TOM GOES TO VICKSBURG--MORGAN'S RAID--GEN. BASIL W. DUKE CAPTURES
TOM--GETTYSBURG--GEN. ROBERT E. LEE GIVES TOM HIS BREAKFAST--IN
LIBBY PRISON--LINCOLN'S SPEECH AT GETTYSBURG.
Late in June of 1863 Tom again left General Grant's headquarters. These
were then in the outskirts of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The long siege of
that town, held by a considerable Confederate force under General
Pemberton, was nearing its end. Tom longed to be in at the death, but
that could not be. He had been sent with dispatches to Grant and this
time there had been no suggestion by the President that he might fight a
bit if he felt like it. So he was now again on his way to Washington. He
was a long time getting there, nearly a year; and this was the way of
it.
July 2, 1863, Gen. John H. Morgan, a brilliant and daring Confederate
cavalry commander, got his troops across the Cumberland River at
Burkesville, in southern Kentucky, on flat-boats and canoes lashed
together. None but he and his second in command knew whither the
proposed raid was to lead. People about their starting-point thought
Morgan was merely reconnoitering. An old farmer from Calfkills Creek
went along uninvited, because he wished to buy some salt at a
"salt-lick" a few miles north of Burkesville and within the Union lines.
He expected to go and come back safely with Morgan's men. After he had
been through a few marches and more fights and saw no chance of ever
getting home, he plaintively said: "I swar ef I wouldn't give all the
salt in Kaintucky to stand once more safe and sound on the banks of
Calfkills Creek."
Tom Strong, second-lieutenant, U. S. A., had not reckoned upon John H.
Morgan, general C. S. A., when he planned his journey eastward from
Cairo. No one dreamed that Morgan would dare do what he did do. The
Confederate cavalry rode northward across Kentucky, with one or two
skirmishes per day to keep it busy. It crossed the Ohio and fought for
the South on Northern soil. It threatened Cincinnati. It threw southern
Indiana and Ohio into a frenzy of fear. It did great damage, but damage
such as the laws of civilized warfare permit. Morgan's gallant men were
Americans. No woman or child was harmed; no man not under arms was
killed. Military stores were seized or destroyed, food and supplies were
taken, bridges were burned, railroads were torn up, and a clean sweep
was made of all the horses to be found. The Confederate cavalry was in
sad need of new horses. The Union officer who led the pursuit of Morgan
said, in his official report: "His system of horse-stealing was
perfect." But so far as war can be a Christian thing Morgan made it so.
Now the railroad which suffered most from the Confederate raid was the
one upon which Tom was traveling eastward. The train he had taken came
to a sudden stop at a way-station in Ohio, where a red flag was
furiously waved.
"Morgan's torn up the track just ahead," shouted the man who held the
flag.
Nothing more could be learned there and then. Of course the raiders had
cut the wires. By and by fugitives began to straggle in from the
eastward, farmers who had fled from their farms driving their horses
before them, villagers who feared the sack and ruin that really came to
no one, women and children on foot, on horseback, in carts, in wagons,
in buggies. Every fugitive had a new tale of terror to tell, but nobody
really knew anything. Tom questioned each newcomer. Piecing together
what they said, he concluded that Morgan had swept northward; that the
track had been destroyed for but a mile or so, possibly less: and that
the quickest way for him to get to Washington was to walk across the
short gap and get a train or an engine on the other side. He could find
no one who would go with him, even as a guide, but well-meant directions
were showered upon him. So were well-meant warnings, about ten warnings
to one direction. The railroad, however, was his best guide-post. He
started eastward, riding a horse he had bought from one of the
fugitives. The big bay brute stood over sixteen hands high, but the
price Tom paid for him was a good deal higher than the horse.
All went well at first. He soon reached the place where the Confederates
had wrecked the railroad. Their work had been thorough. Every little
bridge or trestle had been burned. Rails and ties had been torn up, the
ties massed together and set on fire, the rails thrown upon the burning
ties and twisted by the heat into sinuous snakes of iron. Occasionally a
hot rail had been twisted about a tree until it became a mere set of
loops, never to serve again the purpose for which it had been made. The
telegraph poles had been chopped down and the wires were tangled into a
broken and useless web. In some places the rails had entirely
disappeared. Doubtless these had been thrown into the little streams
which the burned bridges had spanned. Altogether the road-bed looked as
if some highly intelligent hurricane and earthquake had co-operated in
its destruction. It would be many a day before a train could again run
upon it. Morgan's system of wrecking a railroad was almost as perfect as
his system of horse-stealing.
A country-road wandered along beside where the railroad had been, so
Tom's progress was easy. Its bridges, too, had gone up in smoke, but the
little streams were shallow and could be forded without difficulty, for
June had been rainless and hot that year. The few houses the boy passed
were shut-up and deserted. The fear of Morgan had swept the countryside
bare of man, woman, and child. The solitude, the unnatural solitude of a
region normally full of human life, told on Tom's nerves. He longed to
see a human being. He had now left the gap in the railroad well behind,
but he was still in an Eden without an Adam or an Eve. So, as dusk came,
he rejoiced to see the gleam of a candle in a farmhouse not far ahead.
He was so sure Morgan's whole command was by this time far to the
northward that he galloped gayly up to the house--and, perforce,
presented to the Confederacy one of the best horses seized in the entire
raid.
The gleam had come from a back window. The whole front of the house was
closed, but that is common in rustic places and Tom was sure he would
find the family in the kitchen, with both food and news to give him.
Instead he found just outside the kitchen, as he and the big bay turned
the corner, a group of dismounted cavalrymen in Confederate gray. A
mounted officer was beside them. Two mounted men, one carrying a guidon,
was nearby. Tom pulled hard on his right rein, to turn and run, and bent
close to his saddle to escape the bullets he expected. But one of the
men was already clutching the left rein. The horse reared and plunged
and kicked. The rider, to his infinite disgust, was hurled from the
saddle and landed on his hands and knees before the group. It was rather
an abject position in which to be captured. The Southerners roared with
good-humored laughter as they picked him up. Even the officer smiled at
the boy's plight.
Before the men, on a table outside the kitchen door, lay a half-dozen
appetizing apple pies, evidently of that day's baking. The farmer's
wife, before she fled, had put them there with the hope that they might
propitiate the raiders, if they came, and so might save the house from
destruction. She did not know that Morgan's men did not make war that
way. Those of them who had come there suspected a trap in this open
offer of the pies.
"They mout be pizened," one trooper suggested.
At that moment, when they were hesitating between hunger and fear, Tom
butted in upon them and was seized.
"Let the Yankee sample the pies," shouted a second soldier when the
little scurry of the capture was over. This met instant approval and
Tom, now upon his feet, was being pushed forward to the table when the
officer spoke, with a smiling dignity that showed he was the friend as
well as the commander of his rude soldiery.
"I'll do the sampling," he said. "Give me a pie."
He bit with strong white teeth through the savory morsel and detected no
foreign taint. The pies vanished forthwith, half of one of them down
Tom's hungry throat. Then the officer spoke to him.
"Son," he said, "I suppose you borrowed that uniform somewhere, didn't
you? You're too young to wear it by right. Who are you?"
He was a man of medium height, spare but splendidly built, with his face
bronzed by long campaigning in the open air, regular features, piercing
black eyes that twinkled, but could shoot fire, waving black hair above
a beautiful brow, dazzling white teeth--altogether a vivid man. His
mustache and imperial were black. He was as handsome as Abraham Lincoln
was plain, yet there was between the two, the one the son of a Southern
aristocrat, the other the son of a Southern poor white, an elusive
resemblance. It may have been the innate nobleness and kindliness of
both men. It may have been the Kentucky blood which was their common
portion. At any rate, the resemblance was there.
[Illustration: From "Famous Adventures of the Civil War." The Century Co.
GENERAL DUKE SAMPLES THE PIES]
Tom took one glance at the chief of his captors and then saluted with
real respect as he replied:
"I am Thomas Strong, sir, second-lieutenant, U. S. A."
"Upon my word, sir, I am sorry to hear it. We don't make war on boys. If
you had been, as I thought, just masquerading as a soldier, I would have
turned you loose at once. Now I must take you with us."
Ten minutes afterwards, the little group with Tom, disarmed but unbound,
in the middle of it, was galloping northeastward. A few yards ahead of
it the officer rode with a free bridle rein, chatting with an aide
beside him. He rode like a centaur. Tom thought him one of the finest
soldiers he had ever seen. And so he was. He was Gen. Basil W. Duke,
brother-in-law, second in command, and historian of General Morgan. He
was a soldier and a gentleman, if ever God made one.
A fortnight later, a fortnight of almost constant fighting, much of it
with home-guards and militia who feared Morgan too much to fight him
hard, but part of it with seasoned soldiers who fought as good Americans
should, Morgan crossed the Ohio again into the comparative safety of
West Virginia. He took across with him his few prisoners, including Tom.
Then, finding that the mass of his brigade had been cut off from
crossing, the Confederate general detached a dozen men to take the
prisoners south while he himself with most of the troopers with him
recrossed to where danger beckoned. On July 26, 1862, at Salineville,
Ohio, not far from Pittsburg, trapped, surrounded, and outnumbered, he
surrendered with the 364 men who were all that were left of his gallant
band. Our government made the mistake of treating him and his officers
not as captured soldiers but as arrested bandits. They were sent to the
Ohio State Penitentiary, whence Morgan made a daring escape not long
afterwards. He made his way to freedom on Southern soil. Meanwhile, Tom
had been taken to captivity on that same soil. He was in Libby Prison,
at the Confederate Capital, Richmond, Virginia.
His journey thither had been long and hard and uneventful, except for
the gradual loss of the few things he had with him. His pistol and his
money had been taken when he was first captured. Now, as he was turned
over to one Confederate command after another, bit by bit his belongings
disappeared. His boots went early in the journey. His cap was plucked
from his head. His uniform was eagerly seized by a Confederate spy, who
meant to use it in getting inside the Union lines. When he was finally
turned over to the Provost Marshal of the chief Confederate army,
commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee, he was bareheaded and barefoot and had
nothing to wear except an old Confederate gray shirt and the ragged
remains of what had once been a pair of Confederate gray trousers, held
about his waist by a string. He was hungry and tired and unbelievably
dirty. The one good meal he had had on his long march had been given him
at Frederick, Maryland, by a delightful old lady whom Tom always
believed to be Barbara Frietchie.
It was August now. On July 4, Grant had taken Vicksburg and Meade had
defeated Lee at Gettysburg. The doom of the Confederacy had begun to
dawn. None the less Robert E. Lee's tattered legions, forced back from
the great offensive in Pennsylvania to the stubborn defense of Richmond,
trusted, worshiped, and loved their great general.
* * * * *
Meade, the Union commander, by excess of caution, had let Lee escape
after Gettysburg. He did not attack the retreating foe. Lincoln was
deeply grieved.
"We had them within our grasp," he said, throwing out his long arms. "We
had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I
could say or do could make our army move."
Four days afterwards, General Wadsworth of New York, a gallant fighter,
one of the corps commanders who had tried to spur the too-prudent Meade
into attacking, came to the White House.
"Why did Lee escape?" Lincoln eagerly asked him.
"Because nobody stopped him."
And that was the truth of it. If Lee had been stopped, the war would
have ended nearly two years before it did end. It is a wonderful proof
of Lincoln's wonderful sense of justice that though he repeated: "Our
army held the war in the hollow of their hand and they would not close
it," he added at once: "Still, I am very, very grateful to Meade for the
great service he did at Gettysburg."
* * * * *
Lee was a son of "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, the daring cavalry commander
of the Revolution and the author of the immortal phrase about
Washington: "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of
his countrymen." Robert E. Lee had had an honorable career at West Point
and in the war with Mexico and was Lieutenant-Colonel of Engineers in
the United States army when the war between the States began. He loved
his country and her flag, but he had been bred in the belief that his
loyalty was due first to Virginia rather than to the Union. When the Old
Dominion, after first refusing to secede, finally did so, Lieut.-Col.
Lee, U. S. A., became General Lee, C. S. A. Great efforts were made to
keep him on the Union side. It is said he was offered the chief command
of our army. Sadly he did his duty as he saw it. He put aside the offers
made him, resigned his commission, and left Arlington for Richmond.
Arlington, now a vast cemetery of Union soldiers, crowns a hill on the
Virginia side of the Potomac. The city of Washington lies at its feet.
The valley of the Potomac spreads before it. From the portico of the
old-fashioned house, a portico upheld by many columns, one can look
towards Mt. Vernon, not many miles away, but hid from sight by
clustering hills. The house was built in 1802 by George Washington Parke
Custis, son of Washington's stepson, who was his aide at Yorktown in
1783, and grandson of Martha Washington. Parke Custis, who died in 1858,
directed in his will that his slaves should be freed in five years. Lee,
his son-in-law and executor, scrupulously freed them in 1863 and gave
them passes through the Confederate lines. He had already given freedom
to his own slaves. Long before the war, he wrote from Fort Brown, Texas,
to his wife: "In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but will
acknowledge that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political
evil in any country.... I think it is a greater evil to the white than
the black race."
[Illustration: ARLINGTON
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. New York.]
Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest four Virginians. He ranks with
George Washington, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson. No praise could
be greater. When "the Lost Cause," as the Southerners fondly call their
great fight for what they believed to be right, reeled down to decisive
defeat, the general whom they had worshiped in war proved himself a
great patriot in peace. His last years were passed as President of
Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Long before his death, his
name was honored by every fair-minded man on the Northern as well as the
Southern side of Mason and Dixon's line. One of the noblest eulogies of
him was voiced upon the centennial of his birth, January 9, 1907, at
Washington and Lee University, by Charles Francis Adams. The best blood
of Massachusetts honored the best blood of Virginia. Our country was
then again one country and all of it was free.
* * * * *
Tom Strong was standing with a group of other prisoners, all Northern
officers, under guard, beside the Provost Marshal's tent at Lee's
headquarters. These were upon a little knoll, from which the eye ranged
over the long lines of rotten tents, huts, and heaps of brush that gave
such shelter as they could to the ragged, hungry, and undaunted legions
of the Confederacy. It was early in the morning. Scanty breakfasts were
cooking over a thousand fires. From the cook-tent at headquarters, there
came an odor of bubbling coffee that made the prisoners' hunger the
harder to bear. The whole camp was strangely silent.
Then, in the distance, there was a storm of cheering. It gained in sound
and shrillness. The soldiers poured out of their tents by the thousand.
Those who had hats waved them; those who had not waved their arms; and
every throat joined in the famous "rebel yell." Through the shouting
thousands rode a half-dozen superbly mounted horsemen, at their head a
gallant figure, with close-cropped white beard, whiskers, and mustache,
seated upon a superb iron-gray horse, sixteen hands high, the famous
Traveler.
[Illustration: GEN. ROBERT E. LEE ON TRAVELER]
It was Robert E. Lee, the one hope of the Confederacy. Even his iron
self-control almost broke, as he saw the passionate joy with which he
was hailed by the survivors of the gallant gray army he had launched in
vain against the bayonet-crowned hills of Gettysburg. A flush almost as
red as that of youth crept across his pale cheeks and a mist crept into
his eyes. His charger bore him proudly up the grassy knoll where the
Union prisoners were huddled together. As his glance swept over them,
he noted with surprise the youthfulness of the boy who stood in the
front line. Many a boy as young as Tom or even younger was in the ranks
Lee led. Many an old man bent under the weight of his gun in those
ranks. The Confederacy, by this time almost bled white, was said to
have "robbed the cradle and the grave" to keep its armies at fighting
strength. The North, with many more millions of people, had not been
driven to do this. Tom was one of the few boys in the armies of the
Union.
"Who is this?" asked Lee, as he checked Traveler before the group.
"Thomas Strong, sir," answered the boy.
"Your rank?"
"Second-lieutenant, sir."
"Where were you captured?"
"In Ohio, sir, by General Morgan."
Tom was faint with hunger as he was put through this little catechism.
As he made the last answer, he reeled against the next prisoner, Col.
Thomas E. Rose, of Indiana, who caught and held him. Lee misunderstood
the movement. His lip curled with disgust as he said:
"Are you--a boy--drunk?"
Tom was too far gone to answer, but Rose and a half-dozen others
answered for him.
"Not drunk, but hungry, General."
"I beg your pardon," the courteous Virginian replied, "but at least you
shall be hungry no longer. My staff and I will postpone our breakfast
until you have eaten. Pompey!" An old negro came out of the cook-tent.
He had been one of George Washington Parke Custis's slaves. When freed,
he had refused to leave "Marse Robert," whose cook he had become. He
wore the remains of a Confederate uniform. "Pompey, give these
gentlemen our breakfast. We will wait."
"But--but--Marse Robert, I'se dun got real coffee dis mornin'."
"Our involuntary guests," said Lee with a gentle smile as he turned to
the prisoners, "will, I hope, enjoy the real coffee."
And enjoy it they did. It and the cornbread and bacon that came with it
were nectar and ambrosia to the hungry prisoners. The only fleck upon
the feast was when one of them, in his hurry to be served, spoke rudely
to old Pompey. The negro turned away without a word, but his feelings
were deeply hurt. When the Union officer hurled after him a word of foul
abuse, Pompey turned back, laid his hand upon his ragged uniform, and
said:
"I doesn't objeck to de pussonal cussin', sah, but you must 'speck de
unicorn."
After that the "unicorn" and the fine old negro who wore it were both
amply respected. When everything in sight had been eaten, the prisoners
were ordered to fall in line. Their guards stood in front of the little
column, beside it, behind it.
"Forward, march!"
They marched southward for a few miles, tramped through the swarming,
somber streets of Richmond, and reached Libby Prison. Its doors closed
behind them with a clang. Captivity in the open had been hard enough to
bear. This new kind of captivity, within doors, with barred windows, was
to be harder yet. Tom was to spend six weary months in Libby Prison.
* * * * *
It was while he was there that Abraham Lincoln made his wonderful
Gettysburg speech.
The battlefield of Gettysburg was made sacred by the men who died there
for Freedom's sake and also by the men who died there for the sake of
what they honestly thought were the rights of the Slave States. Congress
made the battlefield a Soldiers' Cemetery. It was to be dedicated to its
great memories on November 19, 1863. The morning before a special train
left Washington for Gettysburg. It carried President Lincoln, Secretary
of State Seward, two other members of the Cabinet, the two private
secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, the distinguished Pennsylvanian, Wayne
MacVeagh, later U. S. Attorney-General and later still our Minister to
Italy, and others of lesser note. Among those latter was the Hon. Thomas
Strong, who had been made one of the party by Lincoln's kind
thoughtfulness. It was he who afterwards told his son the story of
Lincoln's Gettysburg speech, scarcely regarded at the moment, but long
since recognized as one of the masterpieces of English literature.
The little town of Gettysburg was in a ferment that November night, when
the President's train arrived. It was full of people and bands and
whisky. Crowds strolled through the streets, serenading statesmen and
calling for speeches with an American crowd's insatiable appetite for
talky-talk. "MacVeagh," says Hay, "made a most beautiful and touching
speech of five minutes," but another Pennsylvanian made a most
disgusting and drunken speech of many minutes. Lincoln and most of his
party of course had no share in all this brawling merriment. He and
Seward had talked briefly to shouting thousands early in the evening.
On the way up from Washington, the President had sat in a sad
abstraction. He took little part in the talk that buzzed about him.
Once, when MacVeagh was vehemently declaiming about the way the Southern
magnates were misleading the Southern masses, Lincoln said with a weary
smile one of those sayings of his which will never be forgotten. "You
can fool part of the people all the time; you can fool all the people
part of the time; but you can't fool all the people all the time." Then
he became silent again. He did not know what he was to say on the
morrow. The chief oration was to be by Edward Everett of Massachusetts,
a trained orator, fluent and finished in polished phrase. He had been
Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to England, Secretary of State,
United States Senator. He was handsome, distinguished, graceful. The
ungainly President felt that he and his words would be but a foil to
Everett and his sonorous sentences, sentences that were sure to come
rolling in like "the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." Everett had
graduated from Harvard, Lincoln from a log-cabin. Both must face on the
morrow the same audience.
The President searched his pockets and found the stub of a pencil. From
the aisle of the car, he picked up a piece of brown wrapping paper,
thrown there by Seward, who had just opened a package of books in the
opposite seat. He penciled a few words, bent his head upon his great
knotted hand in thought, then penciled a few more. Then he struck out
some words and added others, read his completed task and did not find it
good. He shook his head, stuffed the brown wrapping paper into his
pocket, and took up again his interrupted talk with MacVeagh.
At eleven the next morning, from an open-air platform on the
battlefield, Everett held the vast audience through two hours of fervent
speech, fervent with patriotism, fervent also with bitterness against
the men he called "the Southern rebels." His speech was literature and
his voice was music. As the thunder of his peroration ended a
thunderstorm of applause began. When it, too, died away, there shambled
to the front of the platform an ungainly, badly dressed man, contrasting
sharply and in every way disadvantageously with Everett of the silver
tongue. This man's tongue betrayed him too. He tried to pitch his voice
to reach all that vast audience and his first words came in a squeaking
falsetto. A titter ran through the crowd. Lincoln stopped speaking.
There were a few seconds of painful silence. Then he came to his own.
With a voice enriched by a passionate sincerity, he began again and
finished his Gettysburg speech. Here it is:
"Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this
Continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great
battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a
final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation
might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we
cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or
to detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they
who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to
be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they
here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
The President ceased to speak. There was no thunderstorm of applause
such as had followed Everett's studied sentences and polished periods.
There was no applause at all. One long stir of emotion throbbed through
the silent throng, but did not break the silence. Then the multitude
dispersed, talking of what Everett had said, thinking of what Lincoln
had said. Most of the notables on the platform thought the President's
speech a failure. Time has shown that it was one of the greatest things
even he ever did.
Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews has written in her short story "The Perfect
Tribute" the history of the Gettysburg speech. The boy who would know
what manner of man our Abraham Lincoln was should read "The Perfect
Tribute." One of the characters in the story, a dying Confederate
officer, says to Lincoln without knowing to whom he was speaking: "The
speech so went home to the hearts of all those thousands of people that
when it ended it was as if the whole audience held its breath--there was
not a hand lifted to applaud. One might as well applaud the Lord's
prayer--it would be sacrilege. And they all felt it--down to the lowest.
There was a long minute of reverent silence, no sound from all that
great throng--it seems to me, an enemy, that it was the most perfect
tribute that has ever been paid by any people to any orator."
The Gettysburg speech was not for the moment. It is for all time.