STILL MORE FRATERNAL BLOODSHED, ON PRINCIPLE.--OUTING FEATURES
DISAPPEAR, AND GIVE PLACE TO STRAINED RELATIONS BETWEEN COMBATANTS, WHO
BEGIN TO MIX THINGS.
On December 13 the year's business closed with the battle of
Fredericksburg, under the management of General Burnside. Twelve
thousand Union troops were killed before night mercifully shut down upon
the slaughter.
The Confederates were protected by stone walls and situated upon a
commanding height, from which they were able to shoot down the Yankees
with perfect sang-froid and deliberation.
In the midst of all these discouragements, the red brother fetched loose
in Minnesota, Iowa, and Dakota, and massacred seven hundred men, women,
and children. The outbreak was under the management of Little Crow, and
was confined to the Sioux Nation. Thirty-nine of these Indians were
hanged on the same scaffold at Mankato, Minnesota, as a result of this
wholesale murder.
This execution constitutes one of the green spots in the author's
memory. In all lives now and then an oasis is liable to fall. This was
oasis enough to last the writer for years.
In 1863 the Federal army numbered about seven hundred thousand men, and
the Confederates about three hundred and fifty thousand. Still it took
two more years to close the war.
It is held now by good judges that the war was prolonged by the jealousy
existing between Union commanders who wanted to be President or
something else, and that it took so much time for the generals to keep
their eyes on caucuses and county papers at home that they fought best
when surprised and attacked by the foe.
General Grant moved again on Vicksburg, and on May 1, defeated Pemberton
at Fort Gibson. He also prevented a junction between Joseph E. Johnston
and Pemberton, and drove the latter into Vicksburg, securing the stopper
so tightly that after forty-seven days the garrison surrendered, July 4.
This fight cost the Confederates thirty-seven thousand prisoners, ten
thousand killed and wounded, and immense quantities of stores. It was a
warm time in Vicksburg; a curious man who stuck his hat out for twenty
seconds above the ramparts found fifteen bullet-holes in it when he took
it down, and when he wore it to church he attracted more attention than
the collection.
The North now began to sit up and take notice. Morning papers began to
sell once more, and Grant was the name on every tongue.
The Mississippi was open to the Gulf, and the Confederacy was
practically surrounded.
[Illustration: ATTRACTED MORE ATTENTION THAN THE COLLECTION.]
Rosecrans would have moved on the enemy, but learned that the foe had
several head of cavalry more than he did, also a team of artillery. At
this time John Morgan made a raid into Ohio. He surrounded Cincinnati,
but did not take it, as he was not keeping house at the time and hated
to pay storage on it. He got to Parkersburg, West Virginia, and was
captured there with almost his entire force.
On September 19 and 20 occurred the battle of Chickamauga. Longstreet
rushed into a breach in the Union line and swept it with a great big
besom of wrath with which he had wisely provided himself on starting
out. Rosecrans felt mortified when he came to himself and found that his
horse had been so unmanageable that he had carried him ten miles from
the carnage.
But the left, under Thomas, held fast its position, and no doubt saved
the little band of sixty thousand men which Rosecrans commanded at the
time.
His army now found itself shut up in intrenchments, with Bragg on the
hills threatening the Union forces with starvation.
On November 24-25 a battle near Chattanooga took place, with Grant at
the head of the Federal forces. Hooker came to join him from the Army of
the Potomac, and Sherman hurried to his standard from Iuka. Thomas made
a dash and captured Orchard Knob, and Hooker, on the following day,
charged Lookout Mountain.
This was the most brilliant, perhaps, of Grant's victories. It is known
as the "battle of Missionary Ridge." Hooker had exceeded his prerogative
and kept on after capturing the crest of Lookout Mountain, while Sherman
was giving the foe several varieties of fits, from the north, when Grant
discovered that before him the line was being weakened in order to help
the Confederate flanks. So with Thomas he crossed through the first line
and over the rifle-pits, forgot that he had intended to halt and reform,
and concluded to wait and reform after the war was over, when he should
have more time, and that night along the entire line of heights the
camp-fires of the Union army winked at one another in ghoulish glee.
The army under Bragg was routed, and Bragg resigned his command.
Burnside, who had been relieved of the command of the Army of the
Potomac, was sent to East Tennessee, where the brave but frost-bitten
troops of Longstreet shut him up at Knoxville and compelled him to board
at the railroad eating-house there.
Sherman's worn and weary boys were now ordered at once to the relief of
Burnside, and Longstreet, getting word of it, made a furious assault on
the former, who repulsed him with loss, and he went away from there as
Sherman approached from the west.
[Illustration: "WHERE AM I?"]
Hooker had succeeded Burnside in the command of the Army of the Potomac,
and he judged that, as Lee was now left with but sixty thousand men,
while the Army of the Potomac contained one hundred thousand who craved
out-of-door exercise, he might do well to go and get Lee, returning in
the cool of the evening. Lee, however, accomplished the division of his
army while concealed in the woods and sent Jackson to fall on Hooker's
rear. The close of the fight found Hooker on his old camping-ground
opposite Fredericksburg, murmuring to himself, in a dazed sort of way,
"Where am I?" Lee felt so good over this that he decided to go North and
get something to eat. He also decided to get catalogues and price-lists
of Philadelphia and New York while there. Threatening Baltimore in order
to mislead General Meade, who was now in command of the Federals, Lee
struck into Pennsylvania and met with the Union cavalry a little west of
Gettysburg on the Chambersburg road. It is said that Gettysburg was not
intended by either army as the site for the battle, Lee hoping to avoid
a fight, depending as he did on the well-known hospitality of the
Pennsylvanians, and Meade intending to have the fight at Pipe Creek,
where he had some property.
July 1-2-3 were the dates of this memorable battle. The first day was
rather favorable to Lee, quite a number of Yankee prisoners being taken
while they were lost in the crowded streets of Gettysburg.
The second day was opened by Longstreet, who charged the Union left, and
ran across Sickles, who had by mistake formed in the way of Meade's
intended line of battle. They outflanked him, but, as they swung around
him, Warren met them with a diabolical welcome, which stayed them.
Sickles found himself on Cemetery Ridge, while the Confederates under
Ewell were on Culp's Hill.
On the third day, at one P.M., Lee opened with one hundred and fifty
guns on Cemetery Ridge. The air was a hornet's nest of screaming shells
with fiery tails. As it lulled a little, out of the woods came eighteen
thousand men in battle-array extending over a mile in length. The
Yankees knew a good thing when they saw it, and they paused to admire
this beautiful gathering of foemen in whose veins there flowed the same
blood as in their own, and whose ancestors had stood shoulder to
shoulder with their own in a hundred battles for freedom.
Their sentiment gave place to shouts of battle, and into the silent
phalanx a hundred guns poured their red-hot messages of death. The
golden grain was drenched with the blood of men no less brave because
they were not victorious, and the rich fields of Pennsylvania drank with
thirsty eagerness the warm blood of many a Southern son.
Yet they moved onward. Volley after volley of musketry mowed them down,
and the puny reaper in the neglected grain gave place to the grim reaper
Death, all down that unwavering line of gray and brown.
They marched up to the Union breastworks, bayoneted the gunners at their
work, planted their flags on the parapets, and, while the Federals
converged from every point to this, exploding powder burned the faces of
these contending hosts, who, hand to hand, fought each other to death,
while far-away widows and orphans multiplied to mourn through the coming
years over this ghastly folly of civil war.
Whole companies of the Confederates rushed as prisoners into the arms of
their enemies, and the shattered remnant of the battered foe retreated
from the field.
While all this was going on in Pennsylvania, Pemberton was arranging
terms of surrender at Vicksburg, and from this date onward the
Confederacy began to wobble in its orbit, and the President of this
ill-advised but bitterly punished scheme began to wish that he had been
in Canada when the war broke out.
In April of the same year Admiral Dupont, an able seaman with massive
whiskers, decided to run the fortifications at Charleston with
iron-clads, but the Charleston people thought they could run them
themselves. So they drove him back after the sinking of the Kennebec and
the serious injury of all the other vessels.
General Gillmore then landed with troops. Fort Wagner was captured. The
54th Regiment of colored troops, the finest organized in the Free
States, took a prominent part and fought with great coolness and
bravery. By December there were fifty thousand colored troops enlisted,
and before the war closed over two hundred thousand.
It is needless to say that this made the Yankee unpopular at the time in
the best society of the South.
General Gillmore attempted to capture Sumter, and did reduce it to a
pulp, but when he went to gather it he was met by a garrison still
concealed in the basement, and peppered with volleys of hot
shingle-nails and other bric-à-brac, which forced him to retire with
loss.
He said afterward that Fort Sumter was not desirable anyhow.
[Illustration: PRICE OF LIVING RUNNING UP TO EIGHT HUNDRED AND NINE
HUNDRED DOLLARS PER DAY.]
This closed the most memorable year of the war, with the price of living
at the South running up to eight hundred and nine hundred dollars per
day, and currency depreciating so rapidly that one's salary had to be
advanced every morning in order to keep pace with the price of
mule-steaks.