SOLDIERS I HAVE MET
In speaking of soldiers I shall do better to pay slight attention
to the men of chief importance; for them the trumpets have sounded
sufficiently and I came into personal contact with only one or two.
Grant, I saw once, after he was Lieutenant-General, on the platform of
a railroad station submitting stoically to the compliments of a lively
crowd of women. Once again I saw him, in academic surroundings, sturdy
and impassive, an incongruous element among the caps and gowns; but it
was among such men that he won what is to my mind one of his greatest
victories. What triumph of Grant's was greater than his subjugation
of Matthew Arnold! I rode once on the railroad-train for some hours
immediately behind Sheridan, and had a good chance to study the sinewy
little man in his trim uniform which showed every movement of his
muscles. Though the ride was hot and monotonous I was impressed with
his vitality. He seemed to have eyes all around his head. The man was
in repose, but it was the repose of a leopard; at a sudden call, every
fibre would evidently become tense, the servant of a nimble brain, and
an instant pounce upon any opposition could be depended upon. What a
pity, I found myself thinking, that the fellow has no longer a chance
for his live energy (the war was then well over), and I had to check
an incipient wish that a turmoil might arise that would again give a
proper scope to his soldierly force. Happily there was no longer need
for such service, but I feel that Sheridan was really more than a good
sword. One finds in his memoirs unexpected outbursts of fancy and high
sentiment, and he could admire the fine heroism of a character like
Charles Russell Lowell. It is fair to judge a man by what he admires.
At the Harvard commemoration of 1865, standing under the archway at
the northern end of Gore Hall, I encountered the thin, plainly clad
figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I was in soldier's dress and as he gave
me a nod of recognition he said, looking at my chevrons, very simply
but with feeling, "This day belongs to you." Passing around then
to the west front, I had before me a contrast in a brilliant group
marshalled by my friend and classmate Colonel Theodore Lyman, in
the centre of which rose the stately figure in full uniform of
Major-General Meade. "Ah, Jimmy," said Theodore with the aggressive
geniality which his old associates so well remember, "come right
here," and catching me by the arm he pulled the corporal into the
immediate presence of the victor of Gettysburg. "This is Corporal
Hosmer," said he, "and this, Jimmy, is Major-General Meade,"
introducing us with much friendly patting of my shoulder and a
handling of the Major-General almost equally familiar. He had long
been a trusted member of Meade's staff but the war was over and a
close friendship held them on common ground. "He has written a book,
General, about the war." Then came a word of commendation and the tall
General, as he gave my hand a cordial pressure, beamed down upon me
with pleasant eyes. In the peaceful time that had come, we were all
citizens together; the private and the General were on a level, though
that aquiline face had been called upon not long before to confront,
at the head of one hundred thousand men, the hosts of Lee.
Of our other great commanders I never saw Thomas, but my knowledge of
Sherman was something more than the mere glimpse I had of the figures
of his compeers. His home was in St. Louis, in which city I was then
residing, and he was much in society. He was really a Connecticut
Yankee though transplanted to Ohio, and he was, in figure and
character, thoroughly a New Englander. He was tall and slender, his
prominent forehead standing out from light straight hair, a stubby
beard veiling a well-pronounced and well-worked jaw (for he was one of
the readiest of talkers), it would require little scratching to get
to the uncontaminated Yankee underneath. A New Englander of the best
type, shrewd, kindly, deeply concerned for the welfare of his country
and of men. A fashionable lady invited him to dine without his wife.
Sherman, on arriving, found other ladies present; to his hostess, who
came forward to receive him with effusion, he said: "Madam, I dine
with Mrs. Sherman to-night," and the party went forward without the
lion who was to have given it distinction. He would not have his wife
slighted; nor in more important things would he endure to see a
lame outcome when he might set things in better shape. He encouraged
schools and worthy charities by giving them his hearty countenance.
No arm was more potent than his in saving the country, nor was his
patriotism selfish. He saved his country because he believed it was
for the good of the world.
Sherman has been criticised for his ruthlessness, but no one can say
that he was not effective. He bore on hard but with the belief that
only such action could bring the war to a close. No one could come in
contact with him without feeling that he was a soft-hearted man. It
was one of the most interesting evenings of my life when, as a guest
of N.O. Nelson, the philanthropic captain of industry in St. Louis,
I was one of a company of a dozen to hear Sherman tell John Fiske his
story of the war. We sat at table from seven o'clock until midnight,
the two illustrious figures with their heads together exchanging a
rapid fire of question and answer, but the rest of us were by no means
silent. Sherman was full of affability and took good-naturedly the
sharp inquiries. "How was it, General, at Shiloh; was not your line
quite too unguarded on the Corinth side, and was not the coming on of
Sidney Johnston a bad surprise for you?" "Oh, later in the war," said
Sherman, "we no doubt should have done differently, but we got ready
for them as they came on." "Was there not bad demoralisation," I
said, "ten thousand or more skulkers huddled under the bluff on the
Tennessee?" "Oh," said Sherman, "the rear of an army in battle is
always a sorry place; but on the firing line, where I was, things
did not look so bad."--"Your adversaries, General, were often good
fellows, were they not, and you are good friends now?" "The best
fellows in the world," said Sherman, "and as to friendship, Hood wants
me to be his literary executor and take care of his memoirs."
He was ready to confess to mistakes, and with frank and proper
exultation pointed out the gradual improvement and the triumphant
result. Plenty of good stories and much hearty laughter came in among
the more tragic episodes. We saw John Fiske take it all in, swaying
in his chair ponderously back and forth, but the _War in the
Mississippi Valley_, which came out soon after, showed that his
memory retained every point. On another occasion, as Sherman on a
stormy night took me home in his carriage, we skirted the blocks which
had been the site of Camp Jackson, the first field of the Civil War
that Sherman had witnessed. That was the beginning of things in
the West, and he on that day only a by-stander. He was at the time
possibly irresolute as to what he should do, and he certainly had no
premonition of the large part he was destined to play. As he looked
out of the window that night into the driving storm on the spot where
once he had brooded so anxiously, I wondered if he had any memory of
the soul struggle of that crisis.
After his death, there took place in the streets of St. Louis an
imposing military funeral. As the cortège paused for a moment, I stood
at the side of the gun-carriage which bore the coffin wrapped in the
flag, and paid my tribute to this good man and great citizen who had
played his part well.
A controversy, which has now died away, used to be waged during
and soon after the Civil War as to whether West Point had really
vindicated a place for itself. Many an American, full of that
over-confidence which besets us, maintained that a man could become a
good soldier by a turn of the hand as it were. Given courage, physical
vigour, and fair practical aptitude, a lawyer, a merchant, or a civil
engineer could take sword in hand and at short notice head a squadron
or muster an army. This view has so far as I know been set forward by
no one more plausibly than by Jacob D. Cox, a stout civilian soldier
who led well the Twenty-third Corps and later became Governor of Ohio
and a successful Secretary of the Interior. I once met General Cox
in an interesting way, on a Sunday afternoon, at the home of Judge
Alfonso Taft at Walnut Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cincinnati. Judge
Taft in those days was a somewhat noteworthy figure. He had served the
country well as Minister to Russia and also as a member of the Cabinet
at Washington, and was one of the foremost men of the fair city where
he lived. His sister-in-law married an intimate friend of mine, and
there were other reasons which gave me some title to his notice, and I
was for the time his guest. A sturdy white-haired boy of ten or so sat
at the table at dinner and hung with his brothers about the group of
elders as they talked in the afternoon. This boy was William H.
Taft taking in the scraps of talk as the chatting progressed on his
father's porch. General Cox dropped in for an afternoon call and I
scanned eagerly his scholarly face and figure, well knit through the
harshest experiences in camp and battle. He was a man of fine tastes
and well accomplished both in science and literature with a substratum
of manly tenacity and good sense, who did noble duty on many a field
and produced, in his _Military Reminiscences_ one of our most
satisfactory books on the Civil War period. The manner of the veteran
was simple and pleasant. Nothing betrayed that he had been the hero
in such an eventful past. I have of course no thought of sketching his
career or criticising his account of it. As to the point to which I
have referred, his claim that a peaceful American can be turned into
a soldier off-hand and that the West Pointers no more made good in the
war than did the civilians, he sets forth the case calmly. He takes
the curriculum at West Point as it was sixty years ago and plainly
shows that as regards acquirements in general it bears a poor
comparison with that of civilian universities and colleges of
that period. As to especial military education, he claims that the
instruction at West Point was comparatively trifling; the cadets were
well drilled only in the elements, while as regards the larger matters
of strategy and the management of armies there was slight opportunity
to learn. The cadet came out qualified to drill a company or at most
a regiment, while as to manoeuvring of divisions and corps he had no
chance to perfect himself. The cadet, moreover, had this handicap--he
had been made the slave of routine and his natural enterprise had been
so far repressed that he magnified petty details and precedents and
was slow to adapt himself to an unlooked-for emergency. He cites an
example where he himself was set to fight a battle by a West Point
superior with old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns, the improved arms
which were at hand and which might easily have been used with good
effect remaining in the rear. His conclusion is that a wide-awake
American trained in the hustle of daily life, with a good basis of
common sense and some capacity for adaptation, could, with a few
month's experience, undertake to good advantage the direction of
soldiers, and that the West Point preceding 1861 had an influence
rather nugatory in bringing about success. It is perhaps sufficient
answer to arguments of this kind that while during our Civil War there
was a most relentless sifting of men for high positions, little regard
being paid to the education and antecedents of those submitted to it,
the men who finally emerged at the front were almost exclusively West
Pointers. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas, the Union champions
_par excellence_, were West Pointers. Lee, Stonewall Jackson,
the Johnstons, and Longstreet are no less conspicuous among the
Confederates. Civilians for the most part were not found in the high
places, or if they were so placed the results were unfortunate, as in
the cases of Butler, Banks, and McClernand. There were of course
good soldiers who came from civil life. Cox himself is a conspicuous
instance, and there were Terry, John A. Logan, and other good division
commanders. On the Southern side may be instanced N.B. Forrest and
J.B. Gordon; but these men rarely attained to more than secondary
positions, the highest places falling, as if by gravitation, into the
hands of West Pointers. An influence there was in the little academy
on the Hudson which somehow brought to pass a superior warlike
efficiency. The training at West Point, supplemented as it usually was
by campaigning on the plains, although duty was done only by men in
squads, and the hardships and perils were scarcely greater than those
encountered by the ordinary pioneer and railroad-builder, somehow
evoked the field-marshal quality and made it easier to grapple
with the tremendous problems with which the army was so suddenly
confronted.
A certain pathos attaches to the story of some of those civilian
soldiers. In my youthful days, I had often seen N.P. Banks, who had
risen from the humblest beginning into much political importance. No
large distinction can be claimed for him in any direction, and for
elevation of character he was certainly not marked; but he was a man
of respectable ability and he climbed creditably from factory-boy to
mechanic and thence (through no noisome paths) to Congress, to the
post of Governor, and to the Speakership at Washington.
He had military ambition and with the beginning of the war went
at once into the army, unfortunately for him, as major-general
and commander of a department. Could he have gone in as captain or
colonel, his fortune would probably have been different. But, sent
to command in the Shenandoah Valley, it was his fate to meet at the
outset the most formidable of adversaries, Stonewall Jackson. He
was sorely hoodwinked and humiliated, but so were several of his
successors. At Cedar Mountain, understanding that his orders were
peremptory, he threw his corps upon double their numbers and fought
with all the bravery in the world though with defective tactics.
Another corps should have been at hand, but it failed to arrive. There
was a moment when Banks, weak though he was, was near to victory, but
he failed in the end in an impossible task and was made scapegoat for
the blunders of others. He was sent to supersede Butler in Louisiana
with a force quite inadequate for the duty expected. It was here that
I came into contact with him. Interested friends had laid my case
before him, as one who might serve well in a higher position than that
of a private, and he good-naturedly sent word to me to report to
him at a certain hour in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hôtel at New
Orleans. The city was in the firm grasp of the Union, as our transport
had sailed up the evening before. The ships of Farragut, their decks
crowded with blue jackets held under their broad-sides a dense and
sullen multitude. A heavy salute reverberated from the river as the
new commander took his place, but conditions were precarious.
As I walked up the street in my soldier's dress, a handsome Southern
girl almost ran me off the sidewalk with a look in her face which, but
for fear of the calaboose, might have been backed up by words and acts
of insult, while the faces of the men were full of hate. I stood
at last in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hôtel and presently the
commander-in-chief, threading his way through a throng of officers,
was at my side. I was much dishevelled and still ill after a stormy
passage in a crowded ship, but the General was very courteous to the
private. He had heard of my enlistment and indicated that he would be
glad to utilise me, as he desired to utilise every man, for the best
welfare of the service. What did I desire? I told him I had no thought
but to do my duty as well as I could wherever I might be put. He
discussed the situation reasonably, then offered me a clerkship at
headquarters, where I might escape the chief perils of the campaign
and where perhaps my education would serve the public. For a moment I
hesitated and he passed on, leaving me to decide. My friends felt that
I had not the physical strength for work in the field; should I accept
the snug place back of the firing-line or risk it at the front? By the
next day, I had fully determined to stick to my regiment. I sought
the General again at headquarters. Colonel Irwin of his staff at
the moment was arranging around his shoulders the yellow sash of the
major-general for the formal ceremony of taking command, which
was close at hand. But the General had a kindly recognition of the
private, assented to my decision, and gave me a pass to the regiment,
which had already been hurried onward to the front. I laid my knapsack
down by the side of that of my young brother in the camp, which was
then at the front.
Banks was a kindly man who meant and did the best he could for the
humblest soldier in his army. His further military career I can only
briefly sketch. He planned two fierce and calamitous assaults upon
Port Hudson; errors no doubt, but Grant and Lee at the moment were
making just such errors. The Red River campaign was a disastrous
failure, but Banks had every handicap which a general could suffer:
an insufficient force, a demand from the Administration that he
should attend to a civil reordering when only fighting was in place,
subordinates insolent and disobedient. And finally nature herself took
arms against him, for the Red River fell when, by all precedents, it
should have risen. It was an enterprise which his judgment utterly
disapproved, the difficulties of which he faced with good resolution.
It ended his career, for though once at a later time he went to
Congress, he ever afterwards stood a discredited figure, dying, as I
have heard, poor and broken-hearted in obscurity. His State has tried
to render him a late justice by setting him up in bronze on Beacon
Hill. It was done through opposition and the statue is sneered at more
often than admired. He was an able man I believe and meant well, and
I for one find it pathetic that the lines of my old commander did not
fall more pleasantly.
Butler, on the other hand, I do not regard as a pathetic figure. On
the night of my arrival in New Orleans, strolling about the strange
city, I found myself at headquarters, and a Massachusetts boy standing
sentry on the porch in a spirit of comradeship invited me up. As I
ascended the steps Butler, who had been standing at the door, closed
it with a crash and retired within. Through a crevice in the blinds
he was plain to be seen seated at his desk in profound thought, his
bull-dog face in repose, his rude forcefulness very manifest. His rule
at New Orleans had come to an end and no doubt he was pondering it and
dreaming of what the future had in store for him. His burly frame was
relaxed, his bluff unshaken countenance with the queer sinister cast
of the eyes fully lighted up by the lamp on his table. I studied him
at leisure, his marvellous energy for a moment in repose. In those
days his name was much in the mouths of men, and whatever may be said
in his disfavour, it cannot be denied after fifty years that his rule
of New Orleans was a masterpiece of resolution, a riding rough-shod
over a great disaffected city which marked him as full of intrepidity
and executive force. In the field he was a worse failure than ever
Banks had been. In my idea he deserves in 1864 the characterisation
by Charles Francis Adams. He was the Grouchy who made futile Grant's
advance upon Richmond and he blundered at Fort Fisher, but he was a
pachyderm of the toughest--too thick-skinned to be troubled by
the scratches of criticism, always floundering to the front with
unquenched energy, sometimes a power for good and sometimes for evil.
It is hard to strike the balance and say whether for the most part
he helped or hindered, but our past would lack a strong element of
picturesqueness if old Ben Butler were eliminated.
There were pathetic figures among the West Pointers as well as among
the civilian generals. At St. Louis, in the seventies, I used to see
sometimes an unobtrusive man in citizen's dress, marked by no trait
which distinguished him from the ordinary, a man serious in his
bearing, who one might easily think had undergone some crushing blow.
This was Major-General John Pope. His son was in our university and
his sister, a most kind and gracious lady, was a near friend. Pope
seems destined to go down in our history merely as a braggart and an
incompetent. Probably no man of that time meant better or was more
abused by capricious fate. Cox, whose daughter married the son of Pope
and who therefore came to know him well in his later years, defends
him vigorously. In the early years of the war he showed himself bold
and active. The capture of Island Number Ten with its garrison was
rather a naval and engineering exploit than an achievement of the
army, but Pope seems to have done well what was required of him and
probably deserved his promotion to the command of a corps at Corinth
when an advance southward was meditated in the early summer of '62.
It was with deep unwillingness that he received the summons of the
Administration to command an army in Virginia, and only assumed the
place from the feeling that a soldier must stand where he is put.
Arrived at Washington, he found himself in an atmosphere hot with
wrath and mortification. The Peninsular campaign had failed and strong
spirits like Stanton and Ben Wade, Chairman of the Committee on the
Conduct of the War, were on fire through disappointment. The new
General, whose position until within a few months had been a humble
one, was brow-beaten and dominated by powerful personalities and
forced to stand for acts and words which were not really his own.
He declared, said Cox, that his bombastic and truculent orders were
practically dictated by others. The declaration that his headquarters
would be his saddle, which Lee so wittily turned, saying, "then
his headquarters would be where his hindquarters ought to be," Pope
declares he never made. When his environment had in this way aroused
prejudice against him, he was set to command an army whose higher
officers felt outraged at his sudden rise over their heads and whose
soldiers were discouraged by defeat. He was expected to oppose skilful
and victorious foes with instruments that bent and broke in the crisis
as he tried to wield them. Only supreme genius could have wrought
success in such a situation, and that Pope did not at all possess. He
was only a man of resolution, with no exceptional gifts, who desired
to do his best for his country. In the West he had proceeded usefully
and honourably, and it was the worst misfortune for him that he was
taken for the new place. I hope that history will deal kindly with
him and that, since he was a worthy and strenuous patriot, he will not
live merely as an object of execration and ridicule.
In August, 1863, my too brief term of service having expired, I came
home to the Connecticut Valley and resumed my pulpit, which I had left
for a vacation and powder-smoke. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had taken
place, and we at the North too fondly hoped that all was over and that
we might confidently settle down to peace. When going west to Buffalo
for a visit I was delayed a few hours at Syracuse and took the
occasion to call on an intimate friend of my father and myself, the
Rev. Samuel J. May. Mr. May, a bright and beautiful spirit, was by
nature a strong peace man, but, fired by the woes of the slave, he
had become an extreme abolitionist and was ready to fight for his
principles. Entering Mr. May's quiet study I found him in intimate
talk with a man of unassuming demeanour, in citizen's dress, marked by
no distinction of face or figure. He might have been a delegate to
a peace convention, or a country minister from way-back calling on a
professional brother. What was my astonishment when Mr. May introduced
him as Major-General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the Twelfth Corps,
who, taking a short furlough after Gettysburg, was at home for the
moment and had dropped in for a friendly call. Slocum had been in the
thick of most of the bitter Virginia battles from the first, and all
the world knew that at Gettysburg, by beating back the thrust of
the Stonewall division toward the Baltimore pike, he had secured the
threatened rear of the army of the Potomac and averted defeat. This
had taken place in the preceding month, and I naturally marvelled that
the unpretending, simple man could be that victorious champion,
but for the time being we were there plain citizens, and, American
fashion, the Major-General and the Corporal shook hands and
fraternised on equal terms. It probably helped me with Slocum that I
too had been in danger. About the time he was defending Culp's Hill, I
had been in the ditch at the foot of the Port Hudson rampart.
While reticent as to his part at Gettysburg, he spoke with feeling of
what his corps had been through, and knowing that both Mr. May and
I were Massachusetts men took an evident pleasure in commending the
regiments from that State. Of the 2d Massachusetts he spoke with
high appreciation; it was an admirable body of men and thoroughly
disciplined. It was always ready; its losses were fearful and he felt
that he ought to spare it if he could, but a crisis always came when
only the best would answer, and again and again the 2d Massachusetts
was thrown in. Particularly at Gettysburg its services had been great
and its sacrifice costly. He spoke feelingly of the young officers who
had been slain and also of humbler men. Since that time I have stood
by the simple stone at the "bloody swale at the foot of Culp's Hill,"
which marked the position held that day by the 2d Massachusetts. It
takes no trained eye to see that it was a point of especial difficulty
and importance. Some of the men of that regiment who fell that day
were my own college comrades. I was glad to know from his lips that
the commander thought their work heroic.
One naturally brackets the name of Slocum with that of Howard,
secondary figures of course in the great Civil War drama and yet
both steadfast and worthy soldiers. They rose together into places of
responsibility during the Peninsular campaign, became commanders of
corps about the same time, served side by side at Gettysburg, went
together to the West, and finally, one at the head of Sherman's right
wing and the other at the head of the left, made the march to the sea
and through the Carolinas. Neither perhaps was a brilliant soldier.
So far as the records show, Slocum always did his work well, was
increasingly trusted to the last, and nowhere made a grave mistake. In
Howard's case, the rout at Chancellorsville will always detract from
his fame; he was, however, on that day new in his place, and the
infatuation of Hooker by an evil contagion passed down to his
lieutenants. But he too steadily improved, refusing resolutely to be
discouraged by his mistakes and always doing better next time. Perhaps
no one act during the war was more important than the occupation of
Cemetery Hill on the morning of July 1, 1863, by a Federal division.
I think that the credit of that act cannot be denied to Howard. In
a later time he passed under the control of Sherman in the West, a
shrewd and relentless judge of men, and Sherman trusted him to the
utmost. To a group of officers in their cups who were chaffing Howard
for being Puritanical, Sherman curtly said: "Let Howard alone; I want
one general who doesn't drink."
I saw General Howard at Gettysburg on the fortieth anniversary of
the battle. We were under the same roof, and during the evening I sat
close to him in the common room and heard him talk,--a strenuous old
man, his empty sleeve recalling tragically the combats through which
he had passed. Close by under the stars could still be traced the
lines occupied by Steinwehr's division, the troops which with such
momentous results Howard had posted on Cemetery Hill. I might easily
have talked with him, for he was affable to old and young, but I
preferred to study the good veteran from a distance and let others
draw out his story while I listened.
In the winter of 1861 I went to Port Royal, through the good offices
of my friend Rufus Saxton, then a captain and quartermaster of the
expedition under which Dupont had taken possession of the Sea Islands
in South Carolina. The capture of Port Royal had taken place a few
weeks before and the army was encamped on the conquered territory.
Saxton was an interesting figure, who in an unusual way showed during
the war a fine spirit of self-sacrifice. At the outbreak, a high
position in the field was within his grasp; he was second in command
to Lyon in St. Louis, and being intimate with McClellan might have
held a position of responsibility in the field. He was indeed made a
general. Once in 1862 he was in command of a considerable force,
and when Banks was driven out of the Shenandoah Valley by Stonewall
Jackson he withstood at Harper's Ferry the rush of the Confederates
into Maryland. But at the solicitation of Lincoln and Stanton he gave
up service in the field, for which he was well fitted and which he
earnestly desired, to act as Military Governor of the Sea Islands,
where his work was to receive and care for the thousands of negroes
who by the flight of their masters in that region had been left
to themselves. Here he remained throughout the war, while his old
comrades were winning fame at the head of divisions and corps, a
patient, humane teacher and administrator among the nation's wards.
He was content to live through the stirring time inconspicuous, but he
won the respect of all kindly hearts at the North and deep gratitude
from the helpless blacks whom he so long and humanely befriended.
I came in contact during that visit with a number of soldiers soon
to be famous. In the boat which carried me from the transport to the
shore I had as a fellow-passenger James H. Wilson, then a lieutenant
but soon to be a famous cavalry commander. He was a restless athletic
young man, who when I met him was on fire with wrath over the giving
up of Mason and Slidell, the news of which had come to the post by our
steamer. I tried to argue with him, that we had enough on our hands
with the South without rushing into war with England besides, but he
was impetuously confident that we could take care of all foes outside
and in, and maintained that the giving up of the envoys was a burning
shame. His vigour and confidence were excessive, I thought, but they
carried him far in a time soon to come.
I talked with General Thomas W. Sherman, the commander of the
expedition, in his tent, but was more interested in a dispute which
presently sprang up between the General and a companion of mine,
Jonathan Saxton, father of Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist of the most
perfervid type, a good talker and quite unabashed, plain farmer though
he was, by a pair of epaulettes.
Among our regular officers there were few abolitionists. Rufus Saxton
told me that Lyon was the only one of any distinction who could be so
classed among the men he knew. T.W. Sherman was like his fellows and
listened impatiently to what he felt was fanaticism gone mad, but the
fluent old farmer drove home his radicalism undauntedly. T.W. Sherman
before the war had been a well-known figure as commander of Sherman's
flying artillery, which was perhaps the most famous organisation of
the regular army, but his name scarcely appears in the history of the
Civil War, more perhaps from lack of good fortune than of merit. He
was crippled with wounds in the first important battle in which he
was concerned. The two brigadiers at Port Royal, Horatio G. Wright and
Isaac I. Stevens, both became soldiers of note. Wright was a handsome
fellow in his best years, whom I recall stroking his chin with an
amused quizzical expression while Jonathan Saxton poured out his
Garrisonism. His brigade lay well to the south and his headquarters
were at the old Tybee lighthouse which marked the entrance to the
harbour of Savannah. I climbed with him up the sand hill, from the top
of which we looked down upon Fort Pulaski then in Confederate hands
and within short range. We peered cautiously over the summit, for
shells frequently came from the fort. Wright held in his hand a
fragment of one which had just before exploded. "How well it took the
groove!" he said, pointing out to me the signs on the iron that the
rifled cannon from which it had come had given the missile in the
discharge the proper twist. Wright's after-career is part of the
war's history, always strenuous and constantly rising. The fame
which attaches to the Sixth Corps is largely due to the leadership of
Wright. If he fell short at Cedar Creek in 1864 it was a lapse which
may be pardoned in the circumstances. Sheridan retrieved the day
and magnanimously palliated the misfortune of Wright. "It might have
happened to me or to any man." The good soldier deserves the fine
monument which stands by his grave in the foreground at Arlington.
I had at Port Royal a long and friendly talk with Isaac I. Stevens. He
was already a man of note. After achieving the highest honours at West
Point he had gone to the West, and in the great unexplored Pacific
Northwest had conquered, built, and systematised until a fair
foundation was laid for the fine civilisation which now sixty years
later has been reared upon it. He was modest in his bearing, with
well-knit and sinewy frame, and possessed at the same time refined
manners and a taste for the higher things of life. Before the year had
passed, his life went out in the second battle of Bull Run. In the
end of that terrible campaign, he essayed with Phil Kearny to stem at
Chantilly the rush of Stonewall Jackson upon Washington. The attempt
was successful, but Stevens died waving the colours at the head of
his men. It is said that Lincoln had marked him for the command of the
Army of the Potomac. He had made good in all previous positions, and
perhaps would have made good in the chief place, but here I stumble
once more upon a might-have-been and am silent.
Dear ghosts of old-time friends swarm in my thought as I dream of
those days. The white marbles in Memorial Chapel solemnly bear the
names of Harvard's Civil War soldiers and tell how they died. There
was one of whom I might say much, an elder companion, a wise and
pleasant spirit who did something toward my shaping for life. A
cannon-ball at Cold Harbor was the end for him. There was another,
a brilliant, handsome young Irishman, bred a Catholic, who under the
influence of Moncure D. Conway had come out as a Unitarian and left
his Washington home for a radical environment in the North. He was
brilliant and witty with small capacity or taste for persistent
plodding, but forever hitting effectively on the spur of the moment.
He was as chivalrous as a palladin and went to his early grave
light-hearted, as part of the day's work which must not be shirked. I
have his image vividly as he laughed and joked in our last interview.
"Dress-parade at six o'clock; come over and see the dress-paradoes!"
He fell wounded at Chancellorsville, and while being carried off the
field was struck a second time as he lay on the stretcher, and so he
passed.
There were fine fellows, too, in those days who stood on the other
side: McKim, President of the Hasty Pudding Club, who fell in
Virginia; W.H.F. Lee, who was in the Law School and whom I recall as a
stalwart athlete rowing on the Charles. It helped me much a few years
ago when I visited many Southern battle-fields that I could tell old
Confederates "Rooney" Lee and I had in our youth been college mates.
My classmate J.B. Clark of Mississippi was a graceful magnetic fellow
who had small basis of scholarship, perhaps, but a marked power for
effective utterance. He fascinated us by his warm Southern fluency,
and we gave him at last the highest distinction we could confer, the
class oration. He left us then and we did not see him for fifty years.
He enlisted in the 21st Mississippi and passed through the roughest
hardships and perils. We felt afterwards that he held coldly aloof
from us through long years. At our jubilee, however, he came back
wrinkled and white-haired, but quite recognisable as the fascinating
boy of fifty years before. He had a long and good record behind him as
an officer of the University of Texas, and we gave him reason to think
that we loved him still. The most cordial meetings I have ever known
have been those between men who had fought each other bitterly, each
with an honest conviction that he was in the right, but who at last
have come out on common ground.
Among the Harvard soldiers three stand out in my thought as especially
interesting, William Francis Bartlett, Charles Russell Lowell, and
Francis Channing Barlow. Bartlett was younger than I, entering service
when scarcely beyond boyhood, losing a leg at Ball's Bluff, and when
only twenty-three Colonel of the 49th Massachusetts. I remember well
a beautiful night, the moon at the full, and the hospital on the
river bank just below Port Hudson where hundreds of wounded men were
arriving from a disastrous battle-field close at hand.
Bartlett had ridden into battle on horseback, his one leg making it
impossible for him to go on foot, and he was a conspicuous mark for
the sharpshooters. A ball had passed through his remaining foot, and
still another through his arm, causing painful wounds to which he was
forced to yield. He lay stretched out, a tall, slender figure with a
clear-cut patrician face, very pale and still but with every sign
of suffering stoically repressed. He was conscious as I stood for
a moment at his side. It was not a time to speak even a word, but
I hoped he might feel through some occult influence that a Harvard
brother was there at hand, full of sympathy for him. He afterwards
recovered in part, and, with unconquerable will, though he was only
a fragment of a man, went in again and was still again stricken. He
survived it all, and to me it was perhaps the most thrilling incident
of the Harvard commemoration of 1865 to see Bartlett, too crippled to
walk without their support, helped to a place of honour on the stage
by reverent friends.
Charles Russell Lowell was in the class preceding mine; his father had
been my father's classmate, and had done me many a favour; his mother
was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women
of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the
sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar
of his class, of whom the utmost was expected. How strange that
fate should have made them soldiers! They both perished on the
battle-field. As I remember Charlie Lowell, the boy was fitly the
father of the man. We were playing football one day on the Delta, the
old-fashioned game of those days, at which modern athletes smile, but
which we old fellows think was a good tough game for all that. I had
secured the ball, and thinking I had time, placed it rather leisurely,
promising myself an effective kick. A slight figure bounded with
lightning rush from the opposing line, and from under my very foot
drove the ball far behind me to a point which secured victory.
How little I knew that I had just witnessed a small exhibition of the
quickness and prompt decision which no long time after on critical
battle-fields were to be put to splendid use. He proved to be a nearly
perfect soldier; Sheridan said of him, that he knew of no virtue that
could be added to Lowell. To us he seems one of the manliest of men,
thoughtful for others, even for dumb beasts. In Edward Emerson's
charming life of him, nothing, perhaps, is sweeter than his affection
for his horses, of which it was said that thirteen were killed under
him before he came to death himself. He studied their characters as
if they had been human beings, and dwells in his letters on the
particular lovable traits each one showed--these mute companions who
stood so closely by him in life and death.
When our class first assembled in 1851 there was a slight boy
of seventeen in the company, Francis Channing Barlow. He was
inconspicuous through face or figure, but it early became clear that
he was to be our first scholar, and a wayward deportment with an
odd sardonic wit soon made him an object of interest. Barlow came
admirably fitted, and this good preparation, standing back of great
quickness and power of mind, made it easy for him almost without study
to take a leading place. As a boy he was well grounded, outside of his
special accomplishments, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I remember
his telling me that his mother read Plutarch to him when he was a
child, and that and many another good book he had thoroughly stored
away. Such accomplishments were an exasperation to us poor fellows who
had come in from the remote outskirts and found we must compete for
honours with men so well equipped. We perhaps magnified the gifts
and acquirements of the fellows who had been more favourably placed.
Barlow seemed like a paragon of scholarship, and the nonchalance with
which he always won in the classrooms was a constant marvel. He had a
queer way of turning serious things into fun. With a freshman
desire for self-improvement, a thing apt to evaporate in the college
atmosphere, we had formed a society for grave writing and debate and
hired for our meetings the lodge-room of the "Glorious Apollers" or
some such organisation. At an early meeting of the society, while
we were solemnly struggling through a dignified programme, Barlow
suddenly appeared from a side-door rigged out most fantastically in
plumes and draperies. He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the
order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had
come to take part. He danced and paraded before the conclave and had
no difficulty in turning the session into a wild revel of extravagant
guffaws and antics, and after that time the occasions were many when
Barlow gave a comic turn to things serious. It was said that Barlow,
going back and forth on the train between Concord and Boston as he
did at one time, got hold of an impressionable brake-man, and by
exhortation brought about in him a change of heart, after the most
approved evangelical manner, counterfeiting perfectly the methods of
a revivalist, which he did for the fun of the thing. The story, of
course, was an invention, but quite in character.
He was no respecter of conventions and sometimes trod ruthlessly upon
proprieties. "What will Barlow do next?" was always the question. In
the class-room he was never rattled in any emergency, his really sound
scholarship was always perfectly in hand and in a strait no one could
bluff it with such _sang-froid_ and audacity. He kept his place
at the head of the class to the very end, but there Robert Treat
Paine came out precisely his equal. Among the many thousand marks
accumulating through four years the total for both men was exactly
alike--a thing which I believe has never happened before or since.
Before the Arsenal in Cambridge stood an innocent old cannon that
had not been fired since the War of 1812, perhaps not since the
Revolution. The grass and flowers grew about its silent muzzle, and
lambs might have fed there as in the pretty picture of Landseer.
Any thought that the old cannon could go off had long ceased to be
entertained. One quiet night a tremendous explosion took place; the
cannon had waked up from its long sleep, arousing the babies over a
wide region and many a pane of glass was shivered. What had got into
the old cannon that night was long a mystery. Many years after Barlow
was discovered at the bottom of it--it was the first shot he ever
fired.
Dr. James Walker, the college president, said to a friend of mine at
the beginning of the war, speculating on the probable futures of the
boys who had been under his care, "There's Barlow, now he'll go in
and come out at the top." Barlow had been a sad puzzle to the faculty,
good men, often perplexed to know what to do with him or what would
become of him. Dr. Walker's astuteness divined well the outcome. As
I review those early years I can see now that Barlow then gave plain
signs of the qualities which he was later to display. I remember
sleeping with him once in a room in the top story of Stoughton in
our sophomore year and he talked for a great part of the night
about Napoleon. The Corsican was the hero who beyond all others had
fascinated him, whose career he would especially love to emulate.
We were a pair of boys in a peaceful college, living in a time which
apparently would afford no opportunity for a soldier's career. I have
often thought of that talk. Barlow was really not unlike the youthful
Napoleon, in frame he was slender and delicate, his complexion verged
toward the olive, his face was always beardless. I never saw him
thrown off his poise in any emergency. The straits of course are not
great in which a college boy is placed, but such as they were, Barlow
was always cool, with his mind working at its best in the midst of
them. He was never abashed, but had a resource and an apt one in
every emergency. He was absolutely intrepid before the thrusts of
our sharpest examiners and as I have said could bluff it boldly and
dexterously where his knowledge failed; then the odd cynicism with
which he turned down great pretentions and sometimes matters of
serious import, had a Napoleonic cast. In '61 he enlisted as a private
but rose swiftly through the grades to the command of a regiment. At
Antietam he had part of a brigade and coralled in a meteoric way on
Longstreet's front line some hundreds of prisoners. His losses were
great but he was in the thick of it himself, his poise unruffled
until he was borne desperately wounded from the field. The surgeon who
attended him told me, if I remember right, that a ball passed entirely
through his body carrying with it portions of his clothing, if such
a thing were possible; but, with his usual nonchalance he laughed at
wounds and while still weak and emaciated went back to his place
again in the following spring at the head of a brigade. He underwent
Chancellorsville, and for the Union cause it was a great misfortune
that his fine brigade was taken from its place on Hooker's right
before Stonewall Jackson made his charge. Had Barlow been there
he might have done something to stay the disaster. At Gettysburg,
however, he was in the front in command of a division. An old soldier,
a lieutenant that day under Barlow, told me that he had charge of the
ambulances of the division and on the march near Emmitsburg Barlow put
into the lieutenant's especial charge the ambulance of his wife who,
with a premonition of calamity, insisted on being near at hand to
help. When the battle joined and Gordon swept overwhelmingly upon
Barlow's division, the lieutenant had difficulty in restraining Mrs.
Barlow from rushing at once upon the field among the fighting men. He
held her back almost by force but she remained close at hand.
Barlow was again desperately wounded, so hurt that his death seemed
inevitable, and when the faithful wife, at last making her way,
presented herself even in the rebel lines with a petition for her
husband, supposed to be dying, Gordon chivalrously gave him up. It
was magnanimous, but for him ill-timed. Again Barlow laughed at his
wounds. In May, 1864, he was in the field at the head of the first
division of Hancock's corps and on the 12th of May performed the
memorable exploit, breaking fairly the centre of Lee's army and
bringing it nearer to defeat than it ever came until the catastrophe
at Appomattox. He captured the Spottsylvania salient together with the
best division of the army of northern Virginia, Stonewall Jackson's
old command, two generals, thirty colours, cannon, and small arms to
correspond. John Noyes, a soldier of a class after us, told me that in
the salient he and Barlow worked like privates in the confusion of the
capture, turning with their own hands against the enemy a cannon that
had just been taken. Barlow was as cool as when he fired off the old
cannon in Cambridge ten years before. This stroke proved futile, but
from no shortcoming of Barlow's. A few weeks later at Cold Harbor
he effected a lodgment within the Confederate works when all others
failed. That too proved futile, but his reputation was confirmed
as one of the most brilliant of division commanders. There is a
photograph in existence portraying Hancock and his division generals
as they appeared during that terrible campaign. It was taken in the
woods in the utmost stress of service. Barlow stands in the group just
as he looked in college, the face thin and beardless, almost that of
a boy, and marked with the nonchalance which always characterised
him. There are no military trappings, a rough checked shirt, trousers,
slouching from the waist to campaign boots, hang loosely about the
attenuated limbs. Soon after that he was carried from the field, not
wounded, but in utter exhaustion after exposures which no power of
will could surmount. A few months' respite and he was at his post
again, intercepting by a swift march Lee's retreating column, almost
the last warlike act of the Army of the Potomac before Appomattox.
In this "Last Leaf" I do not deal with "might-have-beens." I only
remember, but we old classmates of Barlow have a feeling that had
the war continued, if only the bullets to which he was always so
hospitable had spared him, he would have gone on to the command of
a corps, and perhaps even to greater distinctions. The photograph
of Barlow, published after his death in the _Harvard Graduates'
Magazine_, presents him as he was soon after the war was over. He
had recovered from the hardships, the face is fairly well rounded
but still rather that of a beardless, laughing boy than of a man. A
stranger studying the face would hear with incredulity the story of
the responsibilities and dangers which that face had confronted. He
laughed it all off lightly, and that was his way when occasionally in
his later years he came to our meetings.
I recall a reunion in 1865, ten years after our graduation. We sat in
full numbers about a sumptuous banquet at the Parker House in
Boston, and naturally in that year the returned soldiers were in the
foreground. In our class were two major-generals, four colonels, a
distinguished surgeon, and many more of lower rank. Barlow was the
central figure. Theodore Lyman, who presided, introduced him with a
glowing tribute, recounting his achievements, a long list from
the time he had entered as a private to his culmination as a full
Major-General. He called at last for nine cheers for the man who had
captured the Spottsylvania salient, and we gave them with a roar that
shook the building. Barlow was the only man in the room who showed not
the slightest emotion. He stood impassive, his face wearing his queer
smile. Other men might have been abashed at the tumultuous warmth of
such a reception from his old mates; a natural utterance at such a
time would have been an expression of joy that the war was over and
that the country had been saved, coupled with modest satisfaction
that he had borne some part in the great vindication, but that was
not Barlow's way. He laughed it off lightly, as if it had been a huge
joke. My classmate, the late Joseph Willard of Boston, told me of a
reunion of the class at a time much later. The men were discussing
the stained-glass window which it had been decided should be put in
Memorial Hall. Since the class had a distinguished military record it
was felt that there should be martial suggestion in the window and the
question was what classic warrior should be portrayed. The face, it
was thought, should have the lineaments of our most famous soldier.
Barlow, who was present, pooh-poohed the whole idea, especially the
suggestion that his face should appear, but someone present having
suggested Alcibiades, probably not seriously as a proper type, that
seemed to strike Barlow's sense of humour. That reckless classic
scapegrace to his cynical fancy perhaps might pass, he might be
Alcibiades, but who should be the dog? Alcibiades had a dog whose
misfortune in losing his tail has been transmitted through centuries
by the pen of Plutarch. "Who will be the dog?" said Barlow and called
upon someone to furnish a face for the hero's canine companion. The
scheme for the window came near to going to wreck amid the outbursts
of laughter. It was carried through later, however, but Alcibiades and
the dog do not appear, although Barlow does. No other Harvard soldier
reached Barlow's eminence, and probably in the whole Army of the
Potomac there were few abler champions. He was a strange, gifted,
most picturesque personality, no doubt a better man under his cynical
exterior than he would ever suffer it to be thought. His service was
great, and the memory of him is an interesting and precious possession
to those who knew him in boyhood and were in touch with him to the
end.