IN AND AROUND RICHMOND.
If temples are a token of godliness, Richmond should be a holy city. It
has great pride in its churches; two of which are noteworthy.
The first is St. John’s Church, on Church Hill,—a large, square-looking
wooden meeting-house, whose ancient walls and rafters once witnessed a
famous scene, and reëchoed words that have become historical. Here was
delivered Patrick Henry’s celebrated speech, since spouted by every
schoolboy,—“Give me liberty or give me death!” Those shining sentences
still hang like a necklace on the breast of American Liberty. The old
meeting-house stands where it stood, overlooking the same earth and the
same beautiful stream. But the men of that age lie buried in the dust of
these old crowded church-yards; and of late one might almost have said
that the wisdom of Virginia lay buried with them.
On the corner of Grace Street, opposite my hotel, I looked out every
morning upon the composite columns and pilasters, and spire clean as a
stiletto, of St. Paul’s Church, with which are connected very different
associations. This is the church, and (if you enter) yonder is the pew,
in which Jeff Davis sat on Sundays, and heard the gospel of Christ
interpreted from the slave-owners’ point of view. Here he sat on that
memorable Sabbath when Lee’s dispatch was handed in to him, saying that
Richmond was lost. The same preacher who preached on that day, still
propounds his doctrines from the desk. The same sexton who handed in the
dispatch glances at you, and, if you are well dressed, offers you a seat
in a good place. The same white congregation that arose then in
confusion and dismay, on seeing the President go out, sit quietly once
more in their seats; and the same colored congregation looks down from
the nigger gallery. The seats are still bare,—the cushions that were
carried to the Rebel hospitals, to serve as mattresses, having not yet
been returned.
Within an arrow’s shot from St. Paul’s, in the State Capitol, on Capitol
Square, were the halls of the late Confederate Congress. I visited them
only once, and found them a scene of dust and confusion,—emblematical.
The desks and seats had been ripped up, and workmen were engaged in
sweeping out the last vestiges of Confederate rule. The furniture, as I
learned, was already at an auction-room on Main Street, selling under
the hammer. I reported the fact to Mr. C——, of the Union Commission, who
was looking for furniture to be used in the freedmen’s schools; and he
made haste to bid for the relics. I hope he got them; for I can fancy no
finer stroke of poetical justice than the conversion of the seats on
which sat the legislators of the great slave empire, and the desks on
which they wrote, into seats and desks for little negro children
learning to read.
It was interesting, by the light of recent events, and in company with
one who knew Richmond of yore, to make the tour of the old negro
auction-rooms. Davis & Co.’s Negro Bazaar was fitting up for a concert
hall. We entered a grocery store,—a broad basement room, with a low,
dark ceiling, supported by two stout wooden pillars. “I’ve seen many a
black Samson sold, standing between those posts; and many a woman too,
as white as you or I.” Now sugar and rice were sold there, but no more
human flesh and blood. The store was kept by a Northern man, who did not
even know what use the room had served in former years.
A short ride from the city are two cemeteries worth visiting. On one
side, Hollywood, where lie buried President Monroe and his doctrine. On
the other side, Oak Wood, a wild, uncultivated hill, half covered with
timber and brush, shading numerous Confederate soldiers’ graves. Here,
set apart from the rest by a rude fence, is the “Yankee Cemetery,”
crowded with the graves of patriot soldiers, who fell in battle, or died
of slow starvation and disease in Richmond prisons; a melancholy field,
which I remember as I saw it one gusty September day, when wild winds
swept it, and shook down over it whirling leaves from the reeling and
roaring trees.
Lieut. M——, of the Freedmen’s Commission, having invited me to visit
Camp Lee, about two miles from the city, came for me one afternoon in a
fine large carryall, comfortably covered, cushioned, and carpeted.
“Perhaps you will not feel honored,” he remarked, as we rattled up Broad
Street, “but you will be interested to know that this is General Robert
E. Lee’s head-quarters’ wagon. You are riding on the seat he rode on
through the campaigns of the last two years. Your feet are on a piece of
carpet which one of the devoted secessionists of Richmond took up from
his hall-floor expressly to line the General’s wagon-bottom,—little
thinking Yankee boot-soles would ever desecrate it! After Lee’s
surrender, this wagon was turned over to the quartermaster’s department,
and the quartermaster turned it over to us.” I was interested, indeed; I
was carried back to those sanguinary campaigns; and I fancied I could
see the face of him sitting there where I sat, and read the thoughts of
his mind, and the emotions of his heart, in those momentous nights and
days. I imagined the plans he revolved in his brain, shut in by those
dark curtains; what he felt after victory, and what after defeat; the
weariness of body and soul; the misgivings, the remorse, when he
remembered his treason and the folly of Virginia,—for he certainly
remembered them in the latter gloomy periods, when he saw the black
cloud of doom settling down upon a bad and failing cause.
Camp Lee, formerly a fair ground, was the conscript camp of the
Confederacy. I had been told many sad stories of young men, and men of
middle age, some of them loyal, seized by the conscript officers and
sent thither, as it were to a reservoir of the people’s blood, whose
stream was necessary to keep the machinery of despotism in motion. I
paced the grounds where, with despairing hearts, they took their first
lessons in the art by which they were to slay and be slain. I stood by
the tree under which deserters were shot. Then I turned to a very
different scene.
The old barrack buildings were now the happy homes of a village of
freedmen. Groups of barefooted and woolly-headed negro children were at
play before the doors, filling the air with their laughter, and showing
all their ivory with grins of delight as I passed among them. The old
men took off their caps to me, the wise old aunties welcomed me with
dignified smiles, and the younger women looked up brightly from their
ironing or cooking as I went by. The young men were all away at their
work. It was, with few exceptions, a self-supporting community, only
about a dozen old or infirm persons, out of three hundred, receiving aid
from the government.
A little removed from the negro village was a cottage formerly occupied
by Confederate officers.
“In that house,” said the Lieutenant, “is living a very remarkable
character. You know him by reputation, ——, formerly one of the ablest
writers on ‘De Bow’s Review,’ and considered the great champion of
slavery in the South.”
“What! the author of ——?” a somewhat celebrated book in its day, and in
the latitude for which it was written; designed to set forth the corrupt
and perishable nature of free societies and progressive ideas, and to
show that slavery was the one divine and enduring institution.
“The very man. He is now a pauper, living on the bounty of the
government. The rent of that cottage is given him, and he draws rations
of the Relief Commission. He will be glad to see you; and he has two
accomplished daughters you will be glad to see.”
Accordingly we called upon him; but, declining to enter the house, we
sat under the stoop, where we could look across the desolate country at
the sunset sky.
Mr. ——, an emaciated, sallow, feeble old man, received us affably, and
talked with us freely on his favorite topics. He had lived to see the
one divine and enduring institution die; but civilization still
survived; and the race that found its welfare and happiness only in
bondage seemed pretty well off, and tolerably happy,—witness the negro
village close by: and the world of progressive ideas still moved on. Yet
this great champion of slavery did not appear to have learned the first
lesson of the times. All his arguments were the old arguments; he knew
nothing but the past, which was gone forever; and the future to him was
chaos.
His two daughters, young and accomplished, came and sat with us in the
twilight, together with a vivacious young lady from Richmond. On our
return to the city, Miss —— accompanied us, with their visitor. The
latter proved to be an audacious and incorrigible little Rebel, and
regaled us with secesh songs. I remember a few lines.
“You can never win us back,
Never, never,
Though we perish in the track
Of your endeavor!”
“You have no such noble blood
For the shedding:
In the veins of Cavaliers
Was its heading!
You have no such noble men
In your abolition den,
To march through fire and fen,
Nothing dreading!”