Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862

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There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we thought a visit to
Camp Curtin might lighten some of them. A rickety wagon carried us to
the camp, in company with a young woman from Troy, who had a basket of
good things with her for a sick brother, "Poor boy! he will be sure to
die," she said. The rustic sentries uncrossed their muskets and let
us in. The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with hills, spacious,
well-kept apparently, but did not present any peculiar attraction for
us. The visit would have been a dull one, had we not happened to get
sight of a singular-looking set of human beings in the distance. They
were clad in stuff of different hues, gray and brown being the leading
shades, but both subdued by a neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize
the variegated apparel of travel-stained vagabonds. They looked slouchy,
listless, torpid,--an ill-conditioned crew, at first sight, made up of
such fellows as an old woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a
broomstick. Yet these were estrays from the fiery army which has given
our generals so much trouble,--"Secesh prisoners," as a by-stander told
us. A talk with them might be profitable and entertaining. But they were
tabooed to the common visitor, and it was necessary to get inside of the
line which separated us from them.

A solid, square captain was standing near by, to whom we were referred.
Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils and ask him for
anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it,
and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit
_hari-kari_. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend
as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian
origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch
type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, capacious in the
hold, and calculated to carry a heavy cargo rather than to make fast
time. He must have been in politics at some time or other, for he made
orations to all the "Secesh," in which he explained to them that the
United States considered and treated them like children, and enforced
upon them the ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels' attempting to do
anything against such a power as that of the National Government.

Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened me, it interfered
somewhat with my little plans of entering into frank and friendly talk
with some of these poor fellows, for whom I could not help feeling a
kind of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of the Rebellion
as one is like to find under the stars and stripes. It is fair to take
a man prisoner. It is fair to make speeches to a man. But to take a man
prisoner and then make speeches to him while in durance is _not_ fair.

I began a few pleasant conversations, which would have come to something
but for the reason assigned.

One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, and a black clay
pipe in his mouth. He was a Scotchman from Ayr, _dour_ enough, and
little disposed to be communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa
Briggs," and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of "Burrns." He
professed to feel no interest in the cause for which he was fighting,
and was in the army, I judged, only from compulsion. There was a
wild-haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who
looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was. I give my
questions and his answers literally.

"What State do you come from?"

"Georgy."

"What part of Georgia?"

"_Midway_."

--[How odd that is! My father was settled for seven years as pastor
over the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a
grandson or great-grandson of one of his parishioners.]--

"Where did you go to church, when you were at home?"

"Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life."

"What did you do before you became a soldier?"

"Nothin'."

"What do you mean to do when you get back?"

"Nothin'."

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed,
this dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence but
one degree above that of the idiot?

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,--one
button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous bosom.
A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the "subject race" by
any obvious meanderings of the _sangre azul_ on his exposed surfaces. He
did not say much, possibly because he was convinced by the statements
and arguments of the Dutch captain. He had on strong, iron-heeled shoes,
of English make, which he said cost him seventeen dollars in Richmond.

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the
prisoners, what they were fighting for. One answered, "For our homes."
Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great
indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a
sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory
to those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting
for. A feeble, attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel uniform, if such
it could be called, stood by without showing any sign of intelligence.
It was cutting very close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity
from the body-politic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the party.
"That is the true Southern type," I said to my companion. A young
fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly
smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and a fine,
almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and as we
turned towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at the
loose canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to talk. He
was from Mississippi, he said, had been, at Georgetown College, and was
so far imbued with letters that even the name of the literary humility
before him was not new to his ears. Of course I found it easy to come
into magnetic relation with him, and to ask him without incivility
what _he_ was fighting for. "Because I like the excitement of it," he
answered.--I know those fighters with women's mouths and boys' cheeks;
one such from the circle of my own friends, sixteen years old, slipped
away from his nursery and dashed in under an assumed name among the
red-legged Zouaves, in whose company he got an ornamental bullet-mark in
one of the earliest conflicts of the war.

"Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?" said my Philadelphia friend to the
young Mississippian.

"I have shot at a good many of them," he replied, modestly, his woman's
mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his
ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs
of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so much for
the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there
was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into
the water, and I nodded a good-bye to the boy-fighter, thinking how
much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with
unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than
it would be to meet him on some remote picket and offer his fair
proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him
before he had time to say _dunder and blixum_.

We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message.
Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army-Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us
hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but
of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but
ripened in Georgia, incisive, prompt, but good-humored, wearing his
broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on
one side,--a sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified
person like him,--business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted
while occupied with another, but giving himself up heartily to the
claimant who held him for the time. He was so genial, so cordial, so
encouraging, that it seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all
the morning, broke away as we came into his presence, and the sunshine
of his large nature filled the air all around us. He took the matter in
hand at once, as if it were his own private affair. In ten minutes he
had a second telegraphic message on its way to Mrs. K--at Hagerstown,
sent through the Government channel from the State Capitol,--one so
direct and urgent that I should be sure of an answer to it, whatever
became of the one I had sent in the morning.

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by an
odd young native, neither boy nor man, "as a codling when 'tis almost an
apple," who said _wery_ for very, simple and sincere, who smiled faintly
at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of suspicion, and a
gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in the atmosphere of
horses. He drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white with tents,
which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly scrawls in huge letters,
thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY BROTHERS, DEVIL'S HOLE, and similar
inscriptions. Then to the Beacon Street of Harrisburg, which looks
upon the Susquehanna instead of the Common, and shows a long front of
handsome houses with fair gardens. The river is pretty nearly a mile
across here, but very shallow now. The codling told us that a Rebel spy
had been caught trying its fords a little while ago, and was now at Camp
Curtin with a heavy ball chained to his leg,--a popular story, but a
lie, Dr. Wilson said. A little farther along we came to the barkless
stump of the tree to which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named
after him, was tied by the Indians for some unpleasant operation of
scalping or roasting, when he was rescued by friendly savages, who
paddled across the stream to save him. Our youngling pointed out a very
respectable-looking stone house as having been "built by the Indians"
about those times. Guides have queer notions occasionally.

I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions and
dogs and things from his Arctic search after the lost navigator.

"Who are those?" I said to my conductor.

"Them?" he answered. "Them's the men that's been out West, out to
Michig'n, aft' _Sir Ben Franklin_."

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or whatever
it is called, seems most worth notice. Its _facade_ is imposing, with a
row of stately columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like a
crag over the brow of a lofty precipice. The lower floor only appeared
to be open to the public. Its tessellated pavement and ample courts
suggested the idea of a temple where great multitudes might kneel
uncrowded at their devotions; but, from appearances about the place
where the altar should be, I judged, that, if one asked the officiating
priest for the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer
would not be unanswered. The edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon
I had once looked upon,--the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua. It was the
same thing in Italy and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum,
and calls it a place of entertainment. The fragrance of innumerable
libations and the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall
ascend day and night through the arches of his funeral monument. What
are the poor dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that
stand at the corners of St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to
this perpetual offering of sacrifice?

Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching. The telegraph-office would
presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from Hagerstown. Let
us step over and see for ourselves. A message! A message!

"_Captain H still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna Is
doing well

Mrs H K_ ----."

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the
hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or,
if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently
narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber
like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now the over-tense nerves
are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over
one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes
the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost
fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was
so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently
confided to me, with infinite _naivete_ and ingenuousness, that, judging
from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer
that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as
I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with
protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers
are supposed to possess in abounding measure. While I fell short of his
ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no
means the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I
had nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest
consciousness of most abundantly deserving.

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday. The train from
Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A.M. We took another ride behind the
codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again. Being in
a gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the
town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as
seen by the different lights of evening and morning. After this, we
visited the school-house hospital. A fine young fellow, whose arm had
been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lockjaw. The beads
of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and contracted features.
He was under the effect of opiates,--why not (if his case was desperate,
as it seemed to be considered) stop his sufferings with chloroform? It
was suggested that it might _shorten life_. "What then?" I said. "Are a
dozen additional spasms worth living for?"

The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we went
to the station. I was struck, while waiting there, with what seemed to
me a great want of care for the safety of the people standing round.
Just after my companion and myself had stepped off the track, I noticed
a car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may say, without engine,
without visible conductor, without any person heralding its approach, so
silently, so insidiously, that I could not help thinking how very near
it came to flattening out me and my match-box worse than the Ravel
pantomimist and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play. The train
was late,--fifteen minutes, half an hour late,--and I began to get
nervous, lest something had happened. While I was looking for it,
out started a freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was
expecting, for a grand smash-up. I shivered at the thought, and asked
an _employe_ of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few
minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train
with this which was just going out. He smiled an official smile, and
answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did
occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least eleven
persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and
crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse. The expected
train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the
track. Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;
there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many
cities.

"How are you, Boy?"

"How are you, Dad?"

* * * * *

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us
Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those
natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime-Minister of Egypt, weep
aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard,--nay, which
had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell
on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the
women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with
sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a
drop or a film of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or
griefs. I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice
addressed me by name. I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed
in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time I should have
yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might
well call forth.

"You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once
in Boston?"

"I do remember him well."

"He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown. I am carrying his body back
with me on this train. He was my only child. If you could come to my
house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a pleasure to
me."

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New
System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship and
capacity. It was this book which first made me acquainted with him, and
I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth. Some time
afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be introduced to
President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid him in a course
of independent study he was proposing to himself. I was most happy to
smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and
express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed
at Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a
trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never
saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his
mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer
would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few
words spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's
chambers. For such a youth, seemingly destined for the inner life of
contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet he spoke to
me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must
now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil
sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed
the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has
died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation
and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded
soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come once
more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the same
region I had left! No mysterious attraction warned me that the heart
warm with the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own. I thought
of that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides unconsciously by
Evangeline upon the great river. Ah, me! if that railroad-crash had been
a few hours earlier, we two should never have met again, after coming so
close to each other!

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough.
The Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once
for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did do, and as I took it
for granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some
ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved with pity,
and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their
invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion
was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some
of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares,
and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the
piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company,--and all this after the
swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the
dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting
ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart! Thanks, uncounted
thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him
from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite
bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well
under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging
everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time
and leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house of
the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind
companion. The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these
benignant Philadelphia households. Many things reminded me that I was no
longer in the land of the Pilgrims. On the table were _Kool Slaa_ and
_Schmeer Kase_, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet,
simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant
of _Baked Beans_, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed
in that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known
to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features. He also
approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom,
we passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach. But he was so
good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it
as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of
that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the
country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by
its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our
economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences,
and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American
city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. It is not a breeding-place
of ideas, which makes it a more agreeable residence for average people.
It is the great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery
enthusiasms of the South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at
their outer limits, and result in a compound that turns neither litmus
red nor turmeric brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which,
leaving out Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must
be considered its famous water-works. In my younger days I visited
Fairmount, and it was with a pious reverence that I renewed my
pilgrimage to that perennial fountain. Its watery ventricles were
throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, the blood of
twenty years bounding in my own heart, I looked upon their giant
mechanism. But in the place of "Pratt's Garden" was an open park, and
the old house where Robert Morris held his court in a former generation
was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension-bridge cobwebbed
itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the
river at a single bound,--an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell
us, than was ever before constructed. The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the
Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes. It had an air
of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level of
respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of the rectangular
city. Philadelphia will never be herself again until another Robert
Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new palladium. She
must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly shake their heads,
like the Jews at the sight of the second temple, remembering the glories
of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not
charm, a weary soul,--and such a vacant hour there was on this same
Friday evening. The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably ventilated.
As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to
cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window
a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange
intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces.
I called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was
irresistibly droll, and Areturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the
blazing luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed
uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr.
Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore
Railroad, had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious
look on his face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and
meant to do it. Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch
spread for the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with
no visits, but those of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I
saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I
am not quite sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of
the kind I have ever seen,--each length being of a special pattern,
ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I
trust some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to
go with the view of the spires of Frederick already referred to, as
mementos of my journey.

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