CHAPTER XLIV.
PEACE.
THE WAR GOVERNORS—CIVILIAN PATRIOTS—THE SUDDEN FALL OF THE CONFEDERACY—CAPTURE OF MR. DAVIS—CHARACTER OF THE INSURRECTION—MAGNANIMITY OF THE VICTORS—THE ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY—LINCOLN'S SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS—LINCOLN IN RICHMOND—THE GRAND REVIEW—THE HOME-COMING—LESSONS OF THE WAR.
No account of the war, however brief, can properly be closed without some mention of the forces other than military that contributed to its success. The assistance and influence of the "war governors," as they were called—including John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, William A. Buckingham of Connecticut, Edwin D. Morgan of New York, William Dennison of Ohio, and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana—was vital to the cause, and was acknowledged as generously as it was given. There was also a class of citizens who, by reason of age or other disability, did not go to the front, and would not have been permitted to, but found a way to assist the Government perhaps even more efficiently. They were thoughtful and scholarly men, who brought out and placed at the service of their country every lesson that could be drawn from history; practical and experienced men, whose hard sense and knowledge of affairs made them natural leaders in the councils of the people; men of fervid eloquence, whose arguments and appeals aroused all there was of latent patriotism in their younger and hardier countrymen, and contributed wonderfully to the rapidity with which quotas were filled and regiments forwarded to the seat of war. There were great numbers of devoted women, who performed uncomplainingly the hardest hospital service, and managed great fairs and relief societies with an enthusiasm that never wearied. And there were the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, whose agents went everywhere between the dépôt in the rear and the skirmish-line in front, carrying not only whatever was needed to alleviate the sufferings of the sick and wounded, but also many things to beguile the tedious hours in camp and diminish the serious evil of homesickness.
It was a common remark, at the time, that the Confederacy crumbled more suddenly in 1865 than it had risen in 1861. It seemed like an empty shell, which, when fairly broken through, had no more stability, and instantly fell to ruins. It was fortunate that when the end came Lee's army was the first to surrender, since all the other commanders felt justified in following his example. To some on the Confederate side, especially in Virginia, the surrender was a surprise, and came like a personal and irreparable grief. But people in other parts of the South, especially those who had seen Sherman's legions marching by their doors, knew that the end was coming. Longstreet had pronounced the cause lost by Lee's want of generalship at Gettysburg; Ewell had said there was no use in fighting longer when Grant had swung his army across the James; Johnston and his lieutenants declared it wrong to keep up the hopeless struggle after the capital had been abandoned and the Army of Northern Virginia had laid down its weapons, and so expressed themselves to Mr. Davis when he stopped to confer with them, in North Carolina, on his flight southward. He said their fortunes might still be retrieved, and independence established, if those who were absent from the armies without leave would but return to their places. He probably understood the situation as well as General Johnston did, and may have spoken not so much from judgment as from a consciousness of greater responsibility, a feeling that as he was the first citizen of the Confederacy he was the last that had any right to despair of it.
Nevertheless, he continued his flight through the Carolinas into Georgia; his cabinet officers, most of whom had set out with him from Richmond, leaving him one after another. When he had arrived at Irwinsville, Ga., accompanied by his family and Postmaster-General Reagan, their little encampment in the woods was surprised, on the morning of May 11th, by two detachments of Wilson's cavalry, and they were all taken prisoners. In the gray of the morning the two detachments, approaching from different sides, fired into each other before they discovered that they were friends, and two soldiers were killed and several wounded. Mr. Davis was taken to Savannah, and thence to Fort Monroe, where he was a prisoner for two years, after which he was released on bail—his bondsmen being Cornelius Vanderbilt, Horace Greeley, and Gerrit Smith, a life-long abolitionist. He was never tried.
The secession movement had been proved to be a rebellion and nothing else—although the mightiest of all rebellions. It never rose to the character of a revolution; for it never had possession of the capital or the public archives, never stopped the wheels of the Government for a single day, was suppressed in the end, and attained none of its objects. But although it was clearly a rebellion, and although its armed struggle had been maintained after all prospect of success had disappeared, such was the magnanimity of the National Government and the Northern people that its leaders escaped the usual fate of rebels. Except by temporary political disabilities, not one of them was punished—neither Mr. Davis nor Mr. Stephens, nor any member of the Confederate cabinet or congress; neither Lee nor Johnston, nor any of their lieutenants, not even Beauregard who advocated the black flag, nor Forrest who massacred his prisoners at Fort Pillow. Most of the officers of high rank in the Confederate army were graduates of the Military Academy at West Point, and had used their military education in an attempt to destroy the very government that gave it to them, and to which they had solemnly sworn allegiance. Some of them, notably General Lee, had rushed into the rebel service without waiting for the United States War Department to accept their resignations. But all such ugly facts were suppressed or forgotten, in the extreme anxiety of the victors lest they should not be sufficiently magnanimous toward the vanquished. There was but a single act of capital punishment. The keeper of the Andersonville stockade was tried, convicted, and executed for cruelty to prisoners. His more guilty superior, General Winder, died two months before the surrender. Two months after that event, the secessionist that had sought the privilege of firing the first gun at the flag of his country, committed suicide rather than live under its protection. The popular cry that soon arose was, "Universal amnesty and universal suffrage!"
No such exhibition of mercy has been seen before or since. Four years previous to this war, there was a rebellion against the authority of the British Government; six years after it, there was one against the French Government; and in both instances the conquered insurgents were punished with the utmost severity. In our own country there had been several minor insurrections preceding the great one. In such of these as were aimed against the institution of slavery—Vesey's, Turner's, and Brown's—the offenders suffered the extreme penalty of the law; in the others—Fries's, Shays's, Dorr's, and the whiskey war—they were punished very lightly or not at all.
The general feeling in the country was of relief that the war was ended—hardly less at the South than at the North. After the surrender of the various armies, the soldiers so recently in arms against each other behaved more like brothers than like enemies. The Confederates were fed liberally from the abundant supplies of the National commissariat, and many of them were furnished with transportation to their homes in distant States. Some of them had been absent from their families during the whole war.
If the people of the North had any disposition to be boisterous over the final victory, it was completely quelled by the shadow of a great sorrow that suddenly fell upon them. A conspiracy had been in progress for a long time among a few half-crazy secessionists in and about the capital. It culminated on the night of Good Friday, April 14, 1865. One of the conspirators forced his way into Secretary Seward's house and attacked the Secretary with a knife, but did not succeed in killing him. Mr. Seward had been thrown from a carriage a few days before, and was lying in bed with his jaws encased in a metallic frame-work, which probably saved his life. The chief conspirator, an obscure actor, made his way into the box at Ford's Theatre where the President and his wife were sitting, witnessing the comedy of "Our American Cousin," shot Mr. Lincoln in the back of the head, jumped from the box to the stage with a flourish of bravado shouting "Sic semper tyrannis!" and escaped behind the scenes and out at the stage door. The dying President was carried to a house across the street, where he expired the next morning. As the principal Confederate army had already surrendered, it was impossible for any one to suppose that the killing of the President could affect the result of the war. Furthermore, Mr. Lincoln had long been in the habit of going to the War Department in the evening, and returning to the White House, unattended, late at night; so that an assassin who merely wished to put him out of the way had abundant opportunities for doing so, with good chances of escaping and concealing his own identity. It was therefore perfectly obvious that the murderer's principal motive was the same as that of the youth who set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. And the newspapers did their utmost to give him the notoriety that he craved, displaying his name in large type at the head of their columns, and repeating about him every anecdote that could be recalled or manufactured. The consequence was that sixteen years later the country was disgraced by another Presidential assassination, mainly from the same motive; and, as the journalists repeated their folly on that occasion, we shall perhaps have still another by and by.
Mr. Lincoln had grown steadily in the affections and admiration of the people. His state papers were the most remarkable in American annals; his firmness where firmness was required, and kindheartedness where kindness was practicable, were almost unfailing; and as the successive events of the war called forth his powers, it was seen that he had unlimited shrewdness and tact, statesmanship of the broadest kind, and that honesty of purpose which is the highest wisdom. Moreover, his lack of all vindictive feeling toward the insurgents, and his steady endeavor to make the restored Union a genuine republic of equal rights, gave tone to the feelings of the whole nation, and at the last won many admirers among his foes in arms. In his second inaugural address, a month before his death, he seemed to speak with that insight and calm judgment which we only look for in the studious historian in aftertimes. "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces. But let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayer of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a loving God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
| JEFFERSON DAVIS'S BODYGUARD. |
A day or two after the evacuation of Richmond, Mr. Lincoln walked through its smoking and disordered streets, where the negroes crowded about him and called down all sorts of uncouth but sincere blessings on his head. He had lived to enter the enemy's capital, lived to see the authority of the United States restored over the whole country, and then was snatched away, when the people were as much as ever in need of his genius for the solution of new problems that suddenly confronted them.
The funeral train retraced the same route over which Mr. Lincoln had gone to Washington from his home in Springfield, Ill., four years before; and to the sorrowful crowds that were gathered at every station, and even along the track in the country, it seemed as if the light of the nation had gone out forever.
The armies returning from the field were brought to Washington for a grand review before being mustered out of service. The city was decorated with flags, mottoes, and floral designs, and the streets were thronged with people, many of whom carried wreaths and bouquets. The Army of the Potomac was reviewed on May 23d, and Sherman's army on the 24th, the troops marching in close column around the Capitol and down Pennsylvania Avenue to the music of their bands. As they passed the grand stand at the White House, where President Johnson and his cabinet reviewed them, the officers saluted with their swords, and commanders of divisions dismounted and went upon the stand.
The armies were quickly disbanded, and each regiment, on its arrival home, was given a public reception and a fitting welcome. The men were well dressed and well fed, but their bronzed faces and their tattered and smoky battle-flags told where they had been. It was computed that the loss of life in the Confederate service was about equal to that in the National. Their losses in battle, as they were generally on the defensive, were smaller, but their means of caring for the wounded were inferior. Thus it cost us nearly six hundred thousand lives and more than six thousand million dollars to destroy the doctrine of State sovereignty, abolish the system of slavery, and begin the career of the United States as a nation.
The home-coming at the North was almost as sorrowful as at the South, because of those that came not. In all the festivities and rejoicings there was hardly a participator whose joy was not saddened by missing some well-known face and form now numbered with the silent three hundred thousand. Grant was there, the commander that had never taken a step backward; and Farragut was there, the sailor without an equal; and the unfailing Sherman, and the patient Thomas, and the intrepid Hancock, and the fiery Sheridan, and the brilliant Custer, and many of lesser rank, who in a smaller theatre of conflict would have won a larger fame. But where was young Ellsworth?—shot dead as soon as he crossed the Potomac. And Winthrop—killed in the first battle, with his best books unwritten. And Lyon—fallen at the head of his little army in Missouri, the first summer of the war. And Baker—sacrificed at Ball's Bluff. And Kearny at Chantilly, and Reno at South Mountain, and Mansfield at Antietam, and Reynolds at Gettysburg, and Wadsworth in the Wilderness, and Sedgwick at Spottsylvania, and McPherson before Atlanta, and Craven in his monitor at the bottom of the sea, and thousands of others, the best and bravest—all gone—all, like Latour, the immortal captain, dead on the field of honor, but none the less dead and a loss to their mourning country. The hackneyed allegory of Curtius had been given a startling illustration and a new significance. The South, too, had lost heavily of her foremost citizens in the great struggle—Bee and Bartow, at Bull Run; Albert Sidney Johnston, leading a desperate charge at Shiloh; Zollicoffer, soldier and journalist, at Mill Spring; Stonewall Jackson, Lee's right arm, at Chancellorsville; Polk, priest and warrior, at Lost Mountain; Armistead, wavering between two allegiances and fighting alternately for each, and Barksdale and Garnett—all at Gettysburg; Hill, at Petersburg; and the dashing Stuart, and Daniel, and Perrin, and Dearing, and Doles, and numberless others. The sudden hush and sense of awe that impresses a child when he steps upon a single grave, may well overcome the strongest man when he looks upon the face of his country scarred with battlefields like these, and considers what blood of manhood was rudely wasted there. And the slain were mostly young, unmarried men, whose native virtues fill no living veins, and will not shine again on any field.
|
RICHMOND AFTER THE EVACUATION—SHOWING THE EFFECT OF THE FIRE. (From a War Department photograph.) |
| GRAND REVIEW OF THE ARMY, WASHINGTON, MAY 23-24, 1865. |
It is poor business measuring the mouldered ramparts and counting the silent guns, marking the deserted battlefields and decorating the grassy graves, unless we can learn from it all some nobler lesson than to destroy. Men write of this, as of other wars, as if the only thing necessary to be impressed upon the rising generation were the virtue of physical courage and contempt of death. It seems to me that is the last thing that we need to teach; for since the days of John Smith in Virginia and the men of the Mayflower in Massachusetts, no generation of Americans has shown any lack of it. From Louisburg to Petersburg—a hundred and twenty years, the full span of four generations—they have stood to their guns and been shot down in greater comparative numbers than any other race on earth. In the war of secession there was not a State, not a county, probably not a town, between the great lakes and the gulf, that was not represented on fields where all that men could do with powder and steel was done, and valor was exhibited at its highest pitch. It was a common saying in the Army of the Potomac that courage was the cheapest thing there; and it might have been said of all the other armies as well. There is not the slightest necessity for lauding American bravery or impressing it upon American youth. But there is the gravest necessity for teaching them respect for law, and reverence for human life, and regard for the rights of their fellow-men, and all that is significant in the history of our country—lest their feet run to evil and they make haste to shed innocent blood. I would be glad to convince my compatriots that it is not enough to think they are right, but they are bound to know they are right, before they rush into any experiments that are to cost the lives of men and the tears of orphans, in their own land or in any other. I would warn them to beware of provincial conceit. I would have them comprehend that one may fight bravely, and still be a perjured felon; that one may die humbly, and still be a patriot whom his country cannot afford to lose; that as might does not make right, so neither do rags and bare feet necessarily argue a noble cause. I would teach them that it is criminal either to hide the truth or to refuse assent to that which they see must follow logically from ascertained truth. I would show them that a political lie is as despicable as a personal lie, whether uttered in an editorial, or a platform, or a President's message, or a colored cartoon, or a disingenuous ballot; and that political chicanery, when long persisted in, is liable to settle its shameful account in a stoppage of civilization and a spilling of life. These are simple lessons, yet they are not taught in a day, and some whom we call educated go through life without mastering them at all.
It may be useful to learn from one war how to conduct another; but it is infinitely better to learn how to avert another. I am doubly anxious to impress this consideration upon my readers, because history seems to show us that armed conflicts have a tendency to come in pairs, with an interval of a few years, and because I think I see, in certain circumstances now existing within our beloved Republic, the elements of a second civil war. No American citizen should lightly repeat that the result is worth all it cost, unless he has considered how heavy was the cost, and is doing his utmost to perpetuate the result. To strive to forget the great war, for the sake of sentimental politics, is to cast away our dearest experience and invite, in some troubled future, the destruction we so hardly escaped in the past. There can be remembrance without animosity, but there cannot be oblivion without peril.
| AN EXPLODED GUN IN THE DEFENCE OF RICHMOND. |
THE FIRST UNITED STATES FLAG RAISED IN RICHMOND AFTER THE WAR.
BY MRS. LASALLE CORBELL PICKETT,
Wife of Major-General George E. Pickett, C. S. A.
The first knell of the evacuation of Richmond sounded on Sunday morning while we were on our knees in St. Paul's Church, invoking God's protecting care for our absent loved ones, and blessings on our cause.
The intense excitement, the tolling of the bells, the hasty parting, the knowledge that all communication would be cut off between us and our loved ones, and the dread, undefined fear in our helplessness and desertion, make a nightmare memory.
General Ewell had orders for the destruction of the public buildings, which orders our Secretary of War, Gen. J. C. Breckenridge, strove earnestly but without avail to have countermanded. The order, alas! was obeyed beyond "the letter of the law."
The terrible conflagration was kindled by the Confederate authorities, who applied the torch to the Shockoe warehouse, it, too, being classed among the public buildings because of the tobacco belonging to France and England stored in it. A fresh breeze was blowing from the south; the fire swept on in its haste and fury over a great area in an almost incredibly short time, and by noon the flames had transformed into a desert waste all the city bounded by Seventh and Fifteenth Streets, and Main Street and the river. One thousand houses were destroyed. The streets were filled with furniture and every description of wares, dashed down to be trampled in the mud or buried where they lay.
At night a saturnalia began. About dark, the Government commissary began the destruction of its stores. Soldiers and citizens gathered in front, catching the liquor in basins and pitchers; some with their hats and some with their boots. It took but a short time for this to make a manifestation as dread as the flames. The crowd became a howling mob, so frenzied that the officers of the law had to flee for their lives, reviving memories of 1781, when the British under Arnold rode down Richmond Hill, and, invading the city, broke open the stores and emptied the provisions and liquors into the gutters, making even the uninitiated cows and hogs drunk for days.
All through the night, crowds of men, women, and children traversed the streets, loading themselves with supplies and plunder. At midnight, soldiers drunk with vile liquor, followed by a reckless crowd as drunk as themselves, dashed in the plate-glass windows of the stores, and made a wreck of everything.
About nine o'clock on Monday morning, terrific shell explosions, rapid and continuous, added to the terror of the scene, and gave the impression that the city was being shelled by the retreating Confederate army from the south side. But the explosions were soon found to proceed from the Government arsenal and laboratory, then in flames. Later in the morning, a merciful Providence caused a lull in the breeze. The terrific explosion of the laboratory and of the arsenal caused every window in our home to break. The old plate-glass mirrors, built in the walls, were cracked and shattered.
Fort Darling was blown up, and later on the rams. It was eight o'clock when the Federal troops entered the city. It required the greatest effort to tame down the riotous, crazed mob, and induce them to take part in the struggle to save their own. The firemen, afraid of the soldiers who had obeyed the orders to light the torch, would not listen to any appeals or entreaties, and so the flames were under full headway, fanned by a southern breeze, when the Union soldiers came to the rescue.
The flouring mills caught fire from the tobacco houses, communicating it to Cary and Main Streets. Every bank was destroyed. The War Department was a mass of ruins; the Enquirer and Dispatch offices were in ashes; and the county court-house, the American Hotel, and most of the finest stores of the city were ruined.
Libby Prison and the Presbyterian church escaped. Such a reign of terror and pillage, fire and flame, fear and despair! The yelling and howling and swearing and weeping and wailing beggar description. Families houseless and homeless under the open sky!
I shall never forget General Weitzel's command, composed exclusively of colored troops, as I saw them through the dense black columns of smoke. General Weitzel had for some time been stationed on the north side of the James River, but a few miles from Richmond, and he had only to march in and take possession. He despatched Major A. H. Stevens of the Fourth Massachusetts cavalry, and Major E. E. Graves of his staff, with about a hundred mounted men, to reconnoitre the roads and works leading to Richmond. They had gone but a little distance into the Confederate lines, when they saw a shabby, old-fashioned carriage, drawn by a pair of lean, lank horses, the occupants waving a white flag. They met this flag-of-truce party at the line of fortifications, just beyond the junction of the Osborne turnpike and New Market road. The carriage contained the mayor of Richmond—Colonel Mayo—Judge Meredith of the Supreme Court, and Judge Lyons. The fourth worthy I cannot recall. Judge Lyons, our former minister to England, and one of the representative men of Virginia, made the introductions in his own characteristic way, and then Colonel Mayo, who was in command of the flag-of-truce party, handed to Major Stevens a small slip of wall paper, on which was written the following: "It is proper to formally surrender to the Federal authorities the city of Richmond, hitherto capital of the Confederate States of America, and the defences protecting it up to this time." That was all. The document was approved of, and Major Stevens most courteously accepted the terms for his commanding general, to whom it was at once transmitted, and moved his column upon the evacuated city, taking possession and saving it from ashes.
His first order was to sound the alarm bells and to take command at once of the fire department, which consisted of fourteen substitute men, those who were exempt from service because of disease, two steam fire engines, four worthless hand engines, and a large amount of hose, destroyed by the retreating half-crazed Confederates. His next order was to raise the stars and stripes over the Capitol. Quick as thought, two soldiers, one from Company E and one from Company H of the Fourth Massachusetts cavalry, crept to the summit and planted the flag of the nation. Two bright, tasteful guidons were hoisted by the halyards in place of the red cross. The living colors of the Union were greeted, while our "Warriors' banner took its flight to meet the warrior's soul."
That flag, whose design has been accredited alike to both George Washington and John Adams, was raised over Virginia by Massachusetts, in place of the one whose kinship and likeness had not, even after renewed effort, been entirely destroyed. For by the adoption of the stars and bars (three horizontal bars of equal width—the middle one white, the others red—with a blue union of nine stars in a circle) by the Confederate Congress in March, 1861, the Confederate flag was made so akin and so similar to that of the nation, as to cause confusion; so in 1863 the stars and bars was supplanted by a flag with a white field, having the battle flag (a red field charged with a blue saltier, on which were thirteen stars) for a union. This, having been mistaken for a flag of truce, was altered by covering the outer half of the field beyond the union with a vertical red bar. This was the last flag of the Confederacy.
Richmond will testify that the soldiers of Massachusetts were worthy of the honor of raising the first United States flag over her Capitol—the Capitol of the Confederacy—and also to the unvarying courtesy of Major Stevens, and the fidelity with which he kept his trust.