Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 by Various

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"Her face glowed with a soft crimson flush, and again her eyes were
suffused with tears, through which beamed a look of sweet, heavenly
sorrow,--such as might have shone in the orbs of the angel who enforced
upon Adam the sentence of expulsion from Paradise, and who, while
sharing the exile's grief, beheld in the remote horizon, far beyond the
tangled wilderness of Earth, another gate, wide opening to welcome him
to the Immortal Land. She was silent for a little time, and then she
murmured, lingering gently on the words, 'No, it must not be. We are,
indeed, inalienably one, in a nearer and dearer sense than can be
expressed by any transient symbol. Let us not seek to quit the
spiritual sphere in which we have long dwelt and communed together, for
one liable to discord and misinterpretation. I have an irresistible
impression that my life here will be very brief. While I remain, come
to me when you will, let me be the Egeria of your hours of leisure, and
a consoler in your cares,--but let us await, for another and a higher
life, the more perfect consummation of our love. For, oh, believe, as I
believe, faith is no mockery, nor is the heart's prophecy a lie. We
were not born to be the dupes of dreams or the sport of chance. The
voice which whispered to me long ago the promise fulfilled in this hour
tells me that in a bright Hereafter we shall find compensation for
every sorrow, reality for every ideal, and that there at last shall be
resolved in luminous perception the veiled and troubled mystery of
PRESENCE!'"

* * * * *

CHIEFLY ABOUT WAR-MATTERS.

BY A PEACEABLE MAN.

There is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically sealed
seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into which the
disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate. Of course, the
general heart-quake of the country long ago knocked at my cottage-door,
and compelled me, reluctantly, to suspend the contemplation of certain
fantasies, to which, according to my harmless custom, I was endeavoring
to give a sufficiently life-like aspect to admit of their figuring in a
romance. As I make no pretensions to state-craft or soldiership, and
could promote the common weal neither by valor nor counsel, it seemed,
at first, a pity that I should be debarred from such unsubstantial
business as I had contrived for myself, since nothing more genuine was
to be substituted for it. But I magnanimously considered that there is
a kind of treason in insulating one's self from the universal fear and
sorrow, and thinking one's idle thoughts in the dread time of civil
war; and could a man be so cold and hard-hearted, he would better
deserve to be sent to Fort Warren than many who have found their way
thither on the score of violent, but misdirected sympathies. I
remembered the touching rebuke administered by King Charles to that
rural squire the echo of whose hunting-horn came to the poor monarch's
ear on the morning before a battle, where the sovereignty and
constitution of England were to be set at stake. So I gave myself up to
reading newspapers and listening to the click of the telegraph, like
other people; until, after a great many months of such pastime, it grew
so abominably irksome that I determined to look a little more closely
at matters with my own eyes.

Accordingly we set out--a friend and myself--towards Washington, while
it was still the long, dreary January of our Northern year, though
March in name; nor were we unwilling to clip a little margin off the
five months' winter, during which there is nothing genial in New
England save the fireside. It was a clear, frosty morning, when we
started. The sun shone brightly on snow-covered hills in the
neighborhood of Boston, and burnished the surface of frozen ponds; and
the wintry weather kept along with us while we trundled through
Worcester and Springfield, and all those old, familiar towns, and
through the village-cities of Connecticut. In New York the streets were
afloat with liquid mud and slosh. Over New Jersey there was still a
thin covering of snow, with the face of Nature visible through the
rents in her white shroud, though with little or no symptom of reviving
life. But when we reached Philadelphia, the air was mild and balmy;
there was but a patch or two of dingy winter here and there, and the
bare, brown fields about the city were ready to be green. We had met
the Spring half-way, in her slow progress from the South; and if we
kept onward at the same pace, and could get through the Rebel lines, we
should soon come to fresh grass, fruit-blossoms, green peas,
strawberries, and all such delights of early summer.

On our way, we heard many rumors of the war, but saw few signs of it.
The people were staid and decorous, according to their ordinary
fashion; and business seemed about as brisk as usual,--though, I
suppose, it was considerably diverted from its customary channels into
warlike ones. In the cities, especially in New York, there was a rather
prominent display of military goods at the shopwindows,--such as
swords with gilded scabbards and trappings, epaulets, carabines,
revolvers, and sometimes a great iron cannon at the edge of the
pavement, as if Mars had dropped one of his pocket-pistols there,
while hurrying to the field. As railway-companions, we had now and then
a volunteer in his French-gray great-coat, returning from furlough, or
a new-made officer travelling to join his regiment, in his new-made
uniform, which was perhaps all of the military character that he had
about him,--but proud of his eagle-buttons, and likely enough to do
them honor before the gilt should be wholly dimmed. The country, in
short, so far as bustle and movement went, was more quiet than in
ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its restless elements
had been drawn towards the seat of conflict. But the air was full of a
vague disturbance. To me, at least, it seemed so, emerging from such a
solitude as has been hinted at, and the more impressible by rumors and
indefinable presentiments, since I had not lived, like other men, in
an atmosphere of continual talk about the war. A battle was momentarily
expected on the Potomac; for, though our army was still on the hither
side of the river, all of us were looking towards the mysterious and
terrible Manassas, with the idea that somewhere in its neighborhood
lay a ghastly battlefield, yet to be fought, but foredoomed of old to
be bloodier than the one where we had reaped such shame. Of all haunted
places, methinks such a destined field should be thickest thronged with
ugly phantoms, ominous of mischief through ages beforehand.

Beyond Philadelphia there was a much greater abundance of military
people. Between Baltimore and Washington a guard seemed to hold every
station along the railroad; and frequently, on the hill-sides, we saw a
collection of weather-beaten tents, the peaks of which, blackened with
smoke, indicated that they had been made comfortable by stove-heat
throughout the winter. At several commanding positions we saw
fortifications, with the muzzles of cannon protruding from the
ramparts, the slopes of which were made of the yellow earth of that
region, and still unsodded; whereas, till these troublous times, there
have been no forts but what were grass-grown with the lapse of at least
a lifetime of peace. Our stopping-places were thronged with soldiers,
some of whom came through the cars, asking for newspapers that
contained accounts of the battle between the Merrimack and Monitor,
which had been fought the day before. A railway-train met us, conveying
a regiment out of Washington to some unknown point; and reaching the
capital, we filed out of the station between lines of soldiers, with
shouldered muskets, putting us in mind of similar spectacles at the
gates of European cities. It was not without sorrow that we saw the
free circulation of the nation's life-blood (at the very heart,
moreover) clogged with such strictures as these, which have caused
chronic diseases in almost all countries save our own. Will the time
ever come again, in America, when we may live half a score of years
without once seeing the likeness of a soldier, except it be in the
festal march of a company on its summer tour? Not in this generation,
I fear, nor in the next, nor till the Millennium; and even that blessed
epoch, as the prophecies seem to intimate, will advance to the sound
of the trumpet.

One terrible idea occurs, in reference to this matter. Even supposing
the war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into the mass of the
population within the year, what an incalculable preponderance will
there be of military titles and pretensions for at least half a century
to come! Every country-neighborhood will have its general or two, its
three or four colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without
end,--besides non-commissioned officers and privates, more than the
recruiting-offices ever knew of,--all with their campaign-stories,
which will become the staple of fireside-talk forevermore. Military
merit, or rather, since that is not so readily estimated, military
notoriety, will be the measure of all claims to civil distinction. One
bullet-headed general will succeed another in the Presidential chair;
and veterans will hold the offices at home and abroad, and sit in
Congress and the State legislatures, and fill all the avenues of public
life. And yet I do not speak of this deprecatingly, since, very likely,
it may substitute something more real and genuine, instead of the many
shams on which men have heretofore founded their claims to public
regard; but it behooves civilians to consider their wretched prospects
in the future, and assume the military button before it is too late.

We were not in time to see Washington as a camp. On the very day of
our arrival sixty thousand men had crossed the Potomac on their march
towards Manassas; and almost with their first step into the Virginia
mud, the phantasmagory of a countless host and impregnable ramparts,
before which they had so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite
away. It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a
gigantic enemy, and, beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered
to himself and the world that he had merely punctured an enormously
swollen bladder. There are instances of a similar character in old
romances, where great armies are long kept at bay by the arts of
necromancers, who build airy towers and battlements, and muster
warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of seeming
impregnability, until some bolder champion of the besiegers dashes
forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman, and finds him
melt away in the death-grapple. With such heroic adventures let the
march upon Manassas be hereafter reckoned. The whole business, though
connected with the destinies of a nation, takes inevitably a tinge of
the ludicrous. The vast preparation of men and warlike material,--the
majestic patience and docility with which the people waited through
those weary and dreary months,--the martial skill, courage, and
caution, with which our movement was ultimately made,--and, at last,
the tremendous shock with which we were brought suddenly up against
nothing at all! The Southerners show little sense of humor nowadays,
but I think they must have meant to provoke a laugh at our expense,
when they planted those Quaker guns. At all events, no other Rebel
artillery has played upon us with such overwhelming effect.

The troops being gone, we had the better leisure and opportunity to
look into other matters. It is natural enough to suppose that the
centre and heart of Washington is the Capitol; and certainly, in its
outward aspect, the world has not many statelier or more beautiful
edifices, nor any, I should suppose, more skilfully adapted to
legislative purposes, and to all accompanying needs. But, etc., etc.
[Footnote: We omit several paragraphs here, in which the author speaks
of some prominent Members of Congress with a freedom that seems to have
been not unkindly meant, but might be liable to misconstruction. As he
admits that he never listened to an important debate, we can hardly
recognize his qualification to estimate these gentlemen, in their
legislative and oratorical capacities.]

* * * * *

We found one man, however, at the Capitol, who was satisfactorily
adequate to the business which brought him thither. In quest of him, we
went through halls, galleries, and corridors, and ascended a noble
staircase, balustraded with a dark and beautifully variegated marble
from Tennessee, the richness of which is quite a sufficient cause for
objecting to the secession of that State. At last we came to a barrier
of pine boards, built right across the stairs. Knocking at a rough,
temporary door, we thrust a card beneath; and in a minute or two it was
opened by a person in his shirt-sleeves, a middle-aged figure, neither
tall nor short, of Teutonic build and aspect, with an ample beard of a
ruddy tinge and chestnut hair. He looked at us, in the first place,
with keen and somewhat guarded eyes, as if it were not his practice to
vouchsafe any great warmth of greeting, except upon sure ground of
observation. Soon, however, his look grew kindly and genial, (not that
it had ever been in the least degree repulsive, but only reserved,) and
Leutze allowed us to gaze at the cartoon of his great fresco, and
talked about it unaffectedly, as only a man of true genius can speak
of his own works. Meanwhile the noble design spoke for itself upon the
wall. A sketch in color, which we saw afterwards, helped us to form
some distant and flickering notion of what the picture will be, a few
months hence, when these bare outlines, already so rich in thought and
suggestiveness, shall glow with a fire of their own,--a fire which, I
truly believe, will consume every other pictorial decoration of the
Capitol, or, at least, will compel us to banish those stiff and
respectable productions to some less conspicuous gallery. The work
will be emphatically original and American, embracing characteristics
that neither art nor literature have yet dealt with, and producing new
forms of artistic beauty from the natural features of the
Rocky-Mountain region, which Leutze seems to have studied broadly and
minutely. The garb of the hunters and wanderers of those deserts, too,
under his free and natural management, is shown as the most
picturesque of costumes. But it would be doing this admirable painter
no kind office to overlay his picture with any more of my colorless
and uncertain words; so I shall merely add that it looked full of
energy, hope, progress, irrepressible movement onward, all represented
in a momentary pause of triumph; and it was most cheering to feel its
good augury at this dismal time, when our country might seem to have
arrived at such a deadly stand-still.

It was an absolute comfort, indeed, to find Leutze so quietly busy at
this great national work, which is destined to glow for centuries on
the walls of the Capitol, if that edifice shall stand, or must share
its fate, if treason shall succeed in subverting it with the Union
which it represents. It was delightful to see him so calmly
elaborating his design, while other men doubted and feared, or hoped
treacherously, and whispered to one another that the nation would
exist only a little longer, or that, if a remnant still held together,
its centre and seat of government would be far northward and westward
of Washington. But the artist keeps right on, firm of heart and hand,
drawing his outlines with an unwavering pencil, beautifying and
idealizing our rude, material life, and thus manifesting that we have
an indefeasible claim to a more enduring national existence. In honest
truth, what with the hope-inspiring influence of the design, and what
with Leutze's undisturbed evolvement of it, I was exceedingly
encouraged, and allowed these cheerful auguries to weigh against a
sinister omen that was pointed out to me in another part of the
Capitol. The freestone walls of the central edifice are pervaded with
great cracks, and threaten to come thundering down, under the immense
weight of the iron dome,--an appropriate catastrophe enough, if it
should occur on the day when we drop the Southern stars out of our
flag.

Everybody seems to be at Washington, and yet there is a singular dearth
of imperatively noticeable people there. I question whether there are
half a dozen individuals, in all kinds of eminence, at whom a stranger,
wearied with the contact of a hundred moderate celebrities, would turn
round to snatch a second glance. Secretary Seward, to be sure,--a
pale, large-nosed, elderly man, of moderate stature, with a decided
originality of gait and aspect, and a cigar in his mouth,--etc., etc.

[Footnote: We are again compelled to interfere with our friend's
license of personal description and criticism. Even Cabinet Ministers
(to whom the next few pages of the article were devoted) have their
private immunities, which ought to be conscientiously observed,--unless,
indeed, the writer chanced to have some very piquant motives for
violating them.]

* * * * *

Of course, there was one other personage, in the class of statesmen,
whom I should have been truly mortified to leave Washington without
seeing; since (temporarily, at least, and by force of circumstances)
he was the man of men. But a private grief had built up a barrier about
him, impeding the customary free intercourse of Americans with their
chief magistrate; so that I might have come away without a glimpse of
his very remarkable physiognomy, save for a semi-official opportunity
of which I was glad to take advantage. The fact is, we were invited to
annex ourselves, as supernumeraries, to a deputation that was about to
wait upon the President, from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with a
present of a splendid whip.

Our immediate party consisted only of four or five, (including Major
Ben Perley Poore, with his note-book and pencil.) but we were joined
by several other persons, who seemed to have been lounging about the
precincts of the White House, under the spacious porch, or within the
hall, and who swarmed in with us to take the chances of a presentation.
Nine o'clock had been appointed as the time for receiving the
deputation, and we were punctual to the moment; but not so the
President, who sent us word that he was eating his breakfast, and would
come as soon as he could. His appetite, we were glad to think, must
have been a pretty fair one; for we waited about half an hour in one of
the antechambers, and then were ushered into a reception-room, in one
corner of which sat the Secretaries of War and of the Treasury,
expecting, like ourselves, the termination of the Presidential
breakfast. During this interval there were several new additions to
our group, one or two of whom were in a working-garb, so that we formed
a very miscellaneous collection of people, mostly unknown to each
other, and without any common sponsor, but all with an equal right to
look our head-servant in the face. By-and-by there was a little stir on
the staircase and in the passageway, etc., etc.

[Footnote: We are compelled to omit two or three pages, in which the
author describes the interview, and gives his idea of the personal
appearance and deportment of the President. The sketch appears to have
been written in a benign spirit, and perhaps conveys a not inaccurate
impression of its august subject; but it lacks _reverence_, and it
pains us to see a gentleman of ripe age, and who has spent years under
the corrective influence of foreign institutions, falling into the
characteristic and most ominous fault of Young America.]

* * * * *

Good Heavens! what liberties have I been taking with one of the
potentates of the earth, and the man on whose conduct more important
consequences depend than on that of any other historical personage of
the century! But with whom is an American citizen entitled to take a
liberty, if not with his own chief magistrate? However, lest the above
allusions to President Lincoln's little peculiarities (already well
known to the country and to the world) should be misinterpreted, I deem
it proper to say a word or two, in regard to him, of unfeigned respect
and measurable confidence. He is evidently a man of keen faculties,
and, what is still more to the purpose, of powerful character. As to
his integrity, the people have that intuition of it which is never
deceived. Before he actually entered upon his great office, and for a
considerable time afterwards, there is no reason to suppose that he
adequately estimated the gigantic task about to be imposed on him, or,
at least, had any distinct idea how it was to be managed; and I presume
there may have been more than one veteran politician who proposed to
himself to take the power out of President Lincoln's hands into his
own, leaving our honest friend only the public responsibility for the
good or ill success of the career. The extremely imperfect development
of his statesmanly qualities, at that period, may have justified such
designs. But the President is teachable by events, and has now spent a
year in a very arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind,
capable of much expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies
and activities than those of his early life; and if he came to
Washington a backwoods humorist, he has already transformed himself
into as good a statesman (to speak moderately) as his prime-minister.

Among other excursions to camps and places of interest in the
neighborhood of Washington, we went, one day, to Alexandria. It is a
little port on the Potomac, with one or two shabby wharves and docks,
resembling those of a fishing-village in New England, and the
respectable old brick town rising gently behind. In peaceful times it
no doubt bore an aspect of decorous quietude and dulness; but it was
now thronged with the Northern soldiery, whose stir and bustle
contrasted strikingly with the many closed warehouses, the absence of
citizens from their customary haunts, and the lack of any symptom of
healthy activity, while army-wagons trundled heavily over the
pavements, and sentinels paced the sidewalks, and mounted dragoons
dashed to and fro on military errands. I tried to imagine how very
disagreeable the presence of a Southern army would be in a sober town
of Massachusetts; and the thought considerably lessened my wonder at
the cold and shy regards that are cast upon our troops, the gloom, the
sullen demeanor, the declared or scarcely hidden sympathy with
rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange thing in human
life, that the greatest errors both of men and women often spring from
their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so, undoubtedly,
thousands of warm-hearted, sympathetic, and impulsive persons have
joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal for the cause, but because,
between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily
lay nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government against
which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by such plausible
arguments as against that of the United States. The anomaly of two
allegiances (of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man's
feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General
Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and has no
symbol but a flag) is exceedingly mischievous in this point of view;
for it has converted crowds of honest people into traitors, who seem to
themselves not merely innocent, but patriotic, and who die for a bad
cause with as quiet a conscience as if it were the best. In the vast
extent of our country,--too vast by far to be taken into one small
human heart,--we inevitably limit to our own State, or, at farthest,
to our own section, that sentiment of physical love for the soil which
renders an Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to the
dignity and well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot,
treading anywhere upon it, would make a bruise on each individual
breast. If a man loves his own State, therefore, and is content to be
ruined with her, let us shoot him, if we can, but allow him an
honorable burial in the soil he fights for. [Footnote: We do not
thoroughly comprehend the author's drift in the foregoing paragraph,
but are inclined to think its tone reprehensible, and its tendency
impolitic in the present stage of our national difficulties.]

In Alexandria, we visited the tavern in which Colonel Ellsworth was
killed, and saw the spot where he fell, and the stairs below, whence
Jackson fired the fatal shot, and where he himself was slain a moment
afterwards; so that the assassin and his victim must have met on the
threshold of the spirit-world, and perhaps came to a better
understanding before they had taken many steps on the other side.
Ellsworth was too generous to bear an immortal grudge for a deed like
that, done in hot blood, and by no skulking enemy. The memorial-hunters
have completely cut away the original wood-work around the spot, with
their pocket-knives; and the staircase, balustrade, and floor, as well
as the adjacent doors and doorframes, have recently been renewed; the
walls, moreover, are covered with new paper-hangings, the former having
been torn off in tatters; and thus it becomes something like a
metaphysical question whether the place of the murder actually exists.

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