CHAPTER VII.

HIS NOMINATION FOR THE PRESIDENCY.

On the 12th of June, 1852, the democratic national convention assembled

at Baltimore, in order to select a candidate for the presidency of the

United States. Many names, eminently distinguished in peace and war, had

been brought before the public, during several months previous; and among

them, though by no means occupying a very prominent place, was the name

of Franklin Pierce. In January of this year, the Democracy of New

Hampshire had signified its preference of General Pierce as a

presidential candidate in the approaching canvass--a demonstration which

drew from him the following response, addressed to his friend, Mr.

Atherton:--

“I am far from being insensible to the generous confidence so often

manifested towards me by the people of this state; and although the

object indicated in the resolution, having particular reference to

myself, be not one of desire on my part, the expression is not on that

account less gratifying.

“Doubtless the spontaneous and just appreciation of an intelligent people

is the best earthly reward for earnest and cheerful services rendered to

one’s state and country; and while it is a matter of unfeigned regret

that my life has been so barren of usefulness, I shall ever hold this and

similar tributes among my most cherished recollections.

“To these, my sincere and grateful acknowledgments, I desire to add that

the same motives which induced me, several years ago, to retire from

public life, and which since that time controlled my judgment in this

respect, now impel me to say that the use of my name in any event, before

the democratic national convention at Baltimore, to which you are a

delegate, would be utterly repugnant to my taste and wishes.”

The sentiments expressed in the above letter were genuine, and from his

heart. He had looked long and closely at the effects of high public

station on the character and happiness, and on what is the innermost and

dearest part of a man’s possessions--his independence; and he had

satisfied himself that office, however elevated, should be avoided for

one’s own sake, or accepted only as a good citizen would make any other

sacrifice, at the call and at the need of his country.

As the time for the assembling of the national convention drew near,

there were other sufficient indications of his sincerity in declining a

stake in the great game. A circular letter was addressed, by Major

Scott, of Virginia, to the distinguished Democrats whose claims had

heretofore been publicly discussed, requesting a statement of their

opinions on several points, and inquiring what would be the course of

each of these gentlemen, in certain contingencies, in case of his

attaining the presidency. These queries, it may be presumed, were of

such a nature that General Pierce might have answered them, had he seen

fit to do so, to the satisfaction of Major Scott himself, or to that of

the southern democratic party, whom it seemed his purpose to represent.

With not more than one exception, the other statesmen and soldiers, to

whom the circular had been sent, made a response. General Pierce

preserved an unbroken silence. It was equivalent to the withdrawal of

all claims which he might be supposed to possess, in reference to the

contemplated office; and he thereby repeated, to the delegates of the

national party, the same avowal of distaste for public life which he had

already made known to the Democracy of his native state. He had thus

done everything in his power, actively or passively,--everything that he

could have done, without showing such an estimate of his position before

the country as was inconsistent with the modesty of his character,--to

avoid the perilous and burdensome honor of the candidacy.

The convention met, at the date above mentioned, and continued its

sessions during four days. Thirty-five ballotings were held, with a

continually decreasing prospect that the friends of any one of the

gentlemen hitherto prominent before the people would succeed in obtaining

the two-thirds vote that was requisite for a nomination. Thus far, not a

vote had been thrown for General Pierce; but, at the thirty-sixth ballot,

the delegation of old Virginia brought forward his name. In the course

of several more trials, his strength increased, very gradually at first,

but afterwards with a growing impetus, until, at the forty-ninth ballot,

the votes were for Franklin Pierce two hundred and eighty-two, and eleven

for all other candidates. Thus Franklin Pierce became the nominee of the

convention; and as quickly as the lightning flash could blazon it abroad

his name was on every tongue, from end to end of this vast country.

Within an hour he grew to be illustrious.

It would be a pretension, which we do not mean to put forward, to assert

that, whether considering the length and amount of his public services,

or his prominence before the country, General Pierce stood on equal

ground with several of the distinguished men whose claims, to use the

customary phrase, had been rejected in favor of his own. But no man, be

his public services or sacrifices what they might, ever did or ever could

possess, in the slightest degree, what we may term a legitimate claim to

be elevated to the rulership of a free people. The nation would degrade

itself, and violate every principle upon which its institutions are

founded, by offering its majestic obedience to one of its citizens as a

reward for whatever splendor of achievement. The conqueror may assert a

claim, such as it is, to the sovereignty of the people whom he

subjugates; but, with us Americans, when a statesman comes to the chief

direction of affairs, it is at the summons of the nation, addressed to

the servant whom it deems best fitted to spend his wisdom, his strength,

and his life in its behalf. On this principle, which is obviously the

correct one, a candidate’s previous services are entitled to

consideration only as they indicate the qualities which may enable him to

render higher services in the position which his countrymen choose that

he shall occupy. What he has done is of no importance, except as proving

what he can do. And it is on this score, because they see in his public

course the irrefragable evidences of patriotism, integrity, and courage,

and because they recognize in him the noble gift of natural authority,

and have a prescience of the stately endowment of administrative genius,

that his fellow-citizens are about to summon Franklin Pierce to the

presidency. To those who know him well, the event comes, not like

accident, but as a consummation which might have been anticipated, from

its innate fitness, and as the final step of a career which, all along,

has tended thitherward.

It is not as a reward that he will take upon him the mighty burden of

this office, of which the toil and awful responsibility whiten the

statesman’s head, and in which, as in more than one instance we have

seen, the warrior encounters a deadlier risk than in the battle-field.

When General Pierce received the news of his nomination, it affected him

with no thrill of joy, but a sadness, which, for many days, was

perceptible in his deportment. It awoke in his heart the sense of

religious dependence--a sentiment that has been growing continually

stronger, through all the trials and experiences of his life; and there

was nothing feigned in that passage of his beautiful letter, accepting

the nomination, in which he expresses his reliance upon heavenly support.

The committee, appointed by the Baltimore convention, conveyed to him the

intelligence of his nomination in the following terms:--

“A national convention of the democratic republican party, which met at

Baltimore on the first Tuesday in June, unanimously nominated you as a

candidate for the high trust of the President of the United States. We

have been delegated to acquaint you with the nomination, and earnestly to

request that you will accept it. Persuaded as we are that this office

should never be pursued by an unchastened ambition, it cannot be refused

by a dutiful patriotism.

“The circumstances under which you will be presented for the canvass of

your countrymen seem to be propitious to the interests which the

Constitution intrusts to our Federal Union, and must be auspicious to

your own name. You come before the people without the impulse of

personal wishes, and free from selfish expectations. You are identified

with none of the distractions which have recently disturbed our country,

whilst you are known to be faithful to the Constitution--to all its

guaranties and compromises. You will be free to exercise your tried

abilities, within the path of duty, in protecting that repose we happily

enjoy, and in giving efficacy and control to those cardinal principles

that have already illustrated the party which has now selected you as its

leader--principles that regard the security and prosperity of the whole

country, and the paramount power of its laws, as indissolubly associated

with the perpetuity of our civil and religious liberties.

“The convention did not pretermit the duty of reiterating those

principles, and you will find them prominently set forth in the

resolutions it adopted. To these we respectfully invite your attention.

“It is firmly believed that to your talents and patriotism the security

of our holy Union, with its expanded and expanding interests, may be

wisely trusted, and that, amid all the perils which may assail the

Constitution, you will have the heart to love and the arm to defend it.”

We quote likewise General Pierce’s reply:--

“I have the honor to acknowledge your personal kindness in presenting me,

this day, your letter, officially informing me of my nomination, by the

democratic national convention, as a candidate for the presidency of the

United States. The surprise with which I received the intelligence of my

nomination was not unmingled with painful solicitude; and yet it is

proper for me to say that the manner in which it was conferred was

peculiarly gratifying.

“The delegation from New Hampshire, with all the glow of state pride, and

with all the warmth of personal regard, would not have submitted my name

to the convention, nor would they have cast a vote for me, under

circumstances other than those which occurred.

“I shall always cherish with pride and gratitude the recollection of the

fact that the voice which first pronounced, and pronounced alone, came

from the Mother of States--a pride and gratitude rising above any

consequences that can betide me personally. May I not regard it as a

fact pointing to the overthrow of sectional jealousies, and looking to

the permanent life and vigor of the Union, cemented by the blood of those

who have passed to their reward?--a Union wonderful in its formation,

boundless in its hopes, amazing in its destiny.

“I accept the nomination, relying upon an abiding devotion to the

interests, honor, and glory of the whole country, but, above and beyond

all, upon a Power superior to all human might--a Power which, from the

first gun of the Revolution, in every crisis through which we have

passed, in every hour of acknowledged peril, when the dark clouds had

shut down over us, has interposed as if to baffle human wisdom, outmarch

human forecast, and bring out of darkness the rainbow of promise. Weak

myself, faith and hope repose there in security.

“I accept the nomination upon the platform adopted by the convention, not

because this is expected of me as a candidate, but because the principles

it embraces command the approbation of my judgment; and with them, I

believe I can safely say, there has been no word or act of my life in

conflict.”

The news of his nomination went abroad over the Union, and, far and wide,

there came a response, in which was distinguishable a truer appreciation

of some of General Pierce’s leading traits than could have been

anticipated, considering the unobtrusive tenor of his legislative life,

and the lapse of time since he had entirely withdrawn himself from the

nation’s eye. It was the marvellous and mystic influence of character,

in regard to which the judgment of the people is so seldom found

erroneous, and which conveys the perception of itself through some medium

higher and deeper than the intellect. Everywhere the country knows that

a man of steadfast will, true heart, and generous qualities has been

brought forward, to receive the suffrages of his fellow-citizens.

He comes before the people of the United States at a remarkable era in

the history of this country and of the world. The two great parties of

the nation appear--at least to an observer somewhat removed from both--to

have nearly merged into one another; for they preserve the attitude of

political antagonism rather through the effect of their old organizations

than because any great and radical principles are at present in dispute

between them. The measures advocated by the one party, and resisted by

the other, through a long series of years, have now ceased to be the

pivots on which the election turns. The prominent statesmen, so long

identified with those measures, will henceforth relinquish their

controlling influence over public affairs. Both parties, it may likewise

be said, are united in one common purpose,--that of preserving our sacred

Union, as the immovable basis from which the destinies, not of America

alone, but of mankind at large, may be carried upward and consummated.

And thus men stand together, in unwonted quiet and harmony, awaiting the

new movement in advance which all these tokens indicate.

It remains for the citizens of this great country to decide, within the

next few weeks, whether they will retard the steps of human progress by

placing at its head an illustrious soldier, indeed, a patriot, and one

indelibly stamped into the history of the past, but who has already done

his work, and has not in him the spirit of the present or of the coming

time; or whether they will put their trust in a new man, whom a life of

energy and various activity has tested, but not worn out, and advance

with him into the auspicious epoch upon which we are about to enter.

NOTE.

We have done far less than justice to Franklin Pierce’s college standing,

in our statement in Chapter I. Some circumstances connected with this

matter are too characteristic not to be reported.

During the first two years, Pierce was extremely inattentive to his

college duties, bestowing only such modicum of time upon them as was

requisite to supply the merest superficial acquaintance with the course

of study for the recitation room. The consequence was that when the

relative standing of the members of the class was first authoritatively

ascertained, in the junior year, he found himself occupying precisely the

lowest position in point of scholarship. In the first mortification of

wounded pride, he resolved never to attend another recitation, and

accordingly absented himself from college exercises of all kinds for

several days, expecting and desiring that some form of punishment, such

as suspension or expulsion, would be the result. The faculty of the

college, however, with a wise lenity, took no notice of this behavior;

and at last, having had time to grow cool, and moved by the grief of his

friend Little and another classmate, Pierce determined to resume the

routine of college duties. “But,” said he to his friends, “if I do so,

you shall see a change!”

Accordingly, from that time forward, he devoted himself to study. His

mind, having run wild for so long a period, could be reclaimed only by

the severest efforts of an iron resolution; and for three months

afterwards, he rose at four in the morning, toiled all day over his

books, and retired only at midnight, allowing himself but four hours for

sleep. With habit and exercise, he acquired command over his

intellectual powers, and was no longer under the necessity of application

so intense. But from the moment when he made his resolve until the close

of his college life, he never incurred a censure, never was absent (and

then unavoidably) but from two college exercises, never went into the

recitation room without a thorough acquaintance with the subject to be

recited, and finally graduated as the third scholar of his class.

Nothing save the low standard of his previous scholarship prevented his

taking a yet higher rank.

The moral of this little story lies in the stern and continued exercise

of self-controlling will, which redeemed him from indolence, completely

changed the aspect of his character, and made this the turning point of

his life.

CHIEFLY ABOUT WAR MATTERS.

By a Peaceable Man.

[This article appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” for July, 1862, and is

now first reprinted among Hawthorne’s collected writings. The editor of

the magazine objected to sundry paragraphs in the manuscript, and these

were cancelled with the consent of the author, who himself supplied all

the foot-notes that accompanied the article when it was published. It

has seemed best to retain them in the present reproduction. One of the

suppressed passages, in which President Lincoln is described, has since

been printed, and is therefore restored to its proper place in the

following pages.--G. P. L.]

Here is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically sealed

seclusion, except possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing

influences of this war do not penetrate. Of course, the general

heart-quake of the country long ago knocked at my cottage-door, and

compelled me, reluctantly, to suspend the contemplation of certain

fantasies, to which, according to my harmless custom, I was endeavoring

to give a sufficiently life-like aspect to admit of their figuring in a

romance. As I make no pretensions to state-craft or soldiership, and

could promote the common weal neither by valor nor counsel, it seemed, at

first, a pity that I should be debarred from such unsubstantial business

as I had contrived for myself, since nothing more genuine was to be

substituted for it. But I magnanimously considered that there is a kind

of treason in insulating one’s self from the universal fear and sorrow,

and thinking one’s idle thoughts in the dread time of civil war; and

could a man be so cold and hardhearted, he would better deserve to be

sent to Fort Warren than many who have found their way thither on the

score of violent, but misdirected sympathies. I remembered the touching

rebuke administered by King Charles to that rural squire the echo of

whose hunting-horn came to the poor monarch’s ear on the morning before a

battle, where the sovereignty and constitution of England were to be set

at a stake. So I gave myself up to reading newspapers and listening to

the click of the telegraph, like other people; until, after a great many

months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that I determined

to look a little more closely at matters with my own eyes.

Accordingly we set out--a friend and myself--towards Washington, while it

was still the long, dreary January of our Northern year, though March in

name; nor were we unwilling to clip a little margin off the five months’

winter, during which there is nothing genial in New England save the

fireside. It was a clear, frosty morning, when we started. The sun

shone brightly on snow-covered hills in the neighborhood of Boston, and

burnished the surface of frozen ponds; and the wintry weather kept along

with us while we trundled through Worcester and Springfield, and all

those old, familiar towns, and through the village-cities of Connecticut.

In New York the streets were afloat with liquid mud and slosh. Over New

Jersey there was still a thin covering of snow, with the face of Nature

visible through the rents in her white shroud, though with little or no

symptom of reviving life. But when we reached Philadelphia, the air was

mild and balmy; there was but a patch or two of dingy winter here and

there, and the bare, brown fields about the city were ready to be green.

We had met the Spring half-way, in her slow progress from the South; and

if we kept onward at the same pace, and could get through the Rebel

lines, we should soon come to fresh grass, fruit-blossoms, green peas,

strawberries, and all such delights of early summer.

On our way, we heard many rumors of the war, but saw few signs of it.

The people were staid and decorous, according to their ordinary fashion;

and business seemed about as brisk as usual,--though, I suppose, it was

considerably diverted from its customary channels into warlike ones. In

the cities, especially in New York, there was a rather prominent display

of military goods at the shop windows,--such as swords with gilded

scabbards and trappings, epaulets, carabines, revolvers, and sometimes a

great iron cannon at the edge of the pavement, as if Mars had dropped

one of his pocket-pistols there, while hurrying to the field. As

railway-companions, we had now and then a volunteer in his French-gray

great-coat, returning from furlough, or a new-made officer travelling to

join his regiment, in his new-made uniform, which was perhaps all of the

military character that he had about him,--but proud of his eagle-buttons

and likely enough to do them honor before the gilt should be wholly

dimmed. The country, in short, so far as bustle and movement went, was

more quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its

restless elements had been drawn towards the seat of the conflict. But

the air was full of a vague disturbance. To me, at least, it seemed so,

emerging from such a solitude as has been hinted at, and the more

impressible by rumors and indefinable presentiments, since I had not

lived, like other men, in an atmosphere of continual talk about the war.

A battle was momentarily expected on the Potomac; for, though our army

was still on the hither side of the river, all of us were looking towards

the mysterious and terrible Manassas, with the idea that somewhere in its

neighborhood lay a ghastly battle-field, yet to be fought, but foredoomed

of old to be bloodier than the one where we had reaped such shame. Of

all haunted places, methinks such a destined field should be thickest

thronged with ugly phantoms, ominous of mischief through ages beforehand.

Beyond Philadelphia there was a much greater abundance of military

people. Between Baltimore and Washington a guard seemed to hold every

station along the railroad; and frequently, on the hill-sides, we saw a

collection of weather-beaten tents, the peaks of which, blackened with

smoke, indicated that they had been made comfortable by stove-heat

throughout the winter. At several commanding positions we saw

fortifications, with the muzzles of cannon protruding from the ramparts,

the slopes of which were made of the yellow earth of that region, and

still unsodded; whereas, till these troublous times, there have been no

forts but what were grass-grown with the lapse of at least a lifetime of

peace. Our stopping-places were thronged with soldiers, some of whom

came through the cars asking for newspapers that contained accounts of

the battle between the Merrimack and Monitor, which had been fought the

day before. A railway-train met us, conveying a regiment out of

Washington to some unknown point; and reaching the capital, we filed out

of the station between lines of soldiers, with shouldered muskets,

putting us in mind of similar spectacles at the gates of European cities.

It was not without sorrow that we saw the free circulation of the

nation’s life-blood (at the very heart, moreover) clogged with such

strictures as these, which have caused chronic diseases in almost all

countries save our own. Will the time ever come again, in America, when

we may live half a score of years without once seeing the likeness of a

soldier, except it be in the festal march of a company on its summer

tour? Not in this generation, I fear, nor in the next, nor till the

Millennium; and even that blessed epoch, as the prophecies seem to

intimate, will advance to the sound of the trumpet.

One terrible idea occurs in reference to this matter. Even supposing the

war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into the mass of the

population within the year, what an incalculable preponderance will there

be of military titles and pretensions for at least half a century to

come! Every country-neighborhood will have its general or two, its three

or four colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without end,--besides

non-commissioned officers and privates, more than the recruiting offices

ever knew of,--all with their campaign-stories, which will become the

staple of fireside talk forevermore. Military merit, or rather, since

that is not so readily estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure

of all claims to civil distinction.--One bullet-headed general will

succeed another in the Presidential chair; and veterans will hold the

offices at home and abroad, and sit in Congress and the state

legislatures, and fill all the avenues of public life. And yet I do not

speak of this deprecatingly, since, very likely, it may substitute

something more real and genuine, instead of the many shams on which men

have heretofore founded their claims to public regard; but it behooves

civilians to consider their wretched prospects in the future, and assume

the military button before it is too late.

We were not in time to see Washington as a camp. On the very day of our

arrival sixty thousand men had crossed the Potomac on their march towards

Manassas; and almost with their first step into the Virginia mud, the

phantasmagory of a countless host and impregnable ramparts, before which

they had so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite away. It was as if

General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and,

beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world

that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder. There are

instances of a similar character in old romances, where great armies are

long kept at bay by the arts of necromancers, who build airy towers and

battlements, and muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a

defence of seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the

besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman,

and finds him melt away in the death grapple. With such heroic

adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter reckoned. The whole

business, though connected with the destinies of a nation, takes

inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous. The vast preparation of men and

warlike material,--the majestic patience and docility with which the

people waited through those weary and dreary months,--the martial skill,

courage, and caution, with which our movement was ultimately made,--and,

at last, the tremendous shock with which we were brought suddenly up

against nothing at all! The Southerners show little sense of humor

nowadays, but I think they must have meant to provoke a laugh at our

expense, when they planted those Quaker guns. At all events, no other

Rebel artillery has played upon us with such overwhelming effect.

The troops being gone, we had the better leisure and opportunity to look

into other matters. It is natural enough to suppose that the centre and

heart of Washington is the Capitol; and certainly, in its outward aspect,

the world has not many statelier or more beautiful edifices, nor any, I

should suppose, more skilfully adapted to legislative purposes, and to

all accompanying needs. But, etc., etc. [We omit several paragraphs

here, in which the author speaks of some prominent Members of Congress

with a freedom that seems to have been not unkindly meant, but might be

liable to misconstruction. As he admits that he never listened to an

important debate, we can hardly recognize his qualifications to estimate

these gentlemen, in their legislative and oratorical capacities.]

* * * * * *

We found one man, however, at the Capitol, who was satisfactorily

adequate to the business which brought him thither. In quest of him, we

went through halls, galleries, and corridors, and ascended a noble

staircase, balustraded with a dark and beautifully variegated marble from

Tennessee, the richness of which is quite a sufficient cause for

objecting to the secession of that State. At last we came to a barrier

of pine boards, built right across the stairs. Knocking at a rough,

temporary door, we thrust a card beneath; and in a minute or two it was

opened by a person in his shirt-sleeves, a middle-aged figure, neither

tall nor short, of Teutonic build and aspect, with an ample beard of a

ruddy tinge and chestnut hair. He looked at us, in the first place, with

keen and somewhat guarded eyes, as if it were not his practice to

vouchsafe any great warmth of greeting, except upon sure ground of

observation. Soon, however, his look grew kindly and genial (not that it

had ever been in the least degree repulsive, but only reserved), and

Leutze allowed us to gaze at the cartoon of his great fresco, and talked

about it unaffectedly, as only a man of true genius can speak of his own

works. Meanwhile the noble design spoke for itself upon the wall. A

sketch in color, which we saw afterwards, helped us to form some distant

and flickering notion of what the picture will be, a few months hence,

when these bare outlines, already so rich in thought and suggestiveness,

shall glow with a fire of their own,--a fire which, I truly believe, will

consume every other pictorial decoration of the Capitol, or, at least,

will compel us to banish those stiff and respectable productions to some

less conspicuous gallery. The work will be emphatically original and

American, embracing characteristics that neither art nor literature have

yet dealt with, and producing new forms of artistic beauty from the

natural features of the Rocky-Mountain region, which Leutze seems to have

studied broadly and minutely. The garb of the hunters and wanderers of

those deserts, too, under his free and natural management, is shown as

the most picturesque of costumes. But it would be doing this admirable

painter no kind office to overlay his picture with any more of my

colorless and uncertain words; so I shall merely add that it looked full

of energy, hope, progress, irrepressible movement onward, all represented

in a momentary pause of triumph; and it was most cheering to feel its

good augury at this dismal time, when our country might seem to have

arrived at such a deadly stand-still.

It was an absolute comfort, indeed, to find Leutze so quietly busy at

this great national work, which is destined to glow for centuries on the

walls of the Capitol, if that edifice shall stand, or must share its

fate, if treason shall succeed in subverting it with the Union which it

represents. It was delightful to see him so calmly elaborating his

design, while other men doubted and feared, or hoped treacherously, and

whispered to one another that the nation would exist only a little

longer, or that, if a remnant still held together, its centre and seat of

government would be far northward and westward of Washington. But the

artist keeps right on, firm of heart and hand, drawing his outlines with

an unwavering pencil, beautifying and idealizing our rude, material life,

and thus manifesting that we have an indefeasible claim to a more

enduring national existence. In honest truth, what with the

hope-inspiring influence of the design, and what with Leutze’s

undisturbed evolvement of it, I was exceedingly encouraged, and allowed

these cheerful auguries to weigh against a sinister omen that was pointed

out to me in another part of the Capitol. The freestone walls of the

central edifice are pervaded with great cracks, and threaten to come

thundering down, under the immense weight of the iron dome,--an

appropriate catastrophe enough if it should occur on the day when we drop

the Southern stars out of our flag.

Everybody seems to be at Washington, and yet there is a singular dearth

of imperatively noticeable people there. I question whether there are

half a dozen individuals, in all kinds of eminence, at whom a stranger,

wearied with the contact of a hundred moderate celebrities, would turn

round to snatch a second glance. Secretary Seward, to be sure,--a pale,

large-nosed, elderly man, of moderate stature, with a decided originality

of gait and aspect, and a cigar in his mouth,--etc., etc.

[We are again compelled to interfere with our friend’s license of

personal description and criticism. Even Cabinet Ministers (to whom the

next few pages of the article were devoted) had their private immunities,

which ought to be conscientiously observed,--unless, indeed, the writer

chanced to have some very piquant motives for violating them.]

* * * * * *

Of course, there was one other personage, in the class of statesmen, whom

I should have been truly mortified to leave Washington without seeing;

since (temporarily, at least, and by force of circumstances) he was the

man of men. But a private grief had built up a barrier about him,

impeding the customary free intercourse of Americans with their chief

magistrate; so that I might have come away without a glimpse of his very

remarkable physiognomy, save for a semi-official opportunity of which I

was glad to take advantage. The fact is, we were invited to annex

ourselves, as supernumeraries, to a deputation that was about to wait

upon the President, from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with a present of

a splendid whip.

Our immediate party consisted only of four or five (including Major Ben

Perley Poore, with his note-book and pencil), but we were joined by

several other persons, who seemed to have been lounging about the

precincts of the White House, under the spacious porch, or within the

hall, and who swarmed in with us to take the chances of a presentation.

Nine o’clock had been appointed as the time for receiving the deputation,

and we were punctual to the moment; but not so the President, who sent us

word that he was eating his breakfast, and would come as soon as he

could. His appetite, we were glad to think, must have been a pretty fair

one; for we waited about half an hour in one of the antechambers, and

then were ushered into a reception-room, in one corner of which sat the

Secretaries of War and of the Treasury, expecting, like ourselves, the

termination of the Presidential breakfast. During this interval there

were several new additions to our group, one or two of whom were in a

working-garb, so that we formed a very miscellaneous collection of

people, mostly unknown to each other, and without any common sponsor, but

all with an equal right to look our head-servant in the face.

By and by there was a little stir on the staircase and in the

passage-way, and in lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an

exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor, whom (as being about the homeliest

man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable) it was

impossible not to recognize as Uncle Abe.

Unquestionably, Western man though he be, and Kentuckian by birth,

President Lincoln is the essential representative of all Yankees, and the

veritable specimen, physically, of what the world seems determined to

regard as our characteristic qualities. It is the strangest and yet the

fittest thing in the jumble of human vicissitudes, that he, out of so

many millions, unlooked for, unselected by any intelligible process that

could be based upon his genuine qualities, unknown to those who chose

him, and unsuspected of what endowments may adapt him for his tremendous

responsibility, should have found the way open for him to fling his lank

personality into the chair of state,--where, I presume, it was his first

impulse to throw his legs on the council-table, and tell the Cabinet

Ministers a story. There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor

the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in

the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him a thousand

times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the pattern

American, though with a certain extravagance which, possibly, I

exaggerated still further by the delighted eagerness with which I took it

in. If put to guess his calling and livelihood, I should have taken him

for a country schoolmaster as soon as anything else. He was dressed in a

rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully

that the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his

figure, and had grown to be an outer skin of the man. He had shabby

slippers on his feet. His hair was black, still unmixed with gray,

stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither

brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow; and

as to a night-cap, Uncle Abe probably knows nothing of such effeminacies.

His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an insalubrious

atmosphere around the White House; he has thick black eyebrows and an

impending brow; his nose is large, and the lines about his mouth are very

strongly defined.

The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in

the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed,

illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out

of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted

with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense;

no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly

so, and yet, in some sort, sly,--at least, endowed with a sort of tact

and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take

an antagonist in flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him right in

front. But, on the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage,

with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share

in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom

it would have been practicable to put in his place.

Immediately on his entrance the President accosted our member of

Congress, who had us in charge, and, with a comical twist of his face,

made some jocular remark about the length of his breakfast. He then

greeted us all round, not waiting for an introduction, but shaking and

squeezing everybody’s hand with the utmost cordiality, whether the

individual’s name was announced to him or not. His manner towards us was

wholly without pretence, but yet had a kind of natural dignity, quite

sufficient to keep the forwardest of us from clapping him on the shoulder

and asking him for a story. A mutual acquaintance being established, our

leader took the whip out of its case, and began to read the address of

presentation. The whip was an exceedingly long one, its handle wrought

in ivory (by some artist in the Massachusetts State Prison, I believe),

and ornamented with a medallion of the President, and other equally

beautiful devices; and along its whole length there was a succession of

golden bands and ferrules. The address was shorter than the whip, but

equally well made, consisting chiefly of an explanatory description of

these artistic designs, and closing with a hint that the gift was a

suggestive and emblematic one, and that the President would recognize the

use to which such an instrument should be put.

This suggestion gave Uncle Abe rather a delicate task in his reply,

because, slight as the matter seemed, it apparently called for some

declaration, or intimation, or faint foreshadowing of policy in reference

to the conduct of the war, and the final treatment of the Rebels. But

the President’s Yankee aptness and not-to-be-caughtness stood him in good

stead, and he jerked or wiggled himself out of the dilemma with an

uncouth dexterity that was entirely in character; although, without his

gesticulation of eye and month,--and especially the flourish of the whip,

with which he imagined himself touching up a pair of fat horses,--I doubt

whether his words would be worth recording, even if I could remember

them. The gist of the reply was, that he accepted the whip as an emblem

of peace; not punishment; and, this great affair over, we retired out of

the presence in high good-humor, only regretting that we could not have

seen the President sit down and fold up his legs (which is said to be a

most extraordinary spectacle), or have heard him tell one of those

delectable stories for which he is so celebrated. A good many of them

are afloat upon the common talk of Washington, and are certainly the

aptest, pithiest, and funniest little things imaginable; though, to be

sure, they smack of the frontier freedom, and would not always bear

repetition in a drawing-room, or on the immaculate page of the Atlantic.

[The above passage relating to President Lincoln was one of those omitted

from the article as originally published, and the following note was

appended to explain the omission, which had been indicated by a line of

points:--

We are compelled to omit two or three pages, in which the author

describes the interview, and gives his idea of the personal appearance

and deportment of the President. The sketch appears to have been written

in a benign spirit, and perhaps conveys a not inaccurate impression of

its august subject; but it lacks reverence, and it pains us to see a

gentleman of ripe age, and who has spent years under the corrective

influence of foreign institutions, falling into the characteristic and

most ominous fault of Young America.]

Good Heavens! what liberties have I been taking with one of the

potentates of the earth, and the man on whose conduct more important

consequences depend than on that of any other historical personage of the

century! But with whom is an American citizen entitled to take a

liberty, if not with his own chief magistrate? However, lest the above

allusions to President Lincoln’s little peculiarities (already well known

to the country and to the world) should be misinterpreted, I deem it

proper to say a word or two in regard to him, of unfeigned respect and

measurable confidence. He is evidently a man of keen faculties, and,

what is still more to the purpose, of powerful character. As to his

integrity, the people have that intuition of it which is never deceived.

Before he actually entered upon his great office, and for a considerable

time afterwards, there is no reason to suppose that he adequately

estimated the gigantic task about to be imposed on him, or, at least, had

any distinct idea how it was to be managed; and I presume there may have

been more than one veteran politician who proposed to himself to take the

power out of President Lincoln’s hands into his own, leaving our honest

friend only the public responsibility for the good or ill success of the

career. The extremely imperfect development of his statesmanly

qualities, at that period, may have justified such designs. But the

President is teachable by events, and has now spent a year in a very

arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, capable of much

expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and activities

than those of his early life; and if he came to Washington a backwoods

humorist, he has already transformed himself into as good a statesman (to

speak moderately) as his prime-minister.

Among other excursions to camps and places of interest in the

neighborhood of Washington, we went, one day, to Alexandria. It is a

little port on the Potomac, with one or two shabby wharves and docks,

resembling those of a fishing-village in New England, and the respectable

old brick town rising gently behind. In peaceful times it no doubt bore

an aspect of decorous quietude and dulness; but it was now thronged with

the Northern soldiery, whose stir and bustle contrasted strikingly with

the many closed warehouses, the absence of citizens from their customary

haunts, and the lack of any symptom of healthy activity, while

army-wagons trundled heavily over the pavements, and sentinels paced the

sidewalks, and mounted dragoons dashed to and fro on military errands. I

tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of a Southern army

would be in a sober town of Massachusetts; and the thought considerably

lessened my wonder at the cold and shy regards that are cast upon our

troops, the gloom, the sullen demeanor, the declared or scarcely hidden

sympathy with rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange

thing in human life, that the greatest errors both of men and women often

spring from their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so,

undoubtedly, thousands of warm-hearted, sympathetic, and impulsive

persons have joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal for the cause, but

because, between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which

necessarily lay nearest the heart. There never existed any other

government against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by

such plausible arguments, as against that of the United States. The

anomaly of two allegiances (of which that of the State comes nearest home

to a man’s feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the

General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and

has no symbol but a flag) is exceedingly mischievous in this point of

view; for it has converted crowds of honest people into traitors, who

seem to themselves not merely innocent but patriotic, and who die for a

bad cause with as quiet a conscience as if it were the best. In the vast

extent of our country,--too vast by far to be taken into one small human

heart,--we inevitably limit to our own State, or, at farthest, to our own

section, that sentiment of physical love for the soil which renders an

Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to the dignity and

well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot, treading anywhere

upon it, would make a bruise on each individual breast. If a man loves

his individual State, therefore, and is content to be ruined with her,

let us shoot him if we can, but allow him an honorable burial in the soil

he fights for.

[We do not thoroughly comprehend the author’s drift in the foregoing

paragraph, but are inclined to think its tone reprehensible, and its

tendency impolitic in the present stage of our national difficulties.]

In Alexandria we visited the tavern in which Colonel Ellsworth was

killed, and saw the spot where he fell, and saw the stairs below, whence

Jackson fired the fatal shot, and where he himself was slain a moment

afterwards; so that the assassin and his victim must have met on the

threshold of the spirit-world, and perhaps came to a better understanding

before they had taken many steps on the other side. Ellsworth was too

generous to bear an immortal grudge for a deed like that, done in hot

blood, and by no skulking enemy. The memorial-hunters have completely

cut away the original wood-work around the spot, with their

pocket-knives; and the staircase, balustrade, and floor, as well as the

adjacent doors and door-frames, have recently been renewed; the walls,

moreover, are covered with new paper-hangings, the former having been

torn off in tatters; and thus it becomes something like a metaphysical

question whether the place of the murder actually exists.

Driving out of Alexandria, we stopped on the edge of the city to inspect

an old slave-pen, which is one of the lions of the place, but a very poor

one; and a little farther on, we came to a brick church, where Washington

used sometimes to attend service,--a pre-Revolutionary edifice, with ivy

growing over its walls, though not very luxuriantly. Reaching the open

country, we saw forts and camps on all sides; some of the tents being

placed immediately on the ground, while others were raised over a

basement of logs, laid lengthwise, like those of a log-hut, or driven

vertically into the soil in a circle,--thus forming a solid wall, the

chinks closed up with Virginia mud, and above it the pyramidal shelter of

the tent. Here were in progress all the occupations, and all the

idleness, of the soldier in the tented field: some were cooking the

company-rations in pots hung over fires in the open air; some played at

ball, or developed their muscular power by gymnastic exercise; some read

newspapers; some smoked cigars or pipes; and many were cleaning their

arms or accoutrements,--the more carefully, perhaps, because their

division was to be reviewed by the Commander-in-Chief that afternoon;

others sat on the ground, while their comrades cut their hair,--it being

a soldierly fashion (and for excellent reasons) to crop it within an inch

of the skull; others, finally, lay asleep in breast-high tents, with

their legs protruding into the open air.

We paid a visit to Fort Ellsworth, and from its ramparts (which have been

heaped up out of the muddy soil within the last few months, and will

require still a year or two to make them verdant) we had a beautiful view

of the Potomac, a truly majestic river, and the surrounding country. The

fortifications, so numerous in all this region, and now so unsightly with

their bare, precipitous sides, will remain as historic monuments,

grass-grown and picturesque memorials of an epoch of terror and

suffering: they will serve to make our country dearer and more

interesting to us, and afford fit soil for poetry to root itself in: for

this is a plant which thrives best in spots where blood has been spilt

long ago, and grows in abundant clusters in old ditches, such as the moat

around Fort Ellsworth will be a century hence. It may seem to be paying

dear for what many will reckon but a worthless weed; but the more

historical associations we can link with our localities, the richer will

be the daily life that feeds upon the past, and the more valuable the

things that have been long established: so that our children will be less

prodigal than their fathers in sacrificing good institutions to

passionate impulses and impracticable theories. This herb of grace, let

us hope, will be found in the old footprints of the war.

Even in an aesthetic point of view, however, the war has done a great

deal of enduring mischief, by causing the devastation of great tracts of

woodland scenery, in which this part of Virginia would appear to be very

rich. Around all the encampments, and everywhere along the road, we saw

the bare sites of what had evidently been tracts of hard-wood forest,

indicated by the unsightly stumps of well-grown trees, not smoothly

felled by regular axe-men, but hacked, haggled, and unevenly amputated,

as by a sword or other miserable tool, in an unskilful hand. Fifty years

will not repair this desolation. An army destroys everything before and

around it, even to the very grass; for the sites of the encampments are

converted into barren esplanades, like those of the squares in French

cities, where not a blade of grass is allowed to grow. As to the other

symptoms of devastation and obstruction, such as deserted houses,

unfenced fields, and a general aspect of nakedness and ruin, I know not

how much may be due to a normal lack of neatness in the rural life of

Virginia, which puts a squalid face even upon a prosperous state of

things; but undoubtedly the war must have spoilt what was good, and made

the bad a great deal worse. The carcasses of horses were scattered along

the wayside.

One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was

presented by a party of contrabands, escaping out of the mysterious

depths of Secessia; and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely delay

with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and encountering

nobody to turn them back. They were unlike the specimens of their race

whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far

more agreeable. So rudely were they attired,--as if their garb had grown

upon them spontaneously,--so picturesquely natural in manners, and

wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity (which is quite polished away

from the Northern black man), that they seemed a kind of creature by

themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to

the fawns and rustic deities of olden times. I wonder whether I shall

excite anybody’s wrath by saying this. It is no great matter. At all

events, I felt most kindly towards these poor fugitives, but knew not

precisely what to wish in their behalf, nor in the least how to help

them. For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not

have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant, on

their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger’s land; and I

think my prevalent idea was, that, whoever may be benefited by the

results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes,

the childhood of whose race is now gone forever, and who must henceforth

fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms. On behalf of

my own race, I am glad and can only hope that an inscrutable Providence

means good to both parties.

There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the

children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia in a very

singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from

the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a

brood of Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned

slaves upon the Southern soil,--a monstrous birth, but with which we have

an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistible

impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The

character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this

revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one,--and

two such portents never sprang from an identical source before.

While we drove onward, a young officer on horseback looked earnestly into

the carriage, and recognized some faces that he had seen before; so he

rode along by our side, and we pestered him with queries and

observations, to which he responded more civilly than they deserved. He

was on General McClellan’s staff; and a gallant cavalier, high-booted,

with a revolver in his belt, and mounted on a noble horse, which trotted

hard and high without disturbing the rider in his accustomed seat. His

face had a healthy hue of exposure and an expression of careless

hardihood; and, as I looked at him, it seemed to me that the war had

brought good fortune to the youth of this epoch, if to none beside; since

they now make it their daily business to ride a horse and handle a sword,

instead of lounging listlessly through the duties, occupations,

pleasures--all tedious alike--to which the artificial state of society

limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke

of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish

in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed. The enervating effects of

centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to

enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger,--to kill

men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously,--and to be happy in

following out their native instincts of destruction, precisely in the

spirit of Homer’s heroes, only with some considerable change of mode.

One touch of Nature makes not only the whole world, but all time, akin.

Set men face to face, with weapons in their hands, and they are as ready

to slaughter one another now, after playing at peace and good-will for so

many years, as in the rudest ages, that never heard of peace-societies,

and thought no wine so delicious as what they quaffed from an enemy’s

skull. Indeed, if the report of a Congressional committee may be

trusted, that old-fashioned kind of goblet has again come into use at the

expense of our Northern head-pieces,--a costly drinking-cup to him that

furnishes it! Heaven forgive me for seeming to jest upon such a

subject!--only, it is so odd, when we measure our advances from

barbarism, and find ourselves just here! [We hardly expected this

outbreak in favor of war from the Peaceable Man; but the justness of our

cause makes us all soldiers at heart, however quiet in our outward life.

We have heard of twenty Quakers in a single company of a Pennsylvania

regiment.]

We now approached General McClellan’s head-quarters, which, at that time,

were established at Fairfield Seminary. The edifice was situated on a

gentle elevation, amid very agreeable scenery, and, at a distance, looked

like a gentleman’s seat. Preparations were going forward for reviewing a

division of ten or twelve thousand men, the various regiments composing

which had begun to array themselves on an extensive plain, where,

methought, there was a more convenient place for a battle than is usually

found in this broken and difficult country. Two thousand cavalry made a

portion of the troops to be reviewed. By and by we saw a pretty numerous

troop of mounted officers, who were congregated on a distant part of the

plain, and whom we finally ascertained to be the Commander-in-Chief’s

staff, with McClellan himself at their head. Our party managed to

establish itself in a position conveniently close to the General, to

whom, moreover, we had the honor of an introduction; and he bowed, on his

horseback, with a good deal of dignity and martial courtesy, but no airs

nor fuss nor pretension beyond what his character and rank inevitably

gave him.

Now, at that juncture, and in fact, up to the present moment, there was,

and is, a most fierce and bitter outcry, and detraction loud and low,

against General McClellan, accusing him of sloth, imbecility, cowardice,

treasonable purposes, and, in short, utterly denying his ability as a

soldier, and questioning his integrity as a man. Nor was this to be

wondered at; for when before, in all history, do we find a general in

command of half a million of men, and in presence of an enemy inferior in

numbers and no better disciplined than his own troops, leaving it still

debatable, after the better part of a year, whether he is a soldier or

no? The question would seem to answer itself in the very asking.

Nevertheless, being most profoundly ignorant of the art of war, like the

majority of the General’s critics, and, on the other hand, having some

considerable impressibility by men’s characters, I was glad of the

opportunity to look him in the face, and to feel whatever influence might

reach me from his sphere. So I stared at him, as the phrase goes, with

all the eyes I had; and the reader shall have the benefit of what I saw,

--to which he is the more welcome, because, in writing this article, I

feel disposed to be singularly frank, and can scarcely restrain myself

from telling truths the utterance of which I should get slender thanks

for.

The General was dressed in a simple, dark-blue uniform, without epaulets,

booted to the knee, and with a cloth cap upon his head; and, at first

sight, you might have taken him for a corporal of dragoons, of

particularly neat and soldier-like aspect, and in the prime of his age

and strength. He is only of middling stature, but his build is very

compact and sturdy, with broad shoulders and a look of great physical

vigor, which, in fact, he is said to possess,--he and Beauregard having

been rivals in that particular, and both distinguished above other men.

His complexion is dark and sanguine, with dark hair. He has a strong,

bold, soldierly face, full of decision; a Roman nose, by no means a thin

prominence, but very thick and firm; and if he follows it (which I should

think likely), it may be pretty confidently trusted to guide him aright.

His profile would make a more effective likeness than the full face,

which, however, is much better in the real man than in any photograph

that I have seen. His forehead is not remarkably large, but comes

forward at the eyebrows; it is not the brow nor countenance of a

prominently intellectual man (not a natural student, I mean, or abstract

thinker), but of one whose office it is to handle things practically and

to bring about tangible results. His face looked capable of being very

stern, but wore, in its repose, when I saw it, an aspect pleasant and

dignified; it is not, in its character, an American face, nor an English

one. The man on whom he fixes his eye is conscious of him. In his

natural disposition, he seems calm and self-possessed, sustaining his

great responsibilities cheerfully, without shrinking, or weariness, or

spasmodic effort, or damage to his health, but all with quiet, deep-drawn

breaths; just as his broad shoulders would bear up a heavy burden without

aching beneath it.

After we had had sufficient time to peruse the man (so far as it could be

done with one pair of very attentive eyes), the General rode off,

followed by his cavalcade, and was lost to sight among the troops. They

received him with loud shouts, by the eager uproar of which--now near,

now in the centre, now on the outskirts of the division, and now sweeping

back towards us in a great volume of sound--we could trace his progress

through the ranks. If he is a coward, or a traitor, or a humbug, or

anything less than a brave, true, and able man, that mass of intelligent

soldiers, whose lives and honor he had in charge, were utterly deceived,

and so was this present writer; for they believed in him, and so did I;

and had I stood in the ranks, should have shouted with the lustiest of

them. Of course I may be mistaken; my opinion on such a point is worth

nothing, although my impression may be worth a little more; neither do I

consider the General’s antecedents as bearing very decided testimony to

his practical soldiership. A thorough knowledge of the science of war

seems to be conceded to him; he is allowed to be a good military critic;

but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of

a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest

acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to

produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give

up my faith in General McClellan’s soldiership until he is defeated, nor

in his courage and integrity even then.

Another of our excursions was to Harper’s Ferry,--the Directors of the

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad having kindly invited us to accompany them on

the first trip over the newly laid track, after its breaking up by the

Rebels. It began to rain, in the early morning, pretty soon after we

left Washington, and continued to pour a cataract throughout the day; so

that the aspect of the country was dreary, where it would otherwise have

been delightful, as we entered among the hill-scenery that is formed by

the subsiding swells of the Alleghanies. The latter part of our journey

lay along the shore of the Potomac, in its upper course, where the margin

of that noble river is bordered by gray, over-hanging crags, beneath

which--and sometimes right through them--the railroad takes its way. In

one place the Rebels had attempted to arrest a train by precipitating an

immense mass of rock down upon the track, by the side of which it still

lay, deeply imbedded in the ground, and looking as if it might have lain

there since the Deluge. The scenery grew even more picturesque as we

proceeded, the bluffs becoming very bold in their descent upon the river,

which, at Harper’s Ferry, presents as striking a vista among the hills as

a painter could desire to see. But a beautiful landscape is a luxury,

and luxuries are thrown away amid discomfort; and when we alighted in the

tenacious mud and almost fathomless puddle, on the hither side of the

Ferry (the ultimate point to which the cars proceeded, since the railroad

bridge had been destroyed by the Rebels), I cannot remember that any very

rapturous emotions were awakened by the scenery.

We paddled and floundered over the ruins of the track, and, scrambling

down an embankment, crossed the Potomac by a pontoon-bridge, a thousand

feet in length, over the narrow line of which--level with the river, and

rising and subsiding with it--General Banks had recently led his whole

army, with its ponderous artillery and heavy laden wagons. Yet our own

tread made it vibrate. The broken bridge of the railroad was a little

below us, and at the base of one of its massive piers, in the rocky bed

of the river, lay a locomotive, which the Rebels had precipitated there.

As we passed over, we looked towards the Virginia shore, and beheld the

little town of Harper’s Ferry, gathered about the base of a round hill

and climbing up its steep acclivity; so that it somewhat resembled the

Etruscan cities which I have seen among the Apennines, rushing, as it

were, down an apparently breakneck height. About midway of the ascent

stood a shabby brick church, towards which a difficult path went

scrambling up the precipice, indicating, one would say; a very fervent

aspiration on the part of the worshippers, unless there was some easier

mode of access in another direction. Immediately on the shore of the

Potomac, and extending back towards the town, lay the dismal ruins of the

United States arsenal and armory, consisting of piles of broken bricks

and a waste of shapeless demolition, amid which we saw gun-barrels in

heaps of hundreds together. They were the relics of the conflagration,

bent with the heat of the fire, and rusted with the wintry rain to which

they had since been exposed. The brightest sunshine could not have made

the scene cheerful, nor have taken away the gloom from the dilapidated

town; for, besides the natural shabbiness, and decayed, unthrifty look of

a Virginian village, it has an inexpressible forlornness resulting from

the devastations of war and its occupation by both armies alternately.

Yet there would be a less striking contrast between Southern and New

England villages, if the former were as much in the habit of using white

paint as we are. It is prodigiously efficacious in putting a bright face

upon a bad matter.

There was one small shop which appeared to have nothing for sale. A

single man and one or two boys were all the inhabitants in view, except

the Yankee sentinels and soldiers, belonging to Massachusetts regiments,

who were scattered about pretty numerously. A guard-house stood on the

slope of the hill; and in the level street at its base were the offices

of the Provost-Marshal and other military authorities, to whom we

forthwith reported ourselves. The Provost-Marshal kindly sent a corporal

to guide us to the little building which John Brown seized upon as his

fortress, and which, after it was stormed by the United States marines,

became his temporary prison. It is an old engine-house, rusty and

shabby, like every other work of man’s hands in this God-forsaken town,

and stands fronting upon the river, only a short distance from the bank,

nearly at the point where the pontoon-bridge touches the Virginia shore.

In its front wall, on each side of the door, are two or three ragged

loop-holes, which John Brown perforated for his defence, knocking out

merely a brick or two, so as to give himself and his garrison a sight

over their rifles. Through these orifices the sturdy old man dealt a

good deal of deadly mischief among his assailants, until they broke down

the door by thrusting against it with a ladder, and tumbled headlong in

upon him. I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any

farther than sympathy with Whittier’s excellent ballad about him may go;

nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a

sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from

that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the

death of this blood-stained fanatic has “made the Gallows as venerable as

the Cross!” Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom

fairly, and took it firmly. He himself, I am persuaded (such was his

natural integrity), would have acknowledged that Virginia had a right to

take the life which he had staked and lost; although it would have been

better for her, in the hour that is fast coming, if she could generously

have forgotten the criminality of his attempt in its enormous folly. On

the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking at the matter

unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in

seeing him hanged, if it were only in requittal of his preposterous

miscalculation of possibilities. [Can it be a son of old Massachusetts

who utters this abominable sentiment? For shame.]

But, coolly as I seem to say these things, my Yankee heart stirred

triumphantly when I saw the use to which John Brown’s fortress and

prison-house has now been put. What right have I to complain of any

other man’s foolish impulses, when I cannot possibly control my own? The

engine-house is now a place of confinement for Rebel prisoners.

A Massachusetts soldier stood on guard, but readily permitted our whole

party to enter. It was a wretched place. A room of perhaps twenty-five

feet square occupied the whole interior of the building, having an iron

stove in its centre, whence a rusty funnel ascended towards a hole in the

roof, which served the purposes of ventilation, as well as for the exit

of smoke. We found ourselves right in the midst of the Rebels, some of

whom lay on heaps of straw, asleep, or, at all events, giving no sign of

consciousness; others sat in the corners of the room, huddled close

together, and staring with a lazy kind of interest at the visitors; two

were astride of some planks, playing with the dirtiest pack of cards that

I ever happened to see. There was only one figure in the least military

among all these twenty prisoners of war,--a man with a dark, intelligent,

moustached face, wearing a shabby cotton uniform, which he had contrived

to arrange with a degree of soldierly smartness, though it had evidently

borne the brunt of a very filthy campaign. He stood erect, and talked

freely with those who addressed him, telling them his place of residence,

the number of his regiment, the circumstances of his capture, and such

other particulars as their Northern inquisitiveness prompted them to ask.

I liked the manliness of his deportment; he was neither ashamed, nor

afraid, nor in the slightest degree sullen, peppery, or contumacious, but

bore himself as if whatever animosity he had felt towards his enemies was

left upon the battle-field, and would not be resumed till he had again a

weapon in his hand.

Neither could I detect a trace of hostile feeling in the countenance,

words, or manner of any prisoner there. Almost to a man, they were

simple, bumpkin-like fellows, dressed in homespun clothes, with faces

singularly vacant of meaning, but sufficiently good-humored: a breed of

men, in short, such as I did not suppose to exist in this country,

although I have seen their like in some other parts of the world. They

were peasants, and of a very low order; a class of people with whom our

Northern rural population has not a single trait in common. They were

exceedingly respectful,--more so than a rustic New-Englander ever dreams

of being towards anybody, except perhaps his minister; and had they worn

any hats they would probably have been self-constrained to take them off,

under the unusual circumstance of being permitted to hold conversation

with well-dressed persons. It is my belief that not a single bumpkin of

them all (the moustached soldier always excepted) had the remotest

comprehension of what they had been fighting for, or how they had

deserved to be shut up in that dreary hole; nor, possibly, did they care

to inquire into this latter mystery, but took it as a godsend to be

suffered to lie here in a heap of unwashed human bodies, well warmed and

well foddered to-day, and without the necessity of bothering themselves

about the possible hunger and cold of to-morrow. Their dark prison-life

may have seemed to them the sunshine of all their lifetime.

There was one poor wretch, a wild-beast of a man, at whom I gazed with

greater interest than at his fellows; although I know not that each one

of them, in their semi-barbarous moral state, might not have been capable

of the same savage impulse that had made this particular individual a

horror to all beholders. At the close of some battle or skirmish, a

wounded Union soldier had crept on hands and knees to his feet, and

besought his assistance,--not dreaming that any creature in human shape,

in the Christian land where they had so recently been brethren, could

refuse it. But this man (this fiend, if you prefer to call him so,

though I would not advise it) flung a bitter curse at the poor

Northerner, and absolutely trampled the soul out of his body, as he lay

writhing beneath his feet. The fellow’s face was horribly ugly; but I am

not quite sure that I should have noticed it if I had not known his

story. He spoke not a word, and met nobody’s eye, but kept staring

upward into the smoky vacancy towards the ceiling, where, it might be, he

beheld a continual portraiture of his victim’s horror-stricken agonies.

I rather fancy, however, that his moral sense was yet too torpid to

trouble him with such remorseful visions, and that, for his own part, he

might have had very agreeable reminiscences of the soldier’s death, if

other eyes had not been bent reproachfully upon him and warned him that

something was amiss. It was this reproach in other men’s eyes that made

him look aside. He was a wild-beast, as I began with saying,--an

unsophisticated wild-beast,--while the rest of us are partially tamed,

though still the scent of blood excites some of the savage instincts of

our nature. What this wretch needed, in order to make him capable of the

degree of mercy and benevolence that exists in us, was simply such a

measure of moral and intellectual development as we have received; and,

in my mind, the present war is so well justified by no other

consideration as by the probability that it will free this class of

Southern whites from a thraldom in which they scarcely begin to be

responsible beings. So far as the education of the heart is concerned,

the negroes have apparently the advantage of them; and as to other

schooling, it is practically unattainable by black or white.

Looking round at these poor prisoners, therefore, it struck me as an

immense absurdity that they should fancy us their enemies; since, whether

we intend it so or no, they have a far greater stake on our success than

we can possibly have. For ourselves, the balance of advantages between

defeat and triumph may admit of question. For them, all truly valuable

things are dependent on our complete success; for thence would come the

regeneration of a people,--the removal of a foul scurf that has overgrown

their life, and keeps then in a state of disease and decrepitude, one of

the chief symptoms of which is, that, the more they suffer and are

debased, the more they imagine themselves strong and beautiful. No human

effort, on a grand scale, has ever yet resulted according to the purpose,

of its projectors. The advantages are always incidental. Man’s

accidents are God’s purposes. We miss the good we sought, and do the

good we little cared for. [The author seems to imagine that he has

compressed a great deal of meaning into these little, hard, dry pellets

of aphoristic wisdom. We disagree with him. The counsels of wise and

good men are often coincident with the purposes of Providence; and the

present war promises to illustrate our remark.]

Our Government evidently knows when and where to lay its finger upon its

most available citizens; for, quite unexpectedly, we were joined by some

other gentlemen, scarcely less competent than ourselves, in a commission

to proceed to Fortress Monroe and examine into things in general. Of

course, official propriety compels us to be extremely guarded in our

description of the interesting objects which this expedition opened to

our view. There can be no harm, however, in stating that we were

received by the commander of the fortress with a kind of acid

good-nature, or mild cynicism, that indicated him to be a humorist,

characterized by certain rather pungent peculiarities, yet of no

unamiable cast. He is a small, thin, old gentleman, set off by a large

pair of brilliant epaulets,--the only pair, so far as my observation

went, that adorn the shoulders of any officer in the Union army. Either

for our inspection, or because the matter had already been arranged, he

drew out a regiment of Zouaves that formed the principal part of his

garrison, and appeared at their head, sitting on horseback with rigid

perpendicularity, and affording us a vivid idea of the disciplinarian of

Baron Steuben’s school.

There can be no question of the General’s military qualities; he must

have been especially useful in converting raw recruits into trained and

efficient soldiers. But valor and martial skill are of so evanescent a

character (hardly less fleeting than a woman’s beauty), that Government

has perhaps taken the safer course in assigning to this gallant officer,

though distinguished in former wars, no more active duty than the

guardianship of an apparently impregnable fortress. The ideas of

military men solidify and fossilize so fast, while military science makes

such rapid advances, that even here there might be a difficulty. An

active, diversified, and therefore a youthful, ingenuity is required by

the quick exigencies of this singular war. Fortress Monroe, for example,

in spite of the massive solidity of its ramparts, its broad and deep

moat, and all the contrivances of defence that were known at the not very

remote epoch of its construction, is now pronounced absolutely incapable

of resisting the novel modes of assault which may be brought to bear upon

it. It can only be the flexible talent of a young man that will evolve a

new efficiency out of its obsolete strength.

It is a pity that old men grow unfit for war, not only by their

incapacity for new ideas, but by the peaceful and unadventurous

tendencies that gradually possess themselves of the once turbulent

disposition, which used to snuff the battle-smoke as its congenial

atmosphere. It is a pity; because it would be such an economy of human

existence, if time-stricken people (whose value I have the better right

to estimate, as reckoning myself one of them) could snatch from their

juniors the exclusive privilege of carrying on the war. In case of death

upon the battle-field, how unequal would be the comparative sacrifice!

On one part, a few unenjoyable years, the little remnant of a life grown

torpid; on the other, the many fervent summers of manhood in its spring

and prime, with all that they include of possible benefit to mankind.

Then, too, a bullet offers such a brief and easy way, such a pretty

little orifice, through which the weary spirit might seize the

opportunity to be exhaled! If I had the ordering of these matters, fifty

should be the tenderest age at which a recruit might be accepted for

training; at fifty-five or sixty, I would consider him eligible for most

kinds of military duty and exposure, excluding that of a forlorn hope,

which no soldier should be permitted to volunteer upon, short of the ripe

age of seventy. As a general rule, these venerable combatants should

have the preference for all dangerous and honorable service in the order

of their seniority, with a distinction in favor of those whose

infirmities might render their lives less worth the keeping. Methinks

there would be no more Bull Runs; a warrior with gout in his toe, or

rheumatism in his joints, or with one foot in the grave, would make a

sorry fugitive!

On this admirable system, the productive part of the population would be

undisturbed even by the bloodiest war; and, best of all, those thousands

upon thousands of our Northern girls, whose proper mates will perish in

camp-hospitals or on Southern battle-fields, would avoid their doom of

forlorn old-maidenhood. But, no doubt, the plan will be pooh-poohed down

by the War Department; though it could scarcely be more disastrous than

the one on which we began the war, when a young army was struck with

paralysis through the age of its commander.

The waters around Fortress Monroe were thronged with a gallant array of

ships of war and transports, wearing the Union flag,--“Old Glory,” as I

hear it called in these days. A little withdrawn from our national fleet

lay two French frigates, and, in another direction, an English sloop,

under that banner which always makes itself visible, like a red portent

in the air, wherever there is strife. In pursuance of our official duty

(which had no ascertainable limits), we went on board the flag-ship, and

were shown over every part of her, and down into her depths, inspecting

her gallant crew, her powerful armament, her mighty engines, and her

furnaces, where the fires are always kept burning, as well at midnight as

at noon, so that it would require only five minutes to put the vessel

under full steam. This vigilance has been felt necessary ever since the

Merrimack made that terrible dash from Norfolk. Splendid as she is,

however, and provided with all but the very latest improvements in naval

armament, the Minnesota belongs to a class of vessels that will be built

no more, nor ever fight another battle,--being as much a thing of the

past as any of the ships of Queen Elizabeth’s time, which grappled with

the galleons of the Spanish Armada.

On her quarter-deck, an elderly flag-officer was pacing to and fro, with

a self-conscious dignity to which a touch of the gout or rheumatism

perhaps contributed a little additional stiffness. He seemed to be a

gallant gentleman, but of the old, slow, and pompous school of naval

worthies, who have grown up amid rules, forms, and etiquette which were

adopted full-blown from the British navy into ours, and are somewhat too

cumbrous for the quick spirit of to-day. This order of nautical heroes

will probably go down, along with the ships in which they fought

valorously and strutted most intolerably. How can an admiral condescend

to go to sea in an iron pot? What space and elbow-room can be found for

quarter-deck dignity in the cramped lookout of the Monitor, or even in

the twenty-feet diameter of her cheese-box? All the pomp and splendor of

naval warfare are gone by. Henceforth there must come up a race of

enginemen and smoke-blackened cannoneers, who will hammer away at their

enemies under the direction of a single pair of eyes; and even heroism--

so deadly a gripe is Science laying on our noble possibilities--will

become a quality of very minor importance, when its possessor cannot

break through the iron crust of his own armament and give the world a

glimpse of it.

At no great distance from the Minnesota lay the strangest-looking craft I

ever saw. It was a platform of iron, so nearly on a level with the water

that the swash of the waves broke over it, under the impulse of a very

moderate breeze; and on this platform was raised a circular structure,

likewise of iron, and rather broad and capacious, but of no great height.

It could not be called a vessel at all; it was a machine,--and I have

seen one of somewhat similar appearance employed in cleaning out the

docks; or, for lack of a better similitude, it looked like a gigantic

rat-trap. It was ugly, questionable, suspicious, evidently mischievous,

--nay, I will allow myself to call it devilish; for this was the new

war-fiend, destined, along with others of the same breed, to annihilate

whole navies and batter down old supremacies. The wooden walls of Old

England cease to exist, and a whole history of naval renown reaches its

period, now that the Monitor comes smoking into view; while the billows

dash over what seems her deck, and storms bury even her turret in green

water, as she burrows and snorts along, oftener under the surface than

above. The singularity of the object has betrayed me into a more

ambitious vein of description than I often indulge; and, after all, I

might as well have contented myself with simply saying that she looked

very queer.

Going on board, we were surprised at the extent and convenience of her

interior accommodations. There is a spacious ward-room, nine or ten feet

in height, besides a private cabin for the commander, and sleeping

accommodations on an ample scale; the whole well lighted and ventilated,

though beneath the surface of the water. Forward, or aft (for it is

impossible to tell stem from stern), the crew are relatively quite as

well provided for as the officers. It was like finding a palace, with

all its conveniences, under the sea. The inaccessibility, the apparent

impregnability, of this submerged iron fortress are most satisfactory;

the officers and crew get down through a little hole in the deck,

hermetically seal themselves, and go below; and until they see fit to

reappear, there would seem to be no power given to man whereby they can

be brought to light. A storm of cannon-shot damages them no more than a

handful of dried peas. We saw the shot-marks made by the great artillery

of the Merrimack on the outer casing of the iron tower; they were about

the breadth and depth of shallow saucers, almost imperceptible dents,

with no corresponding bulge on the interior surface. In fact, the thing

looked altogether too safe; though it may not prove quite an agreeable

predicament to be thus boxed up in impenetrable iron, with the

possibility, one would imagine, of being sent to the bottom of the sea,

and, even there, not drowned, but stifled. Nothing, however, can exceed

the confidence of the officers in this new craft. It was pleasant to see

their benign exultation in her powers of mischief, and the delight with

which they exhibited the circumvolutory movement of the tower, the quick

thrusting forth of the immense guns to deliver their ponderous missiles,

and then the immediate recoil, and the security behind the closed

port-holes. Yet even this will not long be the last and most terrible

improvement in the science of war. Already we hear of vessels the

armament of which is to act entirely beneath the surface of the water; so

that, with no other external symptoms than a great bubbling and foaming,

and gush of smoke, and belch of smothered thunder out of the yeasty

waves, there shall be a deadly fight going on below,--and, by and by, a

sucking whirlpool, as one of the ships goes down.

The Monitor was certainly an object of great interest; but on our way to

Newport News, whither we next went, we saw a spectacle that affected us

with far profounder emotion. It was the sight of the few sticks that are

left of the frigate Congress, stranded near the shore,--and still more,

the masts of the Cumberland rising midway out of the water, with a

tattered rag of a pennant fluttering from one of them. The invisible

hull of the latter ship seems to be careened over, so that the three

masts stand slantwise; the rigging looks quite unimpaired, except that a

few ropes dangle loosely from the yards. The flag (which never was

struck, thank Heaven!) is entirely hidden under the waters of the bay,

but is still doubtless waving in its old place, although it floats to and

fro with the swell and reflex of the tide, instead of rustling on the

breeze. A remnant of the dead crew still man the sunken ship, and

sometimes a drowned body floats up to the surface.

That was a noble fight. When was ever a better word spoken than that of

Commodore Smith, the father of the commander of the Congress, when he

heard that his son’s ship was surrendered? “Then Joe’s dead!” said he;

and so it proved. Nor can any warrior be more certain of enduring renown

than the gallant Morris, who fought so well the final battle of the old

system of naval warfare, and won glory for his country and himself out of

inevitable disaster and defeat. That last gun from the Cumberland, when

her deck was half submerged, sounded the requiem of many sinking ships.

Then went down all the navies of Europe and our own, Old Ironsides and

all, and Trafalgar and a thousand other fights became only a memory,

never to be acted over again; and thus our brave countrymen come last in

the long procession of heroic sailors that includes Blake and Nelson, and

so many mariners of England, and other mariners as brave as they, whose

renown is our native inheritance. There will be other battles, but no

more such tests of seamanship and manhood as the battles of the past;

and, moreover, the Millennium is certainly approaching, because human

strife is to be transferred from the heart and personality of man into

cunning contrivances of machinery, which by and by will fight out our

wars with only the clank and smash of iron, strewing the field with

broken engines, but damaging nobody’s little finger except by accident.

Such is obviously the tendency of modern improvement. But, in the mean

while, so long as manhood retains any part of its pristine value, no

country can afford to let gallantry like that of Morris and his crew, any

more than that of the brave Worden, pass unhonored and unrewarded. If

the Government do nothing, let the people take the matter into their own

hands, and cities give him swords, gold boxes, festivals of triumph, and,

if he needs it, heaps of gold. Let poets brood upon the theme, and make

themselves sensible how much of the past and future is contained within

its compass, till its spirit shall flash forth in the lightning of a

song!

From these various excursions, and a good many others (including one to

Manassas), we gained a pretty lively idea of what was going on; but,

after all, if compelled to pass a rainy day in the hall and parlors of

Willard’s Hotel, it proved about as profitably spent as if we had

floundered through miles of Virginia mud, in quest of interesting matter.

This hotel, in fact, may be much more justly called the centre of

Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House, or the

State Department. Everybody may be seen there. It is the meeting-place

of the true representatives of the country,--not such as are chosen

blindly and amiss by electors who take a folded ballot from the hand of a

local politician, and thrust it into the ballot-box unread, but men who

gravitate or are attracted hither by real business, or a native impulse

to breathe the intensest atmosphere of the nation’s life, or a genuine

anxiety to see how this life-and-death struggle is going to deal with us.

Nor these only, but all manner of loafers. Never, in any other spot, was

there such a miscellany of people. You exchange nods with governors of

sovereign States; you elbow illustrious men, and tread on the toes of

generals; you hear statesmen and orators speaking in their familiar

tones. You are mixed up with office-seekers, wire-pullers, inventors,

artists, poets, prosers (including editors, army-correspondents, attaches

of foreign journals, and long-winded talkers), clerks, diplomatists,

mail-contractors, railway-directors, until your own identity is lost

among them. Occasionally you talk with a man whom you have never before

heard of, and are struck with the brightness of a thought, and fancy that

there is more wisdom hidden among the obscure than is anywhere revealed

among the famous. You adopt the universal habit of the place, and call

for mint-julep, a whiskey-skin, a gin-cocktail, a brandy smash, or a

glass of pure Old Rye; for the conviviality of Washington sets in at an

early hour, and, so far as I had opportunity of observing, never

terminates at any hour, and all these drinks are continually in request

by almost all these people. A constant atmosphere of cigar-smoke, too,

envelops the motley crowd, and forms a sympathetic medium, in which men

meet more closely and talk more frankly than in any other kind of air.

If legislators would smoke in session, they might speak truer words, and

fewer of them, and bring about more valuable results.

It is curious to observe what antiquated figures and costumes sometimes

make their appearance at Willard’s. You meet elderly men with frilled

shirt-fronts, for example, the fashion of which adornment passed away

from among the people of this world half a century ago. It is as if one

of Stuart’s portraits were walking abroad. I see no way of accounting

for this, except that the trouble of the times, the impiety of traitors,

and the peril of our sacred Union and Constitution have disturbed, in

their honored graves, some of the venerable fathers of the country,

and summoned them forth to protest against the meditated and

half-accomplished sacrilege. If it be so, their wonted fires are not

altogether extinguished in their ashes,--in their throats, I might rather

say,--for I beheld one of these excellent old men quaffing such a horn of

Bourbon whiskey as a toper of the present century would be loath to

venture upon. But, really, one would be glad to know where these strange

figures come from. It shows, at any rate, how many remote, decaying

villages and country-neighborhoods of the North, and forest-nooks of the

West, and old mansion-houses in cities, are shaken by the tremor of our

native soil, so that men long hidden in retirement put on the garments of

their youth and hurry out to inquire what is the matter. The old men

whom we see here have generally more marked faces than the young ones,

and naturally enough; since it must be an extraordinary vigor and

renewability of life that can overcome the rusty sloth of age, and keep

the senior flexible enough to take an interest in new things; whereas

hundreds of commonplace young men come hither to stare with eyes of

vacant wonder, and with vague hopes of finding out what they are fit for.

And this war (we may say so much in its favor) has been the means of

discovering that important secret to not a few.

We saw at Willard’s many who had thus found out for themselves, that,

when Nature gives a young man no other utilizable faculty, she must be

understood as intending him for a soldier. The bulk of the army had

moved out of Washington before we reached the city; yet it seemed to me

that at least two thirds of the guests and idlers at the hotel were one

or another token of the military profession. Many of them, no doubt,

were self-commissioned officers, and had put on the buttons and the

shoulder-straps, and booted themselves to the knees, merely because

captain, in these days, is so good a travelling-name. The majority,

however, had been duly appointed by the President, but might be none the

better warriors for that. It was pleasant, occasionally, to distinguish

a grizzly veteran among this crowd of carpet-knights,--the trained

soldier of a lifetime, long ago from West Point, who had spent his prime

upon the frontier, and very likely could show an Indian bullet-mark on

his breast,--if such decorations, won in an obscure warfare, were worth

the showing now.

The question often occurred to me,--and, to say the truth, it added an

indefinable piquancy to the scene,--what proportion of all these people,

whether soldiers or civilians, were true at heart to the Union, and what

part were tainted, more or less, with treasonable sympathies and wishes,

even if such had never blossomed into purpose. Traitors there were among

them,--no doubt of that,--civil servants of the public, very reputable

persons, who yet deserved to dangle from a cord; or men who buttoned

military coats over their breasts, hiding perilous secrets there, which

might bring the gallant officer to stand pale-faced before a file of

musketeers, with his open grave behind him. But, without insisting upon

such picturesque criminality and punishment as this, an observer, who

kept both his eyes and heart open, would find it by no means difficult to

discern that many residents and visitors of Washington so far sided with

the South as to desire nothing more nor better than to see everything

reestablished a little worse than its former basis. If the cabinet of

Richmond were transferred to the Federal city, and the North awfully

snubbed, at least, and driven back within its old political limits, they

would deem it a happy day. It is no wonder, and, if we look at the

matter generously, no unpardonable crime. Very excellent people

hereabouts remember the many dynasties in which the Southern character

has been predominant, and contrast the genial courtesy, the warm and

graceful freedom of that region, with what they call (though I utterly

disagree with them) the frigidity of our Northern manners, and the

Western plainness of the President. They have a conscientious, though

mistaken belief, that the South was driven out of the Union by

intolerable wrong on our part, and that we are responsible for having

compelled true patriots to love only half their country instead of the

whole, and brave soldiers to draw their swords against the Constitution

which they would once have died for,--to draw them, too, with a

bitterness of animosity which is the only symptom of brotherhood (since

brothers hate each other best) that any longer exists. They whisper

these things with tears in their eyes, and shake their heads, and stoop

their poor old shoulders, at the tidings of another and another Northern

victory, which, in their opinion, puts farther off the remote, the

already impossible, chance of a reunion.

I am sorry for them, though it is by no means a sorrow without hope.

Since the matter has gone so far, there seems to be no way but to go on

winning victories, and establishing peace and a truer union in another

generation, at the expense, probably, of greater trouble, in the present

one, than any other people ever voluntarily suffered. We woo the South

“as the Lion wooes his bride;” it is a rough courtship, but perhaps love

and a quiet household may come of it at last. Or, if we stop short of

that blessed consummation, heaven was heaven still, as Milton sings,

after Lucifer and a third part of the angels had seceded from its golden

palaces,--and perhaps all the more heavenly, because so many gloomy

brows, and soured, vindictive hearts, had gone to plot ineffectual

schemes of mischief elsewhere.

[We regret the innuendo in the concluding sentence. The war can never be

allowed to terminate, except in the complete triumph of Northern

principles. We hold the event in our own hands, and may choose whether

to terminate it by the methods already so successfully used, or by other

means equally within our control, and calculated to be still more

speedily efficacious. In truth, the work is already done.

We should be sorry to cast a doubt on the Peaceable Man’s loyalty, but he

will allow us to say that we consider him premature in his kindly

feelings towards traitors and sympathizers with treason. As the author

himself says of John Brown (and, so applied, we thought it an atrociously

cold-blooded dictum), “any common-sensible man would feel an intellectual

satisfaction in seeing them hanged, were it only for their preposterous

miscalculation of possibilities.” There are some degrees of absurdity

that put Reason herself into a rage, and affect us like an intolerable

crime,--which this Rebellion is, into the bargain.]

ALICE DOANE’S APPEAL.

On a pleasant afternoon of June, it was my good fortune to be the

companion of two young ladies in a walk. The direction of our course

being left to me, I led them neither to Legge’s Hill, nor to the Cold

Spring, nor to the rude shores and old batteries of the Neck, nor yet to

Paradise; though if the latter place were rightly named, my fair friends

would have been at home there. We reached the outskirts of the town, and

turning aside from a street of tanners and curriers, began to ascend a

hill, which at a distance, by its dark slope and the even line of its

summit, resembled a green rampart along the road. It was less steep than

its aspect threatened. The eminence formed part of an extensive tract of

pasture land, and was traversed by cow paths in various directions; but,

strange to tell, though the whole slope and summit were of a peculiar

deep green, scarce a blade of grass was visible from the base upward.

This deceitful verdure was occasioned by a plentiful crop of “wood-wax,”

which wears the same dark and glossy green throughout the summer, except

at one short period, when it puts forth a profusion of yellow blossoms.

At that season, to a distant spectator, the hill appears absolutely

overlaid with gold, or covered with a glory of sunshine, even beneath a

clouded sky. But the curious wanderer on the hill will perceive that all

the grass, and everything that should nourish man or beast, has been

destroyed by this vile and ineradicable weed: its tufted roots make the

soil their own, and permit nothing else to vegetate among them; so that a

physical curse may be said to have blasted the spot, where guilt and

frenzy consummated the most execrable scene that our history blushes to

record. For this was the field where superstition won her darkest

triumph; the high place where our fathers set up their shame, to the

mournful gaze of generations far remote. The dust of martyrs was beneath

our feet. We stood on Gallows Hill.

For my own part, I have often courted the historic influence of the spot.

But it is singular how few come on pilgrimage to this famous hill; how

many spend their lives almost at its base, and never once obey the

summons of the shadowy past, as it beckons them to the summit. Till a

year or two since, this portion of our history had been very imperfectly

written, and, as we are not a people of legend or tradition, it was not

every citizen of our ancient town that could tell, within half a century,

so much as the date of the witchcraft delusion. Recently, indeed, an

historian has treated the subject in a manner that will keep his name

alive, in the only desirable connection with the errors of our ancestry,

by converting the hill of their disgrace into an honorable monument of

his own antiquarian lore, and of that better wisdom, which draws the

moral while it tells the tale. But we are a people of the present, and

have no heartfelt interest in the olden time. Every fifth of November,

in commemoration of they know not what, or rather without an idea beyond

the momentary blaze, the young men scare the town with bonfires on this

haunted height, but never dream of paying funeral honors to those who

died so wrongfully, and, without a coffin or a prayer, were buried here.