THE FIELD OF SPOTTSYLVANIA.
I walked on to the tavern where Richard H. Hicks was baiting his horse.
The landlord took me to a lumber-room where he kept, carefully locked
up, a very remarkable curiosity. It was the stump of a tree, eleven
inches in diameter, which had been cut off by bullets—not by
cannon-shot, but by leaden bullets—in the Spottsylvania fight. It looked
like a colossal scrub-broom. “I had a stump twice as big as this, cut
off by bullets in the same way, only much smoother; but some Federal
officers took it from me and sent it to the War Department at
Washington.”
He had many battle-scars about his house to show; one of which I
remember: “A shell come in through the wall thar, wrapped itself up in a
bed that stood hyer, and busted in five pieces.”
In one of the rooms I found a Union officer lying on a lounge, sick with
the prevailing fever. He seemed glad to see a Northern face, and urged
me to be seated.
“It is fearfully lonesome here; and just now I have no companion but the
ague.”
Learning that he had been some time in command of the post, I inquired
the reason why the citizens appeared so eager to save the government
expense in feeding their poor.
“It is very simple: they wish to get control of the business in order to
cut off the negroes. They had rather have the assistance the government
affords withdrawn altogether, than that the freedmen should come in for
a share. It is their policy to keep the blacks entirely dependent upon
their former masters, and consequently as much slaves as before.”
“You of course hear many complaints that the blacks will not work?”
“Yes, and they are true in certain cases: they will not work for such
wages as their late owners are willing to give; in other words, they
will not work for less than nothing. But when they have encouragement
they work very well, in their fashion,—which is not the Yankee fashion,
certainly, but the fashion which slavery has bred them up to. They have
not yet learned to appreciate, however, the binding character of a
contract. It is a new thing to them. Besides, the master too often sets
them bad examples by failing to keep his own engagements. He has been in
the habit of breaking his promises to them at his convenience; and now
he finds fault that they do not keep theirs any better. The masters have
not yet learned how to treat their old servants under the new
conditions. They cannot learn that they are no longer slaves. That is
one great source of trouble. On the other hand, where the freedman
receives rational, just, and kind treatment, he behaves well and works
well, almost without exception. I expect a good deal of difficulty soon.
The negroes have in many places made contracts to work for a part of the
crop; now when the corn comes to be divided, their ideas and their
master’s, with regard to what ‘a part’ of the crop is, will be found to
differ considerably. I was not an anti-slavery man at home,” he added;
“and I give you simply the results of my observation since I have been
in the South.”
“What do you think would be the effect if our troops were withdrawn?”
“I hardly know; but I should expect one of two things: either that the
freedmen would be reduced to a worse condition than they were ever in
before, or that they would rise in insurrection.”
The landlord wished me to go and look at his corn. It was certainly a
noble crop. The tops of the monstrous ears towered six or eight feet
from the ground; the tops of the stalks at least twelve or fourteen
feet. He maintained that it would average fifty bushels (of shelled
corn) to the acre. I thought the estimate too high.
“Good corn,” said he, “measures finely; sorry corn porely. And consider,
not a spoonful of manure has been put on this ground fo’ fou’ years.”
“But the ground has been resting; and that is as good as manure.”
“Yes; but it’s mighty good soil that will do as well as this. Now tell
your people, if they want to buy good land cheap, hyer’s their chance.
I’ve got a thousand acres; and I’ll sell off seven hundred acres,
claired or timber land, to suit purchasers. It’s well wo’th twenty
dollars an acre; I’ll sell for ten. It a’n’t fur from market; and thar’s
noth’n’ ye can’t raise on this yer land.”
Of all his thousand acres he had only about fifteen under cultivation.
His cornfield was not as large as it appeared; for, running through the
centre of it, like a titanic furrow, were Lee’s tremendous
intrenchments. These few acres were all the old man had been able to
enclose. There was not another fence on his farm. “I had over ten
thousand panels of fence burnt up for me during the wa’; over eighty
thousand rails.”
“By which army?”
“Both: fust one, and then the other. Our own troops were as bad as the
Yankees.”
Afterwards, as we rode away from the tavern, Richard H. Hicks gave me
the following succinct account of the landlord:
“He used to be a heavy coon-dog. He had fifty head o’ darkeys. He
wouldn’t hire ’em, and dey lef’. Now he has nobody to wo’k de land, he’s
got a light pocket, and so he’s a mind to sell.”
Riding west from the Court-House, and striking across the fields on the
right, we passed McCool’s house, in a pleasant shady place, and reached
the scene where the eight days’ fighting culminated. Of the woods,
thinned and despoiled by the storm of iron and lead, only a ghostly
grove of dead trunks and dreary dry limbs remained. Keeping around the
western edge of these, we came to a strange medley of intrenchments,
which it would have required an engineer to unravel and understand. Here
Grant’s works had been pushed up against Lee’s, swallowing them as one
wave swallows another. Nowhere else have I seen evidences of such close
and desperate fighting. For eight days Grant had been thundering at the
gates of the Confederacy; slowly, with fearful loss, he had been
pressing back the enemy and breaking through the obstructions; until
here at last he concentrated all his strength. Each army fought as if
the gods had decreed that the issue of the war depended upon that
struggle. And so indeed they had: the way to Richmond by this route, so
long attempted in vain, was here opened. The grand result proclaimed
that the eight days’ battles were victories; that the enemy, for the
first time on his own chosen ground, had met with ominous defeat.
Inconceivable was the slaughter. Here two red rivers met and spilled
themselves into the ground. Swift currents from the great West,
tributaries from the Atlantic States and from the Lake States, priceless
rills, precious drops, from almost every community and family in the
Union, swelled the northern stream which burst its living banks and
perished here. Every state, every community, every family mourned.
But behind this curtain of woe was the chiselled awful form, the
terrible front and sublime eyes, of the statue of Fate, the nation’s
unalterable Will. Contemplating that, we were silenced, if not consoled.
Every breast—that of the father going to search for the body of his dead
son, that of the mother reading the brief despatch that pierced her as
the bullet pierced her dear boy, that of the pale wife hastening to the
cot-side of her dying husband, nay, the bleeding breasts of the wounded
and dying, while yet they felt a throb of life—thrilled responsive to
Grant’s simple, significant announcement—
“I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”
It took all summer, indeed, and all winter too; but the result had been
decided at Spottsylvania.
The Rebel armies had invaded the North and been driven ingloriously
back. Many times we had started for Richmond and been repulsed. But at
length we were not repulsed: the overwhelming wave poured over the
embankments.
Such thoughts—or rather deep emotions, of which such thoughts are but
the feeble expression—possess the serious tourist, who stands upon that
field furrowed and ridged with earthworks and with graves,—beside that
grove of shattered and shrivelled trees. A conscious solemnity seems
brooding in the air. If the intrenchments could speak, what a history
could they disclose! But those sphinx-like lips of the earth are rigid
and still. Even the winds seem to hush their whispers about that scene
of desolation. All is silence; and the heart of the visitor is
constrained to silence also.
Upon a hacked and barkless trunk at the angle of the woods, in the midst
of the graves, was nailed aloft a board bearing these lines:
“On Fame’s eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And glory guards with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.”
A thick undergrowth had sprung up in the woods. I noticed, stooping
among the bushes along by the breastworks, an old woman and two young
girls.
“Dey ’re chincapinnin’,” said Richard.
But I observed that they gathered the nuts, not from the bushes, but
from the ground. Curiosity impelled me to follow them. The woman had a
haversack slung at her side; one of the girls carried an open pail. They
passed along the intrenchments, searching intently, and occasionally
picking something out of the dirt. Pressing into the bushes, I accosted
them. They scarcely deigned to look at me, but continued their strange
occupation. I questioned them about the battle; but their answers were
as vague and stupid as if they then heard of it for the first time.
Meanwhile I obtained a glance at the open mouth of the heavily freighted
haversack and the half-filled pail, and saw not chincapins, but several
quarts of old bullets.
Wandering along by the intrenchments, I observed the half-rotted
fragments of a book on the ground. They were leaves from a German pocket
Testament, which doubtless some soldier had carried into the fight. I
picked them up, and glanced my eye over the mildewed pages. By whom were
they last perused? What poor immigrant’s heart, fighting here the
battles of his adopted country, had drawn consolation from those words
of life, which lose not their vitality in any language? What was the
fate of that soldier? Was he now telling the story of his campaigns to
his bearded comrades, wife and children; or was that tongue forever
silent in the dust of the graves that surrounded me? While I pondered,
these words caught my eye:—
“Die du mir gegeben hast, die habe ich bewahret, und ist keiner von
ihnen verloren.”—“Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of
them is lost.”
I looked round upon the graves; I thought of the patriot hosts that had
fallen on these fearful battle-fields,—of the households bereft, of the
husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, who went down to the Wilderness
and were never heard of more; and peace and solace, sweet as the winds
of Paradise, came to me in these words, as I repeated them,—
“None of them is lost, none of them is lost!”