A Civil War Boyhood: Ii. Soldier of the Union
I
WHEN I returned from college at Lebanon to my home in the southern part of Middle Tennessee, I little dreamed of the hardships and sufferings through which, during the next two and a half years, I should be obliged to pass. I was but a little over seventeen years of age, too young for a soldier’s life, but surrounded by conditions which gradually forced me into it.
By the first of April, 1862, the Federal armies had occupied Middle and West Tennessee nearly, if not quite at all points, to the southern boundary of the state. Companies of Confederate cavalry and bands of Confederate guerrillas and bushwhackers, however, made raids through the southern tier of counties and dealt summarily with all they could reach who showed any sympathy with the incoming Federals. It was at about that time that the first detachments of Federal troops began to pass through the region of my home. I remember vividly to this day the Indiana regiment which led the advance with its flying flags and its band playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me.’ It was the first time I had seen the flag of my country for a year, and, young as I was, I greeted it with swelling heart. I thought it had come to stay uninterruptedly, and did not realize the vicissitudes of war. The Unionism which, during the preceding twelve months, had been in my spirit and had been denied utterance was incautiously allowed to express itself. Notice was taken of this by the disappointed and angered Secessionists in the neighborhood, and I was marked for persecution.
While the Federal troops were pouring through the country on the way to Pittsburgh Landing, Huntsville, and Chattanooga, I was comparatively safe. After the battle at Shiloh on April 6 and 7, the Federal forces farther eastward began to move toward Shiloh for the contemplated siege of Corinth, and the section in which I resided was again left open to the raids of the Confederate bands of guerrillas. Under this condition of things, it was only a question of a little time until the persecution against the Unionists would be revived. A body of Free-lances, led by a notorious brute named Biffle, now appeared in our neighborhood and began to take the property of the Unionists, arresting many of them as prisoners of war and executing some of them. The Secessionists of the region acted as informers, and took this occasion to wreak their vengeance upon their Unionist neighbors for every personal grudge which existed between them, as well as for political differences.
One day, about the middle of June, a trooper of the Biffle gang presented himself, fully armed, at the gateway of my father’s residence and summoned me to come out to him. The day was very hot, and I was sitting without a coat on the piazza. I walked down to the gate and was told by the man that he had come to impress me into the Confederate military service. I said to him that I must go back into the house and get my coat, to which he made no objection. My father was in the house. On learning the errand of the trooper, he took down a couple of loaded rifles from the gun braces and handed me one; thus armed, we went out to the gate. My father asked the man to state his business again, and, after hearing him through, bade him be gone. We both covered him with our rifles; swearing vengeance, he galloped away.
My father then said to me, ‘He will return shortly with others, and they must not find you here.’ He called a Negro and ordered him to bridle and saddle the swiftest animal in the stable, a beautiful mare which I had named ‘Little Fanny.’ At the same time my mother was preparing a few articles of clothing and a little food. In less than half an hour, I had taken leave of home and parents and was speeding through the dark forests toward an unknown destination.
Confident that my pursuers would turn northward, under the supposition that I should seek the nearest Federal force, my father had directed me to ride southward to Pulaski, the county seat, and try to find and join one Constantine Moffit, a Unionist friend, who, my father knew, was on the point of going over into West Tennessee, where the Federal armies were in full control. Following his directions, and after a day or two of wandering in the woods, I found Moffit and we two started immediately for a crossing of the Tennessee River into the western part of the state. We rode southward to the shallows of the stream near Florence, Alabama, a place called the Muscle Shoals. At this point we waded and swam our horses across and reached the southwest bank in safety. Turning then sharply to the right, we rode down the river toward Shiloh.
II
It was late in the afternoon when we started on our perilous run toward the Federal lines. All night long we sped onward, speechless, almost breathless, expecting every moment to be stopped by the challenge of a sentinel or possibly by a bullet. Over the battlefield of Shiloh and along by the ruined church we galloped at top speed, with something near terror in our hearts as the moonbeams, playing through the openings in the trees upon the rising mist, roused in our imaginat ions pictures of a battle between the spirits of the men who had recently fallen there in fierce physical combat, and whose bodies lay buried just beneath our feet. Faster and faster we spurred our steeds onward over the watercourse which bounded the battlefield on the north, through the towns of Purdy and Henderson, and about noon of the following day we rode, thoroughly exhausted, into the town of Jackson, then the headquarters of the armies operating in West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi. We had covered nearly a hundred miles in less than eighteen hours, and the beautiful little animal which had brought me to safety dropped dead in her tracks before the entrance of the Provost Marshal’s office, where we ended our wild ride.
The Provost Marshal questioned us closely as to who we were, whence we had come, whither we proposed to go, and what, state of things we had left behind us in Middle Tennessee. He was gratified to learn that we were Unionists escaping from Confederate conscription, and was interested in what we told him of the region and its people. He required us, however, to take the oath of allegiance to the United States, which we did unhesitatingly. He also advised us to enlist in the United States Army, and told us that we should be of great service as scouts on account of our knowledge of the country and our experience and efficiency in horsemanship.
It was a hazardous thing to do, for, had we been taken prisoner in any such adventures, we should certainly have been executed as traitors to the Confederacy. However, I took the risk, of which I was not more than half conscious, and for the next eight months I participated in this exciting service. This phase of my military experience culminated in the first days of January of the year 1863, when the Confederate general, N. B. Forrest, undertook, with a force of some six thousand picked cavalry, to destroy the railroad connection between General Grant’s forces in Northern Mississippi and their base of supplies at Cairo, Illinois.
At that time the Mobile and Ohio Railroad had its northern terminus at Columbus, Kentucky, and the stretch between Columbus and Cairo was traversed by boats on the Mississippi River. The railroad ran from Columbus through Union City, Trenton, and Jackson to Grand Junction, and thence farther southward. In the last days of December, 1862, and the first days of January, 1863, Forrest, coming from Middle Tennessee, struck the railroad near Trenton, some sixty or seventy miles south of Columbus. He drove in the small Federal force stationed there, burned some small railroad bridges, and turned northward with the purpose of destroying the railroad bridges over the two forks of the Ohio River and the trestle work in the swamp between the two forks. This he accomplished, and then turned his column toward Columbus. By this time, however, Grant had sent reënforcements from the southern part of Tennessee, and Forrest, fearing an attack in the rear, suddenly wheeled southward and met the Federals at a placed called Parker’s Crossroads, near the town of Lexington in West Tennessee, where he suffered a severe defeat and lost about half his command, making his escape with the other half across the Tennessee River into Middle Tennessee. While he lost the battle, he accomplished his purpose in so demoralizing General Grant’s transportation facilities as to force Grant to give up his plan of attacking Vicksburg by advancing from the north into its rear.
III
After the battle at Parker s Crossroads, the troops with whom I was connected, a Missouri regiment, were sent into the swamp region between the forks of the Obion River, called the Obion Bottom, to repair the railroad. Here I suffered the greatest hardships of my life. We were wading in the water most of the time, and the swamp was infested with poisonous insects and reptiles and hideous toads and turtles. We could scarcely find a spot elevated enough to sleep on at night, and when we did find such a spot and built a fire on it, snakes and lizards and scorpions would crawl around it and over us, and insects and night birds of every description would fly around, stinging us and striking us with their wings and beaks and giving utterance to the most terrifying cries and screams.
After a month of almost superhuman efforts, amid such dire surroundings, we repaired the railroad roughly so that the supply trains could pass over it, and were about to emerge from our confinement in this terrible swamp when we were overtaken by a storm of lightning and thunder and torrential rain such as I had never before experienced. It was near nightfall, and we endeavored to shelter ourselves with our tents as best we could and await the morning light to guide our footsteps out of this horrible place, but Providence had not reserved this fate for us. In the middle of the night the waters of the two branches of the river between which we were encamped began to rise rapidly and to overflow the lowland between, and it was soon evident that we must escape from this trap at once or never. The bugles were sounded, and we were ordered to turn our steps toward the south fork of the river, since it was the nearer.
The darkness seemed impenetrable, and we had nothing but the flashes of lightning to show us our way. For hours we stumbled on, drenched to the skin, through water holes, over fallen railroad ties and beams and cypress trees. Sometimes we tried to walk on the embankments and trestlework of the railroad, but after many dangerous falls, some of them fatal, we abandoned this expedient altogether and walked sometimes up to our very armpits in the foul, reptile-inhabited waters of the swamp. About daybreak we arrived at the repaired railroad bridge over the south fork of the river. Slowly we filed over this and took refuge in the old stockade, called Davy Crockett’s Fort after the famous Tennessee hunter who had erected it. We were a sorry-looking lot, burning with swamp fever and shaking with ague, bitten in every exposed place by poisonous insects, ragged and soaking wet, famished, emaciated, exhausted.
The garrison received us, of course, with the open arms of comradeship; but scarcely had we prepared a little food and begun to enjoy it when the fort was attacked by a Confederate force that had been sent from Middle Tennessee to destroy the work we had done. All day the skirmish lasted, — for in comparison with the battles of to-day it was only a skirmish, — and it was near nightfall before we beat them off and routed them.
That night I was set to do sentinel duty on the battlefield. It was still raining in torrents; the lightning shot its wicked tongues athwart the inky sky, and the thunder rolled and reverberated through the heavens like salvos of heavy artillery. With this din and uproar of nature were mingled the cries of injured animals and the shrieks and groans of wounded and dying men. It was a night to inspire terror in the most hardened soldiers. To one so young and sensitive as I was it was awful beyond description, and has remained a hideous nightmare in my memory to this day.
It was in the midst of this frightful experience, however, that the first suggestion of my life’s work came to me. As I strained my eyes to peer into the darkness, and my ears to perceive the first sounds of an approaching enemy, I found myself murmuring to myself: ‘Is it not possible for man, a being of reason, created in the image of God, to solve the problems of his existence by the power of reason and without recourse to the destructive means of physical violence?’ And I then registered the vow in Heaven that, if a kind Providence should deliver me alive from the perils of the war, I would devote my life to teaching men how to live by reason and compromise instead of by bloodshed and destruction.
I was simple enough then to believe that this thought was an original idea with me, and I remained simple enough to follow it as an inspiration from that awful night in January of 1863 in faroff West Tennessee, through many countries and varied experiences and activities, down to the eventful sixth day of April, 1917, when with one grievous blow this vision was dispelled, and my life’s work was brought down in irretrievable ruin all about me. Of this sad ending, however, I must not speak here.
IV
After Forrest’s raid had interrupted the plans of General Grant to advance upon Vicksburg from Corinth, the chief centre of military operations in the west was shifted to Middle Tennessee. The great battle at Murfreesboro was fought on the same days which saw the rout of Forrest’s troopers near Lexington, and the Confederates were driven back upon Chattanooga. It was felt to be necessary to transfer some of the Federal force in West Tennessee to Middle Tennessee in order to continue the advance there and protect the lengthening line of communication. A picked guard from the regiment to which I was attached was detailed to conduct some hundreds of cavalry horses to Louisville, Kentucky, to be forwarded from there to Rosecrans’s army, then at Tullahoma, about halfway between Murfreesboro and Chattanooga. I was among those entrusted with this duty.
We went to Hickman, Kentucky, on the Mississippi River, and boarded a steamer for Louisville. We were nearly a week on the journey, owing to the fact that we ran against one of the frequent snags in the river, and in pulling off we ran aground and remained stuck for several days in the mud. At Louisville we were ordered to go on with our charge to Nashville in Tennessee.
While halted in Nashville, I was assigned to the Quartermaster Service, which had in hand, among other things, the procuring and distribution of all supplies necessary to keep the railroad in operation between Nashville and Rosecrans’s army. The work was responsible, onerous, and even severe. The Confederate cavalry, led by such intrepid and resourceful commanders as Morgan, Forrest, and Wheeler, attacked the railroad line somewhere almost every night. We had blockhouses about every two miles, with a company of soldiers and light artillery to defend them, but it proved a most arduous and harassing duty. Almost daily there was a call upon Nashville for reënforcements at some point or other, and every available man was required to keep things moving between the Rosecrans army and its base of supplies. The activity was incessant day and night.
For nearly a year I was engaged in this nerve-racking service, and my health became much impaired by the strain. Besides the continual physical exertion, I was exposed to much mental anxiety during this period. I was in a region whose people I knew and by whom I was known. I was eyewitness to the losses and sufferings to which they were subjected, without the slightest power to relieve them in the smallest measure. The fortunes of my own parents and relations, all of whom were loyal to the Union, were, nevertheless, wrecked beyond recovery, and not only was no indemnity accorded, but not the faintest hope of one was held out. The Negroes left their work, and, because of the lack of labor, the lands became immediately worthless; sooner or later they were confiscated for taxes.
While I was stationed in Nashville, the window of my workroom in the Quartermaster’s office looked immediately out upon the Chattanooga depot. Day after day I saw the wives and daughters of the once wealthy and wellto-do planters of my own acquaintance getting out of box cars, clad in tatters, carrying bundles of bedding, and staring about vacantly as if not knowing where to look for food or shelter. Some of them were already stricken with famine and disease, and would sink down exhausted in the streets and alleyways, often to die. Many and many a time I walked through the streets leading from the Chattanooga depot to the Provost Marshal’s headquarters and saw scores of men and women, both whites and blacks, broken out with measles, scarlatina, and even smallpox, sitting helplessly on the hard stones or lying in the gutters. Some of these unfortunates I knew personally. It wrung my heart sorely to witness their sufferings and yet be powerless to offer them relief.
There was still another cause of great mental distress to me in the situation in which I found myself. I was regarded by most of those among whom I had grown up as a traitor to my country. It was entirely useless for me to say that I recognized only the United States as my country, and regarded the secession of Tennessee and its connection with the Southern Confederacy as void acts and the Southern Confederacy itself as a delusion. Their political horizon was bounded by the frontiers of the state, and their only conception of sovereignty was ‘States’ rights.’ They would turn their faces away from me with undisguised contempt and hatred whenever we met, and I was made to feel full well that I must never fall alive into the hands of the Confederates. If that happened, I was perfectly aware that I should not even be accorded the honor of facing the firing squad, but should be strung up to the first limb that could be reached. In constant danger of capture or abduction, I spent many anxious days and sleepless nights reflecting upon my possible, and at times seemingly probable, fate.
V
It was just at this period that General Sherman made his noted advance from Dalton to Atlanta. This movement threw upon the troops guarding and operating the railroad between Nashville and Dalton the most herculean tasks and indescribable hardships.
The country between these two points had been so completely devastated that no food or forage could be had from it. The Negroes had by this time all left their work on the farms, and were gathered about the Federal garrisons and camps begging for provisions, clothes, and shelter, and a great many whites were no better off. All supplies for the army of one hundred thousand men and for the starving population had to be brought from Louisville or Cairo to Nashville, and then forwarded to the distributing points and the front.
The attacks of the Confederate cavalry on this long line of railway communication were incessant, day and night. They destroyed the bridges and culverts, tore up the tracks, and burned millions and millions of tons of stores wherever found. The success of Sherman’s great campaign depended far more upon keeping open and in constant operation this one line of communication with his base of supplies than upon anything else. In his memoirs, General Sherman paid a well-merited tribute to the men who performed this task — who, day and night, now in wet and cold and again under the burning sun, wading through mud and water, and, without the joy of real battle, fighting off continually the vicious thrusts, here, there, and everywhere, of the swarms of Confederate horsemen, reënforced by bushwhackers and snipers, did the work of protecting this long line and restoring it with their own hands when broken, as it was a hundred times.
After more than a year of such service I found myself nearly ruined physically, and fell seriously ill. At the same time I suffered great depression through the death of one under whose command I had been, and whom I had learned to respect, admire, and love — General James B. McPherson. I and many others who had come into close contact with him regarded him as one of the most brilliant soldiers the war had developed, and one of the most just and sympathetic men who ever wore an officer’s uniform. He was a man with an almost extravagant sense of duty, who never spared himself any labor or hardship. He seemed to be omnipresent, always turning up where he was most needed. He was attentive to every detail, and yet never lost sight of the main object. He was firm, but kind and courteous. He inspired courage, and at the same time devotion. He was young, handsome, genial, and helpful. No general in the army enjoyed so thoroughly and universally the confidence of his soldiers.
The circumstances of his death were most painful, and his loss appeared to us all to be an unnecessary sacrifice. It was the result of his own almost reckless bravery. He commanded the left wing of Sherman’s army in its advance upon Atlanta after the furious battle at Peachtree Creek. The Confederates made a sudden and unexpected attack on this part of Sherman’s line. Instead of sending a reconnoitring party forward to discover the exact place and purpose of the attack, McPherson himself, practically unattended, rode down his lines in advance and was instantly shot by the attacking force. It was a grave and grievous disaster, and it had a disheartening effect on the spirits of the entire army clear back to the base of its operations.
Sick and tired and depressed, I asked for my discharge, and it was granted.
VI
Upon recovering strength somewhat, I gave my first thought to the problem of what I was to do next. My college education had been broken off in the middle of the sophomore year, and after two and a half years of a very different life — a life which led toward barbarism rat her than culture — I did not know whether I could qualify to enter college again, even as a freshman. Nevertheless, it seemed the only thing for me to do, and I resolved to try it.
For more than a year I had been receiving the pay of a second lieutenant — then one hundred and twelve dollars a month, as I remember — and I had saved nearly all of it. The financial question, therefore, did not trouble me. But where to go was the important question. The institutions in the Southern States were all closed, and if they had been open I should hardly have dared, with my Unionist record, to enter any one of them, even within the regions held by the Federal armies. It was quite plain that I must go north of the Mason and Dixon line.
One day, while pondering this matter of such grave import to me, I passed through the street in Nashville on which the principal law offices were situated, and, by chance, my eye rested on the sign of Jordan Stokes. This was the lawyer who had resided in Lebanon at the time I entered the University there; in the preceding article I have already spoken of his cultivated family and of his two elder sons, who were my closest college friends. Almost involuntarily I stepped into the office, and, recalling myself to the recollection of Mr. Stokes, I inquired about his family, especially his sons, of whom I had heard nothing for two years and more. To my surprise and great interest, he told me that his eldest son, James Fraser, and also his second son, William, were then, and for a year had been, at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and he urged me to join them there. The suggestion struck me most agreeably.
I went on at once to Amherst, and I felt upon my arrival that I had come into a veritable paradise. My friends, the Stokes boys, had been notified of my plans, and, although they did not know exactly the train or even the day, James Fraser was waiting on the platform of the station to welcome me. I had not seen him for nearly three years, and, while he seemed a little more mature, I found the same warm heart and cordial greeting. He insisted on taking me to his own quarters, and in a few minutes we were sitting in his spacious and comfortable study and beginning the recital of our many and varied experiences since that memorable day when we were parted from each other by the retreat of Crittenden’s Confederate army through Lebanon on its way to Murfreesboro and the South.
This event brought to its close that chapter of my life which had for its setting the South and the bloody conflict of civil war.