The Boys of '61 Part 64

"Why do you think so?"

"'Case when I hear bad white folks swearing and cursing about 'em, I reckon dar must be something good about 'em."

"Well, my friends, I am an Abolitionist; I believe that all men have equal rights, and that I have no more right to make a slave of you than you have of me."

Every hat came off in an instant. Hands were reached out toward me, and I heard from a dozen tongues a hearty "G.o.d bless you, sir!"

White men heard me and scowled. Had I uttered those words in Richmond twenty-four hours earlier I should have had no opportunity to repeat them, but paid for my temerity with a halter or a knife; but now those men who stretched out their hands to me would have given the last drop of their blood before they would have seen a hair of my head injured, after that declaration.

The slaves were the true loyal men of the South. They did what they could to help put down the Rebellion by aiding Union prisoners to escape, by giving trustworthy information. The Stars and Stripes was their banner of hope. What a life they led! I met a young colored man, with features more Anglo-Saxon than African, who asked,-

"Do you think, sir, that I could obtain employment in the North?"

"What can you do?"

"Well, sir, I have been an a.s.sistant in a drug store. I can put up prescriptions. I paid forty dollars a month for my time before the Confederate money became worthless, but my master thought that I was going to run away to the Yankees, and sold me awhile ago; and he was my own father, sir."

"Your own father?"

"Yes, sir! They often sell their own flesh and blood, sir!"

Among the correspondents accompanying the army was a gentleman connected with the Philadelphia Press, Mr. Chester, tall, stout, and muscular. G.o.d had given him a colored skin, but beneath it lay a courageous heart. Visiting the Capitol, he entered the Senate chamber and sat down in the Speaker's chair to write a letter. A paroled Rebel officer entered the room.

"Come out of there, you black cuss!" shouted the officer, clenching his fist.

Mr. Chester raised his eyes, calmly surveyed the intruder, and went on with his writing.

"Get out of there, or I'll knock your brains out!" the officer bellowed, pouring out a torrent of oaths; and rus.h.i.+ng up the steps to execute his threat, found himself tumbling over chairs and benches, knocked down by one well-planted blow between his eyes.

Mr. Chester sat down as if nothing had happened. The Rebel sprang to his feet and called upon Captain Hutchins of General Devens's staff for a sword.

"I'll cut the fellow's heart out," said he.

"O no, I guess not. I can't let you have my sword for any such purpose. If you want to fight, I will clear a s.p.a.ce here, and see that you have fair play, but let me tell you that you will get a tremendous thras.h.i.+ng," said Captain Hutchins.

The officer left the hall in disgust. "I thought I would exercise my rights as a belligerent," said Mr. Chester.

I ascended the steps of the Capitol and stood on the roof of the building to gaze upon the panorama, hardly surpa.s.sed in beauty anywhere,-a lovely combination of city, country, valley, hill, plain, field, forest, and foaming river. The events of four years came to remembrance. First, the secession of the state on the 17th of April, 1861, by the convention which sat with closed doors in the hall below, the threats of violence uttered against the Union delegates from the western counties, the wild tumult of the "People's Convention," so called, in Metropolitan Hall,-a body of Jacobins a.s.sembling to browbeat the convention in the Capitol; and when the ordinance was pa.s.sed, the appearance of John Tyler, once President of the United States, with Governor Wise, among the fire-eaters, welcomed with noisy cheers; it seemed as if I could hear the voice of Tyler as he said that Virginia and the people of the South had submitted to aggression till secession was a duty, and that the Almighty would smile upon the work of that day. They were the words of a feeble old man, whose every official act was in the interest of slavery. Vehement the words of Wise, who imagined that the Yankees had seized one of his children as a hostage for himself.

"If they suppose," said he, "that hostages of my own heart's blood will stay my hand in a contest for the maintenance of sacred rights, they are mistaken. Affection for kindred, property, and life itself sink into insignificance in comparison with the overwhelming importance of public duty in such a crisis as this."

Mason, the lordly senator, and Governor Letcher, the drunken executive of the State, also addressed the crazy crowd, fired to a burning heat of madness by pa.s.sion and whiskey.

On that occasion the Confederate flag was raised upon the flagstaff springing from the roof of the Capitol, although the State had not joined the Confederacy. The people were to vote on the question, and yet the Convention had enjoined that the act of secession should be kept a secret till Norfolk Navy Yard and Harper's Ferry a.r.s.enal could be seized.[98] The newspapers of Richmond had no announcement to make the next morning that the State was no longer a member of the Union. What honorable, high-minded, "chivalrous" proceedings!

Then came the volunteers thronging the streets. Professor Jackson (Stonewall) was drilling the cadets. Three days after the pa.s.sage of the ordinance of secession, troops were swarming in the yard around the Capitol, and A. H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, and Ex-President Tyler, and the drunken Letcher were negotiating an alliance offensive and defensive between the sovereign State of Virginia and the States already confederated to establish a slaveholding republic.

Next in order was the arrival of Jeff Davis and the perambulating government of the Confederacy, to tarry a few days in Richmond before proceeding to Was.h.i.+ngton. Davis and his followers made boastful promises of what they could and would do, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the hated Yankees. Then the hurly-burly,-the rush of volunteers, the arrival of troops, welcomed with cheers and smiles, the streets through which they pa.s.sed strewn with flowers by the ladies of Richmond. The Confederate Congress and heads of departments came,-Stephens, Toombs, Cobb, Floyd, Wigfall, Memminger, Mallory,-with thousands of place-hunters, filling the city to overflowing, putting money into the pockets of the citizens,-not gold and silver, but Confederate currency, to be redeemed two years after the ratification of the treaty of peace with the United States. Beauregard, the rising star of the South, came from Charleston, to reap fresh laurels at Mana.s.sas. Richmond was solemn on that memorable Sabbath, the 21st of June, 1861, for through the forenoon the reports were that the Yankees were winning the day; but at night, when the news came from Davis that the "cowardly horde" was flying, panic-stricken, to Was.h.i.+ngton, how jubilant the crowd!

A year later there were pale faces, when the army of McClellan swept through Williamsburg. Jeff Davis packed up his furniture, and made preparations to leave the city. There was another fright when the Rebels came back discomfited from Fair Oaks.

From the roof of the Capitol anxious eyes watched the war-clouds rolling up from Mechanicsville and Cold Harbor. Those were mournful days. Long lines of ambulances, wagons, coaches, and carts, filled with wounded, filed through the streets. How fearful the slaughter to the Rebels in those memorable seven days' fighting! Deep the maledictions heaped upon the drunken Magruder for the carnage at Malvern Hill.

Beneath the roof on which I stood Stuart, Gregg, and Stonewall Jackson,-dead heroes of the Rebellion,-had reposed in state, mourned by the weeping mult.i.tude.

Before me were Libby Prison and Belle Isle. What wretchedness and suffering there! Starvation for soldiers of the Union, within sight of the fertile fields of Manchester, waving with grain and alive with flocks and herds! Nearer the Capitol was the mansion of Jeff Davis, the slave-trader's jail and the slave-market. What agony and cries of distress within the hearing of the Chief Magistrate of the Confederacy, as mothers pressed their infants to their b.r.e.a.s.t.s for the last time.

In front of the Capitol was the stone building erected by the United States, where for four years Jeff Davis had played the sovereign, where Benjamin, Memminger, Toombs, Mallory, Sedden, Trenholm, and Breckenridge had exercised authority, dispensing places of profit to their friends, who came in crowds to find exemption from conscription. Beyond, and on either side, was the forest of blackened chimneys, tottering walls, and smoking ruins of the fire which had swept away the acc.u.mulated wealth of years in a day. How terrible the retribution! Before the war there was quiet in the city, but there came a reign of terror, when ruffians ruled, when peaceful citizens dared not be abroad after dark. There was sorrow in every household for friends fallen in battle, and Poverty sat by many a hearthstone.

Hardest of all to bear was the charity of their enemies. Under the shadow of the Capitol the Christian and Sanitary Commissions were giving bread to the needy. Standing there upon the roof I could look down upon a throng of men, women, and children receiving food from the kind-hearted delegates, upon whose lips were no words of bitterness, but only the song of the angels,-"Peace on earth, good-will to men!"

U. S. Christian Commission.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

THE CONFEDERATE LOAN.

April, 1865.

The att.i.tude of Great Britain towards the United States during the Rebellion will make a strange chapter in history. The first steams.h.i.+p returning from that country after the firing upon Fort Sumter brought the intelligence that the British government had recognized the Rebels as belligerents. Mr. Adams, the newly appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, was on his way to London, but without waiting to hear what representations he might have to make, the ministry with unseemly haste gave encouragement to the Rebels.

Palmerston, Russell, the chief dignitaries of state, and of the Church also, with the London Times and Morning Post, espoused the cause of the slaveholders, while the weavers of Lancas.h.i.+re, though thrown out of employment by the blockade, gave their sympathies to the North. They were ignorant of the causes which led to hostilities. The English press informed them that it was the tariff; that the people of the South had a right to secede; that the United States had no right to restrain them; that the South was fighting for liberty: but notwithstanding this, the operatives, from the beginning, ranged themselves on the side of the Union. They stood in opposition to Palmerston and the peers of the realm,-the press, the aristocracy, and the mill-owners. In this they were guided, perhaps, more by instinct than by reason.

They knew that in the North labor was free, but that the South had made slavery the corner-stone of their Confederacy. Their life was ever a battle, for Labor was the slave of Capital. They knew nothing of State rights, or the rights of belligerents, or of American tariffs, but instinct by a short road led them to the conclusion that the conflict was not merely national, but world-wide, and that the freemen of the North were fighting for the rights of men everywhere.

The London Times was foremost among the newspapers to prophesy the disruption of the Union. Its utterances were oracular. It claimed superior knowledge and a deeper insight of the American question than any of its contemporaries, and its opinions were accepted as truth by all Englishmen who approved the slaveholders' war. s.h.i.+p-builders, cotton-brokers, and capitalists regulated their faith and works by the leading articles of that journal, and loaned their money to the South.

"The great republic is gone, and no serious attempt will be made by the North to save it," wrote Mr. W. H. Russell to the Times in April, 1861.

"General bankruptcy is inevitable, and agrarian and socialist riots may be expected very soon," was the despatch of that individual immediately after the battle of Bull Run.

The tradespeople of England believed him. The South was victor; the Confederacy was to become a nation. The agents of the South were already in England purchasing supplies, paying liberal prices. They found that Englishmen were ready to engage in any scheme of profit,-in running the blockade, building war-s.h.i.+ps for the Confederate government, or selling arms and ammunition, in violation of the laws of the realm.

As a large number of letters written by Rebel agents and emissaries in England and France have fallen into my hands, I purpose in this chapter to give a resume of their contents, which expose the secret history of the Cotton Loan.

Soon after the beginning of hostilities the Liverpool correspondent of the Times, Mr. James Spence, entered heartily into the support of the cause of the South. He was engaged in commercial pursuits, but found leisure not only to keep up his correspondence with the Times, but to write a book ent.i.tled the "American Union," in which he advocated the right of the South to secede, and extolled slavery as a superior condition of life for the laboring man.

"The negroes," said he, "have at all times abundant food: the sufferings of fireless winters are unknown to them, medical attendance is always at command; in old age there is no fear of a workhouse; their children are never a burden or a curse; their labor, though long, is neither difficult nor unhealthy. As a rule, they have their own ground and fowls and vegetables, of which they sell a surplus. So far, then, as merely animal comforts extend, their lot is more free from suffering than those of many cla.s.ses of European laborers."

Such sympathy with slavery received its reward in the appointment of Mr. Spence as financial agent of the Confederacy. Large sums of money were sent from Charleston, Savannah, and Richmond to England. Vessels found little difficulty in running the blockade during the first year of the war, and Na.s.sau became the half-way station, and thousands of Englishmen counted up their gains from blockade-running with glee. Societies were formed in London and other princ.i.p.al cities, called "Confederate Aid a.s.sociations."

An address to the British public was issued, setting forth the barbarism of the North against the South, struggling for her rights.

"The women of the South," reads the address, "have been insulted, imprisoned, flogged, violated, and outraged in a most inhuman and savage manner. Their homes and goods have been destroyed, their houses forcibly entered, the helpless and unresisting inmates murdered, the fleeing overtaken and cut down in cold blood by the savage soldiery of the North.... They are now glutting their h.e.l.lish rage against the people they seek to destroy in inflicting every kind of torture, punishment, and misery that their fruitful minds can invent upon those that they would fain call fellow-citizens.... The atrocities, cruelties, crimes, and outrages committed against the South in this war are without a parallel in the history of the world....

"In the name of suffering Lancas.h.i.+re, civilization, justice, peace, liberty, humanity, Christianity, and a candid world; and by the highest considerations that can call men into action, we beg you to come forward to aid, contribute, and support a brave and valiant people that are fighting for their homes, firesides, birthright, lives, independence, sacred honor, and all that is dear to mankind. By all the sorrows, deprivations, bereavements, losses, hards.h.i.+ps, and suffering that now ingulf the Confederate people, we appeal to you to arouse, and rush to their aid with your pence, s.h.i.+llings, and pounds; give them your sympathy, countenance, and influence, to hurl the tyrants from their country, and obtain the greatest boon to man,-self-government. Fairest and best of earth, for the sake of violated innocence, insulted virtue, and the honor of your s.e.x,-come in woman's majesty and omnipotence, and give strength to a cause that has for its object the highest human aims, the amelioration and exaltation of humanity."

The address was issued by Englishmen, had a wide circulation, and undoubtedly was accepted as a true representation of affairs.

Then Whittier sent his stinging words, "To Englishmen," across the Atlantic:-