AYRES—CRAWFORD—GRIFFIN.
AYRES—CRAWFORD—GRIFFIN.
Stick a pin through Ayres and turn Griffin and Crawfordforward 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 eçhelon, 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 passed 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, dashing, 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 Saturday 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 Crawfordfulfilled 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 shells, and showing in the dusk the curl of flames in the tangled grass, 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 ridingalong the breastworks, and in the act as I am assured, 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 circumstances; but now, wearied with persistent assaults 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 horsemen charged them in their vain attempt to fight "out," and in the rear straggling foot and cavalry began also to assemble; 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 intervalsof 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, slashing 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 assured 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 passing 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, theofficers sharing the same fare with the soldiers, from whom, indeed, they were undistinguishable.
Thus ended the splendid victory of Five Forks, the least bloody 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 Saturday 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 itspews 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 assuaged 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 worship. 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 God, and the frightened congregation worshipped 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 class-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 passed 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 hadno 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 passed, 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 assistants were congregated. Sheridan sat by some fagots, 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.
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 associate, 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, shivering our thunderbolts against it for more than four years, Richmond is still a mystery.
Know then, that, whether coming from Washington or Baltimore, the two points of embarkation, all bound hitherward must rendezvous at Fortress Monroe; thence, in such excellent steamers as theDictator, 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 acolored 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 nobleness of hospitality, high spirit, dignity, and affability which constitute 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 noblest 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 passage, 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 pass Harrison's Landing, where two grand armies,beatenaside 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 hoarsely; 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 ramAtlantain 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, theRoanokedrifts 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 shine above her bulwarks like a flower growing in a carcass. 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 substituting 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 fishing-pole. One should come up this river to geta 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 brass cannon, and all sorts of craft that can float and manœuvre, 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 canal, 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 canal 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 canal 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 shore, 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 multitudes passed 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 likethunderbolts along the mountain-tops, are gone now, and only straggling, meddling fellows pass them at all. The highest of these works commands both ends of the Dutch Gap canal, 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 bloody 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 circumstances, that our fleet could have got to Richmond so long as the Rebels contested the passage; 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. Each elbow of the stream is muscular with snag and snare wherever the swift stream swoops around abruptly. Jagged abatis, driven piles, and artificial lumber, bar the way before us. To the right of us, to the left of us, behind us, stand up the bare parapets, crowned with airy lookout towers, where, at the coming of a nautilus, the whole horizon and foreground would rain crossfires of shell and iron bolts, to sweep into annihilation the tiniest or the staunchestopposition from the earth's surface, and under the earth and above the earth death waited to leap up and draw the daring to its bosom. Not one, nor two, nor three lines of defences frowned down as we cautiously steamed along, but every precipice was bristling with defiance, as if the deep subterranean fires underlying our race had burst here fitfully and frequently, heaving up the swells of the hills till they lay hard and barren for human ingenuity to garnish them with anxious artillery. All along were the deep funnel-shaped cases of the torpedoes just disentombed. But at nightfall Drury's Bluff flitted by like the battlemented wall of a city, and then we saw no more.
The band that greeted us from a distance stops playing as the boat nears the wharf.
There is a stillness, in the midst of which Richmond, with her ruins, her spectral roof, afar, and her unchanging spires, rests beneath a ghastly, fitful glare,—the night stain which a great conflagration leaves behind it for weeks,—struggling silently with colossal shadows along the foreground, two hideous walls alone arise in front, shutting these gleams. They are the Libby Prison and Castle Thunder. Right and left, and far in the moonlighted perspective beyond, there is a soft glitter upon cornices and domes. A haggard glow of candles, faintly defines the thoroughfares that have not suffered ruin; while massive, and upon a height overlooking all, stands the Capitol, flying its black shadow from the sinking moon across a hundred crumbling walls, until its edges touch the windows of the Libby.
But over its massive roof, dimly seen through the mists of the river, and, as before, "through the mists of the deep," the banner of the Union, banished for four years, is shaken out again, broad and beautiful, by the breath of an April night. Upon the face of every leaning figure on the steamer's deck, in sight of that radiant signal, is the same half-melancholy, half-triumphant smile.
The thought of the battle which has passed, of the army,which, after struggling through years for this majestic procession, has swept by and beyond without the view for which its straining eyes have yearned, is sad and strange. There comes back dimly suggestive, a story of Iran and his host, thundering at the gates of Tupelo, for the possession of a wondrous jewel, and awakening once upon a dawn to learn that Tupelo was an empty casket,—to turn back longing, "wondering eyes upon the city, and to hunt the fleeing prize afar." Yet unto those legions of the republic which have emptied Richmond of a prize which yet they may have easily clutched, there go out reverence and blessing even larger than might be bestowed upon them resting in camp, upon these overlooking hills. That true allegiance, that calm and stern self-sacrifice which impels an army forward past the sweet applauses and rewarding calms to which great victories might entitle it, are the purest sources of its glory and its fame. God bless the army that has permitted us to consummate this journey and to gaze upon this spectacle, while it does not impress us too proudly, too triumphantly. Both pride and triumph have, of course, a place in the tumultuous feeling that surges through the hearts of all; yet as in every true man is born an instinct of compassion for a fallen foe, we prefer that the shout should go up in honor of our victory alone, and not because these have suffered.
The boat touches the shore at Rockett's, the foot of Richmond. A few minutes' walk and we tread the pavements of the capital. There are no noisy and no beseeching runners; there is no sound of life, but the stillness of a catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters in reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy voice: "And this is Richmond."
We are under the shadow of ruins. From the pavements where we walk far off into the gradual curtain of the night,stretches a vista of desolation. The hundreds of fabrics, the millions of wealth, that crumbled less than a week ago beneath one fiery kiss, here topple and moulder into rest. A white smoke-wreath rising occasionally, enwraps a shattered wall as in a shroud. A gleam of flame shoots a grotesque picture of broken arches and ragged chimneys into the brain. Huge piles of debris begin to encumber the sidewalks, and even the pavements, as we go on. The streets in some places are quite choked up from walking. We are among the ruins of half a city. The wreck, the loneliness, seem interminable. The memory of lights in houses above, beheld while upon the steamer, alone keeps despondency from a victory over hope; and although the continued existence of the Spottswood Hotel is vouched for by authority, my lodge in such a wilderness seems next to impossible. Away to the right, above the waste of blackened walls, around the phantom-looking flag upon the capitol,—the only sign betwixt heaven and earth, or upon the earth, that Richmond is not wholly deserted,—beyond and out of the ruins, we walk past one of two open doorways where the moon serves as candle to a group of talking negroes. The gas works, injured by fire, are not working, and "ile" has not been struck in the Confederacy. Not a white man appears until we reach the Spottswood,—there before the entrance is a conclave of officers,—then, at last, entering, we stand in that most famous of Southern hotels, the interior of which is filled with the very aroma of the Rebellion. A thankful yielding up of carpet-bags and valises to the indignant negro waiters, and then a brief moonlight stroll toward the capitol.
Within the gates of the Square, that swing on their hinges silent as the hour we pass alone, before us stands the magnificent monument crowned with Crawford's equestrian statue of Washington. The right hand of the rider, lifted against the sky, points a prophetic finger toward the southwest. Dark, and motionless, and grand, it is the onesymbol belonging solely to the Union, which they have not dared to desecrate; which they have strangely chosen to consider neither as an insult nor a rebuke.
Gazing beyond at the capitol itself, and back again at the figure which overlooks the building, it is not hard to imagine that, while the noisy debates of a congress of traitors to the Union that he founded were in progress, those bronze lips sometimes smiled in scorn.
Leaving Richmond proper, and descending into the low, squalid portion of the town known as Rocketts, one sees among the many large warehouses, used without exception for the storage of tobacco, a certain one more irregular than the rest. An archway leads into it, and upon the outside of the second story windows runs a long ledge or footway, whereupon sentries used to stride, guarding the miserable people within. This is the jail of Castle Thunder, and it was the civil or State prison of the capital. Ill as were the accommodations of prisoners of war, the treatment of their own unoffending citizens by the Rebel government was ten times more infamous. We could not repress indignation, nor by any philosophic or charitable effort excuse the atrocious tyranny which here lashed, chained, handcuffed, tortured, shot, and hung, hundreds of people whom it could not stultify or impress. We may grant that the Confederacy had become a government; that, in its perilous incipiency, it had apology for severity and rigor with all malcontents; that, in its own struggle for death or life, it might, in self-defence, absorb all private liberty; but even thus the terrible testimony of this Castle Thunder is an everlasting stigma upon the Southern cause. We entered its strong portal, and there in the new commandant's room lay the record left behind by the Confederates. Its pages made one shudder.
These are some of the entries:—
"George Barton,—giving food to Federal prisoners of war; forty lashes upon the bare back. Approved. Sentence carried into effect July 2."Peter B. Innis,—passing forged government notes; chain and ball for twelve months; forty lashes a day. Approved."Arthur Wright,—attempting to desert to the enemy; sentenced to be shot. Approved. Carried into effect, March 26."John Morton,—communicating with the enemy; to be hung. Approved. Carried into effect, March 26."
"George Barton,—giving food to Federal prisoners of war; forty lashes upon the bare back. Approved. Sentence carried into effect July 2.
"Peter B. Innis,—passing forged government notes; chain and ball for twelve months; forty lashes a day. Approved.
"Arthur Wright,—attempting to desert to the enemy; sentenced to be shot. Approved. Carried into effect, March 26.
"John Morton,—communicating with the enemy; to be hung. Approved. Carried into effect, March 26."
In an inner room are some fifty pairs of balls and chains, with anklets and handcuffs upon them, which have bent the spirit and body of many a resisting heart. Within are two condemned cells, perfectly dark,—a faded flap over the window peep-hole,—the smell from which would knock a strong man down.
For in their centre lies the sink, ever open, and the floors are sappy with uncleanliness. To the right of these, a door leads to a walled yard not forty feet long, nor fifteen wide, overlooked by the barred windows of the main prison rooms, and by sentry boxes upon the wall-top. Here the wretched were shot and hung in sight of their trembling comrades. The brick wall at the foot of the yard is scarred and crushed by balls and bullets which first passed through some human heart and wrote here their damning testimony. The gallows had been suspended from a wing in the ledge, and in mid-air the impotent captive swung, none daring or willing to say a good word for him; and not for any offence against God's law, not for wronging his neighbor, or shedding blood, or making his kind miserable, but for standing in the way of an upstart organization, which his impulse and his judgment alike impelled him to oppose. This little yard, bullet-marked, close, and shut from all sympathy, is to us the ghastliest spot in the world. Can Mr. Davis visit it, and pray as he does so devoutly afterward? When menplead the justice of the South, and arguments are prompt to favor them, let this prison yard rise up and say that no such crimes in liberty's name have ever been committed, on this continent, at least. Up stairs, in Castle Thunder, there are two or three large rooms, barred and dimly lit, and two or three series of condemned cells, pent-up and pitchy, where, by a refinement of cruelty, the ceiling has been built low so that no man can stand upright. Here fifteen or twenty were crowded together, and, in the burning atmosphere, they stripped themselves stark naked, so that when in the morning the cell-doors were opened, they came forth as from the grave, begging for death. There are women's cells too; for this great and valiant government recognized women as belligerents, and locked them up close to a sentry's cartridge, so that, in the bitterness of solitude, they were unsexed, and railed, and blasphemed, like wanton things. On the pavements before the jail, were hidden numberless guards, who shot at every rag fluttering from the cages, and all this little circle of death and terror was enacted close to the bright river, and airy pediment of that high capitol, where bold men hoped by war to wring from a reluctant Union, acknowledgment of arrogant independence to rein civilization as it pleased, and warp the destinies of our race.
When Richmond was a plain city, a county seat, and the residence of a governor and commonwealth legislature, its enterprise was as gradual as its hospitality and private probity were steadfast. It was always a fierce political arena, and its two great journals, theWhigandEnquirer, were not more violently partisan than its hustings. In the latter its debaters were wide-famed. No such "stump" has ever existed in America, commencing with Patrick Henry, whose eloquence was as intense and telling as his statesmanship was errant and inconsistent, and passing through the shrill and bitter apostrophies of John Randolph down to the latest era of Henry A. Wise, the most sufferable and interminable campaign orator extant, and John Minor Botts, scarcely his inferior. With us, out of door rhetoric is dry, studied, and argumentative; here an inspiration, based upon feeling rather than reason, and so earnest that it knew no personal friendship where its political affinities stopped. Whig and Democrat were not men of the same race or family in Richmond; they passed each other on the sidewalk with a sneer or a scowl, and knew no coalition even in the house of God. Even when the Whig party as an organization deceased, the Whigs, as individuals, retained their traditional antipathy, and the advent of secession was decried by these, not because they loved the Union more, but the triumphant Democracy the less. Separation was a feature of the hated faith, and no good could come out of Nazareth. The Union men of Richmond who have hungered in Castle Thunder, and been driven, needy and naked, from the South, were all old line Whigs, distrusting the North, but disliking Democracy. However, the war burst at last, heralded by that mysterious lunatic who appeared like a warning giant in the twilight day of the Union,—old John Brown; and as the Gulf States wheeled into line and pulled down the old colors, the Old Dominion, Southern and slaveholding, was too impulsive not to follow the whirlwind. She did not go for policy's sake, nor for principle's sake, but for emotion's sake. How wild and jubilant, and confident, were those Richmond mass meetings, at which separation was counselled! How awful seems their levity at this distance, with the city conquered and in ruins! On the Capitol Hill the mad orators inveighed; within the Capitol met the disunion assembly in secret and prolonged session; before the American, the Exchange, and the Spottswood hotels, visiting commissioners harangued the crowd; the people went to ballot on the day of State suicide, with laughing and wagging, and at the decree that Virginia and her people had resolved to quit the fabric of their fathers, bonfires and illuminations lit up the river and the sky.
Done, these were the men to stand fast. Done in dream, the first acts were mirages rather than comprehensible events. They marched upon Harper's Ferry; they suppressed the Unionists in their midst; they erased the sacred mottoes of amity and unity from their monuments, and won to the new cause they so blindly embraced every inch of their soil except Old Point, where Fortress Monroe still stood defiant, to be in the end the source of their downfall. Gayly went the populace of Richmond, and splendid parties made the nights lustrous. When they heard that their town was mentioned, among many others, as the probable Confederate capital, they threw their hearts into the suggestionand offered lands and edifices as free gifts for the honor of being the centre of the South. A few, more interested, beheld in the coming of the seat of government higher rents and increased patronage, crowded hotels, and railway stock at a premium; but the mass, with the enthusiasm of women or children, thought only of their beloved city growing in rank and power; the home of legislators, orators, and savans; the seat of all rank and the depository of archives. At last the good news came; Richmond was the capital of a great nation; that courtesy bound all grateful Virginian hearts to the common cause forever; the heyday and gratulation were renewed; the new President, and the reverend senators appeared on Richmond streets; the citizens were proud and happy.
There was no spectre of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its extremest and most deadly phase. Richmond and Virginia laughed at these, flushed in the present, and invincible in the past. They only held high heads,—and trade, with vanity, grew strong, till every citizen wondered why all this glory had been so long delayed, and despised the ten years preceding the rupture, if not, indeed, the whole past of the Union.
The President of the United States proclaimed war; an army marched upon the city. Not until the battle of Bull Run, when the dead and mangled came by hundreds into the town, did any one discover the consequences of Richmond's new distinction; but by this time the Rebel government had absorbed Virginia, and was master of the city. Thenceforward Richmond was the scene of all terrors, the prey of all fears and passions. Campaign after campaign was directed against her; she lived in the perpetual thunder of cannon; raiders pressed to her gates; she was agreat garrison and hospital only, besieged and cut off from her own provinces; armies passed through her to the sound of drums, and returned to the creak of ambulances. She lost her social prestige, and became a barrack-city, filled with sutlers, adventurers, and refugees, till, bearing bravely up amid domestic riot and horrible demoralization,—a jail, a navy-yard, a base of operations,—she grew pinched, and base, and haggard, and, at last, deserted. Given over to sack and fire, the wretches who used her retreated in the night, and the enemies she had provoked marched over her defences, and laid her—spent, degenerate, and disgraced—under martial law.
The outline of the scenes immediately associated with the evacuation of Richmond has been told by telegraph. Now that the stupefied citizens have recovered reason and memory so well as to tell us the story, it seems the most dramatic and fearful of the war. On Saturday the city was calm and trusting; Lee, its idol, held Grant, at Petersburg, fast; the daily journals came out as usual, filled with soothing accounts; that night came vague rumors of reverses; in the morning vaguer rumors of evacuation; by Sunday night the public records were burned in the streets, and the only remaining railway carried off the specie of the banks; before daylight on Monday, the explosions of bridges and half-built ships of war shook the houses; in the imperfect day, women, and old men, and children began to sway and surge before the guarded depot, which refused to admit them; then the town fell afire; no remonstrance could pacify the incendiaries; the spring wind carried the flame from the burning boats on the canal to the great Galligo Mills, to files of massive warehouses groaning with tobacco, into the heart of the town, where stores, and vaults, and banks, and factories lined the wide, undulating streets; it filled the gray concave with flame till the stars of the dawn shrank to pale invisibility in the advancing glare, and the crackle of hot roofs and beams, and the crashof walls and timbers, drowned the cries of the frightened and bankrupt, who beheld their fortunes wither in an hour, and the inheritance of their children fall to ashes. By the red, consuming light, poured past the straggling Confederate soldiers, dead to the acknowledgment of private rights, and sacking shop and home with curses and ribaldry; the suburban citizens and the menial negroes adopted their examples; carrying off whatever came next their hands, and with arms full of "swag," dropping it in the highway, lured by some dearer plunder. Negroes, with baskets of stolen champagne and rare jars of tamarinds, sought their dusky quarters to swill and carouse; and whites of the middle, and even of the higher class, lent themselves to theft, who, before this debased era, would have died before so surrendering their honor. All was peril, terror, and license; all who had nothing to lose were thieves; all who had anything left to lose were cowards. The conflagration swept through the densest, proudest blocks, driving off, not only the resident worthy, but the resident corrupt. Where were the lewd contractors, who had hoarded Confederate scrip by the basest exactions? With the fall of the capital their dollars dwindled to dust; four years of crime had resulted in beggary; still, with grasping palms, they adhered to their valueless paper, bearing it away. But of all the wretched, the Cyprians were the foremost. These inhabited the dense and business part of the town, where their houses were serried and compact; and, driven forth by the fire, they sought the street in their plumes and calicoes, to spend a cold and shivering bivouac in the square of the Capitol. From afar, the rich men of Sunday watched the flames of Monday sweeping on in terrible impetuosity, knowing that every tongue of light which leaped on high carried with it the competence they had sinned to acquire. And behind all, plunderer, incendiary, and straggler, came the one vague, overlapping, dreadful fear of—the enemy. Would they finish what friends had commenced,—the sack.the desolation, the slaughter of the place? Richmond had cost them half a million of lives, a mountain of blood and wealth, four years of deadly struggle; would they not complete its ruin?
The morning came; the Confederates were gone; cavalry in blue galloped up the streets; a brigade of white infantry filed after them; then came the detested negroes. Behold! the victors, the subjugators, assist to quench the flames,—and Richmond is captured, but secure!
Many of the churches were open on the Sunday of April 9, 1865, and were thinly attended by the more adventurous of the citizens, with a sprinkling of soldiers and Northern civilians. Mr. Woodbridge, at the Monument Church, built on the site of a famous burnt theatre, prayed for "all in authority," and held his tongue upon dangerous topics. The First Baptist Negro Church has been occupied all the week by Massachusetts chaplains, and Northern negro preachers, who have talked the gospel of John Brown to gaping audiences of wool, white-eyeball, and ivory, telling them that the day of deliverance has come, and that they have only to possess the land which the Lord by the bayonet has given them. To-day, Mr. Allen, the regular white preacher, occupied the pulpit, and told the negroes that slavery was a divine institution, which would continue forever, and that the duty of every good servant was to stay at home and mind his master. Half of the enlightened Africans got up midway of the discourse and left; the rest were in doubt, and two or three black class-leaders, whom the parson had wheeled over, prayed lustily that the Lord would keep Old Virginny from new ideas and all Yankee salvations; so that in the end the population were quite tangled up, as much so as if they had read the book of Revelation. I attended Saint Paul's, the fashionable Episcopalian church, where Lee, Davis, Memminger, and the rest had been communicants, and heard Doctor Minnegerode discourse. He was one of the Prussian refugees of 1848,and, though a hot Jacobin there, became a more bitter secessionist here. He is learned, fluent, and thoughtful, but speaks with a slight Teutonic accent. Jeff Davis's pew was occupied by nobody, the door thereof being shut. Jeff was a very devout man, but not so much so as Lee, who made all the responses fervently, and knelt at every requirement. This church is capable of "seating" fifteen hundred persons, has galleries running entirely around it, and is sustained at the roof within by composite pilasters of plaster, and at the pulpit by columns of mongrel Corinthian; thetout ensembleis very excellent; a darkey sexton gave us a pew, and there were some handsome ladies present, dark Richmond beauties, haughty and thinly clothed, with only here and there a jockey-feathered hat, or a velvet mantilla, to tell of long siege and privation. We saw that those who dressed the shabbiest had yet preserved some little article of jewelry—a finger-ring, a brooch, a bracelet, showing how the last thing in woman to die is her vanity. Poor, proud souls! Last Sunday many of them were heiresses; now many of them could not pay the expenses of their own funerals. There were some Confederate officers in the house. They reminded me of the captive Jews holding worship in their gutted Temple. Some ruffians broke into this church after the occupation, and wrote ribaldry in the Bible and hymn-book. Dr. Minnegerode dared not pray for the Confederate States, and his sermon was trite, based upon the text of the eleventh chapter of the Acts—"The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch." In the opening lesson, however, he aimed poison at the North, selecting the forty-fourth and following Psalms, commencing, "We have heard with our ears, O God! our fathers have told us, what work Thou didst in their days, in the times of old." Then it spoke of the heathen being driven out and the chosen people planted; afflicted by God's disfavor, the forefathers held the territory, and the generation extant would yet rout its enemies. But now the old stockwere put to shame, a reproach to their neighbors and those that dwelt round about them. "Thou hast broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death," going not forth with our armies, bowing our souls to the dust till our bellies cleave unto the earth; we are killed all the day long, and counted as sheep for the slaughter.
Let all who would drink the essence of sorrow and anguish, read this wonderful Psalm, to learn how after this recapitulation, the parson said aloud the thrilling invocation.
"Arise! for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' sake."
Then came the next Psalm, light and tripping, full of praise for the king and his bride, coming to the nuptials with her virgin train: "instead of thy fathers, shall be thy children, whom thou mayst make princes in all the earth." A poetic parallel might be drawn between all this and the early hopes of Richmond; but the third Psalm came in like a beautiful peroration.
"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,—the Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah! He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire."
Clear, direct, and in meaning monotone, the captive high-priest read all this, so fearfully applicable to the subjugated and ruined town, and then the organ threw its tender music into the half-empty concave, sobbing like a far voice of multitudes, until the sweet singing of Madame Ruhl, the chorister, swept into the moan of pipes, and rose to a grand peal, quivering and trilling, like a nightingale wounded, making more tears than the sublimest operatic effort and the house reeled and trembled, as if Miriam and her chanting virgins were lifting praises to God in the midst of the desert.
That part of the New Testament read, by some strangefatuity, touches also the despair of the city. It told of Christ betrayed by Iscariot, deserted by his disciples, saying to his few trusty ones: "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad." "Can ye not watch with me one hour?" he says to the timid and sleeping; and turning to his conquerors, avers that the Son of Man shall return to Jerusalem, "sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." All this, of course, was the prescribed lesson for the Sunday before Easter, which to-day happened to be; but had the pastor searched it out to meet the exigencies of the place and time, it could not have been moreapropos. He read also from Daniel, where the king's dream was interpreted; his realm, like a tree worn down to the root, and the king himself making his dwelling with the wild asses, but in the end "thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee, after that thou shalt have known that the heavens do rule."
Again the organ rang, and the wonderful voice of the choristers alternated with deep religious prayers, whose refrain was, "Have mercy upon us."
Only one Sunday gone by, the church was densely packed with Rebel officers and people; Mrs. Lee was there, and the president, in his high and whitened hairs. Midway of the discourse a telegram came up the aisle, borne by a rapid orderly. The president read it, and strode away; the preacher read it, and faltered, and turned pale; it said: