 | CHAPTER IX.
FROM NEW BOSTON TO NEW ORLEANS, VIA FORT JACKSON. Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty |  |
9. CHAPTER IX.
FROM NEW BOSTON TO NEW ORLEANS, VIA FORT JACKSON.
“By” (this and that)! swore Colonel Carter to himself
when, twenty-four hours out from Sandy Hook, he
opened his sealed orders in the privacy of his state-room.
“Butler has got an expedition to himself. We are in for
a round of Big Bethels as sure as” (this and that and the
other.)
I wish it to be understood that I do not endorse the
above criticism on the celebrated proconsul of Louisiana.
I am not sketching the life of General Butler, but of Colonel
Carter—I am not trying to show how things really
were, but only how the Colonel looked at them.
Carter opened the door and looked into the cabin.
There stood a particularly clean soldier of the Tenth, his
uniform carefully brushed, his shoes, belts, cartridge-box
and cap-pouch blacked, his buttons and brasses shining
like morning suns, white cotton gloves on his hands, and
his bayonet in its scabbard, but without a musket. Being
the neatest man of all those detailed for guard that morning,
he had been selected by the Adjutant as the Colonel's
orderly. He saluted his commander by carrying his right
hand open to his fore-piece, then well out to the right,
then dropping it with the little finger against the seam
of his trousers, meanwhile standing bolt upright with his
heels well together. The Colonel surveyed him from top
to toe with a look of approbation.
“Very well, orderly,” said he. “Very clean and soldierly.
Been in the old army, I see.”
Here he gratified himself with another full-length inspection
of this statue of neatness and speechless respect.
“Now go to the captain of the vessel,” he added, “give
him my compliments, and request him to step to my state-room.”
The orderly saluted again, faced about as if on a pivot,
and walked away.
“Here, come back, sir,” called the Colonel. “What
did I tell you?”
“You told me, sir, to give your compliments to the
captain of the vessel, and request him to step to your
state-room,” replied the soldier.
“My God! he understood the first time,” exclaimed the
Colonel. “Been in the old army, I see. Quite right, sir;
go on.”
In a few minutes the marine functionary was closeted
with the military potentiality.
“Sit down, Captain,” said the Colonel. “Take a glass
of wine.”
“No, thank you, Colonel,” said the Captain, a small,
brown, quiet-mannered, taciturn man of forty-five, his
iron-grey locks carefully oiled and brushed, and his dark-blue
morning-suit as neat as possible. “I make it a rule
at sea,” he added, “never to take any thing but a bottle
of porter at dinner.”
“Very good: never get drunk on duty—good rule,”
laughed the Colonel. “Well, here are our orders. Look
them over, Captain, if you please.”
The Captain read, lifted his eyebrows with an air of
comprehension, put the paper back in the envelope, returned
it to the Colonel, and remarked, “Ship Island.”
“It would be best to say nothing about it at present,”
observed Carter. “Some accident may yet send us back
to New York, and then the thing would be known earlier
than the War Department wants.”
“Very good. I will lay the proper course, and say nothing.”
And so, with a little further talk about cleaning quarters
and cooking rations, the interview terminated. It
was not till the transport was off the beach of Ship Island
that the Tenth Barataria became aware of its destination.
Meantime, taking advantage of a run of smooth weather,
Carter disciplined his green regiment into a state of cleanliness,
order and subserviency, which made it a wonder
to itself. He had two daily inspections with regard to
personal cleanliness, going through the companies himself,
praising the neat and remorselessly punishing the dirty.
“What do you mean by such hair as that, sir?” he would
say, poking up a set of long locks with the hilt of his sabre.
“Have it off before night, sir. Have it cut short
and neatly combed by to-morrow morning.”
For offences which to the freeborn American citizen
seemed peccadilloes or even virtues, (such as saying to a
second-lieutenant, “I am as good as you are,”) men were
seized up by the wrists to the rigging with their toes
scarcely touching the deck. The soldiers had to obey orders
without a word, to touch their caps to officers, to
stop chaffing the sentinels, to keep off the quarter-deck,
and out of the cabin.
“By (this and that) I'll teach them to be soldiers,”
swore the Colonel. “They had their skylarking in Barataria.
They are on duty now.”
The men were not pleased; freeborn Americans could
not at first be gratified with such despotism, however salutary;
but they were intelligent enough to see that there
was a hard, practical sense at the bottom of it: they not
only feared and obeyed, but they respected. Every American
who is true to his national education regards with
consideration a man who knows his own business. Whenever
the Colonel walked on the main deck, or in the hold
where the men were quartered, there was a silence, a
quiet standing out of the way, a rising to the feet, and a
touching of fore-pieces. To his officers Carter was distant
and authoritative, although formally courteous. It was,
from the rigging, and to keep them down;” and when the
officer of the day reported that the job was done, it was,
“Very well, Lieutenant, much obliged to you.” Even the
private soldiers whom he berated and punished were
scrupulously addressed by the title of “Sir.”
“My God, sir! I ought not to be obliged to speak to
the enlisted men at all,” he observed apologetically to the
captain of the transport. “A colonel in the old army was
a little deity, a Grand Lama, who never opened his mouth
except on the greatest occasions. But my officers, you
see, don't know their business. I am as badly off as you
would be if your mates, sailors and firemen were all farmers.
I must attend to things myself.”
“Captain Colburne,” he said on another occasion, “how
about your property returns? Have the goodness to let
me look at them.”
Colburne brought two packets of neatly folded papers,
tied up in the famous, the historical, the proverbial red tape,
and endorsed; the one, “Return of Ordnance and Ordnance
Stores appertaining to Co. I, 10th Regt. Barataria Vols., for
the quarter ending December 31st, 1861;” the other,
“Return of Clothing and Camp and Garrison Equipage
appertaining to Co. I, 10th Regt. Barataria Vols., for the
quarter ending Dec. 31st, 1861.” Carter glanced over the
footings, the receipts and the invoices with the prompt and
accurate eye of a bank accountant.
“Correct,” said he. “Very much to your credit, Captain.
—Orderly! give my compliments to all the commandants
of companies, and request them to call on the immediately
in the after cabin.”
One after another the captains walked in, saluted, and
took seats in obedience to a wave of the Colonel's hand.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “those of you who have finished
your property returns for the last quarter will send them
in to the adjutant this afternoon for examination. Those
who have not, will proceed to complete them immediately.
Colburne. His papers are correct. Gentlemen, the United
States Army Regulations are as important to you as the
United States Army Tactics. Ignorance of one will get
you into trouble as surely as ignorance of the other.
Such parts of the Regulation as refer to the army accountability
system are of especial consequence to your pockets.
Neglect your returns, and you will get your pay stopped.
This is not properly my business. You are responsible
for yourselves directly to the War Department. But I
wish to set you on the right path. You ought to take a
pride, gentlemen, in learning the whole of your profession,
even if you are sure that the war will not last three
months. If a thing is worth learning at all it should be
learned well, if only for the good of a man's own soul.
Never do a duty by halves. No man of any self-respect
will accept an officer's pay without performing the whole
of an officer's duty. And this accountability system is
worth study. It is the most admirable system of book-keeping
that ever was devised. John C. Calhoun perfected
it when he was Secretary of War and at the top of his intellectual
powers. I have no hesitation in saying that a man
who can account truthfully and without loss for all the
public property in a company, according to this system, is
able to master the business of any mercantile house or
banking establishment. The system is as minute and inexorable
as a balance-sheet. When I was a boy, just out
of West Point and in command of a company on the Indian
frontier, I took part in a skirmish. I was as vain over my
first fight as a kitten over its first mouse. I thought the
fame of it must illuminate Washington and dazzle the
clerks in the department offices. In my next return I
accounted for three missing ball-screws as lost in the engagement
of Trapper's Bluff. I supposed the army accountability
system would bow to a second-lieutenant
who had been under fire. But, gentlemen, it did no such
thing. I got a letter from the Chief of Ordnance informing
the three ball-screws were lost. I couldn't do it, couldn't
make out a satisfactory certificate, and had them taken
out of my pay. I, the hero of an engagement, who had
personally shot a Pawnee, was charged thirty-nine cents
for three ball-screws.”
Emboldened by the Colonel's smiles of grim humor the
audience burst into a laugh.
“I knew another case,” he proceeded. “A young
fellow was appointed quartermaster at Puget Sound.
About a year after he had sent in his first return he was
notified by the Quartermaster General that it did not properly
account for certain cap letters, value five cents. Indignant
at what he considered such small-beer fault-finding,
he immediately mailed five cents to Washington,
with a statement that it was intended to cover the deficiency.
Six months later he received a sharp note from
the Quartermaster General, returning him his five cents,
informing him that the department was not accustomed to
settle accounts in that manner, and directing him to forward
the proper papers concerning the missing property
under penalty of being reported to the Adjutant General.
The last I knew of him he was still corresponding on the
subject, and hoping that the rebels would take enough of
Washington to burn the quartermaster's department.
Now, gentlemen, this is not nonsense. It is business and
sense, as any bank cashier will tell you. Red-Tape
means order, accuracy, honesty, solvency. A defalcation
of five cents is as bad in principle as a defalcation of a
million. I tell you these stories to give you an idea
of what will be exacted of you some time or other, it may
be soon, but certainly at last. I wish you to complete your
returns as soon as possible. They ought to have gone in
long since. That is all, gentlemen.”
“I talked to them like a Dutch uncle,” said Carter to
the captain of the transport, after relating the above interview.
The fact is that in the regular army we generally
command of a company I gave mine the ten dollars
monthly for accountability, and hardly ever saw my
papers except when I signed them, all made up and ready
to forward. But here the first sergeants, confound them!
don't know so much as the officers. The officers must do
every thing personally, and I must set them the example.”
So much at present for Carter as chief of a volunteer,
regiment which it was his duty and pride to transform
into a regiment of regulars. Professionally if not personally,
as a soldier if not as a man, he had an imperious
conscience; and his aristocratic breeding and tolerably
hard heart enabled him to obey it in this matter of discipline
without hesitation or pity. And now, in the calm
leisure of this winter voyage over summer seas, let us go
back a little in his history, and see what kind of a life his
had been outside of the regulations and devoirs of the
army.
“How rapidly times change!” he said to Colburne in a
moment of unusual communicativeness. “Three years
ago I expected to take a regiment or so across this gulf
on a very different errand. I was, by (this and that) a
filibuster and pro-slavery champion in those days; at least
by intention. I was closeted with the Lamars and the
Soules—the Governor of South Carolina and the Governor
of Mississippi and the Governor of Louisiana—the gentlemen
who proposed to carry the auction-block of freedom
into Yucatan, Cuba, the island of Atalantis, and the moon.
I expected to be a second Cortez. Not that I cared
much about their pro-slavery projects and palaverings. I
was a soldier of fortune, only anxious for active service,
pay and promotion. I might have been monarch of all I
surveyed by this time, if the world had turned as we expected.
But this war broke up my prospects. They saw
it coming, and decided that they must husband their resources
for it. It was necessary to take sides for a greater
and I chose mine.”
These confessions were too fragmentary and guarded to
satisfy the curiosity of Colburne; but he subsequently obtained
information in the South from which he was able
to piece out this part of Carter's history; and the facts
are perhaps worth repeating as illustrative of the man and
his times. Our knowledge is sufficiently complete to enable
us to decide that the part which he played in the filibustering
conspiracy was not that of a Burr, but of a
Walker, which indeed might be inferred from the fact
that he was not intellectually capable of making himself
head of a cabal which included some of the cleverest of
the keen-sighted (though not far-sighted) statemen of the
south. It is no special reflection on the Colonel's brains
to say that they were not equal to those of Soule and
Jefferson Davis. Moreover a soldier is usually a poor intriguer,
because his profession rarely leads him to appeal
to any other influence than open authority: he is not
obliged to learn the politician's essential arts of convincing,
wheedling and circumventing; he simply says to his man
Go, and he goeth. Carter, then, was to be the commander
of the regiment, or brigade, or division, or whatever might
be the proposed force of armed filibusters. There appears
to have been no doubt in the minds of the ringleaders as
to his fidelity. He was a Virginian born, and of a family
which sat in the upper seats of the southern oligarchy.
Furthermore, he had married a wife and certain appertaining
human property in Louisiana; and although he had
buried the first, and dissolved the second (as Cleopatra did
pearls) in the wine cup, it was reasonable to suppose that
they had exercised an establishing influence on his character;
for what Yankee even was ever known to remain an
abolitionist after having once tasted the pleasure of living
by the labor of others? Moreover he had become agent
and honorary stockholder of a company which had a new
patent rifle to dispose of; and it was an item of the filibustering
armed with ordnance furnished by this Pennsylvania manufactory.
Finally, having melted down his own and his
wife's patrimony in the crucible of pleasure, and been driven
by debts to resign his lieutenancy for something which
promised, but did not provide, a better income, he was
known to be dreadfully in need of money.
It is impossible to make the whole conspiracy a matter
of plain and positive history. Colburne thought he had
learned that at least two or three thousand men were
sworn in as officers and soldiers, and that the Governors
of several Southern States had pledged themselves to support
it, even at the risk of being obliged to bully the
venerable public functionary who then occupied the
White House. It is certain that councils of state and war
were held in the Mills House at Charleston and in the St.
Charles Hotel at New Orleans. It is even asserted that a
distinguished southern divine was present at some of these
sessions, and gave his blessing to the plan as one of the
most hopeful missionary enterprises of the day; and the
story, ironical as it may seem to misguided Yankees, becomes
seriously credible when we remember that certain
devout southerners advocated the slave-trade itself as a
means of christianizing benighted Africans. Where the
expedition was to go and when it was to sail are still
points of uncertainty. Carter himself never told, and perhaps
was not let into the secret. His part was to draw
over as many of his old comrades as possible; to organize
the enlisted men into companies and regiments, and to
command the force when it should once be landed. Concerning
the causes of the failure of the enterprise we know
nothing more than what he stated to Colburne. The arch
conspirators foresaw the election of Lincoln, and resolved
to save the material and enthusiasm of the South for war
at home. It is pretty certain, however, that they sought
to bring Carter's courage and professional ability into the
new channel which they had resolved to open for such
fortunes, apparently such a mere Dugald Dalgetty,
was not seduced into treason by their no doubt earnest
persuasions and flattering promises. He may have resisted
their blandishments merely because he knew that
the other side was the strongest and richest; but if we
are charitable we will concede that it argued in him some
still uneradicated roots of military honor and patriotism.
At all events, here he was, confident, cheerful and jealous,
going forth to fight for his old flag and his whole country.
This vague and unsatisfactory story of the conspiracy
would not have been worth relating did it not shed
some cloudy light on the man's dubious history and contradictory
character.
We may take it for granted that Captain Colburne devoted
much of his time during this voyage to meditations
on Miss Ravenel. But lovers' reveries not being popular
reading in these days, I shall omit all the interesting matter
thus offered, notwithstanding that the young man has
my earnest sympathies and good wishes.
One summer-like March morning the steam transport,
black with men, lay bowing to the snow-like sand-drifts
of Ship Island; and by sunset the regiment was ashore,
the camp marked out, tents pitched, rations cooking, and
line formed for dress-parade; an instance of military
promptness which elicited the praises of Generals Phelps
and Butler.
It is well known that the expedition against New Orleans
started from Ship Island as its base. Over the organization
of the enterprise, the battalion and brigade
drills on the dazzling sands, the gun-boat fights in the
offing with rebel cruisers from Mobile, the arrival of Farragut's
frigates and Porter's bomb-schooners, and the
grand review of the expeditionary force, I must hurry
without a word of description, although I might make up
a volume on these subjects from the newspapers of the
day, and from three or four long and enthusiastic letters
not properly come within the scope of this narrative,
which is biographical and not historical. Parenthetically
it may be well to remark that neither Carter nor Colburne
ever referred to Miss Ravenel in their few and brief
interviews. The latter was not disposed to talk of her
to that listener; and the former was too much occupied
with his duties to give much thought to an absent Dulcinea.
The Colonel was no longer in that youthfully tender
stage when absence increases affection. To make him
love it was necessary to have a woman in pretty close
personal propinquity.
In a month or two from the arrival of the Tenth Barataria
at Ship Island it was again on board a transport, this
time bound for New Orleans via Fort Jackson.
“This part of Louisiana looks as the world must have
looked in the marsupial period,” says Colburne in a letter
to the Doctor written from the Head of the Passes.
“There are two narrow but seemingly endless antennæ of
land; between them rolls a river and outside of them
spreads an ocean. Dry land there is none, for the Mississippi
being unusually high the soil is submerged, and
the trees and shrubs of these long ribbons of underwood
which enclose us have their boles in the water. I do not
understand why the ichthyosauri should have died out in
Louisiana. It certainly is not fitted, so far as I can see,
for human habitation. May it not have been the chaos
(vide Milton) through which Satan floundered? Miss
Ravenel will, I trust, forgive me for this hypothesis when
she learns that it is suggested by your theory that Lucifer
was and is and ever will be peculiarly at home in this part
of the world.”
In a subsequent passage he gives a long account of the
famous bombardment of the forts, which I feel obliged to
suppress as not strictly biographical, he not being under
fire but only an eye-witness and ear-witness of the cannonade.
One paragraph alone I deem it worth while to copy,
the presence of sublime but monotonous circumstance.
“Here we are, in view of what I am told is the greatest
bombardment known in marine, or, as I should call it, amphibious
warfare. You take it for granted, I suppose, that
we are in a state of constant and noble excitement; but
the extraordinary truth is that we are in a condition of
wearisome ennui and deplorable desaeuvrement. We are
too ignorant of the great scientific problems of war to
take an intelligent interest in the fearful equation of fleets
=forts. We got tired a week ago of the mere auricular
pleasure of the incessant bombing. We got tired a day or
two afterward of climbing to the crosstrees to look at the
fading globes of smoke left aloft in the air by the bursting
shells. We are totally tired of the monotonous flow of
the muddy river, and the interminable parallel curves of its
natural levees and the glassy stretches of ocean which
seem to slope upwards toward the eastern and western
horizon. We pass our time in playing cards, smoking,
grumbling at our wretched fare, exchanging dull gossip
and wishing that we might be allowed to do something.
Happy is the man who chances once a day to find a clear
space of a dozen feet on the crowded deck where he can
take a constitutional. Waiting for a belated train, alone,
in a country railroad station, is not half so wearisome.”
But in a subsequent page of the same letter he makes
record of startling events and vivid emotions.
“The fleet has forced the passage of the forts. We
have had a day and a night of almost crazy excitement.
A battle, a victory, a glorious feat of arms has been
achieved within our hearing, though beyond our sight and
range of action. A submerged iron-clad, one of the
wrecks of the enemy's fleet, drifted against our cable,
shook us over the edge of eternity, and then floated by
harmlessly. Blazing fire-ships have passed us, lighting up
the midnight river until its ripples seemed of flame.”
In another part of the letter he says, “The forts have
the track of that amazing Farragut. As I look around me
with what knowledge of science there is in my eyes, I feel
as if I had lived a few millions of years since yesterday;
for within twenty-four hours we have sailed out of the
marsupial period into the comparatively modern era of
fluvial deposits and luxuriant vegetation. Give my compliments
to Miss Ravenel, and tell her that I modify my
criticisms on the scenery of Louisiana. On either side the
land is a living emerald. The plantation houses are embowered
in orange groves—in a glossy mass of brilliant,
fragrant verdure. I do not know the names of a quarter
of the plants and trees which I see; but I pass the livelong
day in admiring and almost adoring their tropical
beauty. We are no welcome tourists, at least not to the
white inhabitants; very few of them show themselves, and
they do not answer our cheering, nor hardly look at us;
they walk or ride grimly by, with faces set straight forward,
as if they could thereby ignore our existence. But
to the negroes we evidently appear as friends and redeemers.
Such joyous gatherings of dark faces, such deep-chested
shouts of welcome and deliverance, such a waving
of green boughs and white vestments, and even of pickaninnies—such
a bending of knees and visible praising of
God for his long-expected and at last realized mercy, salutes
our eyes from morn till night, as makes me grateful
to Heaven for this hour of holy triumph. How glorious
will be that time, now near at hand, when our re-united
country will be free of the shame and curse of slavery!”
Miss Ravenel spit in her angry pussy-cat fashion when
her father read to her this passage of the letter.
“We are in New Orleans,” proceeds Colburne towards
the close of this prodigious epistle. “Our regiment was
the first to reach the city and to witness the bareness of
the once-crowded wharves, the desertion of the streets and
the sullen spite of the few remaining inhabitants. I suspect
that your aristocratic acquaintances have all fled at
poor foreigners, and rowdies more savage-looking
than the tribes of the Bowery. The spirit of impotent but
impertinent hate in this population is astonishing. The
ragged news-boys will not sell us a paper—the beggarly
restaurants will not furnish us a dinner. Wherever I walk
I am saluted by mutterings of `Damned Yankee!'—`Cut
his heart out!' &c. &c. I once more profess allegiance to
your theory that this is where Satan's seat is. But the
evil spirits who inhabit this city of desolation only grimace
and mumble, without attempting any manner of injury.
If Miss Ravenel fears that there will be a popular insurrection
and a consequent burning of the city, assure her
from me that she may dismiss all such terrors.”
And here, from mere lack of space rather than of interesting
matter, I must close my extracts from this incomparably
elongated letter. I question, by the way, whether
Colburne would have covered so much paper had he not
been reasonably justified in imagining a pretty family picture
of the Doctor reading and Miss Ravenel listening.
| CHAPTER IX.
FROM NEW BOSTON TO NEW ORLEANS, VIA FORT JACKSON. Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty | |