North America — Volume 2

by Anthony Trollope

But when we came to inspect the mortar-boats, our misgivings as to any future destination for this fleet were relieved, and our admiration was given to the smartness of the contractor who had secured to himself the job of building them. In the first place they had all leaked till the spaces between the bottoms and the decks were filled with water. This space had been intended for ammunition, but now seemed hardly to be fitted for that purpose. The officer who was about to test them by putting a mortar into one and by firing it off with twenty-three pounds of powder, had the water pumped out of a selected raft, and we were towed by a steam-tug from their moorings a mile up the river, down to the spot where the mortar lay ready to be lifted in by a derrick. But as we turned on the river, the tug-boat which had brought us down, was unable to hold us up against the force of the stream. A second tug-boat was at hand, and with one on each side we were just able, in half-an-hour, to recover the 100 yards which we had lost down the river. The pressure against the stream was so great, owing partly to the weight of the raft, and partly to the fact that its flat head buried itself in the water, that it was almost immoveable against the stream, although the mortar was not yet on it.

It soon became manifest that no trial could be made on that day, and so we were obliged to leave Cairo without having witnessed the firing of the great gun. My belief is that very little evil to the enemy will result from those mortar-boats, and that they cannot be used with much effect. Since that time they have been used on the Mississippi, but as yet we do not know with what result. Island No. 10 has been taken, but I do not know that the mortar-boats contributed much to that success. The enormous cost of moving them against the stream of the river is in itself a barrier to their use. When we saw them—and then they were quite new—many of the rivets were already gone. The small boats had been stolen from some of them, and the ropes and oars from others. There they lay, thirty-eight in number, up against the mud-banks of the Ohio, under the boughs of the half-clad, melancholy forest trees, as sad a spectacle of reckless prodigality as the eye ever beheld. But the contractor who made them no doubt was a smart man.

This armada was moored on the Ohio against the low, reedy bank, a mile above the levee, where the old unchanged forest of nature came down to the very edge of the river, and mixed itself with the shallow overflowing waters. I am wrong in saying that it lay under the boughs of the trees, for such trees do not spread themselves out with broad branches. They stand thickly together, broken, stunted, spongy with rot, straight and ugly, with ragged tops and shattered arms, seemingly decayed, but still ever renewing themselves with the rapid moist life of luxuriant forest vegetation. Nothing to my eyes is sadder than the monotonous desolation of such scenery. We, in England, when we read and speak of the primeval forests of America, are apt to form pictures in our minds of woodland glades, with spreading oaks and green mossy turf beneath,—of scenes than which nothing that God has given us is more charming. But these forests are not after that fashion; they offer no allurement to the lover, no solace to the melancholy man of thought. The ground is deep with mud, or overflown with water. The soil and the river have no defined margins. Each tree, though full of the forms of life, has all the appearance of death. Even to the outward eye they seem to be laden with ague, fever, sudden chills, and pestilential malaria.

When we first visited the spot we were alone, and we walked across from the railway line to the place at which the boats were moored. They lay in treble rank along the shore, and immediately above them an old steam-boat was fastened against the bank. Her back was broken, and she was given up to ruin,—placed there that she might rot quietly into her watery grave. It was mid-winter, and every tree was covered with frozen sleet and small particles of snow which had drizzled through the air; for the snow had not fallen in hearty, honest flakes. The ground beneath our feet was crisp with frost, but traitorous in its crispness; not frozen manfully so as to bear a man's weight, but ready at every point to let him through into the fat, glutinous mud below. I never saw a sadder picture, or one which did more to awaken pity for those whose fate had fixed their abodes in such a locality. And yet there was a beauty about it too,—a melancholy, death-like beauty. The disordered ruin and confused decay of the forest was all gemmed with particles of ice. The eye reaching through the thin underwood could form for itself picturesque shapes and solitary bowers of broken wood, which were bright with the opaque brightness of the hoar-frost. The great river ran noiselessly along, rapid, but still with an apparent lethargy in its waters. The ground beneath our feet was fertile beyond compare, but as yet fertile to death rather than to life. Where we then trod man had not yet come with his axe and his plough; but the railroad was close to us, and within a mile of the spot thousands of dollars had been spent in raising a city which was to have been rich with the united wealth of the rivers and the land. Hitherto fever and ague, mud and malaria, had been too strong for man, and the dollars had been spent in vain. The day, however, will come when this promontory between the two great rivers will be a fit abode for industry. Men will settle there, wandering down from the North and East, and toil sadly, and leave their bones among the mud. Thin, pale-faced, joyless mothers will come there, and grow old before their time; and sickly children will be born, struggling up with wan faces to their sad life's labour. But the work will go on, for it is God's work; and the earth will be prepared for the people, and the fat rottenness of the still living forest will be made to give forth its riches.

We found that two days at Cairo were quite enough for us. We had seen the gun-boats and the mortar-boats, and gone through the sheds of the soldiers. The latter were bad, comfortless, damp, and cold; and certain quarters of the officers, into which we were hospitably taken, were wretched abodes enough; but the sheds of Cairo did not stink like those of Benton barracks at St. Louis, nor had illness been prevalent there to the same degree. I do not know why this should have been so, but such was the result of my observation. The locality of Benton barracks must, from its nature, have been the more healthy, but it had become by art the foulest place I ever visited. Throughout the army it seemed to be the fact, that the men under canvas were more comfortable, in better spirits, and also in better health than those who were lodged in sheds. We had inspected the Cairo army and the Cairo navy, and had also seen all that Cairo had to show us of its own. We were thoroughly disgusted with the hotel, and retired on the second night to bed, giving positive orders that we might be called at half-past two, with reference to that terrible start to be made at half-past three. As a matter of course we kept dozing and waking till past one, in our fear lest neglect on the part of the watcher should entail on us another day at this place; of course we went fast asleep about the time at which we should have roused ourselves; and of course we were called just fifteen minutes before the train started. Everybody knows how these things always go. And then the pair of us, jumping out of bed in that wretched chamber, went through the mockery of washing and packing which always takes place on such occasions;—a mockery indeed of washing, for there was but one basin between us! And a mockery also of packing, for I left my hair-brushes behind me! Cairo was avenged in that I had declined to avail myself of the privileges of free citizenship which had been offered to me in that barber's shop. And then, while we were in our agony, pulling at the straps of our portmanteaux and swearing at the faithlessness of the boots, up came the clerk of the hotel—the great man from behind the bar—and scolded us prodigiously for our delay. "Called! We had been called an hour ago!" Which statement, however, was decidedly untrue, as we remarked, not with extreme patience. "We should certainly be late," he said; "it would take us five minutes to reach the train, and the cars would be off in four." Nobody who has not experienced them can understand the agonies of such moments,—of such moments as regards travelling in general; but none who have not been at Cairo can understand the extreme agony produced by the threat of a prolonged sojourn in that city. At last we were out of the house, rushing through the mud, slush, and half-melted snow, along the wooden track to the railway, laden with bags and coats, and deafened by that melancholy, wailing sound, as though of a huge polar she-bear in the pangs of travail upon an iceberg, which proceeds from an American railway-engine before it commences its work. How we slipped and stumbled, and splashed and swore, rushing along in the dark night, with buttons loose, and our clothes half on! And how pitilessly we were treated! We gained our cars, and even succeeded in bringing with us our luggage; but we did not do so with the sympathy, but amidst the derision of the bystanders. And then the seats were all full, and we found that there was a lower depth even in the terrible deep of a railway train in a western State. There was a second-class carriage, prepared, I presume, for those who esteemed themselves too dirty for association with the aristocracy of Cairo; and into this we flung ourselves. Even this was a joy to us, for we were being carried away from Eden. We had acknowledged ourselves to be no fitting colleagues for Mark Tapley, and would have been glad to escape from Cairo even had we worked our way out of the place as assistant-stokers to the engine-driver. Poor Cairo! unfortunate Cairo! "It is about played out!" said its citizen to me. But in truth the play was commenced a little too soon. Those players have played out; but another set will yet have their innings, and make a score that shall perhaps be talked of far and wide in the western world.

We were still bent upon army inspection, and with this purpose went back from Cairo to Louisville in Kentucky. I had passed through Louisville before, as told in my last chapter, but had not gone south from Louisville towards the Green River, and had seen nothing of General Buell's soldiers. I should have mentioned before that when we were at St. Louis, we asked General Halleck, the officer in command of the northern army of Missouri, whether he could allow us to pass through his lines to the South. This he assured us he was forbidden to do, at the same time offering us every facility in his power for such an expedition if we could obtain the consent of Mr. Seward, who at that time had apparently succeeded in engrossing into his own hands, for the moment, supreme authority in all matters of Government. Before leaving Washington we had determined not to ask Mr. Seward, having but little hope of obtaining his permission, and being unwilling to encounter his refusal. Before going to General Halleck we had considered the question of visiting the land of Dixie without permission from any of the men in authority. I ascertained that this might easily have been done from Kentucky to Tennessee, but that it could only be done on foot. There are very few available roads running North and South through these States. The railways came before roads; and even where the railways are far asunder, almost all the traffic of the country takes itself to them, preferring a long circuitous conveyance with steam, to short distances without. Consequently such roads as there are run laterally to the railways, meeting them at this point or that, and thus maintaining the communication of the country. Now the railways were of course in the hands of the armies. The few direct roads leading from North to South were in the same condition, and the bye-roads were impassable from mud. The frontier of the North therefore, though very extended, was not very easily to be passed, unless, as I have said before, by men on foot. For myself I confess that I was anxious to go South; but not to do so without my coats and trousers, or shirts and pocket-handkerchiefs. The readiest way of getting across the line,—and the way which was I believe the most frequently used,—was from below Baltimore in Maryland by boat across the Potomac. But in this there was a considerable danger of being taken, and I had no desire to become a state-prisoner in the hands of Mr. Seward under circumstances which would have justified our Minister in asking for my release only as a matter of favour. Therefore when at St. Louis, I gave up all hopes of seeing "Dixie" during my present stay in America. I presume it to be generally known that Dixie is the negro's heaven, and that the southern slave States, in which it is presumed that they have found a Paradise, have since the beginning of the war been so named.

We remained a few days at Louisville, and were greatly struck with the natural beauty of the country around it. Indeed, as far as I was enabled to see, Kentucky has superior attractions as a place of rural residence for an English gentleman, to any other State in the Union. There is nothing of landscape there equal to the banks of the upper Mississippi, or to some parts of the Hudson river. It has none of the wild grandeur of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, nor does it break itself into valleys equal to those of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania. But all those are beauties for the tourist rather than for the resident. In Kentucky the land lies in knolls and soft sloping hills. The trees stand apart, forming forest openings. The herbage is rich, and the soil, though not fertile like the prairies of Illinois, or the river bottoms of the Mississippi and its tributaries, is good, steadfast, wholesome farming ground. It is a fine country for a resident gentleman farmer, and in its outward aspect reminds me more of England in its rural aspects, than any other State which I visited. Round Louisville there are beautiful sites for houses, of which advantage in some instances has been taken. But, nevertheless, Louisville though a well-built, handsome city, is not now a thriving city. I liked it because the hotel was above par, and because the country round it was good for walking; but it has not advanced as Cincinnati and St. Louis have advanced. And yet its position on the Ohio is favourable, and it is well circumstanced as regards the wants of its own State. But it is not a free-soil city. Nor indeed is St. Louis; but St. Louis is tending that way, and has but little to do with the "domestic institution." At the hotels in Cincinnati and St. Louis you are served by white men, and are very badly served. At Louisville the ministration is by black men, "bound to labour." The difference in the comfort is very great. The white servants are noisy, dirty, forgetful, indifferent, and sometimes impudent. The negroes are the very reverse of all this; you cannot hurry them; but in all other respects,—and perhaps even in that respect also,—they are good servants. This is the work for which they seem to have been intended. But nevertheless where they are, life and energy seem to languish, and prosperity cannot make any true advance. They are symbols of the luxury of the white men who employ them, and as such are signs of decay and emblems of decreasing power. They are good labourers themselves, but their very presence makes labour dishonourable. That Kentucky will speedily rid herself of the institution I believe firmly. When she has so done, the commercial city of that State may perhaps go a-head again like her sisters.

At this very time the Federal army was commencing that series of active movements in Kentucky and through Tennessee which led to such important results, and gave to the North the first solid victories which they had gained since the contest began. On the 19th of January one wing of General Buell's army, under General Thomas, had defeated the secessionists near Somerset, in the south-eastern district of Kentucky, under General Zollicoffer, who was there killed. But in that action the attack was made by Zollicoffer and the secessionists. When we were at Louisville we heard of the success of that gun-boat expedition up the Tennessee river by which Fort Henry was taken. Fort Henry had been built by the Confederates on the Tennessee,—exactly on the confines of the States of Tennessee and Kentucky. They had also another fort, Fort Donnelson, on the Cumberland river, which at that point runs parallel to the Tennessee, and is there distant from it but a very few miles. Both these rivers run into the Ohio. Nashville, which is the capital of Tennessee, is higher up on the Cumberland; and it was now intended to send the gun-boats down the Tennessee back into the Ohio, and thence up the Cumberland, there to attack Fort Donnelson, and afterwards to assist General Buell's army in making its way down to Nashville. The gun-boats were attached to General Halleck's army, and received their directions from St. Louis. General Buell's head-quarters were at Louisville, and his advanced position was on the Green River, on the line of the railway from Louisville to Nashville. The secessionists had destroyed the railway bridge over the Green River, and were now lying at Bowling Green, between the Green River and Nashville. This place it was understood that they had fortified.

Matters were in this position when we got a military pass to go down by the railway to the army on the Green River,—for the railway was open to no one without a military pass;—and we started, trusting that Providence would supply us with rations and quarters. An officer attached to General Buell's staff, with whom however our acquaintance was of the very slightest, had telegraphed down to say that we were coming. I cannot say that I expected much from the message, seeing that it simply amounted to a very thin introduction to a general officer to whom we were strangers even by name, from a gentleman to whom we had brought a note from another gentleman whose acquaintance we had chanced to pick up on the road. We manifestly had no right to expect much; but to us, expecting very little, very much was given. General Johnson was the officer to whose care we were confided, he being a brigadier under General M'Cook, who commanded the advance. We were met by an aide-de-camp and saddle-horses, and soon found ourselves in the General's tent, or rather in a shanty formed of solid upright wooden logs, driven into the ground with the bark still on, and having the interstices filled in with clay. This was roofed with canvas, and altogether made a very eligible military residence. The General slept in a big box about nine feet long and four broad which occupied one end of the shanty, and he seemed in all his fixings to be as comfortably put up as any gentleman might be when out on such a picnic as this. We arrived in time for dinner, which was brought in, table and all, by two negroes. The party was made up by a doctor, who carved, and two of the staff, and a very nice dinner we had. In half-an-hour we were intimate with the whole party, and as familiar with the things around us as though we had been living in tents all our lives. Indeed I had by this time been so often in the tents of the northern army, that I almost felt entitled to make myself at home. It has seemed to me that an Englishman has always been made welcome in these camps. There has been and is at this moment a terribly bitter feeling among Americans against England, and I have heard this expressed quite as loudly by men in the army as by civilians; but I think I may say that this has never been brought to bear upon individual intercourse. Certainly we have said some very sharp things of them,—words which, whether true or false, whether deserved or undeserved, must have been offensive to them. I have known this feeling of offence to amount almost to an agony of anger. But nevertheless I have never seen any falling off in the hospitality and courtesy generally shown by a civilized people to passing visitors. I have argued the matter of England's course throughout the war, till I have been hoarse with asseverating the rectitude of her conduct and her national unselfishness. I have met very strong opponents on the subject, and have been coerced into loud strains of voice; but I never yet met one American who was personally uncivil to me as an Englishman, or who seemed to be made personally angry by my remarks. I found no coldness in that hospitality to which as a stranger I was entitled, because of the national ill-feeling which circumstances have engendered. And while on this subject I will remark, that when travelling I have found it expedient to let those with whom I might chance to talk know at once that I was an Englishman. In fault of such knowledge things would be said which could not but be disagreeable to me; but not even from any rough western enthusiast in a railway carriage have I ever heard a word spoken insolently to England, after I had made my nationality known. I have learned that Wellington was beaten at Waterloo; that Lord Palmerston was so unpopular that he could not walk alone in the streets; that the House of Commons was an acknowledged failure; that starvation was the normal condition of the British people, and that the Queen was a bloodthirsty tyrant. But these assertions were not made with the intention that they should be heard by an Englishman. To us as a nation they are at the present moment unjust almost beyond belief; but I do not think that the feeling has ever taken the guise of personal discourtesy.

We spent two days in the camp close upon the Green River, and I do not know that I enjoyed any days of my trip more thoroughly than I did these. In truth for the last month, since I had left Washington, my life had not been one of enjoyment. I had been rolling in mud and had been damp with filth. Camp Wood, as they called this military settlement on the Green River, was also muddy; but we were excellently well-mounted; the weather was very cold, but peculiarly fine, and the soldiers around us, as far as we could judge, seemed to be better off in all respects than those we had visited at St. Louis, at Rolla, or at Cairo. They were all in tents, and seemed to be light-spirited and happy. Their rations were excellent,—but so much may, I think, be said of the whole northern army from Alexandria on the Potomac to Springfield in the west of Missouri. There was very little illness at that time in the camp in Kentucky, and the reports made to us led us to think that on the whole this had been the most healthy division of the army. The men, moreover, were less muddy than their brethren either east or west of them,—at any rate this may be said of them as regards the infantry.