FEVER DREAMS IN WAR.
A subtle enemy had of late joined the Confederate cause against the
invaders. He was known as Pestilence, and his footsteps were so soft
that neither scout nor picket could bar his entrance. His paths were
subterranean,--through the tepid swamp water, the shallow graves of the
dead; and aerial,--through the stench of rotting animals, the nightly
miasms of bog and fen. His victims were not pierced, or crushed, or
mangled, but their deaths were not less terrible, because more
lingering. They seemed to wither and shrivel away; their eyes became at
first very bright, and afterward lustreless; their skins grew hard and
sallow; their lips faded to a dry whiteness; all the fluids of the body
were consumed; and they crumbled to corruption before life had fairly
gone from them.
This visitation has been, by common consent, dubbed "the Chickahominy
fever," and some have called it the typhus fever. The troops called it
the "camp fever," and it was frequently aggravated by affections of the
bowels and throat. The number of persons that died with it was fabulous.
Some have gone so far as to say that the army could have better afforded
the slaughter of twenty thousand men, than the delay on the
Chickahominy. The embalmers were now enjoying their millennium, and a
steam coffin manufactory was erected at White House, where twenty men
worked day and night, turning out hundreds of pine boxes. I had,
occasion, in one of my visits to the depot, to repair to the tent of one
of the embalmers. He was a sedate, grave person, and when I saw him,
standing over the nude, hard corpse, he reminded me of the implacable
vulture, looking into the eyes of Prometheus. His battery and tube were
pulsing, like one's heart and lungs, and the subject was being drained
at the neck. I compared the discolored body with the figure of _Ianthe_,
as revealed in Queen Mab, but failed to see the beautifulness of death.
"If you could only make him breathe, Professor," said an officer
standing by.
The dry skin of the embalmer broke into chalky dimples, and he grinned
very much as a corpse might do:--
"Ah!" he said, "_then_ there would be money made."
To hear these embalmers converse with each other was like listening to
the witch sayings in Macbeth. It appeared that the arch-fiend of
embalming was a Frenchman named Sonca, or something of that kind, and
all these worthies professed to have purchased his "system." They told
grisly anecdotes of "operations," and experimented with chemicals, and
congratulated each other upon the fever. They would, I think, have piled
the whole earth with catacombs of stony corpses, and we should have no
more green graves, but keep our dead with us as household ornaments.
The negroes did not suffer with the fever, although their quarters were
close and filthy. Their Elysium had come; there was no more work. They
slept and danced and grinned, and these three actions made up the sum of
their existence. Such people to increase and multiply I never beheld.
There were scores of new babies every day; they appeared to be born by
twins and triplets; they learned to walk in twenty-four hours; and their
mothers were strong and hearty in less time. Such soulless, lost,
degraded men and women did nowhere else exist. The divinity they never
had; the human they had forgotten; they did no great wrongs,--thieving,
quarrelling, deceiving,--but they failed to do any rights, and their
worship was animal, and almost profane. They sang incongruous mixtures
of hymns and field songs:--
"Oh! bruddern, watch an' pray, _watch_ an' pray!
De harvest am a ripenin' our Lord an' Marser say!
Oh! ho! yo! dat ole coon, de serpent, ho! oh!
Watch an' pray!"
I have heard them sing such medleys with tears in their eyes, apparently
fervid and rapt. A very gray old man would lead off, keeping time to the
words with his head and hands; the mass joining in at intervals, and
raising a screaming alleluja. Directly they would all rise, link hands,
and proceed to dance the accompaniment. The motion would be slow at
first, and the method of singing maintained; after a time they would
move more rapidly, shouting the lines together; and suddenly becoming
convulsed with strange excitement, they would toss up their arms, leap,
fall, groan, and, seemingly, lose consciousness. Their prayers were
earnest and vehement, but often degenerated to mere howls and noises.
Some of both sexes had grand voices, that rang like bugles, and the very
impropriety of their music made it fascinating. It used to seem to me
that any of the great composers might have borrowed advantageously some
of those original negro airs. In many cases, their owners came within
the lines, registered their allegiance, and recovered the negroes. These
were often veritable Shylocks, that claimed their pounds of flesh, with
unblushing reference to the law. The poor Africs went back cowed and
tearful, and it is probable that they were afterward sent to the far
South, that terrible _terra incognita_ to a border slave.
Among the houses to which I resorted was that of a Mr. Hill, one mile
from White House. He had a thousand acres of land and a valuable fishery
on the Pamunkey. The latter was worth, in good seasons, two thousand
dollars a year. He had fished and farmed with negroes; but these had
leagued to run away, and he sent them across the river to a second farm
that he owned in King William County. It was at Hill's house that the
widow Custis was visiting when young Washington reined at the gate, on
his road to Williamsburg. With reverent feelings I used to regard the
old place, and Hill frequently stole away from his formidable military
household, to talk with me on the front porch. Perhaps in the same
moonlights, with the river shimmering at their feet, and the grapevine
shadowing the creaky corners,--their voices softened, their chairs drawn
very close, their hands touching with a thrill,--the young soldier and
his affianced had made their courtship. I sometimes sat breathless,
thinking that their figures had come back, and that I heard them
whispering.
Hill was a Virginian,--large, hospitable, severe, proud,--and once I
ventured to speak upon the policy of slavery, with a view to develop his
own relation to the "institution." He said, with the swaggering manner
of his class, that slavery was a "domestic" institution, and that
therefore no political law could reach it. I insinuated, quietly, that
no political law should therefore sustain it, and took exception to the
idea that what was domestic was therefore without the province of
legislation. When I exampled polygamy, Hill became passionate, and asked
if I was an abolitionist. I opined that I was not, and he so far
relented as to say that slavery was sanctioned by divine and human laws;
that it was ultimately to be embraced by all white nationalities, and
that the Caucasian was certain, in the end, to subjugate and possess
every other race. He pointed, with some shrewdness, to the condition of
the Chinese in California and Australia, and epitomized the gradual
enslaving of the Mongol and Malay in various quarters of the world.
"As to our treatment of niggers," he said, curtly, "I never prevaricate,
as some masters do, in that respect. I whip my niggers when they want
it! If they are saucy, or careless, or lazy, I have 'em flogged. About
twice a year every nigger has to be punished. If they ain't roped over
twice a year, they take on airs and want to be gentlemen. A nigger is
bound by no sentiment of duty or affection. You must keep him in trim by
fear."
Among the victims of the swamp fever, were Major Larrabee, and
Lieutenant-Colonel Emory, of the Fifth Wisconsin regiment; I had been
indebted to them for many a meal and draught of spirits. I had talked
with each of them, when the camps were darkened and the soldiery asleep.
Larrabee was a soldier by nature,--adventurous, energetic, intrepid,
aggressive. He had been a country Judge in Wisconsin, and afterwards a
member of Congress. When the war commenced, he enlisted as a common
soldier, but public sentiment forced the State Government to make him a
Major. Emory was a mild, reflective, unimpassioned gentleman,--too
modest to be eminent, too scrupulous to be ambitious. The men were
opposites, but both capital companions, and they were seized with the
fever about the same time. The Major was removed to White House, and I
visited him one day in the hospital quarters. Surgeon General Watson,
hospital commandant, took me through the quarters; there was quite a
town of sick men; they lay in wall-tents--about twenty in a tent,--and
there were daily deaths; those that caught the fever, were afterwards
unfit for duty, as they took relapses on resuming the field. The tents
were pitched in a damp cornfield; for the Federals so reverenced their
national shrines, that they forbade White House and lawn to be used for
hospital purposes. Under the best circumstances, a field hospital is a
comfortless place; but here the sun shone like a furnace upon the tents,
and the rains drowned out the inmates. If a man can possibly avoid it,
let him never go to the hospital: for he will be called a "skulker," or
a "shyster," that desires to escape the impending battle. Twenty hot,
feverish, tossing men, confined in a small tent, like an oven, and
exposed to contumely and bad food, should get a wholesome horror of war
and glory.
So far as I could observe and learn, the authorities at White House
carried high heads, and covetous hands. In brief, they lived like
princes, and behaved like knaves. There was one--whose conduct has never
been investigated--who furnished one of the deserted mansions near by,
and brought a lady from the North to keep it in order. He drove a span
that rivalled anything in Broadway, and his wines were luscious. His
establishment reminded me of that of Napoleon III. in the late Italian
war, and yet, this man was receiving merely a Colonel's pay. My
impression is that everybody at White House robbed the Government, and
in the end, to cover their delinquencies, these scoundrels set fire to
an immense quantity of stores, and squared their accounts thus: "Burned
on the Pamunkey, June 28, commissary, quartermaster's, and hospital
stores, one million dollars."
The time was now drawing to a close that I should pass amid the familiar
scenes of this region. The good people at Daker's were still kindly; but
having climbed into the great bed one night, I found my legs aching, my
brain violently throbbing, my chest full of pain and my eyes weak. When
I woke in the morning my lips were fevered, I could eat nothing, and
when I reached my saddle, it seemed that I should faint. In a word, the
Chickahominy fever had seized upon me. My ride to New Bridge was marked
by great agony, and during much of the time I was quite blind. I turned
off, at Gaines's Mill, to rest at Captain Kingwalt's; but the old
gentleman was in the grip of the ague, and I forebore to trouble him
with a statement of my grievances. Skyhiski made me a cup of tea, which
I could not drink, and Fogg made me lie on his "poncho." It was like old
times come back, to hear them all speak cheerfully, and the man Clover
said that if there "warn't" a battle soon, he knew what he'd do, he
did! he'd go home, straight as a buck!
"Becoz," said the man Clover, flourishing his hands, "I volunteered to
fight. To _fight_, sir! not to dig and drive team. Here we air, sir,
stuck in the mud, burnin' with fever, livin' on hardtack. And thair's
Richmond! Just thair! You can chuck a stone at it, if you mind to. A'ter
awhile them rebbils'll pop out, and fix us. Why ain't we led up,
sa-a-y?"
The man Clover represented common sentiment among the troops at this
time; but I told him that in all probability he would soon be gratified
with a battle. My prediction was so far correct, that when I met the man
Clover on the James River, a week afterward, he said, with a rueful
countenance--
"Sa-a-a-y! It never rains but it pours, does it?"
As I rode from the camp of the Pennsylvania Reserves, at noon, on the
21st of June, I seemed to feel a gloomy premonition of the calamities
that were shortly to fall upon the "Army of the Potomac." I passed in
front of Hogan house; through the wood above the mill; along Gaines's
Lane, between his mansion and his barn; across a creek, tributary to the
Chickahominy; and up the ploughed hills by a military road, toward
Grapevine Bridge. Lieutenant-Colonel Heath, of the Fifth Maine Regiment,
was riding with me, and we stopped at the tip of an elevated field to
look back upon the scene. I was very sick and weary, and I lay my head
upon the mane of my nag, while Heath threw a leg across his saddle
pommel, and straightened his slight figure; we both gazed earnestly.
The river lay in the hollow or ravine to the left, and a few farm-houses
sat among the trees on the hill-tops beyond. A battery was planted at
each house, and we could see the lines of red-clay parapets marking the
sites. From the roof of one of the houses floated a speck of
canvas,--the revolutionary flag. A horseman or two moved shadow-like
across a slope of yellow grain. Before and back the woods belted the
landscape, and some pickets of both sides paced the river brink: they
did not fire upon each other.
Our side of the Chickahominy was not less peaceful. A couple of
batteries lay below us, in the meadows; but the horses were dozing in
the harness, and the gunners, standing bolt upright at the breech,
seemed parts of their pieces; the teamsters lay grouped in the long
grass. Immediately in front, Gaines's Mansion and outhouses spotted a
hillside, and we could note beyond a few white tents shining through the
trees. The roof of the old mill crouched between a medley of wavy fields
and woods, to our right, and just at our feet a tiny rill divided
Gaines's Mill from our own. Behind us, over the wilderness of swamp and
bog-timber, rose Smith's redoubt, with the Federal flag flaunting from
the rampart.
"Townsend," said Heath, as he swept the whole country with his keen eye,
"do you know that we are standing upon historic ground?"
He had been a poet and an orator, and he seemed to feel the solemnity of
the place.
"It may become historic to-morrow," I replied.
"It is so to-day," he said, earnestly; "not from battle as yet; _that_
may or may not happen; but in the pause before the storm there is
something grand; and this is the pause."
He took his soft beaver in his hand, and his short red hair stood
pugnaciously back from his fine forehead.
"The men that have been here already," he added, "consecrated the place;
young McClellan, and bluff, bull-headed Franklin; the one-armed devil,
Kearney, and handsome Joe Hooker; gray, gristly Heintzelman;
white-bearded, insane Sumner; Stuart, Lee, Johnston, the Hills----"
"Why not," said I, laughingly, "Eric the red,--the redoubtable Heath!"
"Why not?" he said, with a flourish; "Fate may have something in store
for me, as well as for these."
I have thought, since, how terribly our light conversation found
verification in fact. If I had said to Heath, that, at the very moment,
Jefferson Davis and his Commander-in-chief were sitting in the dwelling
opposite, reconnoitring and consulting; that, even now, their telescopes
were directed upon us; that the effect of their counsel was to be
manifest in less than a week; that one of the bloodiest battles of
modern times was to be fought beside and around us; that six days of the
most terrible fighting known in history were to ensue; that my friend
and comrade was standing upon the same clods which would be reddened, at
his next coming, with his heart's blood; and that the trenches were to
yawn beneath his hoofs, to swallow himself and his steed,--if I had
foretold these things as they were to occur, I wonder if the "pause
before the storm" would have been less awful, and our ride campward less
sedate. Poor Heath! Gallant New Englander! he called at my bedside, the
sixth day following, as I lay full of pain, fear, and fever, and after
he bade me good by, I heard his horse's hoofs ringing down the lane. Ten
minutes afterward he was shot through the head.
When I reached Michie's, at three o'clock, I had to be helped from the
saddle, and the fever was raging in my whole body before nightfall. My
hands were flushed, my face hot, but my feet were quite cold, and I was
seized with chills that seemed to shake my teeth from my head. Mrs.
Michie made me a bowl of scorching tea, and one of the black-girls
bathed my limbs in boiling water. The fever dreams came to me that
night, in snatches of burning sleep, and toward morning I lay restlessly
awake, moving from side to side, famishing for drink, but rejecting it,
when they brought it to my lips. The next day, my kind hostess gave me
some nourishing soup, but after a vain effort to partake of it, I was
compelled to put it aside. O'Ganlon procured some pickled fruit and
vegetables from a sutler, which I ate voraciously, quaffing the vinegar
like wine. Some of my regimental friends heard of my illness, and they
sent me quiet luxuries, which gladdened me, though I did not eat. During
the day I had some moments of ease, when I tried to read. There was a
copy of Wordsworth's poems in the house, and I used to repeat stanzas
from "Peter Bell," till they rang, in eddies of rhyme, through my weak
brain, and continued to scan and jangle far into the nights. Some of
these fever-dreams were like delusions in delirium: peopled with
monsters, that grinned and growled. Little black globules used to leer
from corners, and after a time they began to revolve toward me,
increasing as they came, and at length rolling like mountains of surge.
I frequently woke with a scream, and found my body in profuse
perspiration. There were fiery snakes, also, that, at first, moved
slowly around me, and I followed them with red and terrified eyes. After
awhile they flashed in circles of lightning, and hissed showers of
sparks, until I became quite crazed with fear. The most horrible
apparitions used to come to my bedside, and if I dropped to sleep with
any thought half formed or half developed, the odd half of that thought
became impregnated, somehow, and straightway loomed up a goblin, or a
giant, or a grotesque something, that proceeded to torture me, like a
sort of Frankenstein, for having made it. Amid all these ghastly things,
there came beautiful glimpses of form, scene, and sensation, that
straightway changed to horrors. I remember, for example, that I was
gliding down a stream, where the boughs overhead were as shady as the
waters, and there were holy eyes that seemed to cool my fever; but
suddenly the stream became choked with corpses, that entangled their
dead limbs with mine, until I strangled and called aloud,--waking up
O'Ganlon and some reporters who proposed to give me morphine, that I
might not alarm the house.
How the poor soldiers fared, in the hot hospitals, I shudder to think;
but a more merciful decree spared my life, and kind treatment met me at
every hand. Otherwise, I believe, I should not be alive to-day to write
this story; for the fever had seized me in its severest form, and I had
almost tutored myself to look upon my end, far from my home and on the
very eve of my manhood.
O'Ganlon, at last, resolved to send me to White House, and started
thither one day, to obtain a berth for me upon a Sanitary steamer. The
next day an ambulance came to the door. I tried to sit up in bed, and
succeeded; I feebly robed myself and staggered to the stairs. I crawled,
rather than walked, to the hall below; but when I took a chair, and felt
the cool breeze from the oaks fanning my hair, I seemed to know that I
should get well.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!" pealed some cannon at the moment, and all the
windows shook with the concussion.
Directly we heard volleys of musketry, and then the camps were astir.
Horses went hither and thither; signal flags flashed to-and-fro; a
battery of the Reserve Artillery dashed down the lane.
I felt my strength coming back with the excitement; I even smiled feebly
as the guns thundered past.
"Take away your ambulance, old fellow," I said, "I shan't go home till I
see a battle."