Kitabı oku: «With Fire and Sword», sayfa 9

On Sunday morning General Sherman asked me to take a walk with him through the immense arsenal of Fayetteville before he should blow it up. We were gone an hour, and I was surprised at his great familiarity with all the machinery and works of the immense establishment. He talked constantly and explained many things to me. Never more than at that time was I impressed with the universal knowledge, the extraordinary genius, of the man. There seemed to be nothing there he did not understand. On our way back to headquarters I heard him give the order to destroy everything, to burn the arsenal down, blow it up, to leave absolutely nothing, and he added the prayer that the American government might never again give North Carolina an arsenal and forts to betray. He was very angry now at those who had used the United States property in their desire to destroy the government itself. He had seen nothing in the war that seemed so treasonable, unless it was the base ingratitude of those who entered the service of the Rebellion after having been educated at West Point at the Government's expense.

Pretty soon he said to me: "If I can get any kind of a boat up here, I am going to have you try to reach Wilmington with dispatches." Almost at that minute a steam whistle sounded in the woods below us. "There it is," said the General joyfully. "Pike got through." Very soon someone came running to say a communication had come from the seashore; a little tug had run the Rebel gauntlet all the way from Wilmington.

We went in to lunch and the General announced to the staff his intention of sending me down the river, and off to General Grant with dispatches. This chance to get word of his movements and his successes to General Grant and the North was of vast importance, and it moved him greatly. He left his lunch half finished and commenced writing letters and reports to the commander-in-chief. That evening at twilight General Sherman walked with me down to the riverside where the little tug lay waiting. "When you reach the North," he said, putting his arm around me, "don't tell them we have been cutting any great swath in the Carolinas; simply tell them the plain facts; tell them that the army is not lost, but is well, and still marching." So careful was I as to his injunctions, that even the newspapers at Washington never knew how the great news from Sherman reached the North.

I did not know then, starting down the river with my message, that it was to be seven years before I was again to see the face of my beloved commander.

The Cape Fear River was flooded at this time, a mile wide, in places even more, and though its banks were lined with guerrillas there could not be great danger, if we could stay in the middle of the stream, unless our little boat should get wrecked in the darkness by floating trees or by running into shallow places. The lights were all put out. The pilot house and the sides of the boat were covered by bales of cotton, to protect us against the Rebel bullets. My dispatches to General Grant were carefully sewed up inside my shirt, and were weighted, so that I could hastily sink them in the river should we be captured. A half dozen refugees from Columbia joined us. Among them was the Mrs. C – , whose property Devine and I had tried to save the night of the fire. It was a curious and dangerous voyage down that roaring, flooded river for a woman to be undertaking in the darkness, but this woman had now undertaken many dangers. Another of my companions on that strange voyage was Theodore Davis, a corresponding artist of Harper's Weekly. We kept the boat in the channel as far as we could guess it, and, for the rest, simply floated in the darkness. We went through undiscovered; not a shot fired at us. Before daylight, so swift had been the current, we were in Wilmington.

General Terry had just taken Wilmington and was in command of the city. Some of my dispatches were for him. He was still in bed, in one of the fine residences of the place, but instantly arose and urged me to jump into bed and get some rest while he should arrange to get me immediate transportation to Grant. I slept till nine, and when I came down to the drawing-room, now used as headquarters, General Terry asked if perhaps it were I who wrote the song about Sherman's March from Atlanta seaward. It had been sung at the theater the night before, he said. I was much gratified to have him tell me that the whole army had taken it up. "Tens of thousands of men," he said, "were singing it." I knew, as already told, that an exchanged prisoner had brought the song through the Rebel lines in an artificial leg he wore, but it was an agreeable surprise to now learn of its sudden and tremendous success.

General Terry impressed me as the handsomest soldier I had seen in the army – McPherson, the commander of my own corp, only excepted. He was, too, a refined and perfect gentleman. Looking at him I thought of the cavaliers of romance. Here was real knighthood, born and bred in the soil of the republic. The laurels for his heroic capture of Fort Fisher were fresh on his brow.

Before noon an ocean steamer, the Edward Everett, was ordered to take me at once to Fortress Monroe. Two of my army friends went along. The captain, leaving on so short notice, had provided his ship with insufficient ballast, and to me, a landsman, the vessel's lurchings were very astonishing. I had never seen the ocean before, and it was not long till I wished I might never see it again. To add to my alarm, a fierce tempest sprang up as we passed around Cape Hatteras, and the danger was no longer imaginary, but very real. The few passengers on the boat might as well have been dead, so far as any self-help was to be thought of in case of disaster. Even the captain was very seasick, and, altogether, passengers and crew were badly scared. For many hours it was nothing but a fierce blow and a roll about on the mad waters. All things come to an end; so did this storm, and at last we reached Fortress Monroe, where I was hurriedly transferred by some sailors in a yawl over to a boat that had already started up the James toward Richmond. Our captain had signaled that he had a dispatch bearer from the Carolinas. We had not gone far until we passed the top of a ship's mast sticking a few feet above the water. It was the mast of the Cumberland, that had gone down in her fight with the Merrimac with as brave a crew as ever manned a war boat.

The steamer I was now on was crowded with officers in bright uniforms, apparently returning to their regiments. I wondered if all the Eastern army had been home on a furlough. I could not help contrasting to myself this ship full of sleek, brightly uniformed officers with the rough-clad soldiers and officers of the army of Sherman. Sherman's foragers and veterans of the March to the Sea might have cut an awkward figure alongside these gay youths just from Washington.

In the afternoon the ship came to at City Point, and I climbed up the bank of the river bluff for perhaps a hundred feet, and was soon directed to the headquarters of the commander-in-chief of the United States armies.

When I reached the open door of Grant's famous little cabin a young officer asked me to come in, and was introducing me to the chief of staff, Rawlins, who stood there with some letters in his hands. That instant General Grant showed his face at the door in the back of the room. I knew who it was at once. He stepped forward to where General Rawlins was speaking with me, listened to the conversation a moment, and without any formal introduction, smiled, took me by the hand and led me into the back room of the cabin shutting the door behind us. He asked me to sit down, but I first proceeded to rip the dispatches out of my clothing, and with intense interest watched his features while he sat on a camp stool by the window, his legs crossed, and read Sherman's letter. I could see the glow of silent satisfaction as he glanced along the lines that told of his great lieutenant's successes in the South. He glanced at another letter I held in my hand. "It is for the President," I said. "He will be here yet to-night," he answered. "His boat must now be coming up the bay."

Then General Grant questioned me as to all I knew about Sherman's army, the character of the opposition he had met, the condition of his soldiers, their clothing, the roads, the weather. He also asked me how I had reached him with the dispatches, coming all the way from the interior of North Carolina. He seemed to have thought for a moment that I had come across Virginia on foot. He wanted to know of me again about the terrible treatment of prisoners in the South. What I told him only "confirmed," he said, what he had heard from a hundred sources.

Very shortly he heard the voice of General Ord in the outer room.

"Come in here, Ord," he said, holding the door open. "Come in and hear the news from Sherman. Look at that, listen to this," and again he went through Sherman's letter, reading parts of it aloud. "Good! Good!" cried Ord, fairly dancing about the cabin, his spurs and saber jingling. "I was really getting afraid." "Not I, not I, not a bit," exclaimed Grant enthusiastically, as he rose to his feet. "I knew my man. I knew General Sherman."

I was astonished now at the simple and perfectly frank manner with which General Grant talked to me about the situation of the army. I had ventured to ask if there was any outlook for the immediate fall of Richmond or a battle.

"Very great," he answered. "I am only afraid Lee may slip out before we can get a great blow at him. Any hour this may happen." Just then there was cannonading. I wondered if a fight were commencing somewhere in the line already. General Grant did not change a muscle in his face. "Send out and see what the firing is," he said to an officer quietly, and then as quietly continued talking, asking me to tell him all I knew of a recent escapade of Kilpatrick and his cavalry. It happened that I knew all about it. Only a couple of weeks before Kilpatrick and his headquarters had been surprised in bed at a bivouac on the flank of Sherman's army, and were surrounded and some were captured. By a heroic struggle the cavalry leader had escaped his captors, had instantly rallied his troops there in the dark woods and given the bold Rebels a little drubbing. The next day I had been with Sherman at headquarters and listened to Kilpatrick's recital of his adventure. My own narration of the night's cavalry fight, reciting how the cavalrymen and his aids dashed about with nothing on but their shirts, made General Grant smile very audibly. "I had expected the whole thing to be about as you say," he exclaimed, in a grateful way, "but the Richmond newspapers which fell into my hands made a big thing of the so-called capture of Sherman's cavalry leader."

Once, as the General rose and stood directly in front of us, I was astonished to see how small he seemed. I had seen Grant before, but on horseback or in battle, and, somehow, I had always regarded him as a rather large, solidly built man. To-day in the little back room of his cabin, talking with him, I saw how mistaken I had been. General Grant, as I now saw him, was, in fact, a little man. Several times he rose and walked about the room. He was not more than five feet seven or eight inches high, and he could not have weighed more than one hundred and forty or fifty pounds. He wore a simple fatigue uniform, and his coat thrown open gave him the appearance of being larger chested than he really was. His brown hair was neither short nor long, and he wore a full beard, well trimmed. Had I not known to whom I was talking, or had I not seen the three stars on his shoulders, I would have supposed myself in the presence of some simple army captain. There was nothing whatever about him to announce the presence of genius or extraordinary ability of any kind. He was in no sense a striking-looking man. His manner and words to me were kind and earnest. There was an agreeable look about his mouth and eyes that made him seem very sincere. Indeed, if any one thing about him impressed me more than another, it was his apparent sincerity and earnestness. And he looked to me like a man of great common sense. Of vanity, pretence, or power there was not a single sign. He could not have looked very greatly different when he was hewing logs for his house at his father-in-law's farm ten years before, from what he looked just now, quietly directing a million soldiers in the greatest war of modern times.

Like General Sherman, he repeatedly expressed his interest concerning the terrible experiences I had undergone in Southern prisons.

"I suppose you will want to get home as quickly as possible, won't you?" he inquired, "or would you rather remain here awhile and look about the army?" A steamer was to leave for the North in an hour. Privately, I was fearing a sudden break-down of my health, and longed for a home that I had visited but eight days during four long years of war. Then I thought of my letter to Mr. Lincoln. The General seemed to anticipate my thought. "Leave the President's letter with me," he said, "if you choose, and I will give it to him, or stay over and give it to him yourself."

There was no man living I was so anxious to see as Abraham Lincoln. And this was my opportunity. But something like a premonition said, "Go home." When I expressed my feeling General Grant stepped to the door of the office room and directed General Rawlins to see that I be provided with leave of absence and transportation. That little order, signed by Rawlins, I still possess.

With an earnest handshake and good-by General Grant thanked me for bringing him the dispatches. I was not to see him again for many years.³

CHAPTER XV

Washington City in the last days of the war – Look, the President! —The last man of the regiment

Leaving General Grant's headquarters at City Point was for me a final good-by to the army. The little steamer Martin carried me down the James River, up the Chesapeake Bay, and the Potomac, toward the North. I recall now the strange sensations I had in passing Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon. The green slopes and the oak wood in front of the old mansion were in full view. I could even see the front columns of the house, and someone on the steamer's deck pointed out to me the spot where stood the simple brick mausoleum where with folded arms slept the Father of his Country. I could not help reflecting that at that moment not a hundred miles away stood nearly all George Washington's State's descendants, with arms in their hands, striving to destroy the government that he had founded.

How I enjoyed that ship ride! Here there was no sandy prison pen with poor, starving, dying comrades lying around; no futile efforts at escape; no taunts and jeers that the American flag had gone down in disgrace; now all was free and beautiful, and mine. The hated rag of the Confederacy that had floated over my head and threatened me every day with death for fifteen long months was gone forever. At the mast of our little vessel waved the Stars and Stripes, conscious, it seemed to me, of the free air I was breathing. That was a happy day for me.

Some time in the following night the wheels of the boat stopped revolving – there was silence; and when I woke at daylight there was the land. The ship was fast in the slip at the wharf, and there, too, was the capital of the republic. I went ashore by myself and wandered into the city, my mind crowded every moment with the thoughts of what had taken place here in the last four years. Soldiers I saw everywhere, with arms and without arms. Negroes, now freedmen, by the ten thousand fairly darkened the population. With some friends I found a boarding place on the avenue above the National Hotel. If I wanted to see great men, notorious men, men making history, all kinds of men, I had only to step into the corridors of the National.

I had little or no ready money, nor could I get any until the government settled my accounts. I waited in Washington for a week. General Sherman had given me papers that would insure my promotion in the regular army. I presented them; they were all-sufficient; I needed only to say the word. But I was sick and tired of war, and would not have exchanged a glimpse of my Western home for the commission of a brigadier.

But while I stayed in Washington what sights I saw! Our capital is now possibly the finest in the world. Then it was the most hateful; the most hateful in every way. Militarism, treason, political scoundrelism, and every other bad ism reigned in every hotel, on every street corner, in Congress, out of Congress – everywhere; reigned right at the elbows of loyalty and patriotism such as the world never saw. Society was one grand conglomeration of everything good and bad.

Washington City itself was a spectacle. It had no streets, save one or two – simply dirty unpaved roads. The dirty street cars, pulled by worn-out horses, were crowded inside and outside by a mass of struggling politicians, soldiers, gamblers, adventurers, and women. The city was also full of hospitals; everywhere there were lazarettos and graveyards. It looked as if half the Union army had dragged itself into the capital to die. The great Capital building was uncompleted; its dome stood there covered with scaffoldings and windlasses. The plaza at the east end of the structure looked like a vast stone quarry. The Washington Monument had only gotten itself safe above high-water mark; and what there was of it was in danger of falling down. It stood in the middle of the flats, the mud and the malaria – the graveyard, in short, that formed the unsavory prospect from the White House windows.

Aside from the unfinished government buildings there was not a pretense of architecture in all Washington. There was nothing beautiful there. The very atmosphere seemed sickly; fever, malaria, were everywhere. It was the one city in all creation to get out of as soon as possible.

Once I tried to get a glimpse of the President. I failed. The White House gates were held by sentries. "Why do you want to see that old Ape?" said a man to me one day. I was shocked, and would like to have killed him. But he was not alone in his vileness. Thousands in Washington affected to despise Lincoln. I wondered then that it was regarded safe for him to appear in public. One day a carriage rolled rapidly up the avenue in front of the National. I heard some men cry, "Look, the President!" I glanced quickly. A tall, dark man, wearing a silk hat sat in the carriage; at his side a lady.

In a moment they were out of sight. There was not a cheer, not a hat touched, not a hand waved, and yet that was Abraham Lincoln passing, soon to be the greatest man in history. A little wrangle and almost a fist-fight between some bystanders on the pavement followed; one party denouncing the President for freeing the "damned niggers"; another thanking God for the President's noble deed. Such scenes were going on everywhere all over the capital, pro and con. Approval and hatred. The best praised, the worst abused mortal in America was just entering on his second term at the White House. I never even had a glimpse of the kindly face again.

At last my accounts were ready. "But your regiment," said the Assistant War Secretary, "does not exist. What was left of them were all put into a cavalry troop long ago. You are the last man of the regiment." Across the face of my paper he wrote, "Discharged as a supernumerary officer." That paper lies before me while I write. I was paid off in shining greenbacks for all the time I had been in prison.

As to the eighty comrades who had been captured with me that 25th of November in the assault on Missionary Ridge, all but sixteen were dead. Nine of my old Company B of the Fifth Regiment were taken prisoners, and only one of them had survived the horrors of Andersonville. Poor Cartwright died not long after, and I alone of the little band was left to tell the story.