“What do you mean by a heavy coon-dog?”
“Why, ye see, when a man owns a big plantation, and a heap o’ darkeys, and carries a heavy pocket, or if he’s do’n’ a big thing, den we call him a heavy coon-dog. Jeff Davis was a heavy coon-dog; but he’s a light coon-dog now!”
Our route lay through a rough, hilly country, never more than very thinly inhabited, and now scarcely that. About every two miles we passed a poor log house in the woods, or on the edge of overgrown fields,—sometimes tenantless, but oftener occupied by a pale, poverty-smitten family afflicted with the chills. I do not remember more than two or three framed houses on the road, and they looked scarcely less disconsolate than their log neighbors.
It is twelve miles from Fredericksburg to Spottsylvania Court-House. At the end of nine or ten miles we began to meet with signs of military operations,—skirmish-lines, rifle-pits, and graves by the roadside.
Rising a gentle ascent, we had a view of the Court-House, and of the surrounding country,—barren, hilly fields, with here and there a scattered tree, or clump of trees, commonly pines, and boundaries of heavier timber beyond. There were breastworks running in various directions,—along by the road, across the road, and diagonally over the crests. The country was all cut up with them; and I found the Rebel works strangely mixed up with our own. As our army advanced, it had possessed itself of the enemy’s rifle-pits, skirmish-line, and still more important intrenchments, and converted them to its own use.
Grant’s main line of breastworks, very heavy, constructed of rails and stakes and earth, crosses the road at nearly right angles, and stretches away out of sight on either side over the hills and into the woods. I was reminded of what Elijah had told me the day before at Brock’s Road, in the Wilderness. “Grant’s breastworks run thirty miles through the country, from near Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan, spang past Spottsylvany Court-House and the Mattapony River.”
The road to the Court-House runs south. On the left was Beverly’s house, and a shattered empty house on the right. Richard pointed out the hill on which his battery was stationed early in the battle. “We had to git away f’om dar, though. Your batteries drove us.”
We rode on to the Court-House: a goodly-brick building, with heavy pillars in front, one of which had been broken off by a shell, leaving a corner of the portico hanging in the air. There were but six other buildings of any importance in the place,—one jail, one tavern, (no school-house,) one private dwelling, and three churches; all of brick, and all more or less battered by artillery.
Entering the Court-House amid heaps of rubbish which littered the yard about the doors, I had the good fortune to find the county clerk at his desk. He received me politely, and offered to show me about the building. It had been well riddled by shot and shell; but masons and carpenters were at work repairing damages; so that there was a prospect of the county, in a few months, having a court-house again.
“What is most to be regretted,” the clerk said, “is the destruction of documents which can’t be restored. All the records and papers of the court were destroyed by the Union soldiers after they got possession.” And he showed me a room heaped with the fragments. It looked like a room in a rag-man’s warehouse.