467 
 1>48W17 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
MAJOR GENERAL 
 
 CHARLES DEVENS 
 
 Justice of' the Supreme Court of 
 Massachusetts 
 
 Cam glaric quant Plfwurto 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE COMMANDERY OF THE STATE OF 
 
 MASSACHUSETTS MILITARY ORDER OF THE LOYAL 
 
 LEGION OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 MARCH 19, 1891. 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS A. WALKER 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 E467.1.D48 W17 
 
 Major General Charles Devens, Justice of 
 
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 3 1924 030 945 137 
 
 BOSTON 
 Press of Rockwell and Churchill 
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 UNiVtRSITYJ 
 .^ LIBRARY 
 
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Companions : — 
 
 The soldiers of the Union are falling now, under the 
 dread artillery of Time, almost as fast as they fell in 1862 
 and '3 and '4. To that fatal fire we are powerless to make 
 reply. Against that foe our once trusty muskets are dumb. 
 The sharpest sword is without point or edge to the viewless 
 forms which beset us in front and flank and rear. Over 
 those grim barricades we well know we shall never carry 
 one solitary bayonet. On them no hand shall ever plant 
 a hostile flag. The soldiers of these once victorious hosts 
 must advance, and still advance, without pause or possibility 
 of retreat, until the last survivor shall throw up his arms in 
 mortal agony, and the Grand Army of the Union shall 
 have perished from the earth. 
 
 Fatal as have been the last few years to the men of 1861-5, 
 that which has but just opened threatens to be memorable 
 beyond all others in its tale of fallen warriors. Already we 
 have seen the former general-in-chief of the army and the 
 former admiral-in-chief of the navy lying dead on the self- 
 same day, awaiting burial at the hands of a mourning 
 nation ; and to-night we are assembled to pay our tribute 
 of respect and grief to the best beloved of Massachusetts' 
 soldiers in the great war for liberty and union. 
 
 In his ever-memorable oration, Mr. Everett, in phrases 
 whose felicity has " been the admiration and the despair of 
 the rhetorician, explained the failure of the public mind 
 justly to estimate the true greatness of Washington, and 
 the exceptional difficulty which the biographer or the eulo- 
 
4 MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES DEVBNS. 
 
 gist encounters in portraying his character, by the fact of 
 his singularly complete and harmonious development. "In 
 him were united," said Mr. Everett, " all the qualities re- 
 quired for the honorable and successful conduct of the 
 greatest affairs, each in the happy mean of a full maturity, 
 and all in that true proportion in which they balance and 
 sustain each other." "To complain of the character of 
 Washington," he continues, "that it is destitute of brill- 
 iant qualities, is to complain of a circle that has no salient 
 points and no sharp angles in its circumference, forgetting 
 that it owes all its wonderful properties to the unbroken 
 curve of which every point is equidistant from the centre." 
 
 Somewhat the same difficulty besets him who would speak 
 to comrades, friends, and fellow-citizens regarding Charles 
 Devens. Had he, whom to-night we mourn, been only a 
 daring, dashing soldier, from whose career stood strongly 
 out two or three days of conspicuous achievement, it would 
 be comparatively an easy task to recite his story and pro- 
 nounce his eulogy. But Charles Devens was not alone a 
 soldier, tried and true, brave and capable. In a long life 
 of civil service he was not less distinguished. He was a 
 jurist of stainless purity and professional eminence ; a states- 
 man who sat in the highest councils of the nation as the 
 successor of Rodney, Pinkney, and Wirt ; an orator who 
 has had few equals in the later days of the Republic, and 
 whose power to touch the pathetic and heroic chords, when 
 dealing with martial themes, has seldom been excelled in 
 the history of human eloquence ; he was a gentleman so 
 highly and variously accomplished, so learned in the finer 
 letters, so graceful and stately in bearing, so winning and 
 charming in address, so rich and full in conversation, as to 
 make him the idol of every social circle. To a figure so 
 rounded out and perfected on every side, Mr. Everett's 
 characterization may well be applied, wefre it only in apol- 
 ogy for the shortcomings of whomsoever shall undertake 
 its description. 
 
 But whatever any one who knew him, in all the fulness of 
 
MAJOR GBNBEAL CHARLES DBVBNS. 6 
 
 his character and life, might have deemed most admirable in 
 him, our friend, to himself, was, first and foremost, a soldier. 
 It was in this act and part he would have chosen, for him- 
 self, to be portrayed ; and therefore it was meet that, when 
 his obsequies were to be performed in yonder beautiful tem- 
 ple, the flag of his country and of his beloved Commonwealth 
 should be displayed ; that armed men should line the steps 
 of tlie chancel ; that his bier should be preceded by muffled 
 drums, beating the soldier's dirge ; and that, when all was 
 said, and it only remained to lay that once stately figure in 
 the grave, bugles should, from transept and from gallery, 
 sound forth " Taps " : the soldier's " good-night ! lights out ! 
 to sleep!" 
 
 I have said that General Deveus was, to himself, first and 
 foremost, a soldier ; and that it was as such he would, for 
 himself, have chosen to be portrayed. Let me not be mis- 
 understood. It was not to martial instincts that this feeling 
 was due, though these he had strongly rooted in his nature ; 
 and even before the war served in the militia of his State, 
 a pretty severe test, in those days, as all will appreciate who 
 recollect the old-fashioned musters and reviews. Nor was 
 this feeling the result of warlike enthusiasm engendered in 
 the mighty conflicts in which he had taken part, where armed 
 men by the hundred thousand crashed together under leaders 
 like Lee and Grant. Nor, again, was this in any measure due 
 to pride in his own personal achievements. It was not be- 
 cause he had been a soldier, merely, but because he had been 
 a soldier of the Union, that Charles Devens held those four 
 years of military service to be, beyond all others, the chief 
 thing in his long and distinguished career. It was the noble 
 cause, it was the glorious outcome, which made the war, for 
 him, the better part of his life. It was in the name of the 
 Union that he armed himself and went forth to battle ; it 
 was the integrity of his country, made forever inviolate and 
 secure, which rendered the recollections of his achievements 
 and sufferings precious beyond comparison with professional 
 honors, or political preferment, or social successes. 
 
6. MAJOB GENEKAL CHARLES DETBNS. 
 
 The outbreak of the Rebellion found Charles Devens, just 
 entering upon the forty-second year of his age, engaged in 
 the practice of law in the city of Worcester, in partnership 
 with Mr. George Frisbie Hoar, now a Senator in Congress 
 from the State of Massachusetts. For months before hostil- 
 ities began, the portents of war had filled his mind, and the 
 actual catastrophe found him ready. His age, his social 
 position, his professional engagements would have combined 
 to give him a far better excuse from service in the field than 
 had the great majority of those who stayed at home ; but 
 this was never a possibility for a moment in his case. It was 
 certain of him, if of no other man in the " Heart of the 
 Commonwealth," that he would be among the first who 
 should go to the defence of the nation's capital. He had 
 attended the gloomy inauguration of President Lincoln at 
 Washington six weeks before. From his lifelong friend. 
 General Charles P. Stone, then in command of the militia of 
 the District of Columbia, he had learned much of the plans of 
 the Southern conspirators ; and he had rejoiped with all his 
 soul in the fiery and steadfast courage exhibited in that ap- 
 palling crisis by the gallant Holt, of Kentucky, then Secretary 
 of War in place of the treacherous and perjured Floyd. He 
 had returned to his home full of forebodings, but nerved also 
 to a stern determination to take a man's and a patriot's part 
 in whatever might come. And so, when the angry roar 
 of the cannon bombarding Sumter awoke the nation from 
 its weak dreams of compromise and conciliation, the crisis 
 found no man in all the land better prepared. Promptly 
 as it was offered, he accepted the commapd of the three 
 small companies of militia which then existed in and around 
 Worcester, and called upon his fellow-citizens to fill their 
 ranks. 
 
 No one of all the thousands who crowded Mechanics' Hall 
 on the evening of the 16th of April will ever forget his as- 
 pect and bearing as he appealed to the young men before 
 him. Burning with the excitement of the occasion, his • 
 always fervid eloquence flamed to its utmost height as he 
 
MAJOR 6BNEEA1 CHARLES DBVENS. 7 
 
 looked into the eager crowd of upturned faces, in every one 
 of which he saw a possible soldier of the Union. 
 
 Small as, by the accident of the situation, was his com- 
 mand, Charles Devens' accession to the forces of Massachu- 
 setts, called forth by the President's proclamation, was a 
 thing of prime importance. Among those to whom previous 
 experience in the militia assigned a place in the first levies of 
 the old Bay State, he was by far the most conspicuous. Few 
 of them were men widely known. His position, his charac- 
 ter, his preeminent abilities, did much to give authority to the 
 subsequent calls which the great War Governor made upon 
 the men of mark throughout the State to give themselves to 
 the defence of the country. This had much to do, we can 
 hardly doubt, with the extraordinary wealth of talent and 
 social distinction with which the later levies of Massachusetts 
 were officered. The influence of that cause, in the war of 
 the Rebellion, is seldom appreciated. When a man like 
 Charles Devens, or James Wadsworth, or Peter Porter, or 
 Theodore Winthrop entered the army forming for the main- 
 tenance of the Constitution and the laws, he did more than 
 bring one other good soldier, possibly, also, a capable com- 
 mander, to the cause of the Union. Nowhere are breeding 
 and learning and social distinction more potent than in the 
 ranks of a volunteer soldiery. Such a man becomes at once 
 a force in such a body. His presence carries authority, com- 
 municates inspiration, suggests noble aims, rebukes intrigue, 
 and stills vulgar clamor. One such colonel in a division, one 
 such brigadier in a corps, is worth many who are in all tech- 
 nical respects equally good soldiers and are at heart fully as 
 honest, brave, and loyal. 
 
 High as was the resolve, patriotic as were the aspirations 
 of the Third Battalion of Rifles when they left Worcester for 
 the front, the services of those good companies were not des- 
 tined to become conspicuous. They were sent to Baltimore, 
 where they formed a part of the garrison of Fort McHenry, 
 then sorely needed to overawe the desperate secession- 
 ism of that turbulent city, whose streets were still reeking 
 
8 MAJOK GENEEAl CHARLES DEVBNS. 
 
 with the blood of the skin isons of Massachusetts. Before 
 the term of enlistment for his battalion had expired, Major 
 Devens was, on the 15th of July, appointed by Governor 
 Andrew to raise a regiment, designated, by a felicitous coin- 
 cidence, the Fifteenth of the Massachusetts line, that having 
 been the number assigned to the regiment from Worcester 
 county in the war of the Revolution. 
 
 The experiences of. the Fifteenth Massachusetts were 
 destined to contrast strongly with the uneventful services 
 of the Third Battalion. Engaged in more than a score of 
 battles, the Fifteenth was, at Antietam, to win the costly 
 honor of standing fourth on the roll of all the infantry regi- 
 ments of the Union armies, East and West, in the number 
 of its dead on any single field, losing in a short half-hour 
 318 men, of whom 108 were killed or mortally wounded. 
 It was later, at Gettysburg, ito lose one-half of all it carried 
 into action. Its total number of officers and men killed or 
 mortally wounded, from that bloody October day of 1861, 
 on the banks of the Upper Potomac, down to its final and 
 disastrous action at Petersburg, on the 22d of June, 1864, 
 was to be 241, or exactly one-seventh of its total enlistment. 
 Such was the destined career of the gallant regiment which 
 Colonel Devens gathered at Camp Scott, frqm all the towns 
 of the good county which boasts the title, " Heart of the 
 Commonwealth," and at the head of which, in stern and 
 proud array, he marched out of Worcester on the 8th of 
 August, 1861. 
 
 Any one who knew Charles Devens at home would have 
 said with confidence that he would prove, through all the 
 severe trials of campaign and battle, a brave, vigilant, and 
 faithful officer, flinching from no necessary exposure or hard- 
 ship, and failing at no point in the care of his troops. But 
 such a one might, had he given thought to the matter, also 
 have said, at least to himself, that, with his elegant, dignified, 
 leisurely, and somewhat luxurious habits, he would be likely 
 to be one of those officers who, when circumstances favor, 
 take exceedingly good care of their own comfort, and indulge 
 
MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES DEVENS. 9 
 
 themselves just as far as duty allows. If any one made such. 
 a prediction on the 8th of August, 1861, he was singularly 
 mistaken. Among all the devoted officers of the Army of 
 the Potomac, I doubt if there was one who, in active cam- 
 paign, spared himself less, or favored himself more grudg- 
 ingly. Many a frontiersman, altogether unaccustomed to 
 luxury and well inured to hardship, was more dainty and 
 self-regardful than Charles Devens in the field. I should 
 not dare, at this distance of time, to say for how many weeks 
 it was he once told me he had not taken off his boots to 
 sleep. Even when a general officer, he sometimes lay in the 
 very trenches with the troops. His disposition to share 
 the lot of his men carried him too far, even for the good of 
 the service ; and the hardships which he might well have 
 spared himself, and which, at his age, he should have spared 
 himself, ultimately brought on the frightful pains of inflam- 
 matory rheumatism, which, at times, disabled him. 
 
 Not only could the privations and sufferings of campaigns 
 like those, of the Army 'of the Potomac not shake his forti- 
 tude ; they could not even disturb that delicious urbanity, 
 without a trace of pomposity yet with just a spice of man- 
 nerism in it, which no friend of his can ever think of without 
 a Ibving smile and tear. Who of us ever saw a more perfect 
 gentleman in all that constitutes the grace of life ? Only 
 those who knew him in the field can believe that none of 
 this " rubbed off " in the rough encounters and amid the 
 grimy conditions of campaign. At the battle of Williams- 
 burg, on the plain around the Whittaker house, which was 
 ankle deep with mud, under the most disheartening con- 
 ditions as to the progress of the fight, I introduced Colonel, 
 afterward General, Wheaton, to his new brigade commander. 
 The next morning I met Wheaton, who exclaimed, with the 
 gi-eatest enthusiasm, " Why, Walker, what a beautiful man 
 he is ! There we lay together on the ground, the night so 
 dark that we could not see each other, the mud so deep as 
 almost to take a cast of our forms, the water at times fairly 
 running over us, hungry, wet, and dirty, and yet he talked 
 
10 MAJOK GBmSRAL CHAKLBS DBVENS. 
 
 on ill that courtly, quaint voice of his, saying the most de- 
 lightful things, witty and graceful and fine, just as he might 
 have done at a dinner-table or in a drawing-room. Certainly, 
 he is the most perfect gentleman I ever met." 
 
 In its entrance into actual service against the enemy, the 
 Fifteenth Massachusetts was given much less time for train- 
 ing and for hardening than was the lot of most of the regi- 
 ments of the Potomac Army. Soon after its arrival in 
 Washington, Colonel Devens was ordered to march his com- 
 mand northward to Poolesville, on the Upper Potomac, to 
 join the corps of observation under General Stone; and, on 
 the 21st of October, 1861, his regiment was sent across the 
 river as the vanguard of the force which was, under false 
 information as to the strength and position of the enemy, to 
 fight the bloody and disastrous battle of Ball's Bluff. Here 
 the Fifteenth was joined by the Twentieth, and here these 
 two Massachusetts regiments, destined to be comrades in 
 many a long and bitter struggle, together underwent their 
 baptism of fire. 
 
 When all was ended, when the last hope of the day was gone, 
 when eveiything had been done that could be done to provide 
 for the retreat, or rather the escape, of the broken regiments, 
 Devens flung his sword into the river and followed it, swim- 
 ming to the other shore, and at once gave his energies to col- 
 lecting and reorganizing the remnants of the gallant regiment 
 that had so proudly marched out of the streets of Worcester 
 but ten weeks before. Those labors were not in vain. All 
 through the long winter the good Fifteenth was undergoing 
 the patient, sympathetic, forbearing, yet exacting discipline 
 of its commander, and the new year found the regiment, not 
 indeed filled up to its former numbers, but undismayed in 
 heart and thoroughly accomplished in all soldierly exercises. 
 
 Colonel Devens' high bearing at Ball's Bluff, and his 
 admirable character as a regimental commander, could not 
 fail to secure his early promotion ; and on the opening of 
 the Peninsula campaign of McClellan he was appointed a 
 brigadier-general of volunteers, and assigned to a brigade in 
 
MAJOE, GENERAL CHARLES DEVENS. 11 
 
 Couch's division of the Fourth Corps, a brigS,de which com- 
 prised, among other excellent regiments, the Seventh and 
 Tenth of the Massachusetts line. A part of his command 
 was creditably, though by no means desperately, engaged in 
 front of Fort Magruder on the 5th of May ; but it was not 
 until the 31st of that month, around Seven Pines, that the 
 brigade was first called to drink deep of the bitter cup which 
 was thereafter so often to be pressed to its lips. 
 
 When Casey's troops had been driven from their intrench- 
 ments by the overwhelming attacks of Hill and Longstreet, 
 and were being forced down the Williamsburg stage-road by 
 vastly superior numbers, it was the brigade of Devens which 
 was first called up and thrown into the whirling vortex of 
 that desperate fight, to stay the progress of the flushed and 
 victorious Confederates. In the small group of general 
 officers, who, almost in despair, re-formed the broken lines, 
 again and again leading forward a few hundred men to the 
 charge, to win the time that was needed to bring up the 
 troops of Sumner and Heintzelman, no figure was more con- 
 spicuous than that of Charles Devens. Few fields during 
 the war were more stubbornly contested. It was the Shiloh 
 of the Eastern army. Seldom were the resources of valor 
 and devotion, in a supreme moment, more strikingly illus- 
 trated. From that desperate conflict Devens was at last 
 borne away severely wounded, but not until the shouts of 
 Hooker's men, fast crowding up the railroad to the succor of 
 their overborne comrades on the left, had been answered by 
 the roar of Kirby's guns at Fair Oaks, which told that the 
 knightly Sedgwick was up on the right and that the hour of 
 Confederate triumph was over and past. 
 
 General Devens' wound did not permit him to return to 
 duty during the short month the Army of the Potomac re- 
 mained upon the Chickahominy, so that he missed the battles 
 of the famous Seven Days, in which his brigade took an al- 
 ways creditable part, which culminated on the bloody slopes 
 of Malvern. In the movement to the support of Pope, on 
 the line of Bull Run, and in the northward march into 
 
12 MAJOR GBNEKAL CHAELES DEVBKS. 
 
 Maryland, again under McClellan, General Devens was in 
 command of his brigade, which was at no point seriously- 
 engaged with the enemy. 
 
 The breaking up of the Fourth Corps carried him and his 
 good regiments into the heroic Sixth Corps, with which he 
 took part in the memorable battle, on the left, at Fredericks- 
 burg, in December, 1862. In his official report General New- 
 ton says: " My acknowledgments are due to all, according 
 to their opportunities, but especially to Brigadier General 
 Charles Devens, who commanded the advance and the rear 
 guard, in the' crossing and recrossing of the river." During 
 the winter of inaction which followed the repulse of Burn- 
 side's forces. General Devens remained with the Sixth Corps ; 
 but, on the approach of active operations in the spring, he 
 was assigned by Hooker to the command of a division of the 
 Eleventh Corps, which, with the gallant Twelfth, had been 
 brought down from the armies around Washington and in 
 the Valley, to reenforce the Army of the Potomac after, its 
 tremendous losses of December. 
 
 In his promotion to the command of a division. General 
 Devens had, in less than two years, reached the highest posi- 
 tion to which a volunteer, entering the army at middle age, 
 could safely aspire. The war did indeed afford a few in- 
 stances of officers from civil life attaining the perilous 
 height of a corps commander ; but even the best two or 
 three cases of such promotion are not wholly free from ques- 
 tion. No matter how faithfully and intelligently a volunteer 
 officer may have acquitted himself in the command of a regi- 
 ment, a brigade, or a division, all of one arm of .the service, 
 dealing with the comparatively simple duties of such posi- 
 tions, his promotion to the command of a corps must needs 
 raise an altogether new set of problems, demanding, not 
 merely higher native abilities, but also a vast amount of 
 technical knowledge regarding other arms of the service, 
 regarding the operations attending the supply of troops, the 
 conduct of marches, the occupation and fortification of posi- 
 tions, the passage of streams. Such an amount of knowledge 
 
MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES DEVENS. 13 
 
 is not likely to be picked up in two or three years of mili- 
 tary service ; yet for that knowledge only a very high order 
 of military genius can offer an available substitute. 
 
 We must, therefore, it seems to me, consider that volun- 
 teer officer of the War of the Rebellion most fortunate who 
 attained, and with credit held, the position of a division 
 commander, without being tried in any higher rank. In 
 this was honor enough for any citizen-soldier, were he the 
 first citizen of his State or of the nation. Here he could 
 exert all his powers, vrith the least danger of compromising 
 his command through his own unskilfulness or lack of tech- 
 nical knowledge in some sudden and critical emergency. If 
 such a view of the situation would have been truly wise for 
 any soldier from civil life, it was one which peculiarly com- 
 mended itself to General Devens' temperament and dispo- 
 sition. The eager ambition which actuated many men of 
 his rank was wholly foreign to him. He had no dreams of 
 martial fame. He wished to do his duty in the war, and 
 he liked a dignified and honorable place to do it in ; but that 
 would have been a most unwelcome fortune which called 
 him to a position of the highest ^esponsibilit3^ The com- 
 mand of a division, to which, as was said, he was promoted 
 in April, 1863, was the acme of his soldierly ambition, and 
 he rested in it with a great deal of satisfaction. 
 
 General Devens' appointment to his new command came 
 so short a time before the battle of ChanceUorsville that 
 little opportunity was afforded him to become acquainted 
 with his officers and men, much less to acquire influence 
 and control over them, before the giant collision took place. 
 It was his evil fortune to be posted, with his division of 
 4,000 men, upon the extreme right of Hooker's army, as it 
 lay, on the 2d of May, awaiting Lee's initiative, having al- 
 ready hopelessly lost its own. That flank was swung far 
 out " in air," without as much as a squadron of cavalry to 
 guard the avenues of Confederate approach ; with only one 
 small brigade " refused," to meet the impending attack of 
 Jackson's 26,000 men. 
 
14 KAJOE GENERAL CHARLES DEVENS. 
 
 Intelligence of the presence of the enemy had been for- 
 warded by General Devens to headquarters, but brought 
 neither reenforcements nor directions to alter the disposi- 
 tions of the right wing. Towards evening the blow fell. 
 No force of equal numbers, however constituted, could, in 
 that position, long have held its groimd against such a 
 column, much less against such a column commanded by 
 such a leader as Stonewall Jackson. General Devens was 
 wounded by a musket ball in the foot almost at the first 
 onset, but for nearly an hour thereafter kept his horse and 
 kept the field, making the most strenuous efforts to hold 
 his men together and to stay the Confederate advance. 
 The wound which General Devens received at Ohancellors- 
 ville was of a nature seriously to cripple him through some 
 months, during the latter part of which he was able to un- 
 dertake the duty of organizing the conscripts of 1863, —a 
 task doubtless as important as it certainly was disagreeable. 
 
 The opening of the great campaign of 1864 found him 
 again in the field ; but, as the Eleventh Corps had been sent 
 West, he was assigned to a provisional division, unat- 
 tached, and a few days later to a division of the Eighteenth 
 Corps, commanded by Gen. William F. Smith. Under that 
 highly accomplished officer he moved his division to reen- 
 force the Army of the Potomac, then marching rapidly by 
 the flank to seize Cold Harbor. Here, on the 1st of June, 
 his troops were engaged with severe loss, in support of the 
 Sixth Corps, and later, in carrying the enemy's intrenched 
 line, in which he captured three hundred prisoners. Again, 
 on the Sd of June, in that attack which is never spoken of 
 without awe and 'bated breath by any one who participated 
 in it, Devens' division took a heroic but ineffectual part. 
 So crippled now was its commander by inflammatory rheu- 
 matism, contracted through his untiring exertions and un- 
 sparing exposure of himself, uniting with the effects of 
 previous wounds, that at times he could neither mount his 
 horse nor stand in his place, but was carried on a stretcher 
 along his line. Yet he clung to his command till flesh and 
 
MAJOR GENBEAL CHARLES DEVENS. 15 
 
 blood could do no more ; and then was borne away from the 
 front, as he had been from Fair Oaks and Chancellorsville. 
 
 Cold Harbor was the last action in which General Devens 
 participated. December of 1864 found him again with the 
 troops in the field, commanding the division which had, in 
 the reorganization of the Army of the James, become the 
 third of the Twenty-fourth Corps, then posted on the Rich- 
 mond end of the long Union line. During that memorable 
 winter he and his men looked across the narrow spaces which 
 separated them from the Confederate works, and speculated 
 on what would happen when, in the opening spring, they 
 should again be called to charge over that well-known 
 ground, so often drenched with the best blood of the 
 Potomac Army. But, by the strange irony of fate, Rich- 
 mond, for four long years the object of unceasing attack, 
 was to fall by no blow directed against itself ; its fortifica- 
 tions, which had been piled higher and higher with each 
 succeeding alarm, were in the end to be of as little account 
 as those which still encircled Washington. The fate of 
 Richmond was to be decided in wooded swamps far away 
 ' to the south-west ; and the city was at last to be evacuated 
 without a shot or summons of surrender. 
 
 Many of us have heard General Devens tell the story of 
 his entry into Richmond with his division, first of all the 
 Union armies, on the morning of the 3d of April, 1865. It 
 was an honor which might have fallen upon any one of the 
 good divisions that had so long and so nobly battled for the 
 Union. A score of general officers had equally well earned 
 the position of Military Governor of Richmond which was 
 assigned to him by reason of his accidental priority. Yet, 
 adventitious as was the distinction, and as he acknowledged 
 it to be, General Devens yet felt it then and always there- 
 after treasured it as the greatest boon and privilege of his 
 life. In all the tedious routine of service, in all the dis- 
 agreeable and painful experiences of campaign, in all the 
 terror and agony of conflict, he had never as a soldier lost 
 sight of the object of the war. With • many, perhaps with 
 
16 MAJOR GENEE.AI. CHABLES DEVENS. 
 
 most, of those of his rank, professional feeling, habit, or per- 
 sonal ambition more or less obscured the cause for which 
 they fought. To Charles Devens, during every day of those 
 four years, the cause, the eause^ THE CAUSE stood forth to 
 view as clearly as on that April evening of 1861, when in 
 Mechanics' HaU he called upon the young men of Worcester 
 to rise and go with him to the rescue of Washington. So 
 that it was with a delight which few would have felt as 
 keenly, he led his division, with glancing bayonets, through 
 the streets of that city which had so long embodied and per- 
 sonified resistance to the Constitution and laws, and threw 
 the Stars and Stripes to the breeze on which had but the day 
 before floated the defiant flag of the Confederacy. 
 
 It was the same absorbing interest in the cause, the same 
 joy in the triumphant outcome of the war, which made 
 General Devens, through the twenty-five years during which 
 he was permitted to enjoy the pleasures of peace and the 
 rewards of professional success, first and foremost, as I have 
 before said, a soldier. No interests could, with him, enter 
 into competition with those which centred around the great 
 struggle for the Union. This it was which made him, though 
 strongly conservative by native instincts and early afiilia- 
 tions, a stalwart and a radical in politics. This it was, in 
 connection with his essential kindliness of heart, which made 
 him, in a peculiar sense, the soldier's friend, so that his path 
 to and from his home, and into and out of the Court-House, 
 was ever beset by veterans who had a tale of woe to tell or a 
 helping hand to claim. This it was which gave zest to his 
 studies in military history, as a member and as President of 
 the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts ; studies 
 which bore such admirable fruit in his Bunker Hill address 
 of 1875, in his opening lecture of the Lowell Institute course 
 upon the war, and in numerous addresses on special themes. 
 This, lastly, it was which made him eminently and pre- 
 eminently the Orator of the War of the Rebellion. 
 
 It is only ia this last character that I shall speak of him in 
 the few remaining minutes for which I ask your attention. 
 
MAJOE GENERAL CHARLES DEVBNS. 17 
 
 Time would not serve to follow his civil career after the war, 
 as a magistrate of lofty bearing and stainless purity, illus- 
 trating the immortal principles of human justice on the 
 Superior and on the Supreme Bench of his native Common- 
 wealth, or as a Cabinet officer at Washington, sternly loyal 
 to his party affiliations, discreet and wise in council, courtly, 
 witty, and pleasing in the social converse of the gay capital. 
 Nor even, if time served, would this be the place. It is as 
 the Orator of the War that Charles Devens is best remem- 
 bered by all except the comparatively few who were privi- 
 leged to serve with him in the field ; and it is as such he will 
 take his permanent place in the sight of our posterity. Ex- 
 cepting the brief but infinitely moving speech of Lincoln at 
 Gettysburg and the graceful oration of Everett, no address 
 which has been delivered upon the themes of the great 
 struggle can compare with General Devens' response for the 
 returning soldiers at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865, 
 his eulogy upon Meade at New Haven in 1873, his inspired 
 tributes to Grant in Boston and at Worcester in 1885, and 
 his last public address, the oration before the Loyal Legion 
 in Philadelphia, April 15, 1890, on the twenty-fifth anni- 
 versary of the founding of the Order. Taken together, 
 these, with others, like his speeches at the dedication of the 
 Soldiers and Sailors' Monument on Boston Common in 1877, 
 and at the dedication of the monuments to the Fifteenth 
 Massachusetts and to Col. George H. Ward at Gettysburg 
 in 1886, form a body of martial and patriotic eloquence 
 altogether unique in Am«rican literature. 
 
 In them we have sentences as evenly balanced, periods as 
 perfectly polished, phrases as expressive and felicitous as 
 those of Everett; yet the whole is tender with a love for 
 the soldier like that of Lincoln ; while at times through the 
 self-restraint of the artist bursts a fire like that of Sheridan 
 
 in battle. 
 
 How can I better close this address, how can I do more to 
 bring before you the man, the patriot, the orator, Charles 
 Devens, than by repeating, even though it be with a weak 
 
18 MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES DEVESTS. 
 
 and faltering tongue, those eloquent passages of his Worces- 
 ter oration in which he contrasted the dying Napoleon with 
 the dying Grant? The attempt is a perilous one, for his 
 accents were at once strong and sweet, and his rare voice 
 ranged in perfect harmony from the highest to the lowest 
 notes of the orator. But at least in doing this I shall, when 
 I sit down, leave the words, if not the tones, of our dear de- 
 parted friend pulsating in your ears : — 
 
 "There is in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington, the 
 beautiful statue by Vela of Napoleon, as he is dying at St. 
 Helena. It is the saddest thing upon which my eyes have 
 ever looked. The Emperor is sitting, with his morning gown 
 half wrapped around his naked breast, and on his lap lies 
 outspread the map of Europe. The face, of wondrous beauty, 
 is of unutterable grief. Wasted opportunities, disappointed 
 ambition, remorse, have set upon it their ineffaceable seal. 
 His wife is far away, his only son a prisoner at the Austrian 
 court. Upon the throne of France, trampled as she is 
 under the feet of the armies of Europe, sits again a Bourbon 
 king, held there by foreign bayonets. He seems to recall 
 the brave who have died by thousands, not that man might 
 be nobler and better, but to minister to his thirst for do- 
 minion, his insatiate passion for power. He seems to remem- 
 ber that by his own acts he has brought ruin upon the people 
 who had loved him devotedly and upon himself. In those 
 last days, says his biographer, M. Thiers, he talked much of 
 his old companions. ' Shall I see them again, Dessaix and 
 Lannes, Murat and Ney?' Ah, what comfort could there 
 be in that ; Lannes, who on the field of Essling^ dying, had 
 said to him, ' Sire, you will ruin everything by these constant 
 wars,' or Murat and Ney, who for him had died deatlas not 
 altogether honorable to themselves, even if disgraceful to 
 those who inflicted them. Or, what comfort to him to see 
 again that splendid youth of France, who had followed him 
 from the sands of Egypt to the snows of Russia, the only re- 
 ward of whose valor had been the destruction of their own 
 liberty and country. 
 
MAJOR GENERAL CHARLES DEVENS. 19 
 
 " As we turn in sorrow from this scene, which the cunning 
 hand of the artist has made so lifelike, we behold that which 
 has been enacted almost before our own bodily eyes. It is 
 sixty-five years later, and another sits in his chair to die. 
 Upon hira is the same mortal disease, although in a far more 
 agonizing form. His face had never the Olympian beauty of 
 the great Emperor. It is marked now with the heavy lines 
 that princely care and rugged war have impressed deep upon 
 it ; but it is grave and majestic still. The broad brow and 
 heavy jaw tell alike of the calm thought and resolute wUl 
 which show him fit to be among the kings of men. He has 
 led great armies on fields as fiercely contested as Wagram, or 
 Austerlitz, or Waterloo itself, and a million of men have 
 sprung at his trumpet call. He too has ruled, as consti- 
 tutional magistrate, over a realm broader and fairer than 
 France itself. Life has to him been labor and duty; and 
 until tongue and hand and brain refuse their office, he labors 
 still. Around him gathers everything that makes life beau- 
 tiful, and'parting from it so hard; but there is no remorse, no 
 thought of duties left undone to the country which in its 
 sore need called to him, no obligations unfulfilled to those 
 who had followed him to danger and to death. The only 
 woman he has ever loved is there with tender hand to mois- 
 ten the parched lips or wipe the gathering death-damp from 
 his brow. Their children and grandchildren are at his feet. 
 From a grateful country have come up in a thousand forms 
 the utterances of love and reverence. Those lately in arms 
 against the cause he served have generously and tenderly 
 united in each expression of feeling. He looks abroad over 
 the country whose union he fought to preserve : everywhere 
 there is peace and prosperity ; no hostile armies trample the 
 soil ; no hostile bayonets flash back the sun ; the war drums 
 long since are silent. The fields are abeady -frhite with the 
 harvest, the great gateways on the Atlantic and Pacific seas 
 are open, and through them commerce pours its generous 
 tide. Master and slave are known no longer in the land 
 where labor is honored and manhood is revered. 
 
20 MAJOB GENERAL CHAKLES DEVBNS. 
 
 " To him, too, in those dieaming and waiting hours, come 
 the memories of those who have fallen in battle by his side, 
 or, yielding since to the remorseless artillery of time, have 
 gone before him. Even if he does not utter them, how well 
 we may imagine the thoughts that pass through his mind as 
 he feels that he draws near to them ! 
 
 " ' Shall I see them again, McPherson, Reynolds, and Sedg- 
 wick, as they died at the head of their army corps ; Rawlins, 
 whom I loved as a brother; Hooker, as when his cannon 
 rang down from among the clouds on Lookout's crest; 
 Thomas, as he triumphed at Nashville ; Meade, as he dashed 
 back the fierce charge at Gettysburg, or urged to the last 
 dread struggle the ever faithful Army of the Potomac ? If 
 it be so, I know they will meet me as comrades and brothers. 
 Nor these alone ; not alone the great chiefs who urged for- 
 ward the fiery onset of mighty battalions. Shall I see again, 
 the splendid youth of 1861, as they came in all the ardor of 
 their generous patriotism, in all the fire of their splendid 
 courage, to fill the ranks of our armies ? Shall I see them, 
 as when tlirough the valleys the battle poured its awful tide, 
 or as when the hills were made red by their glorious sacri- 
 fice ? I am very near them now. Almost I can behold them, 
 although the light on their faces is that which never was on 
 land or sea. Almost I can hear their bugles call to me, as 
 the notes softly rise and fall across the dark valley through 
 which I must pass. I go to them, and I know there is not 
 one that will not meet me as a father and a friend.' "