York, under the advice of Marshall Pollard's friend, who was accustomed
to put his counsel into the form of something like a command whenever
that seemed to him necessary. She was urged to remain in the city, too,
by all her friends who were near Baillie Pegram's prison hospital. "Stay
where you are," was the burden of all their letters. "You can do no good
here, and you may do much harm if you attempt to come, while you will
very surely be needed where you are, if we succeed, as we hope, in
effecting Captain Pegram's escape. We shall do all that is possible to
accomplish that, but when we do he will still be a very ill man,--for if
he is to escape at all, it must be before he sufficiently recovers to
be sent to a prison. You will be needed then to care for him somewhere,
for, of course, he must not remain in this quarter of the country. Be
patient and trust us--and Sam. For that boy is a wonder of devotion and
ingenuity. He has just left us to return to the hospital before morning.
He makes the journey on foot by night, three times a week, walking
twenty odd miles each trip, in all sorts of weather. When we
remonstrated with him to-night--for a fearful storm is raging--and told
him he should have waited for better weather, he indignantly replied:
'Den Mis' Agatha would have had to wait a whole day beyond her time fer
news. No sirree. Sam's a-gwine to come on de 'pinted nights, ef it rains
pitchforks an' de win' blows de ha'r offen he haid.'"
So Agatha busied herself with such concerns as were hers. She laboured
hard to improve the service of her "underground railroad," and sent
medicines and surgical appliances through the lines with a frequency
that surprised the authorities at Richmond. She corresponded in a
disguised way with her friends in and near Washington, offering all she
could of helpful suggestion to them and through them to Sam. It was by
her command that Sam told his master, while in the hospital, just where
and how she was to be found if he should escape, and how perfectly
equipped she was to come to his assistance in such a case.
For the rest, she battled bravely with her sorrow and her anxieties,
lest they unfit her for prompt and judicious action when the time for
action should come. In brief, she behaved like the devoted and heroic
woman she was.
After long months of weary waiting, her pulse was one day set bounding
by the tidings that the master of Warlock had escaped from the hospital,
and was in safe hands. This news was communicated by means of a
telegram, which said only, "Dress goods satisfactory. Trimmings
excellent."
Fuller news came by letter a day later, and it was far less joyous. It
told her that the exposure, exertion, and excitement of the escape had
brought Baillie into a condition of dangerous illness; that he lay
helpless in the physician's house; that no one was permitted to see him
for fear of discovery, except Sam, who had been installed as nurse.
Other letters followed this daily for a week, each more discouraging
than the last. Finally came one from the doctor himself, in answer to
Agatha's demand, in which he wrote:
"I labour under many difficulties. Captain Pegram's presence in my house
must be concealed as long as that can be accomplished. I am a bachelor,
and I often receive patients for treatment here, but in this case the
man's illness is the consequence of a bullet wound, and should that fact
become known, it would pretty certainly cause an inquiry; for my
Southern sentiments are well known, and in the eyes of the governmental
secret service, I am very distinctly a 'suspect.' The consequence of all
this is that I dare not introduce a competent nurse into the house.
"Sam is willing and absolutely devoted, but of course he knows nothing
of nursing. Yet nursing, and especially the tender nursing of a woman,
is this patient's chief need. If he were in New York now, where
political rancour is held in check by the fact that sentiment there is
divided, and where people are too busy to meddle with other people's
affairs, we could manage the matter easily. You can scarcely imagine how
different the conditions here are. I might easily command the services
of any one of half a dozen or a dozen gentlewomen of Maryland whom I
could trust absolutely. But the very fact of my bringing one of them
here to nurse a stranger, would set a pack of clever detectives on the
scent, and within twenty-four hours they would know the exact truth.
"You will see, my dear young lady, how perplexing a situation it is. I
hoped at first that Capt. P. might presently rally sufficiently to stand
the trip to New York. I could have managed that. But he simply cannot be
moved now, or for many weeks to come. It would be murder to make the
attempt."
When Agatha had read this latter, her mind was instantly made up.
"I must go to him at all hazards and all costs, and nurse him myself.
But first I must think out a way, so that there may be no failure."
She sat for an hour thinking and planning. Then she got up and hurriedly
scribbled two letters. It was after nightfall, and Agatha had never yet
gone into the streets by night. Her terror of that particular form of
danger was great. But these letters must be posted at once, and by her
own hand. There were no lamp-post mailing-boxes in those half-civilised
days, and she must travel many blocks to reach the nearest post-office
station. She took up the little pistol which she had so long carried for
the purpose of defending her honour by self-destruction, if need should
arise, examined its chambers, placed it beneath her cloak, and hurried
into the street.
Then, as now, to the shame of what we call our civilisation, no woman
could traverse the thoroughfares of a great city after dark and
unattended without risk of insult or worse. Then, as now, a costly
police force utterly ignored its duty of so vigilantly protecting the
helpless that the streets should be as safe to women as to men, by night
as well as by day.
During that little walk of a dozen city blocks through streets that the
public adequately paid to have securely guarded, Agatha felt far more of
fear than she had experienced while facing the canister fire of Baillie
Pegram's guns.
She escaped molestation more by good fortune than by any security that
police protection afforded or now affords to the wives and daughters of
a community that calls itself civilised, and pays princely sums every
year for a police protection that it does not get.
One of her letters was addressed to a friend in Baltimore. It gave her
the address of Marshall Pollard's friend, the banker, and added:
"On receipt of this you are to telegraph, asking him to find and send
you a nurse who speaks French--a Frenchwoman preferred. He will send me,
in response to the demand, as Mlle. Roland,--an anagram of my own name.
I shall speak nothing but French in your house, and afterward."
To Baillie's doctor she wrote:
"I think I see a way out of your difficulties. Can you not make a new
diagnosis of Captain Pegram's case--finding him ill of tuberculosis, or
typhoid, or some other wasting malady corresponding with his external
appearance, thus concealing the fact that he suffers in consequence of a
wound? He speaks French like a Parisian--I suppose he can even dream in
that language, as I always do--so for safety and by way of forwarding
my plan, you may regard him as a French gentleman who has fallen ill
during his travels in America, and come to you for treatment. You are to
be very anxious to secure a French nurse for him, and to that end you
may write as soon as you receive this, to the gentlewoman whose address
in Baltimore is enclosed, asking her to procure such a nurse if she can.
I will be that nurse, and will know no English during my stay. This plan
will enable me to go to Captain Pegram's bedside without exciting the
least suspicion, and, when he is sufficiently recovered to travel, there
will be little if any trouble in arranging for his nurse to take the
convalescent to New York, and thence to Europe. Once out of the country
and well again, he can go to Nassau, and thence to a Southern port on
one of the English blockade-running ships. To secure all this we must
scrupulously maintain the fiction that he is a Frenchman, and I a French
nurse."
Agatha's first care on the next morning was to visit the banker and
instruct him as to the part he was to play in the conspiracy, when the
telegram should come from Baltimore. That done, she plied her needle
nimbly, fashioning caps, aprons and the like, such as French nurses only
wore at that time, before there were any trained nurses other than
Frenchwomen among us. She was already wearing black gowns, of course,
and when she added a jet rosary and a stiffly starched broad white
collar to her costume, she had no need to inform anybody that she was a
hospital-bred nurse from Paris.
In the little Maryland town where Baillie Pegram lay in a stupor, her
advent attracted much curious attention, especially because of the
jaunty little nurse's cap she wore, and of her inability to speak
English. But this curiosity averted, rather than invited suspicion, as
Agatha had intended and planned that it should do.
The physician's knowledge of the French language was scant, and his
pronunciation was execrably bad, but he managed to greet the nurse in
that tongue on her arrival, and to say, very gallantly:
"Now my patient should surely get well. Under care of such a nurse even
a dead man might be persuaded back to life."
XXVII
_AGATHA'S WONDER-STORY_
Agatha had been for more than a week at Baillie Pegram's bedside before
he manifested any consciousness of her presence. But from the very first
her ministrations had seemed to soothe him.
Even when his fever brought active delirium with it, a word from his
soft-voiced French nurse quieted him, and each day showed less of fever
and more of strength.
At last one day he lay quiet, and Agatha sat stitching at something near
the foot of the bed. Her face was bent over her work, so that she did
not see when he opened his eyes and gazed steadily at her for a time.
Not until she looked up, as she was accustomed watchfully to do every
little while, did he fully recognise her. Then, in a feeble voice, he
spoke her name--nothing more.
She gently readjusted his pillows, and he fell into a more natural
sleep than he had known since his relapse had befallen him.
When he waked again, Sam was sitting by, Agatha having left the room for
a brief while.
"Who has been here, Sam?" the sick man asked.
"Nobody, Mas' Baillie, on'y de French lady what's a-nussin' of yo',"
replied Sam, lying with the utmost equanimity, in accordance with what
he believed to be the spirit of his instructions.
"I dreamed it, then. Tell me where I am, Sam."
"I ain't Sam an' yo' ain't Mas' Baillie; I'se jes' _garshong_, an' yo'se
a French gentleman, an' yo' cawn't talk nuffin' but French, an' so
'tain't no use fer yo' to try to talk to me. Yo' mus' jes' go to sleep,
now, an' when de French nuss comes back, yo' kin ax her in French like
whatsomever yo' wants to know."
Baillie's bewildered wits struggled for a moment with the problem of his
own identity, but before the French nurse returned he had fallen asleep
again. It was not until the next day, therefore, that he had opportunity
to ask Agatha anything, but his fever had abated by that time, and his
mind was rapidly clearing.
"Tell me about it all, please," he said to her.
"Sh--speak only in French," she replied, herself speaking in that
tongue. "It is very necessary, and address me as Mademoiselle Roland."
Then she told him so much as was necessary to prevent him from
exercising his imagination in an exciting way. When she had explained
that he was still in the house of the doctor who had aided him in his
escape, and that the pretence of his being a French gentleman and she a
French nurse was necessary for safety, she added:
"I came to you when you were very ill and needed me, and I shall stay
with you so long as you need me. You mustn't talk now. Wait a few days,
and you will be strong enough."
The prediction was fulfilled, and a few days later Agatha told him the
whole story of her own and Sam's search for him, dwelling particularly
upon Sam's devotion and the ingenuity he had brought to bear upon the
problem of rescue. For at times when there was no possibility that
anybody should overhear, Agatha had made Sam tell her all the details
of that affair, until she knew as well as he did every word he had
spoken and every step he had taken in the execution of his purpose.
Baillie's progress toward recovery was necessarily slow, but it was
steady and continuous, and after many weeks, when he was permitted to
sit up for awhile each day, he begged to hear about the progress of the
war.
It was now September, 1862, and what she had to tell him was one of the
most dramatic stories that the history of our American war has to
relate.
McClellan had proved himself to be a great organiser and a masterful
engineer, and he had at last tried to prove himself to be also a great
general.
He had so perfectly fortified the city of Washington that a brigade or a
division or two might easily hold it against the most determined hosts.
He had organised the "regiments cowering upon the Potomac," and the
scores of other regiments that had come pouring into the capital, into
one of the finest armies that had ever taken the field in any
country in the world. He had multiplied his artillery, and
swelled his cavalry force to proportions that rendered it numerically
superior to Stuart's "Mamelukes." He had so perfected his supply
departments--quartermaster's, commissary's, medical, and ordnance--that
their work was accomplished with the precision, the certainty, and the
smoothness of well-ordered machinery.
He had brought under his immediate command a perfectly organised army,
numbering nearly or quite two hundred thousand men.[1] The Confederates
had in Virginia about one-fourth that number available for the defence
of Richmond. Nor could this army of defence be reinforced from other
parts of the South, for during the long waiting-time in Virginia, events
of the most vital importance had been occurring at the West. Chief of
these in importance, though the government at Washington was slow to
recognise the fact, was the discovery there of a really capable
commander--General Grant. He had captured Forts Henry and Donelson, thus
gaining control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, breaking the
Confederate line of defence, and pushing the Southern armies completely
out of Kentucky, and almost out of Tennessee. He was preparing, when
McClellan moved, to complete that part of his work by fighting the
tremendous battle of Shiloh.
[Footnote 1: Rossiter Johnson, in his "History of the War of Secession,"
says that 121,000 were sent to Fortress Monroe and seventy thousand left
at Washington, besides McDowell's corps and Bleuker's division.]
Thus the Confederates could not afford to draw so much as a single
regiment or battery from that field for the strengthening of Johnston's
force in Virginia. Finally, early in March, Johnston had withdrawn from
Centreville and Manassas to the immediate neighbourhood of Richmond.
It was in such circumstances that McClellan at last undertook to use the
great army he had created, for the purpose it was meant to accomplish.
Early in the spring, he transferred 120,000 men by water to Fortress
Monroe, leaving seventy thousand at and near Washington, to hold that
capital secure. Somewhat more than half of this force at Washington was
to advance upon Richmond by way of Fredericksburg, and add forty
thousand men to McClellan's great army when he should sit down before
the Confederate capital. He, meanwhile, was to march up the peninsula
formed by the York and James Rivers, supported by the navy on either
side.
Richmond was seemingly doomed, and everywhere at the North the
expectation was that McClellan, with his overwhelming forces and his
well-nigh perfect organisation, would make an end of the war before the
first anniversary of the battle of Manassas.
If McClellan had been half as capable in the field as he had proved
himself to be in the work of organisation, this might easily have
happened. But he was cautious to a positively paralysing degree. It was
his habit of mind to overestimate his enemy's strength to his own
undoing. Thus when he began his advance up the peninsula, with nearly
sixty thousand men, to be almost immediately reinforced to one hundred
thousand and more, he found a Confederate line stretched across the
peninsula at Yorktown. It consisted of thirteen thousand men under
Magruder, and with his enormous superiority of numbers, McClellan might
have run over it in a day, while with his transports, protected by
gunboats, he might easily have carried his army by it on either side,
compelling its retreat or surrender. But in his excessive caution he
assumed that the entire Confederate force was concentrated there, and
his imagination doubled the strength of that force. He confidently
believed that the Yorktown lines were defended by an army of eighty
thousand or more, and instead of finding out the facts by an assault, he
wasted nearly a month in scientifically besieging the little force of
thirteen thousand men, with an army six or eight times as great, and a
siege train of enormous strength.
When at last he had pushed his siege parallels near enough for an
assault, he found his enemy gone, and discovered that the great frowning
cannon in their works were nothing more than wooden logs, painted black,
and mounted like heavy guns.
The North had not yet found a general capable of commanding the superb
army it had created, or of making effective use of those enormously
superior resources which from the beginning had been at its disposal.
Grant had splendidly demonstrated his capacity at Shiloh, but Halleck
had immediately superseded him, and completely thrown away the
opportunity there presented. Grant was still denied any but volunteer
rank, and for many weeks after Shiloh he was left, as he has himself
recorded, with none but nominal command, and was not even consulted by
his immeasurably inferior superior.
McClellan at last reached the neighbourhood of Richmond, and placed his
great army on the eastern and northern fronts of the Confederate
capital. But still permitting his imagination to mislead him, he
confidently believed the Confederate forces to be quite twice as
numerous as they were in fact. So instead of pressing them vigorously,
as a more enterprising and less excessively cautious commander would
have done, he proceeded to fortify and for weeks kept his splendid army
idle in a pestilential swamp, whose miasms were far deadlier than
bullets and shells could have been.
At the end of May the Confederates assailed his left wing, believing
that a flood in the river had isolated it from the rest of the army, and
a bloody five days' battle ensued, with no decisive results, except to
demonstrate the fighting quality of the troops under McClellan's
command.
Still he hesitated and fortified, and urgently called for
reinforcements. These to the number of forty thousand were on their way
to join him, marching directly southward from Washington.
But the Confederates had been more fortunate than their foes. They had
found their great commander, a piece of good fortune which did not
happen to the Federal armies until nearly two years later. After the
battle of Seven Pines at the end of May and the beginning of June,
Robert E. Lee assumed personal command of the forces defending Richmond,
and from that hour the great game of war was played by him with a
sagacity and a boldness that had not been seen before.
Lee's problem was to drive McClellan's army away from Richmond, and
transfer the scene of active hostilities to some more distant point. To
that end he must prevent the coming of McDowell with his army to
McClellan's assistance. Accordingly he ordered Jackson to sweep down the
Shenandoah valley, threatening an advance upon Washington in its rear,
thus putting the Federals there upon their defence. He rightly believed
that the excessive concern felt at the North for the safety of the
capital would make Jackson's operations an occasion of great alarm.
The result was precisely what Lee had intended. Jackson swept like a
hurricane through the valley, moving so rapidly and appearing so
suddenly at unexpected and widely separated points as to seem both
ubiquitous and irresistible. The Federal army which was marching to
reinforce McClellan was promptly turned aside and sent over the
mountains to meet and check Jackson. While it was hurrying westward,
Jackson suddenly slipped out of the valley and carried his "foot
cavalry"--as his rapidly marching corps had come to be called--to the
neighbourhood of Richmond, where Lee was ready to fall upon his
adversary in full force, striking his right flank like a thunderbolt,
pushing into his rear, pressing him back in successive encounters,
threatening his base of supplies on the York River, and finally
compelling him to retreat to the cover of his gunboats at Harrison's
Landing on the James.
All this constituted what is known as the "Seven Days' Battles." It was
a brilliant operation, attended at every step by heroic fighting on both
sides, and by consummate skill on both--for if Lee's successful
operation for his enemy's dislodgment was good strategy, McClellan's
successful withdrawal of his army from its imperilled position to one
in which it could not be assailed, was scarcely less so.
But still more dramatic events were to follow. McClellan had been driven
away from the immediate neighbourhood of the Confederate capital, but
his new position at Harrison's Landing was one from which he might at
any moment advance again either upon Richmond or upon Petersburg, which
was afterward proved to be the military key to the capital. His army was
still numerically stronger than Lee's, and it might be reinforced at any
time, and to any desired extent, while Lee had already under his command
every man that could be spared from other points. More important still,
the fighting strength of McClellan's forces had been bettered by the
battling they had done. The men were inured to war work now, and had
improved in steadiness and discipline under the tutelage of experience.
Except that its confidence in its general was somewhat impaired, the
Army of the Potomac was a stronger and more trustworthy war implement
than it had been at the beginning. So long as it should remain where it
was, Lee must keep the greater part of his own force in the
intrenchments in front of Richmond, and the seat of war must remain
discouragingly near the Confederate capital. In the meanwhile a new
Federal force, called the Army of Virginia, had been sent out from
Washington under General John Pope, to assail Richmond from the north
and west, while securely covering Washington. Pope's base was at
Manassas, and his army had been pushed forward to the line of the
Rappahannock, where there was no army to meet it and check its advance
upon Richmond.
Lee must act quickly. For should Pope come within striking-distance of
Richmond on the northwest, McClellan's army would very certainly advance
from the east, and Richmond would be threatened by a stronger force than
ever before.
But Lee could not move in adequate force to meet and check Pope's
advance, without leaving Richmond undefended against any advance that
McClellan might see fit to make. His perplexing problem was to compel
the withdrawal of McClellan, and the transfer of his army to Washington.
To effect this, Lee again played upon the nervous apprehension felt in
Washington for the safety of that city. He detached Jackson, and sent
him to the Rappahannock to threaten Pope, while remaining within reach
of Richmond in case of need. This movement increased the apprehension in
Washington, and a considerable part of McClellan's force was withdrawn
by water. Thereupon Lee sent another corps to the Rappahannock, a
proceeding which led to the withdrawal of pretty nearly all that
remained of McClellan's army, to reinforce Pope, and the abandonment of
the campaign by way of the peninsula. Lee instantly transferred the
remainder of his army to the Rappahannock, leaving only a small garrison
in the works at Richmond.
Pope was alert to meet Lee at every point, and he was being strengthened
by daily reinforcements from what had been McClellan's army. But in
Pope, with all his energy and dash and extraordinary self-confidence,
the Federal government had not found a leader capable of playing the
great war game on equal terms with Robert E. Lee. Grant and Sherman were
still in subordinate commands at the West, while Halleck, who believed
in neither of them, had been brought to Washington and placed in
supreme control of all the Union armies.