off that single wagon load of provisions. Two years later we should not
have been surprised at his prices, but at that time we were appalled.
Nevertheless, some of us were buying with the recklessness of men
who do not know at what hour a bullet may draw a red line below all
accounts.
Just then old Jones came out in his yellow coat and his pot hat,
looking greatly more like a farmer than the wagon man did. Speaking
through his nose, and with that extraordinary deliberation which always
made his conversation a caricature of human speech, he asked: “What are
you chargin’ for turkeys? What are you chargin’ for butter?” And so on
through the list, receiving a reply to each query, and carefully noting
it in his thoroughly organized mind.
Then he turned to one of the men and said: “Send the regimental
commissary to me.”
When the commissary came he said to him: “Take these supplies, and
distribute them equitably among the different messes according to their
numbers.”
By this time the farmer had become alarmed. He said: “Who’s goin’ to
pay for all this?”
“I am,” said old Jones. “In my own way.”
“Well, hold on,” said the farmer.
“No, I reckon we won’t hold on,” said old Jones.
“But I’ll send for the colonel of the regiment,” said the farmer.
Then old Jones replied with a relish: “I am the colonel of this
regiment. And I have ordered these food supplies distributed to the
men in the messes. The regimental commissary will obey my orders.
And as soon as your wagon is emptied, you will get out of this camp
in a considerable of a hurry,”--perhaps he used a shorter word than
“considerable,”--“or I’ll hang you in front of headquarters. There’s no
court of appeals in this camp. Now git!” as the last of the supplies
were taken out of the wagon by the regimental commissary.
We were all a little bit sorry that the poor farmer should lose his
entire load. And yet we sympathized with old Jones’s remark as he
walked away.
“I’ll teach these thieves that they can’t loot a camp that I’m a
runnin’.”
A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE
Dick Fulcher was the best natured man in the battery, and he was
nothing else.
He was entirely ignorant and entirely content to be so. He could
neither read nor write, and we could never persuade him to try to
learn. He had nothing resembling pride in his composition apparently,
nothing that it would do to call a character.
One morning the alarm came that the enemy had landed below, and we were
ordered hurriedly forward. Fulcher had just taken post as stable-guard,
and was, therefore, under no obligation of duty to go. He quietly threw
down the musket he was carrying, and, going up to the sergeant-major,
said: “Major, can’t I be taken off guard? I want to go with the battery
into the fight.”
His request was granted, of course. He was number four at Joe’s gun;
number four is the man who pulls the lanyard, or string, that fires
the gun. When we unlimbered to the front on Yemassee Creek, within
pistol-shot range of the advancing enemy, Fulcher was laughing as
usual, and apparently as indifferent to the work he was doing as he
had been to everything else, since we had first known him.
I remember wondering, as I watched him, why a man who felt so little
interest in the dangerous business had gone out of his way as he had
done to engage in it.
The fire of the enemy was terrific in its destructiveness from the
first. Within the first three minutes we had lost ten men and a score
of horses. Among the men was Fulcher. He had fallen, shot through the
body, just as the command was given to him to “fire.”
Lying there upon the ground, with his life ebbing away, he made a
feeble effort to pull the lanyard; but his strength was too far gone,
and Joe, being short of men, took his place. He had to stand astride
the poor dying fellow, in order to do his work, for Fulcher’s wound was
beyond the possibility of a surgeon’s help.
After two or three more shots of the gun, Joe heard Fulcher feebly
calling to him: “Joe--Joe.” Inclining his ear, Joe received this last
message: “I’m done for, sergeant. But won’t you just write to my father
and tell him I died like a man? I’d like him to know that about his
only boy.”
Joe wrote the letter and it was blotted with tears.
After all, it is hard to guess what a man is made of till you know his
motives.
[Illustration: A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE.]
A WOMAN’S LAST WORD
The city of Richmond was in flames.
We were beginning that last terrible retreat which ended the war. Fire
had been set to the arsenal as a military possession, which must on no
account fall into the enemy’s hands.
As the flames spread, because of a turn of the wind, other buildings
caught. The whole business part of the city was on fire. To make things
worse, some idiot had ordered that all the liquor in the city should be
poured into the gutters.
The rivers of alcohol had been ignited from the burning buildings, and
in their turn had set fire to other buildings. It was a time and a
scene of unutterable terror.
As we marched up the fire-lined street, with the flames scorching the
very hair off our horses, George Goodsmith--the best cannoneer that
ever wielded a rammer--came up to the headquarters squad, and said:
“Captain, my wife’s in Richmond. We’ve been married less than a year.
She is soon to become a mother. I beg permission to bid her good-by.
I’ll join the battery later.”
The permission was granted readily, and George Goodsmith put spurs to
his horse. He had just been made a sergeant, and was therefore mounted.
It was in the gray of the morning that he hurriedly met his wife.
With caresses of the tenderest kind, he bade her farewell. Realizing
for a moment the utter hopelessness of our making another stand on
the Roanoke, or any other line, he said in bitterness of soul: “Why
shouldn’t I stay here and take care of you?”
The woman straightened herself and replied: “I would rather be the
widow of a brave man than the wife of a coward.”
That was their parting, for the time was very short. Mayo’s bridge
across the James River was already in flames when Goodsmith perilously
galloped across it.
Three or four days later, for I never could keep tab on time at that
period of the war, we went into the battle at Farmville. Goodsmith was
in his place in command of the piece.
Just before fire opened he beckoned to me and I rode up to hear what he
had to say.
“I’m going to be killed, I think,” he said. “If I am, I want my wife to
know that she is the widow of a--_brave man_. I want her to know that
I did my duty to the last. And--and if you live long enough, and this
thing don’t kill Mary--I want you to tell the _little one_ about his
father.”
Goodsmith’s premonition of his death was one of many that were
fulfilled during the war.
A moment later a fearful struggle began. At the first fire George
Goodsmith’s wife became the “widow of a brave man.” His body was heavy
with lead.
His son, then unborn, is now a successful broker in a great city.
There is nothing particularly knightly or heroic about him, for this
is not a knightly or heroic age. But he takes very tender care of his
mother--that “widow of a brave man.”
AN INCOMPLETE STORY
When General Field came to Cairo, Illinois, after the war, I welcomed
him with especial heartiness.
I was a little bit lonely, lacking comrades in sympathy with me.
General Field had been my drillmaster at Ashland, at the war’s
beginning. Later, after he became a great general, I had many times
been of his following in raids and scouts, and other military
expeditions.
Like all the rest of us at the end of the war, General Field was very
poor. He had come to Cairo to engage in business, and had not been able
to bring his family with him. So he rented a bachelor room in the bank
building in which my office was situated, and we two used to spend the
evenings together in front of my office fire.
At that time General Don Carlos Buell was operating a coal mine in
Kentucky, some distance up the Ohio River. He sold his coal through the
commission house for which I was attorney.
When he came to Cairo, he, also, usually spent his evenings in my
office.
One evening General Field was smoking a long pipe before my fire, and
he and I were chatting about war times--we hadn’t yet got far enough
away from the war to regard any other topic as worthy of intelligent
conversation.
“The saddest part of it all, to us of the old army at least,” said
General Field, “is the breaking up of old friendships. There’s Buell,
now. He and I once tented together, messed together, slept under the
same blankets together, and, without any blankets at all, under the
same frozen sky; marched together, fought together, suffered together,
and endured together. Once we thought of each other as brothers might.
Now, if we should meet, he would refuse even to shake my hand. He would
regard me as a rebel--to him _anathema maranatha_.”
At this moment came a knock at the door. I opened it, and to my
consternation there stood General Buell.
My first impulse was to say to him that I was overengaged that evening,
and couldn’t see him. My second was to invite him to my bedroom for a
special conference, for which I could profess to have been longing. My
third was to fabricate the story of a telegram, which should call him
immediately to the house of the head of the firm.
Feeling that none of these devices would answer the purpose, I thought
of the coal-shed below; but I remembered that there was no gas-burner
there, and the night was rather a dark one.
Meantime, General Buell was catching cold in the hall. So at last
I invited him in, taking pains to call him only by his title, not
mentioning his name. As he entered, Field, who was always scrupulous
in attention to the little niceties of courtesy, arose to receive the
stranger.
When the two gentlemen had bowed to each other,--for it was no part of
my purpose to introduce them, if I could help it,--I turned to General
Buell and said: “General, I’m afraid there is a little discrepancy in
the measurement of those last coal barges. If you have your memorandum
book with you, we’ll go to the outer office and straighten the thing
up. The book-keepers are bothered about it.”
Alas! My little device came to nothing. Buell had caught sight
of Field, and Field had looked upon Buell. Though years of hard
campaigning had intervened since they had last met, each recognized the
other instantly, and after a moment’s hesitation each threw himself
into the other’s arms.
“Why, it’s Buell!”
“Why, it’s Field!”
I can’t tell the rest of this story, because I didn’t stay to see it. I
don’t like to see two men hugging each other with tears in their eyes.
RANDOM FACTS
ILLUSTRATIVE OF SOUTHERN SOLDIER CONDITIONS
We soldiers of the Southern army lacked many things. Sometimes we
lacked almost everything. We did not always have clothes, but when we
had any, they were apt to be good ones; they were made of cadet gray
cloth, imported from England through the blockade. And those Englishmen
have a habit of making uncommonly good cloths.
We were often without shoes; but when we had shoes, they also came from
England, and were thoroughly good, both in material and make.
But towards the end of the war, we lacked many essential things. We
lacked medicines for one thing, and quinine, especially. I remember
that one gentlewoman was deemed a peculiar patriot, because she got
through the lines with one hundred and forty ounce bottles of quinine
hung inside her hoop-skirt.
For lack of that and other drugs, our surgeons had to resort to many
substitutions. Some of these were discoveries of permanent value. That
is why the medical profession has studied with interest the records of
our Southern surgeon-general’s department, now in possession of the war
department at Washington.
These records, it is said, contribute more than any other like
documents to the science of medicine.
Another thing that we terribly lacked was gunpowder--the one supreme
agent of all warfare. Our fire was often compulsorily made as light as
possible, in order to spare our cartridge boxes.
To supply this rudimentary need, the women of the country diligently
dug up the earthen floors of all their smokehouses, and all their
tobacco barns, and rendered out the nitre they contained. Some of them
even destroyed their tobacco crops by boiling, in order to extract the
precious salt necessary to the destruction of their enemy.
In the cities, our womenkind were requested to preserve and deliver to
government collectors all those slops that contain nitre.
It was in this way alone that we got gunpowder enough to maintain
resistance to the end. And we had equally to pinch in other ways in
order that we might continue to be “fighting men.”
All the window-weights in all the houses, and all the other leaden
things that could be melted down, were converted into bullets. Even
then we ran dreadfully short towards the end of the war. At Petersburg,
good soldiers felt it to be their duty to spend all their spare time
in collecting the multitudinous bullets with which the ground was
everywhere strewn. These battered missiles turned into the arsenals
were remoulded and came back to us in the form of effective, fixed
ammunition.
When we marched to meet Grant in the Wilderness, in the spring of
1864, we were about the most destitute army that ever marched to
meet anybody, anywhere. We had nothing to transport, and we had no
transportation.
At the beginning of every campaign it is customary for the commanding
general to issue an order, setting forth the allotment of baggage
wagons to officers and men. Just before we marched that spring some wag
in the army had printed and circulated a mock order from General Lee, a
copy of which now lies before me.
GENERAL ORDERS, NUMBER 1.
HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA,
April 20, 1864.
The allotment of baggage wagons to the officers and men of the Army
of Northern Virginia during the coming campaign will be as follows:--
To every thirty officers.... No baggage wagon.
To every three hundred men.... Ditto.
(Signed) ROBERT E. LEE, General.
This order was a good-natured forgery, of course. Nevertheless it was
carried out to the letter. The fact is that we had no baggage and no
baggage wagons. The only baggage wagons I ever heard of in connection
with that campaign were a few that General D. H. Hill summoned for a
special occasion. His musicians put in a petition at the beginning
of the summer’s work for wagons to carry their instruments. He
assented instantly, and ordered the wagons brought up. As soon as the
instruments were comfortably deposited within them, he turned to his
quartermaster and said: “Send those wagons to Richmond.” Then turning
to his adjutant he said: “Have muskets issued to these men immediately.”
General D. H. Hill was not a man from whose orders anybody under him
was disposed to appeal.
We entered that campaign stripped almost to the buff. We had no
tents, even for the highest officers. We had no canteens. We had no
haversacks. We had no knapsacks. We had no oilcloths to sleep on.
We had no tin cups. We had almost no cooking utensils and almost no
blankets. We had no shoes, and our socks had long ago been worn out. We
had an average of one overcoat to every thousand men.
It was in this condition of destitution that we entered the battles in
the Wilderness. The Federal army was as much oversupplied as we were
underfurnished with all the necessaries of campaigning. What with a
perfectly equipped quartermaster’s department, a sanitary commission
volunteering superfluous tin cups and everything else and with other
sources of lavish supply, public and private, every Federal soldier
entered the campaign carrying about three times as much as any soldier
should carry. The moment there was fighting to be done, they shed all
these things--as a man throws off his overcoat when there is work to do.
In the shiftings and changes of position that occurred during that most
irregular of all possible contests, we were thrown often into positions
where the shedding had been done. The first thought of every man of us
was to equip himself with such necessaries as were lying about. It took
us a week to get rid of the superfluous plunder, and reduce ourselves
again to the condition of soldiers in light marching order.
The one worst lack of all we could not supply in this way. That was the
lack of food. It was an army of starving men that fought those battles
in the Wilderness. It was an army of starving men that confronted Grant
at Spottsylvania. It was an army of starving men that faced the guns at
Cold Harbor, at Bottom’s bridge, and all the way to Petersburg. Not
until we were established in the works there, did any man have enough
food in a week to supply his physical needs for a day. I have elsewhere
in these stories illustrated this fact somewhat, but as it was the
central fact in connection with that campaign, it seems to me important
here to state it in its fulness.
At Petersburg we began to get something like regular rations, though
they were very meagre and of extremely bad quality. It was, perhaps,
under the influence of this prolonged starvation and hard work that
the men fell victims to the great religious revival of that time. It
was the ecstasy of anchorites. It proved, if anything ever did, the
efficacy of fasting as an inducement to fervid prayer. Saint Simeon
Stylites perched on top of his tower was no better subject of religious
enthusiasm than were these worn out and starved veterans, whose
cause was an object of perpetual worship. They believed no longer in
themselves; they no longer looked even to their generals for results.
The time and the mood had come when they trusted God alone to give them
victory. Starvation had made them devotees.
MY FRIEND PHIL[2]
To begin with, Phil was black.
The reader will please understand that the word “black” is here used
in its literal, and not in its conventional, sense. Phil was actually
as well as ethnologically black. There was no trace of a lighter tint
anywhere in his complexion. Not a suspicion of brown appeared in his
cheeks, and even his great thick lips, protruding far beyond the
outposts of his nose, were as sable as the rest of his face. It was
all a dead black, too, unaccompanied by that lustre which, by surface
reflection, relieves the shadow upon commonplace African faces.
And nobody knew all this better than Phil did.
“Phil ain’t none o’ yer coffee-colored niggas,” he would say in moments
of exultation, when his mood was to straighten his broad shoulders and
boast a little. “Phil ain’t none o’ yer coffee-colored niggas, ner none
o’ yer _alapacker_ niggas, nuther. Ise black, I is. Dat’s sho’. Ain’t
got no bacon-rind shine in _my_ skin; but I jes’ tell yer what, mastah,
Phil kin jes’ take the very shut offen dem shiny niggas an’ hoff an’
hoff niggas, when’t comes to de wuk. Drive? Kin I? Kin Phil drive? What
yer mean, mastah, by axin’ such a question?”
Nobody had asked Phil such a question; but Phil had some remarks
that he wanted to make on the subject of his accomplishments in this
respect, and was disposed to answer what he wished somebody would ask.
“Drive? Co’se I kin. Der never was a hoss ner mule yit whatever had
a mouf an’ two laigs dat Phil can’t han’le, an’ yer better b’lieve,
mastah, Phil can plaunt de wheel ’twix’ de acorn an’ de shell.”
If I report Phil’s boastings, it is only because they constitute too
large a proportion of what he said to be omitted. I do so to confirm,
not to gainsay them, or to hold their author up to ridicule.
He was my friend, the faithfulest one I ever knew, and now he is dead.
If he boasted now and then, no one could have had a better right. His
was the pride of performance, and not the vanity of pretension.
Phil was a Virginian--and a gentleman in his way--and a slave, though
I doubt if he ever suspected his gentility, or felt his bondage as a
burden in the least. He had no aspirations for freedom or for anything
else, I think, except jollity and comfort. I do not say that this was
well, but it was a fact.
My acquaintance with Phil began when I was a half-grown boy. Until that
time I had lived in a free state, so that when I had returned to the
land of my fathers, and become an inmate of the old family mansion in
one of the south-side counties of Virginia, the plantation negro was a
fresh and very interesting study to me.
On the morning after my arrival, as I lay in the antique carved
bed assigned to me, wondering at the quaint picturesqueness of my
surroundings, and the delightful strangeness of the life which I was
now in contact with for the first time, a weird, musical sound, of
singular power and marvellous sweetness, floated through the open
dormer windows, borne upon the breath of such a June morning as I
had never before seen. I listened, but could make nothing of it by
guessing. It was music, certainly, at least a “concord of sweet
sounds.” It rose and fell like the ground swell of the sea, and was as
full of melody and sweetness as is the song of birds, but it was as
destitute as they of anything like a tune. It began nowhere, and went
nowhither. I had no memory of anything with which to compare it, and
could conceive of no throat or instrument capable of producing such a
sound. On the great piazza below, at the front of the house, sat the
master of the mansion. Of him I straightway made inquiry.
“What is that?” I asked curiously.
“Phil,” answered my uncle.
“And who is ‘Phil,’ and what on earth is he doing, and especially how
is he doing it?”
“He is calling the hogs, and you may be sure he is doing it well. If
you’ll walk up to that skirt of woods, you can put your other questions
to him in person. He is not shy or difficult of approach. Introduce
yourself--be sure to tell him whose son you are.”
My uncle’s face wore an amused smile as I walked away. He could imagine
the sequel.
In the edge of the timber stood a tall, broad-shouldered, brawny
negro man. He was singularly ugly, but with a countenance so full of
good humor that I was irresistibly attracted by it from the first. At
his feet stood great baskets of corn, and around him were gathered a
hundred or more swine, busily eating the breakfast he was dispensing.
As I approached, his hat--what there was of it--was doffed. I was
greeted with a fabulous bow, apparently meant to be half a tribute of
respect, and half a bit of buffoonery, indulged in for my amusement or
his own.
“Good mawnin’, young mastah. I hope I see you well dis mawnin’.”
“Thank you, I’m very well,” I replied. “You’re Phil, I suppose?”
“You’re right, fo’ dis wunst, young mastah. Ise Phil toe be sho’. Ax
der hawgs--dey done know me.”
“Well, Phil, I’m glad to make your acquaintance. I’m your mas’ Jo’s
son.”
“What dat? Mas’ Jo’s son! MAS’ JO’S SON!! MY MAS’ JO’S SON!!! Lem me
shake han’s wid you, mastah. Jes’ to think! MAS’ JO’S SON! An’ Phil
done live to shake han’s wid mas’ Jo’s son. Why, my young mastah, I
done raise your father! Him an’ me done play ma’bles togeder many and
many a time. We was boys togeder right heah, on dis very identumcal
plauntation. Used to go in swimmin’ togeder, an’ go fishin’ an’ steal
de mules out’n de stables Sundays, an’ ride races wid ’em and git
cotched, too, sometimes when ole mastah git home from chu’ch. MY
MASTAH. But Ise glad to see yer.”
All this while the great giant was wrenching my hand well-nigh off,
laughing and weeping alternately, and stamping with a delight which
could find no other vent than in physical exertion. I was naturally
anxious to divert the conversation into some other and less personal
channel, and managed to do so presently by asking Phil to give me a
specimen of his hog-calling cry, which I wished to hear near at hand.
That performance over, we talked again. I began by saying I had never
heard any one call hogs in that way before.