Charles Carleton Coffin Part 5

There the New England men were warm in their welcome of the sole representative of the press of the Eastern States, though St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York journals were also represented.

Among these were A. D. Richardson, of the New York _Tribune_, and Whitelaw Reid, of the Cincinnati _Gazette_. Unlike General Don Carlos Buell, General U. S. Grant, in command at Cairo, had no horror of newspaper correspondents, and granted them all reasonable facilities.

For the first time Carleton looked upon the gunboats, "three being of the coal-transport pattern, and five of the turtle style," with sides sloping inward, both above and below the deck. A shot from the enemy would be likely either to fly up in the air or "go into the realms of the catfish." As to the army, Carleton noticed that, as compared with the Army of the Potomac, discipline was much more severe in the East, while real democracy was much more general in the West. Men seemed less proud of their shoulder-straps. The rules of military etiquette were barely observed.

"There is but very little of the soldier about these Western troops.

They are armed citizens, brave, active, energetic, with a fine physique, acquainted with hardships, reared to rough life ... but it is by no means certain that they will not be quite as effective in the field. The troops here are a splendid set of men, all of them young.... There is more bone and muscle here, but less culture ... I have heard far less profanity here than on the Potomac, among officers and men." He believed there were fewer profane words used and less whiskey drunk than among the troops in the East. There was not as much attention paid to neatness and camp hygiene.

It was at Cairo that Carleton made the personal acquaintance, which he retained until their death, of General Ulysses S. Grant and Commodore Foote. The latter had already made a superb reputation as a naval officer in Africa and China. Before Foote was able to equip and start his fleet, or Grant could move his army southward, on what proved to be their resistless march, Carleton made journeys into Kentucky, wrote letters from Cincinnati and Chicago, and arrived back in time to join General Grant's column. He went down the river, seeing the victorious battle and siege operations. First from Cairo, and then from Fort Donelson, he penned brilliant and accurate accounts of the capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, which opened the Southern Confederacy to the advance of the Union army. While Grant beat the rebels, Carleton beat his fellow correspondents, even though he had first to spend many hours among the wounded. The newspaper men from New York had poked not a little fun at the "Boston man," chaffing him because they thought the New England newspapers "slow" and "out of date in methods." They fully expected that Carleton's despatches would be far behind theirs in point of time as well as in general value. Their boasting was sadly premature. Carleton beat them all, and their humiliation was great.

The matter was in this wise. He had hoped by taking the first boat from Fort Donelson to Cairo to find time to write out an account of the siege and surrender of the great fortresses; but during his travel of one hundred and eighty miles on the river, the steamer had in its cabin and staterooms two hundred maimed soldiers and officers with their wounds undressed. Instead of occupation with ink-bottle, pen, and paper, Carleton found himself giving water to the wounded, and holding the light for surgeons and nurses. Then, knowing that no other correspondent had the exact and copious information possessed by himself, he took the cars, writing his letters on the route from Cairo to Chicago, where he mailed them.

No doubt at this time, while Carleton was writing so brilliantly to a quarter of a million readers, many of them envied him his opportunities. Distance lent enchantment to the view. "But let me say," wrote Carleton, "if they were once brought into close contact with all the dreadful realities of war,--if they were obliged to stand the chances of getting their heads knocked off, or blown to atoms by an unexpected sh.e.l.l, or bored through with a minie ball,--to stand their chances of being captured by the enemy,--to live on bread and water, and little of it, as all of the correspondents have been obliged to do the past week,--to sleep on the ground, or on a sack of corn, or in a barn, with the wind blowing a gale, and the snow whirling in drifts, and the thermometer shrunk to zero,--and then, after the battle is over and the field won, to walk among the dying and the dead, to behold all the ghastly sights of trunkless heads and headless trunks,--to see the human form mutilated, disfigured, torn, and mangled by shot and sh.e.l.l,--to step in pools of blood,--to hear all around sighs, groans, imprecations, and prayers from dying men,--they would be content to let others become historians of the war. But this is not all; a correspondent must keep ever in view the thousands that are looking at the journal he represents, who expect his account at the earliest possible moment. If he is behindhand, his occupation is gone. His account must be first, or among the first, or it is nothing. Day and night he must be on the alert, improving every opportunity and turning it to account. If he loses a steamboat trip, or a train of cars, or a mail, it is all up with him. He might as well put his pencil in his pocket and go home."

Carleton had a hearty laugh over a letter from a friend who advised him "to take more time and rewrite his letters," adding that it would be for his benefit. To Carleton, who often wrote amid the smoke of battle or on deck amid bursting sh.e.l.ls, or while flying over the prairies at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, in order, first of all, to be ahead of his rivals, this seemed a joke. In after-years of calm and leisure, when writing his books, he painted word pictures and finished his chapters, giving them a rhetorical gloss impossible when writing in haste against the pressure of rushing time. Although Boston was two hundred miles farther from Cairo than New York, yet all New England had read Carleton's account in the _Journal_ before any correspondent's letters from Fort Donelson or Henry appeared in the newspapers of Manhattan.

After the fall of Columbus, the next point to which army and navy were to give attention was the famous Island Number Ten. Here the Confederates were concentrating all that were available in men and cannon. Thousands of negroes were at work upon the trenches, and it was believed that the fight would be most desperate. After long waiting for his armament and the training of his men, Commodore Foote was ready. Carleton wrote at Cairo, March 10, 1862, in the exhilaration of high hopes:

"Like the waves of the Atlantic is the tide of events. How they sweep!

Henry, Donelson, Bowling Green, Nashville, Roanoke, Columbus, Hampton Roads, Mana.s.sas, Cedar Creek,--wave upon wave, dashing at the foundation of a house built upon the sand.

... The gigantic structure is tottering. A few more days like that of the immediate past, and the Confederacy will have a name and a place only in history. And what a history it will be! A most stupendous crime. A conspiracy unparalleled, crushed out by a free people, and the best government of all times saved to the world! How it sends one's blood through his veins to think of it! Who would not live in such an age as this? Before this reaches you, the telegraph, I hope, will have informed you that the Mississippi is open to New Orleans."

So thought Carleton then. Who at that time was wiser than he?

Island Number Ten, so named quite early in history, by the pilots descending the river, was a place but little known in the East. To the writer it was one of interest, because here had lived for a year or so a beloved sister whose letters from the plantation and home at which she was a guest were not only frequent, but full of the fun and keen interest about things as seen on a slave plantation by a bright young girl of twenty from Philadelphia. Well do I remember the handsome planter of commanding form and winning manners who had made my sister's stay in the family of the Merriwethers so pleasant, and who at our home in Philadelphia told of his life on the Mississippi. This was but two or three years before the breaking out of the war. This same plantation on Island Number Ten was afterwards sown thickly with the seed of war, shot, and sh.e.l.l. In front of it took place the great naval battle, which Carleton witnessed from the deck of the gunboat _Pittsburg_, which he has described not only in his letters but also in the books written later. After the destruction of the rebel fleet followed the heavy bombardment which, after many days of constant rain of iron, compelled the evacuation of the forts early in April. Even after these staggering blows at the Confederacy, Carleton expatiated on the mighty work that yet remained to be done before Secessia should become one of the curiosities of history in the limbo of things exploded.

A month of arduous toil and continuous activity on foot, on deck, and on horseback followed. On the river and in Tennessee and in Mississippi the tireless news-gatherer plied his tasks. Then came tidings of the capture of New Orleans, the evacuation of Fort Pillow, in or near which Carleton wrote two of his best letters; the retreat of the Confederates from Memphis, and the annihilation of the rebel fleet in a great water battle, during which Carleton had the very best position for observation, only two other journalists being present to witness it with him. Owing to a week's sickness, he did not see the battle of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, but he arrived on the ground very soon after, and went over the whole field with partic.i.p.ants in the struggle and while the debris was still fresh. He made so thorough a study of this decisive field of valor, that he was able to write with notable power and clearness both in his letters at the time and later in his books.

We find him in Chicago, June 17th, in Boston, June 21st, where, in one of his letters, numbering probably about the two hundredth, he welcomes the sweet breezes of New England, her mountains, the deep-toned diapason of the ever-sounding sea, the green fields, the troops of smiling children, the toll of church bells, and the warm grasp of hands from a host of kind-hearted friends; and, best of all, the pure patriotism, the true, holy devotion of a people whose mighty hearts beat now and ever "for union and liberty, one and inseparable."

CHAPTER X.

AT ANTIETAM AND FREDERICKSBURG.

The opening of the battle-summer of 1862 found the seat of war in the East, in the tidewater region of Virginia. These were the days when "strategy" was the word. General George B. McClellan's leading idea was to capture Richmond rather than destroy the Confederate army. His own forces lay on both sides of the Chickahominy, in the peninsula below Richmond. The series of five battles had already begun when Carleton arrived in Baltimore, July 2d. A peremptory order from Washington having stopped every one from reaching Fortress Monroe, he had therefore to do the next best thing as collector and reviser of news. After studying the whole situation, he wrote a long and detailed letter from Baltimore.

Spending most of the summer at home, he was able to rejoin the army early in September, when Lee began his daring invasion of the North,--a political even more than a military move. Then Confederate audacity was fully matched by Pennsylvania's patriotism. Although the State had already one hundred and fifty regiments in service, Governor Andrew D. Curtin called for fifty thousand more men. Within ten days that number of militia were armed and equipped, and in the field.

Millionaires and wage-earners, professors and students, ministers and their congregations were in line guarding the c.u.mberland Valley.

Neither disasters nor the incapacity of generals chilled the fierce resolve of Pennsylvania's sons, who were determined to show that the North could not be successfully invaded, even by veterans led by the bravest and most competent generals of the age.

Carleton was in the saddle as soon as he learned that Lee had moved.

From Parkton to Hanover Junction, to Westminster, to Harrisburg, to Green Castle, to Hagerstown, to Keitisville he rode, and at these places he wrote, hoping to be in at the mightiest battle which, until this time, had ever been fought on American soil. For many days it was a mystery to the Washington authorities, and to the Army of the Potomac, where Lee and his divisions were; but, with his usual good fortune, Carleton was but nine miles distant, at Hagerstown, when the booming of the cannon at Antietam roused him from his sleep. It was not many minutes before he was in saddle and away. Instead of the ride down the Sharpsburg pike that would have brought him in rear of the enemy, he rode down the Boonsboro road, reaching the right wing of the Union army just as Hooker was pushing his columns into position.

Striking off from the main road, through fields and farms, he came to Antietam creek. He found a ford, and reached a pathway where a line of wagons loaded with the wounded was winding down the slope. On the fields above was a squadron of cavalry to hold back stragglers. In the first ambulance he descried a silver star, and saw the face of the brave General Richardson, dead, with a bullet through his breast. At the farmhouses, rows of men were already lying in the straw, waiting their turn at the surgeon's hands, while long lines of men were bringing the fallen on stretchers. With hatred of war in his heart, but with faith in its stern necessity, Carleton rode on to see the fight which raged in front of Sumner, noticing that the cannon of Hooker and Mansfield were silent, cooling their lips after the morning's fever. Of the superb Pennsylvania Reserve Corps, which he had seen a year ago at review, there was now but a remnant. He ascended the ridge, where thirty pieces of cannon were every moment emptying their black mouths of fire and iron.

All day long Carleton was witness of the battle, and then sent home from Sharpsburg, September 19th, in addition to his preliminary letter, a long and comprehensive account in five columns of print. It was so animated in style, so exact in particulars, and so skilful and clear in its general grouping, that its writer was overwhelmed with congratulations by the best of all critics, his fellow correspondents.

In two other letters from Sharpsburg, he reviewed the whole subject judicially, and then returned home for a few days' recuperation.

From Philadelphia we find two of his letters, one describing the transport of troops and the monitors then on the stocks, or in the Delaware, and another reviewing the account of Antietam which he had read in the Charleston _Courier_. Indeed, all through the war, Mr.

Coffin took pains to inform himself as to Southern opinion, and the methods of its manufacture and influence by the press. He was thus able to correct and purify his own judgments. He preserved his copies of the Southern papers, and gradually acc.u.mulated, during and after the war, a unique collection of the newspapers of the South. His first opinion about the battle of Antietam, written October 8, 1862, is the same as that which he held thirty years later:

"In reviewing the contest, aided by the Southern account, it seems that all through the day, complete, decisive, annihilating victory lay within our grasp, and yet we did not take it."

Let us read further from the closing paragraph of that letter, which he wrote in Philadelphia, before moving West to the army in Kentucky:

"In saying this, I raise no criticism, make no question or blame, but prefer to look upon it as a controlling of that Providence which notices the fall of every sparrow. The time had not come for complete victory,--for annihilation of the rebel army. We are not yet over the Red Sea. The baptism of blood is not yet complete. The cause of the war is not yet removed,--retribution for crime is not yet finished. We must suffer again. With firmer faith than ever in the ultimate triumph of right, truth, and justice, let us accept the fiery ordeal."

Like the pendulum of an observatory clock, the bob-point of which touches at each vibration the mercury which transmits intelligence of its movements to distant points, Carleton now swung himself to Cincinnati. In Louisville he gave an account, from reports, of the battle of Perryville. It was written in the utmost haste, with one eye upon the hands of his watch moving on to the minute of the closing of the mail. In such a case, according to his custom, he wrote a second letter, when possessed with fuller data from eye-witnesses. In the heart of Kentucky he was able to see the effects of the President's Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, which had been issued but three weeks before. He described the coming of the Confederate army into Kentucky as "the Flatterer, dressed in a white garment, who with many fair speeches would have turned Christian and Faithful from the glittering gates of the Golden City, shining serene and fair over the land of Beulah." The robe having dropped from Flatterer's limbs, the Kentuckian saw that the reality was hideous, and that to follow him was to go back again to the City of Destruction. The Confederates moved southward, laden with plunder, while General Buell, with his army of one hundred and forty thousand men, after having mildly pursued them for twenty-one days, returned to Louisville. Carleton's comment upon these movements is, "Such is strategy."

Finding himself again in the trough of inactivity, and ever ready to mount on the wave of opportunity, Carleton moved again to the East, writing in the cars while whirling to Virginia. His first letters from the East were penned at Harper's Ferry. Then began his zigzag movements, like a planet. We find his pen active at Berlin, Md., Purcellville, Va., Upperville, Va., where, beside the cavalry battles between Pleasanton and Stewart, he saw that seven corps were in motion. From Gainesville, Warrenton Junction, Orleans, Warrenton, Catlett's Station, and again and often from Washington, and from Falmouth, he sent his letters, which, if not always full of battle, kept the heart of New England patient and courageous.

McClellan had been removed, and Burnside, taking command, led his army to the riverside before Fredericksburg. Carleton was witness of the bombardment of the city by the Federal artillery. From his coign of vantage at General Sumner's headquarters, on the piazza of an elegant mansion, one hundred feet above the Rappahannock, and about three-quarters of a mile from it, he could see, as though it were a great cartoon and he a weaver of the Gobelins tapestry of history, the awful pattern of war. Beyond the sixteen rifled Rodman guns of large calibre and long range, mounted on the river bluff and thrust out through sand-bags, behind the ma.s.ses of infantry, the pontoon and artillery trains, Carleton stood and saw the making of a bridge in fifteen minutes, in the face of a terrific musketry fire from the opposite sh.o.r.e. Then followed views of the street fight in the doomed city, the shattered houses, the cloudless sky, the setting sun, the gorgeous sunset dyes, the deepening shadows, the ma.s.ses of men upon the opposite hills, the screaming sh.e.l.ls, the puffs of white smoke, the bursting storms of iron, the blood-red flames illuminating the ruin of dwellings, the battle smoke settling in the valley, so densely as to obscure or hide the flashes. All this was before Carleton on that afternoon and evening of that winter's day, December 11th. Then he spread his blanket for a little sleep, expecting to awake to behold one of the greatest battles of modern times; but the sun set without the two great armies coming to close quarters.

The next day was a hard one, for Carleton was in the field until night, now watching a bombardment, now a charge, and again a long and stubborn, persistent musketry fire. The sh.e.l.ls sang near him, and at one time he was evidently the target for a whole Confederate battery; for, within a few seconds, a round shot struck a few rods in front of him, a second fell to the right, a third went over his head, a fourth skimmed along the surface of the ground, just over the backs of a regiment, lying flat on their faces. As he moved to the shelter of the river bank, a shot dropped obligingly in the water before him. All day long the lines of batteries on the hills smoked like Etna and Vesuvius. Sometimes, between ordnance and musketry, there were twenty thousand flashes a minute. Carleton thus far had seen no battles where the fire equalled that which was poured upon Sumner's command during the last grand, but hopeless, charge at sunset. At nightfall, when the wearied soldiers could lie down for rest, Carleton began the work of writing his letter. Among other things he said:

"With the deference to military strategics, my own common sense deprecated attempting the movements which were made, as unnecessary and unwise,--which must be accomplished with fearful slaughter, and which I believed would be unsuccessful....

"It is a plain of Balaklava, where the Light Brigade, renowned in song, made their fearful charge."

Then follows a simple but sufficient diagram of the Confederate impregnable position, where, with only common printer's type, and the "daggers" of punctuation standing for Blakesley and Armstrong guns, printer's ink told the story. Though nearly exhausted by his manifold labors of brain and muscle, Carleton, on the 15th, visited the battle-field, which did not exceed one hundred acres, and the city in which the troops were quietly quartered, but in which a Confederate sh.e.l.l was falling every ten minutes. After surveying the near and distant scenes from the cupola of an already well-riddled house, Carleton followed the army when it withdrew to Falmouth, seeing through his gla.s.s the Confederates leaping upon the deserted entrenchments and staring at the empty town.

Returning to Washington, he reviewed as usual the battle, and then returned homeward, according to his wont, for three weeks of rest and refreshment. His last letter, before leaving the front, was a n.o.ble and inspiriting plea for patience and continuance. He wrote: "The army is ready to fight, but the people are despondent. The army has not lost its nerve, its self-possession, its balance; it is more powerful to-day than it has ever been. It has no thought of giving up the contest. The cause is holy. It is not for power or dominion, but for the rich inheritance decreed by our fathers."

The same bugle call of inspiration sounded from his lips and pen, when he rejoined the army on the Rappahannock, and Hooker was in command.

He wrote: "The army needs several things; first, to be supported by the people at home. There is nothing which will so quickly take the strength out of the soldier as a blue letter from home, and on the other hand there is nothing which would give him so much life as a cheerful, hopeful letter from his friends. Let every one look beyond the immediate present into the years to come, and think of the inheritance he is to bequeath to his children. Let him see the coming millions of our people on this continent; let him lay his ear to the ground, and hear the tread of that mighty host which is to people the Mississippi Valley; which will climb the mountains of the West, to coin the hidden riches into gold; let him see the great cities springing up on the Pacific Coast; let him understand that this nation is yet in its youth; that this continent is to be the highway between China and Europe; let him behold this contest in its vast proportion, reaching through all coming time, and affecting the entire human race forever; let him resolve that, come weal or come woe, come life or come death, that it shall be sustained, and it will be."

Another letter deals in rather severe sarcasm with a friend who belonged to "the Nightshade family," one of those individuals who thrive on darkness. He wrote: "People of New England, are you not ashamed of yourselves? Away with your old womanish fears, your shivering, your timidity, your garrulousness.... Sustain your sons by bold, inspiring, patriotic words and acts; act like men.... This army, this government must be sustained. It will be."

CHAPTER XI.

THE IRONCLADS OFF CHARLESTON.

After five letters from Washington, in the first of which he had predicted that in a few days, for the first time in war, there would be the great contest between ironclads and forts, and the stroke of fifteen-inch shot against masonry, Carleton set off for salt water, determining to see the tug-of-war on the Atlantic coast. It was on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, February 7th, that he stood on deck of the steamer _Augusta Dinsmore_ as she moved through the floating ma.s.ses of ice down the Hudson River to the sea. This new ship was owned by Adams's Express Company, and with her consort, _Mary Sandford_, was employed in carrying barrels of apples, boxes of clothing, messages of love, and tokens of affection between the Union soldiers along the coast and their friends at home. Heavily loaded with express packages, with fifty or sixty thousand letters, and with several hundred fifteen-inch solid shot, packed ready for delivery by Admiral Du Pont at or into Fort Sumter, the trim craft pa.s.sed over a sea like gla.s.s, except that now and then was a dying groan or heave of the storm of a week before. A pleasant Sunday at sea was spent with worship, sermon, and song. After sixty hours on salt water, Carleton's ear caught the boom of the surf on the beach. The sea-gulls flitted around, and after the sun had rent the pall of fog, the town of Beaufort appeared in view.

The harbor was full of schooners which had come from up North, bringing potatoes, onions, apples, and Yankee notions for the great blue-coated community at Newburgh. Carleton moved up the poverty-stricken country through marsh, sea-sand, pitch-pine, swamp, and plain. Here and there were the shanties of sand-hillers, negro huts, and scores of long, lank, scrimped-up, razor-backed pigs of the Congo breed, as to color; but in speed, racers, outstripping the fleetest horses. Making his headquarters at Hilton Head, Carleton made a thorough study of the military and naval situation. He visited the New England regiments. He saw the enlistment of negro troops, and devoted one letter to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson's first South Carolina regiment of volunteers.

With his usual luck, that is, the result of intelligence and energy which left nothing to mere luck, Carleton stood on the steamer _Nantasket_, off Charleston, April 7, 1863. Both admiral and general had recognized the war correspondents as the historians of the hour.

At half past one, the signal for sailing was displayed from the flag-ship. Then the ugly black floating fortresses moved off in a line, each a third or a half a mile apart, against the ma.s.ses of granite at Sumter and Moultrie, and the earthen batteries on three sides. "There are no clouds of canvas, no beautiful models of marine architecture, none of the stateliness and majesty which have marked hundreds of great naval engagements. There is but little to the sight calculated to excite enthusiasm. There are eight black specks, and one oblong block, like so many bugs. There are no human beings in sight,--no propelling power visible."

A few minutes later, "the ocean boils." Columns of spray are tossed high in air, as if a hundred submarine mines were let instantly off, or a school of whales were trying which could spout highest. There is a screaming in the air, a buzzing and humming never before so loud.

"You must think the earth's crust is ruptured, and the volcanic fires, long pent, have suddenly found vent."