Charles Carleton Coffin: War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman

by William Elliot Griffis

"In reviewing the contest, aided by the Southern account, it seems that all through the day, complete, decisive, annihilating victory lay within our grasp, and yet we did not take it."

Let us read further from the closing paragraph of that letter, which he wrote in Philadelphia, before moving West to the army in Kentucky:

"In saying this, I raise no criticism, make no question or blame, but prefer to look upon it as a controlling of that Providence which notices the fall of every sparrow. The time had not come for complete victory,—for annihilation of the rebel army. We are not yet over the Red Sea. The baptism of blood is not yet complete. The cause of the war is not yet removed,—retribution for crime is not yet finished. We must suffer again. With firmer faith than ever in the ultimate triumph of right, truth, and justice, let us accept the fiery ordeal."

Like the pendulum of an observatory clock, the bob-point of which touches at each vibration the mercury which transmits intelligence of its movements to distant points, Carleton now swung himself to Cincinnati. In Louisville he gave an account, from reports, of the battle of Perryville. It was written in the utmost haste, with one eye upon the hands of his watch moving on to the minute of the closing of the mail. In such a case, according to his custom, he wrote a second letter, when possessed with fuller data from eye-witnesses. In the heart of Kentucky he was able to see the effects of the President's Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued but three weeks before. He described the coming of the Confederate army into Kentucky as "the Flatterer, dressed in a white garment, who with many fair speeches would have turned Christian and Faithful from the glittering gates of the Golden City, shining serene and fair over the land of Beulah." The robe having dropped from Flatterer's limbs, the Kentuckian saw that the reality was hideous, and that to follow him was to go back again to the City of Destruction. The Confederates moved southward, laden with plunder, while General Buell, with his army of one hundred and forty thousand men, after having mildly pursued them for twenty-one days, returned to Louisville. Carleton's comment upon these movements is, "Such is strategy."

Finding himself again in the trough of inactivity, and ever ready to mount on the wave of opportunity, Carleton moved again to the East, writing in the cars while whirling to Virginia. His first letters from the East were penned at Harper's Ferry. Then began his zigzag movements, like a planet. We find his pen active at Berlin, Md., Purcellville, Va., Upperville, Va., where, beside the cavalry battles between Pleasanton and Stewart, he saw that seven corps were in motion. From Gainesville, Warrenton Junction, Orleans, Warrenton, Catlett's Station, and again and often from Washington, and from Falmouth, he sent his letters, which, if not always full of battle, kept the heart of New England patient and courageous.

McClellan had been removed, and Burnside, taking command, led his army to the riverside before Fredericksburg. Carleton was witness of the bombardment of the city by the Federal artillery. From his coign of vantage at General Sumner's headquarters, on the piazza of an elegant mansion, one hundred feet above the Rappahannock, and about three-quarters of a mile from it, he could see, as though it were a great cartoon and he a weaver of the Gobelins tapestry of history, the awful pattern of war. Beyond the sixteen rifled Rodman guns of large calibre and long range, mounted on the river bluff and thrust out through sand-bags, behind the masses of infantry, the pontoon and artillery trains, Carleton stood and saw the making of a bridge in fifteen minutes, in the face of a terrific musketry fire from the opposite shore. Then followed views of the street fight in the doomed city, the shattered houses, the cloudless sky, the setting sun, the gorgeous sunset dyes, the deepening shadows, the masses of men upon the opposite hills, the screaming shells, the puffs of white smoke, the bursting storms of iron, the blood-red flames illuminating the ruin of dwellings, the battle smoke settling in the valley, so densely as to obscure or hide the flashes. All this was before Carleton on that afternoon and evening of that winter's day, December 11th. Then he spread his blanket for a little sleep, expecting to awake to behold one of the greatest battles of modern times; but the sun set without the two great armies coming to close quarters.

The next day was a hard one, for Carleton was in the field until night, now watching a bombardment, now a charge, and again a long and stubborn, persistent musketry fire. The shells sang near him, and at one time he was evidently the target for a whole Confederate battery; for, within a few seconds, a round shot struck a few rods in front of him, a second fell to the right, a third went over his head, a fourth skimmed along the surface of the ground, just over the backs of a regiment, lying flat on their faces. As he moved to the shelter of the river bank, a shot dropped obligingly in the water before him. All day long the lines of batteries on the hills smoked like Etna and Vesuvius. Sometimes, between ordnance and musketry, there were twenty thousand flashes a minute. Carleton thus far had seen no battles where the fire equalled that which was poured upon Sumner's command during the last grand, but hopeless, charge at sunset. At nightfall, when the wearied soldiers could lie down for rest, Carleton began the work of writing his letter. Among other things he said:

"With the deference to military strategics, my own common sense deprecated attempting the movements which were made, as unnecessary and unwise,—which must be accomplished with fearful slaughter, and which I believed would be unsuccessful....

"It is a plain of Balaklava, where the Light Brigade, renowned in song, made their fearful charge."

Then follows a simple but sufficient diagram of the Confederate impregnable position, where, with only common printer's type, and the "daggers" of punctuation standing for Blakesley and Armstrong guns, printer's ink told the story. Though nearly exhausted by his manifold labors of brain and muscle, Carleton, on the 15th, visited the battle-field, which did not exceed one hundred acres, and the city in which the troops were quietly quartered, but in which a Confederate shell was falling every ten minutes. After surveying the near and distant scenes from the cupola of an already well-riddled house, Carleton followed the army when it withdrew to Falmouth, seeing through his glass the Confederates leaping upon the deserted entrenchments and staring at the empty town.