Four Years in Rebel Capitals Part 1

Four Years in Rebel Capitals.

by T. C. DeLeon.

IN PLACE OF PREFACE.

Fortunate, indeed, is the reader who takes up a volume without preface; of which the persons are left to enact their own drama and the author does not come before the curtain, like the chorus of Greek tragedy, to speak for them.

But, in printing the pages that follow, it may seem needful to ask that they be taken for what they are; simple sketches of the inner life of "Rebeldom"--behind its Chinese wall of wood and steel--during those unexampled four years of its existence.

Written almost immediately after the war, from notes and recollections gathered during its most trying scenes, these papers are now revised, condensed and formulated for the first time. In years past, some of their crude predecessors have appeared--as random articles--in the columns of the Mobile _Sunday Times_, Appleton's _Journal_, the Louisville _Courier-Journal_, the Philadelphia _Times_ and other publications.

Even in their present condensation and revision, they claim only to be simple memoranda of the result of great events; and of their reaction upon the mental and moral tone of the southern people, rather than a record of those events themselves.

This volume aspires neither to the height of history, nor to the depths of political a.n.a.lysis; for it may still be too early for either, or for both, of these. Equally has it resisted temptation to touch on many topics--not strictly belonging inside the Southern Capitals--still vexed by political agitation, or personal interest. These, if unsettled by dire arbitrament of the sword, must be left to Time and his best coadjutor, "sober second-thought."

Campaigns and battles have already surfeited most readers; and their details--usually so incorrectly stated by the inexpert--have little to do with a relation of things within the Confederacy, as they then appeared to the ma.s.ses of her people. Such, therefore, are simply touched upon in outline, where necessary to show their reaction upon the popular pulse, or to correct some flagrant error regarding that.

To the vast majority of those without her boundaries--to very many, indeed, within them--realities of the South, during the war, were a sealed book. False impressions, on many important points, were disseminated; and these, because unnoted, have grown to proportions of accepted truth. A few of them, it may not yet be too late to correct.

While the pages that follow fail not to record some weaknesses in our people, or some flagrant errors of their leaders, they yet endeavor to chronicle faithfully heroic constancy of men, and selfless devotion of women, whose peers the student of History may challenge that vaunting Muse to show.

To prejudiced provincialism, on the one side, they may appear too lukewarm; by stupid fanaticism on the other, they may be called treasonable. But--written without prejudice, and equally without fear, or favor--they have aimed only at impartial truth, and at nearest possible correctness of narration.

Indubitably the war proved that there were great men, on both the sides to it; and, to-day, the little men on either--"May profit by their example. If _this_ be treason, make the most of it!"

The sole object kept in view was to paint honestly the inner life of the South; the general tone of her people, under strain and privation unparalleled; the gradual changes of society and character in the struggling nation--in a clear, unshaded outline of _things as they were_.

Should this volume at all succeed in giving this; should it uproot one false impression, to plant a single true one in its place, then has it fully equaled the aspiration of

THE AUTHOR.

MOBILE, ALA., June 25, 1890.

CHAPTER I.

THE FOREHEAD OF THE STORM.

The cloud no bigger than a man's hand had risen.

It became visible to all in Washington over the southern horizon. All around to East and West was but the dull, dingy line of the storm that was soon to burst in wild fury over that section, leaving only seared desolation in its wake. Already the timid and wary began to take in sail and think of a port; while the most reckless looked from the horizon to each other's faces, with restless and uneasy glances.

In the days of 1860, as everybody knows, the society of Washington city was composed of two distinct circles, tangent at no one point. The larger, outer circle whirled around with crash and fury several months in each year; then, spinning out its centrifugal force, flew into minute fragments and scattered to extreme ends of the land. The smaller one--the inner circle--revolved sedately in its accustomed grooves, moving no whit faster for the buzz of the monster that surrounded and half hid it for so long; and when that spun itself to pieces moved on as undisturbed as Werther's Charlotte.

The outer circle drew with it all the outside population, all the "dwellers in tents," from the busiest lobbyman to the laziest looker-on. All the "hotel people"--those caravans that yearly poured unceasing into the not too comfortable _caravanserai_ down town--stretched eager hands toward this circle; for, to them, it meant Washington. Having clutched an insecure grasp upon its rim, away they went with a fizz and a spin, dizzy and delighted--devil take the hindmost! Therein did the thousand lobbyists, who yearly came to roll logs, pull wires and juggle through bills, find their congenial prey.

Who shall rise up and write the secret history of that wonderful committee and of the ways and means it used to prey impartially upon government and client? Who shall record the "deeds without a name,"

hatched out of eggs from the midnight terrapin; the strange secrets drawn out by the post-prandial corkscrew? Who shall justly calculate the influence the lobby and its workings had in hastening that inevitable, the war between the states?

Into this outer circle whirled that smaller element which came to the Capital to spend money--not to make it. Diamonds flash, point lace flounces flaunt! Who will stop that mighty whirligig to inspect whether the champagne is real, or the turtle is prime?

_Allons! le jeu est fait!_

Camp-followers and hangers-on of Congress, many of its members from the West, claim agents from Kansas, husbandless married women from California and subterranean politicians from everywhere herein found elements as congenial as profitable. All stirred into the great _olla podrida_ and helped to "Make the h.e.l.l broth boil and bubble."

The inner circle was the real society of Washington. Half submerged for half of each year by acc.u.mulating streams of strangers, it ever rose the same--fresh and unstained by deposit from the baser flood. Therein, beyond doubt, one found the most cultured coteries, the courtliest polish and the simplest elegance that the drawing-rooms of this continent could boast. The bench and the bar of the highest court lent their loftiest intellects and keenest wits. Careful selections were there from Congress of those who held senates on their lips and kept together the machinery of an expanding nation; and those "rising men,"

soon to replace, or to struggle with them, across the narrow Potomac near by. To this society, too, the foreign legations furnished a strong element. Bred in courts, familiar with the theories of all the world, these men must prove valuable and agreeable addition to any society into which they are thrown.

It is rather the fashion just now to inveigh against foreigners in society, to lay at their door many of the peccadilloes that have crept into our city life; but the diplomats are, with rare exceptions, men of birth, education and of proved ability in their own homes. Their ethics may be less strict than those which obtain about Plymouth Rock, but experience with them will prove that, however loose their own code, they carefully conform to the custom of others; that if they have any scars across their morals, they have also the tact and good taste to keep them decorously draped from sight.

In the inner circle of Washington were those officers of the army and navy, selected for ability or service--or possibly "by grace of cousinship"--to hold posts near the government; and, with full allowance for favoritism, some of these were men of culture, travel and attainment--most of them were gentlemen. And the nucleus, as well as the amalgam of all these elements, was the resident families of old Washingtonians. These had lived there so long as to be able to winnow the chaff and throw the refuse off.

There has ever been much talk about the corruption of Washington, easy hints about Sodom, with a general sweep at the depravity of its social system. But it is plain these facile fault-finders knew no more of its inner circle--and for its resident society only is any city responsible--than they did of the court of the Grand Turk. Such critics had come to Washington, had made their "d.i.c.ker," danced at the hotel hops, and been jostled on the Avenue. If they essayed an entrance into the charmed circle, they failed.

Year after year, even the t.i.tans of the lobby a.s.sailed the gates of that heaven refused them; and year after year they fell back, baffled and grommelling, into the pit of that outer circle whence they came.

Yet every year, especially in the autumn and spring, behind that Chinese wall was a round of entertainments less costly than the crushes of the critic circle, but stamped with quiet elegance aped in vain by the non-elect. And when the whirl whirled out at last, with the departing Congress; when the howling crowd had danced its mad _carmagnole_ and its vulgar echoes had died into distance, then Washington society was itself again. Then the sociality of intercourse--that peculiar charm which made it so unique--became once more free and unrestrained.

Pa.s.sing from the reek of a hotel ball, or the stewing soiree of a Cabinet secretary into the quiet _salon_ of a West End home, the very atmosphere was different, and comparison came of itself with that old _Quartier Saint Germain_, which kept undefiled from the pitch that smirched its Paris, through all the hideous dramas of the _bonnet rouge_.

The influence of political place in this country has long sp.a.w.ned a social degradation. Where the gift is in the hands of a fixed power, its seeking is lowering enough; but when it is besought from the enlightened voter himself, "the scurvy politician" becomes a reality painfully frequent. Soliciting the ballot over a gla.s.s of green corn juice in the back room of a country grocery, or flattering the _cara sposa_ of the farmhouse, with squalling brat upon his knee, is scarcely calculated to make the best of men more of "an ornament to society." Constant contact with sharpers and constant effort to be sharper than they is equally as apt to blunt his sense of delicacy as it is to unfit one for higher responsibilities of official station. So it was not unnatural that that society of Washington, based wholly on politics, was not found wholly clean. But under the seething surface--first visible to the casual glance--was a substratum as pure as it was solid and unyielding.

Habitues of twenty years remarked that, with all the giddy whirl of previous winters in the outer circle, none had approached in mad rapidity that of 1860-61. The rush of aimless visiting, matinees and dinners, b.a.l.l.s and suppers, followed each other without cessation; dress and diamonds, equipage and cards, all cost more than ever before.

This might be the last of it, said an uneasy sense of the coming storm; and in the precedent sultriness, the thousands who had come to make money vied with the tens who came to spend it in mad distribution of the proceeds. Madame, who had made an immense investment of somebody's capital in diamonds and lace, must let the world see them. Mademoiselle must make a certain exhibit of shapely shoulders and of telling stride in the German; and time was shortening fast. And Knower, of the Third House, had put all the proceeds of engineering that last bill through, into gorgeous plate. It would never do to waste it, for Knower meant business; and this might be the end of the thing.

So the stream rushed on, catching the weak and timid ones upon its brink and plunging them into the whirling vortex. And still the rusty old wheels revolved, as creakily as ever, at the Capital. Blobb, of Oregon, made machine speeches to the sleepy House, but neither he, nor they, noted the darkening atmosphere without. Senator Jenks took his half-hourly "nip" with laudable punctuality, thereafter rising eloquent to call Mr. President's attention to that little bill; and all the while that huge engine, the lobby, steadily pumped away in the political bas.e.m.e.nt, sending streams of hot corruption into every artery of the government.

Suddenly a sullen reverberation echoes over the Potomac from the South.

The long-threatened deed is done at last. South Carolina has seceded, and the first link is rudely stricken from the chain.

There is a little start; that is all. The Third House stays for a second its gold spoon; and, perhaps, a trifle of the turtle spills before reaching its mouth. Madame rearranges her parure and smoothes her ruffled lace; while Mademoiselle pouts a little, then studies her card for the next waltzer. Senator Jenks takes his "nip" just a trifle more regularly; and Blobb, of Oregon, draws a longer breath before his next period. As for the lobby-pump, its piston grows red-hot and its valves fly wide open, with the work it does; while thicker and more foul are the streams it sends abroad.

For awhile there is some little talk around Willard's about the "secesh;" and the old soldiers wear grave faces as they pa.s.s to and fro between the War Department and General Scott's headquarters. But to the outer circle, it is only a nine-day wonder; while the dancing and dining army men soon make light of the matter.

But the stone the surface closes smoothly over at the center makes large ripples at the edges. Faces that were long before now begin to lengthen; and thoughtful men wag solemn heads as they pa.s.s, or pause to take each other by the b.u.t.tonhole. More frequent knots discuss the status in hotel lobbies and even in the pa.s.sages of the departments; careful non-partisans keep their lips tightly closed, and hot talk, _pro_ or _con_, begins to grow more popular.

One day I find, per card, that the Patagonian Amba.s.sador dines me at seven. As it is not a state dinner I go, to find it even more stupid.

At dessert the reserve wears off and all soon get deep in the "Star of the West" episode.

"Looks mighty bad now, sir. Something must be done, sir, and soon, too," says Diggs, a hard-working M.C. from the North-west. "But, as yet, I don't see--what, exactly!"

"Will your government use force to supply Fort Sumter?" asks Count B., of the Sardinian legation.

"If so, it might surely drive out those states so doubtful now, that they may not go to extremes," suggested the Prussian _charge ad interim_.

"Why, they'll be whipped back by the army and navy within ninety days from date," remarks a gentleman connected with pension brokerage.