John C. Breckenridge now climbed down to grasp the depraved prize he had at last so well earned. Elected a Senator of the United States at the close of the Vice-Presidency in the preceding March, he readily took a voluntary oath to support the Constitution of an undivided land; played the spy upon the efforts of its government to thwart the attempts to dissever it; and at the close of the session, unable longer to profit by his office and oath, took a brigadier’s commission and a new oath against a country which had loaded his family and himself with its highest honors. Once the cherished type of a chivalrous gentleman, he engrafted upon the abused name of chivalry definitions more reproachful than those which spring from the addled eccentricities of Don Quixote; his old friends, if any such survive, must long have desired to feel that he had only lost an arm in a service which, undistinguished by any advantage brought to it by a man who had deserted everything for it, sunk the remains of a character once high, and an intellect once brilliant, to a depth compared with which history refuses an example. Others may plead some excuse, more or less admissible, for their armed heresies: Davis, that his was a logical sequence to his lifelong convictions of State supremacy; Toombs, Cobb, Stephens, and others, that their States dragged them out; Floyd, the necessity of putting money in his purse; Wise, the loss of a guiding intelligence. But to not one of these can John C. Breckenridge point to mitigate the just severities of that moral verdict which, in cases of such cumulated guilt, can only appease the general uneasiness at the exhibition of depravity so fathomless, by the most exemplary damages. Looking into the dreadful chasms, down which his example cast so many others; the maimed cripples, the hollow-eyed widows, Justice slain by stabs in the back, exiles from poor homes smitten by the bludgeons of secret agents, even humorous History grows stern-featured and allows a saddening pity to cloud her habitual smile, as she flings her knotted whip over the shoulders of high-born guilt.
As the year 1861 drew towards its close, the war, dropping in the old traditional path of empire, trended westward and seated itself in the valley of the Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant, then thirty-nine years old, newly assigned to the District of Cairo, took Paducah, Kentucky; and settled on Belmont,—not August, the banker, but a small town in Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, opposite Columbus, Kentucky. This latter place was then held by that mitred Spartan warrior, Leonidas Polk, who had left the light of the star which guided wise men to the Babe, for the hazy star of the major-general,—one of the dim twinklers in that milky-way which, after four years’ watering, disappeared from the sight of even telescopic gazers.
Gradually large forces were drawn to the State of Kentucky,—nicely balancing on neutral ground,—while her reluctant hand was coyly withdrawn from any Union by her guardian, Governor Magoffin, and was thereby sought with greater ardor by each suitor. The Confederates offered her a bridal Pillow, but the Federals sent Ulysses, that wise and silent Greek, whose manly deeds soon effectually won her affections.
Christmas eve, 1861, put a million of armed men and two millions of diurnal debt into the long stocking of iron-ridden America.
Division Second.
Cotton Mixed. January 1,1862, to January 1,1864.
The Road to Peace.—Distance thither illustrated.—What certain Knights might have learned.—The Difficulties created by losing Battles in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas detailed.—What Grant, Thomas, Curtis, and others did; and what Crittenden, Zollicoffer, etc, had done unto them.—Whistling in the Woods.—Wonderful Story-telling Powers of J. Davis.—How he repeated Tales with charming Variation.—A Sea Story in which Iron enters.—Farragut and Porter up the Mississippi.—Received at New Orleans with Illuminations and Bonfires.—Butler deals with effervescing Materials.—The Peninsular Campaign traced.—Spading and Fighting.—The Glories and Disasters of the Army of the Potomac.—The American Pope fallible.—Lee’s Trip into Maryland.—Accidents at South Mountain and Antietam.—Difficult Questions besiege Mr. Lincoln in Washington.—His New-Year’s Gift to the Slaves.—Getting rich on Paper.—Cotton mixed.—A Depraved Currency.—Hooker gets at Lee’s Rear at Chancellorsville.—What followed.—Lee at Gettysburg; gets the Advertising its Springs want.—The Sorrows of Vicksburg, July 4,1863.—The Mississippi open.—Mortar-boat Building.—Valor of Colored Regiments at Charleston; and of discolored Irish in New York.—Contrasts.—Grant Transfigured at Missionary Ridge and Look-Out Mountain without Bragging of it.
“How far is it, my boy, by this road to Drainsville?” asked a mud-spattered traveller of a shrewd lad by the roadside. “If you keep on the way that you are heading,” replied the boy, “and can manage the Atlantic and Pacific on horseback, it is 23,999 miles; if you turn your horse’s head and go right back it is one mile.”
Such were the comparative distances which the Equestrian Knights of the Woolly Order—had they inquired on New-Year’s morning, 1862—would have found parted them from that desirable end of their weary journey, the pleasant village of Peace. Looking, however, only at the delusive finger-boards which cottonized brains had set up along that way; singing jaunty songs of Southern superiority and Northern low-down manners; and listening to a confused distant cheer, occasionally borne to them by certain winds out of the North and by easterly breezes from Europe, they rode on, fancying that they would soon dismount at their journey’s end, give their splashed animals into the accustomed charge of the old faithful, colored ostlers, and set down to the old dishes of glorious hominy and glorifying homily. Instead, however, of this experience, they met interminable difficulties,—Generals Crittenden and Zollicoffer, jostled out of saddle by General Thomas at Mill Spring, and floundering badly through Kentucky into Tennessee; another set captured at and with Fort Henry, February[February] 6th, by Flag-Officer Foote, whose flotilla kept on, as if little conscious of its impertinent doings, up the Tennessee River as far as Florence, with encouraging shouts from loyal throats on either bank; Fort Donelson so surrendered to the silent-lipped Grant, February[February] 16th, and its twelve thousand men and forty pieces of cannon so thoroughly taken up by him as to furnish no stopping-place for the tired party; Missouri, constipated under the empiric treatment of Van Dorn and Price, and evacuated under the drastic prescriptions of General Curtis, too weak to entertain the travellers; Pea Ridge, Arkansas, so shelled out by the Union pickers March 6, 7, and 8, 1862, that Ben McCullough and numerous rangers had gone into dead silences when called upon for help; New Madrid given up with six thousand butternut-colored troops to the constraining faith in the American Pope; Shiloh delivered in April to the armed Emanuel of Union expectations; Island Number Ten, in the Mississippi, with its seven thousand hosts and vast supplies, taken possession of April 7th, so as to afford no shelter to the equestrians; the restoration of all Kentucky and Tennessee back into the soft bands of the Union; the destruction of the Confederate flotilla in Albemarle Sound, and the taking of Roanoke Island, Forts Macon and Pulaski,—these unexpected incidents, as they advanced on the long trip, were rude shocks to the sight, the comfort, and the spirits of the hard-whistling equestrians. Whistle however they did and must, to keep up their courage through the gloomy woods, while to stimulate the flagging tempers of some of the riders, the leading horseman, Davis, told them in a high voice—loud enough to be heard all over Europe—some very exciting stories about Northern atrocities, made-up tales that beat everything in the way of romance since the Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw. These stories always seemed to entertain the hard-travelling party, who frequently called upon him to repeat them, which he did with some charmingly horrible variations.
Suddenly, however, on the 8th of March, a novel sight greeted the eyes of all in Hampton Roads. The steam-frigate Merrimac, raised from her salty bed near Portsmouth, receiving a new coat of mail, an ugly looking iron rhinoceros-shaped snout, and the soft, new pet name of Virginia, rolled out in ungainly strength into the wide bay; and commenced goring the Federal herd of wooden frigates, fatally ripping up the Cumberland and Congress, and cruelly gashing the St. Lawrence and Roanoke. Unhurt herself, her scaly armor undented, she slunk back gorged to her lair, prepared for a more savage repast on the rest of the frightened gunboats and ships on the following morning; when lo! on the morrow, tumbling out for her cruel pastime, she met the little, pert, saucy Monitor, one fifth her size only, and also clothed in steel, which stepped up close by her side and delivered two unexpected, round messages, each weighing one hundred and sixty-eight pounds. Indignant at this interference with her intended lunch, the masculine Virginia commenced flinging iron bolts and round indignities, but the pert little thing hurled heavier blows back. The Virginia then punched her five times with her indignant snout; but the wee one only laughed at her impotent raillery, and pitched back at her such crashing logic, that she rolled back again with her maw wholly unsated. On the part of the Monitor it was a Word-en-a blow. The well-hammered arguments, taught by the new system of military logic, carried alarming weight wherever maritime questions are chopped.