STRANGE STORIES
OF THE CIVIL WAR
I
A BOY’S IMPRESSIONS OF THE CIVIL WAR
EVERY time I see the citizen soldiers of the National Guard march down the avenue I have a choking sensation in my throat, and sometimes tears come to my eyes. A young man who stood beside me one day when I could not help making an exhibition of myself, said, “What’s the matter with you?” And my answer was, “They make me think of the men I saw going to the front in war-times.” Then the young man laughed, and said, “What can you remember of the war?” He was about twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, and the Civil War was to him something to be read of in a dusty book. I was five years old when the war began. I could read and write, and was going to school. Many of the things which I saw then made impressions on my mind never to be effaced this side of the grave.
I was living in the city of Pittsburg, at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers, whose waters, joined in the Ohio, flowed past many a field that will live in history. Pittsburg was not in the midst of the war, but it was close enough to some scenes of action, especially Gettysburg, and important enough as a point of departure and source of supplies to keep it filled with soldiers, and warmly in touch with all that was going on. What I wish to tell you is something about the way it all appeared to a boy.
My first recollection is of my father reading from a newspaper the announcement that Major Anderson and his garrison at Fort Sumter had been fired upon. That was in April, 1861, and I was in my sixth year; but I remember that I was greatly excited, and wondered what it all meant. It must have been later than that when my father gave me an explanation, which I remember to this day. He said: “My little boy, there is war between the people of the North and those of the South. The people in the South want to have slaves, and the people in the North say they must not have them. So the people of the South say they will not belong to the United States any more, and the people of the North say they must. And so they are fighting, and the fighting will go on till one or the other is beaten.”[1]
All at once Pittsburg became alive with military preparations. Drums were beating in the streets all day and far into the night. Every hour a detachment of soldiers would march along Smithfield Street, and as I lived just above the corner of it on Second Street, now called Second Avenue, I would run to see every squad go by, till it became tiresome, and nothing short of a regiment could interrupt my play. Those must have been the seventy-five thousand volunteers called for by Abraham Lincoln to serve three months and crush the rebellion. Some of those men came back at the end of their three months, but of that I remember little or nothing. The only thing that made a strong impression on me in the early days of the war, after the attack on Sumter, was the killing of Ellsworth. I suppose every boy knows now how the gallant young Colonel of the New York Fire Zouaves took down the Confederate flag that was flying over an inn in Alexandria, and was shot dead by the proprietor of the house, who was immediately killed by Private Brownell.
That incident fired the hearts of all the boys in Pittsburg. We could not understand much of what we heard about the movements of troops, and I have forgotten everything which may have reached my ears at the time. But we could understand the murder of Ellsworth, and to this day I remember how we little fellows burned with indignation, and how we all wished we had been Brownell to shoot down the innkeeper. Somehow the untimely fate of the brave young Zouave commander appealed to us very forcibly, and I think some of us cried about it. It appealed to our mothers too, and suddenly the little boys in Pittsburg began to blossom out in Zouave suits. My mother had one made for me—a light-blue jacket with brass buttons, a red cap, and red trousers. She bought me a little flag, and had my picture taken in my uniform, and she has that picture yet. Next she got me a little tin sword; and then two older boys procured blue army overcoats and caps, and borrowed two muskets from the property-man at the theatre, and I used to drill those boys, and march them proudly all over Pittsburg, to the intense delight of the grown-up people, who cheered us wherever we went.
The next thing which remains indelibly fixed in my memory is the surprise and terror which flashed across the whole North when we heard the news from Bull Run. Of course I do not remember the date of the battle, and I am obliged to refer to my history to find that it took place in July, 1861. But we boys in Pittsburg had been indulging in much loud talk, as boys will, of the way in which our soldiers were going to blow out the rebellion, as one would blow out a candle; and here came the news that these miserable rebels, whom we despised, had thrashed our glorious army terribly, and were thinking about walking into Washington. My impressions at the time were that a lot of Southern slave-drivers, armed with snake whips and wearing slouch-hats, would soon arrive in Pittsburg and make us all stand around and obey orders. My father about this time used to pace the floor in deep thought after reading the newspaper, and used to set off for business with a bowed head. Later in life I learned that in those days he drew his last twenty-five dollars out of the bank, and did not know where more was to come from. But I thought he expected to be killed or made a slave. The boys used to discuss what steps they would take if the rebels came, and it was pretty generally agreed that we would all have to run across the Monongahela River bridge, climb Coal Hill, and hide in the mines.
From the time of Bull Run to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln my boyhood memories, as they come back to me now, present no orderly sequence of events. In a dim way I remember the distress and consternation caused by the dread event at Ball’s Bluff, and in an equally uncertain way I remember how we cheered and danced when the news of a victory arrived. Just across the street from my father’s house stood the Homœopathic Hospital, and next to it was a vacant lot in which pig-iron was stored. There we boys were wont to resort. We sat on the piles of pig metal and gravely discussed the progress of the war, and I well remember that one of my earliest combats arose from my proclaiming my belief that General Burnside was a greater man than George B. McClellan. That was rank treason; but I think Burnside’s whiskers made a conquest of me. I will add that the dispute ended in a triumphant victory for the defender of McClellan’s fame. Thereupon I went home to my mother and “told on” the defender. I got little consolation, for my mother said: “Don’t come to me. If a boy hits you, you must hit back; but don’t come in crying to me.” We were a warlike race in those days.