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

by James Kendall Hosmer

Among our regular officers there were few abolitionists. Rufus Saxton told me that Lyon was the only one of any distinction who could be so classed among the men he knew. T.W. Sherman was like his fellows and listened impatiently to what he felt was fanaticism gone mad, but the fluent old farmer drove home his radicalism undauntedly. T.W. Sherman before the war had been a well-known figure as commander of Sherman's flying artillery, which was perhaps the most famous organisation of the regular army, but his name scarcely appears in the history of the Civil War, more perhaps from lack of good fortune than of merit. He was crippled with wounds in the first important battle in which he was concerned. The two brigadiers at Port Royal, Horatio G. Wright and Isaac I. Stevens, both became soldiers of note. Wright was a handsome fellow in his best years, whom I recall stroking his chin with an amused quizzical expression while Jonathan Saxton poured out his Garrisonism. His brigade lay well to the south and his headquarters were at the old Tybee lighthouse which marked the entrance to the harbour of Savannah. I climbed with him up the sand hill, from the top of which we looked down upon Fort Pulaski then in Confederate hands and within short range. We peered cautiously over the summit, for shells frequently came from the fort. Wright held in his hand a fragment of one which had just before exploded. "How well it took the groove!" he said, pointing out to me the signs on the iron that the rifled cannon from which it had come had given the missile in the discharge the proper twist. Wright's after-career is part of the war's history, always strenuous and constantly rising. The fame which attaches to the Sixth Corps is largely due to the leadership of Wright. If he fell short at Cedar Creek in 1864 it was a lapse which may be pardoned in the circumstances. Sheridan retrieved the day and magnanimously palliated the misfortune of Wright. "It might have happened to me or to any man." The good soldier deserves the fine monument which stands by his grave in the foreground at Arlington.

I had at Port Royal a long and friendly talk with Isaac I. Stevens. He was already a man of note. After achieving the highest honours at West Point he had gone to the West, and in the great unexplored Pacific Northwest had conquered, built, and systematised until a fair foundation was laid for the fine civilisation which now sixty years later has been reared upon it. He was modest in his bearing, with well-knit and sinewy frame, and possessed at the same time refined manners and a taste for the higher things of life. Before the year had passed, his life went out in the second battle of Bull Run. In the end of that terrible campaign, he essayed with Phil Kearny to stem at Chantilly the rush of Stonewall Jackson upon Washington. The attempt was successful, but Stevens died waving the colours at the head of his men. It is said that Lincoln had marked him for the command of the Army of the Potomac. He had made good in all previous positions, and perhaps would have made good in the chief place, but here I stumble once more upon a might-have-been and am silent.

Dear ghosts of old-time friends swarm in my thought as I dream of those days. The white marbles in Memorial Chapel solemnly bear the names of Harvard's Civil War soldiers and tell how they died. There was one of whom I might say much, an elder companion, a wise and pleasant spirit who did something toward my shaping for life. A cannon-ball at Cold Harbor was the end for him. There was another, a brilliant, handsome young Irishman, bred a Catholic, who under the influence of Moncure D. Conway had come out as a Unitarian and left his Washington home for a radical environment in the North. He was brilliant and witty with small capacity or taste for persistent plodding, but forever hitting effectively on the spur of the moment. He was as chivalrous as a palladin and went to his early grave light-hearted, as part of the day's work which must not be shirked. I have his image vividly as he laughed and joked in our last interview. "Dress-parade at six o'clock; come over and see the dress-paradoes!" He fell wounded at Chancellorsville, and while being carried off the field was struck a second time as he lay on the stretcher, and so he passed.

There were fine fellows, too, in those days who stood on the other side: McKim, President of the Hasty Pudding Club, who fell in Virginia; W.H.F. Lee, who was in the Law School and whom I recall as a stalwart athlete rowing on the Charles. It helped me much a few years ago when I visited many Southern battle-fields that I could tell old Confederates "Rooney" Lee and I had in our youth been college mates. My classmate J.B. Clark of Mississippi was a graceful magnetic fellow who had small basis of scholarship, perhaps, but a marked power for effective utterance. He fascinated us by his warm Southern fluency, and we gave him at last the highest distinction we could confer, the class oration. He left us then and we did not see him for fifty years. He enlisted in the 21st Mississippi and passed through the roughest hardships and perils. We felt afterwards that he held coldly aloof from us through long years. At our jubilee, however, he came back wrinkled and white-haired, but quite recognisable as the fascinating boy of fifty years before. He had a long and good record behind him as an officer of the University of Texas, and we gave him reason to think that we loved him still. The most cordial meetings I have ever known have been those between men who had fought each other bitterly, each with an honest conviction that he was in the right, but who at last have come out on common ground.

Among the Harvard soldiers three stand out in my thought as especially interesting, William Francis Bartlett, Charles Russell Lowell, and Francis Channing Barlow. Bartlett was younger than I, entering service when scarcely beyond boyhood, losing a leg at Ball's Bluff, and when only twenty-three Colonel of the 49th Massachusetts. I remember well a beautiful night, the moon at the full, and the hospital on the river bank just below Port Hudson where hundreds of wounded men were arriving from a disastrous battle-field close at hand.

Bartlett had ridden into battle on horseback, his one leg making it impossible for him to go on foot, and he was a conspicuous mark for the sharpshooters. A ball had passed through his remaining foot, and still another through his arm, causing painful wounds to which he was forced to yield. He lay stretched out, a tall, slender figure with a clear-cut patrician face, very pale and still but with every sign of suffering stoically repressed. He was conscious as I stood for a moment at his side. It was not a time to speak even a word, but I hoped he might feel through some occult influence that a Harvard brother was there at hand, full of sympathy for him. He afterwards recovered in part, and, with unconquerable will, though he was only a fragment of a man, went in again and was still again stricken. He survived it all, and to me it was perhaps the most thrilling incident of the Harvard commemoration of 1865 to see Bartlett, too crippled to walk without their support, helped to a place of honour on the stage by reverent friends.

Charles Russell Lowell was in the class preceding mine; his father had been my father's classmate, and had done me many a favour; his mother was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar of his class, of whom the utmost was expected. How strange that fate should have made them soldiers! They both perished on the battle-field. As I remember Charlie Lowell, the boy was fitly the father of the man. We were playing football one day on the Delta, the old-fashioned game of those days, at which modern athletes smile, but which we old fellows think was a good tough game for all that. I had secured the ball, and thinking I had time, placed it rather leisurely, promising myself an effective kick. A slight figure bounded with lightning rush from the opposing line, and from under my very foot drove the ball far behind me to a point which secured victory.

How little I knew that I had just witnessed a small exhibition of the quickness and prompt decision which no long time after on critical battle-fields were to be put to splendid use. He proved to be a nearly perfect soldier; Sheridan said of him, that he knew of no virtue that could be added to Lowell. To us he seems one of the manliest of men, thoughtful for others, even for dumb beasts. In Edward Emerson's charming life of him, nothing, perhaps, is sweeter than his affection for his horses, of which it was said that thirteen were killed under him before he came to death himself. He studied their characters as if they had been human beings, and dwells in his letters on the particular lovable traits each one showed—these mute companions who stood so closely by him in life and death.

When our class first assembled in 1851 there was a slight boy of seventeen in the company, Francis Channing Barlow. He was inconspicuous through face or figure, but it early became clear that he was to be our first scholar, and a wayward deportment with an odd sardonic wit soon made him an object of interest. Barlow came admirably fitted, and this good preparation, standing back of great quickness and power of mind, made it easy for him almost without study to take a leading place. As a boy he was well grounded, outside of his special accomplishments, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I remember his telling me that his mother read Plutarch to him when he was a child, and that and many another good book he had thoroughly stored away. Such accomplishments were an exasperation to us poor fellows who had come in from the remote outskirts and found we must compete for honours with men so well equipped. We perhaps magnified the gifts and acquirements of the fellows who had been more favourably placed. Barlow seemed like a paragon of scholarship, and the nonchalance with which he always won in the classrooms was a constant marvel. He had a queer way of turning serious things into fun. With a freshman desire for self-improvement, a thing apt to evaporate in the college atmosphere, we had formed a society for grave writing and debate and hired for our meetings the lodge-room of the "Glorious Apollers" or some such organisation. At an early meeting of the society, while we were solemnly struggling through a dignified programme, Barlow suddenly appeared from a side-door rigged out most fantastically in plumes and draperies. He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had come to take part. He danced and paraded before the conclave and had no difficulty in turning the session into a wild revel of extravagant guffaws and antics, and after that time the occasions were many when Barlow gave a comic turn to things serious. It was said that Barlow, going back and forth on the train between Concord and Boston as he did at one time, got hold of an impressionable brake-man, and by exhortation brought about in him a change of heart, after the most approved evangelical manner, counterfeiting perfectly the methods of a revivalist, which he did for the fun of the thing. The story, of course, was an invention, but quite in character.

He was no respecter of conventions and sometimes trod ruthlessly upon proprieties. "What will Barlow do next?" was always the question. In the class-room he was never rattled in any emergency, his really sound scholarship was always perfectly in hand and in a strait no one could bluff it with such sang-froid and audacity. He kept his place at the head of the class to the very end, but there Robert Treat Paine came out precisely his equal. Among the many thousand marks accumulating through four years the total for both men was exactly alike—a thing which I believe has never happened before or since.