North America — Volume 2

by Anthony Trollope

I had no wish myself to go to Cairo, having heard it but indifferently spoken of by all men; but my friend with whom I was travelling was peremptory in the matter. He had heard of gun-boats and mortar-boats, of forts built upon the river, of Columbiads, Dahlgrens, and Parrotts, of all the pomps and circumstance of glorious war, and entertained an idea that Cairo was the nucleus or pivot of all really strategetic movements in this terrible national struggle. Under such circumstances I was as it were forced to go to Cairo, and bore myself, under the circumstances, as much like Mark Tapley as my nature would permit. I was not jolly while I was there certainly, but I did not absolutely break down and perish in its mud.

Cairo is the southern terminus of the Illinois central railway. There is but one daily arrival there, namely, at half-past four in the morning, and but one despatch, which is at half-past three in the morning. Everything is thus done to assist that view of life which Mark Tapley took when he resolved to ascertain under what possible worst circumstances of existence he could still maintain his jovial character. Why anybody should ever arrive at Cairo at half-past four A.M., I cannot understand. The departure at any hour is easy of comprehension. The place is situated exactly at the point at which the Ohio and the Mississippi meet, and is, I should say, merely guessing on the matter, some ten or twelve feet lower than the winter level of the two rivers. This gives it naturally a depressed appearance, which must have much aided Mark Tapley in his endeavours. Who were the founders of Cairo I have never ascertained. They are probably buried fathoms deep in the mud, and their names will no doubt remain a mystery to the latest ages. They were brought thither, I presume, by the apparent water privileges of the place; but the water privileges have been too much for them, and by the excess of their powers have succeeded in drowning all the capital of the early Cairovians, and in throwing a wet blanket of thick, moist, glutinous dirt over all their energies.

The free State of Illinois runs down far south between the slave States of Kentucky to the east, and of Missouri to the west, and is the most southern point of the continuous free-soil territory of the Northern States. This point of it is a part of a district called Egypt, which is as fertile as the old country from whence it has borrowed a name; but it suffers under those afflictions which are common to all newly-settled lands which owe their fertility to the vicinity of great rivers. Fever and ague universally prevail. Men and women grow up with their lantern faces like spectres. The children are prematurely old; and the earth which is so fruitful is hideous in its fertility. Cairo and its immediate neighbourhood must, I suppose, have been subject to yearly inundation before it was "settled up." At present it is guarded on the shores of each river by high mud banks, built so as to protect the point of land. These are called the levees, and do perform their duty by keeping out the body of the waters. The shore between the banks is, I believe, never above breast deep with the inundation; and from the circumstances of the place, and the soft, half-liquid nature of the soil, this inundation generally takes the shape of mud instead of water.

Here, at the very point, has been built a town. Whether the town existed during Mr. Tapley's time I have not been able to learn. At the period of my visit, it was falling quickly into ruin; indeed I think I may pronounce it to have been on its last legs. At that moment a galvanic motion had been pumped into it by the war movements of General Halleck, but the true bearings of the town, as a town, were not less plainly to be read on that account. Every street was absolutely impassable from mud. I mean that in walking down the middle of any street in Cairo a moderately framed man would soon stick fast and not be able to move. The houses are generally built at considerable intervals and rarely face each other, and along one side of each street a plank boarding was laid, on which the mud had accumulated only up to one's ankles. I walked all over Cairo with big boots, and with my trousers tucked up to my knees; but at the crossings I found considerable danger, and occasionally had my doubts as to the possibility of progress. I was alone in my work, and saw no one else making any such attempt. A few only were moving about, and they moved in wretched carts, each drawn by two miserable, floundering horses. These carts were always empty, but were presumed to be engaged in some way on military service. No faces looked out at the windows of the houses, no forms stood in the doorways. A few shops were open, but only in the drinking shops did I see customers. In these silent, muddy men were sitting,—not with drink before them, as men sit with us,—but with the cud within their jaws, ruminating. Their drinking is always done on foot. They stand silent at a bar, with two small glasses before them. Out of one they swallow the whisky, and from the other they take a gulp of water, as though to rinse their mouths. After that, they again sit down and ruminate. It was thus that men enjoyed themselves at Cairo.

I cannot tell what was the existing population of Cairo. I asked one resident; but he only shook his head and said that the place was about "played out." And a miserable play it must have been. I tried to walk round the point on the levees, but I found that the mud was so deep and slippery on that which protected the town from the Mississippi, that I could not move on it. On the other, which forms the bank of the Ohio, the railway runs, and here was gathered all the life and movement of the place. But the life was galvanic in its nature, created by a war-galvanism of which the shocks were almost neutralized by mud.

As Cairo is of all towns in America the most desolate, so is its hotel the most forlorn and wretched. Not that it lacked custom. It was so full that no room was to be had on our first entry from the railway cars at five A.M., and we were reduced to the necessity of washing our hands and faces in the public wash-room. When I entered it the barber and his assistants were asleep there, and four or five citizens from the railway were busy at the basins. There is a fixed resolution in these places that you shall be drenched with dirt and drowned in abominations, which is overpowering to a mind less strong than Mark Tapley's. The filth is paraded and made to go as far as possible. The stranger is spared none of the elements of nastiness. I remember how an old woman once stood over me in my youth, forcing me to swallow the gritty dregs of her terrible medicine-cup. The treatment I received in the hotel at Cairo reminded me of that old woman. In that room I did not dare to brush my teeth lest I should give offence; and I saw at once that I was regarded with suspicion when I used my own comb instead of that provided for the public.

At length we got a room, one room for the two. I had become so depressed in spirits that I did not dare to object to this arrangement. My friend could not complain much, even to me, feeling that these miseries had been produced by his own obstinacy. "It is a new phase of life," he said. That, at any rate, was true. If nothing more be necessary for pleasurable excitement than a new phase of life, I would recommend all who require pleasurable excitement to go to Cairo. They will certainly find a new phase of life. But do not let them remain too long, or they may find something beyond a new phase of life. Within a week of that time my friend was taking quinine, looking hollow about the eyes, and whispering to me of fever and ague. To say that there was nothing eatable or drinkable in that hotel, would be to tell that which will be understood without telling. My friend, however, was a cautious man, carrying with him comfortable tin pots, hermetically sealed, from Fortnum & Mason's; and on the second day of our sojourn we were invited by two officers to join their dinner at a Cairo eating-house. We ploughed our way gallantly through the mud to a little shanty, at the door of which we were peremptorily demanded by the landlord to scrub ourselves before we entered with the stump of an old broom. This we did, producing on our nether persons the appearance of bread which has been carefully spread with treacle by an economic housekeeper. And the proprietor was right, for had we not done so, the treacle would have run off through the whole house. But after this we fared royally. Squirrel soup and prairie chickens regaled us. One of our new friends had laden his pockets with champagne and brandy; the other with glasses and a corkscrew; and as the bottle went round, I began to feel something of the spirit of Mark Tapley in my soul.

But our visit to Cairo had been made rather with reference to its present warlike character, than with any eye to the natural beauties of the place. A large force of men had been collected there, and also a fleet of gun-boats. We had come there fortified with letters to generals and commodores, and were prepared to go through a large amount of military inspection. But the bird had flown before our arrival; or rather the body and wings of the bird, leaving behind only a draggled tail and a few of its feathers. There were only a thousand soldiers at Cairo when we were there;—that is, a thousand stationed in the Cairo sheds. Two regiments passed through the place during the time, getting out of one steamer on to another, or passing from the railway into boats. One of these regiments passed before me down the slope of the river-bank, and the men as a body seemed to be healthy. Very many were drunk, and all were mud-clogged up to their shoulders and very caps. In other respects they appeared to be in good order. It must be understood that these soldiers, the volunteers, had never been made subject to any discipline as to cleanliness. They wore their hair long. Their hats or caps, though all made in some military form and with some military appendance, were various and ill-assorted. They all were covered with loose, thick, blue-gray great-coats, which no doubt were warm and wholesome, but which from their looseness and colour seemed to be peculiarly susceptible of receiving and showing a very large amount of mud. Their boots were always good; but each man was shod as he liked. Many wore heavy over-boots coming up the leg;—boots of excellent manufacture, and from their cost, if for no other reason, quite out of the reach of an English soldier; boots in which a man would be not at all unfortunate to find himself hunting; but from these, or from their high-lows, shoes, or whatever they might wear, the mud had never been even scraped. These men were all warmly clothed, but clothed apparently with an endeavour to contract as much mud as might be possible.

The generals and commodores were gone up the Ohio river and up the Tennessee in an expedition with gun-boats, which turned out to be successful, and of which we have all read in the daily history of this war. They had departed the day before our arrival, and though we still found at Cairo a squadron of gun-boats,—if gun-boats go in squadrons,—the bulk of the army had been moved. There was left there one regiment and one colonel, who kindly described to us the battles he had fought, and gave us permission to see everything that was to be seen. Four of these gun-boats were still lying in the Ohio, close under the terminus of the railway with their flat, ugly noses against the muddy bank, and we were shown over two of them. They certainly seemed to be formidable weapons for river warfare, and to have been "got up quite irrespective of expense." So much, indeed, may be said for the Americans throughout the war. They cannot be accused of parsimony. The largest of these vessels, called the "Benton," had cost £36,000. These boats are made with sides sloping inwards, at an angle of 45 degrees. The iron is two-and-a-half inches thick, and it has not, I believe, been calculated that this will resist cannon shot of great weight, should it be struck in a direct line. But the angle of the sides of the boat makes it improbable that any such shot should strike them; and the iron, bedded as it is upon oak, is supposed to be sufficient to turn a shot that does not hit it in a direct line. The boats are also roofed in with iron, and the pilots who steer the vessel stand encased, as it were, under an iron cupola. I imagine that these boats are well calculated for the river service, for which they have been built. Six or seven of them had gone up the Tennessee river the day before we reached Cairo, and while we were there they succeeded in knocking down Fort Henry, and in carrying off the soldiers stationed there and the officer in command. One of the boats, however, had been penetrated by a shot which made its way into the boiler, and the men on deck, six, I think, in number, were scalded to death by the escaping steam. The two pilots up in the cupola were destroyed in this terrible manner. As they were altogether closed in by the iron roof and sides, there was no escape for the steam. The boats, however, were well made and very powerfully armed, and will, probably, succeed in driving the secessionist armies away from the great river banks. By what machinery the secessionist armies are to be followed into the interior is altogether another question.

But there was also another fleet at Cairo, and we were informed that we were just in time to see the first essay made at testing the utility of this armada. It consisted of no less than thirty-eight mortar-boats, each of which had cost £1700. These mortar-boats were broad, flat-bottomed rafts, each constructed with a deck raised three feet above the bottom. They were protected by high iron sides, supposed to be proof against rifle balls, and when supplied had been furnished each with a little boat, a rope, and four rough sweeps or oars. They had no other furniture or belongings, and were to be moved either by steam tugs or by the use of the long oars which were sent with them. It was intended that one 13-inch mortar, of enormous weight, should be put upon each, that these mortars should be fired with twenty-three pounds of powder, and that the shell thrown should, at a distance of three miles, fall with absolute precision into any devoted town which the rebels might hold on the river banks. The grandeur of the idea is almost sublime. So large an amount of powder had, I imagine, never then been used for the single charge in any instrument of war; and when we were told that thirty-eight of them were to play at once on a city, and that they could be used with absolute precision, it seemed as though the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah could not be worse than the fate of that city. Could any city be safe when such implements of war were about upon the waters?