CHAPTER X.

AT ANTIETAM AND FREDERICKSBURG.

The opening of the battle-summer of 1862 found the seat of war in the East, in the tidewater region of Virginia. These were the days when "strategy" was the word. General George B. McClellan's leading idea was to capture Richmond rather than destroy the Confederate army. His own forces lay on both sides of the Chickahominy, in the peninsula below Richmond. The series of five battles had already begun when Carleton arrived in Baltimore, July 2d. A peremptory order from Washington having stopped every one from reaching Fortress Monroe, he had therefore to do the next best thing as collector and reviser of news. After studying the whole situation, he wrote a long and detailed letter from Baltimore.

Spending most of the summer at home, he was able to rejoin the army early in September, when Lee began his daring invasion of the North,--a political even more than a military move. Then Confederate audacity was fully matched by Pennsylvania's patriotism. Although the State had already one hundred and fifty regiments in service, Governor Andrew D. Curtin called for fifty thousand more men. Within ten days that number of militia were armed and equipped, and in the field. Millionaires and wage-earners, professors and students, ministers and their congregations were in line guarding the Cumberland Valley. Neither disasters nor the incapacity of generals chilled the fierce resolve of Pennsylvania's sons, who were determined to show that the North could not be successfully invaded, even by veterans led by the bravest and most competent generals of the age.

Carleton was in the saddle as soon as he learned that Lee had moved. From Parkton to Hanover Junction, to Westminster, to Harrisburg, to Green Castle, to Hagerstown, to Keitisville he rode, and at these places he wrote, hoping to be in at the mightiest battle which, until this time, had ever been fought on American soil. For many days it was a mystery to the Washington authorities, and to the Army of the Potomac, where Lee and his divisions were; but, with his usual good fortune, Carleton was but nine miles distant, at Hagerstown, when the booming of the cannon at Antietam roused him from his sleep. It was not many minutes before he was in saddle and away. Instead of the ride down the Sharpsburg pike that would have brought him in rear of the enemy, he rode down the Boonsboro road, reaching the right wing of the Union army just as Hooker was pushing his columns into position. Striking off from the main road, through fields and farms, he came to Antietam creek. He found a ford, and reached a pathway where a line of wagons loaded with the wounded was winding down the slope. On the fields above was a squadron of cavalry to hold back stragglers. In the first ambulance he descried a silver star, and saw the face of the brave General Richardson, dead, with a bullet through his breast. At the farmhouses, rows of men were already lying in the straw, waiting their turn at the surgeon's hands, while long lines of men were bringing the fallen on stretchers. With hatred of war in his heart, but with faith in its stern necessity, Carleton rode on to see the fight which raged in front of Sumner, noticing that the cannon of Hooker and Mansfield were silent, cooling their lips after the morning's fever. Of the superb Pennsylvania Reserve Corps, which he had seen a year ago at review, there was now but a remnant. He ascended the ridge, where thirty pieces of cannon were every moment emptying their black mouths of fire and iron.

All day long Carleton was witness of the battle, and then sent home from Sharpsburg, September 19th, in addition to his preliminary letter, a long and comprehensive account in five columns of print. It was so animated in style, so exact in particulars, and so skilful and clear in its general grouping, that its writer was overwhelmed with congratulations by the best of all critics, his fellow correspondents. In two other letters from Sharpsburg, he reviewed the whole subject judicially, and then returned home for a few days' recuperation.

From Philadelphia we find two of his letters, one describing the transport of troops and the monitors then on the stocks, or in the Delaware, and another reviewing the account of Antietam which he had read in the Charleston _Courier_. Indeed, all through the war, Mr. Coffin took pains to inform himself as to Southern opinion, and the methods of its manufacture and influence by the press. He was thus able to correct and purify his own judgments. He preserved his copies of the Southern papers, and gradually accumulated, during and after the war, a unique collection of the newspapers of the South. His first opinion about the battle of Antietam, written October 8, 1862, is the same as that which he held thirty years later:

"In reviewing the contest, aided by the Southern account, it seems that all through the day, complete, decisive, annihilating victory lay within our grasp, and yet we did not take it."

Let us read further from the closing paragraph of that letter, which he wrote in Philadelphia, before moving West to the army in Kentucky:

"In saying this, I raise no criticism, make no question or blame, but prefer to look upon it as a controlling of that Providence which notices the fall of every sparrow. The time had not come for complete victory,--for annihilation of the rebel army. We are not yet over the Red Sea. The baptism of blood is not yet complete. The cause of the war is not yet removed,--retribution for crime is not yet finished. We must suffer again. With firmer faith than ever in the ultimate triumph of right, truth, and justice, let us accept the fiery ordeal."

Like the pendulum of an observatory clock, the bob-point of which touches at each vibration the mercury which transmits intelligence of its movements to distant points, Carleton now swung himself to Cincinnati. In Louisville he gave an account, from reports, of the battle of Perryville. It was written in the utmost haste, with one eye upon the hands of his watch moving on to the minute of the closing of the mail. In such a case, according to his custom, he wrote a second letter, when possessed with fuller data from eye-witnesses. In the heart of Kentucky he was able to see the effects of the President's Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued but three weeks before. He described the coming of the Confederate army into Kentucky as "the Flatterer, dressed in a white garment, who with many fair speeches would have turned Christian and Faithful from the glittering gates of the Golden City, shining serene and fair over the land of Beulah." The robe having dropped from Flatterer's limbs, the Kentuckian saw that the reality was hideous, and that to follow him was to go back again to the City of Destruction. The Confederates moved southward, laden with plunder, while General Buell, with his army of one hundred and forty thousand men, after having mildly pursued them for twenty-one days, returned to Louisville. Carleton's comment upon these movements is, "Such is strategy."

Finding himself again in the trough of inactivity, and ever ready to mount on the wave of opportunity, Carleton moved again to the East, writing in the cars while whirling to Virginia. His first letters from the East were penned at Harper's Ferry. Then began his zigzag movements, like a planet. We find his pen active at Berlin, Md., Purcellville, Va., Upperville, Va., where, beside the cavalry battles between Pleasanton and Stewart, he saw that seven corps were in motion. From Gainesville, Warrenton Junction, Orleans, Warrenton, Catlett's Station, and again and often from Washington, and from Falmouth, he sent his letters, which, if not always full of battle, kept the heart of New England patient and courageous.

McClellan had been removed, and Burnside, taking command, led his army to the riverside before Fredericksburg. Carleton was witness of the bombardment of the city by the Federal artillery. From his coign of vantage at General Sumner's headquarters, on the piazza of an elegant mansion, one hundred feet above the Rappahannock, and about three-quarters of a mile from it, he could see, as though it were a great cartoon and he a weaver of the Gobelins tapestry of history, the awful pattern of war. Beyond the sixteen rifled Rodman guns of large calibre and long range, mounted on the river bluff and thrust out through sand-bags, behind the masses of infantry, the pontoon and artillery trains, Carleton stood and saw the making of a bridge in fifteen minutes, in the face of a terrific musketry fire from the opposite shore. Then followed views of the street fight in the doomed city, the shattered houses, the cloudless sky, the setting sun, the gorgeous sunset dyes, the deepening shadows, the masses of men upon the opposite hills, the screaming shells, the puffs of white smoke, the bursting storms of iron, the blood-red flames illuminating the ruin of dwellings, the battle smoke settling in the valley, so densely as to obscure or hide the flashes. All this was before Carleton on that afternoon and evening of that winter's day, December 11th. Then he spread his blanket for a little sleep, expecting to awake to behold one of the greatest battles of modern times; but the sun set without the two great armies coming to close quarters.

The next day was a hard one, for Carleton was in the field until night, now watching a bombardment, now a charge, and again a long and stubborn, persistent musketry fire. The shells sang near him, and at one time he was evidently the target for a whole Confederate battery; for, within a few seconds, a round shot struck a few rods in front of him, a second fell to the right, a third went over his head, a fourth skimmed along the surface of the ground, just over the backs of a regiment, lying flat on their faces. As he moved to the shelter of the river bank, a shot dropped obligingly in the water before him. All day long the lines of batteries on the hills smoked like Etna and Vesuvius. Sometimes, between ordnance and musketry, there were twenty thousand flashes a minute. Carleton thus far had seen no battles where the fire equalled that which was poured upon Sumner's command during the last grand, but hopeless, charge at sunset. At nightfall, when the wearied soldiers could lie down for rest, Carleton began the work of writing his letter. Among other things he said:

"With the deference to military strategics, my own common sense deprecated attempting the movements which were made, as unnecessary and unwise,--which must be accomplished with fearful slaughter, and which I believed would be unsuccessful....

"It is a plain of Balaklava, where the Light Brigade, renowned in song, made their fearful charge."

Then follows a simple but sufficient diagram of the Confederate impregnable position, where, with only common printer's type, and the "daggers" of punctuation standing for Blakesley and Armstrong guns, printer's ink told the story. Though nearly exhausted by his manifold labors of brain and muscle, Carleton, on the 15th, visited the battle-field, which did not exceed one hundred acres, and the city in which the troops were quietly quartered, but in which a Confederate shell was falling every ten minutes. After surveying the near and distant scenes from the cupola of an already well-riddled house, Carleton followed the army when it withdrew to Falmouth, seeing through his glass the Confederates leaping upon the deserted entrenchments and staring at the empty town.

Returning to Washington, he reviewed as usual the battle, and then returned homeward, according to his wont, for three weeks of rest and refreshment. His last letter, before leaving the front, was a noble and inspiriting plea for patience and continuance. He wrote: "The army is ready to fight, but the people are despondent. The army has not lost its nerve, its self-possession, its balance; it is more powerful to-day than it has ever been. It has no thought of giving up the contest. The cause is holy. It is not for power or dominion, but for the rich inheritance decreed by our fathers."

The same bugle call of inspiration sounded from his lips and pen, when he rejoined the army on the Rappahannock, and Hooker was in command. He wrote: "The army needs several things; first, to be supported by the people at home. There is nothing which will so quickly take the strength out of the soldier as a blue letter from home, and on the other hand there is nothing which would give him so much life as a cheerful, hopeful letter from his friends. Let every one look beyond the immediate present into the years to come, and think of the inheritance he is to bequeath to his children. Let him see the coming millions of our people on this continent; let him lay his ear to the ground, and hear the tread of that mighty host which is to people the Mississippi Valley; which will climb the mountains of the West, to coin the hidden riches into gold; let him see the great cities springing up on the Pacific Coast; let him understand that this nation is yet in its youth; that this continent is to be the highway between China and Europe; let him behold this contest in its vast proportion, reaching through all coming time, and affecting the entire human race forever; let him resolve that, come weal or come woe, come life or come death, that it shall be sustained, and it will be."

Another letter deals in rather severe sarcasm with a friend who belonged to "the Nightshade family," one of those individuals who thrive on darkness. He wrote: "People of New England, are you not ashamed of yourselves? Away with your old womanish fears, your shivering, your timidity, your garrulousness.... Sustain your sons by bold, inspiring, patriotic words and acts; act like men.... This army, this government must be sustained. It will be."