“Both: fust one, and then the other. Our own troops were as bad as the Yankees.”
Afterwards, as we rode away from the tavern, Richard H. Hicks gave me the following succinct account of the landlord:
“He used to be a heavy coon-dog. He had fifty head o’ darkeys. He wouldn’t hire ’em, and dey lef’. Now he has nobody to wo’k de land, he’s got a light pocket, and so he’s a mind to sell.”
Riding west from the Court-House, and striking across the fields on the right, we passed McCool’s house, in a pleasant shady place, and reached the scene where the eight days’ fighting culminated. Of the woods, thinned and despoiled by the storm of iron and lead, only a ghostly grove of dead trunks and dreary dry limbs remained. Keeping around the western edge of these, we came to a strange medley of intrenchments, which it would have required an engineer to unravel and understand. Here Grant’s works had been pushed up against Lee’s, swallowing them as one wave swallows another. Nowhere else have I seen evidences of such close and desperate fighting. For eight days Grant had been thundering at the gates of the Confederacy; slowly, with fearful loss, he had been pressing back the enemy and breaking through the obstructions; until here at last he concentrated all his strength. Each army fought as if the gods had decreed that the issue of the war depended upon that struggle. And so indeed they had: the way to Richmond by this route, so long attempted in vain, was here opened. The grand result proclaimed that the eight days’ battles were victories; that the enemy, for the first time on his own chosen ground, had met with ominous defeat. Inconceivable was the slaughter. Here two red rivers met and spilled themselves into the ground. Swift currents from the great West, tributaries from the Atlantic States and from the Lake States, priceless rills, precious drops, from almost every community and family in the Union, swelled the northern stream which burst its living banks and perished here. Every state, every community, every family mourned.
But behind this curtain of woe was the chiselled awful form, the terrible front and sublime eyes, of the statue of Fate, the nation’s unalterable Will. Contemplating that, we were silenced, if not consoled. Every breast—that of the father going to search for the body of his dead son, that of the mother reading the brief despatch that pierced her as the bullet pierced her dear boy, that of the pale wife hastening to the cot-side of her dying husband, nay, the bleeding breasts of the wounded and dying, while yet they felt a throb of life—thrilled responsive to Grant’s simple, significant announcement—
“I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”
It took all summer, indeed, and all winter too; but the result had been decided at Spottsylvania.
The Rebel armies had invaded the North and been driven ingloriously back. Many times we had started for Richmond and been repulsed. But at length we were not repulsed: the overwhelming wave poured over the embankments.
Such thoughts—or rather deep emotions, of which such thoughts are but the feeble expression—possess the serious tourist, who stands upon that field furrowed and ridged with earthworks and with graves,—beside that grove of shattered and shrivelled trees. A conscious solemnity seems brooding in the air. If the intrenchments could speak, what a history could they disclose! But those sphinx-like lips of the earth are rigid and still. Even the winds seem to hush their whispers about that scene of desolation. All is silence; and the heart of the visitor is constrained to silence also.
Upon a hacked and barkless trunk at the angle of the woods, in the midst of the graves, was nailed aloft a board bearing these lines: