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.