VISIT TO FORT FISHER, AND INSPECTION OF THAT STRONGHOLD--THE WAY IT WAS
CAPTURED--OUT ON THE OCEAN SAILING--TERRIBLY SEASICK--RAPID RECOVERY
--ARRIVAL AT ANNAPOLIS--WASHED, CLOTHED AND FED--UNBOUNDED LUXURY, AND
DAYS OF UNADULTERATED HAPPINESS.
When we reached the mouth of Cape Fear River the wind was blowing so
hard that our Captain did not think it best to venture out, so he cast
anchor. The cabin of the vessel was filled with officers who had been
released from prison about the same time we were. I was also given a
berth in the cabin, in consideration of my being the non-commissioned
officer in charge of the men, and I found the associations quite
pleasant. A party was made up, which included me, to visit Fort Fisher,
and we spent the larger part of a day very agreeably in wandering over
that great stronghold. We found it wonderful in its strength, and
were prepared to accept the statement of those who had seen foreign
defensive works, that it was much more powerful than the famous
Malakoff, which so long defied the besiegers of Sebastopol.
The situation of the fort was on a narrow and low spit of ground
between Cape Fear River and the ocean. On this the Rebels had erected,
with prodigious labor, an embankment over a mile in length, twenty-five
feet thick and twenty feet high. About two-thirds of this bank faced
the sea; the other third ran across the spit of land to protect the
fort against an attack from the land side. Still stronger than the bank
forming the front of the fort were the traverses, which prevented an
enfilading fire These were regular hills, twenty-five to forty feet
high, and broad and long in proportion. There were fifteen or twenty
of them along the face of the fort. Inside of them were capacious
bomb proofs, sufficiently large to shelter the whole garrison. It
seemed as if a whole Township had been dug up, carted down there and
set on edge. In front of the works was a strong palisade. Between
each pair of traverses were one or two enormous guns, none less than
one-hundred-and-fifty pounders. Among these we saw a great Armstrong
gun, which had been presented to the Southern Confederacy by its
manufacturer, Sir William Armstrong, who, like the majority of the
English nobility, was a warm admirer of the Jeff. Davis crowd. It was
the finest piece of ordnance ever seen in this country. The carriage
was rosewood, and the mountings gilt brass. The breech of the gun had
five reinforcements.
To attack this place our Government assembled the most powerful
fleet ever sent on such an expedition. Over seventy-five men-of-war,
including six monitors, and carrying six hundred guns, assailed it
with a storm of shot and shell that averaged four projectiles per
second for several hours; the parapet was battered, and the large guns
crushed as one smashes a bottle with a stone. The garrison fled into
the bomb-proofs for protection. The troops, who had landed above the
fort, moved up to assail the land face, while a brigade of sailors and
marines attacked the sea face.
As the fleet had to cease firing to allow the charge, the Rebels ran
out of their casemates and, manning the parapet, opened such a fire
of musketry that the brigade from the fleet was driven back, but the
soldiers made a lodgment on the land face. Then began some beautiful
cooperative tactics between the Army and Navy, communication being kept
up with signal flags. Our men were on one side of the parapets and the
Rebels on the other, with the fighting almost hand-to-hand. The vessels
ranged out to where their guns would rake the Rebel line, and as their
shot tore down its length, the Rebels gave way, and falling back to the
next traverse, renewed the conflict there. Guided by the signals our
vessels changed their positions, so as to rake this line also, and so
the fight went on until twelve traverses had been carried, one after
the other, when the rebels surrendered.
The next day the Rebels abandoned Fort Caswell and other fortifications
in the immediate neighborhood, surrendered two gunboats, and fell
back to the lines at Fort Anderson. After Fort Fisher fell, several
blockade-runners were lured inside and captured.
Never before had there been such a demonstration of the power of
heavy artillery. Huge cannon were pounded into fragments, hills of
sand ripped open, deep crevasses blown in the ground by exploding
shells, wooden buildings reduced to kindling-wood, etc. The ground
was literally paved with fragments of shot and shell, which, now red
with rust from the corroding salt air, made the interior of the fort
resemble what one of our party likened it to “an old brickyard.”
Whichever way we looked along the shores we saw abundant evidence of
the greatness of the business which gave the place its importance. In
all directions, as far as the eye could reach, the beach was dotted
with the bleaching skeletons of blockade-runners--some run ashore by
their mistaking the channel, more beached to escape the hot pursuit of
our blockaders.
Directly in front of the sea face of the fort, and not four hundred
yards from the savage mouths of the huge guns, the blackened timbers of
a burned blockade-runner showed above the water at low tide. Coming in
from Nassau with a cargo of priceless value to the gasping Confederacy,
she was observed and chased by one of our vessels, a swifter sailer,
even, than herself. The war ship closed rapidly upon her. She sought
the protection of the guns of Fort Fisher, which opened venomously on
the chaser. They did not stop her, though they were less than half a
mile away. In another minute she would have sent the Rebel vessel to
the bottom of the sea, by a broadside from her heavy guns, but the
Captain of the latter turned her suddenly, and ran her high up on the
beach, wrecking his vessel, but saving the much more valuable cargo.
Our vessel then hauled off, and as night fell, quiet was restored. At
midnight two boat-loads of determined men, rowing with muffled oars
moved silently out from the blockader towards the beached vessel.
In their boats they had some cans of turpentine, and several large
shells. When they reached the blockade-runner they found all her crew
gone ashore, save one watchman, whom they overpowered before he could
give the alarm. They cautiously felt their way around, with the aid of
a dark lantern, secured the ship’s chronometer, her papers and some
other desired objects. They then saturated with the turpentine piles of
combustible material, placed about the vessel to the best advantage,
and finished by depositing the shells where their explosion would ruin
the machinery. All this was done so near to the fort that the sentinels
on the parapets could be heard with the greatest distinctness as they
repeated their half-hourly cry of “All’s well.” Their preparations
completed, the daring fellows touched matches to the doomed vessel in a
dozen places at once, and sprang into their boats. The flames instantly
enveloped the ship, and showed the gunners the incendiaries rowing
rapidly away. A hail of shot beat the water into a foam around the
boats, but their good fortune still attended them, and they got back
without losing a man.
The wind at length calmed sufficiently to encourage our Captain to
venture out, and we were soon battling with the rolling waves, far out
of sight of land. For awhile the novelty of the scene fascinated me.
I was at last on the ocean, of which I had heard, read and imagined
so much. The creaking cordage, the straining engine, the plunging
ship, the wild waste of tumbling billows, everyone apparently racing
to where our tossing bark was struggling to maintain herself, all had
an entrancing interest for me, and I tried to recall Byron’s sublime
apostrophe to the ocean:
Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
Classes itself in tempest: in all time,
Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving--boundless, endless, and sublime--
The image of eternity--the throne
Of the invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obey thee: thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone,
Just then, my reverie was broken by the strong hand of the gruff
Captain of, the vessel descending upon my shoulder, and he said:
“See, here, youngster! Ain’t you the fellow that was put in command of
these men?”
I acknowledged such to be the case.
“Well,” said the Captain; “I want you to ’tend to your business and
straighten them around, so that we can clean off the decks.”
I turned from the bulwark over which I had been contemplating the vasty
deep, and saw the sorriest, most woe-begone lot that the imagination
can conceive. Every mother’s son was wretchedly sea-sick. They were
paying the penalty of their overfeeding in Wilmington; and every face
looked as if its owner was discovering for the first time what the real
lower depths of human misery was. They all seemed afraid they would not
die; as if they were praying for death, but feeling certain that he was
going back on them in a most shameful way.
We straightened them around a little, washed them and the decks off
with a hose, and then I started down in the hold to see how matters
were with the six hundred down there. The boys there were much sicker
than those on deck. As I lifted the hatch there rose an odor which
appeared strong enough to raise the plank itself. Every onion that
had been issued to us in Wilmington seemed to lie down there in the
last stages of decomposition. All of the seventy distinct smells which
Coleridge counted at Cologne might have been counted in any given
cubic foot of atmosphere, while the next foot would have an entirely
different and equally demonstrative “bouquet.”
I recoiled, and leaned against the bulwark, but soon summoned up
courage enough to go half-way down the ladder, and shout out in as
stern a tone as I could command:
“Here, now! I want you fellows to straighten around there, right off,
and help clean up!”
They were as angry and cross as they were sick. They wanted nothing in
the world so much as the opportunity I had given them to swear at and
abuse somebody. Every one of them raised on his elbow, and shaking his
fist at me yelled out:
“O, you go to ----, you ---- ---- ----. Just come down another step,
and I’ll knock the whole head off ’en you.”
I did not go down any farther.
Coming back on the deck my stomach began to feel qualmish. Some
wretched idiot, whose grandfather’s grave I hope the jackasses have
defiled, as the Turks would say, told me that the best preventive of
sea-sickness was to drink as much of the milk punch as I could swallow.
Like another idiot, I did so.
I went again to the side of the vessel, but now the fascination of the
scene had all faded out. The restless billows were dreary, savage,
hungry and dizzying; they seemed to claw at, and tear, and wrench
the struggling ship as a group of huge lions would tease and worry a
captive dog. They distressed her and all on board by dealing a blow
which would send her reeling in one direction, but before she had swung
the full length that impulse would have sent her, catching her on the
opposite side with a stunning shock that sent her another way, only to
meet another rude buffet from still another side.
I thought we could all have stood it if the motion had been like that
of a swing-backward and forward--or even if the to and fro motion had
been complicated with a side-wise swing, but to be put through every
possible bewildering motion in the briefest space of time was more than
heads of iron and stomachs of brass could stand.
Mine were not made of such perdurable stuff.
They commenced mutinous demonstrations in regard to the milk punch.
I began wondering whether the milk was not the horrible beer swill,
stump-tail kind of which I had heard so much.
And the whisky in it; to use a vigorous Westernism, descriptive of mean
whisky, it seemed to me that I could smell the boy’s feet who plowed
the corn from which it was distilled.
Then the onions I had eaten in Wilmington began to rebel, and incite
the bread, meat and coffee to gastric insurrection, and I became so
utterly wretched that life had no farther attractions.
While I was leaning over the bulwark, musing on the complete hollowness
of all earthly things, the Captain of the vessel caught hold of me
roughly, and said:
“Look here, you’re just playin’ the very devil a-commandin’ these here
men. Why in ---- don’t you stiffen up, and hump yourself around, and
make these men mind, or else belt them over the head with a capstan
bar! Now I want you to ’tend to your business. D’you understand me?”
I turned a pair of weary and hopeless eyes upon him, and started to say
that a man who would talk to one in my forlorn condition of “stiffening
up,” and “belting other fellows over the head with a capstan bar,”
would insult a woman dying with consumption, but I suddenly became too
full for utterance.
The milk punch, the onions, the bread, and meat and coffee tired of
fighting it out in the narrow quarters where I had stowed them, had
started upwards tumultuously.
I turned my head again to the sea, and looking down into its smaragdine
depths, let go of the victualistic store which I had been industriously
accumulating ever since I had come through the lines.
I vomited until I felt as empty and hollow as a stove pipe. There
was a vacuum that extended clear to my toe-nails. I feared that
every retching struggle would dent me in, all over, as one sees tin
preserving cans crushed in by outside pressure, and I apprehended that
if I kept on much longer my shoe-soles would come up after the rest.
I will mention, parenthetically, that, to this day I abhor milk punch,
and also onions.
Unutterably miserable as I was I could not refrain from a ghost of a
smile, when a poor country boy near me sang out in an interval between
vomiting spells:
“O, Captain, for God’s sake, stop the boat and lem’me go ashore, and I
swear I’ll walk every step of the way home.”
He was like old Gonzalo in the ‘Tempest:’
Now world I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren
ground; long heath; brown furze; anything. The wills above be done!
but I would fain die a dry death.
After this misery had lasted about two days we got past Cape Hatteras,
and out of reach of its malign influence, and recovered as rapidly as
we had been prostrated.
We regained spirits and appetites with amazing swiftness; the sun came
out warm and cheerful, we cleaned up our quarters and ourselves as best
we could, and during the remainder of the voyage were as blithe and
cheerful as so many crickets.
The fun in the cabin was rollicking. The officers had been as sick as
the men, but were wonderfully vivacious when the ‘mal du mer’ passed
off. In the party was a fine glee club, which had been organized at
“Camp Sorgum,” the officers’ prison at Columbia. Its leader was a Major
of the Fifth Iowa Cavalry, who possessed a marvelously sweet tenor
voice, and well developed musical powers. While we were at Wilmington
he sang “When Sherman Marched Down to the Sea,” to an audience of
soldiers that packed the Opera House densely.
The enthusiasm he aroused was simply indescribable; men shouted, and
the tears ran down their faces. He was recalled time and again, each
time with an increase in the furore. The audience would have staid
there all night to listen to him sing that one song. Poor fellow, he
only went home to die. An attack of pneumonia carried him off within a
fortnight after we separated at Annapolis.
The Glee Club had several songs which they rendered in regular negro
minstrel style, and in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous. One of
their favorites was “Billy Patterson.” All standing up in a ring, the
tenors would lead off:
“I saw an old man go riding by,”
and the baritones, flinging themselves around with the looseness of
Christy’s Minstrels, in a “break down,” would reply:
“Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me!”
Then the tenors would resume:
“Says I, Ole man, your horse’ll die.”
Then the baritones, with an air of exaggerated interest;
“A-ha-a-a, Billy Patterson!”
Tenors:
“For. It he dies, I’ll tan his skin;
An’ if he lives I’ll ride him agin,”
All-together, with a furious “break down” at the close:
“Then I’ll lay five dollars down,
And count them one by one;
Then I’ll lay five dollars down,
If anybody will show me the man
That struck Billy Patterson.”
And so on. It used to upset my gravity entirely to see a crowd of
grave and dignified Captains, Majors and Colonels going through this
nonsensical drollery with all the abandon of professional burnt-cork
artists.
As we were nearing the entrance to Chesapeake Bay we passed a great
monitor, who was exercising her crew at the guns. She fired directly
across our course, the huge four hundred pound balls shipping along
the water, about a mile ahead of us, as we boys used to make the flat
stones skip in the play of “Ducks and Drakes.” One or two of the shots
came so. close that I feared she might be mistaking us for a Rebel ship
intent on some raid up the Bay, and I looked up anxiously to see that
the flag should float out so conspicuously that she could not help
seeing it.
The next day our vessel ran alongside of the dock at the Naval Academy
at Annapolis, that institution now being used as a hospital for paroled
prisoners. The musicians of the Post band came down with stretchers
to carry the sick to the Hospital, while those of us who were able
to walk were ordered to fall in and march up. The distance was but a
few hundred yards. On reaching the building we marched up on a little
balcony, and as we did so each one of us was seized by a hospital
attendant, who, with the quick dexterity attained by long practice,
snatched every one of our filthy, lousy rags off in the twinkling of an
eye, and flung them over the railing to the ground, where a man loaded
them into a wagon with a pitchfork.
With them went our faithful little black can, our hoop-iron spoon, and
our chessboard and men.
Thus entirely denuded, each boy was given a shove which sent him into a
little room, where a barber pressed him down upon a stool, and almost
before he understood what was being done, had his hair and beard cut
off as close as shears would do it. Another tap on the back sent the
shorn lamb into a room furnished with great tubs of water and with
about six inches of soap suds on the zinc-covered floor.
In another minute two men with sponges had removed every trace of
prison grime from his body, and passed him on to two more men, who
wiped him dry, and moved him on to where a man handed him a new shirt,
a pair of drawers, pair of socks, pair of pantaloons, pair of slippers,
and a hospital gown, and motioned him to go on into the large room,
and array himself in his new garments. Like everything else about the
Hospital this performance was reduced to a perfect system. Not a word
was spoken by anybody, not a moment’s time lost, and it seemed to me
that it was not ten minutes after I marched up on the balcony, covered
with dirt, rags, vermin, and a matted shock of hair, until I marched
out of the room, clean and well clothed. Now I began to feel as if I
was really a man again.
The next thing done was to register our names, rank, regiment, when
and where captured, when and where released. After this we were shown
to our rooms. And such rooms as they were. All the old maids in the
country could not have improved their spick-span neatness. The floors
were as white as pine plank could be scoured; the sheets and bedding
as clean as cotton and linen and woolen could be washed. Nothing in
any home in the land was any more daintily, wholesomely, unqualifiedly
clean than were these little chambers, each containing two beds, one
for each man assigned to their occupancy.
Andrews doubted if we could stand all this radical change in our
habits. He feared that it was rushing things too fast. We might have
had our hair cut one week, and taken a bath all over a week later, and
so progress down to sleeping between white sheets in the course of six
months, but to do it all in one day seemed like tempting fate.
Every turn showed us some new feature of the marvelous order of this
wonderful institution. Shortly after we were sent to our rooms, a
Surgeon entered with a Clerk. After answering the usual questions as
to name, rank, company and regiment, the Surgeon examined our tongues,
eyes, limbs and general appearance, and communicated his conclusions
to the Clerk, who filled out a blank card. This card was stuck into
a little tin holder at the head of my bed. Andrews’s card was the
same, except the name. The Surgeon was followed by a Sergeant, who
was Chief of the Dining-Room, and the Clerk, who made a minute of the
diet ordered for us, and moved off. Andrews and I immediately became
very solicitous to know what species of diet No. 1 was. After the
seasickness left us our appetites became as ravenous as a buzz-saw,
and unless Diet No. 1 was more than No. 1 in name, it would not fill
the bill. We had not long to remain in suspense, for soon another
non-commissioned officer passed through at the head of a train of
attendants, bearing trays. Consulting the list in his hand, he said to
one of his followers, “Two No. 1’s,” and that satellite set down two
large plates, upon each of which were a cup of coffee, a shred of meat,
two boiled eggs and a couple of rolls.
“Well,” said Andrews, as the procession moved away, “I want to know
where this thing’s going to stop. I am trying hard to get used to
wearing a shirt without any lice in it, and to sitting down on a chair,
and to sleeping in a clean bed, but when it comes to having my meals
sent to my room, I’m afraid I’ll degenerate into a pampered child of
luxury. They are really piling it on too strong. Let us see, Mc.; how
long’s it been since we were sitting on the sand there in Florence,
boiling our pint of meal in that old can?”
“It seems many years, Lale,” I said; “but for heaven’s sake let us try
to forget it as soon as possible. We will always remember too much of
it.”
And we did try hard to make the miserable recollections fade out of our
minds. When we were stripped on the balcony we threw away every visible
token that could remind us of the hateful experience we had passed
through. We did not retain a scrap of paper or a relic to recall the
unhappy past. We loathed everything connected with it.
The days that followed were very happy ones. The Paymaster came around
and paid us each two months’ pay and twenty-five cents a day “ration
money” for every day we had been in prison. This gave Andrews and
I about one hundred and sixty-five dollars apiece--an abundance of
spending money. Uncle Sam was very kind and considerate to his soldier
nephews, and the Hospital authorities neglected nothing that would add
to our comfort. The superbly-kept grounds of the Naval Academy were
renewing the freshness of their loveliness under the tender wooing
of the advancing Spring, and every step one sauntered through them
was a new delight. A magnificent band gave us sweet music morning and
evening. Every dispatch from the South told of the victorious progress
of our arms, and the rapid approach of the close of the struggle. All
we had to do was to enjoy the goods the gods were showering upon us,
and we did so with appreciative, thankful hearts. After awhile all
able to travel were given furloughs of thirty days to visit their
homes, with instructions to report at the expiration of their leaves
of absence to the camps of rendezvous nearest their homes, and we
separated, nearly every man going in a different direction.