J. T. Trowbridge

“ We passed but few farm-houses, and those were mostly built of logs. We crossed heavy lines of Beauregard’s breastworks; and could have traced the route of the great armies by the bones of horses, horned cattle, and mules we saw whitening in the woods and by the roadside. A crest of hilly fields showed us a magnificent sweep of level wooded country on the west and south, like a brown wavy sea, with tossed tree-tops for breakers. ”

“ Teach them that the laborer is a man, and that labor is manly,—a truth that is now dawning upon them,—and the necessity of mediation between the two races will no longer exist.
Then the institutions of the South will spontaneously assimilate to our own. Then we shall have a Union of States, not in form only, but in spirit also. Then shall we see established the reality of the cause that has cost so many priceless lives and such lavish outpouring of treasure. Then will disloyalty die of inanition, and its deeds live only in legend and in story. ”

“ The streets are sufficiently spacious, and regularly laid out, many of them being thrown up into long, sweeping lines of beauty by the hills on which they are built. The hills indeed are the charm of Richmond, overlooking the falls of the James, on the left bank of which it stands; giving you shining glimpses of the winding river up and down,—commanding views of the verdant valley and of the hilly country around,—and here, at the end of some pleasant street, falling off abruptly into the wild slopes of some romantic ravine. ”

“ It is but a little time, at the longest, that the immortal soul thou art will animate this bone; but the hour comes quickly when to have been a good soldier of the truth on any field, whether resounding with arms, or silent with the calm strong struggle of love and patience, and to have given thy life to the cause, will be sweeter to thee than the fatness of the earth and length of days. ”

“ If you wish to determine how much the negro’s heart is in this election, watch his face as he comes away from that little window. His vote once in, every feature blazes with joy; but his vote rejected, sorrow and dismay are expressed even in his attitudes. Watch the anxious but resolute sooty faces in those waiting their turns. Is all this emotion due to the duplicity of Yankee adventurers? Can the ‘carpet-bagger’ thus sway the very soul of the black man to reach his own selfish ends? Is it for a possible mule and forty acres of land that the negro is thus profoundly stirred ”

“ The levee is crowded with casks and cotton bales, covering acres of ground. Up and down the steep way cut through the brow of the bluff, affording access to the landing from the town, a stream of drays is passing and repassing. Freights are going aboard, or coming ashore. Drays are loading and unloading. Bales of cotton and hay, casks, boxes, sacks of grain, lumber, household furniture, supplies for plantations, mules, ploughs, wagons, are tumbled, rolled, carried, tossed, driven, pushed, and dragged, by an army of laborers, from the levee along the broad wooden stages to the steamers’ decks. ”

“ It is often sincere; but it is sometimes mere cant, easily kept in vogue, by newspapers and politicians, among a people who delight in vehement and minatory talk, for the mere talk’s sake.
Of another armed rebellion not the least apprehension need be entertained. The South has had enough of war for a long time to come; it has supped full of horrors. The habiliments of mourning, which one sees everywhere in its towns and cities, will cast their dark shadow upon any future attempt at secession, long after they have been put away in the silent wardrobes of the past. ”

“ It is a steep mile and more by the road from the Ferry to 66the top of the cliffs: a mile which richly repays the travel. Yet one need not go so far nor climb so high to see the beauties of the place. Whichever way you turn, river, or rock, or wild woods charm the eye. The Potomac comes down from its verdant bowers gurgling among its innumerable rocky islets. On one side is the canal, on the other the race which feeds the government works, each tumbling its yeasty super-flux over waste-weir walls into the river. ”

“ The graves in our hearts also, which we deemed forever desolate, she clothes with the tender verdure of reviving hope before we are aware, and gilds them with the sunshine of a new love and joy. Blessed be our provident mother for this sweet law, but for which the homes in the land, bereft by these countless deaths in hospitals and on bloody fields, would lie draped in endless mourning. ”

“ The acting in bad faith by the children of those good men, has cost the country a million lives—the flower of the land—and untold sums of wealth. I believe He intends to demand its fulfillment now, and I plant myself upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as defined by the framers of those documents, and expounded by the leading men of that period, and claim that they secure me my rights, if honestly and faithfully executed. Settle at once and forever the question of human rights by giving us equality before the law. ”

“ I count an evening walk under Loudon Heights, with the broad, sprawling river hoarsely babbling over its rocky bed on one side, and the still precipices soaring to heaven on the other,—and the narrow stony road cut round their base lying before me, untrodden at that hour by any human foot save my own,—I count that lonely walk amid the cool, dewy scents stealing out of the undergrowth, and the colors of the evening sky gilding the cliffs, as one of the pleasantest of my life. ”

“ Where now is the haughty slave empire whose eternal foundations were deemed established by that victory? Where is the banner of Freedom trailed so low, all torn and blood-stained, in the dust? God lives! There is an overruling Power that never sleeps; patient, foreseeing what we cannot see, and, in sublime knowledge of the end, tolerating the wrath of the unrighteous and the arrogance of the unjust. ”

“ The river itself is very beautiful there, with its many green islets, its tumbling rapids sweeping down among rocks and foaming over ledges, and its side-dams thrown out like arms to draw the waters into their tranquil embrace. My eye, ranging over this scene, rested on that fair hill; and I thought that, surely, no pleasanter or more healthful spot could have been selected for an encampment of prisoners; But it is unsafe to trust the enchantment of distance; and after seeing Libby and Castle Thunder, I set out to visit Belle Island. ”

“ A Confederate brigadier-general said to me: “One could track the line of Sherman’s march all through Georgia and South Carolina by the fires on the horizon. He burned the gin-houses, cotton-presses, railroad depots, bridges, freight-houses, and unoccupied dwellings, with some that were occupied. He stripped our people of everything. He deserves to be called the Great Robber of the nineteenth century. He did a sort of retail business in North Carolina, but it was a wholesale business, and no mistake, in Georgia, though perhaps not quite so smashing as his South Carolina operations.” ”

“ Away on the south are the mountains of Georgia; on the north, those of Tennessee. Dividing these peaks and ranges with its shining cimeter, curves the river, overhung by precipitous crags. Far beneath you, as you look from the northern brow of the hill, ply the steamboats, breaking the surface into streaks of foam, and puffing white wreaths up into the clear, still air. Opposite, across the river, are clusters of high, wooded hills, with signal-stations on their peaks. ”

“ In the floorless hall of justice rank weeds were growing. Names of Union soldiers were scrawled along the walls. No torch had been applied to the wood-work, but the work of destruction had been performed by the hands of hilarious soldier-boys ripping up floors and pulling down laths and joists to the tune of “John Brown,”—the swelling melody of the song, and the accompaniment of crashing partitions, reminding the citizens, who thought to have destroyed the old hero, that his soul was marching on. ”

“ The bodies of once living and brave men, slowly mouldering to dust in this sanctified soil, form but a small, a single sheaf from that great recent harvest reaped by Death with the sickle of war.
Once living and brave! How full of life, how full of unflinching courage and fiery zeal they marched up hither to fight the great fight, and to give their lives! And each man had his history ”

“ Nor has our intelligence, even in a barbarous state, been much below the level of those who ate the acorns falling from the lofty oak of Dodona, and worshipped the tree from which they fell. The civilization of the nineteenth century is the product of 800 years; and with this start ahead, with all the wealth, intelligence, and power and prestige of a great government, men pretend to believe that they are afraid of negro domination, afraid that 4,000,000 of negroes, scattered over this vast country, will rule 30,000,000 of intelligent white people. ”

“ The broad levee, lined with wharves on one side and belted by busy streets on the other, crowded with merchandise, and thronged with merchants, boatmen, and laborers, presents always a lively and entertaining spectacle. Steam and sailing crafts of every description, arriving, departing, loading, unloading, and fringing the city with their long array of smoke-pipes and masts, give you some idea of the commerce of New Orleans. ”

“ Here we engaged a bright young colored girl to guide us to the spot where John Brown’s gallows stood. She led us into the wilderness of weeds, waist-high to her as she tramped on, parting them before her with her hands. The country all around us lay utterly desolate, without enclosures, and without cultivation. We seemed to be striking out into the rolling prairies of the West, except that these fields of ripening and fading weeds had not the summer freshness of the prairie-grass. ”

“ X. Of all who were faithful in the trials of the late war, there were none entitled to more especial honor than the brave soldiers and seamen who endured the hardships of campaign and cruise, and imperilled their lives in the service of the country; the bounties and pensions provided by the laws for these brave defenders of the nation, are obligations never to be forgotten; the widows and orphans of the gallant dead are the wards of the people—a sacred legacy bequeathed to the nation’s protecting care. ”

“ Until late at night, and often all night, amid darkness and fog and rain, the loading of freight goes on by this lurid illumination. The laborers are chiefly negroes whose ebon, dusky, sallow and tawny faces, lithe attitudes, and sublime carelessness of attire, heighten the pictorial effect of the scene. Bale after bale is tumbled from the drays, and rolled down the levee,—a negro at each end of it holding and guiding it with cotton-hooks. At the foot of the landing it is seized by two other negroes, who roll it along the plank to its place on the deck of the upward-bound boat. ”

“ More clearly, too, than ever before, does the nation now recognize that the greatest glory of a republic is that it throws the shield of its protection over the humblest and weakest of its people, and vindicates the rights of the poor and the powerless as faithfully as those of the rich and the powerful. I rejoice, too, in this connection, to find in your platform the frank and fearless avowal that naturalized citizens must be protected abroad at every hazard, as though they were native-born. ”

“ In all countries and states, and at all times, ignorance, which brings in its train all other vices, has been the worst foe of good government. But with an intelligent and enterprising people no form of despotism, neither autocracy, oligarchy, or mob law, can prevail. Hence dark as may be the clouds which now overhang the South, we look confidently for a brighter future, when its despotic aristocracy shall no longer hold sway. ”

“ I have heard people scoff at John A. Washington for selling the inherited bones of the great,—for surely the two hundred thousand dollars, paid by the Ladies’ Association for the Mount Vernon estate, was not the price merely of that old mansion, these out-houses, since repaired, and two hundred acres of land,—but I do not scoff at him for that. Why should not one, who dealt in living human flesh and blood, also traffic a little in the ashes of the dead? ”

“ All the region between Fredericksburg and Richmond seems not only almost uninhabited now, but always to have been so,—at least to the eye familiar with New-England farms and villages. But one must forget the thriving and energetic North when he enters a country stamped with the dark seal of slavery. Large and fertile Virginia, with eight times the area of Massachusetts, scarcely equals in population that barren little State. The result is, that, where Southern State pride sees prosperous settlements, the travelling Yankee discovers little more than uncultivated wastes. ”

“ We set them up again, and left the field to the pensive sound of the cow-bells and the teasing song of the locust.
Walking back to the road through the gap, and surveying the crests flanking and commanding it, which were held by the Rebels, but carried with irresistible impetuosity by the men of Burnside’s and Hooker’s corps, one is still more astonished by the successful issue of that terrible day’s work. All along these heights rebel and loyal dead lie buried in graves scarcely distinguishable from each other. ”

“ Secession saw with dismay that to this class the first place in the future government of the country rightfully belonged. Their old neighbors, who had so long done evil to them continually, or given them only dark looks, now shrank sullenly out of their sight, or openly courted their smiles. A professed Union sentiment blossomed everywhere; lives, that had all along been thistles, now bore a plentiful harvest of figs. This was a hopeful state of things. It is better, as an example to a community, that goodness should receive insincere homage, than none at all ”

“ That they would delight in such a calamity is as certain as the fact that the next gale that sweeps from the North will not take to them ‘the clash of resounding arms.’ They cannot understand the elastic temper and wholesome tolerance of the North, where elections come and go, crises ripen and decline, with no thought of bloodshed, nor black-lists, nor social disdain, contempt, and persecution. ”