George Alfred Townsend

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Death was welcome to Chitty if he could so distinguish himself. Between Chitty and a nap in a wagon, I managed to loiter out the morning, and at three o'clock, a cannon peal, so close that it shook the houses, brought my horse upon his haunches. For awhile I did not leave the village. Cannon upon cannon exploded; the young ladies ceased their mirth; the landlord staggered with white lips into the air, and after a couple of hours, I heard the signal that I knew so well—a volley of musketry. Full of all the old impulses, I climbed into the saddle, and spurred my horse towards the battle-field. ”

“ With the thousand and one airy palaces that youth builds and time annihilates, my first romance of war towered to the stars in a day, and crumbled to earth in a night.
At two o'clock in the morning we halted at Metropolitan Mills, on the Alexandria and Leesburg turnpike. A bridge had been destroyed below, and the creek was so swollen that neither artillery nor cavalry could ford it. The meadows were submerged and the rain still descended in torrents. The chilled troops made bonfires of some new panel fence, and stormed all the henroosts in the vicinity. ”

“ Hearing of the coming of the army, the proprietors had vainly endeavored to gather their crops, but the negroes would not work, and they had not modern implements, whereby to mow the grain rapidly. The profanation of those glorious stretches of corn and rye were to me some of the most melancholy episodes of the war. No mind can realize how the grain-fields used to ripple, when the fresh breezes blew up and down the furrows, and the hot suns of that almost tropical climate, had yielded each separate head till the whole landscape was like a bright cloud, or a golden sea. ”

“ 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 the Dictator, start up the broad James River. ”

“ I forgot my fever. But another and a hotter fever burned my temples,—the fearful excitement of the time! Whither were we to go, cut off from the York, beaten before Richmond,—perhaps even now surrounded,—and to be butchered to-morrow, till the clouds should rain blood? Were we to retreat one hundred miles down the hostile Peninsula,—a battle at every rod, a grave at every footstep? Then I remembered the wounded heaped at Gaines's Mill, and how they were groaning without remedy, ebbing at every pulse, counting the flashing drops, calling for water, for mercy, for death. So I found heart ”

“ 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. ”

“ The horsemen rode around them in vain; no charge could break the shining squares, until our dismounted carbineers poured in their volleys afresh, making gaps in the spent ranks, and then in their wavering time the cavalry thundered down. The Rebels could stand no more; they reeled and swayed, and fell back broken and beaten. And on the ground their colonel lay, sealing his devotion with his life.
Through wood and brake and swamp, across field and trench, we pushed the fighting defenders steadily. ”

“ With a last look at Savage's white house, the abandoned wretches in the lawn, the blood-red hospital flag, the torn track and smouldering cars, I turned my face southward, crossed some bare plains, that had once been fields, and at eight o'clock passed down the Williamsburg road, toward Bottom Bridge. The original roadway was now a bottomless stretch of sand, full of stranded wheels, dead horses, shreds of blankets, discarded haversacks, and mounds of spilled crackers. Other routes for wagons had been opened across fields, over bluffs, around pits and bogs, and through thickets and woods. ”

“ 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. ”

“ However keenly I felt these things, I had learned that modesty amounted to little in the army; so I pushed my nag steadily forward and scattered the camp vernacular, in the shape of imprecations, left and right.
"Colonel," I called to the officer in command, as the line of bayonets edged me in, "may I pass out? I am a civilian!"
"No!" said the Colonel, wrathfully. "This is no place for a civilian." ”

“ I pity the army mule, though he never asked me for sym [Pg 308] pathy. Who ever loved a mule? You can love a lion, and make him lick your hand: some people love parrots, and owls; and I once knew a person who could catch black snakes and carry them lovingly in his bosom; but I never knew a beloved mule. Yet this war has been fought and won by hybrids. They have pulled us out of ruts and fed us, and starved for us. The mule is the great quartermaster. See him and his brethren yonder in corral,—miserable veterans of no particular race, slab-sided, and capable of holding ink between their ribs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At every second the prospect widened, the belt of horizon enlarged, remote farmhouses came in view; the earth was like a perfectly flat surface, painted with blue woods, and streaked with pictures of roads, fields, fences, and streams. As we climbed higher, the river seemed directly beneath us, the farms on the opposite bank were plainly discernible, and Richmond lay only a little way off, enthroned on its many hills, with the James stretching white and sinuous from its feet to the horizon. ”

“ Others of the Confederates ran from the wood, and engaged hand to hand with antagonists, and, in places, a score of combatants met sturdily upon the plain, lunging with knife and sabre bayonet, striking with clubbed musket, or discharging revolvers. But at last the broken lines regained the shelter of the timber, and there was a momentary lull in the thunder.
For a time, each party kept in the edges of the timber, firing at will, but the Confederates were moving forward in masses by detours, until some thousands of them stood in the places of the few who were at first isolated. ”

“ The negroes did not suffer with the fever, although their quarters were close and filthy. Their Elysium had come; there was no more work. They slept and danced and grinned, and these three actions made up the sum of their existence. Such people to increase and multiply I never beheld. There were scores of new babies every day; they appeared to be born by twins and triplets; they learned to walk in twenty-four hours; and their mothers were strong and hearty in less time. Such soulless, lost, degraded men and women did nowhere else exist. The divinity they never had; the human they had forgotten ”

“ The mouth of the James and the York were visible from the deck, and long lines of shipping stretched from each to the Fortress. The quay itself was like the pool in the Thames, a mass of spars, smoke-stacks, ensigns and swelling hills. The low deck and quaint cupola of the famous Monitor appeared close into shore, 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 multitude press up again, reinforced every hour, and at last the pale day climbs over the jail-walls, and waiting people see each other by its glimmer. The bells of Notre Dame peal out; a hundred towers fall into the march of the music; the early journals are shrieked by French newsboys, and folks begin to count the minutes on their watches. There are men on the ground who saw the first guillotine at work. ”

“ The scene presented in Michie's lawn and oak grove, on Saturday morning, was terribly picturesque, and characteristic of the calamity of war. The well was beset by crowds of wounded men, perishing of thirst, who made frantic efforts to reach the bucket, but were borne back by the stronger desperadoes. The kitchen was swarming with hungry soldiers who begged corn-bread and half-cooked dough from the negroes. The shady side-yard was dotted with pale, bruised, and bleeding people, who slept out their weariness upon the damp grass, forgetful, for the moment, of their sores. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Human nature was here so depraved, that man lost faith in his kind. Death lurked behind ambuscades and fortifications over the river, but Sin, its mother, coquetted here, and as an American, I often went to bed, loathing the Capital, as but little better than Sodom, though its danger had called forth thousands of great hearts to throb out, in its defence. For every stone in the Capitol building, a man has laid down his life. For every ripple on the Potomac, some equivalent of blood has been shed. ”

“ Courtesy will conquer all that bayonets have not won. The burnt district is still hideously yawning in the heart of the town, a monument to the sternness of those bold revolutionists who are being hunted to their last quarry. Despotism, under the plea of necessity, has met with its end here as it must everywhere. We shall have no more experiments for liberty out of the Union, if the new Union will grant all that it gave before. ”

“ Not the drum, the bugle, or the fife, though these are thrilling, after their fashion; but the music of modern ordnance and projectile, the beautiful whistle of the minie-ball, the howl of shell that makes unearthly havoc with the air, the whiz-z-z of solid shot, the chirp of bullets, the scream of grape and canister, the yell of immense conical cylinders, that fall like redhot stoves and spout burning coals. ”