The Last Leaf / Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe

by James Kendall Hosmer

Banks was a kindly man who meant and did the best he could for the humblest soldier in his army. His further military career I can only briefly sketch. He planned two fierce and calamitous assaults upon Port Hudson; errors no doubt, but Grant and Lee at the moment were making just such errors. The Red River campaign was a disastrous failure, but Banks had every handicap which a general could suffer: an insufficient force, a demand from the Administration that he should attend to a civil reordering when only fighting was in place, subordinates insolent and disobedient. And finally nature herself took arms against him, for the Red River fell when, by all precedents, it should have risen. It was an enterprise which his judgment utterly disapproved, the difficulties of which he faced with good resolution. It ended his career, for though once at a later time he went to Congress, he ever afterwards stood a discredited figure, dying, as I have heard, poor and broken-hearted in obscurity. His State has tried to render him a late justice by setting him up in bronze on Beacon Hill. It was done through opposition and the statue is sneered at more often than admired. He was an able man I believe and meant well, and I for one find it pathetic that the lines of my old commander did not fall more pleasantly.

Butler, on the other hand, I do not regard as a pathetic figure. On the night of my arrival in New Orleans, strolling about the strange city, I found myself at headquarters, and a Massachusetts boy standing sentry on the porch in a spirit of comradeship invited me up. As I ascended the steps Butler, who had been standing at the door, closed it with a crash and retired within. Through a crevice in the blinds he was plain to be seen seated at his desk in profound thought, his bull-dog face in repose, his rude forcefulness very manifest. His rule at New Orleans had come to an end and no doubt he was pondering it and dreaming of what the future had in store for him. His burly frame was relaxed, his bluff unshaken countenance with the queer sinister cast of the eyes fully lighted up by the lamp on his table. I studied him at leisure, his marvellous energy for a moment in repose. In those days his name was much in the mouths of men, and whatever may be said in his disfavour, it cannot be denied after fifty years that his rule of New Orleans was a masterpiece of resolution, a riding rough-shod over a great disaffected city which marked him as full of intrepidity and executive force. In the field he was a worse failure than ever Banks had been. In my idea he deserves in 1864 the characterisation by Charles Francis Adams. He was the Grouchy who made futile Grant's advance upon Richmond and he blundered at Fort Fisher, but he was a pachyderm of the toughest—too thick-skinned to be troubled by the scratches of criticism, always floundering to the front with unquenched energy, sometimes a power for good and sometimes for evil. It is hard to strike the balance and say whether for the most part he helped or hindered, but our past would lack a strong element of picturesqueness if old Ben Butler were eliminated.

There were pathetic figures among the West Pointers as well as among the civilian generals. At St. Louis, in the seventies, I used to see sometimes an unobtrusive man in citizen's dress, marked by no trait which distinguished him from the ordinary, a man serious in his bearing, who one might easily think had undergone some crushing blow. This was Major-General John Pope. His son was in our university and his sister, a most kind and gracious lady, was a near friend. Pope seems destined to go down in our history merely as a braggart and an incompetent. Probably no man of that time meant better or was more abused by capricious fate. Cox, whose daughter married the son of Pope and who therefore came to know him well in his later years, defends him vigorously. In the early years of the war he showed himself bold and active. The capture of Island Number Ten with its garrison was rather a naval and engineering exploit than an achievement of the army, but Pope seems to have done well what was required of him and probably deserved his promotion to the command of a corps at Corinth when an advance southward was meditated in the early summer of '62. It was with deep unwillingness that he received the summons of the Administration to command an army in Virginia, and only assumed the place from the feeling that a soldier must stand where he is put. Arrived at Washington, he found himself in an atmosphere hot with wrath and mortification. The Peninsular campaign had failed and strong spirits like Stanton and Ben Wade, Chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, were on fire through disappointment. The new General, whose position until within a few months had been a humble one, was brow-beaten and dominated by powerful personalities and forced to stand for acts and words which were not really his own. He declared, said Cox, that his bombastic and truculent orders were practically dictated by others. The declaration that his headquarters would be his saddle, which Lee so wittily turned, saying, "then his headquarters would be where his hindquarters ought to be," Pope declares he never made. When his environment had in this way aroused prejudice against him, he was set to command an army whose higher officers felt outraged at his sudden rise over their heads and whose soldiers were discouraged by defeat. He was expected to oppose skilful and victorious foes with instruments that bent and broke in the crisis as he tried to wield them. Only supreme genius could have wrought success in such a situation, and that Pope did not at all possess. He was only a man of resolution, with no exceptional gifts, who desired to do his best for his country. In the West he had proceeded usefully and honourably, and it was the worst misfortune for him that he was taken for the new place. I hope that history will deal kindly with him and that, since he was a worthy and strenuous patriot, he will not live merely as an object of execration and ridicule.

In August, 1863, my too brief term of service having expired, I came home to the Connecticut Valley and resumed my pulpit, which I had left for a vacation and powder-smoke. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had taken place, and we at the North too fondly hoped that all was over and that we might confidently settle down to peace. When going west to Buffalo for a visit I was delayed a few hours at Syracuse and took the occasion to call on an intimate friend of my father and myself, the Rev. Samuel J. May. Mr. May, a bright and beautiful spirit, was by nature a strong peace man, but, fired by the woes of the slave, he had become an extreme abolitionist and was ready to fight for his principles. Entering Mr. May's quiet study I found him in intimate talk with a man of unassuming demeanour, in citizen's dress, marked by no distinction of face or figure. He might have been a delegate to a peace convention, or a country minister from way-back calling on a professional brother. What was my astonishment when Mr. May introduced him as Major-General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the Twelfth Corps, who, taking a short furlough after Gettysburg, was at home for the moment and had dropped in for a friendly call. Slocum had been in the thick of most of the bitter Virginia battles from the first, and all the world knew that at Gettysburg, by beating back the thrust of the Stonewall division toward the Baltimore pike, he had secured the threatened rear of the army of the Potomac and averted defeat. This had taken place in the preceding month, and I naturally marvelled that the unpretending, simple man could be that victorious champion, but for the time being we were there plain citizens, and, American fashion, the Major-General and the Corporal shook hands and fraternised on equal terms. It probably helped me with Slocum that I too had been in danger. About the time he was defending Culp's Hill, I had been in the ditch at the foot of the Port Hudson rampart.

While reticent as to his part at Gettysburg, he spoke with feeling of what his corps had been through, and knowing that both Mr. May and I were Massachusetts men took an evident pleasure in commending the regiments from that State. Of the 2d Massachusetts he spoke with high appreciation; it was an admirable body of men and thoroughly disciplined. It was always ready; its losses were fearful and he felt that he ought to spare it if he could, but a crisis always came when only the best would answer, and again and again the 2d Massachusetts was thrown in. Particularly at Gettysburg its services had been great and its sacrifice costly. He spoke feelingly of the young officers who had been slain and also of humbler men. Since that time I have stood by the simple stone at the "bloody swale at the foot of Culp's Hill," which marked the position held that day by the 2d Massachusetts. It takes no trained eye to see that it was a point of especial difficulty and importance. Some of the men of that regiment who fell that day were my own college comrades. I was glad to know from his lips that the commander thought their work heroic.

One naturally brackets the name of Slocum with that of Howard, secondary figures of course in the great Civil War drama and yet both steadfast and worthy soldiers. They rose together into places of responsibility during the Peninsular campaign, became commanders of corps about the same time, served side by side at Gettysburg, went together to the West, and finally, one at the head of Sherman's right wing and the other at the head of the left, made the march to the sea and through the Carolinas. Neither perhaps was a brilliant soldier. So far as the records show, Slocum always did his work well, was increasingly trusted to the last, and nowhere made a grave mistake. In Howard's case, the rout at Chancellorsville will always detract from his fame; he was, however, on that day new in his place, and the infatuation of Hooker by an evil contagion passed down to his lieutenants. But he too steadily improved, refusing resolutely to be discouraged by his mistakes and always doing better next time. Perhaps no one act during the war was more important than the occupation of Cemetery Hill on the morning of July 1, 1863, by a Federal division. I think that the credit of that act cannot be denied to Howard. In a later time he passed under the control of Sherman in the West, a shrewd and relentless judge of men, and Sherman trusted him to the utmost. To a group of officers in their cups who were chaffing Howard for being Puritanical, Sherman curtly said: "Let Howard alone; I want one general who doesn't drink."

I saw General Howard at Gettysburg on the fortieth anniversary of the battle. We were under the same roof, and during the evening I sat close to him in the common room and heard him talk,—a strenuous old man, his empty sleeve recalling tragically the combats through which he had passed. Close by under the stars could still be traced the lines occupied by Steinwehr's division, the troops which with such momentous results Howard had posted on Cemetery Hill. I might easily have talked with him, for he was affable to old and young, but I preferred to study the good veteran from a distance and let others draw out his story while I listened.

In the winter of 1861 I went to Port Royal, through the good offices of my friend Rufus Saxton, then a captain and quartermaster of the expedition under which Dupont had taken possession of the Sea Islands in South Carolina. The capture of Port Royal had taken place a few weeks before and the army was encamped on the conquered territory. Saxton was an interesting figure, who in an unusual way showed during the war a fine spirit of self-sacrifice. At the outbreak, a high position in the field was within his grasp; he was second in command to Lyon in St. Louis, and being intimate with McClellan might have held a position of responsibility in the field. He was indeed made a general. Once in 1862 he was in command of a considerable force, and when Banks was driven out of the Shenandoah Valley by Stonewall Jackson he withstood at Harper's Ferry the rush of the Confederates into Maryland. But at the solicitation of Lincoln and Stanton he gave up service in the field, for which he was well fitted and which he earnestly desired, to act as Military Governor of the Sea Islands, where his work was to receive and care for the thousands of negroes who by the flight of their masters in that region had been left to themselves. Here he remained throughout the war, while his old comrades were winning fame at the head of divisions and corps, a patient, humane teacher and administrator among the nation's wards. He was content to live through the stirring time inconspicuous, but he won the respect of all kindly hearts at the North and deep gratitude from the helpless blacks whom he so long and humanely befriended.

I came in contact during that visit with a number of soldiers soon to be famous. In the boat which carried me from the transport to the shore I had as a fellow-passenger James H. Wilson, then a lieutenant but soon to be a famous cavalry commander. He was a restless athletic young man, who when I met him was on fire with wrath over the giving up of Mason and Slidell, the news of which had come to the post by our steamer. I tried to argue with him, that we had enough on our hands with the South without rushing into war with England besides, but he was impetuously confident that we could take care of all foes outside and in, and maintained that the giving up of the envoys was a burning shame. His vigour and confidence were excessive, I thought, but they carried him far in a time soon to come.

I talked with General Thomas W. Sherman, the commander of the expedition, in his tent, but was more interested in a dispute which presently sprang up between the General and a companion of mine, Jonathan Saxton, father of Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist of the most perfervid type, a good talker and quite unabashed, plain farmer though he was, by a pair of epaulettes.