We passed a long hour in the Libby, and then visited Castle Thunder and the hospitals for our wounded. I should be glad to describe what I saw in those "institutions," but the limits of my paper forbid it.
It was five o'clock when we bade the Judge a friendly good-bye, and took our seats in the ambulance. As we did so, he said to us,—
"I have not taken your parole, Gentlemen. I shall trust to your honor not to disclose anything you have seen or heard that might operate against us in a military way."
"You may rely upon us, Judge; and, some day, give us a chance to return the courtesy and kindness you have shown to us. We shall not forget it."
We arrived near the Union lines just as the sun was going down. Captain Hatch, who had accompanied us, waved his flag as we halted near a grove of trees, and a young officer rode over to us from the nearest picket-station. We despatched him to General Foster for a pair of horses, and in half an hour entered the General's tent. He pressed us to remain to dinner, proposing to kill the fatted calf,—"for these my sons were dead and are alive again, were lost and are found."
We let him kill it, (it tasted wonderfully like salt pork,) and in half an hour were on our way to General Butler's head-quarters.
Here ended our last day in Dixie, and here, perhaps, should end this article; but the time has come when I can disclose my real purpose in seeking an audience of the Rebel leader; and as such a disclosure may relieve me, in the minds of candid men, from some of the aspersions cast upon my motives by Rebel sympathizers, I willingly make it. In making it, however, I wish to be understood as speaking only for myself. My companion, Colonel Jaquess, while he fully shared in my motives, and rightly estimated the objects I sought to accomplish, had other, and, it may be, higher aims. And I wish also to say, that to him attaches whatever credit is due to any one for the conception and execution of this "mission." While I love my country as well as any man, and in this enterprise cheerfully perilled my life to serve it, I was only his co-worker: I should not have undertaken it alone.
No reader of this magazine is so young as not to remember, that, between the first of June and the first of August last, a Peace simoom swept over the country, throwing dust into the people's eyes, and threatening to bury the nation in disunion. All at once the North grew tired of the war. It began to count the money and the blood it had cost, and to overlook the great principles for which it was waged. Men of all shades of political opinion—radical Republicans, as well as honest Democrats—cried out for concession, compromise, armistice,—for anything to end the war,—anything but disunion. To that the North would not consent, and peace I knew could not be had without it, I knew that, because on the sixteenth of June, Jeff. Davis had said to a prominent Southerner that he would negotiate only on the basis of Southern Independence, and that declaration had come to me only five days after it was made.
The people, therefore, were under a delusion. They were crying out for peace when there was no peace,—when there could be no peace consistent with the interest and security of the country. The result of this delusion, were it not dispelled, would be that the Chicago Convention, or some other convention, would nominate a man pledged to peace, but willing to concede Southern independence, and on that tide of popular frenzy he would sail into the Presidency. Then the deluded people would learn, too late, that peace meant only disunion. They would learn it too late, because power would then be in the hands of a Peace Congress and a Peace President, and it required no spirit of prophecy to predict what such an Administration would do. It would make peace on the best terms it could get; and the best terms it could get were Disunion and Southern Independence.