Campaigns Of A Non-Combatant, And His Romaunt Abroad During The War Part 5

Among the pa.s.sengers were a young officer and his bride. They had been married only a few days, and she had obtained permission to accompany him to Old Point. Very pretty, she seemed, in her travelling hat and flowing robes; and he wore a handsome new uniform with prodigious shoulder-bars. There was a piano in the saloon, where another young lady of the party performed during the evening, and the bride and groom accompanied her with a song. It was the popular Federal parody of "Gay and Happy:"

"Then let the South fling aloft what it will,-- We are for the Union still!

For the Union! For the Union!

We are for the Union still!"

The bride and groom sang alternate stanzas, and the concourse of soldiers, civilians, and females swelled the chorus. The reserve being thus broken, the young officer sang the "Star-Spangled Banner," and the refrain must have called up the mermaids. Dancing ensued, and a soldier volunteered a hornpipe. A young man with an astonis.h.i.+ng compa.s.s of lungs repeated something from Shakespeare, and the night pa.s.sed by gleefully and reputably. One could hardly realize, in the cheerful eyes and active figures of the dance, the sad uncertainties of the time. Youth trips lightest, somehow, on the brink of the grave.

The hilarities of the evening so influenced the German quartered with me, that he sang s.n.a.t.c.hes of foreign ballads during most of the night, and obliged me, at last, to call the steward and insist upon his good behavior.

In the gray of the morning I ventured on deck, and, following the silvery line of beach, made out the s.h.i.+pping at anchor in Hampton Roads.

The _Minnesota_ flag-s.h.i.+p lay across the horizon, and after a time I remarked the low walls and black derricks of the Rip Raps. The white tents at Hampton were then revealed, and finally I distinguished Fortress Monroe, the key of the Chesapeake, bristling with guns, and floating the Federal flag. As we rounded to off the quay, I studied with intense interest the scene of so many historic events. Sewall's Point lay to the south, a stretch of woody beach, around whose western tip the dreaded _Merrimac_ had so often moved slowly to the encounter. The spars of the _Congress_ and the _c.u.mberland_ still floated along the strand, but, like them, the invulnerable monster had become the prey of the waves. The guns of the Rip Raps and the terrible broadsides of the Federal gunboats, had swept the Confederates from Sewall's Point,--their flag and battery were gone,--and farther seaward, at Willoughby Spit, some figures upon the beach marked the route of the victorious Federals to the city of Norfolk.

The mouth of the James and the York were visible from the deck, and long lines of s.h.i.+pping stretched from each to the Fortress. The quay itself was like the pool in the Thames, a ma.s.s of spars, smoke-stacks, ensigns and swelling hills. The low deck and quaint cupola of the famous _Monitor_ appeared close into sh.o.r.e, and near at hand rose the thick body of the _Galena_. Long boats and flat boats went hither and thither across the blue waves: the grim ports of the men of war were open and the guns frowned darkly from their coverts; the seamen were gathering for muster on the flags.h.i.+p, and drums beat from the barracks on sh.o.r.e; the Lincoln gun, a fearful piece of ordnance, rose like the Sphynx from the Fortress sands, and the sodded parapet, the winding stone walls, the tops of the brick quarters within the Fort, were some of the features of a strangely animated scene, that has yet to be perpetuated upon canvas, and made historic.

At eight o'clock the pa.s.sengers were allowed to land, and a provost guard marched them to the Hygeia House,--of old a watering-place hotel,--where, by groups, they were ushered into a small room, and the oath of allegiance administered to them. The young officer who officiated, repeated the words of the oath, with a broad grin upon his face, and the pa.s.sengers were required to a.s.sent by word and by gesture.

Among those who took the oath in this way, was a very old sailor, who had been in the Federal service for the better part of his life, and whose five sons were now in the army. He called "Amen" very loudly and fervently, and there was some perceptible disposition on the part of other ardent patriots, to celebrate the occasion with three cheers. The quartermaster, stationed at the Fortress gave me a pa.s.s to go by steamer up the York to White House, and as there were three hours to elapse before departure, I strolled about the place with our agent. In times of peace, Old Point was simply a stone fortification, and one of the strongest of its kind in the world. Many years and many millions of dollars were required to build it, but it was, in general, feebly garrisoned, and was, altogether, a stupid, tedious locality, except in the bathing months, when the beauty and fas.h.i.+on of Virginia resorted to its hotel. A few cottages had grown up around it, tenanted only in "the season;" and a little way off, on the mainland, stood the pretty village of Hampton.

By a strange oversight, the South failed to seize Fortress Monroe at the beginning of the Rebellion; the Federals soon made it the basis for their armies and a leading naval station. The battle of Big Bethel was one of the first occurrences in the vicinity. Then the dwellings of Hampton were burned and its people exiled. In rapid succession followed the naval battles in the Roads, the siege and surrender of Yorktown, the flight of the Confederates up the Peninsula to Richmond, and finally the battles of Williamsburg, and West Point, and the capture of Norfolk.

These things had already transpired; it was now the month of May; and the victorious army, following up its vantages, had pursued the fugitives by land and water to "White House," at the head of navigation on the Pamunkey river. Thither it was my lot to go, and witness the turning-point of their fortunes, and their subsequent calamity and repulse.

I found Old Point a weary place of resort, even in the busy era of civil war. The bar at the Hygeia House was beset with thirsty and idle people, who swore instinctively, and drank raw spirits pa.s.sionately. The quant.i.ty of sh.e.l.l, ball, ordnance, camp equipage, and war munitions of every description piled around the fort, was marvellously great. It seemed to me that Xerxes, the first Napoleon, or the greediest of conquerors, ancient or modern, would have beheld with amazement the gigantic preparations at command of the Federal Government. Energy and enterprise displayed their implements of death on every hand. One was startled at the prodigal outlay of means, and the reckless summoning of men. I looked at the starred and striped ensign that flaunted above the Fort, and thought of Madame Roland's appeal to the statue by the guillotine.

The settlers were numbered by regiments here. Their places of business were mainly structures or "shanties" of rough plank, and most of them were the owners of sloops, or schooners, for the transportation of freight from New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, to their depots at Old Point. Some possessed a dozen wagons, that plied regularly between these stores and camps. The traffic was not confined to men; for women and children kept pace with the army, trading in every possible article of necessity or luxury. For these--disciples of the dime and the dollar--war had no terrors. They took their muck-rakes, like the man in Bunyan, and gathered the almighty coppers, from the pestilential camp and the reeking battle-field.

CHAPTER VII.

ON TO RICHMOND.

Yorktown lies twenty-one miles northwestward from Old Point, and thither I turned my face at noon, resolving to delay my journey to "White House," till next day morning. Crossing an estuary of the bay upon a narrow causeway, I pa.s.sed Hampton,--half burned, half desolate,--and at three o'clock came to "Big Bethel," the scene of the battle of June 11, 1861. A small earthwork marks the site of Magruder's field-pieces, and hard by the slain were buried. The spot was noteworthy to me, since Lieutenant Greble, a fellow alumnus, had perished here, and likewise, Theodore Winthrop, the gifted author of "Cecil Dreeme" and "John Brent."

The latter did not live to know his exaltation. That morning never came whereon he "woke, and found himself famous."

The road ran parallel with the deserted defences of the Confederates for some distance. The country was flat and full of swamps, but marked at intervals by relics of camps. The farm-houses were untenanted, the fences laid flat or destroyed, the fields strewn with discarded clothing, arms, and utensils. By and by, we entered the outer line of Federal parallels, and wound among lunettes, cremailleres, redoubts, and rifle-pits. Marks of sh.e.l.l and ball were frequent, in furrows and holes, where the clay had been upheaved. Every foot of ground, for fifteen miles henceforward, had been touched by the shovel and the pick. My companion suggested that as much digging, concentred upon one point, would have taken the Federals to China. The sappers and miners had made their stealthy trenches, rod by rod, each morning appearing closer to their adversaries, and finally, completed their work, at less than a hundred yards from the Confederate defences. Three minutes would have sufficed from the final position, to hurl columns upon the opposing outworks, and sweep them with the bayonet. Ten days only had elapsed since the evacuation (May 4), and the siege guns still remained in some of the batteries. McClellan wors.h.i.+pped great ordnance, and some of his columbiads, that were mounted in the water battery, yawned cavernously through their embrasures, and might have furnished sleeping accommodations to the gunners. A few mortars stood in position by the river side, and there were Parrott, Griffin, and Dahlgren pieces in the sh.o.r.e batteries.

However numerous and powerful were the Federal fortifications, they bore no comparison, in either respect, to those relinquished by the revolutionists. Miniature mountain ranges they seemed, deeply ditched, and revetted with sods, fascines, hurdles, gabions or sand bags. Along the York riverside there were water batteries of surpa.s.sing beauty, that seemed, at a little distance, successions of gentle terraces. Their pieces were likewise of enormous calibre, and their number almost incredible. The advanced line of fortifications, sketched from the mouth of Warwick creek, on the South, to a point fifteen miles distant on the York: one hundred and forty guns were planted along this chain of defences; but there were two other concentric lines, mounting, each, one hundred and twenty, and two hundred and forty guns. The remote series consisted of six forts of ma.s.sive size and height, fronted by swamps and flooded meadows, with frequent creeks and ravines interposing; sharp _fraise_ and _abattis_ planted against scarp and slope, pointed cruelly eastward. There were two water batteries, of six and four thirty-two columbiads respectively, and the town itself, which stands upon a red clay bluff, was encircled by a series of immense rifled and smooth-bore pieces, including a powerful pivot-gun, that one of McClellan's sh.e.l.ls struck during the first day's bombardment, and split it into fragments.

At Gloucester Point, across the York river, the great guns of the _Merrimac_ were planted, it is said, and a fleet of fire-rafts and torpedo-s.h.i.+ps were moored in the stream. By all accounts, there could have been no less than five hundred guns behind the Confederate entrenchments, the greater portion, of course, field-pieces, and, as the defending army was composed of one hundred thousand men, we must add that number of small arms to the list of ordnance. If we compute the Federals at so high a figure,--and they could scarcely have had less than a hundred thousand men afield,--we must increase the enormous amount of their field, siege, and small ordnance, by the naval guns of the fleet, that stood anch.o.r.ed in the bay. It is probable that a thousand cannon and two hundred thousand muskets were a.s.sembled in and around Yorktown during this memorable siege. The mind shudders to see the terrible deductions of these statistics. The monster, who wished that the world had but one neck, that he might sever it, would have gloated at such realization! How many days or hours would have here sufficed to annihilate all the races of men? Happily, the world was spared the spectacle of these deadly mouths at once aflame. Beautiful but awful must have been the scene, and the earth must have staggered with the shock. One might almost have imagined that man, in his ambition, had shut his G.o.d in heaven, and besieged him there.

While the fortifications defending it amazed me, the village of Yorktown disappointed me. I marvelled that so paltry a settlement should have been twice made historic. Here, in the year 1783, Lord Cornwallis surrendered his starving command to the American colonists and their French allies. But the entrenchments of that earlier day had been almost obliterated by these recent labors. The field, where the Earl delivered up his sword, was trodden bare, and dotted with ditches and ramparts; while a small monument, that marked the event, had been hacked to fragments by the Southerners, and carried away piecemeal. Yet, strange to say, relics of the first bombardment had just been discovered, and, among them, a gold-hilted sword.

I visited, in the evening, the late quarters of General Hill, a small white house with green shutters, and also the famous "Nelson House," a roomy mansion where, of old, Cornwallis slept, and where, a few days past, Jefferson Davis and General Lee had held with Magruder, and his a.s.sociates, a council of war. It had been also used for hospital purposes, but some negroes were now the only occupants.

The Confederates left behind them seventy spiked and shattered cannon, some powder, and a few splintered wagons; but in all material respects, their evacuation was thorough and creditable. Some deserters took the first tidings of the retreat to the astonished Federals, and they raised the national flag within the fortifications, in the gray of the morning of the 4th of May. Many negroes also escaped the vigilance of their taskmasters, and remained to welcome the victors. The fine works of Yorktown are monuments to negro labor, for _they_ were the hewers and the diggers. Every slave-owner in Eastern Virginia was obliged to send one half of his male servants between the ages of sixteen and fifty to the Confederate camps, and they were organized into gangs and set to work. In some cases they were put to military service and made excellent sharpshooters. The last gun discharged from the town was said to have been fired by a negro.

I slept on board a barge at the wharf that evening, and my dreams ran upon a thousand themes. To every American this was hallowed ground. It had been celebrated by the pencil of Trumbull, the pen of Franklin, and the eloquence of Jefferson. Scarce eighty years had elapsed since those great minds established a fraternal government; but the site of their crowning glory was now the scene of their children's shame. Discord had stolen upon their councils and blood had profaned their shrine.

I visited next day a bomb-proof postern, or subterranean pa.s.sage, connecting the citadel with the outworks, and loitered about the fortifications till noon, when I took pa.s.sage on the mail steamer, which left the Fortress at eleven o'clock, and reached White House at dusk the same evening. The whole river as I ascended was filled with merchant and naval craft. They made a continuous line from Old Point to the mouth of York River, and the masts and spars environing Yorktown and Gloucester, reminded one of a scene on the Mersey or the Clyde. At West Point, there was an array of s.h.i.+pping scarcely less formidable, and the windings of the interminably crooked Pamunkey were marked for leagues by sails, smoke-stacks, and masts. The landings and wharves were besieged by flat-boats and sloops, and Zouaves were hoisting forage and commissary stores up the red bluffs at every turn of our vessel.

The Pamunkey was a beautiful stream, densely wooded, and occasional vistas opened up along its borders of wheat-fields and meadows, with Virginia farm-houses and negro quarters on the hilltops. Some of the houses on the river banks appeared to be tenanted by white people, but the majority had a haunted, desolate appearance, the only signs of life being strolling soldiers, who thrust their legs through the second story windows, or contemplated the river from the chimney-tops, and groups of negroes who sunned themselves on the piazza, or rushed to the margin to gaze and grin at the pa.s.sing steamers. There were occasional residences not unworthy of old manorial and baronial times, and these were attended at a little distance by negro quarters of logs, arranged in rows, and provided with mud chimneys built against their gables. Few of the Northern navigable rivers were so picturesque and varied.

We pa.s.sed two Confederate gunboats, that had been half completed, and burned on the stocks. Their charred elbows and ribs, stared out, like the remains of some extinct monsters; a little delay might have found each of them armed and manned, and carrying havoc upon the rivers and the seas. West Point was simply a tongue, or spit of land, dividing the Mattapony from the Pamunkey river at their junction; a few houses were built upon the shallow, and some wharves, half demolished, marked the terminus of the York and Richmond railroad. A paltry water-battery was the sole defence. Below c.u.mberland (a collection of huts and a wharf), a number of schooners had been sunk across the river, and, with the aid of an island in the middle, these const.i.tuted a rather rigid blockade. The steamboat pa.s.sed through, steering carefully, but some sailing vessels that followed required to be towed between the narrow apertures. The tops only of the sunken masts could be discerned above the surface, and much time and labor must have been required to place the boats in line and sink them. Vessels were counted by scores above and below this blockade, and at c.u.mberland the masts were like a forest; cl.u.s.ters of pontoons were here anch.o.r.ed in the river, and a short distance below we found three of the light-draught Federal gunboats moored in the stream.

It was growing dark as we rounded to at "White House;" the camp fires of the grand army lit up the sky, and edged the tree-boughs on the margin with ribands of silver. Some drums beat in the distance; sentries paced the strand; the hum of men, and the lowing of commissary cattle, were borne towards us confusedly; soldiers were bathing in the river; team-horses were drinking at the brink; a throng of motley people were crowding about the landing to receive the papers and mails. I had at last arrived at the seat of war, and my ambition to chronicle battles and bloodshed was about to be gratified.

At first, I was troubled to make my way; the tents had just been pitched; none knew the location of divisions other than their own, and it was now so dark that I did not care to venture far. After a vain attempt to find some flat-boats where there were lodgings and meals to be had, I struck out for general head-quarters, and, undergoing repeated snubbings from pert members of staff, fell in at length, with a very tall, spare, and angular young officer, who spoke broken English, and who heard my inquiries, courteously; he stepped into General Marcy's tent, but the Chief of Staff did not know the direction of Smith's division; he then repaired to Gen. Van Vleet, the chief Quartermaster, but with ill success. A party of officers were smoking under a "fly,"

and some of these called to him, thus--

"Captain! Duke! De Chartres! What do you wish?"

It was, then, the Orleans Prince who had befriended me, and I had the good fortune to hear that the division, of which I was in search, lay a half mile up the river. I never spoke to the Bourbon afterward, but saw him often; and that he was as chivalrous as he was kind, all testimony proved.

A private escorted me to a Captain Mott's tent, and this officer introduced me to General Hanc.o.c.k. I was at once invited to mess with the General's staff, and in the course of an hour felt perfectly at home.

Hanc.o.c.k was one of the handsomest officers in the army; he had served in the Mexican war, and was subsequently a Captain in the Quartermaster's department. But the Rebellion placed stars in many shoulder-bars, and few were more worthily designated than this young Pennsylvanian. His first laurels were gained at Williamsburg; but the story of a celebrated charge that won him the day's applause, and McClellan's encomium of the "Superb Hanc.o.c.k," was altogether fict.i.tious. The musket, not the bayonet, gave him the victory. I may doubt, in this place, that any extensive bayonet charge has been known during the war. Some have gone so far as to deny that the bayonet has ever been used at all.

Hanc.o.c.k's regiments were the 5th Wisconsin, 49th Pennsylvanian, 43d New York, and 6th Maine. They represented widely different characteristics, and I esteemed myself fortunate to obtain a position where I could so eligibly study men, habits, and warfare. During the evening I fell in with the Colonel of each of these regiments, and from the conversation that ensued, I gleaned a fair idea of them all.

The Wisconsin regiment was from a new and ambitious State of the Northwest. The men were rough-mannered, great-hearted farmers, wood-choppers, and tradesmen. They had all the impulsiveness of the Yankee, with less selfishness, and quite as much bravery. The Colonel was named Cobb, and he had held some leading offices in Wisconsin. A part of his life had been adventurously spent, and he had partic.i.p.ated in the Mexican war. He was an ardent Republican in politics, and had been Speaker of a branch of the State Legislature. He was an attorney in a small county town when the war commenced, and his name had been broached for the Governors.h.i.+p. In person he was small, lithe, and capable of enduring great fatigue. His hair was a little gray, and he had no beard. He did not respect appearances, and his sword, as I saw, was antique and quite different in shape from the regulation weapon. He had penetrating gray eyes, and his manners were generally reserved. One had not to regard him twice to see that he was both cautious and resolute. He was too ambitious to be frank, and too pa.s.sionate not to be brave. In the formula of learning he was not always correct; but few were of quicker perception or more practical and philosophic. He might not, in an emergency, be nicely scrupulous as to means, but he never wavered in respect to objects. His will was the written law to his regiment, and I believed his executive abilities superior to those of any officer in the brigade, not excepting the General's.

The New York regiment was commanded by a young officer named Vinton. He was not more than thirty-five years of age, and was a graduate of the United States Military Academy. Pa.s.sionately devoted to engineering, he withdrew from the army, and pa.s.sed five years in Paris, at the study of his art. Returning homeward by way of the West Indies, he visited Honduras, and projected a filibustering expedition to its sh.o.r.es from the States. While perfecting the design, the Rebellion commenced, and his old patron, General Scott, secured him the colonelcy of a volunteer regiment. He still cherished his scheme of "Colonization," and half of his men were promised to accompany him. Personally, Colonel Vinton was straight, dark, and handsome. He was courteous, affable, and brave,--but wedded to his peculiar views, and, as I thought, a thorough "Young American."

The Maine regiment was fathered by Colonel Burnham, a staunch old yeoman and soldier, who has since been made a General. His probity and good-nature were adjuncts of his valor, and his men were of the better cla.s.s of New Englanders. The fourth regiment fell into the hands of a lawyer from Lewistown, Pennsylvania. He had been also in the Mexican war, and was remarkable mainly for strictness with regard to the sanitary regulations of his camps. He had wells dug at every stoppage, and his tents were generally fenced and canopied with cedar arbors.

General Hanc.o.c.k's staff was composed of a number of young men, most of whom had been called from civil life. His brigade const.i.tuted one of three commanded by General Smith. Four batteries were annexed to the division so formed; the entire number of muskets was perhaps eight thousand. The Chief of Artillery was a Captain Ayres, whose battery saved the three months' army at Bull Run. It so happened that he came into the General's during the evening, and recited the particulars of a gunboat excursion, thirty miles up the Pamunkey, wherein he had landed his men, and burned a quant.i.ty of grain, some warehouses, and s.h.i.+pping.

I pencilled the facts at once, made up my letter, and mailed it early in the morning.

CHAPTER VIII.

RUSTICS IN REBELLION.

At White House, I met some of the mixed Indians and negroes from Indiantown Island, which lies among the osiers in the stream. One of these ferried me over, and the people received me obsequiously, touching their straw hats, and saying, "Sar, at your service!" They were all anxious to hear something of the war, and asked, solicitously, if they were to be protected. Some of them had been to Richmond the previous day, and gave me some unimportant items happening in the city. I found that they had Richmond papers of that date, and purchased them for a few cents. They knew little or nothing of their own history, and had preserved no traditions of their tribe. There was, however, I understood, a very old woman extant, named "Mag," of great repute at medicines, pow-wows, and divination. I expressed a desire to speak with her, and was conducted to a log-house, more ricketty and ruined than any of the others. About fifty half-breeds followed me in respectful curiosity, and they formed a semicircle around the cabin. The old woman sat in the threshold, barefooted, and smoking a stump of clay pipe.

"Yaw's one o' dem Nawden soldiers, Aunt Mag!" said my conductor. "He wants to talk wid ye."

"Sot down, honey," said the old woman, producing a wooden stool; "is you a Yankee, honey? Does you want you fauchun told by de ole 'oman?"

I perceived that the daughter of the Delawares smelt strongly of fire-water, and the fumes of her calumet were most unwholesome. She was greatly disappointed that I did not require her prophetic services, and said, appealingly--

"Why, sar, all de gen'elmen an' ladies from Richmond has dere fauchuns told. I tells 'em true. All my fauchuns comes out true. Ain't dat so, chillen?"

A low murmur of a.s.sent ran round the group, and I was obviously losing caste in the settlement.

"Here is a dime," said I, "that I will give you, to tell me the result of the war. Shall the North be victorious in the next battle? Will Richmond surrender within a week? Shall I take my cigar at the Spotswood on Sunday fortnight?"

"I'se been a lookin' into dat," she said, cunningly; "I'se had dreams on dat ar'. Le'um see how de armies stand!"