The boy went forth to real service, and to successive battles at
Kingston, at Whitehall, and at Goldsborough; and in all this did his
duty bravely and faithfully. He met the temptations and dangers of a
soldier's life with the pure-hearted firmness of a Christian child,
neither afraid nor ashamed to remember his baptismal vows, his
Sunday-school teachings, and his mother's wishes.
He had passed his promise to his mother against drinking and smoking,
and held it with a simple, childlike steadiness. When in the midst of
malarious swamps, physicians and officers advised the use of tobacco.
The boy writes to his mother: "A great many have begun to smoke, but I
shall not do it without your permission, though I think it does a
great deal of good."
In his leisure hours, he was found in his tent reading; and before
battle he prepared his soul with the beautiful psalms and collects for
the day, as appointed by his church, and writes with simplicity to his
friends:--
"I prayed God that he would watch over me, and if I fell, receive my
soul in heaven; and I also prayed that I might not forget the cause I
was fighting for, and turn my back in fear."
After nine months' service, he returned with a soldier's experience,
though with a frame weakened by sickness in a malarious region. But
no sooner did health and strength return than he again enlisted, in
the Massachusetts cavalry service, and passed many months of constant
activity and adventure, being in some severe skirmishes and battles
with that portion of Sheridan's troops who approached nearest to
Richmond, getting within a mile and a half of the city. At the close
of this raid, so hard had been the service, that only thirty horses
were left out of seventy-four in his company, and Walter and two
others were the sole survivors among eight who occupied the same
tent.
On the sixteenth of August, Walter was taken prisoner in a skirmish;
and from the time that this news reached his parents, until the 18th
of the following March, they could ascertain nothing of his fate. A
general exchange of prisoners having been then effected, they learned
that he had died on Christmas Day in Salisbury Prison, of hardship and
privation.
What these hardships were is, alas! easy to be known from those too
well-authenticated accounts published by our government of the
treatment experienced by our soldiers in the Rebel prisons.
Robbed of clothing, of money, of the soldier's best friend, his
sheltering blanket,--herded in shivering nakedness on the bare
ground,--deprived of every implement by which men of energy and spirit
had soon bettered their lot,--forbidden to cut in adjacent forests
branches for shelter, or fuel to cook their coarse food,--fed on a
pint of corn-and-cob-meal per day, with some slight addition of
molasses or rancid meat,--denied all mental resources, all letters
from home, all writing to friends,--these men were cut off from the
land of the living while yet they lived,--they were made to dwell in
darkness as those that have been long dead.
By such slow, lingering tortures,--such weary, wasting anguish and
sickness of body and soul,--it was the infernal policy of the Rebel
government either to wring from them an abjuration of their country,
or by slow and steady draining away of the vital forces to render them
forever unfit to serve in her armies.
Walter's constitution bore four months of this usage, when death came
to his release. A fellow sufferer, who was with him in his last hours,
brought the account to his parents.
Through all his terrible privations, even the lingering pains of slow
starvation, Walter preserved his steady simplicity, his faith in God,
and unswerving fidelity to the cause for which he was suffering.
When the Rebels had kept the prisoners fasting for days, and then
brought in delicacies to tempt their appetite, hoping thereby to
induce them to desert their flag, he only answered, "I would rather be
carried out in that dead-cart!"
When told by some that he must steal from his fellow sufferers, as
many did, in order to relieve the pangs of hunger, he answered, "No, I
was not brought up to that!" And so when his weakened system would no
longer receive the cobmeal which was his principal allowance, he set
his face calmly towards death. He grew gradually weaker and weaker and
fainter and fainter, and at last disease of the lungs set in, and it
became apparent that the end was at hand.
On Christmas Day, while thousands among us were bowing in our
garlanded churches or surrounding festive tables, this young martyr
lay on the cold, damp ground, watched over by his destitute friends,
who sought to soothe his last hours with such scanty comforts as their
utter poverty afforded,--raising his head on the block of wood which
was his only pillow, and moistening his brow and lips with water,
while his life ebbed slowly away, until about two o'clock, when he
suddenly roused himself, stretched out his hand, and, drawing to him
his dearest friend among those around him, said, in a strong, clear
voice:--
"I am going to die. Go tell my father I am ready to die, for I die for
God and my country,"--and, looking up with a triumphant smile, he
passed to the reward of the faithful.
And now, men and brethren, if this story were a single one, it were
worthy to be had in remembrance; but Walter Raymond is not the only
noble-hearted boy or man that has been slowly tortured and starved and
done to death, by the fiendish policy of Jefferson Davis and Robert
Edmund Lee. No,--wherever this simple history shall be read, there
will arise hundreds of men and women who will testify, "Just so died
my son!" "So died my brother!" "So died my husband!" "So died my
father!" The numbers who have died in these lingering tortures are to
be counted, not by hundreds, or even by thousands, but by tens of
thousands.
And is there to be no retribution for a cruelty so vast, so
aggravated, so cowardly and base? And if there is retribution, on
whose head should it fall? Shall we seize and hang the poor, ignorant,
stupid, imbruted semi-barbarians who were set as jailers to keep these
hells of torment and inflict these insults and cruelties? or shall we
punish the educated, intelligent chiefs who were the head and brain of
the iniquity?
If General Lee had been determined not to have prisoners starved or
abused, does any one doubt that he could have prevented these things?
Nobody doubts it. His raiment is red with the blood of his helpless
captives. Does any one doubt that Jefferson Davis, living in ease and
luxury in Richmond, knew that men were dying by inches in filth and
squalor and privation in the Libby Prison, within bowshot of his own
door? Nobody doubts it. It was his will, his deliberate policy, thus
to destroy those who fell into his hands. The chief of a so-called
Confederacy, who could calmly consider among his official documents
incendiary plots for the secret destruction of ships, hotels, and
cities full of peaceable people, is a chief well worthy to preside
over such cruelties; but his only just title is President of
Assassins, and the whole civilized world should make common cause
against such a miscreant.
There has been, on both sides of the water, much weak, ill-advised
talk of mercy and magnanimity to be extended to these men, whose
crimes have produced a misery so vast and incalculable. The wretches
who have tortured the weak and the helpless, who have secretly plotted
to supplement, by dastardly schemes of murder and arson, that strength
which failed them in fair fight, have been commiserated as brave
generals and unfortunate patriots, and efforts are made to place them
within the comities of war.
It is no feeling of personal vengeance, but a sense of the eternal
fitness of things, that makes us rejoice, when criminals who have so
outraged every sentiment of humanity are arrested and arraigned and
awarded due retribution at the bar of their country's justice. There
are crimes against God and human nature which it is treason alike to
God and man not to punish; and such have been the crimes of the
traitors who were banded together in Richmond.
If there be those whose hearts lean to pity, we can show them where
all the pity of their hearts may be better bestowed than in deploring
the woes of assassins. Let them think of the thousands of fathers,
mothers, wives, sisters, whose lives will be forever haunted with
memories of the slow tortures in which their best and bravest were
done to death.
The sufferings of those brave men are ended. Nearly a hundred thousand
are sleeping in those sad nameless graves,--and may their rest be
sweet! "There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be
at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice
of the oppressor." But, O ye who have pity to spare, spare it for the
broken-hearted friends, who, to life's end, will suffer over and over
all that their dear ones endured. Pity the mothers who hear their
sons' faint calls in dreams, who in many a weary night-watch see them
pining and wasting, and yearn with a lifelong, unappeasable yearning
to have been able to soothe those forsaken, lonely death-beds. O man
or woman, if you have pity to spare, spend it not on Lee or
Davis,--spend it on their victims, on the thousands of living hearts
which these men of sin have doomed to an anguish that will end only
with life!
Blessed are the mothers whose sons passed in battle,--a quick, a
painless, a glorious death! Blessed in comparison,--yet we weep for
them. We rise up and give place at sight of their mourning-garments.
We reverence the sanctity of their sorrow. But before this other
sorrow we are dumb in awful silence. We find no words with which to
console such grief. We feel that our peace, our liberties, have been
bought at a fearful price, when we think of the sufferings of our
martyred soldiers. Let us think of them. It was for _us_ they bore
hunger and cold and nakedness. They might have had food and raiment
and comforts, if they would have deserted our cause,--and they did
not. Cut off from all communication with home or friends or brethren,
dragging on the weary months, apparently forgotten,--still they would
not yield, they would not fight against us; and so for us at last they
died.
What return can we make them? Peace has come, and we take up all our
blessings restored and brightened; but if we look, we shall see on
every blessing a bloody cross.
When three brave men broke through the ranks of the enemy, to bring to
King David a draught from the home well, for which he longed, the
generous-hearted prince would not drink it, but poured it out as an
offering before the Lord; for he said, "Is not this the blood of the
men that went in jeopardy of their lives?"
Thousands of noble hearts have been slowly consumed to secure to us
the blessings we are rejoicing in. We owe a duty to these our
martyrs,--the only one we can pay.
In every place, honored by such a history and example, let a monument
be raised at the public expense, on which shall be inscribed the names
of those who died for their country, and the manner of their death.
Such monuments will educate our young men in heroic virtue, and keep
alive to future ages the flame of patriotism. And thus, too, to the
aching heart of bereaved love shall be given the only consolation of
which its sorrows admit, in the reverence which is paid to its lost
loved ones.