THE WAR OF IDEAS AND MUSKET; OR, LINCOLN’S ADMINISTRATION.
1861–1865.
IN THREE DIVISIONS.
DIVISION FIRST.
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.
[Illustration:
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,
“Chi va piano.
Va sano:
Chi va forte,
Va alla morte,”
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.
DIVISION SECOND.
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, February 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, February
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.
[Illustration:
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
beleaguered 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.
DIVISION THIRD.
COTTON WORSTED. JANUARY 1, 1864, TO APRIL 14, 1865.
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:—
“The year of Jubal E. is come,
Return, ye wandering sinners, home.”
In the Southeast, Sherman, flanking Johnston at Dalton in Georgia,
forced him through May and June southwards, delivering battles and
defeats,—which were not ordered,—at Resaca, Dallas, Pine Lost, and
Kenesaw Mountains, until at last he shoved him behind the great southern
knob, Atlanta, whose converging iron lines held the main door of the
Lower Confederacy. Here Johnston disappeared, and the Confederate powers
put a Hood over the head of the assailed Southeast; but all in vain.
Sherman, pounding about the iron-covered Hood with heavy blows through
July and August, cleft the head-piece in two; and on the 2d of September
cast him out, and, seizing the great iron knob, opened wide the door.
On the 15th of November Sherman advanced through Georgia to the sea,
taking a swath sixty miles wide, rolling up winrows at Milledgeville,
cutting down thistles, burdocks, and noxious weeds with his well-whetted
scythe, until, on the 21st of December, he reached the farther side of
his great hay-field at Savannah. Gathering its crop into one bundle, he
despatched it to Mr. Lincoln with this epistle: “I beg to present you,
as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty
guns, plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of
cotton.” Truly cotton now had become very worsted.
In June, that British scorpion, the Alabama,—which had been hatched out
at Liverpool in the spring and summer of 1862, while the British
telescope was steadily turned in another direction, and which for two
years had left its red slime all over the seas, stinging to death, as it
wriggled in its venomous course, sixty-four peaceful American
vessels,—was, by a single blow from the Kearsarge, sent to a sulphureous
grave in the Channel which washed its birthplace. Diplomatic naturalists
have ever since been disputing over the species and quality of this
reptile; while all agree, that, whether warm blooded or cold, it is not
desirable that its kind be perpetuated. Its poisonous carcass is still
coiled in offensive knots around the international diplomatic
lattice-work of the two nations.
During August, Admiral Farragut pried open the iron-set jaws of Mobile
Harbor, drawing its teeth,—Forts Morgan, Gaines, and Powell,—real molars
as they were, producing spasms which threatened lockjaw to the obstinate
patient.
While the red autumn leaves were falling through the North, Confederate
brands were whirled, some out of Canada, others from Northern cities,
upon the bank of St. Alban’s, in Vermont, on warehouses in Buffalo,
Detroit, and New York, on hotels in Cleveland, and on steamboats on the
Lakes. The real sap in the Davis tree was now running down, and the top
branches were shedding their crimson colors earthward.
While these paling evidences of the fall were multiplying, Mr. Lincoln
was re-elected President, by two hundred and twelve votes out of two
hundred and thirty-three. Andrew Johnson, then fifty-six years old, who
had both early and late in life handled the goose,—the one kind as
acceptably as the other,—and had been himself cruelly plucked through
the war by the masked plunderers in Tennessee, was placed in the easy
nest of the Vice-Presidency. His first getting in was so awkward, that
it was manifest something had turned his head.
Sherman, taking breath at Savannah, again swung his effective scythe
through the thin crop, lying between that city and Charleston, which was
cut down, like a rank burdock, February 18, 1865. Then turning
northwards, he gathered in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina;
turned up to the sunlight dank villages, all unused to Northern
implements,—cheered as he went by sable faces,—until at last he halted
at Fayetteville, March 11, 1865, to take a hearty shake of the hand with
his fellow-mowers, General Terry and Admiral Porter. From Wilmington, he
again whetted up his keen blade and cleared the Southern field.
Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Hardee manifested a disposition to stop
him at Bentonville; but a blow sent them reeling from his path, and he
went vigorously forward, garnering blessed harvests for his country and
himself.
[Illustration:
COTTON DOWN.
(p. 512)
]
Meanwhile Grant, through the autumn of 1864, was encompassing Petersburg
and drawing zigzag lines around it, that were too much like the short
epistles that creditors send to unwilling debtors, to be agreeable. The
autumn leaves here fell on busy workers; and among the busiest, the
Silent Man, who was casting up long accounts in his head, which only
opened to let out smoke. In him, however, there was much fire, American
and Greek.
On the 24th of March, the Silent Man issued an order for a centripetal
movement on Richmond. Lee, in every way tried to break the converging
fate. Along the Appomattox River, at Fort Stedman, and at every
weak-looking place, he hurled himself against the links of a chain, now
slowly drawing around him; but all to no purpose. On the 2d of April
Grant broke through Lee’s intrenched lines about Petersburg; and Lee at
once disturbed J. Davis, although at church in Richmond, by a sudden
notice that Petersburg and Richmond were insecure places, and that he
must flee to other refuges, than his old ones. Neither sitting nor lying
would now do; and accordingly the head of the Confederacy took to his
feet, and fled with the few depraved treasures which had not gone
already to corruption. Hurrying through Richmond, he got away as fast as
a very un-express train would carry him, over railroads hacked by
Sheridan, Stoneman, and Grierson. The next morning General Weitzel
entered the capital of the dissolving Confederacy—so long held by brave
men—with a body of colored troops,—representatives of that fate which
four years before had been ignorantly invoked, and now rapidly
fulfilling,—representatives, too, of those one hundred and eighty
thousand others, with skins colored like their own, who had given
themselves to the service of a Union, whose stripes they had often felt,
and whose stars for them had just peeped above the eastern hills and
were beginning to sing for joy.
Lee at once commenced a retreat towards the Southwest, hoping to unite
his broken forces with Johnston, who, however, was too actively taken up
by Sherman to reciprocate his intentions. At Amelia Court-House Sheridan
and his centaurs suddenly appeared before the astonished Confederates on
the 6th of April, and cut seven thousand away from them. The remainder
General Lee dragged forward to Appomattox Court-House, and there
delivered them over to the generous justice of his brother-in-arms, the
silent-lipped, whose magnanimity was a fit type of the large forbearance
of a country, which, wronged by a causeless war,—generated for ends that
in other lands would have brought its authors to the place where all
ropes terminate,—has to look back on no crosses, but for itself.
A really fine character, a great strategist, and personally brave man,
the chief of the Confederate Army, who had delivered such “bloody
instructions” to the fathers, became the head of a college, and deals
out, it is to be hoped, better lessons to the sons.
This surrender was followed, on the 26th of April by that of Johnston;
on the 4th of May, by the remaining Confederate forces under General
Dick Taylor; by the miscellaneous taking of Mobile, Selma, Tuscaloosa,
and Montgomery, and the unfortunate capture of Mr. J. Davis, whose lean
head—made valuable to his captors by a useless expense to the
treasury—was, at an additional expense, taken several times to Richmond,
and shown to the court in satisfaction of his bail bond, and at last
dismissed—to the gibbet of history.
The black cloud, charged with such thunderous bolts, had dissolved, and
the blue sky was showing through the rifted masses, when a sudden clap,
a hissing sound, a sharp wrenching cry, and there lay the straightened
form of Abraham Lincoln.
The victories which he had helped to organize were forgotten; cotton
worsted was unheeded; even the terrible struggles with the long,
wrestling nightmare, were all lost sight of in the grief for the Great
and the Good, whose patriotism had warmed, whose integrity had
strengthened, and whose genial humor had kept warm and mellow, the heart
and hope of a brave and self-sacrificing nation through the contest just
closed,—closed to open upon questions which had need, too, of a Solomon
rather than a Jeroboam.