“I am; but that is no reason why I should be blind to the faults of my State. It was the vanity of Virginia, and nothing else, that caused all our trouble.”
(Here was another name for “State pride.”)
“You were not very much in favor of secession, I take it?”
“In favor of it!” he exclaimed, kindling. “Didn’t they have me in jail here nine weeks because I would not vote for it? If I hadn’t been an old man, they would have hung me. Ah, I told them how it would be, from the first; but they wouldn’t believe me. Now they see! Look at this ruined city! Look at the farms and plantations laid waste! Look at the complete paralysis of business; the rich reduced to poverty; the men and boys with one arm, one leg, or one hand; the tens of thousands of graves; the broken families;—it is all the result of vanity! vanity!”
He showed me the road to the Heights, and we parted on the corner.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE FIELD OF FREDERICKSBURG.
Fredericksburg stands upon a ridge on the right bank of the river. Behind the town is a plain, with a still more elevated ridge beyond. From the summit of the last you obtain an excellent view of the battle-field; the plain below the town where Hooker fought; the heights on the opposite side of the river manned by our batteries; the fields on the left; and the plain between the ridge and the town, where the frightfullest slaughter was.
Along by the foot of the crest, just where it slopes off to the plain, runs a road with a wall of heavy quarried stones on each side. In this road the Rebels lay concealed when the first attempt was made to storm the Heights. The wall on the lower side, towards the town, is the “stone wall” of history. It was a perfect breastwork, of great strength, and in the very best position that could have been chosen. The earth from the fields is more or less banked up against it; and this, together with the weeds and bushes which grew there, served to conceal it from our men. The sudden cruel volley of flame and lead which poured over it into their very faces, scarce a dozen paces distant, as they charged, was the first intimation they received of any enemy below the crest. No troops could stand that near and deadly fire. They broke, and leaving the ground strown with the fallen, retreated to the “ravine,”—a deep ditch with a little stream flowing through it, in the midst of the plain.
“Just when they turned to run, that was the worst time for them!” said a young Rebel I met on the Heights. “Then our men had nothing to fear; but they just rose right up and let ’em have it! Every charge your troops made afterwards, it was the same. The infantry in the road, and the artillery on these Heights, just mowed them down in swaths! You never saw anything look as that plain did after the battle. Saturday morning, before the fight, it was brown; Sunday it was all blue; Monday it was white, and Tuesday it was red.”
I asked him to explain this seeming riddle.