University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
MILES O'REILLY IN RICHMOND.

REBEL VIEWS OF HIS RECEPTION BY PRESIDENT DAVIS.

From the Richmond Examiner (Pro-Beauregard anti-Davis organ),
January 9th, 1863.

History will witness for us, though the personal
adherents of the President seem unable to appreciate,
how much we have borne and forborne
during the last three years in deference to the high
and difficult office of which, to the misfortune of the
Confederacy, Mr. Jefferson Davis is the incumbent.
No imagination can over-estimate the pecks of adverse
opinion and the bushels of contempt we have
swallowed in silence, rather than furnish any handle
to the tools and pimps of the administration, for their
oft-repeated and as often refuted slander, that our
course is designed to embarrass the Government,
and furnish aid and comfort to the enemy by a
betrayal of domestic dissensions. It is high time,
indeed, that this cry about “embarrassing the Government”

should cease. It is, as Edmund Burke
once said, “an attempt to convert the very confession
of imbecility into a buckler against investigation,
and thereby to secure a permanent continuance of
the evil.” Such pleas may avail the Yankee tyranny
at Washington, but are wholly out of place
amongst the people of this free and enlightened Confederacy.
They may do for the organs, journalistic
and Congressional, of the imperial and imperious
despot who rules, reigns and riots over the destinies
of the brutish and degraded North; but we tell Mr.
Davis and his organs that the proud, brilliant, and
chivalrous chieftains of the South despise and defy
all such agencies for the suppression of their honest
convictions.

In silence we have witnessed for over two years
the efforts of our Government to break down and
drive out of our service the General dearest to our
people, and the most trusted champion of their
cause. All know that General Beauregard has been
under the ban of official jealousy ever since the first
great victory of Bull Run. He was sent to command
at Charleston as the readiest means of getting
him out of the way—the calculation being, that if
wooden vessels had forced, with so little loss, the

more powerful defences guarding the approaches to
New Orleans, how little could Beauregard do at
Charleston against the vast flotilla of iron-clads
which Mr. Davis knew, through our friends and
emissaries in the North, to be then preparing for an
attack upon the hated “cradle of Secession.” Over
all these calculations of his enemies, however, the
genius of General Beauregard has triumphed; and
this although the Tredegar foundries, under orders
from our Secretary of War, refused to have cast for
him the larger ordnance his requisitions certified to
be necessary; and even went so far as to delay sending
him the ordinary guns already cast until the full
requisitions from every other commander in the field
had been satisfied. Beauregard could not get a
gun until the Davis pet, Pennsylvania Pemberton,
had been supplied with all he needed, to hand over
to the enemy at Vicksburgh. The Davis pet, Braxton
Bragg, had also to be supplied with all the heavy
artillery requisite to furnish abundant trophies to the
Yankee Vandals in their entrance upon the various
fortified positions which he successively abandoned.
The defence of New Orleans was intrusted to another
Davis pet—“a New York scavenger named
Mansfield Lovell”—to quote the words of General
Pemberton — and with what result the country
knows only too sadly!

But history, we say, will witness how patiently we
have thus far kept silence on all the army blunders
which have notoriously either caused our defeats, or
rendered the most splendid achievements of our
valor as fruitless as Lee's victory in the battle of the
Wilderness, called by the Yankees “Chancellorsville;”
or Bragg's partial successes—rather an opportunity
for a victory than a victory itself—on the
banks of the well-named Chickamauga.

We have seen the Confederacy cut in twain by
the loss of the Mississippi river—the “Scavenger
from New York” surrendering New Orleans without
a blow; a Philadelphia incapable or traitor allowing
himself, with one of our finest armies, to be cooped
up within fortified lines at Vicksburgh, and starved
into surrender by an army in the field, not much, if
at all, superior to his own in numbers. We have
seen Missouri and Arkansas lost by the fatal tendency
of Mr. Davis to allow none but his own creatures to
hold command. Sterling Price, the gallant and
invincible, was superseded by General Heath, of
Virginia; and Heath by Hindman; and Hindman
by half a score of nameless others, who have since

drunk themselves to death in bumpers to the health
of Mr. Davis. The thrice chivalrous John Magruder
has been exiled to Texas, with orders to “raise his
own army if he wants one,” because he threatened
to break his sword when Yorktown was abandoned
to McClellan without a blow; and because he could
not see Bragg's policy of “falling back without a
fight,” whenever the enemy made any demonstration
towards a flanking movement. A fellow called
Finnegan, who talks Connemara Irish and doesn't
know his horse's tail from his sabre, has been left in
command of Florida for the last two years, and
during that whole period has never organized one
single attack upon the enemy, though with a force
outnumbering theirs more than five to one. What
true son of the Sunny South but blushes at our long
record of unvaried disgrace and disaster in North
Carolina? And now to sum up:—

Kentucky lost, Missouri lost, Arkansas lost, New
Mexico and the Indian Territories lost, Mississippi
lost, Tennessee lost, Alabama threatened and helpless;
Georgia, with the foe in overwhelming force
holding possession of her gates; Finnegan drinking
whiskey slings with his staff and playing “old-sledge”
on the top of an empty butter-firkin in the

great Okeefinokee Swamp; North Carolina lying
abject and unresisting before the Yankee raiders;
Magruder without an army to meet Banks in Texas;
Louisiana a prey to bogus conventions in which
“colored Americans of African descent” are induced
to vote for original signers of the Secession Ordinance;
Georgia threatened in rear and neutralized
on her coast-line by the enemy's possession of Fort
Pulaski and the islands commanding the Wassaw
and Ossibaw inlets; Western Virginia created a
new State, and sending anti-slavery representatives
to bow the supple hinges of the knee where thrift
may follow fawning; while over all, upon a throne
of Southern skulls—his long limbs swathed in robes
of blood-dyed velvet, and holding the thigh-bone of
Albert Sidney Johnson as a sceptre in his horrid
hands—sits grimly the hideous Fetish who is the
Yankee emperor!

And as if all this were not enough, to all these
natural evils of war, evils of another kind are now
being added, which seem to argue that the intellect
of Mr. Davis is beginning to suffer under the neuralgic
attacks which have of late grown so intense that
he is often, his friends say, unable to sleep for as many
as five days and nights in succession! We refer, of

course, to the quasi-negotiations which he has allowed
Mr. Ould, our commissioner, to hold with that Federal
commander who has earned for himself the bad
eminence of recognition by the title of “Beast
Butler;” and to the still more flagrant folly and disgrace
of his having granted a safe conduct from
Savannah to Richmond, and from Richmond perhaps
outside the Confederate lines, to a vulgar and
insolent Irish Yahoo, who is ostensibly serving as a
private soldier in the Yankee cohorts under General
Gillmore, but to whom, nevertheless, President Davis
has seen fit to accord the honors of an ambassadorial
reception. We refer—and blush as we refer—to
the reception granted by President Davis on last
Sunday evening to private Miles O'Reilly, 47th
Regiment New York Volunteers, now a part of the
Yankee army of occupation on Morris and Folly
Islands; and to the disgraceful scenes of riot and
open treason, of which that visit was made the occasion,
and of which a full report will be found elsewhere
in our columns.

And who, we ask, after reading that report, can
blame the “basin cats,” the “Screamersville” vagabonds,
the low Irish and Germans, and other canaille
of Butchertown and Rockets, for their unseemly and

scandalous proceedings? Who can wonder when it
was noised abroad that this ridiculous and insulting
envoy had arrived in town and was about to be
received by President Davis, that all the “Union
rats” should have come out of their holes and hailed
with shouts and cheers, the hope of peace—even on
the basis of “submission”—of which the reception of
such an envoy appeared the certain augury? To
Major Ben. Humphreys, the late Gen. John B.
Floyd's worthy nephew, for his dignified rebuke to
the self-abasement of Mr. Davis, we are indebted for
the only redeeming feature in this disgraceful episode
of our history. It is the old, old story:—“Le Roi
s'amuse.” Hector has lost his wits under wine and
the Trojans suffer.

As to what passed between Mr. Davis and the
envoy of the Washington tyrant, we, of course, are
not in a position to give particulars if we would, nor
would we if we could. The interview was held in
the family residence of Mr. Davis, and not in the
official chambers of the President of the Confederacy.
Even for this slight favor we are thankful; for it will
argue ill for the South whenever any individual in
the uniform of the abhorred Union is allowed to
stand, except as a manacled prisoner under sentence of

death, in the Presidential presence upon Capitol
Hill. As to the premature and indiscreet remarks
indulged in by Colonel L. M. Keitt, Gov. John J.
McRae, Lucius Q. C. Lamar, and Ex-Brigadier, now
Private Pryor, in the bar-room of the Spottiswoode
House—for which, as we learn, they were immediately
confined in Castle Thunder—relative to the
passage of an Act declaring Mr. Davis incompetent
by reason of illness, thanking him for his services,
allowing him a handsome pension to reside in Europe,
and appointing Gen. Beauregard to fill the vacancy,
pro tem., we trust that nothing further will be done
—at least at present. If, after full consideration, it be
the judgment of our people that Mr. Davis has
broken down under the burdens of his most onerous
and harassing position, every thing that can be
done should be done, to soften and make graceful
his retirement; and until the people shall have
declared otherwise by vote, Vice President Alexander
Stephens must, to the grief of every true Confederate,
be his successor! We speak of “the people”
in this matter, not of Congress: for it is only too
widely known that a majority of that body, either
from weariness of the war, or devotion to the personal
fortunes of Mr. Davis, are in favor of submitting
proposals for Peace and re-Union to the Washington
despotism whenever Mr. Jefferson Davis may
either die or be removed.

In conclusion, before quitting this ridiculous and
yet painful subject, let us hope that the advisers of
Mr. Davis will have sense enough in themselves and
weight enough with him, to prevent the return of
this scandalous negotiator to the Federal lines. That
he came under a flag of truce to Savannah, and was
there received by Captain Gordon as a guest in the
headquarters of General Mercer, is deplorably true:
that, under a safe-conduct from President Davis, and
in company with ex-General Gustavus W. Smith
(whom we are surprised to find mixed up in such a
business), he came from Savannah to this city, is also
an unfortunate circumstance that cannot be denied.
But in the inflammatory and diabolical speech which
he made from the stoop of the Exchange Hotel to
the “basin cats” and other vagabonds from Screamersville,
Butchertown, and Rockets, who came to
hear and cheer him; and still more in the diabolical
songs with which he favored his congenial admirers
upon that occasion, calling upon our gallant soldiery
to mutiny, kill their officers, hang Congress, lay
down their arms, and then pass quietly under the

yoke—the Caudine forks;—by these acts we claim,
and the law of nations will support us in it (see Puffendorf,
Tome III. Cap. 7, Section 25; Vattel, Vol.
5, pages 227-39; and Grotius, De Legibus Belli,
Vol. VI. Cap. 22, Section 3), that he has forfeited
the protection of his ambassadorial character and
safe-conduct; and we agree, at least thus far, with
the gentlemen who have been imprisoned in Castle
Thunder, that this last and worst insult of the tyrant
Lincoln should be resented by the hanging of his
congenial “envoy” on the highest gallows that can
be erected on Capitol Hill; and that, as was done in
the cases of the three Scotch lords—Kilmarnock,
Cromartie and Balmerino—in the Pretender's Rebellion
of 1746, his entrails and heart be then taken out
and burned;—with the difference that, while theirs
were wholly consumed in the fire and their ashes
then scattered to the winds, the intestines and lights
of this miscreant should only be cooked sufficiently
to form a banquet for “Beast Butler,” to whom, for
his savory deglutition, they should then be transmitted
under flag of truce.

ANOTHER VIEW OF MILES O REILLY'S RECEPTION.

(From the Richmond Enquirer, official organ of Jeff. Davis.)

January 10th, 1864.

Our friends of the Examiner, perhaps thinking it
don't pay to keep cool this cold weather, have worked
themselves up into the delirious condition of
brain fever over an incident which has furnished to
minds of better balance the most amusing and exhilarating
topic of this carnival week. They see treason,
stratagem and bloody spoils in the reception by
President Davis of the latest edition of that magnificent
farce—“Our Irish Ambassador.”

To the proposition of the Examiner that the “intestines
and lights” of Private Miles O'Reilly shall
be cut out, roasted à la maitre d'hotel, and transmitted
to General Butler “for his savory deglutition,”
we are perfectly willing to accede, whenever the
proprietors of the paper in question, and that “gentleman
from Ireland” who is their chief writer, will
agree to present the dish in person to Gen. B. F. B.,
as did Herodias the head of John the Baptist to her
mother!

It is an old saying, though we believe only true
of the worst classes of our Milesian friends, that

“you can never put one Irishman on a spit without
finding half a dozen of his fellow-countrymen not
only ready but eager to roast him;” and of this proverb,
in its exceptional application, the Examiner's
article upon this ridiculus mus affords a shining
example. All its statements in the case are grossly
erroneous, as we shall show hereafter—the naked facts
that a person named Miles O'Reilly was received
under flag of truce by Gen. Mercer at Savannah,
accompanied to this city by ex-General Gustavus W.
Smith, and that he has here been granted an interview
with President Davis alone excepted.

And now let us ask the Examiner why did it not
protest against the two audiences heretofore granted
by President Davis to Dr. Zacharie, the celebrated
corn-cutter and international negotiator, who has
twice visited the South, ostensibly to see “his poor,
dear old father, who lies (permanently) dying in
Savannah;” but really as a semi-official agent of
the Federal Government? Rumor says that Dr.
Zacharie, during his first visit, was a guest on one
occasion at the table of the Examiner people, adding
that he was twice afterwards invited, but would not
go, for the reason that a pickled pig's-head at the
top of the table, pickled pig's feet at the foot, and

four thin slices of broiled bacon as the entremêts, did
not by any means form a pretty feast to set before a
gentleman of his character.

Again, without going into a discussion of the
obsolete theories laid down by Puffendorf, Grotius,
and the other authorities recited by the Examiner,
can we not admit—the United States being at least
our equal—that President Davis can afford to receive
any individual, no matter who or what, that
President Lincoln can afford to send? Sir Walter
Scott was no bad authority upon true chivalry, and
in the mouth of Lord Marmion he has put a quotation
completely decisive of this point:—

As for ourselves, between Dr. Zacharie and Private
O'Reilly, we are clearly in favor of the latter. If
we were in the Washington government's place, perhaps
neither might be sent; but chacun à son gout—
as the old woman said when she kissed her cow.

In the Examiner's charges that Private O'Reilly
made a speech of the most inflammatory character
to the “basin-cats” and other canaille from Butchertown

and Screamersville, “who had assembled to
hear and cheer him;” and that he sang to the same
crowd from the stoop of the Exchange Hotel, songs
advising our gallant soldiers to mutiny, kill their
officers and then submit quietly to the jugurthan
yoke—there is, need we say, not one syllable of
truth? His speech was purely humorous in character,
and—as we have heard from some who were
present—in very excellent taste for the occasion, all
subjects of difference being avoided as much as possible.
He spoke with true Irish pathos of former
happy days in the South, through which, it appears,
he roamed pretty extensively, some ten years ago,
as “deputy aide-de-camp” to a Yankee pedlar of
cheap jewelry, gold pens and other “notions.”

The song about Northern and Southern soldiers
was given on the invitation of Messrs. Boteler, Brokenborough,
De Jarnette and other gentlemen of
equally high character, who had collected on the
Exchange stoop to hear and be amused; and if he
did wrong in singing it, he erred on the invitation
of gentlemen whose loyalty to the Confederate flag
is, to say the very least, as unimpeachable as that of
the Examiner. The main part of his audience, we
may here say, were neither “basin-cats,” nor ca

naille, but out-door hospital-patients and veterans
from Lee's army home on furlough. Will our citizens
believe that to such an audience any song of
the kind described by the Examiner could be sung
with impunity?

So far was this lyric from containing anything improper
for Southrons to hear from a Northern
soldier, that we gladly print it, as a refutation of
the Examiner's slander, from a copy in the hands of
Gen. Winder, who has charge of Private O'Reilly
at the Exchange Hotel. To our way of thinking, it
shows a kindlier feeling on the part of our Northern
foemen to the soldiers of the South, than we were
prepared to expect; and if such be—as Private
O'Reilly claims—a fair example of the sentiments
of the great mass of the Federal “blue-bellies,” it
evinces, we think, a disposition towards a restoration
of Peace and Brotherhood, on terms not only honorable
and just to both sides, but also presenting a
dream of “Universal Dominion,” which we know
to have long lain close to the hearts of the whole
American people before the commencement of this
unhappy civil war.

Of this lyric Private Miles denies the authorship,
saying that it was written by “a great scholar all

out,” named Corporal Tracy, who is now, or was
when Miles last heard from him, senior orderly at
Gen. John A. Logan's head-quarters. Tracy, it appears,
was badly wounded at Gettysburgh, and had
to lie for some weeks in a field-hospital, wherein
Confederate and Union soldiers were mixed up indiscriminately.
It was there and thus that Tracy
wrote; and as his verses were sung by Private
O'Reilly to the air of “Jamie's on the Stormy Sea,”
there were many kindling eyes and heaving hearts
amongst the veterans in his audience. It was entirely
pathetic, and yet entirely manly. The vieux
moustaches, familiar with the sounds of battle, caught
the echoes of old fights in all its swelling lines and
sinking cadences; and the suggestion in the last
stanza that North and South should reunite to wipe
out our “common wrongs” with France and England,
was rapturously applauded.

He called it:

THE BLUE-BELLIES TO THE GREY-BACKS.

A DREAM OF UNIVERSAL DOMINION.

As to the “premature and indiscreet remarks”
made by Messrs. Keitt, Lamar, Curry, McRae, and
Private Roger A. Pryor in the bar-room of the
Spottiswoode House, relative to deposing President
Jeff. Davis and elevating General Beauregard to his
place, we have little to say at present—except to
express our sincere joy that this scheme, so long
festering in the minds of that little clique represented
by the Examiner, has thus been brought to a
head that can be seen and punctured. For Col. Keitt
we are sorry. As commander of Fort Wagner, he
fought bravely and held out with conspicuous resolve.
McRae and Curry have of late so broken
down their constitutions, that whiskey takes effect
on them after the second quart—a thing it never did
before. Lamar is a hot-headed and shallow dreamer,
whose appointment as Professor of Philosophy by
the Mississippi University, was one of the most
magnificent satires ever devised against the miserable
muddle and trash of ethical and metaphysical
acquirements. As to Pryor, formerly a Brigadier,
but reduced for sufficient cause to the ranks, he is a
born and bred conspirator—a natural Marat, to whom
no mercy should be shown; and in his case we
respectfully urge that President Davis owes it to

the country to apply the advice given gratis by the
Examiner in regard to the hanging of Private
O'Reilly, and the burning by the common hangman
of his lights and bowels. When executions of this
just character begin, we caution all the rest of the
Anti-Davis people not to be found too near the
gallows!

Of the only other song given by Private Miles
O'Reilly, from the stoop of the Exchange Hotel, we
have just received a copy from Mayor Mayo, who
was also one of the “basin-cat” audience described
by the Examiner. This song is said to be the work
of a Yankee officer attached to the Ordnance Corps,
named Horace Porter, whose Teutonic version of
“King Dickey de tree times”—Shakespeare's Richard
the Third,—as given in a Dutch district of
Pennsylvania—will long be remembered by all our
young West Pointers who were Cadets at the same
time with Captain Porter. Private Miles sang the
words with great spirit and tenderness to the air of
“Napoleon's March,” the soldiers in his audience
appearing much pleased with it, and giving it an enthusiastic
encore. He called it:

THE REVIEW.

A PICTURE OF OUR VETERANS.

To whatever of “high treason against the Confederacy”
the Examiner can find in this last quaint
and uncouth, but touching and soldierly song, we
bid it welcome. Already it is on the lips and in the
hearts of many of our veterans; and we believe
they will fight none the worse for it when Lee's or
Johnson's bugles again arouse them to strike tents,
pack ten days' rations, and march northward or
westward to repel the foul Yankee invader.

In the mission of Private O'Reilly we see the
rays, and the only rays yet vouchsafed to our straining
sight, of a peaceful dawn. When the Yankee

Government sends us an Envoy of this kind, it is
proof that it must be thinking of making, of its own
motion, some concessions of one sort or the other,
while officially demanding of us absolute submission.
In a word, Mr. Lincoln appears ready, if we can
judge from the tone of his only accredited minister,
Private Miles O'Reilly, to “build a bridge of gold”
for our leaders to retreat over. He will at least give
them a canoe to go ashore on, before asking them
to scuttle their own ship and let her sink, without
further effort, into the darkness and oblivion which
are the meed of all unsuccessful great national
struggles.