The change of parties wrought by the presidential election of 1860 and
completed by the coming in of the Republicans in 1861 was indeed
revolutionary. When Mr. Lincoln had finished his inaugural address and
the crowd on the east portico began to disperse, I reentered the
rotunda between Mr. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, and Mr. John Bell, of
Tennessee, two old friends of my family, and for a little we sat upon a
bench, they discussing the speech we had just heard.
Both were sure there would be no war. All would be well, they thought,
each speaking kindly of Mr. Lincoln. They were among the most eminent
men of the time, I a boy of twenty-one; but to me war seemed a
certainty. Recalling the episode, I have often realized how the
intuitions of youth outwit the wisdom and baffle the experience of age.
I at once resigned my snug sinecure in the Interior Department and,
closing my accounts of every sort, was presently ready to turn my back
upon Washington and seek adventures elsewhere.
They met me halfway and came in plenty. I tried staff duty with General
Polk, who was making an expedition into Western Kentucky. In a few
weeks illness drove me into Nashville, where I passed the next winter
in desultory newspaper work. Then Nashville fell, and, as I was making
my way out of town afoot and trudging the Murfreesboro pike, Forrest,
with his squadron just escaped from Fort Donelson, came thundering by,
and I leaped into an empty saddle. A few days later Forrest, promoted
to brigadier general, attached me to his staff, and the next six months
it was mainly guerilla service, very much to my liking. But Fate, if
not Nature, had decided that I was a better writer than fighter, and
the Bank of Tennessee having bought a newspaper outfit at Chattanooga,
I was sent there to edit The Rebel—my own naming—established as the
organ of the Tennessee state government. I made it the organ of the
army.
It is not the purpose of these pages to retell the well-known story of
the war. My life became a series of ups and downs—mainly downs—the word
being from day to day to fire and fall back; in the Johnston-Sherman
campaign, I served as chief of scouts; then as an aid to General Hood
through the siege of Atlanta, sharing the beginning of the chapter of
disasters that befell that gallant soldier and his army. I was spared
the last and worst of these by a curious piece of special duty, taking
me elsewhere, to which I was assigned in the autumn of 1864 by the
Confederate government.
This involved a foreign journey. It was no less than to go to England
to sell to English buyers some hundred thousand bales of designated
cotton to be thus rescued from spoliation, acting under the supervision
and indeed the orders of the Confederate fiscal agency at Liverpool.
Of course I was ripe for this; but it proved a bigger job than I had
conceived or dreamed. The initial step was to get out of the country.
But how? That was the question. To run the blockade had been easy
enough a few months earlier. All our ports were now sealed by Federal
cruisers and gunboats. There was nothing for it but to slip through the
North and to get either a New York or a Canadian boat. This involved
chances and disguises.