“None of them is lost, none of them is lost!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
“ON TO RICHMOND.”
At mid-day, on the fifteenth of September, I took the train at Fredericksburg for Richmond, expecting to make in three hours the journey which our armies were more than as many years in accomplishing.
“On to Richmond! On to Richmond!” clattered the cars; while my mind recalled the horrors and anxieties of those years, so strangely in contrast with the swiftness and safety of our present speed. Where now were the opposing Rebel hosts? Where the long lines of bristling musketry, the swarms of cavalry, and the terrible artillery? Where the great Slave Empire, the defiant Confederacy itself?
“The earth hath bubbles as the water has,
And these were of them.”
We passed amid the same desolate scenes which I had everywhere observed since I set foot upon the soil of Virginia,—old fields and undergrowths, with signs of human life so feeble and so few, that one began to wonder where the country population of the Old Dominion was to be found. All the region between Fredericksburg and Richmond seems not only almost uninhabited now, but always to have been so,—at least to the eye familiar with New-England farms and villages. But one must forget the thriving and energetic North when he enters a country stamped with the dark seal of slavery. Large and fertile Virginia, with eight times the area of Massachusetts, scarcely equals in population that barren little State. The result is, that, where Southern State pride sees prosperous settlements, the travelling Yankee discovers little more than uncultivated wastes.
Ashton, sixteen miles from Richmond, was the first really civilized-looking place we passed. Farther on I looked for the suburbs of the capital. But Richmond has no suburbs. The pleasant villages and market-gardens that spread smilingly for miles around our large Northern towns, are altogether wanting here. Suddenly the melancholy waste of the country disappears, and you enter the outskirts of the city.
And is this indeed Richmond into which the train glides so smoothly along its polished rails? Is this the fort-encircled capital whose gates refused so long to open to our loudly knocking armies?—and have we entered with so little ado? Is the “Rome of the Confederacy” sitting proudly on her seven hills, aware that here are detestable Yankees within her walls? Will she cast us into Libby? or starve us on Belle Island? or forward us to Wirtz at Andersonville?—for such we know was the fate of Northern men who did get into Richmond during the past four years! You think of what they suffered, as you walk unmolested the pavements of the conquered capital; and something swells within you, which is not exultation, nor rage, nor grief, but a strange mingling of all these.
“Time the Avenger! unto thee I lift