Читать книгу The Boys of '61 or, Four Years of Fighting, Personal Observations with the Army and Navy - Charles Carleton Coffin - Страница 9

Ladies working for the Army.

A correspondent of the Charleston Mercury thus writes of the aspect of affairs in the Rebel lines at that moment:—

"When I entered the field at two o'clock the fortunes of the day were dark. The regiments so badly injured, or wounded and worn, as they staggered out gave gloomy pictures of the scene. We could not be routed, perhaps, but it is doubtful whether we were destined to a victory."

"All seemed about to be lost," wrote the correspondent of the Richmond Dispatch. There was a dust-cloud in the west. I saw it rising over the distant woods, approaching nearer each moment. A few moments later the fatal mistake of Major Barry was made.[2] Griffin and Ricketts could have overwhelmed the newly arrived troops, less than three regiments, with canister. But it was not so to be. One volley from the Rebels, and the tide of affairs was reversed; and the Union army, instead of being victor, was vanquished.

A few moments before the disaster by Mrs. Henry's house, I walked past General Schenck's brigade, which was standing in the road a few rods east of the bridge. A Rebel battery beyond the run was throwing shells, one of which ploughed through the Second Ohio, mangling two soldiers, sprinkling their warm blood upon the greensward.

While drinking at a spring, there was a sudden uproar, a rattling of musketry, and one or two discharges of artillery. Soldiers streamed past, throwing away their guns and equipments. Ayer's battery dashed down the turnpike. A baggage wagon was hurled into the ditch in a twinkling. A hack from Washington, which had brought out a party of Congressmen, was splintered to kindlings. Drivers cut their horses loose and fled in precipitate haste. Instinct is quick to act. There was no time to deliberate, or to obtain information. A swift pace for a half-mile placed me beyond Cub Run, where, standing on a knoll, I had a good opportunity to survey the sight, painful, yet ludicrous to behold. The soldiers, as they crossed the stream, regained their composure and fell into a walk. But the panic like a wave rolled over Centreville to Fairfax. The teamsters of the immense wagon train threw bags of coffee and corn, barrels of beef and pork, and boxes of bread, upon the ground, and fled in terror towards Alexandria. The fright was soon over. The lines at Centreville were in tolerable order when I left that place at five o'clock.

Experience is an excellent teacher, though the tuition is sometimes expensive. There has been no repetition of the scenes of that afternoon during the war. The lesson was salutary. The Rebels on several occasions had the same difficulty. At Fair Oaks, Glendale, and Malvern we now know how greatly demoralized they became. No troops are exempt from the liability of a panic. Old players are not secure from stage fright. The coolest surgeon cannot always control his nerves. The soldiers of the Union in the battle of Bull Run were not cowards. They fought resolutely. The contest was sustained from early in the morning till three in the afternoon. The troops had marched from Centreville. The heat had been intense. Their breakfast was eaten at one o'clock in the morning. They were hungry and parched with thirst, yet they pushed the Rebels back from Sudley Springs, past the turnpike to the hill by Mrs. Henry's.

There is abundant evidence that the Rebels considered the day as lost, when Kirby Smith arrived.

Says the writer in the Richmond Dispatch, alluded to above:—

"They pressed our left flank for several hours with terrible effect, but our men flinched not till their numbers had been so diminished by the well-aimed and steady volleys that they were compelled to give way for new regiments. The Seventh and Eighth Georgia Regiments are said to have suffered heavily.

"Between two and three o'clock large numbers of men were leaving the field, some of them wounded, others exhausted by the long struggle, who gave us gloomy reports; but as the fire on both sides continued steadily, we felt sure that our brave Southerners had not been conquered by the overwhelming hordes of the North. It is, however, due to truth to say that the result of this hour hung trembling in the balance. We had lost numbers of our most distinguished officers. Generals Bartow and Bee had been stricken down; Lieutenant-Colonel Johnson of the Hampton Legion had been killed; Colonel Hampton had been wounded.

"Your correspondent heard General Johnson exclaim to General Cocke just at the critical moment, 'O for four regiments!' His wish was answered, for in the distance our reinforcements appeared. The tide of battle was turned in our favor by the arrival of General Kirby Smith from Winchester, with four thousand men of General Johnson's division. General Smith heard while on the Manassas Railroad cars the roar of battle. He stopped the train, and hurried his troops across the field to the point just where he was most needed. They were at first supposed to be the enemy, their arrival at that point of the field being entirely unexpected. The enemy fell back and a panic seized them."

Smith had about seventeen hundred men instead of four thousand, but he came upon the field in such a manner, that some of the Union officers supposed it was a portion of McDowell's troops. Smith was therefore permitted to take a flanking position within close musket-shot of Rickett's and Griffin's batteries unmolested. One volley, and the victory was changed to defeat. Through chance alone it seemed, but really through Providence, the Rebels won the field. The cavalry charge, of which so much was said at the time, was a feeble affair. The panic began the moment that Smith opened upon Ricketts and Griffin. The cavalry did not advance till the army was in full retreat.

It is laughable to read the accounts of the battle published in the Southern papers. The Richmond Dispatch has a letter written from Manassas 23d July, which has throughout evidences of candor, and yet this writer says, "We have captured sixty-seven pieces of artillery," while we had only thirty-eight guns on the field. Most necromancers have the ability to produce hens' eggs without number from a mysterious bag, but how they could capture sixty-seven pieces of cannon, when McDowell had but thirty-eight, is indeed remarkable. The same writer asserts that we carried into action the Palmetto State and the Confederate flags.

Here is the story of a wonderful cannon-ball. Says the writer: "A whole regiment of the enemy appeared in sight, going at double-quick down the Centreville road. Major Walton immediately ordered another shot. With the aid of our glass we could see them about two miles off. There was no obstruction, and the whole front of the regiment was exposed. One half were seen to fall, and if General Johnston had not at that moment sent an order to cease firing, nearly the whole regiment would have been killed!" The half that did not fall ought to be grateful to Major Walton for not firing a second shot. The writer says in conclusion: "Thus did fifteen thousand men, with eighteen pieces of artillery, drive back ingloriously a force exceeding thirty-five thousand, supported by nearly one hundred pieces of cannon. We have captured nine hundred prisoners, sixty-seven pieces of cannon, Armstrong guns and rifled cannon, hundreds of wagons, loads of provisions and ammunition."

One writer asserted that thirty-two thousand pairs of handcuffs were taken, designed for Rebel prisoners! This absurd statement was believed throughout the South. In January, 1862, while in Kentucky, I met a Southern lady who declared that it must be true, for she had seen a pair of the handcuffs!

The war on the part of the North was undertaken to uphold the Constitution and the Union, but the battle of Bull Run set men to thinking. Four days after the battle, in Washington I met one who all his lifetime had been a Democrat, standing stanchly by the South till the attack on Sumter. Said he: "I go for liberating the niggers. We are fighting on a false issue. The negro is at the bottom of the trouble. The South is fighting for the negro, and nothing else. They use him to defeat us, and we shall be compelled to use him to defeat them."

These sentiments were gaining ground. General Butler had retained the negroes who came into his camp, calling them "contraband of war." Men were beginning to discuss the propriety of not only retaining, but of seizing, the slaves of those who were in arms against the government. The Rebels were using them in the construction of fortifications. Why not place them in the category with gunpowder, horses, and cattle? The reply was, "We must respect the Union people of the South." But where were the Union people?

There were some in Western Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri; but very few in Eastern Virginia. At Centreville there was one man in the seedy village who said he was for the Union: he was a German. At a farm-house just out of the village, I found an old New-Yorker, who was for the Union; but the mass of the people, men, women, and children, had fled—their minds poisoned with tales of the brutality of Northern soldiers. The mass of the people bore toward their few neighbors, who still stood for the Union, a most implacable hatred. I recall the woebegone look which overspread the countenance of a good woman at Vienna on Sunday night, when, as she gave me a draught of milk, I made a plain, candid statement of the disaster which had befallen our army. Her husband had been a friend to the Federal army, had given up his house for officers' quarters; had suffered at the hands of the Rebels; had once been obliged to flee, leaving his wife and family of six children, all of tender age, and the prospect was gloomy. He had gone to bed, to forget in sleep, if possible, the crushing blow. It was near midnight, but the wife and mother could not sleep. She was awake to every approaching footstep, heard every sound, knowing that within a stone's throw of the dwelling there were those, in former times fast friends, who now would be among the first to hound her and her little ones from the place; and why? because they loved the Union!

What had produced this bitterness? There could be but one answer—Slavery. It was clear that, sooner or later, the war would become one of emancipation—freedom to the slave of every man found in arms against the government, or in any way aiding or abetting treason. How seductive, how tyrannical this same monster Slavery!

Three years before the war, a young man, born and educated among the mountains of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, graduating at Williams College, visited Washington, and called upon Mr. Dawes, member of Congress from Massachusetts, to obtain his influence in securing a position at the South as a teacher. Mr. Dawes knew the young man, son of a citizen of high standing, respected not only as a citizen, but in the highest branch of the Legislature of the State in former times, and gladly gave his influence to obtain the situation. A few days after the battle Mr. Dawes visited the Old Capitol prison to see the prisoners which had been brought in. To his surprise he found among them the young man from Berkshire, wearing the uniform of a Rebel.

"How could you find it in your heart to fight against the flag of your country, to turn your back upon your native State, and the institutions under which you have been trained?" he asked.

"I didn't want to fight against the flag, but I was compelled to."

"How compelled?"

"Why, you see, they knew I was from the North; and if I hadn't enlisted, the ladies would have presented me with a petticoat."

He expressed himself averse to taking the oath of allegiance. It was only when allusion was made to his parents—the poignant grief which would all but break his mother's heart, were she to hear of him as a soldier in the traitors' lines—that he gave way, and his eyes filled with tears. He could turn against his country, his State, the institutions of freedom, because his heart was in the South, because he had dreaded the finger of scorn which would have cowed him with a petticoat, but he could not blot out the influence of a mother's love, a mother's patriotism. He had not lived long enough under the hot breath of the simoom to have all the early associations withered and crisped. The mention of "mother" made him a child again.

With him was another Massachusetts man, who had been South many years, and who was more intensely Southern than himself. Another young man, a South Carolinian, was a law student in Harvard College when his State seceded. He went home to enlist. "If it had not been for the war I should now be taking my degree," said he. He was rejoicing over the result of the battle.

Slavery is not only tyrannical, but it is corrupting to morals. The Secessionists of St. Joseph, Missouri, in their eagerness to precipitate a Kansas regiment to destruction, burned a bridge on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, a few miles east of St. Joseph. The train left the city at three o'clock in the morning, and reached the bridge before daybreak. The regiment was not on board, and instead of destroying a thousand Union soldiers, a large number of the citizens of St. Joseph—with women and children, friends and neighbors of the Secessionists—were plunged into the abyss!

The action of these Missouri barbarians was applauded by the Secessionists of Washington. A friend came into my room late one evening in great excitement.

"What is the matter?"

"I am sick at heart," said he, "at what I have heard. I called upon some of my female acquaintances to-night. I knew that they were Secessionists, but did not think that they were so utterly corrupt as I find them to be. They are refined, intelligent, and have moved in the first society of Washington. They boldly declared that it was justifiable to destroy that railroad train in Missouri; that it is right to poison wells, or violate oaths of allegiance, to help on the cause of the South!"

The bitterness of the women of the South during the Rebellion is a strange phenomenon, without a parallel in history. For the women of Ireland, who in the rebellion of '98 cut off the heads of English residents, and chopped up their victims by piecemeal, were from the bogs and fens—one remove only from the beasts; but these women of the South lay claims to a superior culture. It is one thing to be devoted heart and soul to a cause, but it is quite another to advance it at the cost of civilization, Christianity, and the womanly virtues.

The assertion that all women of the South thus gave themselves over to do wickedly, would be altogether too sweeping; a large portion may be included. Mrs. Greenhow and Belle Boyd have written out some of their exploits and machinations for the overthrow of the Union. With them, a false oath or any measure of deceit, was praiseworthy, if it would but aid the Secession cause. They are fair representatives of the females of the South.

Forwarded free.