I am fully aware while I go, I should mention, of all that flows from
the principle governing, by my measure, these recoveries and
reflections--even to the effect, hoped for at least, of stringing their
apparently dispersed and disordered parts upon a fine silver thread;
none other than the principle of response to a long-sought occasion, now
gratefully recognised, for making trial of the recording and figuring
act on behalf of some case of the imaginative faculty under cultivation.
The personal history, as it were, of an imagination, a lively one of
course, in a given and favourable case, had always struck me as a task
that a teller of tales might rejoice in, his advance through it
conceivably causing at every step some rich precipitation--unless it be
rather that the play of strong imaginative passion, passion strong
enough to _be_, for its subject or victim, the very interest of life,
constitutes in itself an endless crisis. Fed by every contact and every
apprehension, and feeding in turn every motion and every act, wouldn't
the light in which it might so cause the whole scene of life to unroll
inevitably become as fine a thing as possible to represent? The idea of
some pretext for such an attempt had again and again, naturally, haunted
me; the man of imagination, and of an "awfully good" one, showed, as the
creature of that force or the sport of that fate or the wielder of that
arm, for the hero of a hundred possible fields--if one could but first
"catch" him, after the fashion of the hare in the famous receipt. Who
and what might he prove, when caught, in respect to _other_ signs and
conditions? He might take, it would seem, some finding and launching,
let alone much handling--which itself, however, would be exactly part of
the pleasure. Meanwhile, it no less appeared, there were other subjects
to go on with, and even if one had to wait for him he would still
perhaps come. It happened for me that he _was_ belatedly to come, but
that he was to turn up then in a shape almost too familiar at first for
recognition, the shape of one of those residual substitutes that engage
doubting eyes the day after the fair. He had been with me all the while,
and only too obscurely and intimately--I had not found him in the market
as an exhibited or _offered_ value. I had in a word to draw him forth
from within rather than meet him in the world before me, the more
convenient sphere of the objective, and to make him objective, in short,
had to turn nothing less than myself inside out. What was _I_ thus,
within and essentially, what had I ever been and could I ever be but a
man of imagination at the active pitch?--so that if it was a question of
treating _some_ happy case, any that would give me what, artistically
speaking, I wanted, here on the very spot was one at hand in default of
a better. It wasn't what I should have preferred, yet it was after all
the example I knew best and should feel most at home with--granting
always that objectivity, the prize to be won, shouldn't just be
frightened away by the odd terms of the affair. It is of course for my
reader to say whether or no what I have done _has_ meant defeat; yet
even if this should be his judgment I fall back on the interest, at the
worst, of certain sorts of failure. I shall have brought up from the
deep many things probably not to have been arrived at for the benefit of
these pages without my particular attempt. Sundry of such I seem still
to recognise, and not least just now those involved in that visionary
"assistance" at the drama of the War, from however far off, which had
become a habit for us without ceasing to be a strain. I am sure I
thought more things under that head, with the fine visionary ache, than
I thought in all other connections together; for the simple reason that
one had to _ask_ leave--of one's own spirit--for these last
intermissions, whereas one but took it, with both hands free, for one's
sense of the bigger cause. There was not in that the least complication
of consciousness. I have sufficiently noted how my apprehension of the
bigger cause was at the same time, and this all through, at once
quickened and kept low; to the point that positively my whole
acquaintance of the personal sort even with such a matter as my brother
Wilky's enrolment in the 44th Massachusetts was to reduce itself to but
a single visit to him in camp.
I recall an afternoon at Readville, near Boston, and the fashion in
which his state of juniority gave way, for me, on the spot, to
immensities of superior difference, immensities that were at the same
time intensities, varieties, supremacies, of the enviable in the
all-difficult and the delightful in the impossible: such a fairy-tale
seemed it, and withal such a flat revolution, that this soft companion
of my childhood should have such romantic chances and should have
mastered, by the mere aid of his native gaiety and sociability, such
mysteries, such engines, such arts. To become first a happy soldier and
then an easy officer was in particular for G. W. J. an exercise of
sociability--and that above all was my extract of the Readville scene,
which most came home to me as a picture, an interplay of bright breezy
air and high shanty-covered levels with blue horizons, and laughing,
welcoming, sunburnt young men, who seemed mainly to bristle, through
their welcome, with Boston genealogies, and who had all alike turned
handsome, only less handsome than their tawny-bearded Colonel, under I
couldn't have said what common grace of clear blue toggery imperfectly
and hitchingly donned in the midst of the camp labours that I gaped at
(by the blessing of heaven I could in default of other adventures still
gape) as at shining revels. I couldn't "do things," I couldn't
indefinitely hang about, though on occasion I did so, as it comes back
to me, verily to desperation; which had to be my dim explanation--dim as
to my ever insisting on it--of so rare a snatch at opportunity for
gapings the liveliest, or in better terms admirations the crudest, that
I could have presumed to encumber the scene with. Scarce credible to me
now, even under recall of my frustrations, that I was able in all this
stretch of time to respond but to a single other summons to admire at
any cost, which I think must have come again from Readville, and the
occasion of which, that of my brother's assumed adjutancy of the so
dramatically, so much more radically recruited 54th involved a view
superficially less harmonious. The whole situation was more wound up and
girded then, the formation of negro regiments affected us as a
tremendous War measure, and I have glanced in another place at the
consequence of it that was at the end of a few months most pointedly to
touch ourselves. That second aspect of the weeks of preparation before
the departure of the regiment can not at all have suggested a frolic,
though at the time I don't remember it as grim, and can only gather
that, as the other impression had been of something quite luminous and
beautiful, so this was vaguely sinister and sad--perhaps simply through
the fact that, though our sympathies, our own as a family's, were, in
the current phrase, all enlisted on behalf of the race that had sat in
bondage, it was impossible for the mustered presence of more specimens
of it, and of stranger, than I had ever seen together, not to make the
young men who were about to lead them appear sacrificed to the general
tragic need in a degree beyond that of their more orthodox appearances.
The air of sacrifice was, however, so to brighten as to confound itself
with that of splendid privilege on the day (May 28th, '63) of the march
of the 54th out of Boston, its fairest of young commanders at its head,
to great reverberations of music, of fluttering banners, launched
benedictions and every public sound; only from that scene, when it took
place, I had to be helplessly absent--just as I see myself in a like
dismal manner deprived of any nearness of view of my still younger
brother's military metamorphosis and contemporary initiation. I vainly
question memory for some such picture of _him_, at this stage of his
adventure, as would have been certain to hang itself, for reasons of
wonder and envy again, in my innermost cabinet. Our differently
compacted and more variously endowed Bob, who had strained much at every
tether, was so eager and ardent that it made for him a positive
authority; but what most recurs to me of his start in the 45th, or of my
baffled vision of it, is the marvel of our not having all just wept,
more than anything else, either for his being so absurdly young or his
being so absurdly strenuous--we might have had our choice of pretexts
and protests. It seemed so short a time since he had been l'ingenieux
petit Robertson of the domestic schoolroom, pairing with our small
sister as I paired with Wilky. We didn't in the least weep, however--we
smiled as over the interest of childhood at its highest bloom, and that
my parents, with their consistent tenderness, should have found their
surrender of their latest born so workable is doubtless a proof that we
were all lifted together as on a wave that might bear us where it would.
Our ingenious Robertson was but seventeen years old, but I suspect his
ingenuity of having, in so good a cause, anticipated his next birthday
by a few months. The 45th was a nine-months regiment, but he got
himself passed out of it, in advance of its discharge, to a lieutenancy
in the 55th U.S.C.T., Colonel A. P. Hallowell (transferred from
lieutenant-colonelcy of the 54th) commanding; though not before he had
been involved in the siege of Charleston, whence the visionary, the
quite Edgar Poeish look, for my entertainment, of the camp-covered
"Folly Island" of his letters. While his regiment was engaged in
Seymour's raid on Florida he suffered a serious sunstroke, with such
consequences that he was recommended for discharge; of which he declined
to avail himself, obtaining instead a position on General Ames's staff
and enjoying thus for six months the relief of being mounted. But he
returned to his regiment in front of Charleston (after service with the
Tenth Army Corps, part of the Army of the James, before Petersburg and
Richmond); and though I have too scant an echo of his letters from that
scene one of the passages that I do recover is of the happiest. "It was
when the line wavered and I saw Gen'l Hartwell's horse on my right rear
up with a shell exploding under him that I rammed my spurs into my own
beast, who, maddened with pain, carried me on through the line, throwing
men down, and over the Rebel works some distance ahead of our troops."
For this action he was breveted captain; and the 55th, later on, was
the first body of troops to enter Charleston and march through its
streets--which term of his experience, as it unfolded, presents him to
my memory as again on staff duty; with Brigadier-Generals Potter, Rufus
Hatch and his old superior and, at my present writing, gallant and vivid
survivor, Alfred Hartwell, who had been his captain and his
lieut.-colonel in the 45th and the 55th respectively.[10]
I can at all events speak perfectly of my own sense of the uplifting
wave just alluded to during the couple of years that the "boys'" letters
from the field came in to us--with the one abatement of glamour for them
the fact that so much of their substance was in the whole air of life
and their young reports of sharp experience but a minor pipe in the huge
mixed concert always in our ears. Faded and touching pages, these
letters are in some abundance before me now, breathing confidence and
extraordinary cheer--though surviving principally but in Wilky's
admirable hand, of all those I knew at that time the most humiliating
to a feebler yet elder fist; and with their liveliest present action to
recompose for me not by any means so much the scenes and circumstances,
the passages of history concerned, as to make me know again and
reinhabit the places, the hours, the stilled or stirred conditions
through which I took them in. These conditions seem indeed mostly to
have settled for me into the single sense of what I missed, compared to
what the authors of our bulletins gained, in wondrous opportunity of
vision, that is _appreciation of the thing seen_--there being clearly
such a lot of this, and all of it, by my conviction, portentous and
prodigious. The key to which assurance was that I longed to live by my
eyes, in the midst of such far-spreading chances, in greater measure
than I then had help to, and that the measure in which _they_ had it
gloriously overflowed. This capacity in them to deal with such an
affluence of life stood out from every line, and images sprung up about
them at every turn of the story. The story, the general one, of the
great surge of action on which they were so early carried, was to take
still other turns during the years I now speak of, some of these not of
the happiest; but with the same relation to it on my own part too
depressingly prolonged--that of seeing, sharing, envying, applauding,
pitying, all from too far-off, and with the queer sense that, whether or
no they would prove to have had the time of their lives, it seemed that
the only time I should have had would stand or fall by theirs. This was
to be yet more deplorably the case later on--I like to give a twitch to
the curtain of a future reduced to the humility of a past: when, the War
being over and we confronted with all the personal questions it had
showily muffled up only to make them step forth with their sharper
angles well upon us, our father, easily beguiled, acquired by purchase
and for the benefit of his younger sons divers cottonlands in Florida;
which scene of blighted hopes it perhaps was that cast upon me, at its
defiant distance, the most provoking spell. There was provocation, at
those subsequent seasons, in the very place-name of Serenola, beautiful
to ear and eye; unforgettable were to remain the times, while the vain
experiment dragged on for our anxiety and curiosity, and finally to our
great discomfiture, when my still ingenuous young brothers, occupied in
raising and selling crops that refused alike, it seemed, to come and to
go, wafted northward their fluctuating faith, their constant hospitality
and above all, for one of the number at home, their large unconscious
evocations. The mere borrowed, and so brokenly borrowed, impression of
southern fields basking in a light we didn't know, of scented
sub-tropic nights, of a situation suffused with economic and social
drama of the strangest and sharpest, worked in me, I dare say most
deceptively, as a sign of material wasted, my material not being in the
least the crops unproduced or unsold, but the precious store of images
ungathered. However, the vicarious sensation had, as I say, been intense
enough, from point to point, before that; a series of Wilky's letters of
the autumn of '62 and the following winter during operations in North
Carolina intended apparently to clear an approach to Charleston overflow
with the vivacity of his interest in whatever befell, and still more in
whatever promised, and reflect, in this freshness of young assurances
and young delusions, the general public fatuity. The thread of interest
for me here would certainly be much more in an exhibition of some such
artless notes of the period, with their faded marks upon them, than in
that of the spirit of my own poor perusal of them--were it not that
those things shrink after years to the common measure when not
testifying to some rarity of experience and expression. All experience
in the field struck me indeed as then rare, and I wondered at both my
brothers' military mastery of statement, through which played, on the
part of the elder, a whimsicality of "turn," an oddity of verbal
collocation, that we had ever cherished, in the family circle, as the
sign of his address. "The next fight we have, I expect," he writes from
Newberne, N. C., on New Year's Day '63, "will be a pretty big one, but I
am confident that under Foster and our gunboats we will rid the State of
these miserable wretches whom the Divine Providence has created in its
wisdom to make men wish----! Send on then, open yourselves a recruiting
establishment if necessary--all we want is numbers! _They_ are the
greatest help to the individual soldier on the battle-field. If he feels
he has 30,000 men behind him pushing on steadily to back him he is in
much more fighting trim than when away in the rear with 10,000 ahead of
him fighting like madmen. It seems that Halleck told Foster when F. was
in Washington that he scarcely slept for a week after learning that we
were near Goldsboro', having heard previously that a reinforcement of
40,000 Rebels were coming down there to whip us. Long live Foster!"
"It was so cold this morning," he writes at another and earlier date,
"that Divine service was held in our barracks instead of out-of-doors,
as it generally is, and it was the most impressive that I have ever
heard. The sermon was on profanity, and the chaplain, after making all
the observations and doing by mouth and action as much as he could to
rid the regiment of the curse, sat down, credulous being, thinking he
had settled the question for ever. Colonel Lee then rose and said that
the chaplain the other day accused him--most properly--of profanity and
of its setting a very bad example to the regiment; also that when he
took the command he had felt how very bad the thing would be in its
influence on all around him. He felt that it would be the great conflict
of his life. At this point his head drooped and he lifted his
handkerchief to his face; but he went on in conclusion: 'Now boys, let
us try one and all to vindicate the sublime principles our chaplain has
just so eloquently expressed, and I will do _my_ best. I hope to God I
have wounded no man's feelings by an oath; if I have I humbly beg his
pardon.' Here he finished." How this passage impressed me at the time
signifies little; but I find myself now feel in its illustration of what
could then happen among soldiers of the old Puritan Commonwealth a rich
recall of some story from Cromwellian ranks. Striking the continuity,
and not unworthy of it my brother's further comment. "I leave you to
imagine which of these appeals did most good, the conventional address
of the pastor or the honest manly heart-touching acknowledgment of our
Colonel. That is the man through and through, and I heard myself say
afterwards: 'Let him swear to all eternity if he _is_ that sort of man,
and if profanity makes such, for goodness' sake let us all swear.' This
may be a bad doctrine, but is one that might after all undergo
discussion." From which letter I cull further: "I really begin to think
you've been hard in your judgments of McClellan. You don't know what an
enemy we have to conquer. Every secesh I've seen, and all the rebel
prisoners here, talk of the War with such callous earnestness." A letter
from Newberne of December 2nd contains a "pathetic" record of momentary
faith, the sort so abundant at the time in what was not at all to be
able to happen. Moreover a name rings out of it which it is a kind of
privilege to give again to the air--when one can do so with some
approach to an association signified; so much did Charles Lowell's
virtue and value and death represent at the season soon to come for
those who stood within sight of them, and with such still unextinct
emotion may the few of these who now survive turn to his admirably
inspired kinsman's Harvard Commemoration Ode and find it infinitely and
tenderly suffused with pride. Two gallantest nephews, particularly
radiant to memory, had James Russell Lowell to commemorate.
I sweep for them a paean, but they wane
Again and yet again
Into a dirge and die away in pain.
In these brave ranks I only see the gaps,
Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps,
Dark to the triumph which they died to gain.
Cabot has had news that Mr. Amos Lawrence of Boston is getting up a
cavalry regiment (Wilky writes), and he has sent home to try for a
commission as 2nd lieutenant. Now if we could only _both_ get such
a commission in that regiment you can judge yourself how desirable
it would be. Perkins will probably have one in the Massachusetts
2nd and our orderly stands a pretty good chance of one in the 44th.
This cavalry colonelcy will probably be for Cabot's cousin, Charles
Lowell.
There is a report that we start this week for Kinston, and if so we
shall doubtless have a good little fight. We have just received 2
new Mass. Regiments, the 8th and the 51st. We have absolutely no
time to ourselves; and what time we do have we want much more to
give to lying down than to anything else. But try your best for me
now, and I promise you to do _my_ best wherever I am.
A homelier truth is in a few lines three weeks later.
The men as a general thing think war a mean piece of business as
it's carried on in this State; we march 20 or 30 miles and find the
enemy entrenched in rifle-pits or hidden away in some
out-of-the-way place; we send our artillery forward, and after a
brisk skirmish ahead the foe is driven back into the woods, and we
march on for 20 miles more to find the same luck. We were all on
the last march praying for a fight, so that we might halt and throw
off our knapsacks. I don't pretend I am eager to make friends with
bullets, but at Whitehall, after marching some 20 miles, I was on
this account really glad when I heard cannonading ahead and the
column was halted and the fight began.
The details of this engagement are missing from the letter, but we found
matter of interest in two or three other passages--one in particular
recording a December day's march with 15,000 men, "not including
artillerymen," 70 pieces of artillery and 1100 cavalry; which, "on
account of obstructions on the roads," had achieved by night but
seventeen miles and resulted in a bivouac "in 3 immense cotton-fields,
one about as large as Easton's Pond at Newport."
We began to see the camp fires of the advance brigade about 4 miles
ahead of us, and I assure you those miles were soon got over. I
think Willy's artistic eye would have enjoyed the sight--it seemed
so as if the world were on fire. When we arrived on the field the
stacks were made, the ranks broken and the men sent after rail
fences, which fortunately abound in this region and are the only
comfort we have at night. A long fire is made, the length of the
stacks, and one rank is placed on one side of it and the other
opposite. I try to make a picture you see, but scratch it out in
despair. The fires made, we sit down and make our coffee in our tin
dippers, and often is one of these pushed over by some careless
wretch who hasn't noticed it on the coals or has been too tired to
look. The coffee and the hard tack consumed we spread our rubber
blankets and sleep as sound as any house in Christendom. At about 5
the fearful reveille calls us to our feet, we make more coffee,
drink it in a hurry, sling our knapsacks and spank down the road in
one of Foster's regular old quicksteps.
Thrilling at our fireside of course were the particulars of the Kinston
engagement, and still more, doubtless, the happy freshness of the
writer.
At 8 A.M. we were on the road, and had hardly marched 3 miles when
we knew by sounds ahead that the ball had opened. We were ordered
up and deployed in an open field on the right of the road, where we
remained some half an hour. Then we were moved some hundred yards
further, but resumed our former position in another field. Here
Foster came up to the Major, who was directly in the rear of our
company and told him to advance our left wing to support Morrison's
battery, which was about half a mile ahead. He also said he was
pressing the Rebs hard and that they were retiring at every shell
from our side. On we went, the left flank company taking the lead,
and many a bullet and shell whizzed over our heads in that longest
half-mile of my life. We seemed to be nearing the fun, for wounded
men were being carried to the rear and dead ones lay on each side
of us in the woods. We were taken into another field on the left of
the road, and before us were deployed the 23rd Mass., who were
firing in great style. First we were ordered to lie down, and then
in 5 or 10 minutes ordered up again, when we charged down that
field in a manner creditable to any Waterloo legion. I felt as if
this moment was the greatest of my life and as if all the devils of
the Inferno were my benighted system. We halted after having
charged some 60 yards, when what should we see on our left, just
out of the woods and stuck up on a rail, but a flag of truce,
placing under its protecting wing some 50 or 60 poor cowering
wretches who, in their zeal for recognition, not only pulled out
all their pocket handkerchiefs, but in the case of one man spread
out his white shirt-flaps and offered them pacifically to the
winds. The most demonic shouts and yells were raised by the 23rd
ahead of us at this sight, in which the 44th joined; while the
regiments on our right, and that of the road, greeted in the same
frightful manner 200 prisoners they had cut off from retreat by the
bridge. So far I was alive and the thing had lasted perhaps 3
hours; all the enemy but the 200 just named had got away over the
bridge to Kinston and our cavalry were in hot pursuit. I don't
think Sergeant G. W. has ever known greater glee in all his born
days. At about 3 P.M. we crossed the bridge and got into the town.
All along the road from bridge to town Rebel equipments, guns and
cartridge-boxes lay thick, and within the place dead men and horses
thickened too. We were taken ahead through the town to support the
New York 3rd Artillery beyond, where it was shelling the woods
around and ridding the place for the night of any troublesome
wanderers. The Union pickets posted out ahead that night said the
shrieks of women and children further on in the wood could be heard
perfectly all night long, these unfortunates having taken refuge
there from the threatened town. That night we lived like
fighting-cocks--molasses, pork, butter, cheese and all sorts of
different delicacies being foraged for and houses entered
regardless of the commonest dues of life, and others set on fire to
show Kinston was our own. She belonged to our army, and almost
every man claimed a house. If I had only had your orders beforehand
for trophies I could have satisfied you with anything named, from a
gold watch to an old brickbat. This is the ugly part of war. A too
victorious army soon goes down; but we luckily didn't have time
for big demoralisation, as the next day in the afternoon we found
ourselves some 17 miles away and bivouacking in a single prodigious
cornfield.
To which I don't resist subjoining another characteristic passage from
the same general scene as a wind-up to that small chapter of history.
The report has gained ground to-day that we leave to-morrow, and if
so I suppose the next three months will be important ones in the
history of the War. Four ironclads and a great many gunboats are in
Beaufort Harbour; we have at present a force of 50,000 infantry, an
immense artillery and upwards of 800 cavalry. Transports
innumerable are filling up every spare inch of our harbour, and
every man's pity and charity are exercised upon Charleston, Mobile
or Wilmington. We are the only nine-months regiment going, a fact
which to the sensitive is highly gratifying, showing Foster's
evident high opinion of us. The expedition, I imagine, will be
pretty interesting, for we shall have excitement enough without the
fearful marches. To-day is Sunday, and I've been reading Hugo's
account of Waterloo in Les Miserables and preparing my mind for
something of the same sort at Wilmington. God grant the battle may
do as much harm to the Rebels as Waterloo did to the French. If it
does the fight will be worth the dreadful carnage it may involve,
and the experience for the survivors an immense treasure. Men will
fight forever if they are well treated. Give them little marching
and keep the wounded away from them, and they'll do anything. I am
very well and in capital spirits, though now and then rather blue
about home. But only 5 months more and then heaven! General Foster
has just issued an order permitting us to inscribe Goldsboro,
Kinston and Whitehall on our banner.
On the discharge of the 44th after the term of nine months for which it
had engaged and my brother's return home, he at once sought service
again in the Massachusetts 54th, his connection with which I have
already recorded, as well as his injuries in the assault on Fort Wagner
fruitlessly made by that regiment in the summer of '63. He recovered
with difficulty, but at last sufficiently, from his wounds (with one
effect of which he had for the rest of his short life grievously to
reckon), and made haste to rejoin his regiment in the field--to the
promotion of my gathering a few more notes. From "off Graham's point,
Tillapenny River, Headquarters 2nd Brigade," he writes in December '64.
We started last night from the riflepits in the front of Deveaux
Neck to cross the Tillapenny and make a reconnaissance on this side
and try and get round the enemy's works. It is now half-past 10
A.M., and I have been trying to wash some of my mud off. We are all
a sorry crowd of beggars--I don't look as I did the night we left
home. I am much of the time mud from head to foot, and my spirit is
getting muddled also. But I am in excellent condition as regards my
wounds and astonish myself by my powers. I rode some 26 miles
yesterday and walked some 3 in thick mud, but don't feel a bit the
worse for it. We're only waiting here an hour or two to get a
relief of horses, when we shall start again. We shan't have a fight
of any kind to-day, but to-morrow expect to give them a little
trouble at Pocotaligo. Colonel Hallowell commands this
reconnaissance. We have only 4 regiments and a section of artillery
from the 2nd Brigade with us. We heard some fine music from the
Rebel lines yesterday. They have got a stunning band over there.
Prisoners tell us it's a militia band from Georgia. Most all the
troops in our front are militia composed of old men and boys, the
flower of the chivalry being just now engaged with Sherman at
Savannah. We hear very heavy firing in that direction this morning,
and I guess the chivalry is getting the worst of it. The taking of
Fort McAllister the other day was a splendid thing--we got 280
prisoners and made them go out and pick up the torpedoes round the
fort. Sherman was up at Oguchee and Ossahaw yesterday on another
consultation with Foster. We had called our whole army out the
night before in front of our works to give him three cheers. This
had a marvellous effect upon the Rebs. About 20 men came in the
night into our lines, thinking we had got reinforcements and were
going to advance. Later. A scout has just come in and tells us the
enemy are intrenched about 4 miles off, so that we _shall_ have
to-day a shindy of some kind. Our headquarters are now in a large
house once owned by Judge Graham. The coloured troops are in high
spirits and have done splendidly this campaign.
The high spirits of the coloured troops appear naturally to have been
shared by their officers--"in the field, Tillapenny River," late at
night on December 23rd, '64.
We have just received such bully news to comfort us that I can't
help rising from my slumbers to drop you a line. A despatch just
received tells us that Sherman has captured 150 guns, 250,000 dols.
worth of cotton at Savannah, that Forrest is killed and routed by
Rousseau, and that Thomas has walked into Hood and given him the
worst kind of fits. I imagine the poor Rebel outposts in our front
feel pretty blue to-night, for what with that and the thermometer
at about zero I guess the night won't pass without robbing their
army of some of its best and bravest. We suffer a good deal from
the cold, but are now sitting round our camp fire in as good
spirits as men could possibly be. A despatch received early this
evening tells us to look out sharp for Hardee, but this latest news
knocks that to a cocked hat, and we are only just remembering that
that gentleman is round. My foot is bully.
As regards that impaired member, on which he was ever afterwards
considerably to limp, he opines three days later, on Christmas evening,
that "even in the palmy days of old it never _felt_ better than now."
And he goes on:
Though Savannah is taken I fear we shan't get much credit for
having helped to take it. Yet night and day we have been at it
hammer and tongs, and as we are away from the main army and
somewhat isolated and cut off our work has been pretty hard. We
have had only 1,200 effective men in our brigade, and out of that
number have had regularly 400 on picket night and day, and the
fatigue and extra guard duty have nearly used them up. Twice we
have been attacked and both times held our own. Twice we attacked
and once have been driven. The only prisoners we have captured on
the whole expedition have been taken by this part of the column,
and on the whole though we didn't march into Savannah I know you
will give us a little credit for having hastened its downfall.
Three prisoners that we took the other night slept at our Hdqrs,
and we had a good long talk with them. We could get out of them
nothing at all that helps from a military point of view, but their
stories about the Confederacy were most hopeless. They were 3
officers and gentlemen of a crack S.C. cavalry company which has
been used during the War simply to guard this coast, and their
language and state of mind were those of the true Southern
chevalier. They confessed to a great scare on finding themselves
hemmed in by coloured troops, and all agree that the niggers are
the worst enemies they have had to face. On Thursday we turned them
over to the Provost-Marshal at Deveaux Neck, who took them to Gen'l
Hatch. The General had got our despatch announcing we could get
nothing at all out of them, and he came down on them most
ruthlessly and told them to draw lots, as one would have to swing
before night. He told them he had got the affidavit of an escaped
Union prisoner, a man captured at Honey Hill and who had come into
our lines the day previous, to the effect that he had witnessed the
hanging of a negro soldier belonging to the 26th U.S.C.T., and that
he had determined one of them should answer for it. Two seemed very
much moved, but the third, Lee by name (cousin of Gen'l Stephen Lee
of the cavalry), said he knew nothing about it, but if it was so,
so it might be. The other two were taken from each other and Gen'l
Hatch managed to draw a good deal of information from them about
our position, that is the force and nature of the enemy and works
in our front. Lee refused to the last to answer any question
whatever, and they all 3 now await at Hilton Head the issue of the
law. The hanging of the negro seems a perfectly ascertained
fact--he was hung by the 48th Georgia Infty, and the story has
naturally much stirred up our coloured troops. If Hardee should
decide to come down on us I believe he would get the worst of it,
and only hope now that our men won't take a prisoner alive. They
certainly make a great mistake at Washington in not attending to
these little matters, and I am sure the moral effect of an order
from the President announcing that such things have happened, and
that the coloured troops have taken them thoroughly to heart, would
be greater on the Rebels than any physical blow we can deal them.
When I read again, "in the field before Pocotaligo," toward the middle
of January '65, that "Sherman leaves to-night from Beaufort with Logan's
Corps to cross Beaufort Ferry and come up on our right flank and push on
to Pocotaligo bridge," the stir as from great things rises again for me,
wraps about Sherman's name as with the huge hum that then surrounded it,
and in short makes me give the passage such honour as I may. "We are
waiting anxiously for the sound of his musketry announcing him." I was
never in my life to wait for any such sound, but how at that juncture I
hung about with privileged Wilky! "We all propose at Hdqrs to take our
stores out and ride up to the bank of the river and watch the fight on
the other side. We are praying to be relieved here--our men are dying
for want of clothing; and when we see Morris Island again we shall
utterly rejoice." He writes three days later from headquarters
established in a plantation the name of which, as well as that of the
stream, of whatever magnitude, that they had crossed to reach it,
happens to be marked by an illegibility quite unprecedented in his
splendid script--to the effect of a still intenser evocation (as was
then to be felt at any rate) of all the bignesses involved. "Sherman's
whole army is in our front, and they expect to move on Charleston at any
moment." Sherman's whole army!--it affected me from afar off as a vast
epic vision. The old vibration lives again, but with it also that of the
smaller and nearer, the more intimate notes--such for instance as: "I
shall go up to the 20th Corps to-morrow and try for a sight of Billy
Perkins and Sam Storrow in the 2nd Mass." Into which I somehow read,
under the touch of a ghostly hand no more "weirdly" laid than _that_,
more volumes than I can the least account for or than I have doubtless
any business to.
My visionary yearning must however, I think, have drawn most to feed on
from the first of a series of missives dated from Headquarters,
Department of the South, Hilton Head S.C., this particular one of the
middle of February. "I write in a great hurry to tell you I have been
placed on General Gillmore's staff as A.D.C. It is just the very thing
for my foot under present circumstances, and I consider myself most
fortunate. I greatly like the General, who is most kind and genial and
very considerate. My duties will be principally the carrying of orders
to Savannah, Morris Island, Fortress Monroe, Combalee(?) Florida, and
the General's correspondence. Charleston is ours," he goes on two days
later: "it surrendered to a negro regiment yesterday at 9 A.M. We have
just come up from Sumter, where we have hoisted the American flag. We
were lying off Bull's Bay yesterday noon waiting for this when the
General saw through his glass the stars and stripes suddenly flown from
the town hall. We immediately steamed up to Sumter and ran up the
colours there. Old Gillmore was in fine feather and I am in consummate
joy." The joy nevertheless, I may add, doesn't prevent the remark after
a couple of days more that "Charleston isn't on the whole such a very
great material victory; in fact the capture of the place is of value
only in that its moral effect tends to strengthen the Union cause."
After which he proceeds:
Governor Aiken of S.C. came up to Hdqrs to-day to call on the
Gen'l, and they had a long talk. He is a "gradual Emancipationist"
and says the worst of the President's acts was his sweeping
Proclamation. Before that every one in this State was ready to come
back on the gradual system, and would have done so if Lincoln's act
hadn't driven them to madness. This is all fine talk, but there is
nothing in it. They had at least 5 months' warning and could have
in that time perfectly returned within the fold; in fact the strong
Abolitionists of the North were afraid the President had made the
thing but too easy for them and that they would get ahead of us and
themselves emancipate. This poor gentleman is simple crazy and
weakminded. Between Davis and us he _is_ puzzled beyond measure,
and doesn't know what line to take. One thing though troubled him
most, namely the ingratitude of the negro. He can't conceive how
the creatures he has treated with such extraordinary kindness and
taken such care of should all be willing to leave him. He says he
was the first man in the South to introduce religion among the
blacks and that his plantation of 600 of them was a model of
civilisation and peace. Just think of this immense slaveholder
telling me as I drove him home that the coat he had on had been
turned three times and his pantaloons the only ones he possessed.
He stated this so simply and touchingly that I couldn't help
offering him a pair of mine--which he refused, however. There are
some 10,000 people in the town, mostly women and negroes, and it's
tremendously ravaged by our shell, about which they have naturally
lied from beginning to end.
"Bob has just come down from Charleston," he writes in March--"he has
been commissioned captain in the 103rd U.S.C.T. I am sorry he has left
his regiment, still he seemed bent on doing so and offers all kinds of
reasons for it. He may judge rightly, but I fear he's hasty;" and
indeed this might appear from a glimpse of our younger brother at his
ease given by him in a letter of some days before, written at two
o'clock in the morning and recording a day spent in a somewhat arduously
performed visit to Charleston. "I drove out to the entrenchments to-day
to see B., and found him with Hartwell (R. J.'s colonel) smoking their
long pipes on the verandah of a neat country cottage with a beautiful
garden in front of them and the birds chirping and rambling around. Bob
looks remarkably well and seemed very nice indeed. He speaks very highly
of Hartwell, and the latter the same of him. They seemed settled in
remarkable comfort at Charleston and to be taking life easy after their
180 miles march through South Carolina." He mentions further that his
visit to the captured city, begun the previous day, had been made in
interesting conditions; there is in fact matter for quotation throughout
the letter, the last of the small group from which I shall borrow. He
had, with his general, accompanied a "large Senatorial delegation from
Washington and shown them round the place." He records the delegation's
"delight" in what they saw; how "a large crowd of young ladies" were of
the party, so that the Senatorial presences were "somewhat relieved and
lightened to the members of the staff;" and also that they all went
over to Forts Sumter and Moultrie and the adjacent works. The pleasure
of the whole company in the scene of desolation thus presented is one of
those ingenuous historic strokes that the time-spirit, after a
sufficient interval, permits itself to smile at--and is not the only
such, it may be noted, in the sincere young statement.
To-morrow they go to Savannah, returning here in the evening, when
there is to be a grand reception for them at Hdqrs. We expect Gen'l
Robert Anderson (the loyalist commandant at Sumter when originally
fired upon) by the next steamer, with Gideon Welles (secretary of
the Navy) and a number of other notables from Washington. Anderson
is going to raise the old flag on Sumter, and of course there will
be a great shindy here--I only wish you were with us to join in it.
I never go to Sumter without the deepest exhilaration--so many
scenes come to my mind. It's the centre of the nest, and for one to
_be_ there is to feel that the whole game is up. These people have
always insisted that there the last gun should be fired. But the
suffering and desolation of this land is the worst feature of the
whole thing. If you could see what they are reduced to you couldn't
help being touched. The best people are in utter penury; they look
like the poorest of the poor and they talk like them also. They are
deeply demoralised, in fact degraded. Charleston is more forsaken
and stricken than I can describe; it reminds me when I go through
the streets of some old doomed city on which the wrath of God has
rested from far back, and if it ever revives will do so simply
through the infinite mercy and charity of the North. But for this
generation at least the inhabitants are done for. Can't H. come
down and pay us a visit of 2 or 3 weeks? I can get him a War Dept.
pass approved by General Gillmore.
H. knew and well remembers the pang of his inability to accept this
invitation, to the value of which for emphasis of tragic life on the
scene of the great drama the next passage adds a touch. Mrs. William
Young, the lady alluded to, was a friend we had known almost only on the
European stage and amid the bright associations of Paris in particular.
Whom did we suppose he had met on the arrival of a steamer from the
North but this more or less distracted acquaintance of other days?--who
had come down "to try and get her stepmother into our lines and take her
home. She is accompanied by a friend from New York, and expects to
succeed in her undertaking. I hardly think she will, however, as her
mother is 90 miles out of our lines and a very old woman. We have sent a
negro out to give her Mrs. Young's news, but how can this poor old thing
travel such a distance on foot and sleep in the swamp besides? It's an
absurd idea, but I shall do everything in my power to facilitate it." Of
what further befell I gather no account; but I remember how a later time
was to cause me to remark on the manner in which even dire tragedy may
lapse, in the individual life, and leave no trace on the ground it has
ravaged--none at least apparent unless pushingly searched for. The last
thing to infer from appearances, on much subsequent renewal of contact
with Mrs. Young in Paris again, was that this tension of a reach forth
across great war-wasted and swamp-smothered spaces for recovery of an
aged and half-starved pedestrian female relative counted for her as a
chapter of experience: the experience of Paris dressmakers and other
like matters had so revived and supervened. But let me add that I speak
here of mere appearances, and have ever inclined to the more ironic and
more complicating vision of them. It would doubtless have been too
simple for wonder that our elegant friend should have lived, as it were,
under the cloud of reminiscence--and wonder had always somewhere to come
in.