouted like a vast black fountain, from the earth, rose the garrison, and guns, and breastworks, of one of the strongest Rebel forts, mined by our troops, and blown into the air on the morning of July 30th, 1864.

There was a deep ravine in front, up in the side of which the mine had been worked. The mouth was still visible, half hidden by rank weeds. In spots the surface earth had caved, leaving chasms opening into the mine along its course. The mouth of the Rebel counter-mine was also visible,—a deep, dark, narrow cavern, supported by framework, in the lower side of the crater. Lying around were relics of the battle,—bent and rusted bayonets, canteens, and fragments of shells. In front were the remains of wooden chevaux-de-frise, which had been literally shot to pieces. And all around were graves.

In the earthworks near by I saw a negro man and woman digging out bullets. They told me they got four cents a pound for them in Petersburg. It was hard work, but they made a living at it.

Riding southward along the Confederate line of works, we came to Fort Damnation, where the Rebels used to set up a flag-staff for our boys to fire at with a six-pound Parrott gun, making a wild sport of warfare. Opposite was Fort Hell, built by our troops, and named in compliment to its profane neighbor. The intrenched picket-lines between the two were not more than seventy-five yards apart; each connected with its fort by a covered way. These works were in an excellent state of preservation. Fort Hell especially, constructed with bomb-proofs and galleries which afforded the most ample protection to its garrison, was in as perfect a condition as when first completed. With a lighted torch I explored its magazine, a Tartarean cave, with deep dark chambers, and walls covered with a cold sweat.

All along in front of the Rebel defences extended the Federal breastworks, and it was interesting to trace the zigzag lines by which our troops had, slowly and persistently, by scientific steps, pushed their position ever nearer and nearer to the enemy’s. Running round all, covered by an embankment, was Grant’s army railroad.

Having driven southward along the Rebel lines to Fort Damnation, and there crossed over to Fort Hell, we now returned northward, riding along the Federal lines. A very good corduroy road, built by our army, took us through deserted villages of huts, where had been its recent winter-quarters; past abandoned plantations and ruined dwellings; over a plain which had been covered with forests before the war, but where not a tree was now standing; and across the line of the Norfolk Railroad, of which not a sleeper or rail remained. We passed Fort Morton, confronting the “crater”; and halted on a hill, in a pleasant little grove of broken and dismantled oaks. Here were the earthworks and bomb-proofs of Fort Stedman, the possession of which had cost more lives than any other point along the lines, not excepting the “crater.” Captured originally from the Rebels, retaken by them, and recaptured by us, it was the subject of incessant warfare.

At the Friend House, farther on, stationed on an eminence overlooking Petersburg, was the celebrated “Petersburg Express,”—the great gun which used to send its iron messengers regularly into the city.

On the Friend Estate I saw, for the first time, evidences of reviving agriculture in this war-blasted region. A good crop of corn had been raised, and some five and thirty negro men and women were beginning the harvest. There was no white man about the place; but they told me they were working on their own account for a portion of the crop.

Returning to town by the City-Point Road, we set out again, in the afternoon, to visit the more distant fortifications beyond Forts Hell and Damnation.

Driving out on the Boydton Plank Road to the Lead Works, we there left it on our right, and proceeded along a sandy track beside the Weldon Railroad where wagon-loads of North Carolina cotton, laboring through the sand, attested that the damage done to this railroad, in December of the previous year, by Warren’s Corps,—which destroyed with conscientious thoroughness fifteen miles of the track,—had not yet been repaired.[3]

Passing the Rebel forts, I was struck with the peculiar construction of the Federal works. As we pushed farther and farther our advanced lines around the city, they became so extended that, to prevent raids on our rear, it was necessary to construct rear lines of defence. Our intrenchments accordingly took the form of a hook, doubled backward, and terminating in something like a barbed point.

Cities of deserted huts, built in the midst of a vast level plain, despoiled of its forests, showed where the winter-quarters of our more advanced corps had been, during this last great campaign.

Passing the winter-quarters of the Sixth Corps, we approached one of the most beautiful villages that ever were seen. It was sheltered by a grove of murmuring pines. An arched gateway admitted us to its silent streets. It was constructed entirely of pine saplings and logs. Even the neat sidewalks were composed of the same material. The huts—if those little dwellings, built in a unique and perfect style of architecture, may be called by that humble name—were furnished with bedrooms and mantel-pieces within, and plain columns and fluted pilasters without, all of rough pine. The plain columns were formed of single trunks, the fluted ones of clusters of saplings,—all with the bark on, of course. The walls were similarly constructed. The village was deserted, with the exception of a safeguard, consisting of half a dozen United States soldiers, stationed there to protect it from vandalism.

The gem of the place was the church. Its walls, pillars, pointed arches, and spire, one hundred feet high, were composed entirely of pines selected and arranged with surprising taste and skill. The pulpit was in keeping with the rest. Above it was the following inscription:—

“Presented to the members of the Poplar Spring Church, by the 50th N. Y. V. Engineers. Capt. M. H. McGrath, architect.”

The Poplar Spring Church, which formerly stood somewhere in that vicinity, had been destroyed during the war; and this church had been left as a fitting legacy to its congregation by the soldiers who built it. The village had been the winter-quarters of the engineer corps.

Driving westward along the track of the army railroad, and past its termination, we struck across the open fields to the Federal signal-tower, lifting skyward its lofty open framework and dizzy platforms, in the midst of an extensive plain. To ascend a few stages of this breezy observatory, and see the sun go down behind the distant dim line of forests, while the evening shadows thickened upon the landscape, was a fit termination to the day’s experience; and we returned with rapid wheels to the city.

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Footnote 2:

The title given to it by President Madison, in speaking of the gallantry of the Petersburg Volunteers, in the war of 1812.

Footnote 3:

Four months later I returned northward from the Carolinas by this road, and found that the bent rails had been straightened and replaced, in an exceedingly scaly condition.

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XXVIII. JAMES RIVER AND FORTRESS MONROE

The next day I proceeded to City Point by railroad,—riding in an old patched-up car marked outside “U. S. Military R. R.,” and furnished inside with pine benches for seats and boards nailed up in place of windows. There was nothing of interest on the road, which passed through a region of stumps and undergrowth, with scarce an inhabitant, save the few negro families that had taken up their abode in abandoned army huts. City Point itself was no less dull. Built on high and rolling ground, at the confluence of the Appomattox and the James,—a fine site for a village,—it had nothing to show but an ugly cluster of rough wooden buildings, such as spring up like fungus in the track of an army, and a long line of government warehouses by the river.

I took the first steamer for Richmond; returning thence, in a few days, down the James to Norfolk and Fortress Monroe. This voyage possesses an interest which can merely be hinted at in a description. You are gliding between shores rich with historical associations old and new. The mind goes back to the time when Captain John Smith, with the expedition of 1607, sailed up this stream, which they named in honor of their king. But you are diverted from those recollections by the landmarks of recent famous events:—the ruins of ironclads below Richmond; the wrecks of gun-boats; obstructions in the channel; Fort Darling, on a high bluff; every commanding eminence crowned by a redoubt; Dutch Gap Canal; Deep Bottom; Butler’s tower of observation; Malvern Hill, where the last battle of McClellan’s retreat was fought,—a gentle elevation on the north bank, marked by a small house and clumps of trees; Harrison’s Landing,—a long pier extending out into the river; Jamestown, the first settlement in Virginia,—now an island with a few huts only, and two or three chimney-stacks of burnt houses,—looking as desolate as when first destroyed, at the time of Bacon’s rebellion, near two hundred years ago; Newport News below, a place with a few shanties, and a row of grinning batteries; Hampton Roads, bristling and animated with shipping,—the scene of the fight between the “Merrimac” and the “Monitor,” initiating a new era in naval warfare; Hampton away on the north, with its conspicuous square white hospital; Norfolk on the south, up the Elizabeth River; the Rip-Raps, and Sewall’s Point; and, most astonishing object of all, that huge finger of the military power, placed here to hold these shores,—Fortress Monroe.

It was a wild, windy day; the anchored ships were tossing on the white-capped waves; but the Fortress presented a beautiful calm picture, as we approached it, with its proud flag careering in the breeze, its white light-house on the beach, and the afternoon sunshine on its broad walls and grassy ramparts.

Before the war, there was a large hotel between the Fortress and the wharves, capable of accommodating a thousand persons. This was torn down, because it obstructed the range of the guns; and a miserable one-and-a-half story dining-saloon had been erected in its place. Here, after much persuasion, I managed to secure a lodging under the low, unfinished roof. The proprietor told me that the government, which owns the land on which his house stands, exacted no payment for it, under General Dix’s administration; but that General Butler, on coming into power, immediately clapped on a smart rent of five hundred dollars a month, which the landlord could pay, or take his house elsewhere. I thought the circumstance characteristic.

The next morning, having a letter to General Miles, in command at the Fortress, I obtained admission within the massy walls. I crossed the moat on the drawbridge, and entered the gate opening under the heavy bastions. I found myself in the midst of a village, on a level plain, shaded by trees. A guard was given me, with orders to show me whatever I wished to see, with one exception,—the interior of Mr. Jefferson Davis’s private residence. This retired Rebel chief had been removed from the casemate in which he was originally confined, and was occupying Carrol Hall, a plain, three-story, yellow-painted building, built for officers’ quarters. I walked past the doors, and looked up at the modest window-curtains, wondering what his thoughts were, sitting there, meditating his fallen fortunes, with the flag of the nation he had attempted to overthrow floating above his head, and its cannon frowning on the ramparts around him. Did he enjoy his cigar, and read the morning newspaper with interest?

The strength and vastness of Fortress Monroe astonishes one. It is the most expensive fortress in the United States, having cost nearly two and a half million-dollars. It is a mile around the ramparts. The walls are fifty feet thick. The stone masonry which forms their outward face rises twenty feet above high-water mark in the moat; and the grassy parapets are built ten feet higher. There were only seven hundred men in the fort,—a small garrison.

I was shown the great magazine which Arnold, one of the Booth conspirators, proposed to blow up. His plan was to get a clerkship in the ordnance office, which would afford him facilities for carrying out his scheme. Had this succeeded, the terrible explosion that would have ensued would not only have destroyed the Fortress, but not a building on the Point would have been left standing.

I made the circuit of the ramparts, overlooking Hampton Roads on one side, and the broad bay on the other. The sun was shining; the waves were breaking on the shore; the band was playing proud martial airs; the nation’s flag rolled voluptuously in the wind; steamers and white-sailed ships were going and coming; the sky above was of deep blue, full of peace. It was hard to realize that the immense structure on which I walked, amid such a scene, was merely an engine of war.

While I was at General Miles’s head-quarters an interesting case of pardoned rebellion was developed. Mr. Y——, a noted secessionist of Warwick County, was one of those who had early pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to the Confederate cause. He had commenced his patriotic service by seizing at his wharf on the Warwick River a private vessel which happened to be loading with lumber at the time when the State seceded, and sending her as a prize up to Richmond; and he had crowned his career by assisting Wirz in his official work at Andersonville. During the war the government against which he was fighting had taken the liberty of cutting a little lumber on this gentleman’s abandoned lands. He had since become professedly loyal, paid a visit to the good President at Washington, and returned to his estates with his pardon in his pocket. The first thing he did was to drive off the government contractor’s employees with threats of violence. He would not even allow them to take away the government property he found on his place, but threatened to shoot every man who approached for that purpose. An officer came to head-quarters, when I was there, requesting a guard of soldiers to protect the lives of the laborers during the removal of this property.

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