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

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Driving out of Alexandria, we stopped on the edge of the city to
inspect an old slave-pen, which is one of the lions of the place, but a
very poor one; and a little farther on, we came to a brick church where
Washington used sometimes to attend service,--a pre-Revolutionary
edifice, with ivy growing over its walls, though not very luxuriantly.
Reaching the open country, we saw forts and camps on all sides; some of
the tents being placed immediately on the ground, while others were
raised over a basement of logs, laid lengthwise, like those of a
log-hut, or driven vertically into the soil in a circle,--thus forming
a solid wall, the chinks closed up with Virginia mud, and above it the
pyramidal shelter of the tent. Here were in progress all the
occupations, and all the idleness, of the soldier in the tented field:
some were cooking the company-rations in pots hung over fires in the
open air; some played at ball, or developed their muscular power by
gymnastic exercise; some read newspapers; some smoked cigars or pipes;
and many were cleaning their arms and accoutrements,--the more
carefully, perhaps, because their division was to be reviewed by the
Commander-in-Chief that afternoon; others sat on the ground, while
their comrades cut their hair,--it being a soldierly fashion (and for
excellent reasons) to crop it within an inch of the skull; others,
finally, lay asleep in breast-high tents, with their legs protruding
into the open air.

We paid a visit to Fort Ellsworth, and from its ramparts (which have
been heaped up out of the muddy soil within the last few months, and
will require still a year or two to make them verdant) we had a
beautiful view of the Potomac, a truly majestic river, and the
surrounding country. The fortifications, so numerous in all this
region, and now so unsightly with their bare, precipitous sides, will
remain as historic monuments, grass-grown and picturesque memorials of
an epoch of terror and suffering: they will serve to make our country
dearer and more interesting to us, and afford fit soil for poetry to
root itself in: for this is a plant which thrives best in spots where
blood has been spilt long ago, and grows in abundant clusters in old
ditches, such as the moat around Fort Ellsworth will be a century
hence. It may seem to be paying dear for what many will reckon but a
worthless weed; but the more historical associations we can link with
our localities, the richer will be the daily life that feeds upon the
past, and the more valuable the things that have been long established:
so that our children will be less prodigal than their fathers in
sacrificing good institutions to passionate impulses and impracticable
theories. This herb of grace, let us hope, may be found in the old
footprints of the war.

Even in an aesthetic point of view, however, the war has done a great
deal of enduring mischief, by causing the devastation of great tracts
of woodland scenery, in which this part of Virginia would appear to
have been very rich. Around all the encampments, and everywhere along
the road, we saw the bare sites of what had evidently been tracts of
hard-wood forest, indicated by the unsightly stumps of well-grown
trees, not smoothly felled by regular axe-men, but hacked, haggled, and
unevenly amputated, as by a sword, or other miserable tool, in an
unskilful hand. Fifty years will not repair this desolation. An army
destroys everything before and around it, even to the very grass; for
the sites of the encampments are converted into barren esplanades, like
those of the squares in French cities, where not a blade of grass is
allowed to grow. As to other symptoms of devastation and obstruction,
such as deserted houses, unfenced fields, and a general aspect of
nakedness and ruin, I know not how much may be due to a normal lack of
neatness in the rural life of Virginia, which puts a squalid face even
upon a prosperous state of things; but undoubtedly the war must have
spoilt what was good, and made the bad a great deal worse. The
carcasses of horses were scattered along the way-side.

One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was
presented by a party of contrabands, escaping out of the mysterious
depths of Secessia; and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely
delay with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and
encountering nobody to turn them back. They were unlike the specimens
of their race whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my
judgment, were far more agreeable. So rudely were they attired,--as if
their garb had grown upon them spontaneously,--so picturesquely natural
in manners, and wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity, (which is
quite polished away from the Northern black man,) that they seemed a
kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite
as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times. I
wonder whether I shall excite anybody's wrath by saying this. It is no
great matter. At all events, I felt most kindly towards these poor
fugitives, but knew not precisely what to wish in their behalf, nor in
the least how to help them. For the sake of the manhood which is latent
in them, I would not have turned them back; but I should have felt
almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to
the stranger's land; and I think my prevalent idea was, that, whoever
may be benefited by the results of this war, it will not be the present
generation of negroes, the childhood of whose race is now gone forever,
and who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world, on very
unequal terms. On behalf of my own race, I am glad, and can only hope
that an inscrutable Providence means good to both parties.

There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the
children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very
singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from
the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth
a brood of Pilgrims upon Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one,
spawned slaves upon the Southern soil,--a monstrous birth, but with
which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an
irresistible impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood
and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little
by this revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark
one,--and two such portents never sprang from an identical source
before.

While we drove onward, a young officer on horseback looked earnestly
into the carriage, and recognized some faces that he had seen before;
so he rode along by our side, and we pestered him with queries and
observations, to which he responded more civilly than they deserved. He
was on General McClellan's staff, and a gallant cavalier, high-booted,
with a revolver in his belt, and mounted on a noble horse, which
trotted hard and high without disturbing the rider in his accustomed
seat. His face had a healthy hue of exposure and an expression of
careless hardihood; and, as I looked at him, it seemed to me that the
war had brought good fortune to the youth of this epoch, if to none
beside; since they now make it their daily business to ride a horse and
handle a sword, instead of lounging listlessly through the duties,
occupations, pleasures--all tedious alike--to which the artificial
state of society limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the
camp and the smoke of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the
hardy virtues flourish in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed.
The enervating effects of centuries of civilization vanish at once,
and leave these young men to enjoy a life of hardship, and the
exhilarating sense of danger,--to kill men blamelessly, or to be
killed gloriously,--and to be happy in following out their native
instincts of destruction, precisely in the spirit of Homer's heroes,
only with some considerable change of mode. One touch of Nature makes
not only the whole world, but all time, akin. Set men face to face,
with weapons in their hands, and they are as ready to slaughter one
another now, after playing at peace and good-will for so many years, as
in the rudest ages, that never heard of peace-societies, and thought no
wine so delicious as what they quaffed from an enemy's skull. Indeed,
if the report of a Congressional committee may be trusted, that
old-fashioned kind of goblet has again come into use, at the expense of
our Northern head-pieces,--a costly drinking-cup to him that furnishes
it! Heaven forgive me for seeming to jest upon such a subject!--only,
it is so odd, when we measure our advances from barbarism, and find
ourselves just here! [Footnote: We hardly expected this outbreak in
favor of war from the Peaceable Man; but the justice of our cause
makes us all soldiers at heart, however quiet in our outward life. We
have heard of twenty Quakers in a single company of a Pennsylvania
regiment.]

We now approached General McClellan's head-quarters, which, at that
time, were established at Fairfield Seminary. The edifice was situated
on a gentle elevation, amid very agreeable scenery, and, at a
distance, looked like a gentleman's seat. Preparations were going
forward for reviewing a division of ten or twelve thousand men, the
various regiments composing which had begun to array themselves on an
extensive plain, where, methought, there was a more convenient place
for a battle than is usually found in this broken and difficult
country. Two thousand cavalry made a portion of the troops to be
reviewed. By-and-by we saw a pretty numerous troop of mounted officers,
who were congregated on a distant part of the plain, and whom we
finally ascertained to be the Commander-in-Chief's staff, with
McClellan himself at their head. Our party managed to establish itself
in a position conveniently close to the General, to whom, moreover, we
had the honor of an introduction; and he bowed, on his horseback,
with a good deal of dignity and martial courtesy, but no airs nor fuss
nor pretension beyond what his character and rank inevitably gave him.

Now, at that juncture, and, in fact, up to the present moment, there
was, and is, a most fierce and bitter outcry, and detraction loud and
low, against General McClellan, accusing him of sloth, imbecility,
cowardice, treasonable purposes, and, in short, utterly denying his
ability as a soldier, and questioning his integrity as a man. Nor was
this to be wondered at; for when before, in all history, do we find a
general in command of half a million of men, and in presence of an
enemy inferior in numbers and no better disciplined than his own
troops, leaving it still debatable, after the better part of a year,
whether he is a soldier or no? The question would seem to answer
itself in the very asking. Nevertheless, being most profoundly
ignorant of the art of war, like the majority of the General's critics,
and, on the other hand, having some considerable impressibility by
men's characters, I was glad of the opportunity to look him in the
face, and to feel whatever influence might reach me from his sphere. So
I stared at him, as the phrase goes, with all the eyes I had; and the
reader shall have the benefit of what I saw,--to which he is the more
welcome, because, in writing this article, I feel disposed to be
singularly frank, and can scarcely restrain myself from telling truths
the utterance of which I should get slender thanks for.

The General was dressed in a simple, dark-blue uniform, without
epaulets, booted to the knee, and with a cloth cap upon his head; and,
at first sight, you might have taken him for a corporal of dragoons, of
particularly neat and soldier-like aspect, and in the prime of his age
and strength. He is only of middling stature, but his build is very
compact and sturdy, with broad shoulders and a look of great physical
vigor, which, in fact, he is said to possess,--he and Beauregard having
been rivals in that particular, and both distinguished above other men.
His complexion is dark and sanguine, with dark hair. He has a strong,
bold, soldierly face, full of decision; a Roman nose, by no means a
thin prominence, but very thick and firm; and if he follows it, (which
I should think likely,) it may be pretty confidently trusted to guide
him aright. His profile would make a more effective likeness than the
full face, which, however, is much better in the real man than in any
photograph that I have seen. His forehead is not remarkably large, but
comes forward at the eyebrows; it is not the brow nor countenance of a
prominently intellectual man, (not a natural student, I mean, or
abstract thinker,) but of one whose office it is to handle things
practically and to bring about tangible results. His face looked
capable of being very stern, but wore, in its repose, when I saw it, an
aspect pleasant and dignified; it is not, in its character, an American
face, nor an English one. The man on whom he fixes his eye is conscious
of him. In his natural disposition, he seems calm and self-possessed,
sustaining his great responsibilities cheerfully, without shrinking,
or weariness, or spasmodic effort, or damage to his health, but all
with quiet, deep-drawn breaths; just as his broad shoulders would bear
up a heavy burden without aching beneath it.

After we had had sufficient time to peruse the man, (so far as it could
be done with one pair of very attentive eyes,) the General rode off,
followed by his cavalcade, and was lost to sight among the troops. They
received him with loud shouts, by the eager uproar of which--now near,
now in the centre, now on the outskirts of the division, and now
sweeping back towards us in a great volume of sound--we could trace his
progress through the ranks. If he is a coward, or a traitor, or a
humbug, or anything less than a brave, true, and able man, that mass of
intelligent soldiers, whose lives and honor he had in charge, were
utterly deceived, and so was this present writer; for they believed in
him, and so did I; and had I stood in the ranks, I should have shouted
with the lustiest of them. Of course I may be mistaken; my opinion on
such a point is worth nothing, although my impression may be worth a
little more; neither do I consider the General's antecedents as
bearing very decided testimony to his practical soldiership. A
thorough knowledge of the science of war seems to be conceded to him;
he is allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible
without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just
as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the
principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single
stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in
General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his
courage and integrity even then.

Another of our excursions was to Harper's Ferry,--the Directors of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad having kindly invited us to accompany
them on the first trip over the newly laid track, after its breaking up
by the Rebels. It began to rain, in the early morning, pretty soon
after we left Washington, and continued to pour a cataract throughout
the day; so that the aspect of the country was dreary, where it would
otherwise have been delightful, as we entered among the hill-scenery
that is formed by the subsiding swells of the Alleghanies. The latter
part of our journey lay along the shore of the Potomac, in its upper
course, where the margin of that noble river is bordered by gray,
overhanging crags, beneath which--and sometimes right through them--the
railroad takes its way. In one place the Rebels had attempted to arrest
a train by precipitating an immense mass of rock down upon the track,
by the side of which it still lay, deeply imbedded in the ground, and
looking as if it might have lain there since the Deluge. The scenery
grew even more picturesque as we proceeded, the bluffs becoming very
bold in their descent upon the river, which, at Harper's Ferry,
presents as striking a vista among the hills as a painter could desire
to see. But a beautiful landscape is a luxury, and luxuries are thrown
away amid discomfort; and when we alighted into the tenacious mud and
almost fathomless puddle, on the hither side of the Ferry, (the
ultimate point to which the cars proceeded, since the railroad bridge
had been destroyed by the Rebels,) I cannot remember that any very
rapturous emotions were awakened by the scenery.

We paddled and floundered over the ruins of the track, and, scrambling
down an embankment, crossed the Potomac by a pontoon-bridge, a thousand
feet in length, over the narrow line of which--level with the river,
and rising and subsiding with it--General Banks had recently led his
whole army, with its ponderous artillery and heavily laden wagons. Yet
our own tread made it vibrate. The broken bridge of the railroad was a
little below us, and at the base of one of its massive piers, in the
rocky bed of the river, lay a locomotive, which the Rebels had
precipitated there.

As we passed over, we looked towards the Virginia shore, and beheld the
little town of Harper's Ferry, gathered about the base of a round hill
and climbing up its steep acclivity; so that it somewhat resembled the
Etruscan cities which I have seen among the Apennines, rushing, as it
were, down an apparently break-neck height. About midway of the ascent
stood a shabby brick church, towards which a difficult path went
scrambling up the precipice, indicating, one would say, a very fervent
aspiration on the part of the worshippers, unless there was some easier
mode of access in another direction. Immediately on the shore of the
Potomac, and extending back towards the town, lay the dismal ruins of
the United States arsenal and armory, consisting of piles of broken
bricks and a waste of shapeless demolition, amid which we saw
gun-barrels in heaps of hundreds together. They were the relics of the
conflagration, bent with the heat of the fire, and rusted with the
wintry rain to which they had since been exposed. The brightest
sunshine could not have made the scene cheerful, nor have taken away
the gloom from the dilapidated town; for, besides the natural
shabbiness, and decayed, unthrifty look of a Virginian village, it has
an inexpressible forlornness resulting from the devastations of war and
its occupation by both armies alternately. Yet there would be a less
striking contrast between Southern and New-England villages, if the
former were as much in the habit of using white paint as we are. It is
prodigiously efficacious in putting a bright face upon a bad matter.

There was one small shop, which appeared to have nothing for sale. A
single man and one or two boys were all the inhabitants in view, except
the Yankee sentinels and soldiers, belonging to Massachusetts
regiments, who were scattered about pretty numerously. A guard-house
stood on the slope of the hill; and in the level street at its base
were the offices of the Provost-Marshal and other military authorities,
to whom we forthwith reported ourselves. The Provost-Marshal kindly
sent a corporal to guide us to the little building which John Brown
seized upon as his fortress, and which, after it was stormed by the
United States marines, became his temporary prison. It is an old
engine-house, rusty and shabby, like every other work of man's hands in
this God-forsaken town, and stands fronting upon the river, only a
short distance from the bank, nearly at the point where the
pontoon-bridge touches the Virginia shore. In its front wall, on each
side of the door, are two or three ragged loop-holes which John Brown
perforated for his defence, knocking out merely a brick or two, so as
to give himself and his garrison a sight over their rifles. Through
these orifices the sturdy old man dealt a good deal of deadly mischief
among his assailants, until they broke down the door by thrusting
against it with a ladder, and tumbled headlong in upon him. I shall not
pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any farther than sympathy
with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect
ever to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a sage, whose
happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that
saying, (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source,) that the
death of this blood-stained fanatic has "made the Gallows as venerable
as the Cross!" Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his
martyrdom fairly, and took it firmly. He himself, I am persuaded, (such
was his natural integrity,) would have acknowledged that Virginia had a
right to take the life which he had staked and lost; although it would
have been better for her, in the hour that is fast coming, if she could
generously have forgotten the criminality of his attempt in its
enormous folly. On the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking at
the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual
satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of his
preposterous miscalculation of possibilities. [Footnote: Can it be a
son of old Massachusetts who utters this abominable sentiment? For
shame!]

But, coolly as I seem to say these things, my Yankee heart stirred
triumphantly when I saw the use to which John Brown's fortress and
prison-house has now been put. What right have I to complain of any
other man's foolish impulses, when I cannot possibly control my own?
The engine-house is now a place of confinement for Rebel prisoners.

A Massachusetts soldier stood on guard, but readily permitted our whole
party to enter. It was a wretched place. A room of perhaps twenty-five
feet square occupied the whole interior of the building, having an
iron stove in its centre, whence a rusty funnel ascended towards a hole
in the roof, which served the purposes of ventilation, as well as for
the exit of smoke. We found ourselves right in the midst of the Rebels,
some of whom lay on heaps of straw, asleep, or, at all events, giving
no sign of consciousness; others sat in the corners of the room,
huddled close together, and staring with a lazy kind of interest at the
visitors; two were astride of some planks, playing with the dirtiest
pack of cards that I ever happened to see. There was only one figure in
the least military among all these twenty prisoners of war,--a man with
a dark, intelligent, moustached face, wearing a shabby cotton uniform,
which he had contrived to arrange with a degree of soldierly smartness,
though it had evidently borne the brunt of a very filthy campaign. He
stood erect, and talked freely with those who addressed him, telling
them his place of residence, the number of his regiment, the
circumstances of his capture, and such other particulars as their
Northern inquisitiveness prompted them to ask. I liked the manliness of
his deportment; he was neither ashamed, nor afraid, nor in the
slightest degree sullen, peppery, or contumacious, but bore himself as
if whatever animosity he had felt towards his enemies was left upon the
battle-field, and would not be resumed till he had again a weapon in
his hand.

Neither could I detect a trace of hostile feeling in the countenance,
words, or manner of any prisoner there. Almost to a man, they were
simple, bumpkin-like fellows, dressed in homespun clothes, with faces
singularly vacant of meaning, but sufficiently good-humored: a breed of
men, in short, such as I did not suppose to exist in this country,
although I have seen their like in some other parts of the world. They
were peasants, and of a very low order: a class of people with whom our
Northern rural population has not a single trait in common. They were
exceedingly respectful,--more so than a rustic New-Englander ever
dreams of being towards anybody, except perhaps his minister; and had
they worn any hats, they would probably have been self-constrained to
take them off, under the unusual circumstance of being permitted to
hold conversation with well-dressed persons. It is my belief that not a
single bumpkin of them all (the moustached soldier always excepted) had
the remotest comprehension of what they had been fighting for, or how
they had deserved to be shut up in that dreary hole; nor, possibly, did
they care to inquire into this latter mystery, but took it as a godsend
to be suffered to lie here in a heap of unwashed human bodies, well
warmed and well foddered to-day, and without the necessity of bothering
themselves about the possible hunger and cold of to-morrow. Their dark
prison-life may have seemed to them the sunshine of all their lifetime.

There was one poor wretch, a wild-beast of a man, at whom I gazed with
greater interest than at his fellows; although I know not that each one
of them, in their semi-barbarous moral state, might not have been
capable of the same savage impulse that had made this particular
individual a horror to all beholders. At the close of some battle or
skirmish, a wounded Union soldier had crept on hands and knees to his
feet, and besought his assistance,--not dreaming that any creature in
human shape, in the Christian land where they had so recently been
brethren, could refuse it. But this man (this fiend, if you prefer to
call him so, though I would not advise it) flung a bitter curse at the
poor Northerner, and absolutely trampled the soul out of his body, as
he lay writhing beneath his feet. The fellow's face was horribly ugly;
but I am not quite sure that I should have noticed it, if I had not
known his story. He spoke not a word, and met nobody's eye, but kept
staring upward into the smoky vacancy towards the ceiling, where, it
might be, he beheld a continual portraiture of his victim's
horror-stricken agonies. I rather fancy, however, that his moral sense
was yet too torpid to trouble him with such remorseful visions, and
that, for his own part, he might have had very agreeable reminiscences
of the soldier's death, if other eyes had not been bent reproachfully
upon him and warned him that something was amiss. It was this reproach
in other men's eyes that made him look aside. He was a wild-beast, as I
began with saying,--an unsophisticated wild-beast,--while the rest of
us are partially tamed, though still the scent of blood excites some of
the savage instincts of our nature. What this wretch needed, in order
to make him capable of the degree of mercy and benevolence that exists
in us, was simply such a measure of moral and intellectual development
as we have received; and, in my mind, the present war is so well
justified by no other consideration as by the probability that it will
free this class of Southern whites from a thraldom in which they
scarcely begin to be responsible beings. So far as the education of the
heart is concerned, the negroes have apparently the advantage of them;
and as to other schooling, it is practically unattainable by black or
white.

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