I was in Chicago when these captives, on their way to Camp Douglas, passed through the streets in sad procession. Motley was the only wear. A few privates had a stripe on the pantaloons and wore gray military caps; but most, in slouched hats and garments of gray or butternut, made no attempt at uniform. Some had the long hair and cadaverous faces of the extreme South; but under the broad-brimmed hats of the majority, appeared the full, coarse features of the working classes of Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The Chicago citizens, who crowded the streets, were guilty of no taunts or rude words toward the prisoners.
Columbus, Kentucky, twenty miles below Cairo, on the highest bluffs of the Mississippi, was called the Gibraltar of the West, and expected to be the scene of a great battle.
On the 4th of March, a naval and land expedition was ready to attack it. Before leaving Cairo, hundreds of workmen crowded the gunboats, repairing damages received on the Tennessee River—
"With busy hammers closing rivets up, And giving dreadful notes of preparation."
Commodore Foote, lame from his Donelson wound, hobbled on board upon crutches. A great National flag was taken along.
"Don't forget that," said the commodore. "Fight or no fight, we must raise it over Columbus!"
Army and Navy Officers Contrasted.
The leading commanders of the flotilla were from the regular navy—quiet and unassuming, with no nonsense about them. They were far freer from envy and jealousy than army officers. Before the war, the latter had been stationed for years at frontier posts, hundreds of miles beyond civilization, with no resources except drinking and gambling, nothing to excite National feeling or prick the bubble of their State pride. Naval officers, going all over the world, had acquired the liberality which only travel imparts, and learned that, abroad, their country was not known as Virginia or Mississippi, but the United States of America. With them, it was the Nation first, and the State afterward. Hence, while nearly all southerners holding commissions in the regular army joined the Rebellion, the navy almost unanimously remained loyal.
The low, flat, black iron-clads crept down the river like enormous turtles. Each had attending it a little pocket edition of a steamboat, in the shape of a tug, capable of carrying fifty or sixty men, and moving up the strong current twelve miles an hour. They were constantly puffing about among the unwieldy vessels like a breathless little errand-boy.
The "Gibraltar of the West."