"HO, FOR THE GUNBOATS, HO!"
His first letter from the Army of the West, he dated, Cincinnati,
December 28, 1861. Instead of a comparatively circumscribed Utica (on
the Potomac), to confine his powers, our modern Ulysses had a line a
thousand miles long, and a territory larger than several New Englands
to look over. His first work, therefore, was to invite his readers to
a panorama of Kentucky and the Mississippi Valley. Thus far in the war
there had been no masterly moves, but, on the contrary, masterly
inactivity. With such splendid chances for heroes, who would improve
them? Neither Wolfe nor Washington had played Micawber, but had
created opportunities. Carleton wrote, "Now is the time for the
highest order of military genius.... We wait for him who shall improve
the propitious hours." So in waiting went out the gloomy year of
1861. At Louisville, Ky., Carleton made the acquaintance in detail of
General Buell's army. The commander, Don Carlos Buell, did not enjoy
the presence of correspondents, and those from Cincinnati and New York
papers had been expelled from the camp; nor was Carleton's letter from
the Secretary of War, asking that "facilities consistent with public
interests" be granted him, of any avail. He wrote on New Year's day,
"No more troops are needed here, or on the Potomac at present; what is
wanted is _activity_,--activity,--activity."
Following Horace Greeley's advice, Carleton went West. On January 4th,
having surveyed the land and people, he sent home two letters, then
moved on to Rolla, in the heart of Missouri, and, having got out of
St. Louis with his passes, he found himself, January 11th, at Cairo.
There the New England men were warm in their welcome of the sole
representative of the press of the Eastern States, though St. Louis,
Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York journals were also represented.
Among these were A. D. Richardson, of the New York _Tribune_, and
Whitelaw Reid, of the Cincinnati _Gazette_. Unlike General Don Carlos
Buell, General U. S. Grant, in command at Cairo, had no horror of
newspaper correspondents, and granted them all reasonable facilities.
For the first time Carleton looked upon the gunboats, "three being of
the coal-transport pattern, and five of the turtle style," with sides
sloping inward, both above and below the deck. A shot from the enemy
would be likely either to fly up in the air or "go into the realms of
the catfish." As to the army, Carleton noticed that, as compared with
the Army of the Potomac, discipline was much more severe in the East,
while real democracy was much more general in the West. Men seemed
less proud of their shoulder-straps. The rules of military etiquette
were barely observed.
"There is but very little of the soldier about these Western troops.
They are armed citizens, brave, active, energetic, with a fine
physique, acquainted with hardships, reared to rough life ... but it
is by no means certain that they will not be quite as effective in the
field. The troops here are a splendid set of men, all of them
young.... There is more bone and muscle here, but less culture ... I
have heard far less profanity here than on the Potomac, among officers
and men." He believed there were fewer profane words used and less
whiskey drunk than among the troops in the East. There was not as much
attention paid to neatness and camp hygiene.
It was at Cairo that Carleton made the personal acquaintance, which he
retained until their death, of General Ulysses S. Grant and Commodore
Foote. The latter had already made a superb reputation as a naval
officer in Africa and China. Before Foote was able to equip and start
his fleet, or Grant could move his army southward, on what proved to
be their resistless march, Carleton made journeys into Kentucky, wrote
letters from Cincinnati and Chicago, and arrived back in time to join
General Grant's column. He went down the river, seeing the victorious
battle and siege operations. First from Cairo, and then from Fort
Donelson, he penned brilliant and accurate accounts of the capture of
Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, which opened the Southern Confederacy to
the advance of the Union army. While Grant beat the rebels, Carleton
beat his fellow correspondents, even though he had first to spend
many hours among the wounded. The newspaper men from New York had
poked not a little fun at the "Boston man," chaffing him because they
thought the New England newspapers "slow" and "out of date in
methods." They fully expected that Carleton's despatches would be far
behind theirs in point of time as well as in general value. Their
boasting was sadly premature. Carleton beat them all, and their
humiliation was great.
The matter was in this wise. He had hoped by taking the first boat
from Fort Donelson to Cairo to find time to write out an account of
the siege and surrender of the great fortresses; but during his travel
of one hundred and eighty miles on the river, the steamer had in its
cabin and staterooms two hundred maimed soldiers and officers with
their wounds undressed. Instead of occupation with ink-bottle, pen,
and paper, Carleton found himself giving water to the wounded, and
holding the light for surgeons and nurses. Then, knowing that no other
correspondent had the exact and copious information possessed by
himself, he took the cars, writing his letters on the route from
Cairo to Chicago, where he mailed them.
No doubt at this time, while Carleton was writing so brilliantly to a
quarter of a million readers, many of them envied him his
opportunities. Distance lent enchantment to the view. "But let me
say," wrote Carleton, "if they were once brought into close contact
with all the dreadful realities of war,--if they were obliged to stand
the chances of getting their heads knocked off, or blown to atoms by
an unexpected shell, or bored through with a minie ball,--to stand
their chances of being captured by the enemy,--to live on bread and
water, and little of it, as all of the correspondents have been
obliged to do the past week,--to sleep on the ground, or on a sack of
corn, or in a barn, with the wind blowing a gale, and the snow
whirling in drifts, and the thermometer shrunk to zero,--and then,
after the battle is over and the field won, to walk among the dying
and the dead, to behold all the ghastly sights of trunkless heads and
headless trunks,--to see the human form mutilated, disfigured, torn,
and mangled by shot and shell,--to step in pools of blood,--to hear
all around sighs, groans, imprecations, and prayers from dying
men,--they would be content to let others become historians of the
war. But this is not all; a correspondent must keep ever in view the
thousands that are looking at the journal he represents, who expect
his account at the earliest possible moment. If he is behindhand, his
occupation is gone. His account must be first, or among the first, or
it is nothing. Day and night he must be on the alert, improving every
opportunity and turning it to account. If he loses a steamboat trip,
or a train of cars, or a mail, it is all up with him. He might as well
put his pencil in his pocket and go home."
Carleton had a hearty laugh over a letter from a friend who advised
him "to take more time and rewrite his letters," adding that it would
be for his benefit. To Carleton, who often wrote amid the smoke of
battle or on deck amid bursting shells, or while flying over the
prairies at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, in order, first of
all, to be ahead of his rivals, this seemed a joke. In after-years of
calm and leisure, when writing his books, he painted word pictures and
finished his chapters, giving them a rhetorical gloss impossible when
writing in haste against the pressure of rushing time. Although Boston
was two hundred miles farther from Cairo than New York, yet all New
England had read Carleton's account in the _Journal_ before any
correspondent's letters from Fort Donelson or Henry appeared in the
newspapers of Manhattan.
After the fall of Columbus, the next point to which army and navy were
to give attention was the famous Island Number Ten. Here the
Confederates were concentrating all that were available in men and
cannon. Thousands of negroes were at work upon the trenches, and it
was believed that the fight would be most desperate. After long
waiting for his armament and the training of his men, Commodore Foote
was ready. Carleton wrote at Cairo, March 10, 1862, in the
exhilaration of high hopes:
"Like the waves of the Atlantic is the tide of events. How they sweep!
Henry, Donelson, Bowling Green, Nashville, Roanoke, Columbus, Hampton
Roads, Manassas, Cedar Creek,--wave upon wave, dashing at the
foundation of a house built upon the sand.
... The gigantic structure is tottering. A few more days like that of
the immediate past, and the Confederacy will have a name and a place
only in history. And what a history it will be! A most stupendous
crime. A conspiracy unparalleled, crushed out by a free people, and
the best government of all times saved to the world! How it sends
one's blood through his veins to think of it! Who would not live in
such an age as this? Before this reaches you, the telegraph, I hope,
will have informed you that the Mississippi is open to New Orleans."
So thought Carleton then. Who at that time was wiser than he?
Island Number Ten, so named quite early in history, by the pilots
descending the river, was a place but little known in the East. To the
writer it was one of interest, because here had lived for a year or so
a beloved sister whose letters from the plantation and home at which
she was a guest were not only frequent, but full of the fun and keen
interest about things as seen on a slave plantation by a bright young
girl of twenty from Philadelphia. Well do I remember the handsome
planter of commanding form and winning manners who had made my
sister's stay in the family of the Merriwethers so pleasant, and who
at our home in Philadelphia told of his life on the Mississippi. This
was but two or three years before the breaking out of the war. This
same plantation on Island Number Ten was afterwards sown thickly with
the seed of war, shot, and shell. In front of it took place the great
naval battle, which Carleton witnessed from the deck of the gunboat
_Pittsburg_, which he has described not only in his letters but also
in the books written later. After the destruction of the rebel fleet
followed the heavy bombardment which, after many days of constant rain
of iron, compelled the evacuation of the forts early in April. Even
after these staggering blows at the Confederacy, Carleton expatiated
on the mighty work that yet remained to be done before Secessia should
become one of the curiosities of history in the limbo of things
exploded.
A month of arduous toil and continuous activity on foot, on deck, and
on horseback followed. On the river and in Tennessee and in
Mississippi the tireless news-gatherer plied his tasks. Then came
tidings of the capture of New Orleans, the evacuation of Fort Pillow,
in or near which Carleton wrote two of his best letters; the retreat
of the Confederates from Memphis, and the annihilation of the rebel
fleet in a great water battle, during which Carleton had the very best
position for observation, only two other journalists being present to
witness it with him. Owing to a week's sickness, he did not see the
battle of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, but he arrived on the ground
very soon after, and went over the whole field with participants in
the struggle and while the debris was still fresh. He made so thorough
a study of this decisive field of valor, that he was able to write
with notable power and clearness both in his letters at the time and
later in his books.
We find him in Chicago, June 17th, in Boston, June 21st, where, in one
of his letters, numbering probably about the two hundredth, he
welcomes the sweet breezes of New England, her mountains, the
deep-toned diapason of the ever-sounding sea, the green fields, the
troops of smiling children, the toll of church bells, and the warm
grasp of hands from a host of kind-hearted friends; and, best of all,
the pure patriotism, the true, holy devotion of a people whose mighty
hearts beat now and ever "for union and liberty, one and
inseparable."