With Fire and Sword

by S. H. M. Byers

We went in to lunch and the General announced to the staff his intention of sending me down the river, and off to General Grant with dispatches. This chance to get word of his movements and his successes to General Grant and the North was of vast importance, and it moved him greatly. He left his lunch half finished and commenced writing letters and reports to the commander-in-chief. That evening at twilight General Sherman walked with me down to the riverside where the little tug lay waiting. "When you reach the North," he said, putting his arm around me, "don't tell them we have been cutting any great swath in the Carolinas; simply tell them the plain facts; tell them that the army is not lost, but is well, and still marching." So careful was I as to his injunctions, that even the newspapers at Washington never knew how the great news from Sherman reached the North.

I did not know then, starting down the river with my message, that it was to be seven years before I was again to see the face of my beloved commander.

The Cape Fear River was flooded at this time, a mile wide, in places even more, and though its banks were lined with guerrillas there could not be great danger, if we could stay in the middle of the stream, unless our little boat should get wrecked in the darkness by floating trees or by running into shallow places. The lights were all put out. The pilot house and the sides of the boat were covered by bales of cotton, to protect us against the Rebel bullets. My dispatches to General Grant were carefully sewed up inside my shirt, and were weighted, so that I could hastily sink them in the river should we be captured. A half dozen refugees from Columbia joined us. Among them was the Mrs. C——, whose property Devine and I had tried to save the night of the fire. It was a curious and dangerous voyage down that roaring, flooded river for a woman to be undertaking in the darkness, but this woman had now undertaken many dangers. Another of my companions on that strange voyage was Theodore Davis, a corresponding artist of Harper's Weekly. We kept the boat in the channel as far as we could guess it, and, for the rest, simply floated in the darkness. We went through undiscovered; not a shot fired at us. Before daylight, so swift had been the current, we were in Wilmington.

General Terry had just taken Wilmington and was in command of the city. Some of my dispatches were for him. He was still in bed, in one of the fine residences of the place, but instantly arose and urged me to jump into bed and get some rest while he should arrange to get me immediate transportation to Grant. I slept till nine, and when I came down to the drawing-room, now used as headquarters, General Terry asked if perhaps it were I who wrote the song about Sherman's March from Atlanta seaward. It had been sung at the theater the night before, he said. I was much gratified to have him tell me that the whole army had taken it up. "Tens of thousands of men," he said, "were singing it." I knew, as already told, that an exchanged prisoner had brought the song through the Rebel lines in an artificial leg he wore, but it was an agreeable surprise to now learn of its sudden and tremendous success.

General Terry impressed me as the handsomest soldier I had seen in the army—McPherson, the commander of my own corp, only excepted. He was, too, a refined and perfect gentleman. Looking at him I thought of the cavaliers of romance. Here was real knighthood, born and bred in the soil of the republic. The laurels for his heroic capture of Fort Fisher were fresh on his brow.

Before noon an ocean steamer, the Edward Everett, was ordered to take me at once to Fortress Monroe. Two of my army friends went along. The captain, leaving on so short notice, had provided his ship with insufficient ballast, and to me, a landsman, the vessel's lurchings were very astonishing. I had never seen the ocean before, and it was not long till I wished I might never see it again. To add to my alarm, a fierce tempest sprang up as we passed around Cape Hatteras, and the danger was no longer imaginary, but very real. The few passengers on the boat might as well have been dead, so far as any self-help was to be thought of in case of disaster. Even the captain was very seasick, and, altogether, passengers and crew were badly scared. For many hours it was nothing but a fierce blow and a roll about on the mad waters. All things come to an end; so did this storm, and at last we reached Fortress Monroe, where I was hurriedly transferred by some sailors in a yawl over to a boat that had already started up the James toward Richmond. Our captain had signaled that he had a dispatch bearer from the Carolinas. We had not gone far until we passed the top of a ship's mast sticking a few feet above the water. It was the mast of the Cumberland, that had gone down in her fight with the Merrimac with as brave a crew as ever manned a war boat.

The steamer I was now on was crowded with officers in bright uniforms, apparently returning to their regiments. I wondered if all the Eastern army had been home on a furlough. I could not help contrasting to myself this ship full of sleek, brightly uniformed officers with the rough-clad soldiers and officers of the army of Sherman. Sherman's foragers and veterans of the March to the Sea might have cut an awkward figure alongside these gay youths just from Washington.

In the afternoon the ship came to at City Point, and I climbed up the bank of the river bluff for perhaps a hundred feet, and was soon directed to the headquarters of the commander-in-chief of the United States armies.

When I reached the open door of Grant's famous little cabin a young officer asked me to come in, and was introducing me to the chief of staff, Rawlins, who stood there with some letters in his hands. That instant General Grant showed his face at the door in the back of the room. I knew who it was at once. He stepped forward to where General Rawlins was speaking with me, listened to the conversation a moment, and without any formal introduction, smiled, took me by the hand and led me into the back room of the cabin shutting the door behind us. He asked me to sit down, but I first proceeded to rip the dispatches out of my clothing, and with intense interest watched his features while he sat on a camp stool by the window, his legs crossed, and read Sherman's letter. I could see the glow of silent satisfaction as he glanced along the lines that told of his great lieutenant's successes in the South. He glanced at another letter I held in my hand. "It is for the President," I said. "He will be here yet to-night," he answered. "His boat must now be coming up the bay."

Then General Grant questioned me as to all I knew about Sherman's army, the character of the opposition he had met, the condition of his soldiers, their clothing, the roads, the weather. He also asked me how I had reached him with the dispatches, coming all the way from the interior of North Carolina. He seemed to have thought for a moment that I had come across Virginia on foot. He wanted to know of me again about the terrible treatment of prisoners in the South. What I told him only "confirmed," he said, what he had heard from a hundred sources.