Chapter 31

THE RUINS OF THE REBELLION.

When Richmond was a plain city, a county seat, and the residence of a governor and commonwealth legislature, its enterprise was as gradual as its hospitality and private probity were steadfast. It was always a fierce political arena, and its two great journals, the _Whig_ and _Enquirer_, were not more violently partisan than its hustings. In the latter its debaters were wide-famed. No such "stump" has ever existed in America, commencing with Patrick Henry, whose eloquence was as intense and telling as his statesmanship was errant and inconsistent, and passing through the shrill and bitter apostrophies of John Randolph down to the latest era of Henry A. Wise, the most sufferable and interminable campaign orator extant, and John Minor Botts, scarcely his inferior. With us, out of door rhetoric is dry, studied, and argumentative; here an inspiration, based upon feeling rather than reason, and so earnest that it knew no personal friendship where its political affinities stopped. Whig and Democrat were not men of the same race or family in Richmond; they passed each other on the sidewalk with a sneer or a scowl, and knew no coalition even in the house of God. Even when the Whig party as an organization deceased, the Whigs, as individuals, retained their traditional antipathy, and the advent of secession was decried by these, not because they loved the Union more, but the triumphant Democracy the less. Separation was a feature of the hated faith, and no good could come out of Nazareth. The Union men of Richmond who have hungered in Castle Thunder, and been driven, needy and naked, from the South, were all old line Whigs, distrusting the North, but disliking Democracy. However, the war burst at last, heralded by that mysterious lunatic who appeared like a warning giant in the twilight day of the Union,--old John Brown; and as the Gulf States wheeled into line and pulled down the old colors, the Old Dominion, Southern and slaveholding, was too impulsive not to follow the whirlwind. She did not go for policy's sake, nor for principle's sake, but for emotion's sake. How wild and jubilant, and confident, were those Richmond mass meetings, at which separation was counselled! How awful seems their levity at this distance, with the city conquered and in ruins! On the Capitol Hill the mad orators inveighed; within the Capitol met the disunion assembly in secret and prolonged session; before the American, the Exchange, and the Spottswood hotels, visiting commissioners harangued the crowd; the people went to ballot on the day of State suicide, with laughing and wagging, and at the decree that Virginia and her people had resolved to quit the fabric of their fathers, bonfires and illuminations lit up the river and the sky.

Done, these were the men to stand fast. Done in dream, the first acts were mirages rather than comprehensible events. They marched upon Harper's Ferry; they suppressed the Unionists in their midst; they erased the sacred mottoes of amity and unity from their monuments, and won to the new cause they so blindly embraced every inch of their soil except Old Point, where Fortress Monroe still stood defiant, to be in the end the source of their downfall. Gayly went the populace of Richmond, and splendid parties made the nights lustrous. When they heard that their town was mentioned, among many others, as the probable Confederate capital, they threw their hearts into the suggestion and offered lands and edifices as free gifts for the honor of being the centre of the South. A few, more interested, beheld in the coming of the seat of government higher rents and increased patronage, crowded hotels, and railway stock at a premium; but the mass, with the enthusiasm of women or children, thought only of their beloved city growing in rank and power; the home of legislators, orators, and savans; the seat of all rank and the depository of archives. At last the good news came; Richmond was the capital of a great nation; that courtesy bound all grateful Virginian hearts to the common cause forever; the heyday and gratulation were renewed; the new President, and the reverend senators appeared on Richmond streets; the citizens were proud and happy.

There was no spectre of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its extremest and most deadly phase. Richmond and Virginia laughed at these, flushed in the present, and invincible in the past. They only held high heads,--and trade, with vanity, grew strong, till every citizen wondered why all this glory had been so long delayed, and despised the ten years preceding the rupture, if not, indeed, the whole past of the Union.

The President of the United States proclaimed war; an army marched upon the city. Not until the battle of Bull Run, when the dead and mangled came by hundreds into the town, did any one discover the consequences of Richmond's new distinction; but by this time the Rebel government had absorbed Virginia, and was master of the city. Thenceforward Richmond was the scene of all terrors, the prey of all fears and passions. Campaign after campaign was directed against her; she lived in the perpetual thunder of cannon; raiders pressed to her gates; she was a great garrison and hospital only, besieged and cut off from her own provinces; armies passed through her to the sound of drums, and returned to the creak of ambulances. She lost her social prestige, and became a barrack-city, filled with sutlers, adventurers, and refugees, till, bearing bravely up amid domestic riot and horrible demoralization,--a jail, a navy-yard, a base of operations,--she grew pinched, and base, and haggard, and, at last, deserted. Given over to sack and fire, the wretches who used her retreated in the night, and the enemies she had provoked marched over her defences, and laid her--spent, degenerate, and disgraced--under martial law.

The outline of the scenes immediately associated with the evacuation of Richmond has been told by telegraph. Now that the stupefied citizens have recovered reason and memory so well as to tell us the story, it seems the most dramatic and fearful of the war. On Saturday the city was calm and trusting; Lee, its idol, held Grant, at Petersburg, fast; the daily journals came out as usual, filled with soothing accounts; that night came vague rumors of reverses; in the morning vaguer rumors of evacuation; by Sunday night the public records were burned in the streets, and the only remaining railway carried off the specie of the banks; before daylight on Monday, the explosions of bridges and half-built ships of war shook the houses; in the imperfect day, women, and old men, and children began to sway and surge before the guarded depot, which refused to admit them; then the town fell afire; no remonstrance could pacify the incendiaries; the spring wind carried the flame from the burning boats on the canal to the great Galligo Mills, to files of massive warehouses groaning with tobacco, into the heart of the town, where stores, and vaults, and banks, and factories lined the wide, undulating streets; it filled the gray concave with flame till the stars of the dawn shrank to pale invisibility in the advancing glare, and the crackle of hot roofs and beams, and the crash of walls and timbers, drowned the cries of the frightened and bankrupt, who beheld their fortunes wither in an hour, and the inheritance of their children fall to ashes. By the red, consuming light, poured past the straggling Confederate soldiers, dead to the acknowledgment of private rights, and sacking shop and home with curses and ribaldry; the suburban citizens and the menial negroes adopted their examples; carrying off whatever came next their hands, and with arms full of "swag," dropping it in the highway, lured by some dearer plunder. Negroes, with baskets of stolen champagne and rare jars of tamarinds, sought their dusky quarters to swill and carouse; and whites of the middle, and even of the higher class, lent themselves to theft, who, before this debased era, would have died before so surrendering their honor. All was peril, terror, and license; all who had nothing to lose were thieves; all who had anything left to lose were cowards. The conflagration swept through the densest, proudest blocks, driving off, not only the resident worthy, but the resident corrupt. Where were the lewd contractors, who had hoarded Confederate scrip by the basest exactions? With the fall of the capital their dollars dwindled to dust; four years of crime had resulted in beggary; still, with grasping palms, they adhered to their valueless paper, bearing it away. But of all the wretched, the Cyprians were the foremost. These inhabited the dense and business part of the town, where their houses were serried and compact; and, driven forth by the fire, they sought the street in their plumes and calicoes, to spend a cold and shivering bivouac in the square of the Capitol. From afar, the rich men of Sunday watched the flames of Monday sweeping on in terrible impetuosity, knowing that every tongue of light which leaped on high carried with it the competence they had sinned to acquire. And behind all, plunderer, incendiary, and straggler, came the one vague, overlapping, dreadful fear of--the enemy. Would they finish what friends had commenced,--the sack, the desolation, the slaughter of the place? Richmond had cost them half a million of lives, a mountain of blood and wealth, four years of deadly struggle; would they not complete its ruin?

The morning came; the Confederates were gone; cavalry in blue galloped up the streets; a brigade of white infantry filed after them; then came the detested negroes. Behold! the victors, the subjugators, assist to quench the flames,--and Richmond is captured, but secure!

Many of the churches were open on the Sunday of April 9, 1865, and were thinly attended by the more adventurous of the citizens, with a sprinkling of soldiers and Northern civilians. Mr. Woodbridge, at the Monument Church, built on the site of a famous burnt theatre, prayed for "all in authority," and held his tongue upon dangerous topics. The First Baptist Negro Church has been occupied all the week by Massachusetts chaplains, and Northern negro preachers, who have talked the gospel of John Brown to gaping audiences of wool, white-eyeball, and ivory, telling them that the day of deliverance has come, and that they have only to possess the land which the Lord by the bayonet has given them. To-day, Mr. Allen, the regular white preacher, occupied the pulpit, and told the negroes that slavery was a divine institution, which would continue forever, and that the duty of every good servant was to stay at home and mind his master. Half of the enlightened Africans got up midway of the discourse and left; the rest were in doubt, and two or three black class-leaders, whom the parson had wheeled over, prayed lustily that the Lord would keep Old Virginny from new ideas and all Yankee salvations; so that in the end the population were quite tangled up, as much so as if they had read the book of Revelation. I attended Saint Paul's, the fashionable Episcopalian church, where Lee, Davis, Memminger, and the rest had been communicants, and heard Doctor Minnegerode discourse. He was one of the Prussian refugees of 1848, and, though a hot Jacobin there, became a more bitter secessionist here. He is learned, fluent, and thoughtful, but speaks with a slight Teutonic accent. Jeff Davis's pew was occupied by nobody, the door thereof being shut. Jeff was a very devout man, but not so much so as Lee, who made all the responses fervently, and knelt at every requirement. This church is capable of "seating" fifteen hundred persons, has galleries running entirely around it, and is sustained at the roof within by composite pilasters of plaster, and at the pulpit by columns of mongrel Corinthian; the _tout ensemble_ is very excellent; a darkey sexton gave us a pew, and there were some handsome ladies present, dark Richmond beauties, haughty and thinly clothed, with only here and there a jockey-feathered hat, or a velvet mantilla, to tell of long siege and privation. We saw that those who dressed the shabbiest had yet preserved some little article of jewelry--a finger-ring, a brooch, a bracelet, showing how the last thing in woman to die is her vanity. Poor, proud souls! Last Sunday many of them were heiresses; now many of them could not pay the expenses of their own funerals. There were some Confederate officers in the house. They reminded me of the captive Jews holding worship in their gutted Temple. Some ruffians broke into this church after the occupation, and wrote ribaldry in the Bible and hymn-book. Dr. Minnegerode dared not pray for the Confederate States, and his sermon was trite, based upon the text of the eleventh chapter of the Acts--"The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch." In the opening lesson, however, he aimed poison at the North, selecting the forty-fourth and following Psalms, commencing, "We have heard with our ears, O God! our fathers have told us, what work Thou didst in their days, in the times of old." Then it spoke of the heathen being driven out and the chosen people planted; afflicted by God's disfavor, the forefathers held the territory, and the generation extant would yet rout its enemies. But now the old stock were put to shame, a reproach to their neighbors and those that dwelt round about them. "Thou hast broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death," going not forth with our armies, bowing our souls to the dust till our bellies cleave unto the earth; we are killed all the day long, and counted as sheep for the slaughter.

Let all who would drink the essence of sorrow and anguish, read this wonderful Psalm, to learn how after this recapitulation, the parson said aloud the thrilling invocation.

"Arise! for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' sake."

Then came the next Psalm, light and tripping, full of praise for the king and his bride, coming to the nuptials with her virgin train: "instead of thy fathers, shall be thy children, whom thou mayst make princes in all the earth." A poetic parallel might be drawn between all this and the early hopes of Richmond; but the third Psalm came in like a beautiful peroration.

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,--the Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah! He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire."

Clear, direct, and in meaning monotone, the captive high-priest read all this, so fearfully applicable to the subjugated and ruined town, and then the organ threw its tender music into the half-empty concave, sobbing like a far voice of multitudes, until the sweet singing of Madame Ruhl, the chorister, swept into the moan of pipes, and rose to a grand peal, quivering and trilling, like a nightingale wounded, making more tears than the sublimest operatic effort and the house reeled and trembled, as if Miriam and her chanting virgins were lifting praises to God in the midst of the desert.

That part of the New Testament read, by some strange fatuity, touches also the despair of the city. It told of Christ betrayed by Iscariot, deserted by his disciples, saying to his few trusty ones: "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad." "Can ye not watch with me one hour?" he says to the timid and sleeping; and turning to his conquerors, avers that the Son of Man shall return to Jerusalem, "sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." All this, of course, was the prescribed lesson for the Sunday before Easter, which to-day happened to be; but had the pastor searched it out to meet the exigencies of the place and time, it could not have been more _apropos_. He read also from Daniel, where the king's dream was interpreted; his realm, like a tree worn down to the root, and the king himself making his dwelling with the wild asses, but in the end "thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee, after that thou shalt have known that the heavens do rule."

Again the organ rang, and the wonderful voice of the choristers alternated with deep religious prayers, whose refrain was, "Have mercy upon us."

Only one Sunday gone by, the church was densely packed with Rebel officers and people; Mrs. Lee was there, and the president, in his high and whitened hairs. Midway of the discourse a telegram came up the aisle, borne by a rapid orderly. The president read it, and strode away; the preacher read it, and faltered, and turned pale; it said:

My lines are broken; Richmond must be evacuated by midnight. ROBERT E. LEE.

Ill news travels without words; the whole house felt that the great calamity had come; they broke for the doors, and left the rector, alone and frightened, to finish the solemn services.

Now the enemy is here; the music and the prayer are not interrupted. God is over all, whether Davis or Lincoln be uppermost.

This campaign, so gloriously and promptly finished, has consumed just eleven days. It took three to flank the Rebel army, one to capture Petersburg, one to occupy Richmond, and six to pursue, overtake, and capture the Army of Northern Virginia. No such memorable fighting has ever been known on our continent, and it parallels the Italian, the Austerlitz, and the Jena campaigns; in breadth of conception, it outrivals them all; it took less men to do it than the last two; it shows equal sagacity with any of them, but none of their brilliant episodes; and, unlike them, we cannot trace its full credit to any single personality. It has made the army immortal, but the lustre of it is diffused, not concentrating upon any single head. Grant must be credited with most of the combinations; yet without the genius and activity of Sheridan, the bewildering rapidity of Sherman, and the steadfastness of such reliable men as Wright, Parke, and Griffin, these combinations would have fallen apart. It is said that Stoneman and Sheridan were to have joined their separate cavalry commands at Lynchburg, and effect a simultaneous junction with the Army of the Potomac. This failed, through a miscalculation of distance or time; but had they succeeded, we should have been less than three days in turning Lee's right, and so made the campaign even more concise. But Grant's talent has been marked and signal. He is the long-expected "coming man." None can be lukewarm in surveying the nice adjustment of so many separate and converging routes to a grand series of victories. Sherman leaves the Rebellion no Gulf city to inhabit, and cuts off Lee's retreat while he absorbs Johnston; the navy closes the last seaport; Sheridan severs all communication with Richmond, and swells the central forces; then the Rebels are lured from their lines and scattered on their right; the same night the intrenchments of Petersburg are stormed, Richmond falls as this prop is removed, being already hungry-hearted, and the flushed army falls upon Lee and finishes the war. Is not this work for gratulation? Glory to the army, perfect at last, and to Grant, to Sheridan, to each of its commanders!

Let us not do injustice to Lee. His tactics at the close of his career were as brilliant as necessity would permit. He could not feed Richmond, even though its impregnable works were behind him to retire to. So he gave his government time to evacuate, and, with his thinned and famishing ranks, made a bold push to join Johnston, some of whose battalions had already reinforced him; overtaken on the way, and punished anew, he did as any great and humane commander would do,--stopped the effusion of blood uselessly, and gave up his sword.

Unless Davis has been captured, we would think it improbable that he had given up the Rebel cause. He was born to revolutionize, containing within himself all the elements of a Rebel leader, and too proud to yield, even when, like Macbeth, pursued to his castle-keep. I am assured by those who know him best that he has been, throughout, the absolute master of the Confederacy, overawing Lee, who, from the first, was a reluctant Rebel; and his design was, until abandoned by his army, to hold Richmond, even through starvation, making, behind its tremendous fortifications, a defence like that of Leyden or Genoa.

There is no more faith in the Rebellion; it will be a long time before the United States is greatly beloved, but it will be always obeyed. Our soldiers look well, most of them being newly uniformed, and behave like gentlemen. Courtesy will conquer all that bayonets have not won. The burnt district is still hideously yawning in the heart of the town, a monument to the sternness of those bold revolutionists who are being hunted to their last quarry. Despotism, under the plea of necessity, has met with its end here as it must everywhere. We shall have no more experiments for liberty out of the Union, if the new Union will grant all that it gave before. Yesterday, when our splendid levies were paraded in the street, with foot, cavalry, and cannon, in admirable order, and kindly-eyed men in command, I looked across their cleanly lines, tipped with bayonets, to the Capitol they had won, bearing at last the tri-color we all love and honor, as the symbol of our homes and the hope of the world, and thought how more grandly, even in her ruin, Richmond stood in the light of its crowding stars, rather than the den of a desperate cabal, whose banner was known in no city nor sea, but as the ensign of corsairs, and hailed only by fustian peers, now rent in the grip of our eagle, and without a fane or an abiding-place. Let us go on, not conquerors, but Republicans, battering down only to rebuild more gloriously,--not narrowing the path of any man, but opening to high and low a broader destiny and a purer patriotism.