tinkle and smear of preparatory smatter which preluded these symbolic
mummeries, grewsome as tableaux of Chicago option matrimony (three
years with the privilege of five), he was totally ignored. He was out
of date like the hot biscuit of our ancestors with its yellow
saleratus pungency--an auriferous bichloride of alkali. He was
forgotten; full satisfaction guaranteed. When the long wavy or
waveless tangent of bayonets, rustless or rusty as the case might be,
stood forth aligned by a tempestuous adjutant with gestures mysterious
and masonic, the unobtrusive Sutler, clothed in clouds of
invisibility, affronted no tenderness of occult proprieties by any
tangible revelation. He was out of sight, like the costumes of
Tyrolean peasantry, variegated with macaroni braidings. He was
absent, conferring perhaps with some ragged Haggard from Coxeyville;
terms private and no questions asked. When ambidextrous battalions
broke by right of companies to the rear into column, and, emulating
the conscious mastery of a Sampson hiving his mellifluous swarm in the
lion's lordly breast, swept past the statuesque chief of review with
resistless swing and strides invincible, he marched not! He sat in
seclusion like the stage manager of a bicycle tournament; he rested in
abeyance, scorched with scorn and broiling on hot epithets, in the
stratified attitude of a listener trying to hear himself cogitate; he
waited patiently, vibrating from gay to grave, from saucy to sincere;
he lingered; no presents, no flowers. When the reckless inspector
snapped hammers and jingled rammers and squinted inquisitively into
muskets' murderous mouths, our friend the Sutler, profoundly versed in
the preciousness of cautiousness, was nowhere seen. There was no
hayseed in his brain; there were no flies on his intellect. With just
enough body, perhaps, to serve as pretext for a soul to stay on
earth, his great head was crowded from pit to dome with prudence. He
had read of premature explosions and was satisfied; he had no wish to
be wounded by an accidental discharge of his duty; to him eyesight was
a poem and each finger a benediction; he was brave to recklessness,
but even his minor members were precious; he blew into no muzzles, for
safety is sweeter than fame; children half price.
The most startling of all war reminiscences perhaps was that revealed
in far northern Michigan more than twenty years after Lee's surrender.
A party of skaters built huge bonfires on thick ice and finally thawed
out an imprisoned echo of bellum days, which cried impressively with
the broad, plaintive, querulous, rebel accent of long ago: "All we
want is to be let alone!" This current Confederate shibboleth
expressed the luminous Sutler's abiding desire. Even when brass music
stormed the camp as with whiffs of canister and grape, deluging all
ears in torrents of harmonious discord, he failed to materialize.
Suspicious of invidious comparison with the bluff drum major's
majestic gorgeousness, he relieved the strain by withdrawing the
infectious pestilence of his overshadowing personality. He vanished
like a beautiful dream; relatives might call and learn something to
their advantage. There were different opinions as to his
whereabouts--but then it is difference of opinion that supports pool
rooms as well as church choirs. Concord and discord were alike
unheeded. The drum's glum rumble; the mighty trombone's round,
reechoed roar; the feeble fierceness of cracked clarionet; the hissing
tortures of the tormented horn tuned to the shrieks of lacerated
souls; the witchbroth symphony from eye of newt and nose of frog and
bar of gospel hymn that drips in blistering spirals out of
tone-shattering fifes; the ghastly ground-swell's undertone that
floats this fumid wreckage of assassinated sound upon its bleeding
bosom--all these and other aggravated vibratory horrors searched for
him vainly in the nooks and corners of a disgusted atmosphere. He was
gone; front seats reserved for friends of the family.
Hence when, if ever, the Sutler shall be monumentalized in
imperishable staff, it will be in none of those attitudes spectacular.
An attitude of watchfulness, of expectancy, of expostulation, or of
despair like one in last stages of the Baconian theory, were nearest
truth to nature. The flashing outbreaks of his fiery mind, the sorrows
of his overloaded heart, no carven stone or molded bronze can portray
to skeptical contemporaries, or transmit to an undeserving,
unbelieving posterity.
If the post of danger is the post of real honor, the Sutler has been
scandalously overlooked in all awards. His assigned position at the
rear during an advance, and in front during a retreat, fatally exposed
him to depredations of the mixed society indigenous thereto.
Encompassed with perils, a floating Atlantis mislaid in a cannibal
archipelago, his only resource was rat-eyed vigilance and
brass-breasted audacity. A recital of his exploits in defending the
citadel wherein his precious perishables lay would shine with the
story of Farragut lashed to a mast, or Hooker bombarding rainbows, a
veritable torch-light procession down the dark avenues of history.
Painting him in gaudy hues would be as unaesthetic as offering green
goggles to a Delsarte club. But a mild touch of eulogy, a harmless
ginger-pop effervescence of panegyric, may supposedly be ventured
before we throw him on the tender mercies of posterity. Would Sir
Patrick's famed toast to the "bloody 69th"--"The last in the field and
the first to leave it; equal to none!" pass muster? If so, who will
begrudge? None, we defiantly aver, unless it be some surviving
marauder, overloaded with bias and twisted with prejudice until his
withers are wrung, who once wore a half-shaved head for
Sutler-burglary, then trod the brambly path of humiliation out of camp
to the tune of "Rogue's March," while sad breezes sighed through rents
in his respectability.
What a magnificent army that was, in which we served--one of the
grandest in numerical strength, by far the grandest in its
intelligence, its achievements and its inspiration, whereof the world
holds record.
Ninus of Assyria, 2200 B. C., led against the Bactrians a force of
1,700,000 foot, 200,000 horse, and 16,000 chariots armed with scythes.
Cyrus besieged Babylon with 600,000 foot and 120,000 horse.
Italy, a little before Hannibal's time, was able to send into the
field nearly 1,000,000 men. Yet Hannibal, during his campaign in Italy
and Spain, plundered 400 towns and destroyed 300,000 people.
When Xerxes arrived at Thermopylae his force by land and sea aggregated
2,641,610, according to Herodotus, a weighty worthy man, and worth his
weight in sesterces.
January 1, 1861, the army of the United States consisted of nineteen
regiments of all arms, numbering, present and absent, 16,402 officers
and men. From April 1, 1861, to April 28, 1865, a monthly average of
56,000 men, a large army in itself, was recruited, equipped and
supplied for the volunteer forces. At the last-named date 1,034,064
volunteers, after four years' casualties of war, were actually in the
service. From first to last 2,678,967 men were mustered in,
constituting 1,668 regiments of infantry, 232 of cavalry and 52 of
artillery--total 1,952 regiments. In three months, from May 7th to
August 7th, 1865, a total of 640,806 troops were mustered out of
service and restored to the ranks of productive citizenship. The cost
of the war to the United States government has been measured in money
at $3,963,159,751.15. The states in rebellion aggregated an area of
733,144 square miles, with 12,572 miles of navigable rivers, 2,523
miles of sea coast and 7,031 miles of inland boundary.
With these facts for a basis we may, if courageous, institute
comparisons with the great events of history. Courage is essential. A
page of fulminating statistics is as dangerous to the unwary as a
loaded gun-boat floating with the current, cocked, capped and aimed
below the water line. In a village ignorant of the science of the
division of labor, one may get his child christened by the same artist
who repaired his boots. In certain localities one may revel, so to
speak, in the enjoyments of a broad phase of humor, based on fried
onions, carbolized tar and commodities of that sort, or of a broad
plane of sociability, based on plug tobacco, pint flasks and
discussion of dog pedigrees. But in the higher realms of statistics,
and other like researches, success depends upon the cultivation of
devoted courage, courageous fortitude, and a subtle intellectuality
intricate as the distorted diagram on the face of a moss agate.
Fenimore Cooper depicts the army Sutler of the Revolutionary contest
as a woman; habitually Irish; rubicund, snuffy, blasphemous and
addicted to gin--in brief an object of charity, socially and
pecuniarily. She can be fitted out, without violence to probability,
with an eye like a cross-section of hard boiled egg, and the shallow
retreating brow of an ibex; also with cotton in her ears. Her clothing
might easily have been fished out at random from a box of
contributions to hailstorm sufferers. Her coquettish, curly locks were
doubtless of oakum texture and solferino tinge. This much is
conjectural, for when we read on and learn that she was the camp
washerwoman we abandon the pursuit forthwith. Like flowers that bloom
in the Japanese spring, she has nothing to do with the case. She
vanishes like a congressman (before the czar era) constructively
absent when a quorum is to be burst. The Sutler of our more refined
war period was of the man masculine. No woman could have filled this
requisition, even in those days of Brigham Young's multi-wife
propaganda. No woman could have fought the good fight and kept the
stock in such a crisis, even with her trousseau reduced to a calico
basis. Where languorous lilies fill the eye with beauty, let the
gentler sex abide. A woman in our Sutler's sphere would have been more
useless than the horse that sustains superannuated relations to a fire
department. She would have been more expensive than the funeral of a
deceased statesman charged to the contingent fund; more dangerous than
a damp basement. During twenty centuries, while among men the glorious
Roman has degenerated into the monkey-tamer, woman, on the contrary,
has greatly advanced. And the advanced woman has apparently come to
stay. The ethereal creature who succumbed to tight lacing has
vanished. A stronger, sterner class succeed. The manly miss comes
forward, and her demands are something sumptuous. Nothing less than
the mandarin's full yellow jacket and peacock feather will suffice.
But the most fluent champion of uplifted femininity never dared to
rise with a whir to claim this dizzy pre-eminence of a Sutlership. The
cut of her garments may be virile and chic, still she aspired not so
high. The bravest of meat-stall heroines, with slaughter-house eyes
and leaf-lard complexion, may declaim suffrage syllogisms with the
witchery of a South Missouri angel, and her young man may tear his
hair in angry anguish at the thought, but Sutlerships transcend the
ambition of both.
Of the man masculine was our Sutler. Not a woman. Neither a dude. No
gallon of gall in a plaid suit, owed for, could have endured, for one
short seething, scorching month, these multiplex ordeals of
catastrophe. At the current quadrennial round-up of aspirants, when
the internal revenue bung-smeller parades his political scars, the
dude is sometimes seen--in the Sutler's tent never. He would have
suffered all the agonies of a bullock threatened with corn-cob
strangulation, and no compensatory convictions. It were better to be
staked out in the legislative vestibule as custodian of cuspidors. We
have been generous in extending the elective franchise to naturalized
citizens and all who declare their intention to become such--probably
too generous. We have encouraged foreign nations to work off their
damaged and unsalable goods on us, in the immigrant line, as in other
lines. But we have never been cruel. We have pitied the sorrows of our
rich young man. We have certainly never been cruel enough to expose
our helpless, inferior fellow-creatures, those curled darlings of
dandydom, to vicissitudes like that of the Sutlership. That were an
infamy fit to make the green goods gouge and the gold brick trick
eminently respectable by comparison. Dudes have their function. So
have train-boys and other calamities. So have rose sherbet and chewing
gum; so have lambrequins and doilies. But not in war time. Neither
they nor any other gin-fizz effervescence of intangible ephemera.
Their fate in such surroundings would be sad as that of the tough but
meritorious army mule, who survived all war's perils, and thirty years
later shattered his hind leg, from hoof to hip, on the chin of a
traveling highwines apostle from Louisville. There was absolutely no
place for the dude in our army life. The velvet of his voice would
speedily roughen. One week of hard bread would ruin his teeth; one
day's rasp of the wind would utterly devastate his complexion. The
rural visitor who begins his city experiences by being piloted to a
bunco bank, and ends them by being piloted to a pawn-shop, would
encounter no more swift, inglorious career. The horrors of the zero
season are intensified when the man with a cold in his head insists on
discussing financial issues with us at every turn. The inconveniences
of army life were pronounced enough, as it was, without the further
infliction of the dreadful dude, in Sutler's trains or elsewhere. Nay,
verily! This small erratum of nature, this insectiverous
insignificance, had no place or function there. Heredity endowed him
with an intellect requiring a three months' vacation four times a
year, and fate left him to the full enjoyment thereof. Fortunately for
the credit of this nation the rebellion was efficiently and
sufficiently suppressed without his infinitesimal assistance.
It is a sad and significant fact that the navy had no Sutlers. The
sailors and marines missed the picturesque inspiration of his
ministering service; the exuberant and perennial freshness of his
presence; the sounding brass of his tickling symbols. Our surviving
web-footed compatriots modestly demand that due recognition be
accorded their important branch of the belligerent forces. In making
and enforcing claims to our attention, their honest clamor fills the
sea-coast air, from Greenland's icy icebergs to Charleston's shifting
sands. And they have right. Did not each base of our supplies rest on
a waterway patrolled by gunboats? Were not all our armies named from
streams along which their fraternal tin-clads trolleyed and thundered?
Was not brave Jack always ready, manning the yards, when we fell back
for reinforcements, and the like, to receive us with three cheers and
a Dartmouth yell? Did not the Monitor, that grand old frigate, without
a sail, a mast, a rope, a stem, a stern, a yardarm or a bowsprit,
steam straight into the core of our hearts, and ram her chilled steel
nostrils far and away into the realms of historic muse?
The naval veteran of to-day, working his chin industriously to keep
his teeth tight and vigorously dodging as best he may the wiles of the
world, the flesh and the politicians, complains at times that scant
allusion crops out in war reunions to episodes wherein he figures
lustrously. Here let full justice be freely done. For Farragut and
Foote and Porter, for Dupont, Dahlgren, and a hundred more, and all
their thousands of devoted, daring shipmates, let honors thicken with
the passing years, and glories brighten as the centuries roll on! The
same glad impulse burned within their breasts; the same great triumphs
gilded their endeavor. Their manners and methods differed widely from
ours, but in aim and motive we are one. It is their good fortune never
to have known how much they lost in having not the solace of the
Sutler. It was not their fault.
The young recruit, christened Zephaniah, was not responsible therefor,
because he experienced his origin at a period when he was powerless to
direct results. If good people would only learn to vote as they pray,
it might possibly be different. But let even a marine run up against a
brace game in Dead Man's Gulch, and permanent enlightenment is liable
to eventuate. And when the atmosphere of our homes grows mephitic with
the odor of satanic journalism, we may perhaps awaken to the danger of
cultivating depravities that are calculated to stimulate a boom in the
brimstone market.
Connecticut produced a learned pig which could read; New York, not to
be outdone, exhibits some educated donkeys that can write, that can
even edit newspapers, have done it, have been caught in the very act,
and, alas, seem inclined to boast of it. When such things can be, and
overcome us like a summer sunshade, why marvel that the navy had no
Sutler? If a shattered and battered son of the sea comes forward now
and then to bask in the glow of that comradeship we so fondly cherish,
let us bid him jolly welcome. In that long period which elapsed
between the dates when President Jefferson Davis was captured in
confidential costume and President Grover Cleveland escaped from the
congressional trocha, our people were steadily but very slowly growing
to an appreciation of their numerous blessings. During this period
many a stranded ex-sailor found himself filled with the vague unrest
of a rural legislator who for the first time carries a railroad pass
in his pocket. The yearning for travel was irresistable. He has thus
projected himself into the sphere of our observation as far inland as
Indianapolis or Omaha. If we have not seized the opportunity to thank
him for Hampton Roads, and Mobile Bay, and Fort Saint Phillip and
Pittsburg Landing and Fort Fisher, for New Orleans and Pensacola and
Galveston, we have ignored a binding obligation and neglected a
golden opportunity. Let us ignore, neglect no longer.
We yield him full measure of credit. We regret more than words can
express that he never enjoyed the felicity of having a Sutler. If one
were accessible he should be introduced to him, even now!
The impression which seems to be somewhat currently prevalent, in
circles usually well informed on financial topics, that many of the
largest fortunes of our present era were founded on the war-profits of
army Sutlers, is manifestly erroneous. It is at all times easier to
get poor in a minute than rich in a month, according to one of the
wise saws of the transcendental orientals. The wealthy widow who has
wasted her substance in riotous trolley parties can verify it.
Fortunes have originated in the profits of army contracts, judiciously
invested in well-slanted real estate at Pittsburg or Cincinnati. Their
inheritors have perhaps reached congress where they speak speeches
prescribed for them by a scrivener. Upon the condemned horses of the
thrifty quartermaster, or sunken cargoes of costly oats duly
accounted for by economical commissaries, mysteriously materializing
later in tangible cash, large estates have been based. They were
mostly dissipated thereafter by extensive land-purchases in remote
regions notable chiefly for a particularly brazen sky and a specially
mean annual temperature, where the prairie dog yelps to his or her
mate as the case may be, sole disturbers of all the dismal silence in
nature's vast immensity.
Even the sumptuous pay of the pampered and envied private soldiers,
the magnificent stipend of thirteen dollars a month equal to an
average of at least six dollars in the precious gold of that period,
was sometimes duly hoarded at compound interest. This, with occasional
mining stock speculations on the side, may have rolled up in the
course of a generation to that standard of affluence which glitters
with hope of dowry to dudes or alimony to divorce lawyers. Believe it
ye who can; assert it ye who dare. It would not be incredible. The
first kiss, alas! often leads to more.
Balder fictions have found credence at the chrysanthemum club, where
the lack luster eye of the effete plunger gazes into the gurgling
optic of the breadstuff debauchee, and where harvesting a royal flush
is the leading industry. Wilder improbabilities were widely swallowed
before the Russian Israelites landed on our coast and introduced their
rich nut-brown flavor to the ward caucus, together with the corrugated
spirituality of a bethel-vocalist and the vulcanized nerve of a
Tammany leader. Statements like those might pass current in village
drug stores, where streams of limpid, scented crystal burst forth from
marbleized iron fountains at five cents per burst. Rumors equally
incredible have floated around unchallenged at _recherche_ receptions
given by Mrs. Olof Swenson, of the James River Valley, S. D., to the
local colonial dames. Notwithstanding all this, such allegations as
these, with due, determined effort, might be made to harmonize with
possibility like a red cart with a sorrel mule.
But no properly fertilized intellect can ever germinate a supposition
that the rudiments of even one contemporaneous million were laid in
the career of a Sutler. A hundred shillings invested in trade will
give a man meat and wine; in acres it will give him cabbage and salt,
wrote another astute Arabian--or mayhap the same. But the Sutler trade
is a valid and visible exception, verified by experience, costly as an
Indian outbreak and conclusive as the rebound of a London free-trade
banquet in the wilds of West Virginia.
Poets of every class have license to festoon life's oasis, _et
cetera_, with platitudes and illogical assertions. But historians,
like the undersigned, must deal in fragments of the eternal verity.
Even the strawberry roan versifier of Zanesville, shouting through a
hole in his headgear, would burst his organ of ideality in the effort
to imagine heirs for the Sutler. He never gave them kingdoms or
dollars. They can not shake their crimped bangs at him and say he eats
pie with a knife, and absorbs soup with emphasis from the end of a
spoon. They can not give him the cold and gurgling laugh--he never
cultivated them beyond the radius of their capacity, and endowed them
with wealth beyond their powers of assimilation. In all the wide,
wild stretch of liars from Ananias to Zola, none will be found bold
enough to assert it.
If the descendants of the Sutler are snobs and sneaks and shams,
social swells and moral lepers, with breath sweetly perfumed and
hearts bitter as Peruvian bark tempered with aloes, they owe no part
of their equivocal character or position to the influence of wealth
derived from him, for he had none. Thus by his lack of lucre to
bequeath, he has avoided many horrible and torturing responsibilities.
For a man who has been ruined by a woman there is no law and no judge.
The inheritor of lightly won riches enters the race for success in
life with a handicap weighty as the breech of a disabled columbiad.
Gaze not upon the red rectification of the illicit still; quaff
sparingly the purple vintage of the Iowa drug store; yield not to
temptation at the stage of a game where the jack-pot boils over; drop
not your precious cash into the open palm of financial enthusiasts
whose soaring souls see cloudbursts of wealth in every fleece of
floating vapor; yield no credence to the millionaire who boasts of his
large inheritance from a Sutler's profits.
As a rallying point in battle, rivaling redans, redoubts and parapets,
rifle-pits, abattis and _chevaux-de-frise_, the Sutler's wagon has
been apostrophized in many bursts of eloquence at reunion banquets
where wit and wine flow sparkling like the dew. When thrust out
between contending armies by design or accident, that modest vehicle
became a glittering prize worth fighting for and risking amputations
for, beside which even the old flag paled for a space its ineffectual
splurge.
Friends, comrades who had lived together in the little shelter tent,
slept under the same blanket, divided the scanty ration and drank from
the same canteen, rallied around its doubtful treasures with all the
swift energy of a benzine explosion. Foes, hungry as sawtooth sharks,
assailed and reassailed it, the rich fruition of their whetted
desires. Where was the hilarious Sutler then with his bluegrass
fertility of resource? Neither in that beleaguered thesaurus nor even
entrenched beneath it, you may confidingly affirm, but likeliest
from safe shelter of some commodious, commanding stump, observing the
struggle with a rural Sunday morning cheerfulness. Like George Eliot's
hero, he is lord of the moment's change and can charge it with his
soul.