read three death warrants. Then he held up another paper and read it.
It was a formal document from the War Department, sustaining the legal
points submitted in Tom Collins's case, disapproving the finding and
sentence, and ordering the man formally enlisted and returned to duty.
The chaplain fell into a collapse of uncontrollable weeping. Tom Collins
came to his relief with the injunction: "Oh, come, now, old snuffy,
cheer up! I'll bet you even money I beat you to Hell yet."
That clergyman afterward confided to me his doubts of "deathbed
repentances," at least in the case of habitual criminals.
XXXI
In the spring of 1864, the battery to which I belonged mutinied--in an
entirely proper and soldierlike way. Longstreet had returned, and the
Army of Northern Virginia was about to encounter Grant in the most
stupendous campaign of the war. We were old soldiers, and we knew
what was coming. But as we had no horses to draw our guns, and as the
quartermaster's department seemed unable to find horses for us, we
were omitted from the orders for the advance into the region of the
Wilderness, where the fighting was obviously to begin. We were ordered
to Cobham Station, a charming region of verdure-clad hills and brawling
streams, where there was no soldiers' work to do and no prospect of
anything less ignoble than provost duty.
Against this we revolted, respectfully and loyally. We sent in a protest
and petition asking that if horses could not be furnished for our guns,
we should be armed with Enfield rifles and permitted to march with our
battalion as a sharpshooting support.
The request was granted and from the Wilderness to Petersburg we marched
and fought and starved right gallantly, usually managing to have a place
between the guns at the points of hottest contest in every action of the
campaign.
At Petersburg we found artillery work of a new kind to do. No sooner
were the conditions of siege established than our battery, because of
its irregularly armed condition, was chosen to work the mortars which
then for the first time became a part of the offensive and defensive
equipment of the Army of Northern Virginia.
All the fragments of batteries whose ranks had been broken up and whose
officers had been killed, wounded, or captured during that campaign of
tremendous fighting, were assigned to us for mortar service, so that our
numbers were swelled to 250 or 300 men. The number was fluctuating from
day to day, as the monotonous murder of siege operations daily depleted
our ranks on the one hand while almost daily there were additions made
of men from disintegrated commands.
I have no purpose here to write a history of that eight months of siege,
during which we were never for one moment out of fire by night or by
day, but there is one story that arose out of it which I have a mind
to tell.
I had been placed in command of an independent mortar fort, taking my
orders directly from General E. P. Alexander--Longstreet's chief of
artillery--and reporting to nobody else.
Infantry officers from the lines in front--colonels and such--used
sometimes to come to my little row of gun-pits and give me orders in
utter ignorance of the conditions and limitations of mortar firing.
The orders were not binding upon me and, under General Alexander's
instructions, I paid no heed to them, wherefore I was often in a state
of friction with the intermeddlers. After a little I discovered a short
and easy method of dealing with them. There was a Federal fort known
to us as the Railroad Iron Battery, whose commanding officer seemed a
person very fond of using his guns in an offensive way. He had both
mortars and rifled field guns, and with all of them he soon got my
range so accurately that all his rifle shells cut my parapet at the
moment of exploding, and all his mortar shells fell among my pits with
extraordinary precision. In order to preserve the lives of my men I had
to take my stand on top of the mound over my magazine whenever he began
bombarding me. From that point I watched the course of his mortar
shells, and when one of them seemed destined to fall into one of my
little gun-pits, I called out the number of the pit and the men in it
ran into their bomb-proof till the explosion was over.
In dealing with the annoyance of intruding infantry officers, I took
advantage of the Railroad Iron Battery's extraordinary readiness to
respond to the smallest attention at my hands. A shell or two hurled in
that direction always brought on a condition of things which prompted
all visitors to my pits to retreat to a covered way and hasten to keep
suddenly remembered engagements on their own lines.
[Sidenote: Gloaming Visitors]
Once my little ruse did not produce the intended effect. It was after
sunset of a day late in August. Two officers came out of the gloaming
and saluted me politely. They were in fatigue uniforms. That is to say,
they wore the light blue trousers that were common to both armies, and
white duck fatigue jackets that bore no insignia of rank upon their
collars.
At the moment I was slowly bombarding something--I forget what or
why--but I remember that I was getting no response. Presently one of
my visitors said:
"You seem to be having the shelling all to yourself."
I resented the remark, thinking it a criticism.
"We'll see," I said. Then turning to my brother, who was my second in
command, I quietly gave the order:
"Touch up the Railroad Iron Battery, Joe."
Thirty seconds later the storm was in full fury about us, but my
visitors did not seem to mind it. Instead of retiring to the covered
way, they nonchalantly stood there by my side on the mound of the
magazine. Every now and then, between explosions, one of them would ask
a question as to the geography of the lines to our right and left.
"What battery is that over there?"
"What is the Federal work that lies in front of it?"
"What is the lay of the land," etc., etc.
Obviously they were officers new to this part of our line and as they
offered no criticism upon the work of my guns, and gave me no orders,
I put aside the antagonism I had felt, and in all good-fellowship
explained the military geography of the region round about.
Meanwhile, Joe had quietly stopped the fire on the Railroad Iron
Battery, and little by little that work ceased its activity. Finally
my visitors politely bade me good evening and took their leave.
I asked Joe who they were, but he did not know. I inquired of others,
but nobody knew. Next morning I asked at General Gracie's headquarters
what new troops had been brought to that part of the line, and learned
that there had been no changes. There and at General Bushrod Johnson's
headquarters I minutely described my visitors, but nobody knew anything
about them, and after a few days of futile conjecture I ceased to think
of them or their visit.
In July, 1865, the war being over, I took passage on the steamer "Lady
Gay," bound from Cairo to New Orleans. There were no women on board,
but there was a passenger list of thirty men or so. Some of us were
ex-Confederates and some had been Federal soldiers.
[Sidenote: The Outcome of a Strange Story]
The two groups did not mingle. The members of each were polite upon
accidental occasion to the members of the other, but they did not
fraternize, at least for a time--till something happened.
I was talking one morning with some of my party when suddenly a man
from the other group approached as if listening to my voice. Presently
he asked:
"Didn't you command a mortar fort at Petersburg?"
I answered that I did, whereupon he asked:
"Do you remember----" and proceeded to outline the incident related
above.
"Yes," I answered in astonishment, "but how do you happen to know
anything about it?"
"I was one of your visitors on that occasion. I thought I couldn't
be mistaken in the voice that commanded, 'Touch up the Railroad Iron
Battery, Joe.'"
"But I don't understand. You were a Federal officer, were you not?"
"Yes."
"Then what were you doing there?"
"That is precisely what my friend and I were trying to find out, while
you kept us for two hours under a fire of hell from our own batteries."
Then he explained:
"You remember that to the left of your position, half a mile or so away,
there lay a swamp. It was utterly impassable when the lines were drawn,
and both sides neglected it in throwing up the breastworks. Well, that
swamp slowly dried up during the summer, and it left something like a
gap in both lines, but the gap was so well covered by the batteries on
both sides that neither bothered to extend earthworks across it. My
friend and I were in charge of pickets and rifle-pits that day, and
we went out to inspect them. Somehow--I don't know how--we got lost on
the swamplands, and, losing our bearings, we found ourselves presently
within the Confederate lines. To say that we were embarrassed is to
put it mildly. We were scared. We didn't know how to get back, and we
couldn't even surrender for the reason that we were not in uniform but
in fatigue dress, and therefore technically, at least, in disguise.
There was nothing about us to show to which army we belonged. As an
old soldier, you know what that meant. If we had given ourselves up we
should have been hanged as spies caught in disguise within your lines.
In our desperate strait we went to you and stood there for an hour or
two under the worst fire we ever endured, while we extracted from you
the geographical information that enabled us to make our way back to
our own lines under cover of darkness."
At that point he grasped my hand warmly and said:
"Tell me, how is Joe? I hope he is 'touching up' something that responds
as readily as the Railroad Iron Battery did that evening."
From that hour until we reached New Orleans, four days later, there
was no barrier between the two groups of passengers. We fraternized
completely. We told stories of our several war experiences that had
no touch or trace of antagonism in them.
Incidentally, we exhausted the steamer "Lady Gay's" supplies of
champagne and cigars, and when we reached New Orleans we had a dinner
together at the St. Charles hotel, no observer of which would have
suspected that a few months before we had been doing our best to
slaughter each other.
XXXII
[Sidenote: The Beginning of Newspaper Life]
Let me pass hurriedly over the years that immediately followed the end
of the war. I went West in search of a living. In Cairo, Illinois, I
became counsel and attorney "at law and in fact," for a great banking,
mining, steamboating, and mercantile firm, whose widely extending
interests covered the whole West and South.
The work was uncongenial and by way of escaping from it, after I had
married, I removed to Mississippi and undertook the practice of law
there.
That work proved still less to my liking and in the summer of 1870
I abandoned it in the profoundest disgust.
With a wife, one child, a little household furniture, and no money
at all, I removed to New York and secured work as a reporter on the
Brooklyn _Union_, an afternoon newspaper.
I knew nothing of the business, art, or mystery of newspaper making, and
I knew nothing of the city. I find it difficult to imagine a man less
well equipped for my new undertaking than I was. But I had an abounding
confidence in my ability to learn anything I wanted to learn, and I
thought I knew how to express myself lucidly in writing. For the rest
I had tireless energy and a good deal of courage of the kind that is
sometimes slangily called "cheek." This was made manifest on the first
day of my service by the fact that while waiting for a petty news
assignment I wrote an editorial article and sent it in to Theodore
Tilton, the editor, for use. I had an impulse of general helpfulness
which was left unrestrained by my utter ignorance of the distinctions
and dignities of a newspaper office. I had a thought which seemed to me
to deserve editorial utterance, and with the mistaken idea that I was
expected to render all the aid I could in the making of the newspaper,
I wrote what I had to say.
Theodore Tilton was a man of very hospitable mind, and he cared little
for traditions. He read my article, approved it, and printed it as a
leader. Better still, he sent for me and asked me what experience I had
had as a newspaper man. I told him I had had none, whereupon he said
encouragingly:
"Oh well, it doesn't matter much. I'll have you on the editorial staff
soon. In the meantime, learn all you can about the city, and especially
about the shams and falsities of its 'Society' with a big 'S.' Study
state politics, and equip yourself to comment critically upon such
things. And whenever you have an editorial in your mind write it and
send it to me."
The _Union_ had been purchased by Mr. Henry C. Bowen, the owner of the
New York _Independent_, then the most widely influential periodical of
its class in America. Theodore Tilton was the editor of both.
[Sidenote: An Old School Man of Letters]
Theodore Tilton was at the crest of the wave of success at that time,
and he took himself and his genius very seriously. Concerning him I
shall write more fully a little later on. At present I wish to say only
that with all his self-appreciation he had a keen appreciation of other
men's abilities, and he sought in every way he could to make them
tributary to his own success in whatever he undertook. To that end he
had engaged some strong men and women as members of his staff on the
_Union_, and among these the most interesting to me was Charles F.
Briggs, the "Harry Franco" of an earlier literary time, the associate
and partner of Edgar Allan Poe on the _Broadway Journal_, the personal
friend or enemy of every literary man of consequence in his time, the
associate of George William Curtis and Parke Godwin in the conduct
of _Putnam's Monthly_; the coadjutor of Henry J. Raymond on the
_Times_, the novelist to whom Lowell dedicated "The Fable for Critics,"
and whose personal and literary characteristics Lowell set forth with
singular aptitude in that poem. In brief, he was in his own person a
representative and embodiment of the literary life of what I had always
regarded as the golden age of American letters. He talked familiarly of
writers who had been to me cloud-haloed demigods, and made men of them
to my apprehension.
Let me add that though the literary life of which he had been a part was
a turbulent one, beset by jealousies and vexed by quarrels of a bitter
personal character, such as would be impossible among men of letters in
our time of more gracious manners, I never knew him to say an unjust
thing about any of the men he had known, or to withhold a just measure
of appreciation from the work of those with whom he had most bitterly
quarreled.
Perhaps no man among Poe's contemporaries had juster reason to feel
bitterness toward the poet's memory than had Mr. Briggs. Yet during my
intimacy with him, extending over many years, I never heard him say
an unkind word of Poe. On the other hand, I never knew him to fail to
contradict upon occasion and in his dogmatic fashion--which was somehow
very convincing--any of the prevalent misapprehensions as to Poe's
character and life which might be mentioned in his presence.
It was not that he was a meekly forgiving person, for he was, on the
contrary, pugnacious in an unusual degree. But the dominant quality of
his character was a love of truth and justice. Concerning Poe and the
supposed immorality of his life, he once said to me, in words that I
am sure I remember accurately because of the impression they made on
my mind:
"He was not immoral at all in his personal life or in his work. He
was merely _un_moral. He had no perception of the difference between
right and wrong in the moral sense of those words. His conscience was
altogether artistic. If you had told him you had killed a man who stood
annoyingly in the way of your purposes, he would have thought none the
worse of you for it. He would have reflected that the man ought not to
have put himself in your way. But if you had been guilty of putting
forth a false quantity in verse, he would have held you to be a monster
for whom no conceivable punishment could be adequate."
Often Mr. Briggs's brusquerie and pugnacity were exaggerated, or
even altogether assumed by way of hiding a sentiment too tender to be
exhibited. Still more frequently the harshest things he said to his
friends--and they were sometimes very bitter--were prompted, not by his
displeasure with those who were their victims, but by some other cause
of "disgruntlement." On such occasions he would repent him of his fault,
and would make amends, but never in any ordinary way or after a fashion
that anybody else would have chosen.
One morning he came into the editorial room which he and I jointly
occupied. I bade him good-morning as usual, but he made no reply. After
a little while he turned upon me with some bitter, stinging utterance
which, if it had come from a younger man, I should have hotly resented.
Coming from a man of his age and distinction, I resented it only by
turning to my desk and maintaining silence during the entire morning.
When his work was done, he left the office without a word, leaving me to
feel that he meant the break between us--the cause of which I did not at
all understand--to be permanent, as I certainly intended that it should.
But when he entered the room next morning he stood still in the middle
of the floor, facing my back, for I had not turned my face away from
my desk.
[Sidenote: Mr. Briggs Explains]
"Good-morning!" he said. "Are you ready to apologize to me?"
I turned toward him with an involuntary smile at the absurdity of the
suggestion, and answered:
"I don't know what I should apologize for, Mr. Briggs."
"Neither do I," he answered. "My question was prompted by curiosity. It
usually happens that apologies come from the person offended, you know.
Are you going to write on this affair in the Senate, or shall I take
it up?"
From that moment his manner was what it always had been during our
association. Beyond what he had said he made no reference to the matter,
but after our work was finished he, in fact, explained his temper of the
day before, while carefully avoiding every suggestion that he meant to
explain it or that there was any connection between the explanation and
the thing explained.
"What do you think of servants?" he asked abruptly. I made some answer,
though I did not understand the reason for his question or its occasion.
"When I was in the Custom House," he resumed, "I had an opportunity to
buy, far below the usual price, some of the finest wines and brandies
ever imported. I bought some Madeira, some sherry, and some brandy--ten
gallons of each, in five-gallon demijohns--and laid them away in my
cellar, thinking the stock sufficient to last me as long as I lived.
I rejoiced in the certainty that however poor I might become, I should
always be able to offer a friend a glass of something really worthy
of a gentleman's attention. Night before last I asked my daughter to
replenish a decanter of sherry which had run low. She went to the cellar
and presently returned with a look on her face that made me think she
had seen a burglar. She reported that there wasn't a drop of anything
left in any of the demijohns. I sent for some detectives, and before
morning they solved the riddle. A servant girl who had resigned from our
service a week or two before had carried all the wine and brandy--two
bottlefuls at a time--to a miserable, disreputable gin mill, and sold
it for what the thievish proprietor saw fit to give. When I learned the
facts I lost my temper, which was a very unprofitable thing to do. I'm
late," looking at his watch, "and must be off."
Mr. Briggs had a keen sense of humor, which he tried hard to disguise
with a shaggy seeming of dogmatic positiveness. He would say his most
humorous things in the tone and with the manner of a man determined to
make himself as disagreeable as possible.
I sat with him at a public dinner one evening. He took the wines with
the successive courses, but when later some one, on the other side of
the table, lifted his glass of champagne and asked Mr. Briggs to drink
with him, he excused himself for taking carbonic water instead of the
wine, by saying:
"I'm a rigid 'temperance' man."
When we all smiled and glanced at the red and white wine glasses he had
emptied in the course of the meal, he turned upon us savagely, saying:
"You smile derisively, but I repeat my assertion that I'm a strict
'temperance' man; I never take a drink unless I want it."
He paused, and then added:
"Temperance consists solely in never taking a drink unless you want it.
Intemperance consists in taking drinks when some other fellow wants
them."
[Sidenote: Mr. Briggs's Generosity]
He was peculiarly generous of encouragement to younger men, when he
thought they deserved it. I may add that he was equally generous of
rebuke under circumstances of an opposite kind. I had entered journalism
without knowing the least thing about the profession, or trade--if that
be the fitter name for it, as I sometimes think it is--and I had not
been engaged in the work long enough to get over my modesty, when one
day I wrote a paragraph of a score or two lines to correct an error into
which the New York _Tribune_ had that morning fallen. Not long before
that time a certain swashbuckler, E. M. Yerger, of Jackson, Mississippi,
had committed a homicide in the nature of a political assassination. The
crime and the assassin's acquittal by reason of political influence had
greatly excited the indignation of the entire North.
There lived at the same time in Memphis another and a very different
E. M. Yerger, a judge whose learning, uprightness, and high personal
character had made him deservedly one of the best loved and most honored
jurists in the Southwest. At the time of which I now write, this Judge
E. M. Yerger had died, and his funeral had been an extraordinary
manifestation of popular esteem, affection, and profound sorrow.
The _Tribune_, misled by the identity of their names, had confounded the
two men, and had that morning "improved the occasion" to hurl a deal of
editorial thunder at the Southern people for thus honoring a fire-eating
assassin.
By way of correcting the error I wrote and printed an editorial
paragraph, setting forth the facts simply, and making no comments.
When Mr. Briggs next entered the office he took my hand warmly in both
his own, and said:
"I congratulate you. That paragraph of yours was the best editorial the
_Union_ has printed since I've been on the paper."
"Why, Mr. Briggs," I protested, "it was only a paragraph----"
"What of that?" he demanded in his most quarrelsome tone. "The Lord's
Prayer is only a paragraph in comparison with some of the 'graces' I've
heard distinguished clergymen get off at banquets by way of impressing
their eloquence upon the oysters that were growing warm under the
gaslights, while they solemnly prated."
"But there was nothing in the paragraph," I argued; "it only corrected
an error."
"Why, sir, do you presume to tell me what is and what isn't in an
article that I've read for myself? You're a novice, a greenhorn in this
business. Don't undertake to instruct my judgment, sir. That paragraph
was excellent editorial writing, because it corrected an error that
did a great injustice; because it gave important and interesting
information; because it set forth facts of public import not known to
our readers generally, and finally, because you put that final period
just where it belonged. Don't contradict me. Don't presume to argue
the matter. I won't stand it."
With that he left the room as abruptly as he had entered it, and with
the manner of a man who has quarreled and has put his antagonist down.
I smilingly recalled the lines in which Lowell so aptly described and
characterized him in "A Fable for Critics":