_The Presentation Mania--The Western Virginia Captain in the War
Department--Politeness and Mr. Secretary Stanton--Capture of the Dutch
Doctor--A Genuine Newspaper Sell._
Presentations by men to officers should be prevented by positive orders;
not that the recipients are not usually meritorious, but the practice by
its prevalency is an unjust tax upon a class little able to bear it. A
costly sword must be presented to our Captain,--intimates a man perhaps
warmly in the Captain's confidence. Forthwith the list is started, and
with extra guard and fatigue duty before the eyes of the men, it makes a
unanimous circuit of the command. Active newspaper reporters, from the
sheer merit of the officer, may be, and may be from the additional
inducement of a little compensation, give an account of the presentation
in one of the dailies that fills the breasts of the officer's friends
with pride, while the decreased remittance of the private may keep back
some creature comfort from his wife and little ones. Statistics showing
how far these presentations are spontaneous offerings, and to what
extent results of wire-working at Head-quarters, would prove more
curious than creditable.
Our Brigade did not escape the Presentation Mania. Never did it develop
itself in a command, however, more spontaneously. The plain, practical
sense of our Brigadier was the more noticeable to the men, on account of
its marked contrast to the quibbles and conceit of the General of
Division. The officers and men of the Brigade had with great care and
cost selected a noble horse of celebrated stock upon which to mount
their Brigadier, and, on a pleasant evening in March, a crowd informally
assembled was busied in arranging for the morrow the programme of
presentation. The General of Division, so far in the cold in the matter,
was just then making himself sensibly felt.
"Colonel," said an officer, who from the direction of Brigade
Head-quarters neared the crowd, addressing a central figure, "you might
as well take the General's horse out to grass awhile."
"Explain yourself," say several.
"Pigey has his foot in the whole matter nicely. The General, you know,
just returned this evening from sick leave. Well, he and his friends,
who came with him to see the presentation ceremonies, had not been at
Head-quarters an hour before that sucker-mouthed Aid made his
appearance, and said that he was directed by the General Commanding the
Division to place him under arrest. The fellow was drunk, and the
General hardly deigned to notice him. As he staggered away, he muttered
that there were fifteen charges against him, and that he would find the
General's grip a tight one."
Amid exclamations, indicating that the perplexity of the matter could
not prevent a sly smile at the ludicrous position in which the Brigadier
and his friends from abroad were placed, the officer continued--
"But the General brings good news from Washington. The Colonel and
Lieutenant-Colonel of the 210th return at an early day."
"Yes, sir, that is so," broke in our Western Virginia Captain, who had
just returned from enjoying one of the furloughs at that time so freely
distributed. "At last the War Department, or rather Mr. Secretary
Stanton, for all the balance of the department, as far as I could learn,
thought the delay outrageous, fulfils its promise. After the
Lieutenant-Colonel had been at home on a sick leave for some time, and
we all thought the matter about dropped; what should I see one day but
his name, with thirty-two others, in a daily, under the head of
'Dismissals from the Army.' There it was, dismissed for doing his duty,
and published right among the names of scoundrels who had skulked five
times from the battle-field; men charged with drunkenness, and every
offence known to the Military Decalogue. My furlough had just come, and
I started for Washington by the next boat, bound to see how the matter
stood. The morning after I got there, I posted up bright and early to
the War Department, but a sergeant near the door, with more polish on
his boots than in his manners, told me that I had better keep shady
until ten o'clock, as business hours commenced then. I sat down on a
pile of old lumber near by, and passed very nearly three hours in
wondering why so many broad-shouldered fellows, who could make a sabre
fall as heavy as the blow of a broad-axe, were lounging about or going
backward and forward upon errands that sickly boys might do as well. As
it grew nearer ten, able-bodied, bright-looking officers, Regulars, as I
was told, educated at Uncle Sam's expense to fight, elegantly
shoulder-strapped, passed in to drive quills in a quiet department,
'remote from death's alarms,' and I wondered if some spirited clerks and
schoolmasters that I knew, who would have been willing to have gone bent
double under knapsacks, if the Surgeon would have accepted them, would
not have performed the duty better, and have permitted the country to
have the benefit of the military education of these gentlemen."
"I see, Captain, that you don't understand it," interrupted an officer.
"Our Regular Officers are not all alike patriotic up to the fighting
point; and it is a charitable provision that permits one, say,--who is
married to a plantation of niggers, or who has other Southern sympathies
or affinities, or who may have conscientious scruples about fighting
against our 'Southern brethren,'--to take a snug salary in some peaceful
department, or to go on recruiting service in quiet towns, where
grasshoppers can be heard singing for squares, and where he is under the
necessity of killing nothing but time, and wounding nothing but his
country's honor and his own, if a man of that description can be said to
possess any. In their offices, these half-hearted Lieutenants, Captains,
and Colonels, are like satraps in their halls, unapproachable, except by
passing bayonets that should be turned towards Richmond."
"Well, if I don't understand it," resumed the Captain, "it is high time
that Uncle Sam understood it. If these men are half-hearted, they will
write no better than they fight, and I guess if the truth could be got
at, they are responsible for most of the clogging in the Commissary and
Quarter-Master Departments. But you've got me off my story. At ten
o'clock I staved in, just as I was, my uniform shabby, and my boots
with a tolerably fair representation of Aquia mud upon them. Passing
from one orderly to another, I brought up at the Adjutant-General's
office, and there I was referred to the head clerk's office, and there a
pleasant-looking, gentlemanly Major told me that the matter would be
certainly set straight as soon as the court-martial records were
forwarded; that they had telegraphed for them again and again; and that
at one time they were reported lost, and at another carried off by one
of General Burnside's Staff Officers. As I had heard of records of the
kind being delayed before, I intimated rather plainly what I thought of
the matter, and told him that I wanted to see the Secretary himself. He
smiled, and told me to take my place in the rear of an odd-looking mixed
assemblage of persons in the hall, who were crowding towards an open
door. It was after two o'clock and after I had stood until I felt
devotional about the knees, when my turn brought me before the door, and
showed me Mr. Secretary himself, standing behind a desk, tossing his
head, now on this side and now on that, with quick jerks, like a
short-horned bull in fly time, despatching business and the hopes of the
parties who had it from their looks, about the same time. Right manfully
did he stand up to his work; better than to his word perhaps, if reports
that I have heard be true."
"A pretty-faced, middle-aged lady approached his desk, and I thought
that I could see a rather awkward effort at a smile hang around the
upper corners of his huge, black beard, as his eye caught her features
through his spectacles, and he received her papers. But the gruff manner
in which he told her the next moment that he would not grant it, showed
I was mistaken.
"'But I was told, Mr. Secretary,' said the woman, in tremulous tones,
'that my papers were all right, and that your assent was a mere
formality. I have three other sons in the service, and this boy is
not'----
"'I don't care what you have been told,' retorted the Secretary, in a
manner that made me so far forget my reverence that my toes suddenly
felt as if disposed to propel something that, strange to say, had the
semblance of humanity, and was not distant at the time. 'You had better
leave the room, madam!' continued the same voice, somewhat gruffer and
sterner, as the poor woman burst into tears at the sudden
disappointment. 'You only interrupt and annoy. We are accustomed to this
sort of thing here.'
"I looked at him as he took the papers of another for examination, and
wondered whether we were really American citizens--sovereigns as our
politicians tell us when on the stump, and whether he was really a
public servant. But I couldn't see it.
"Now, civility is a cheap commodity, and, in my humble opinion, the
least that can be expected of men filling public positions is that they
should possess it in an ordinary degree.
"Three o'clock came, but it was not my turn yet. In fact, the treatment
of the lady had so disgusted me, that I was quite ready to leave when a
servant announced that business hours were over. That evening, I found
out to my great satisfaction that men considerably more influential than
myself had held the Secretary to the promises he had made them, and that
notwithstanding all his backing and filling the order for their return
would be issued."
The disappointment of the morrow was a standing topic in camp and on the
picket line for the ensuing three weeks. The only doubt that existed
with the Court convened for the trial of the Brigadier appeared to be
whether the numerous charges excelled most in frivolity or malice, as a
slight reprimand for writing an unofficial account of an engagement,--an
offence of which several members of the Court had, by their own
confession, repeatedly been guilty,--was the sole result of its labor.
His restoration to command, the presentation, and the return of the
Colonels followed in rapid succession amid the rejoicings of officers
and men.
--Amid the waste of meadow and woodland that characterized the face of
that country, the houses of the farmers, or rather, to use the
grandiloquent language of the inhabitants, "the mansions of the
planters," were objects of peculiar interest. In their quaint appearance
and general air of dilapidation, they stood as relics of the
civilization of another age. Centuries, seemingly, of important events
in the law of progress are crowded into years of our campaigning. The
social status of a large country semi-civilized--whether you regard the
intelligence of its people or the condition of its society--is being
suddenly altered. The war accomplishes what well-designing men lacked
nerve and ability to execute--emancipation. The blessings of a purer
civilization will follow as naturally as sunshine follows storm.
And yet here and there these old buildings would be varied by one
evidently framed upon a Yankee model. Such was what was widely known in
the army as "the Moncure House." On a commanding site at the edge of a
meadow several miles in length, and that seemed from the abrupt bluffs
that bordered it to have been once the bottom of a lake, this two-story
weather-board frame was readily discernible. Its location made it a
prominent point, too, upon the picket line, and it was favored above its
fellows by daily and nightly occupancy by officers of the command. At
this period the Regiment almost lived upon the picket line. An old
wench, with several chalky complexioned children, whose paternal
ancestor was understood to be under a musket of English manufacture
perhaps, somewhere on the south side of the Rappahannock, occupied the
kitchen of the premises. She was unceasing in reminding her military
co-lodgers that the room used by them as head-quarters,--from the window
of which you could take in at a glance the fine expanse of valley,
threaded by a sparkling tributary of the Potomac,--was massa's study,
and that massa was a preacher and had written a "right smart" lot of
sermons in that very place. In the eyes of Dinah the room was invested
with a peculiar sanctity. Not so with its present occupants, who could
not learn that the minister, who was a large slaveholder, had remembered
"those in bonds as bound with them," and who were quite content that
artillery proclaiming "liberty throughout the land" in tones of thunder
had driven away this vender of the divinity of the institution of
slavery.
In this room, on seats rudely improvised, for its proper furniture had
long since disappeared, some officers not on duty were passing a
pleasant April afternoon, when their reveries of other days and rehashes
of old camp yarns were interrupted by the sudden advent of an officer
who a week previously had been detailed in charge of a number of men to
form part of an outer picket station some distance up the river. His
face indicated news, and he was at once the centre of attraction.
"Colonel!" exclaimed he, without waiting to be questioned, "two of our
best men have been taken prisoners, and the little Dutch Doctor----"
"What has happened to him?" from several at once.
"Was taken prisoner and released, but had his horse stolen."
His hearers breathed freer when they heard of the personal safety of the
Doctor, and the officer continued--
"And the loss of our men and his horse has all happened through the
carelessness,--to treat it mildly,--of the exhorting Colonel. He is in
command of the station, and yesterday afternoon the Doctor was on duty
at his head-quarters. In came one of the black-eyed beauties that live
in a house near the ford, about half a mile from the station, boo-hooing
at a terrible rate--that the youngest rebel of her family was dying with
the croup--and that no doctor was near--and all that old story. The
Colonel was fool enough to order the Doctor to mount his horse and go
with the woman. Well, the Doctor had got near the house, when out sprang
two Mississippi Riflemen from the pines on either side of the road and
levelled their pieces at him. The Doctor had to dismount, and they sent
him back on foot. Luckily the Colonel, who, as black Charley says, has
been praying for a star for some time past, had borrowed the Doctor's
dress sword on the pretence that it was lighter to carry, but on the
ground, really, that it looked more Brigadier-like, or he would have
lost that too. I was on duty down by the river hardly two hours after it
happened, and as there is no firing now along the picket line the
soldiers were free-and-easy on both sides. All at once I heard laughter
on the other side, and looking over, I saw a short, thick-set Grey-back
riding the stolen horse near the water's edge. Presently two other
Grey-backs sprang on either side of the horse's head, and with pieces
levelled, in tones loud enough for us to hear, demanded his surrender.
"'Why, shentlemen Rebels, mein Gott, you no take non compatants, me
surgeon,' said the Grey-back on the horse, in equally loud voice.
"'No, d--n you! Dismount! We don't want you. You can be of more service
to the Confederate cause where you are. But we must have the nag.'
"'Mine private property,' he replied, as he dismounted.
"'In a horn,' said one of the Grey-backs, pointing to the U. S. on the
shoulder of the beast. 'That your private mark, eh?'
"'You no shentlemen. By G--t, no honor,' retorted the Grey-back who
personated the Doctor, as he swelled himself and strutted about on the
sand in such a high style of indignation as to draw roars of laughter
from both sides of the river.
"That rather paid us with interest for the way we sold them the day
before. You know they have been crazy after our dailies ever since the
strict general order preventing the exchange of the daily papers between
pickets. Well, that dare-devil of a law student, Tom, determined to have
some fun with them. So when they again, as they often had before, came
to the river with hands full of Richmond papers, proposing exchange, Tom
flourished a paper also. That was the old signal, and forthwith a
raw-boned Alabamian stripped and commenced wading toward a rock that
jutted up in the middle of the river. Tom stripped also, and met him at
the rock. Mum was the word between them, and each turned for his own
shore, the Grey-back with Tom's paper, and Tom with several of the
latest Richmond prints. A crowd of Rebel officers met their messenger at
the water's edge and received the paper. The one who opened it, bent
nearly double with laughter, and the rest rapidly followed as their eyes
lit on the stars and stripes printed in glowing colors on the first page
of the little religious paper that our Chaplains distribute so freely in
camp, called 'The Christian Banner.' One old officer, apparently of
higher rank than the rest, cursed it as he went up the bank as a 'd----d
Yankee sell,--' which did not in the least lessen our enjoyment of Tom's
success.
"But with our two men and the Doctor's horse they have squared accounts
with us since, and all through the fault of the Colonel."
In response to inquiries as to how, when, and where, the officer
continued--
"There was a narrow strip of open land between a belt of woods and the
river. The Colonel posted our two men on the inside of the woods, where
they had no open view towards the enemy at all. That rainy night this
week the Rebs came over in boats and gobbled them up. The Colonel
attributed their loss to their own neglect, and next morning their place
was supplied by four old soldiers, as he called them, from his own
Regiment. That same day at noon, in broad daylight, they were taken."
"And if he were not a firm friend at Division Head-quarters there would
be a dismissal from the service for cause," said an officer of the
crowd.
"Our Corps Commander is too much of a soldier to let it go by," resumed
the officer, "if our Brigadier can force it through Division
Head-quarters, and bring it to his notice."
* * * * *
The order that introduced into the service the novelty of carrying eight
days' rations on a march, had been discussed for some time in the
Regiment. That night the Regiment was withdrawn from the picket line,
and preparations were forthwith made for a practical illustration of the
order on the morrow.