Belonging to this "despised" class of fighting generals, of which Hooker and Sheridan, as I have endeavored to show, despite this McClellan theory, are brilliant graduates, are Major Generals John A. Logan, of Illinois, and Lovell H. Rousseau, of Kentucky. Each of these four is endowed mentally, and constituted by nature, to be a leader of men. Hooker and Sheridan have been confirmed generals by education. Rousseau and Logan owe every thing to nature, and are leaders, not generals, intuitively. The first two have been educated at West Point into being good directors of armed battalions, but it goes "against the grain" with either to confine himself solely to the direction of a battle, and hence they are often seen in battle obeying the dictates of nature, and leading charges which they should direct. Rousseau and Logan never enjoyed the advantages of West Point, and, as nature is unchecked in them by education, he who hunts for them on the battle-field must look along the front line, and not with the reserves. Neither Logan nor Rousseau would be content—it can not really be said that they are competent—to direct a battle on a grand scale: it would simply be an impossible task on the part of either, for they are neither educated nor constituted naturally to be commanders, in the technical sense of the term. They are neither strategists nor even tacticians. Both are bold, daring, enthusiastic in spirit; one has a commanding presence, and the other an inspiring eye, and the natural and most effective position of each is at the head of forlorn hopes, or leading desperate charges to successful issues.
The same contrast in person between "Fighting Joe Hooker," tall, towering, and always graceful, and "Little Phil Sheridan," short, quick, and rough, can be traced between Rousseau, a huge, magnificent, ponderous, and handsome figure, and "Black Jack Logan," a somewhat short but graceful figure, in whose forehead is set the finest pair of eyes ever possessed by a man. The personnel of these four warriors differs very much. Hooker and Rousseau are very different types of the tall and elegant "human form divine," and Logan and Sheridan illustrate the graceful and the graceless in little men; but the great hearts of each beat alike, and on the battle-field the daring and boldness of each are equally conspicuous and effective.
Of all these heroes, however, Rousseau is most naturally a leader. His whole career, civil and military, illustrates him as such; and only in a country of the extent of ours, with such varied and complex interests existing within each other, could any man attain the success with which he has been rewarded, without at the same time gaining such fame as would have made his name as familiar in every home as household words, and invested him with a national reputation. It is a fact illustrative of the vast extent of the late war, and of the existence of the various sectional interests which were second to the great, absorbing feeling of devotion to the whole Union, that there are thousands of people in the East who do not know aught of the geographical position of Western battle-fields, or the history of the military career of the more distinguished officers of the Western armies. The case is also reversed, and such distinguished men as Meade, Hancock, and Sickles, and hundreds less renowned, are hardly known at the West. The people of the East, naturally absorbed in the interests which are nearest and dearest to them, are intimately acquainted with the history and achievements of the chosen leaders of their sons and brothers of the Potomac armies, but know little in detail of the leaders of the Western armies. To the people of the East, Rosecrans is a myth of whom they remember only that he met disaster at Chickamauga; and of Thomas they know little more than that he was the hero of that same defeat. They know little of McPherson, McClernand, Dodge, Blair, Oglesby, Osterhaus, and others, save that they "were with Grant" at Vicksburg and elsewhere. Indeed, the whole army of the West enjoy in the East a mythical existence, and Logan and Rousseau live in our memories as undefinedly, though as firmly, as many of the characters of romance. Nine out of every ten who are asked to tell who and what they are will be puzzled for a reply, and will state much that is pure romance, and nothing illustrative of their characters. And yet no two men have been more prominent or more popular in the armies with which they were connected than these two rising men of the West.
General Rousseau, of whom it is proposed to speak in this chapter, is not a strategist nor a tactician according to the rules of West Point, in whose sciences he is uneducated save by the practical experience of the past four years of war. He makes no pretensions to a knowledge of engineering, or strategy, or grand tactics, is not even versed in the details of logistics; but of all those who have won reputation as hard, pertinacious, and dashing fighters, none more deserve their fame than he. His battles have been brilliant, if short; desperate and bloody contests, in which more has resulted from courage and the enthusiasm imparted to the men than from strategy and tactics. If examination is made into Rousseau's career, it will be found that he has ever been in the front line of battle, not only at Buena Vista, in our miniature contest with Mexico, at Shiloh, Perryville, and Stone River, but in every aspect, and under all circumstances of his career, always ahead, and leading his people in politics as in war. A self-educated and self-made man, of strong intellectual and reasoning powers, quick to resolve and prompt to act, he appears at all times in that noble attitude of one who has led instead of following public sentiment. In youth he was left the junior member of an orphaned family, of which his habit of decision made him the head and chief dependence. Emigrating in 1841 to Indiana, he made himself, by his talents, the leader of a party which had never attained success before his advent, and never won it after his retirement. His personal popularity retained him a seat in the Senate of Indiana for six years. In the middle of the term for which he was elected in 1848, he returned to Kentucky, and began the practice of law at Louisville. The Democrats of the Indiana Senate insisted he should resign, because a non-resident, but his constituents would not allow him to retire; and Rousseau threatened in retaliation to return to reside in Indiana and again run for the Senate. The Democrats were afraid of this very thing, and opposition to Rousseau's retention of his seat for the rest of the term was silenced. The Democrats contented themselves with trying to throw ridicule on him by calling him "the member from Louisville."
Returning to Kentucky in 1849, Rousseau was one of the few of her sons who were prepared to second or adopt the views then agitated by Henry Clay in regard to emancipating slaves. In 1855, when "Know-Nothingism" had swallowed up his old party—the Whig—and held temporarily a great majority in his city, county, and state, Rousseau became the leader of the small minority which rejected the false doctrines of the "American" party. His bitter denunciation of its practices, its tendencies to mob violence, and his persistent opposition to its encroachments on individual rights, nearly cost him his life at the hands of a mob who attacked him while defending a German in the act of depositing his vote. He was shot through the abdomen, and confined for two months to his bed, but had the satisfaction to know, when well again, that the party he had fought almost single-handed had no longer an organized existence. He was also instrumental, in 1855, in saving two of the Catholic churches of Louisville from destruction at the hands of a mob of Know-Nothings, and gained in popularity with both parties, when the passion and excitement of the time had passed away, by these exhibitions of his great courage and sense of right and justice.
It was not merely, however, through the political excitement of the day that Rousseau won his popularity and established his character. For many years past—for at least two generations before the war—the courts of Kentucky have been noted for the many important and exciting criminal trials which have come up in them, and no bar presented finer opportunities for a young criminal lawyer. From the time of Rousseau's return to Kentucky in 1849 to the period when he went into the army in 1861, no important criminal case was tried in the Kentucky courts in which he did not figure on one side or the other. In 1843, the old system of pleading in the common law courts of England, as it existed before it had been clipped and modified by legislation, was in vogue at the Indiana bar, and on his advent in that state Rousseau soon found that no lawyer could practice respectably there without special pleading. A lawyer who was not a special pleader would in those days frequently find his case and himself thrown out of court, without exactly understanding how it was done. He therefore studied special pleading as a system in itself, taking the old English authors on the subject, and, after a few years' hard study and practice, soon made himself one of the best special pleaders in the West. When he returned to Kentucky, this system, not so thoroughly in use there, gave him several triumphs, which at once established his character and gave him plenty of practice. As a jury lawyer Rousseau has had no rival in his district since 1855; and the late Attorney General of the United States, James Speed, acknowledges himself indebted to Rousseau for several of his worst defeats before juries. Knowing the particular and peculiar legal talents of Rousseau, the attorney general employed him to aid in the prosecution of Jeff Davis for treason, and to assist Hon. John H. Clifford and William M. Evarts in the important duty of endeavoring to define treason.
There occurred in Louisville in 1857 a trial of a very remarkable character, which illustrates in a very interesting manner Rousseau's legal ability and his decision and daring. A family of five or six persons, named Joyce, were murdered, and their bodies burned in their house near the city. Suspicion fell upon some negroes on the adjoining plantation, and they were seized by the neighbors and threatened with hanging if they did not confess. One or two of them were hung up for a few moments and then let down nearly exhausted, but still persisted in declaring their innocence. Another, however, tied to a stake, and the fagots fired around him, agreed to confess, and, to avoid death by burning, confessed that himself and the others arrested with him had committed the murder. The negroes—four of them, all belonging to one man—were thrown into jail to await their trial. Their master was satisfied that they were innocent, and determined to engage the best available counsel for them. This was easier to propose than to do, for so great was the excitement among the people that, extending to the lawyers, no other counsel besides Rousseau could be retained, and he was compelled to undertake the defense unaided. He had always been very popular in the district in which the murder had been committed, and many of his old friends from the neighborhood visited him, and urged him not to sacrifice his popularity with them by defending such abased and brutal criminals as these negroes. In vain Rousseau urged that the greater the guilt the greater the necessity for a lawyer. His friends could listen to no reason, and saw no justification in defending negroes who deserved to be hung according to their own confession. When Rousseau intimated that he did not believe the confession, and alluded to the manner in which it had been extorted, they would go away in disgust, and many cursed him for "a damned abolitionist."
When the trial came on, the people of the district in which the murder had been committed crowded the court-house night and day. The sole surviving member of the family, a young man also named Joyce, occupied a seat within the railing of the court-room, while the crowd of his friends were kept outside of the bar. The feeling of animosity in the crowd against the negroes was only kept from breaking out into fury by the certainty of their conviction and punishment by law; but fears were justly entertained that some development of the trial might so excite the by-standers as to cause the instantaneous hanging of the negroes. This fear was fully justified, and an attempt to hang them was only frustrated by the prompt action and daring of Rousseau. The sole evidence for the prosecution was that of the negro who had confessed, and he was put upon the stand, after the usual preliminaries, to give his statement in open court. The negro went on, in a hesitating manner, to give, with many contradictions, the story of how the murder had been committed, and the house fired in several places. He stated that, after the house was almost encircled in flames, the youngest child of the murdered family, a little girl of two years, who had been overlooked in the hurry of the massacre, aroused by the light, sat up in bed and asked, calling to her mother, to know "if she was cooking breakfast." At this part of the evidence there was a deathlike stillness through the court-room. The crowd, horrified, seemed afraid to draw a breath for a moment, and the negro witness himself appeared to fully comprehend the danger of the situation and hesitated. At last one old gentleman—I think he was one of the jury—shading his eye with his hands as if to shut out the scene, uttered, in a pitiful tone through his clenched teeth, the sound which I can only express by "tut! tut! tut! tut!" The half hissing sound could be heard all over the court-room, and as it was heard a cold shudder ran through the crowd, followed a moment after by crimson flushes of passion on bronzed cheeks. In the midst of the silent excitement—for it was an excitement so profound as almost robbed men of the power of speech—young Joyce sprang to his feet and exclaimed,