A tree does not show more markedly than man the results of ancestral care, wealth, and leisurely culture. Numerous are the faces and histories scattered all through our national album, which are signalized by a curious mixture of original forest wildness and park growths newly begun, cultivated shoots grafted upon hardy native stocks, and giving off large unsymmetrically shaped fruits,—fruits less sour than the natural, but less genial, plump, mellow, and blooming than the full-nursed growth. Of these were, in oratory, Felix Grundy, whose exposed youth shot up on the wilderness frontier of Kentucky, where “death was in almost every bush, and an ambuscade in every thicket,” and who attained, in Tennessee, a large altitude and breadth; Sargeant S. Prentiss, transplanted from among the pines of Maine to the coarse richness of a Mississippi soil, and through whose waving tops swept sometimes the storm of invective, sometimes the æolian strains of tenderest, soul-trembling breathings; John J. Crittenden, a farmer’s boy, born in 1785, whose prickly logic sheathed, like a burr, the smooth-meated chestnut; and, among statesmen, Samuel Houston of Texas, shaggy-barked, yet with much tasselling wealth of flower at the top; Daniel D. Tompkins of New York, and a large number of others, strong saplings, pushing up in brave defiance of adversities, some wrought into bureaus, others inlaying cabinets,—American woods, some still sappy and cross-grained, but making as good state furniture as an untechnical taste has hitherto been content to demand or use.
Glancing through our book,—in which we treasure only the portraits of the departed,—we dwell with satisfaction upon a group of high-toned, conscientious, Christian statesmen, who honored public office in their persons, and shed upon the Senate a light so effulgent, that the many opaque substances, so often thrust into it, have not been able wholly to absorb: John Macpherson Berrien, born in 1781; Theodore Frelinghuysen and Samuel L. Southard, in 1787; and William C. Preston in 1794; with whom are worthily associated Hugh S. Legaré, whose fine face brought its welcome into every company, as his radiant mind sparkled and scintillated over every subject; and Benjamin F. Butler of New York, whose clear-cut physiognomy, like an antique on a fine stone, shows handsomely in every setting.
Winfield Scott came into life in 1786, and so crystallized about himself each of the three wars in which he was the principal magnet,—the maritime contest of 1812, the Mexican war in 1847, and the opening of the Rebellion in 1861,—that his calm front and majestic presence would readily single him out as the model figure for our American Mars. Like a great elm in the Berkshire valley he stands, massive in strength of trunk, spreading out in varied branches of learning, special study, and active experience, and dropping his pendulous, wide-circuiting limbs and generous foliage over a broad expanse of rich meadow. Under this vast, wide-reaching, many-dropping banyan-tree history seems to gather in a sleepy, contented calm.
Dearly do we all love to pause over the beautifully bordered page which holds the genial, sunny-faced visage of Washington Irving. He was four years old when Washington delivered his first Inaugural. Through all the nineteenth century he shines, like a blessed presence, until his eclipse, in 1859. How our landscapes, the lives of our best and worthiest, the graceful legends of our rivers, mountains, prairies, and historical sites,—barren, voiceless, and dumb before, warm into life, and stretch out their living hands in tender entreaty, instinct and round with charms of persuasive beauty, as, like the prophet over the child, he stretches himself over them!
Of some of his associates and compeers, still happily spared to us, we cannot speak; for the living are too numerous to be enumerated, and too near to be sketched; but of Joseph Rodman Drake, whose brief twenty-five years of life exhaled such beautiful and deathless creations as the Culprit Fay; of Fitz-Greene Halleck, his companion and fellow-laborer, whose rare humor stole into delicious song, as sprites are said to play hide-and-seek in buttercups and honeysuckles; and of James R. Paulding, linked in literary work as by family ties with Irving, and whose diversified genius gives him a large, if not a choice place in our Walhalla,—of all these kindly faces we delight to keep copies in our album.
Like Irving, fortunate in the enjoyment of a wide European reputation, but less fortunate than he in securing the undivided hearts of his countrymen,—whose early history, aboriginal legends, forest scenery, and naval characters he has so well tapestried in novels, essay, biography, and history,—James Fenimore Cooper, born in 1789, has, by his sea tales, caused many a mother’s heart to yearn after her runaway boy, and by his land stories, garnered up many of our best sheaves of fiction into a national stack. As we gaze on his large, square, massive forehead, we forget his sharply feathered arrows, aimed at our national faults, which generally, of course, missed the conscience and touched only the liver. Remembering “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Spy,” “Pilot,” and “Red Rover,” we fall to blessing the creations which stalk over our rough fences, and brush away our raw villages, uproarious with faces of civilized red-men, and so endeavor to get by, as boys do a haunted place at nightfall, the recollection of those twenty-two libel suits, whose damages he found, like most plaintiffs in that species of legal fiction, to end in the payment of the costs out of his own pocket.
Others there are, too, whose physiognomies recall to us pleasantly the explorers in science, workers amid Nature’s secrets, earlier than those who now push their daring way into her very robing-room: Benjamin Silliman, the elder, who came in 1779, and through a long life lectured so many into the pleasant idea that they knew something of geology and chemistry, and through his “Journal of Science,” established in 1818, gathered up the mental products of his fellow-harvesters; Robert Hare, two years younger, who, at the age of twenty, invented the compound blow-pipe, and up to his death, in 1858, continued his discoveries, until he left, by his spiritual explorations, his scientific brethren behind him; and Benjamin Rush, born in 1780, who by his tasteful style, made boluses less distasteful, and even gave the muses such a draught that they became delirious over his medical pages.
William H. Prescott, reserved until nearly the close of the eighteenth century ere he was born, and becoming blind in outward vision at the age of eighteen, so clarified his inner sight and quickened it to the perception of new beauties, and so perfected himself by the grace, gentleness, and cheerful gayety of a happy nature, that Peru, Mexico, the times of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., filtrated through them, glow in splendor and are inwrought and outwrought in such delicacy of color and such noble boldness as to make him stand out in singularly beautiful proportions to thousands of loving eyes, that have never rested, and will now never rest, upon his fine classic head.
Stop we a moment to admire the intellectual features of Catherine M. Sedgwick, born in 1798, whose wise essays and wiser fictions lie upon so many tables; the calm head of Horatio Greenough, who produced his first work, the “Chanting Cherubs,” upon a commission from Fenimore Cooper, brought out the earliest American group in marble, and became a very Medusa, turning many Americans into stone; and finally the grand, quaint physiognomy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, given to us in 1804, and just withdrawn, whose genial tales and humorous descriptions will keep his memory as odorous as woodbines around the porches of houses seven-gabled, mossed, newly Gothic, or indifferently green-shuttered, and up to their eaves in white paint.
Unwillingly we close the list; for many are worthy to be added, who have laid their aching brains away, and more who are coining from their living thoughts a mintage more national than greenbacks and not half so soiled.
All but two who are named in this our newer album were born in the last century, and drew over its wealth with them and piled it up on our side. Few of them lived less than three, and several more than fourscore years; showing that the possession of intellect often preserves their owners to a longevity as great as office or a life estate.
Cotton Veils hide the Union. March 4, 1861, to January 1, 1862.
Striking Historical Contrasts of professed Virtue and cruel Enforcement.—The American Fetich; its strange, passionate Worship and armed Adoration.—The Freshet of Slavery traced from its small Beginnings.—Mr. Lincoln over its Ridges lands in Washington.—A Striking Announcement, and who it struck.—Of Seward, Cameron, and Chase.—A Naval Joke.—A Wry Fort makes Wry Faces.—An American Nightmare.—Watching with the Sleeper.—Sparing the Rod and getting the Ramrod.—Call for Seventy-five Thousand Ramrods.—Massachusetts Boys and Baltimore Hards.—Busses and Blunderbusses.—Few Office-Seekers, but many Gun-Holders in Washington in April, 1861.—The English Telescope and the Wonders it discovered.—A Dual View.—An Official Talk between two Lords.—A Proclamation to restrain Englishmen.—A Parallel.—War Materials, Forts, etc., generously given away by Loose-handed Custodians.—Twiggs inclined as Tree is bent.—Cotton Curtain before Washington; and a near View of it by General Mansfield.—Colonel Ellsworth.—Butler and Bethel.—Lyons in Missouri.—McClellan moves into Virginia; what he found.—A Wise Man flees when a real Man pursueth.—Bull’s Run and General Run.—A Discovery and Noise over it.—Stonewall Jackson and Praying Soldiers.—Piety and Powder.—A Drill-Ground near Washington.—General Lee’s First Kicks against the Pricks.—Du Pont at Port Royal.—Mason, Slidell, and Vigilant Friends.—John C. Breckenridge a striking Sign-Board.—War in the Mississippi Valley.—Kentucky and her coy Ways.—A Spartan Leonidas and Greek Ulysses.—Christmas Eve, 1861.
“Robespierre,” says a terse, sentence-packing essayist, “would slay one half of France to get the other half to follow his principles of virtue.”
The cotton rebellion is another illustration of the same horrible tenderness, the same selfish loveliness, the same unsentimental sentimentalism.
Like the strange histories of Scylla, of Marius, of Simon de Montfort and his helmed soldiery against the Waldenses, of Alva in the Netherlands, of Philip II., and of Claverhouse, in Scotland, it exhibits a courage, endurance, sacrifices, and heroism which exalt, to compass ends which debase and brutalize human nature.
Setting up in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in free, much-reading America, a fetich for worship, brought from Africa, slimy with snakes, foul, cruel, deformed, and misshapen, its singularly enthusiastic votaries, after insisting by books, tracts, primers, by philosophic essay, bound treatise, and unbound poetry, in Congress, conventions, lecture-rooms, prayer-meetings, horse-races, and in all places, seasonable or unseasonable, thirsty or wet, that the fetich, though repudiated by all civilized people, was the true and undoubted patron of government, society, wealth, progress, and human, i. e. white-skinned happiness, at last seized musket and sword to maintain and perpetuate her horrid rites, although this maintenance should overturn and waste all other shrines.
The cotton-gin struck, in 1793, springs all over the slave States, whose multiplying flows so gathered head in 1821 as to require damming back. The Missouri dike was erected. The pent waters, however, were found so profitable for foreign mill-owners, for over-shot feeders to Northern shelves, for commercial pockets, and political ballot-boxes, as well as such wealth-distributing streams over the growing breadths and easy luxuries of their Southern owners, that expedients were devised to swell their volume, area, and back-water power. The dike, cut in 1854, let out the accumulated deluge into new sluice-ways, which promised to some increased profits, but which produced great ravages in many ways, and at last set towards maelstroms, down whose gurgling throats were sucked, not only the passive and floating citizen, and the compromising, timid politician, but much of the life and wealth of the nation at large.
Over the angry ridges, rapidly rising on the 4th of March, 1861, Mr. Lincoln, uneasy at the white caps crisping the dark swells, and himself in disguise, landed at the national wharf in Washington. Without disguise, however, he at once, in a distinct, calm voice, announced the principles upon which he proposed to meet the menacing flood, namely, not to interfere with its black tides in States where they were legally channelled, nor to create any new courses in Territories in which they had not surged, and steadily to enforce, in spite of all obstructions, the existing rules, regulations, and laws both North and South.
Cotton Supreme.
(p. 483)
This announcement struck the knob of the national shield, and its metallic notes quivered through the air. The three commissioners, despatched from the somehow gathered Confederate assemblage at Montgomery, heard the vibrations the morning of their arrival, March 5th, but failed to shout loud enough to be heard themselves, and returned speedily with their cross-barred message.
Attention was immediately directed to the ravelled American stocking rapidly running down. The blue yarn of the navy was taken up stitch by stitch. The threads of the little army were picked up, lying loosely around at a distance from the capital, and, by much knotting and splicing, were put upon the old, rusty, war-needles for work. It was very sad business for the gentle-minded Lincoln, although helped by Mr. Seward in the State Department,—a very vigorous and manifold letter-writer,—by the wide-headed Chase in the Treasury, by the strong-knuckled Cameron in the noisy War Bureau, and by that long-bearded Gideon Welles, whose unthatched upper story became in time, like a naval depot, the receptacle of a great deal of odd material, most of it too old to be serviceable. In truth, with his funny ways, dropping anchor when he should be making steam, bothered with new inventions, gun bores and spiral devices, which he had never seen at Hartford, and quite incomprehensible often by any one, puzzled by stern duties and running about to know where the ship’s waste was, the latter old gentleman was about the only joke which went about for four years.
Notice by the government of its intention to add to the eighty men in Fort Sumter drew upon that little stone pentagon a lively cannonade of thirty-six hours, by General Beauregard, the Confederate military leader, distorting its resolute visage, and causing wry faces everywhere throughout the North, and very many among the strikers at the South.
The first whizzing shot was the first uneasy spasm in that horrible nightmare which crept over America and held it bound for four years.
For the sake of human nature; for the sake of our common past, and our now dawning brighter future, we would fain draw over the face of the disturbed sleeper a veil, which should but dimly delineate, if it did not altogether hide from view, the uncoffined ghastliness. The purposes of history, however, forbid us, nurses as we are in trouble, as boon companions in feasting, to quit the room; and so holding still, as best we can, the hand of genial Humor, we sit down amid the uncomic scenes of a fratricidal struggle.
Through the evening silences which followed the evacuation of Fort Sumter, April 14, 1861, were heard at Montgomery and in other Confederate cities rhetorical voices of gratulation at the humbled pride, flag, and prosperity of the North, and predictions of bold equestrian sallies into Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; at the North, wails of sorrow, sudden questions of the causeless blows on the tingling national cheek, mixed with remorseful self-accusations at the weak petting, which had so encouraged unrestrained tempers as to invite to this public breaking of the family crockery and this unconcealable family disgrace. “Had not the rod been so long spared,”—was the general feeling,—“we should now be spared the use of the ramrod.” The next morning, however, Mr. Lincoln proclaimed the need of seventy-five thousand ramrods, with good men to accompany them to Washington. At the same time he asked the wise men to meet at the capital in July for consultation. Ere the next daybreak, a thousand Massachusetts lads were on their way towards the Potomac, shining in new-burnished steel and new polished love for that old Union mother, whose goodness had been so steady and uniform as hitherto to excite no manifested return. On the 19th of April they reached Baltimore, and were passing through in the horse-cars, when they were set upon by a bad lot of hards and softs of that city,—as others before and since have frequently been assailed in their transit, by railway and hotel runners. Other regiments soon followed from “the teeming North, through all her unfrozen loins.” Guns were got down from rusted hooks; shoulder-straps straightened; blunderbusses and other busses given and taken; officers beaten up from behind ploughshares to be beaten in first skirmishes into good leaders; and shields from all the free States were clasped around the waist of the capital. Never were there so many gun-holders, nor so few office-seekers, at Washington in the month of April.
The soft velveted hand which caressed was now stiffened into the steel gauntlet to smite.
Meanwhile the English government, employed since 1783 in looking across at us through the large end of its telescope, suddenly got its eye at the other extreme, and discovered the monstrous size of this country, the large population, and unmanifested pluck of the nine somehow seceded States, and, to her, the very obvious absence of any ties or mutual necessity between two such admirably designed single nations. This was the almost unanimous opinion, too, of the well-dressed classes; although some Bright Englishmen, and especially the hard toilers in the manufacturing districts,—although working in smoke,—saw more clearly the object and design as well as the final end of the commencing difficulty than those whose near-sightedness spread a film over all their American observations.
“The Hunited States ’ave too many people,” said Lord John.
“Haltogether, yes,” replied Lord Palmerston.
“Suppose that they should fight?” inquired Lord John.
“Well, two heads are better than one,” replied the facetious Palmerston.
“And so are two customers,” rejoined Lord John, wiping his nose with a cotton pocket-handkerchief.
And forthwith they issued a proclamation of neutrality in the name of the Queen, whose heart was no more in its sentiments than her hand in its composition. It was thought at the time by many people to be very smart; and so it was very smart, altogether too smart. It was a state fiction,—a fancy creation, looking in legal phrase as if all the English were bent on rushing into the prophesied something,—a buffalo-hunt, a Long Island race, or steamboat explosion;—for what the little flurry was about, or would be when the solemn state warning was given, no one knew,—unless they were violently restrained by the British government. It was the unnecessarily vehement declaration of the very disinterested old maid to the unsuspecting, quiet young man, quite innocent of such audacious thoughts as her fears excited and suggested: “Now, if you kiss me I shall resist. I shall. Don’t you try it. Now, there, don’t come towards me. Don’t make such a noise, for everybody will hear you. Hands off. Don’t try it. I shall scream. Quit now. Don’t disturb the neighborhood. Hands off, I tell you. I won’t have anything to do with it.” The warning was as piquant and promotive of the practice deprecated, as the landlord’s to the ostler, never to grease the teeth of traveller’s horses, for if he should they could not eat oats.
The strikers in Arkansas and North Carolina, in May, contrived somehow to get up delegates to meet those from the other Southern States at Richmond, the newly selected gathering-place of Confederated counsellors.
The insurrection commenced to grow. The warned boy began seriously to think of the audacity from which he was so solemnly conjured to desist.
Federal war stores, magazines, and naval materials were handed over to the new State claimants by their loose-wristed custodians, who, although educated by the Federal government, generously gave away her property on the principle of that testator, who requested his own debtors, forthwith after his decease, to pay what they owed to his executors, and nobly forgave his creditors the debts which he owed them. Floydism became as fashionable South as cotton, butternut-colored clothing and long hair. Just as the tree was bent the Twiggs inclined. At Little Rock, Pensacola, Portsmouth, Virginia, and in Texas, large masses of stores, cannon, guns, and naval materials were transferred, like the allegiance of the officers in charge, to the strange African fetich. It looked as if the American people were moving out of the lower story of their large, constitutional bazaar into the upper lofts, and were giving away generously a part of the expensive fixtures to the new incoming tenant.
In May some Confederate cotton curtains, striped with rough military lines, were hung before Washington. They concealed much real weakness and want of furniture behind them, and enabled those, who kept up a confused shouting in the darkened recesses and away from the front, to convey an impression of numbers which did not exist.
Thirteen thousand Federal troops,—part of the seventy-five thousand,—led by General Mansfield, desiring to get a nearer view of the curtain, crossed over the Potomac to Arlington Heights. The Virginia soil, it was found, no more spurned Northern feet than its cultivation was spurned by the hands of its white owners. The next day Colonel Ellsworth, with a Zouave regiment, entered the ancient town of Alexandria. Seeing the new flag swaying in its sluggish air, he tore down, as he supposed, the fetich symbol; but received almost on the instant a fatal shot, and was borne away with slow requiems to the vast Northern cemetery, in which new graves were soon rapidly to be opened. The struck symbol of the Confederacy was not cut down, but only lowered to half-mast, emblem of American hopes and pride.
May 9, Mr. Lincoln made a new call for forty-two thousand men. As quickly as May blossoms come to the expected call of the shower they came in rosy-hearted responses. General Butler hastened with twelve thousand men to Fortress Monroe, whence on the 9th of June he sent a detachment to Big Bethel. No wrestling-match, however, came off there, and no pillar of stone, of course, set up. Meanwhile, Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky,—resisting the second secession cleavage, started by Virginia, and which had drawn after her Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina,—trembled with the forces contending for ascendency in their several borders. In the first State, General Jackson attempted in vain to mesmerize Lyons. Failing in these passes, he made several upward strokes, destroying railroads, bridges, and telegraph wires. But the Federal commander, pursuing him to Boonesville, disabled his arm from renewing such tricks. Uniting his forces with General Sigel’s,—making from their junction six thousand men,—General Lyons attacked at Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield, Ben McCullough and Sterling Price, with a force of twenty thousand.
The attacking party was repulsed, and its brave leader killed, but the followers of the Ranger were too weary to pursue them.
In Virginia, early in July, General George B. McClellan, then in his thirty-sixth year, and General Rosecrans, in his forty-second, collecting the cream of their little armies, skimmed the Confederate pans at Rich Mountain, while immediately after, the Confederate pails were completely upset or seized by General Morris, assisted by some help from Ohio and Indiana, at Carrick’s Ford. General Rosecrans, flowing towards the Southwest, came down like a mountain torrent in the Kanawha valley, even flooding such water-logged estrays as Henry A. Wise and the indicted Floyd. The salt springs of the valley, towards which they sped, could not preserve them from becoming spoiled, and held ever afterward, even by their friends, in bad odor.
A few days afterwards, the troops near Washington, numbering about 35,000 under General McDowell, were moved in a body towards the curtain,—which was drawn back and back by its supporters to Manassas Junction,—where Beauregard, intrenched with 27,000 men, assisted by General Joseph E. Johnston and 16,000 more close at hand in Winchester, steadied and upheld it. As the 35,000 thousand went forward, the three months’ men, whose time had expired, went backward, seeking the far rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon, until the Federal inspecting force was reduced to 18,000. As they approached that historic little rill, Bull Run, they met the combined forces of the Confederates, and after holding the field against them and even advancing upon it, until late in the afternoon, they fell into one of those panics, not unfrequent among troops, raw or seasoned, in which the wild run of frightened bulls or the disordered summersaulting and tumbles of a herd of buffaloes is an orderly march. A mass of huddling soldiers, civilians, teamsters, members of Congress, and other muddled material was thrown upon Washington. The puzzled Confederates, unconscious of victory and of course unpursuing, at length got back to their capital. Discovering at last their stupendous victory, they made up for lost time by shouts so loud that every European echo repeated it, like a very Lurlei. In this big scare were many of the leading generals on either side,—among those on the Federal, Sherman, Burnside, and Heintzelman; and on the Confederate, Longstreet, Ewell, Early, Bonham, and that praying soldier, Stonewall Jackson, then thirty-five years old, and whose saintly, fanatical bravery recalls the gallant slaughterers in the civil wars of Scotland, who tempered their prayers with bayonet-pushing amens, and ended their fervid hacking of enemies with hearty thanksgivings to Heaven.
The losses on either side in men were nearly balanced,—the Federal dead amounting to 481, and the Confederate to 378; the Federal wounded to 1011, the Confederate to 1489; but in prestige, self-respect, and that subtle moral force which cannot be weighed even by grains or scruples, the advantage was greatly with the insurrectionists.
Congress immediately voted to raise 500,000 men for the army, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars in money, and to issue fifty millions of treasury-notes. The Confederate gathering determined to set 400,000 men to help the existing 210,000 hold up the cotton veil, now becoming so heavy and thick with dust and clots, that even Mr. Seward began to doubt whether it could be lifted in thirty days.
In August, Forts Hatteras and Clark were pulled by Commodore Stringham into Pamlico Sound.
For many months the country in front of Washington was converted into a vast drill-ground, over which Drill-Sergeant McClellan exercised the weary feet of over one hundred thousand soldiers, and the wearier patience of many millions of citizens. During this time the echoes of Bull Run, as numerous and diversified as an Irishman’s, haunted the consciences and journals of America, and the hollow faith of Europe. If it was all quiet on the Potomac, it was very unquiet elsewhere. General McClellan was always a believer in the Italian proverb,
and so he held his ground near Washington.
In September, a series of severe skirmishes, lasting three days, between General Robert E. Lee, now fifty-three years old, and General Reynolds, at Cheat Mountain and Elk Water, Virginia, followed by another October 3d at Greenbrier, disagreeably shook up the Confederate commander. These first attempts to turn against his countrymen the science and skill which he had gained at their expense and in their service, were creditable to his conscience, if not to his head and skill.
The sleeper turned over with a sense of smothering, as in his nightmare horror he saw the drawn sword of his favorite sons pointed at him.
On the 29th of October a fleet under Commodore Du Pont, with General T. W. Sherman and twenty thousand men on board, sailed for Port Royal, and after three elliptical turnings in the harbor, threw out such pills as they passed that Forts Walker and Beauregard, suddenly swallowing them, fell into such a vertigo, that they lost their heads, and tumbled helpless upon the ground. To balance this fatal bill of mortality, however, the Confederate General Evans, defeated with great loss a detachment of two thousand one hundred men under General Stone, at Ball’s Bluff, when Oregon lost one of her best senators and citizens, Colonel E. D. Baker.
The cotton veil was becoming very soiled and flecked. November brought out a variety of colors in American affairs, some light with yellow hues, others as dark as the gusty season loves to whirl over a surface ever freezing and thawing. General Scott retired from the chief command of the army, to which General McClellan succeeded; the lean Davis was made high-priest for six years to the Southern fetich, and Mason and Slidell, Confederate commissioners, hurriedly shunning Mr. Welles and his cruisers, were captured by Captain Wilkes off the Trent. They were of course promptly spied by the large, vigilant English telescope, which, in its rapid shifting for the occasion, read English international law backwards, and spelled out our duty from our own precedents. The alacrity with which their surrender was demanded showed that the still anxious young lady had survived the alarm, caused by the unwilling kiss six months before, and was desirous to escape, in precisely the same way, any further impertinences.
John C. Breckenridge now climbed down to grasp the depraved prize he had at last so well earned. Elected a Senator of the United States at the close of the Vice-Presidency in the preceding March, he readily took a voluntary oath to support the Constitution of an undivided land; played the spy upon the efforts of its government to thwart the attempts to dissever it; and at the close of the session, unable longer to profit by his office and oath, took a brigadier’s commission and a new oath against a country which had loaded his family and himself with its highest honors. Once the cherished type of a chivalrous gentleman, he engrafted upon the abused name of chivalry definitions more reproachful than those which spring from the addled eccentricities of Don Quixote; his old friends, if any such survive, must long have desired to feel that he had only lost an arm in a service which, undistinguished by any advantage brought to it by a man who had deserted everything for it, sunk the remains of a character once high, and an intellect once brilliant, to a depth compared with which history refuses an example. Others may plead some excuse, more or less admissible, for their armed heresies: Davis, that his was a logical sequence to his lifelong convictions of State supremacy; Toombs, Cobb, Stephens, and others, that their States dragged them out; Floyd, the necessity of putting money in his purse; Wise, the loss of a guiding intelligence. But to not one of these can John C. Breckenridge point to mitigate the just severities of that moral verdict which, in cases of such cumulated guilt, can only appease the general uneasiness at the exhibition of depravity so fathomless, by the most exemplary damages. Looking into the dreadful chasms, down which his example cast so many others; the maimed cripples, the hollow-eyed widows, Justice slain by stabs in the back, exiles from poor homes smitten by the bludgeons of secret agents, even humorous History grows stern-featured and allows a saddening pity to cloud her habitual smile, as she flings her knotted whip over the shoulders of high-born guilt.
As the year 1861 drew towards its close, the war, dropping in the old traditional path of empire, trended westward and seated itself in the valley of the Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant, then thirty-nine years old, newly assigned to the District of Cairo, took Paducah, Kentucky; and settled on Belmont,—not August, the banker, but a small town in Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, opposite Columbus, Kentucky. This latter place was then held by that mitred Spartan warrior, Leonidas Polk, who had left the light of the star which guided wise men to the Babe, for the hazy star of the major-general,—one of the dim twinklers in that milky-way which, after four years’ watering, disappeared from the sight of even telescopic gazers.
Gradually large forces were drawn to the State of Kentucky,—nicely balancing on neutral ground,—while her reluctant hand was coyly withdrawn from any Union by her guardian, Governor Magoffin, and was thereby sought with greater ardor by each suitor. The Confederates offered her a bridal Pillow, but the Federals sent Ulysses, that wise and silent Greek, whose manly deeds soon effectually won her affections.
Christmas eve, 1861, put a million of armed men and two millions of diurnal debt into the long stocking of iron-ridden America.
Cotton Mixed. January 1,1862, to January 1,1864.
The Road to Peace.—Distance thither illustrated.—What certain Knights might have learned.—The Difficulties created by losing Battles in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas detailed.—What Grant, Thomas, Curtis, and others did; and what Crittenden, Zollicoffer, etc, had done unto them.—Whistling in the Woods.—Wonderful Story-telling Powers of J. Davis.—How he repeated Tales with charming Variation.—A Sea Story in which Iron enters.—Farragut and Porter up the Mississippi.—Received at New Orleans with Illuminations and Bonfires.—Butler deals with effervescing Materials.—The Peninsular Campaign traced.—Spading and Fighting.—The Glories and Disasters of the Army of the Potomac.—The American Pope fallible.—Lee’s Trip into Maryland.—Accidents at South Mountain and Antietam.—Difficult Questions besiege Mr. Lincoln in Washington.—His New-Year’s Gift to the Slaves.—Getting rich on Paper.—Cotton mixed.—A Depraved Currency.—Hooker gets at Lee’s Rear at Chancellorsville.—What followed.—Lee at Gettysburg; gets the Advertising its Springs want.—The Sorrows of Vicksburg, July 4,1863.—The Mississippi open.—Mortar-boat Building.—Valor of Colored Regiments at Charleston; and of discolored Irish in New York.—Contrasts.—Grant Transfigured at Missionary Ridge and Look-Out Mountain without Bragging of it.
“How far is it, my boy, by this road to Drainsville?” asked a mud-spattered traveller of a shrewd lad by the roadside. “If you keep on the way that you are heading,” replied the boy, “and can manage the Atlantic and Pacific on horseback, it is 23,999 miles; if you turn your horse’s head and go right back it is one mile.”
Such were the comparative distances which the Equestrian Knights of the Woolly Order—had they inquired on New-Year’s morning, 1862—would have found parted them from that desirable end of their weary journey, the pleasant village of Peace. Looking, however, only at the delusive finger-boards which cottonized brains had set up along that way; singing jaunty songs of Southern superiority and Northern low-down manners; and listening to a confused distant cheer, occasionally borne to them by certain winds out of the North and by easterly breezes from Europe, they rode on, fancying that they would soon dismount at their journey’s end, give their splashed animals into the accustomed charge of the old faithful, colored ostlers, and set down to the old dishes of glorious hominy and glorifying homily. Instead, however, of this experience, they met interminable difficulties,—Generals Crittenden and Zollicoffer, jostled out of saddle by General Thomas at Mill Spring, and floundering badly through Kentucky into Tennessee; another set captured at and with Fort Henry, FebruaryFebruary 6th, by Flag-Officer Foote, whose flotilla kept on, as if little conscious of its impertinent doings, up the Tennessee River as far as Florence, with encouraging shouts from loyal throats on either bank; Fort Donelson so surrendered to the silent-lipped Grant, FebruaryFebruary 16th, and its twelve thousand men and forty pieces of cannon so thoroughly taken up by him as to furnish no stopping-place for the tired party; Missouri, constipated under the empiric treatment of Van Dorn and Price, and evacuated under the drastic prescriptions of General Curtis, too weak to entertain the travellers; Pea Ridge, Arkansas, so shelled out by the Union pickers March 6, 7, and 8, 1862, that Ben McCullough and numerous rangers had gone into dead silences when called upon for help; New Madrid given up with six thousand butternut-colored troops to the constraining faith in the American Pope; Shiloh delivered in April to the armed Emanuel of Union expectations; Island Number Ten, in the Mississippi, with its seven thousand hosts and vast supplies, taken possession of April 7th, so as to afford no shelter to the equestrians; the restoration of all Kentucky and Tennessee back into the soft bands of the Union; the destruction of the Confederate flotilla in Albemarle Sound, and the taking of Roanoke Island, Forts Macon and Pulaski,—these unexpected incidents, as they advanced on the long trip, were rude shocks to the sight, the comfort, and the spirits of the hard-whistling equestrians. Whistle however they did and must, to keep up their courage through the gloomy woods, while to stimulate the flagging tempers of some of the riders, the leading horseman, Davis, told them in a high voice—loud enough to be heard all over Europe—some very exciting stories about Northern atrocities, made-up tales that beat everything in the way of romance since the Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw. These stories always seemed to entertain the hard-travelling party, who frequently called upon him to repeat them, which he did with some charmingly horrible variations.
Suddenly, however, on the 8th of March, a novel sight greeted the eyes of all in Hampton Roads. The steam-frigate Merrimac, raised from her salty bed near Portsmouth, receiving a new coat of mail, an ugly looking iron rhinoceros-shaped snout, and the soft, new pet name of Virginia, rolled out in ungainly strength into the wide bay; and commenced goring the Federal herd of wooden frigates, fatally ripping up the Cumberland and Congress, and cruelly gashing the St. Lawrence and Roanoke. Unhurt herself, her scaly armor undented, she slunk back gorged to her lair, prepared for a more savage repast on the rest of the frightened gunboats and ships on the following morning; when lo! on the morrow, tumbling out for her cruel pastime, she met the little, pert, saucy Monitor, one fifth her size only, and also clothed in steel, which stepped up close by her side and delivered two unexpected, round messages, each weighing one hundred and sixty-eight pounds. Indignant at this interference with her intended lunch, the masculine Virginia commenced flinging iron bolts and round indignities, but the pert little thing hurled heavier blows back. The Virginia then punched her five times with her indignant snout; but the wee one only laughed at her impotent raillery, and pitched back at her such crashing logic, that she rolled back again with her maw wholly unsated. On the part of the Monitor it was a Word-en-a blow. The well-hammered arguments, taught by the new system of military logic, carried alarming weight wherever maritime questions are chopped.
The Coroner’s Inquest.
(p. 500)
Farragut and Porter soon after got up a yachting party, consisting of forty-five vessels, to cruise through the Gulf and up to New Orleans. Forty miles up from the river’s mouth they encountered Forts Philip and Jackson, great chains, anchored hulks, and batteries, from which came very loud talk, and earnest protestations against any farther proceeding on the part of the yachtsmen. At length, however, by cutting the chain, the entire party, except two, pushed through in a terrible iron hail-storm, and reached the Crescent City, where they were received with terrific demonstrations, bonfires of fifteen thousand bales of cotton, illuminated blockade-runners, shipping, sugar, turpentine, molasses, and other loose-lying combustibles.
Such an incendiary place had to be well secured; and on the 1st of May it was put into the firm charge of the Union Butler, who occasionally uncorked its riotous effervescence, and bottled up some of the more fermenting qualities.
Meanwhile the long waiting public called for the fine drilling party in front of Washington, numbering nearly two hundred thousand, faithfully schooled for eight months, to take the intensely desired trip to Richmond. Early in April, headed by General McClellan, it reached the old Revolutionary camping-ground at Yorktown. Although, in fact, only five thousand Confederates were stationed there, the Federal leader suspected traps ahead, and so went for a month to vigorous spading, road-making, and mining, resuming in this way his early occupations and tastes. These gratified, and no traps found, the army began on the 3d of May to move towards the Chickahominy,—a sluggish, soupy stream, thickened by swamp muds and miasma,—which was reached May 20th and crossed. There was now more spading, and in sight of the Richmond spires.
For six weeks, alas! the spade was busy, not for the living only, through this Golgotha of the war; for now commenced a series of death-dealing combats seldom equalled in our well-mounded planet: May 27th the battle of Hanover Court-House, the Confederates losing; followed by four days of severe skirmishes; succeeded by the gigantic struggle of forty-eight unceasing hours of death-heaping on both sides, at Fair Oaks Station, between the corps of Sumner, Heintzelman, Kearny, and Hooker, on one side, and Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate commander, Longstreet, and the two Hills, on the other; then three weeks of intrenching, sickness, and decimation; and then on the 25th of June, the retreat to the James, crowded with six days of ceaseless combats, embroidering in gloriously ensanguined characters on the shredding flag of the Potomac the well-fought but disastrous battles of Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mills, Savage’s Station, White-Oak Swamp, and Malvern Hill, in which fifteen thousand Union lives were spent.
General Lee was placed in command of the Confederates in the place of General Johnston, wounded at Fair Oaks; and General Halleck displaced General McClellan, wounded before he left Washington in his military reputation, and, though unhurt bodily, more severely injured by his Peninsular campaign.
General Pope was assigned to the head of the Army of the Potomac, but showed in fifteen days of fighting along the Rappahannock that, like another Pope on the Tiber, he was not at all infallible.
In September General Lee took a trip into Maryland, which he hoped to extend to Philadelphia. He was, however, followed by General McClellan, reinstated to the leadership of his old army. Their meetings at South Mountain and Antietam swept thirty thousand Confederates under ground or into hospitals, largely counterbalancing the Peninsular losses.
Cotton had become very mixed, and its skeins tangled and knotted.
Difficult and dark questions now travelled to Washington, and closely besieged Mr. Lincoln. Calmly, patiently, and good-humoredly he sat down with them in a conference to which his own good sense and large-hearted wisdom were invited. The result was that on New-Year’s day, 1863, free papers were plumped into the lean, slave stockings throughout all the somehow seceded States.
During this period history and paper money were both made in large quantities; and the paper business became very lucrative. We were getting rich very fast after the European fashion. In the midst of the armed clash, however, a very Pacific act was committed,—the passage in July, 1862, of the Pacific Railroad charter, which gave one hundred millions of reasons why the Union could not be broken. So far from giving up the South, Congress provided for making Japan and China American dependencies; reaching out with steel fingers for their teas, silks, and almond-eyed live productions.
The year 1863 dawned cheerfully upon the hitherto sombre whites North, as well as upon the more sombre sable loyalists at the South. Blockades on the coast, a currency as depraved as Breckenridge; railroads undulating as saws, over which phthisicy engines groaned, as they drew the ever-lessening transportation; and a population rapidly sieved by repeated drafts, signalled the ravages to which the Confederacy was subjected, and its lessening means constantly clipped and pared away. The curious stories of Mr. Davis had neither wrought a faith beyond his own equestrian escort, nor drawn any recognition from foreign spectators.
Little was done through the winter in the field.
Early in May, General Hooker, successor to Burnside, and the fifth leader of the Potomac Army, having gained Lee’s rear at Chancellorsville, kicked it severely for three hot days; but was in turn kicked roundly. Each army lost about sixteen thousand men,—losses which, if united, would equal the entire number of the American troops engaged in the four principal battles of the Revolution,—Bunker Hill, Princeton, Saratoga, and Yorktown. While this prolonged fight was going forward, Stoneman and Kilpatrick showed some astounding feats of horsemanship, in swinging around Fredericksburg and Richmond; cutting the Confederate lines with such nimble swords that it delighted an enthusiastic audience.
In June, Lee, masking large designs on Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, crossed the Potomac and showed his own face with uncounted others at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, where, for the first three days in July, he was so handled by Meade, that he left 30,000 dead and wounded, 14,000 prisoners, and 27,000 stand of arms, to add attractions, that need no special advertising to Springs that receive so much.
The next day, July 4, Vicksburg, fruitlessly assailed during 1862, and beleagueredbeleaguered from May 4, 1863, by the reticent, self-contained, ever-pounding, never-compounding Grant,—who had inextricably tangled it by parallels and lines unparalleled,—surrendered its army of 30,000 men, 70,000 small arms, 200 cannon, without reckoning those dangerous edge-tools, for the use of which its desperate gamblers had so long been famous. Fortunately the surrender came too late to be abused by the orators of that patient and long-suffering day.
The Mississippi River once more bore all its pipes in peace. The mortar-boat masons, clearing away the ruins which the strikers had caused, had prepared anew the foundations for the prosperity of that noble valley, whose exuberant wealth is hereafter to be rolled adown it by unshackled hands.
While the troops were absent from New York, repelling Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, and the black regiments before Charleston were assisting Gilmore to execute the stern Federal judgment upon that place, the anti-war Irish in New York, largely left away from the front by their own consent, gained the peaceful rear of the native-born colored men, women, and children of that city, and took a safe hand in the only kind of contest which they coveted. The valor which for three days they displayed, in destroying property wholly unowned, of course, by themselves, in chasing and hanging colored people, and in robbing all who had watches or purses to furnish lines for their avaricious bravery to attack, was, by a few, almost as much admired as the heroic courage of the regiments before Charleston.
At Chattanooga, Grant, in the latter part of November, by a heaven-touching struggle of three days, drove away the Confederate forces out of the cloud-hidden heights of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. From this Tabor he himself came down, but not to Bragg of the transfiguration there.
All now admitted that cotton was very mixed and seedy.
What the Confederate Stool—not of Repentance, but of Mars—stood on, and how braced and steadied.—The Daisies and Corn-blooms beneath it.—The broken Industries, harried Life, and disrupted Ties of Unionists in the Border States.—Tragedies.—Grant Commander-in-Chief.—His Plan to break up the Nightmare.—Work ahead.—Jubal E. Early and his Raids.—The Year of Jubal E.—Sherman at Atlanta.—The Southern Knob seized, and the main Door burst open.—An unprotecting Hood; how it was pounded and cleft.—Sherman’s Swath through Georgia.—A Christmas Gift to Mr. Lincoln of a Sheaf.—The Scorpion Alabama; its Hatching out; its slimy, wriggling Course, and sulphureous End.—The Iron Jaws of Mobile pried open, and its Teeth drawn.—Autumn brands at the North.—Tokens of the coming Fall.—Andrew Johnson and the Goose.—Grant breaks Things at Petersburg and disturbs J. Davis in Church at Richmond.—Flight of the Latter with corruptible Treasures.—Negro Troops enter Richmond.—Light Suggestions thereupon.—A Meeting at Appomattox Court-House.—Leaving bloody Instructions, Lee goes to College.—J. Davis in Court and his Sentence.—A Thunder-Clap and its Victim.—Death of Abraham Lincoln.
The Confederate stool—not of repentance, but the iron stool of grim Mars—now stood on three legs. One rested on Southern Arkansas, braced by some eighty thousand regular soldiers; one on Georgia, propped by General Johnston and a large force, drawing their supplies from the corn-cribs of that empire State of the South; and the third and strongest, planted on the Rapidan, and steadied up by the well-sinewed arm of General Lee. Between these rude legs, however, were springing already along the furrows made by the ploughshare of strife the sweet-eyed daisies. Corn gathered its golden blooms out of the dreadful phosphates which had been strewn over so many fields.
Yet while nature’s healings were already anointing the ragged wounds of incisive war, over other and wide districts came ills which almost defied the bungling surgeries and irregular apothecary appliances that were wasted upon or unwisely aggravated them. In these districts predatory bands hovered over and constantly lit upon disorganized and broken industries, as crows cawingly follow a disrupted herd of buffaloes or swoop upon the wounded which fall out of the straggling march. The harryings of cattle; the plunder of farmsteads, of bean-patches,—nursed by the patient labor of suddenly made widows,—and even of houses seemingly secure from their proximity to villages; wayside murders from concealed coverts; midnight shots at men asleep in bed, or treacherously called out on pretended errands of charity, and hewn down, frayed and fretted the lives of those who still clung to the Union throughout the Border States. There were daily tragedies, sadder than the tinselled shows of the stage. There were masqueraders who danced through desultory cruelties at which even the readers of novels, languid over ordinary stories, enkindle into activity and excitement, and family feuds encrimsoning their way into living sorrows and eventually into tales, which in mercy we call fictions.
The winter and spring of 1864 pendulated with balanced successes and reverses to either combatant.
In March, General Grant was made Commander-in-Chief, and immediately set on foot a plan to wake up the uneasy sleeper and free him from the nightmare. This plan was to start simultaneously, and to keep in motion, the various corps of the Federal army; Sherman’s one hundred thousand at Chattanooga against Johnston’s army in Georgia; Banks’s and Farragut’s in conjunction against Mobile; and Grant himself, united with Meade, against Lee and Richmond: thus shredding, at the same time, the still suspended cotton curtain, and preventing its busy stitchers at one point from assisting those making repairs at another. Meade crossed the Rapidan, May 4th, and advanced towards Richmond, giving Lee a very lively hunt through the Wilderness for a month, and at length driving him over the soupy and astonished Chickahominy. At the same time Grant, holding his spirited team well in hand, drove up also towards the Confederate capital, until he halted on the south side of the James.
Soon after, in order to divert attention from that long-coveted spot, Richmond, General Jubal E. Early made into Maryland a raid, which he repeated in July, but from which he was sent whirling back into the Shenandoah valley. He renewed his experiments again in September and October, but was finally chased out by Sheridan and his centaurs, who seemed to mount the wind, and, on their rapid and supperless rides to live off condensed night air.
Along the hyperborean lines rang the warning after the discomfited Confederate:—