Campaigns Of A Non-Combatant, And His Romaunt Abroad During The War Part 26

This soulless Briton had never read any of the poems about the "boundless continent," and had no distinct conception of "size."

From Dinwiddie fields, Sheridan's men went galloping, by the aid of maps and cross-examination, into every by-road; but it was soon apparent that the Rebel infantry meant to give them a push. This came about on Friday, with a foretaste on Thursday.

Little Five Forks, is a cross-road not far from Dinwiddie Court House, in the direction of Petersburg. Big Five Forks, which, it must be borne in mind, gives name to the great battle of Sat.u.r.day, is farther out by many miles, and does not lie within our lines. But, if the left of the army be at Dinwiddie, and the right at Petersburg, Little Five Forks will be first on the front line, though when Sheridan fought there, it was neutral ground, picketed but not possessed. Very early in the week, when the Rebels became aware of the extension of our lines, they added to the regular force which encamped upon our flank line at least a division of troops. These were directed to avoid an infantry fight, but to seek out the cavalry, and, by getting it at disadvantage, rid the region both of the harmfulness of Sheridan, and that prestige of his name, so terrifying to the Virginia house-wife. So long as Sheridan remained upon the far left, the Southside road was unsafe, and the rapidity with which his command could be transferred from point to point rendered it a formidable balance of power. The Rebels knew the country well, and the peculiar course of the highways gave them every advantage.

The cavalry of Sheridan's army proper, is divided into two corps, commanded by Generals Devin and Custer; the cavalry of the Potomac is commanded by General Crook; Mackenzie has control of the cavalry of the James. On Friday, these were under separate orders, and the result was confusion. The infantry was beaten at Gravelly Run, and the cavalry met in flank and front by overwhelming numbers, executed some movements not laid down in the manual. The centre of the battle was Little Five Forks, though the Rebels struck us closer to Dinwiddie Court House, and drove us pell mell up the road into the woods, and out the old Court House road to Gravelly Run. We rallied several times, and charged them into the woods, but they lay concealed in copses, and could go where sabres were useless. The plan of this battle-field will show a series of irregular advances to puzzle anybody but a cavalry-man. The full division of Bushrod Johnston and General Pickett, were developed against us, with spare brigades from other corps. Our cavalry loss during the day was eight hundred in killed and wounded; but we pushed the Rebels so hard that they gave us the field, falling back toward Big Five Forks, and we intrenched immediately. Two thousand men comprise our losses of Friday in Warren's corps and Sheridan's command, including many valuable officers. We shall see how, under a single guidance, splendid results were next day obtained with half the sacrifice.

On Friday night General Grant, dissatisfied, like most observers, with the day's business, placed General Sheridan in the supreme command of the whole of Warren's corps and all the cavalry. General Warren reported to him at nightfall, and the little army was thus composed:--

_General Sheridan's Forces, Sat.u.r.day April 1, 1865._

Three divisions of infantry, under Generals Griffin, Ayres, and Crawford.

Two divisions of cavalry, formerly const.i.tuting the Army of the Shenandoah, now commanded by General Merritt, under Generals Devin and Custer.

One division cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, under General Crook.

Brigade or more cavalry Army of the James, under General Mackenzie.

In this composition the infantry was to the cavalry in the proportion of about two to one, and the entire force a considerable army, far up in the teens. Sheridan was absolute, and his oddly-shaped body began to bob up and down straightway; he visited every part of his line, though it stretched from Dinwiddie Court House to the Quaker road, along the Boydtown Plank and its adjuncts. At daybreak on Sat.u.r.day he fired four signal-guns, to admonish Warren he was off; and his cavalry, by diverging roads, struck their camps. Just south of Culpepper is a certain Stony creek, the tributaries to which wind northward and control the roads. Over Stony creek went Crook, making the longest detour.

Custer took a bottom called Chamberlain's bed; and Devin advanced from Little Five Forks, the whole driving the Rebels toward the left of their works on White Oak road.

We must start with the supposition that our own men far outnumbered the Rebels. The latter were widely separated from their comrades before Petersburg, and the adjustment of our infantry as well as the great movable force at Sheridan's disposal, renders it doubtful that they could have returned. At any rate they did not do so, whether from choice or necessity, and it was a part of our scheme to push them back into their entrenchments. This work was delegated to the cavalry entirely, but, as I have said before, mounted carbineers, are no match for stubborn, bayoneted infantry. So when the hors.e.m.e.n were close up to the Rebels, they were dismounted, and acted as infantry to all intents. A portion of them, under Gregg and Mackenzie, still adhered to the saddle, that they might be put in rapid motion for flanking and charging purposes; but fully five thousand indurated men, who had seen service in the Shenandoah and elsewhere, were formed in line of battle on foot, and by charge and deploy essayed the difficult work of pressing back the entire Rebel column. This they were to do so evenly and ingeniously, that the Rebels should go no farther than their works, either to escape eastward or to discover the whereabouts of Warren's forces, which were already forming. Had they espied the latter they might have become so discouraged as to break and take to the woods; and Sheridan's object was to capture them as well as to rout them. So, all the afternoon, the cavalry pushed them hard, and the strife went on uninterruptedly and terrifically. I have no s.p.a.ce in this hurried despatch to advert either to individual losses or to the many thrilling episodes of the fight. It was fought at so close quarters that our carbines were never out of range; for had this been otherwise, the long rifles of the enemy would have given them every advantage. With their horses within call, the cavalry-men, in line of battle, stood together like walls of stone, swelling onward like those gradually elevating ridges of which Lyell speaks. Now and then a detachment of Rebels would charge down upon us, swaying the lines and threatening to annihilate us; for at no part of the action, till its crisis, did the Southern men exhibit either doubt or dismay, but fought up to the standard of the most valiant treason the world has ever had, and here and there showing some of those wonderful feats of individual courage which are the miracles of the time.

A colonel with a shattered regiment came down upon us in a charge. The bayonets were fixed; the men came on with a yell; their gray uniforms seemed black amidst the smoke; their preserved colors, torn by grape and ball, waved yet defiantly; twice they halted, and poured in volleys, but came on again like the surge from the fog, depleted, but determined; yet, in the hot faces of the carbineers, they read a purpose as resolute, but more calm, and, while they pressed along, swept all the while by scathing volleys, a group of hors.e.m.e.n took them in flank. It was an awful instant; the horses recoiled; the charging column trembled like a single thing, but at once the Rebels, with rare organization, fell into a hollow square, and with solid sheets of steel defied our centaurs. The hors.e.m.e.n rode around them in vain; no charge could break the s.h.i.+ning squares, until our dismounted carbineers poured in their volleys afresh, making gaps in the spent ranks, and then in their wavering time the cavalry thundered down. The Rebels could stand no more; they reeled and swayed, and fell back broken and beaten. And on the ground their colonel lay, sealing his devotion with his life.

Through wood and brake and swamp, across field and trench, we pushed the fighting defenders steadily. For a part of the time, Sheridan himself was there, short and broad, and active, waving his hat, giving orders, seldom out of fire, but never stationary, and close by fell the long yellow locks of Custer, sabre extended, fighting like a Viking, though he was worn and haggard with much work. At four o'clock the Rebels were behind their wooden walls at Five Forks, and still the cavalry pressed them hard, in feint rather than solemn effort, while a battalion dismounted, charged squarely upon the face of their breastworks which lay in the main on the north side of the White Oak road. Then, while the cavalry worked round toward the rear, the infantry of Warren, though commanded by Sheridan, prepared to take part in the battle.

The genius of Sheridan's movement lay in his disposition of the infantry. The skill with which he arranged it, and the difficult manoeuvres he projected and so well executed, should place him as high in infantry tactics as he has heretofore shown himself superior in cavalry. The infantry which had marched at 2 P. M. from the house of Boisseau, on the Boydtown plank-road, was drawn up in four battle lines, a mile or more in length, and in the beginning facing the White Oak road obliquely; the left or pivot was the division of General Ayres, Crawford had the center and Griffin the right. These advanced from the Boydtown plank-road, at ten o'clock, while Sheridan was thundering away with the cavalry, mounted and dismounted, and deluding the Rebels with the idea that he was the sole attacking party; they lay concealed in the woods behind the Gravelly Run meeting-house, but their left was not a half-mile distant from the Rebel works, though their right reached so far off that a novice would have criticized the position sharply. Little by little, Sheridan, extending his lines, drove the whole Rebel force into their breastworks; then he dismounted the ma.s.s of his cavalry and charged the works straight in the front, still thundering on their flank. At last, every Rebel was safe behind his intrenchments. Then the signal was given, and the concealed infantry, many thousand strong, sprang up and advanced by echelon to the right. Imagine a great barndoor shutting to, and you have the movement, if you can also imagine the door itself, hinge and all, moving forward also. This was the door:--

AYRES--CRAWFORD--GRIFFIN.

Stick a pin through Ayres and turn Griffin and Crawford forward as you would a spoke in a wheel, but move your pin up also a very little. In this way Ayres will advance, say half a mile, and Griffin, to describe a quarter revolution, will move through a radius of four miles. But to complicate this movement by echelon, we must imagine the right when half way advanced cutting across the centre and reforming, while Crawford became the right and Griffin the middle of the line of battle. Warren was with Crawford on this march. Gregory commanded the skirmishers.

Ayres was so close to the Rebel left that he might be said to hinge upon it; and at 6 o'clock the whole corps column came crash upon the full flank of the astonished Rebels. Now came the pitch of the battle.

We were already on the Rebel right in force, and thinly in their rear.

Our carbineers were making feint to charge in direct front, and our infantry, four deep, hemmed in their entire left. All this they did not for an instant note, so thorough was their confusion; but seeing it directly, they, so far from giving up, concentrated all their energy and fought like fiends. They had a battery in position, which belched incessantly, and over the breastworks their musketry made one unbroken roll, while against Sheridan's prowlers on their left, by skirmish and sortie, they stuck to their sinking fortunes, so as to win unwilling applause from mouths of wisest censure.

It was just at the coming up of the infantry that Sheridan's little band was pushed the hardest. At one time, indeed, they seemed about to undergo extermination; not that they wavered, but that they were so vastly overpowered. It will remain to the latest time a matter of marvel that so paltry a cavalry force could press back sixteen thousand infantry; but when the infantry blew like a great barndoor--the simile best applicable--upon the enemy's left, the victory that was to come had pa.s.sed the region of strategy and resolved to an affair of personal courage. We had met the enemy; were they to be ours? To expedite this consummation every officer fought as if he were the forlorn hope.

Mounted on his black pony, the same which he rode at Winchester, Sheridan galloped everywhere, his flushed face all the redder, and his plethoric, but nervous figure all the more ubiquitous. He galloped once straight down the Rebel front, with but a handful of his staff. A dozen bullets whistled for him together; one grazed his arm, at which a faithful orderly rode; the black pony leaped high, in fright, and Sheridan was untouched, but the orderly lay dead in the field, and the saddle dashed afar empty. General Warren rode with Crawford most of the afternoon, mounted likewise, and making two or three narrow escapes. He was dark, das.h.i.+ng, and individual as ever, but for some reason or other was relieved of his command after the battle, and Griffin was instated in his place. General Sheridan ordered Warren to report to General Grant's head-quarters, sending the order by an aid. Warren, on his own hook, did not meet on Friday with his general success, and on Sat.u.r.day Sheridan was the master-spirit; but Warren is a General as well as a gentleman, and is only overshadowed by a greater genius,--not obliterated. Ayres, accounted the best soldier in the Fifth corps, but too quietly modest for his own favor, fought like a lion in this pitch of battle, making all the faint-hearted around him ashamed to do ill with such an example contiguous. General Bartlett, keen-faced and active like a fiery scimitar, was leading his division as if he were an immortal! He was closest at hand in the most gallant episodes, and held at nightfall a bundle of captured battle-flags. But Griffin, tall and slight, was the master-genius of the Fifth corps, to which by right he has temporarily succeeded. He led the charge on the flank, and was the first to mount the parapet with his horse, riding over the gunners as May did at Cerro Gordo, and cutting them down. Bartlett's brigade, behind him, finished the business, and the last cannon was fired for the day against the conquering Federals. General Crawford fulfilled his full share of duties throughout the day, amply sustained by such splendid brigade commanders as Baxter, Coulter, and Kellogg, while Gwin and Boweryman were at hand in the division of General Ayres; not to omit the fallen Winthrop, who died to save a friend and win a new laurel.

What shall I say for Chamberlain, who, beyond all question, is the first of our brigade commanders, having been the hero of both Quaker Road and Gravelly Run, and in this action of Five Forks making the air ring with the applauding huzzas of his soldiers, who love him? His is one of the names that will survive the common wreck of shoulder-straps after the war.

But I am individualizing; the fight, as we closed upon the Rebels, was singularly free from great losses on our side, though desperate as any contest ever fought on the continent. One prolonged roar of rifle shook the afternoon; we carried no artillery, and the Rebel battery, until its capture, raked us like an irrepressible demon, and at every foot of the intrenchments a true man fought both in front and behind. The birds of the forest fled afar; the smoke ascended to heaven; locked in so mad frenzy, none saw the sequel of the closing day. Now Richmond rocked in her high towers to watch the impending issue, but soon the day began to look gray, and a pale moon came tremulously out to watch the meeting squadrons. Imagine along a line of a full mile, thirty thousand men struggling for life and prestige; the woods gathering about them--but yesterday the home of hermit hawks and chipmonks--now ablaze with bursting sh.e.l.ls, and showing in the dusk the curl of flames in the tangled gra.s.s, and, rising up the boles of the pine trees, the scaling, scorching tongues. Seven hours this terrible spectacle had been enacted, but the finale of it had almost come.

It was by all accounts in this hour of victory when the modest and brave General Winthrop of the first brigade, Ayres division, was mortally wounded. He was riding along the breastworks, and in the act as I am a.s.sured, of saving a friend's life, was shot through to the left lung.

He fell at once, and his men, who loved him, gathered around and took him tenderly to the rear, where he died before the stretcher on which he lay could be deposited beside the meeting-house door. On the way from the field to the hospital he wandered in mind at times, crying out, "Captain Weaver how is that line? Has the attack succeeded?" etc. When he had been resuscitated for a pause he said: "Doctor, I am done for."

His last words were: "Straighten the line!" And he died peacefully. He was a cousin of Major Winthrop, the author of "Cecil Dreeme." He was twenty-seven years of age. I had talked with him before going into action, as he sat at the side of General Ayres, and was permitted by the guard of honor to uncover his face and look upon it. He was pale and beautiful, marble rather than corpse, and the uniform cut away from his bosom showed how white and fresh was the body, so pulseless now.

General Griffin said to me: "This victory is not worth Winthrop's life."

Winthrop went into the service as a simple color-bearer. He died a brevet brigadier.

At seven o'clock the Rebels came to the conclusion that they were outflanked and whipped. They had been so busily engaged that they were a long time finding out how desperate were their circ.u.mstances; but now, wearied with persistent a.s.saults in front, they fell back to the left, only to see four close lines of battle waiting to drive them across the field, decimated. At the right the hors.e.m.e.n charged them in their vain attempt to fight "out," and in the rear straggling foot and cavalry began also to a.s.semble; slant fire, cross fire, and direct fire, by file and volley rolled in perpetually, cutting down their bravest officers and strewing the fields with bleeding men; groans resounded in the intervals of exploding powder, and to add to their terror and despair, their own artillery, captured from them, threw into their own ranks, from its old position, ungrateful grape and canister, enfilading their breastworks, whizzing and plunging by air line and ricochet, and at last bodies of cavalry fairly mounted their intrenchments, and charged down the parapet, slas.h.i.+ng and trampling them, and producing inexplicable confusion. They had no commanders, at least no orders, and looked in vain for some guiding hand to lead them out of a toil into which they had fallen so bravely and so blindly. A few more volleys, a new and irresistible charge, a shrill and warning command to die or surrender, and, with a sullen and tearful impulse, five thousand muskets are flung upon the ground, and five thousand hot, exhausted, and impotent men are Sheridan's prisoners of war.

Acting with his usual decision, Sheridan placed his captives in care of a provost-guard, and sent them at once to the rear. Those which escaped, he ordered the fiery Custer to pursue with brand and vengeance; and they were pressed far into the desolate forest, spent and hungry, many falling by the way of wounds or exhaustion, many pressed down by hoof or sabre-stroke, and many picked up in mercy and sent back to rejoin their brethren in bonds. We captured in all fully six thousand prisoners.

General Sheridan estimated them modestly at five thousand, but the provost-marshal a.s.sured me that he had a line four abreast a full mile long. I entirely bear him out, having ridden for forty minutes in a direction opposite to that they were taking, and growing weary at last of counting or of seeing them. They were fine, hearty fellows, almost all Virginians, and seemed to take their capture not unkindly. They wore the gray and not very attractive uniform of the Confederacy, but looked to be warm and fat, and pa.s.sing along in the night, under the fir-trees, conveyed at most a romantic idea of grief and tribulation. They were put in a huge pen, midway between Big and Little Five Forks, for the night, the officers sharing the same fare with the soldiers, from whom, indeed, they were undistinguishable.

Thus ended the splendid victory of Five Forks, the least b.l.o.o.d.y to us, but the most successful, proportionate to numbers engaged, that has been fought during the war. One man out of every three engaged took a prisoner. We captured four cannon, an ambulance train and baggage-teams, eight thousand muskets, and twenty-eight battle-flags. General Longstreet, it is thought, commanded. Neither he nor Pickett nor Bushrod Johnston, division commanders, were taken; they were wise enough to see that the day was lost, and imitated Bonaparte after Waterloo.

I attribute this victory almost entirely to Sheridan; it was won by strategy and persistence, and in great part by men who would not stand fire the day before. The happy distribution of duties between cavalry and infantry excited a fine rivalry, and the consciousness of Sheridan's guidance inspired confidence. Has any battle so successful ever been fought in Virginia? or, indeed, in the East? I think not. It has opened to us the enemy's flank, so that we can sweep down upon the Appomattox and inside of his breastworks, enabling us to shorten our lines of intrenchments one half, if no more, and putting out of Lee's service fifteen thousand of his choicest troops. And all this, General Sheridan tells me, has cost him personally no more than eight hundred men, and the service no more than fifteen hundred. Compare this with Chancellorsville, Williamsburg, the Wilderness, Bull Run, and what shall we say? The enemy must have lost in this fight three thousand in killed and wounded.

The scene at Gravelly Run meeting-house at 8 and at 10 o'clock on Sat.u.r.day night, is one of the solemn contrasts of the war, and, I hope, the last of them. A little frame church, planted among the pines, and painted white, with cool, green window-shutters, holds at its foot a gallery for the negroes, and at the head a varnished pulpit. I found its pews moved to the green plain over the threshold, and on its bare floors the screaming wounded. Blood ran in little rills across the planks, and, human feet treading in them, had made indelible prints in every direction; the pulpit-lamps were doing duty, not to shed holy light upon holy pages, but to show the pale and dusty faces of the beseeching; and as they moved in and out, the groans and curses of the suffering replace the gush of peaceful hymns and the deep responses to the preacher's prayers. Federal and Confederate lay together, the bitterness of noon a.s.suaged in the common tribulation of the night, and all the while came in the dripping stretchers, to place in this golgotha new recruits for death and sorrow. I asked the name of the church, but no one knew any more than if it had been the site of some obsolete heathen wors.h.i.+p. At last, a grinning sergeant smacked his thumbs as if the first idea of his life had occurred to him, and led me to the pulpit. Beneath some torn blankets and rent officers' garments, rested the hymn book and Bible, which he produced. Last Sunday these doled out the praises of G.o.d, and the frightened congregation wors.h.i.+pped at their dictation. Now they only served by their fly leaves to give me my whereabouts, and said:--

_Presented to Gravelly Run Meeting House by the Ladies._

Over the portal, the scenes within were reiterated, except that the greatness of a starry night replaced the close and terrible arena of the church. Beneath the trees, where the Methodist circuit-rider had tied his horse, and the urchins, daring cla.s.s-meeting, had wandered away to cast stones at the squirrels, and measure strength at vaulting and running, the gashed and fevered lay irregularly, some soul going out at each whiff of the breeze in the fir-tops; and the teams and surgeons, and straggling soldiers, and galloping orderlies pa.s.sed all the night beneath the old and gibbous moon and the hushed stars, and by the trickle of Gravelly Run stealing off, afeared. But the wounded had no thought that night; the victory absorbed all hearts; we had no losses to notice where so much was won.

A mile past the church, going away from head-quarters all the time, lies Five Forks, the object and name of the battle. A large open field of perhaps thirty acres, interposes between the church and the commencement of the Rebel works. Their left is only some rails and logs to mask marksmen, but the work proper is a very long stretch of all obstructions of a man's height in relief.

The White Oak road runs directly in front of these intrenchments, and was, at the time I pa.s.sed, the general highway for infantry returning from the field and cavalry-men concentrating at General Sheridan's bivouac. Riding a mile I came upon the Five Forks proper, and just to the left, at the foot of some pines, the victor and his a.s.sistants were congregated. Sheridan sat by some f.a.gots, examining a topographical map of the country he had so well traversed; possibly with a view to design further aggressive movements in the morning. He is opposite me now as I pen these paragraphs by the imperfect blaze of his bivouac fire. He is good humored and talkative, like all men conscious of having achieved a great work, and has been good enough to sketch for me the plan of the day's operations, from which I have compiled much of the statement above. Close by lies Custer, trying to sleep, his long yellow hair covering his face; and General Griffin, now commanding the Fifth corps, goes here and there issuing orders, while aides and orderlies rode in and out, bearing further fresh messages of deeds consummated or proposed. We shall have a hot night no doubt, for away off to the right, continue volleys of musketry and discharges of artillery, intermixed with what seem to be thunderbolts of our men-of-war at anchor in the Appomatox and James,--if such can be heard at this great distance,--which tell us that the lines are in motion.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

RICHMOND DESOLATE.

The scenes of entering the doomed stronghold, when Grant had burst its gates, ought to be made vivid as the spectacle of death. With my good and talented a.s.sociate, Mr. Jerome B. Stillson, I hold the Spotswood Hotel, and from this caravansary of the late capital as thoroughly identified with Rebellion as the inn at Bethlehem with the gospel, we date our joint paragraphs upon the condition of the city. A week cannot have exhausted the curiosity of the North to learn the exact appearance of a city which has stood longer, more frequent, and more persistent sieges, than any in Christendom. This town is the Rebellion; it is all that we have directly striven for; quitting it, the Confederate leaders have quitted their sheet-anchor, their roof-tree, their abiding hope.

Its history is the epitome of the whole contest, and to us, s.h.i.+vering our thunderbolts against it for more than four years, Richmond is still a mystery.

Know then, that, whether coming from Was.h.i.+ngton or Baltimore, the two points of embarkation, all bound hitherward must rendezvous at Fortress Monroe; thence, in such excellent steamers as the _Dictator_, start up the broad James River. To own a country-house upon the "Jeems" river is the Virginia gentleman's ultimate aspiration. There, with a tobacco-farm, and wide wheatlands, his feet on his front-porch rails, a Havana cigar between his teeth, and a colored person to bring him frequent juleps, the Virginia gentleman, confident in the divinity of slavery, hopes in his natural, refined idleness, to watch the little family graveyard close up to his threshold, till it shall kindly open and give him sepulture.

Elsewhere men aim to be successful, or enterprising, or eloquent, or scholarly, but that n.o.bleness of hospitality, high spirit, dignity, and affability which const.i.tute our idea of chivalry is everywhere save here an exotic. We say that chivalry is "played out," and that the prestige of "first families" is gone with the hurried retreat before Grant's salamanders. Not so. Secession as a cause is past the range of possibilities. But no people in their subjugation wear a better front than these brave old spirits, whose lives are not their own. Fire has ravaged their beautiful city, soldiers of the color of their servants, guard the crossings and pace the pavement with bayoneted muskets. But gentlemen they are still, in every pace, and inch, and syllable,--such men as we were wont to call brothers and countrymen. However, the James River, at which we commenced, has not a town upon it between the sea and the head of navigation. It is a strong commentary upon this patriarchal civilization, judged by our gregarious tastes, that one of the n.o.blest streams in the world should show to the traveller only here and there a pleasant mansion, flanked by negro cabins, but nowhere a church-spire nor a steam-mill. All that we see from Fortress Monroe to City Point are ridges of breastworks, rifle-pits, and forts, lying bare, yellow, and deserted, to defend its pa.s.sage, excepting at James Island, where the solitary and broken tower of the ancient colony holds guard over some bramble and ruin. Here Smith founded the celebrated settlement, which wooed to its threshold the gentle Pocahontas, and fell to fragments at the behest of the fiery Bacon. The ramparts on the James will remain forever; great as they are, they would hardly hold the bones of the slain in the capture and defence. Four hours from Fortress Monroe we pa.s.s Harrison's Landing, where two grand armies, _beaten_ aside from Richmond, sought the shelter of the river, and at City Point quit our large craft, to be transferred to a light draught vessel, which is to carry the first mail going to Richmond under the national flag since the beginning of the war.

City Point is still a populous place, and the millions of mules upon it bray hoa.r.s.ely; but we leave all these behind, as well as the national standard, which flaunts over General Grant's late head-quarters, and steam past the mouth of the Appomattox to go through the enemy's lines.

Henceforward every foot of the way is freshly interesting. The Rebel ram _Atlanta_ in tow of a couple of tugs, goes past us with a torpedo boat at the rear. She is raking, slant, and formidable; but "old glory" is waving on her. Directly our own leviathan, the _Roanoke_ drifts up, and all her storm-throated tars cheer like the belch of her guns. We see to the right, the tip of Malvern Hill, ever sorrowful and sacred, and soon a great unfinished ram careens by, which never grew to battle-size; the true colors s.h.i.+ne above her bulwarks like a flower growing in a carca.s.s.

Then at little intervals there are frequent prizes from the docks of Richmond, tugs, transports, barges, some of which show under our beautiful banner the Rebel cross, pale and contemptible. These malcontents committed as great crime against good taste in subst.i.tuting for our starry emblem this artistic abomination, as against law and policy in changing the configuration of the Union. There is another flag, however, which we see, half exultantly, half vindictively,--the cross of St. George,--flying from a British cutter.

By and by we come to our intrenchments upon the upper James and at Bermuda Hundred. Now they are very listless and half empty. The boys have gone off to tread on Lee's shanks. Only a few vessels stand at the landings, and the few remnants have laid down the rifle, and taken up the fis.h.i.+ng-pole. One should come up this river to get a conception of our splendid navy. Sharp-pointed gunboats, with bullet-proof crows'

nests and swivels that are the gentlest murderers ever polished; monitors through whose eyeholes a ball a big as a cook-stove squints from a columbiad socket; ferry-boats which are speckled with bra.s.s cannon, and all sorts of craft that can float and manoeuvre, provided they look at us through deadly muzzles are there to the number of fifty or sixty, as many as make the entire navies of all other American nations. After the war we must have a great naval review, and invite all the crowned heads to attend it. Soon we reach Dutch Gap, where lies Butler's ca.n.a.l, or "Butler's gut," as the sailors call it. The river at this point is so crooked that Butler must have laid it out by the aid of his wrong eye. The ca.n.a.l is meant to cut on a long elbow; but being almost at right angles to the course of the river, only the most obliging tide would run through it. As a consequence, it is a sort of a sluice merely, of insufficient width, and as a "sight" very disappointing to great expectations. Between the points of debouch of this ca.n.a.l crosses a drawbridge of pontoons, for the use of our troops, and just beyond it Aiken's Landing, where the flag of truce boat stopped. A fine brick mansion stands in sh.o.r.e, with a wharf abreast it.

The banks around it are trodden here with many feet. These are the traces of the poor prisoners who reached here, fevered, and starving and naked, to catch for the first time the sight of cool waters and friends, and the bright flag which they had followed to the edge of the grave.

How they threw up their hats, and cheered to the feeblest, and wept, and danced, and laughed. Long be the place remembered, as holy, neutral ground, where death never trod, and mult.i.tudes pa.s.sed from suffering, to freedom and home. Beyond this point, the most formidable Rebel works we have seen, line the high bluffs and ridges. They are monuments of patient labor, and make of themselves hills as great as nature's. But the siege pieces, which often bellowed upon them like thunderbolts along the mountain-tops, are gone now, and only straggling, meddling fellows pa.s.s them at all. The highest of these works commands both ends of the Dutch Gap ca.n.a.l, and while our lads were digging they often hid themselves in caves which they dug in the cliff-sides.

We reach the first torpedo at length; a little red flag marks it, by which the boat slips tremulously, though another and another are before, at the sight of which our nervous folks are agitated. Here is a monitor with a drag behind it, which has just fished up one; and the sequel is told by a b.l.o.o.d.y and motionless figure upon the deck. These torpedoes are the true dragon teeth of Cadmus, which spring up armed men.

Happily for us, the Rebels have sown but few of them, and the position of these was pointed out by one of their captains who deserted to our side. In the midst of these lie the obstructions. Great hulks of vessels and chained spars, and tree-tops which reach quite across the river, except where our pioneers have hewn a little gap to let the steamer through. Upon these obstructions a hundred cannon bear from the cliffs before us, and as we go further we see the whole river-bed sprinkled with strange contrivances to keep back our thunder-bearers. We think it absolutely impossible, under any circ.u.mstances, that our fleet could have got to Richmond so long as the Rebels contested the pa.s.sage; each step forward finds new and greater obstacles. The channel is as narrow as Harlem River and as crooked as a walk in the ramble of Central Park.