General Andrews, three or four years ago a briefless young lawyer in a remote Minnesota village—such have been the rapid promotions the war has offered—showed us through the portions of the city destroyed, only a week or two before, by perhaps the most destructive explosion that ever devastated any American city. How it originated will be forever a mystery. Every one who might explain it perished. There were large quantities of ammunition stored near the upper end of the landing, and in the heart of the cotton warehouses. One of the concealed torpedoes left by the Rebels may have been touched; Rebels may themselves have stealthily arranged a system of wires to explode it; a percussion shell may have been dropped; some reckless dare-devil may have been smoking a cigar. However it occurred, there was a sudden roar in the midst of the busy throng of workmen and soldiers, and one common, instantaneous destruction overwhelmed them all.
Over four-fifths of the entire storage of the city was destroyed. A hundred mules were buried in a single corral. Days afterward corpses of here and there a hapless soldier began to be dug out by those who cared to risk exposure to the scattered shells still hourly exploding. Even when we drove down into the ruins we heard now and again a dull, heavy thud, like the stroke of some ponderous weight against the solid earth. It was a shell buried far beneath the rubbish of fallen houses, and fired by the heat that still smouldered across whole squares.
Long before we reached the scene of complete destruction, we came upon houses shattered, bottom stories bereft of superstructure, door and window-frames driven in, gable-ends standing up alone, without the roofs they were raised to bear. The streets were filled with the rubbish. Here was a little fragment of a wall, twenty bricks, perhaps, lying sidewise as they fell, still fastened by the unbroken mortar; there the whole outer course of a gable-end dropped flat, and paving the street. Other walls would still be standing; but six or eight feet from the ground the outer course of bricks had been abruptly started outward an inch or more, and thence upward the wall imitated the direction—but by no means, as we momentarily witnessed, the security—of the leaning towers of Pisa.
All this passed, we came to the scene of actual explosion. Here, for eight or ten squares, was one waste of broken brick and mortar, still smouldering and smoking, and still—horrible thought!—roasting beneath this parched debris its human victims. Solid warehouses, chimneys, cotton-presses, machinery, all had been flattened as a whirlwind might flatten a house of card-boards.
It was a sickening sequel to such a scene to listen, as we afterward did, to the descriptions by our surgeons in the old United States hospital, of the condition in which the Rebels had left it, filthy to the last degree, full of neglected sick men, destitute of medicines, or, indeed, of the commonest hospital comforts. Several of the surviving victims of the explosion had been brought here, who all seemed to attribute it to Rebel torpedoes, fired by design.
Among the soldiers who filled the other wards, it was curious to watch the recognition of the Chief Justice, by his likeness on the one-dollar greenbacks. Finally he entered into conversation with a soldier in one of the outer hospital tents, who told him he was from Ohio. “Ah, so am I.” “Are you? from what part?” asked the soldier. “Don’t you know Mr. Chase, your former Governor?” suggested General Andrews. “O yes; but, Governor, you must remember we haven’t seen any of them greenbacks o’ your’n for so long, we’ve kinder forgot the look o’ your features!” It seemed the paymaster had neglected him.
[26]. One of the best private libraries I have ever seen in the South belongs to a wealthy young Kentuckian, who has had a handsome catalogue of it printed. The books are classified for enumeration under subjects. Under the head of “Sports” were set down, first came others on the laws and usages of dueling! I was assured that the classification was intentional, and in accordance with Southern ideas., some works on gunning, fishing, cock-fighting, etc. Among these
[27]. He was subsequently permitted to renew it. Shortly afterward, copying and indorsing the foolish falsehood that Chief-Justice Chase had given it as his opinion, since his Southern tour, that the negro race would speedily root out the whites throughout the Gulf States, he thought it wise and in good taste to say:
“The Judge, before he made his recent tour through the South, believed that every white man within these States was too lazy to work, and, instead of going out in the morning to get the meat that was desired for dinner, would seize a young negro and pitch it into the dinner-pot, to be served up for the post-prandial meal. By diligent inquiry he found out that this was not true; and so he agreed to make a compromise between his prepossessions and the facts he discovered in his journey. The result is announced in the telegraphic report which we reprint above. We do not eat little negroes, as he believed, but we are so lazy that he seems to be fearful that, as we do not eat them, we are bound, from our demoralized condition, to be presently eaten by them. Well, this is what he has been teaching for many years—the right of the negro to eat the white man.