- lijiiwimsim f f ? i f 3 1822 01355 i* r f , . ; ; .rs i \ f ^ -> ' o LIBRARY UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO PICTURES OF LIFE CAMP AND FIELD BY AUTHOR OF " ATTRACTIONS OF LANGUAGE," " <^I.D TIME PICTURED, "THE WORLD ON WHEELS," ETC., ETC. SECOND EDITION. CHICAGO: S. C, GRIGGS & COMPANY, Entered according tc Act of Congress, in the year 1875. by 5. C. GRIGGS & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. TO HON. THOMAS B. BRYAN, OF CHICAGO AND ELMHURST, THIS LITTLE PACKAGE OF LETTERS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. MAY, 1875, LETTER LIST. On the Threshold, From one World to Another, .,... Going to the Front, Three November Days The Theatre, The Smiting of the Shield, The Capture of Lookout Mountain, The Storming of Mission Ridge Thanksgiving at Chattanooga, ...-...- After the Battle, A Mountain Camp, A Soldier's Morning, Every-day Life under Canvas, 94 The Hospital after the Battle, IO 3 Woman, the Soldier's Friend, Night Ride of the Wounded Brigade IIQ Army Chaplains IIQ The Soldier's "First Man," I2 S Hearing from Home, I2S The New England Schoolma'am, Dressing for Battle, Surveying on Horseback, Old-time Forts and New, .... ... 136 A Flash of Sunshine, . J 39 A Little Picture, .... T 4 2 " Dinner to the Front," "Getting the Idea," . . . r J 49 LETTER LIST. A Medal Struck in the Sic y, " Small Deer," Army Pets, A Flag of Truce A River Route in War Time The Devil's Coffee Mill, Fatigue, ........... The Little Orderly Nashville Street Scenes, . . A Hint of Desolation, ........ A late Breakfast at Chattanooga, . A Potomac Trip in War Time, ...... In Memoriam. Ad Astra Keeping House under Difficulties, ...... " Nearness of Mind,"- War and Words, ......... Alexandria in '64. Soldiers' Res'- ...... 205 Washington in July, '64 209 The Scout and the Spy, 218 A Divided Household, 223 The War Department, . . . . . . . . . 226 Two Battle-fields a Year Old. .. . . .. . 231 Danger and Desolation, 236 Under which King, ......... 243 Flowers, Poetry and Heroes, 249 A Soldier's "Till," ......... 256 Ended. ............ 269 ON THE THRESHOLD. A FEW fragments ot old letters compose this volume. They are not in disguise. They wear the every-day apparel of first expression just as it was fashioned at the Front. They are to a chapter or two of History only what the work of the wood-engraver is to the printed page just a few pictures to brighten the well- considered utterances of .the historic Muse. Written some years ago to the Chicago Evening Journal, thousands who lent them life or gave them heed have passed away. But the deeds have not per- ished ; the story remains ; the pictures are undimmed. Illustrating American manhood, those deeds are the heritage of all the people. One bright day in May, a year ago, the author stood in Rose Hill Cemetery, Chicago, between the quick and the dead. Pausing on the threshold of this little book he is standing between the living and the dead vi ON THE THRESHOLD. once more, and he thinks 'the same thought ana says the same words : We have come into court, this court of the 'Lord, To bear witness for them that can utter no word. Bare-hearted and browed in this presence we stand, For the gift Pentecostal comes down on the land ; To speak for the speechless-how witnesses throng, And the earth is all voice, and the air is all song ! There's a fleet of white ships blown abroad on the deep, And their courses forever they peacefully keep, And they toss us a roar and it melts into words, And they strike to the heart like the sweeping of swords : " Would ye honor the men you must look in their graves. Who did score danger out with their wakes from the waves." There are soft, fleecy clouds fast asleep in the sun, Like a flock of white sheep when the washing is done, Not a breath of a battle is staining the blue, It is nothing but Paradise all the way through ! There are domes of white blossoms where swelled the white tent, There are plows in the field where the war wagons went, There are songs where they lifted up Rachel's lament. Would you know what this mighty beatitude cost, You must search in the graves for what Liberty lost ! Ye that trod the acanthus and trampled it down, And it turned at the touch a Corinthian crown ! Disenthralled from your graves you have left them alone, We will borrow them now for these dead of our own ! Let us bury all bitterness, passion and pride, Lay the rankling old wrong to its rest by their side, Keeping step to the manhood that marches the zone, And believe the good GOD will take care of His own ! IN CAMP AND FIELD. FROM ONE WORLD TO ANOTHER, IT happened to me to follow, for a time, the fortunes of the Army of the Cumberland ; not to grasp a mus- ket, but to wield a meaner implement and trifle with a pen. And yet you must believe that some stray nerve of mine felt down its way at last, to that pencil's point, and almost before I knew it, I was writing my heart out in admiration and love for the fortitude and valor of those Federal journeymen of ours, splendid in doing, and grand in suffering. To pass in forty hours from fields where a thistle is a sin to regions where bayonets sprout as dense as the springing corn in June, is like being born into a new world. If the reader will visit one of the noble Chicago Elevators those immense houses for a mighty hand to move in, that tosses about the grain as lightly as the farmer sows the seed ; if he will watch the golden produce of a broad State received as easily as 8 PICTURES OF LIFE Noah, first Admiral of " the red, white and blue," took in the returning bird ; if he will follow that grain to the snowy loaves and the laden tables of half a continent ; to the tons of white tiles of hard-bread in a thousand Federal camps ; if he will think what a benignant hand of Providence that Elevator is, and then, if, after all this, he will fancy an establishment away at the other extreme of the arc of human invention, as totally unlike in its office and results as two things can be, and exist on the same planet, he will have precisely the place I first blundered into- the Ordnance Depot of the Army of the Cumberland. If you are given to glowing words, be dumb ; if there be any fire in your eye, be pleased to shut it while here, among kegs and barrels of the fine black grain that sows fields with death ; among boxes of cartridges without end ; among rows of canister; among nests of shells, out of v/hich shall be hatched a terrible brood ; among cases of every species of irritable combustible known in war; among clusters of the grape that presses the wine of life out; in the midst of death in every form that flies. Sentinels stand aside, doors unbolted and unbarred swing open, a gush of cool air meets you, the shutters are thrown open, and the treasures of the magazine are revealed. Wooden boxes of four colors, boxes, boxes, everywhere olive, red, black and white. Be seated IN CAMP AND FIELD. 9 upon that olive box ; it contains nothing but solid shot, or, perhaps, percussion shell. In the red, you will be sure to find spherical case-shot ; in the white boxes, can- ister ; and in the black, that diabolical chronometer, time-shell. Take your choice of a seat and be happy. Look through a glass magnifying about sixty times at an old-fashioned clock-weight, and you will see pretty nearly such a thing as stands there at your right, and which happens to be a hundred-pound " Parrott " shell. A dull affair to look at, but give it a ration of nine pounds of powder and a good range, and it will "make" four miles in twelve seconds at a cost of ten dollars, and possibly something else that it would puzzle you to enter in a cash-book. Those little round coops, about the size of a lantern, with wooden top and bottom and two wire rings between, contain, as you see, a cluster of nine such grapes as vine-dresser never cultivated. They together weigh eighteen pounds, and by that handle you can swing them about like a dinner-pail. Give a twenty- four-pound gun six pounds of powder and one coop, and that cluster will make nine terrible and deadly lines of flight. We are not well out of the fruit business, for there are thousands of long tin cans, looking home- like and harmless enough to hold the best berry God ever made, that you put up for next Christmas. They lo PICTURES OF LIFE! are twenty-five pound canisters, filled with shrapnel, five dozen muskets-balls, and packed in, like " Isabellas," with saw-dust, as if they were something to " keep." Driven from a thirty-two with eight pounds of powder, your fruit-can goes to pieces, and the bullets scatter as from a tremendous, wide-mouthed musket. And here we are pleasantly walking where sleeps an earthquake ; making each other hear where slumbers a voice that could shake these everlasting hills. Ah, what a flash of lightning or a glowing coal could do for all this! That is not a potash-kettle you have sat down upon it's a shell ! There are " Parrotts " with their long, black shafts, " reinforced " at the breech, like a trooper's trowsers. There are bright " Napoleons " brisk and spiteful, twelves, twenty-fours, thirty-twos, and so on and so up. Here is a sturdy fellow that growled at Stone River ; there, a grim one that roared at Shiloh ; yonder, a " Columbiad " made at Memphis. Do you see those pairs of immense wheels? They are not mill-wheels, but only the carriages of siege-guns. If it blows at all in this roomy kennel, it must literally " blow great guns." Those rows of carts with the black boxes and the convex covers are not young bakers' wagons gone into mourning, as you might think, but only battery forges, the blacksmith's shops of Mars' own fiery self. IN CAMP AND FIELD. II And so we have seen thunder " in the original package." GOING TO TPIE FRONT. You pass through Kentucky, " the dark and bloody ground," into Tennessee, a beautiful fertile land gone to seed. The villages lie asleep, like lazy dogs, in the sun ; stores are closed, shops deserted ; through a land dotted with the inkiest imaginable heads, as if some psalm-tune had tumbled out of the score and sprinkled the landscape with Ethiopian rain. The print of War's fingers is before you. Now you see a gate left standing, by some strange freak, between its two posts a gate without a fence. And there it swings open upon a path leading to Nowhere ! Not a house, not a threshold, only a heap of stone and a blackened tree to tell the story. Now you see the skeleton of a house, if I may call it so ; the building stripped of all covering, gaunt and ghastly there in its bones. Now a brick mansion catches the eye ; its doors, weary of turning, stand wide open ; its garden shivers with weeds ; the negro quarters empty, the fields ragged and fenceless as the air, and not a living soul ! It may not seem so to you, but I have never felt so heavy a sense of loneliness as when I have seen 12 PICTURES OF LIFE broad forests of tall corn, the blackened stalks two years old, springing out of earth fairly turfed over and matted, the rusted plow careened in one corner, a wreck on a lee shore ; ears of withered corn yet cling- ing to the russet stems ; visions of " hoe-cake " far off and dim ; the masters away in the rebel ranks ; the " people " strown to the four winds. As you near the region of the Cumberlands the scenery begins to grow grand ; the great, wavy lines of the mountains sweep up bravely toward heaven, and sink down into great troughs of green, but the train makes steadily for the strong horizon ; between ledges of God's masonry ; through grooves hewn in the rocks, winding this way and that, run the cars. The woods begin to stand up, here and there, like people in a great congregation, as if the spurs of the Cumberland were thrust into the flanks of creation, and it was rous- ing up to get out of the way of the rowels. An engine comes behind to give us a lift up a prodigious grade of two hundred and fifty feet to the mile. We are going through the mountain. A tunnel, half a mile in length, yawns to swallow us with a throat black as a wolf's mouth. Above it towers the wooded crown, hundreds of feet ; close at our right the world seems to make a mis-step and tumble into a deep ravine. A railroad diverges from our track before we reach the tunnel, and INCAMPANDFIELD. 13 runs zigzag over the mountain to a coal-mine, scarring its side with a great letter Z. Up tugs the train to an entrance over which might well be traced, " Those who enter here leave hope behind ! " We turn our backs upon a shining sun ; it is twilight, night, a darkness that can be felt ; it is like putting your eyes out. There is a lull in the steady talk, no laugh comes from the gloom, and so we blunder and thunder through the mountain, and go over the other side, down the camel's back, along a track curved like a sickle, "by the run." The railroad route from Bridgeport to Chattanooga is one of the wildest and most picturesque on the con- tinent. You make straight at the solid mountain, but creep through a cleft and keep on ; you swing around a curve and hang over a gorge, but you play "the devil on two sticks " and pass it ; you run like a mouse along a narrow shelf high up the rocky wall, the bewildered Tennessee far beneath, winding this way and that to escape from the enchanted mountains. It flashes out upon you here, curved like a cimeter ; it ties the hills up there with love-knots of broad ribbon. The sky line rises and falls around you like a heavy sea ; black heaps of coal high up the mountains, look like blots on this roughest of pages in Nature's "writing-book." The dark cedars counterfeit deep shadows. You go through a stone gateway of the Lord's building, and a 14 PICTURES OF LIFE deep valley is under your feet. You look far across to the other side. Will the train run straight out into mid-air? Will it take wings and fly? It is gliding cautiously out upon the bridge at Falling Water ; the boys in blue far down, look like drops of indigo ; you are safe over, and you thank God and take courage. You pass the ruins of hostile camps ; the huts are gone, but the swallow's-nest fire-places remain, and the hill- sides seem strown with old, rusty honey-comb. And all along the rugged way, at every station, bridge, ravine, are rifle-pits and earthworks, the rude signature rebellion has compelled ; grim War's, his f mark ; and all along, those journeymen of ours grouped to see the train go by ; the train, their one, long, slen- der link with the dear old homes of the North. The black throats of cannon gape at you over the tops of their kennels, in unexpected places. The tunes the drummer beats, all shattered on the crags around, come tumbling back upon the player's head. So, through these grand and everlasting halls we made our way, and when the Morning walked to and fro upon the top of night, and stepped from height to height, and pines took fire and cliffs of gray were glori- fied, it seemed a mighty minster, and I did not wonder God gave the law from Sinai ; that the beatitudes were shed, like Hermon's dew, from a mountain IN CAMP AND FIELD. 15 Sometimes the valleys widened into fields ; garden plats beneath us looked like the squares of a checker- board, and clusters of poor little dwellings, each lazily smoking a big chimney, seemed having their morning gossip together ; now and then, a house was perched high up the mountain, and buzzards, graceful nowhere except in the air, were librating, rocking on their broad wings far below it. A glorious region for painter and poet, whatever plowman may make of it. At last, threading a needle's eye of a tunnel we begin to get into broader ground and the Tennessee bears us com- pany. We wind around the angle of the mountain wall of Lookout ; camps glittering on the hills every- where in 'the morning sun, tumuli of red earth, with sentinels pacing to and fro, regiments checkering the low grounds, engines backing and filling, great store- houses showing new in their fresh-planed wood, forts dumb but not dead, the whole landscape alive with crowds and caravans. And there in the middle of it all, like a rusty hatchet buried in the live oak that grew around it, lies CHATTANOOGA with its ceaseless eddies of armed life, swords and muskets forever drifting and shifting about in them ; good words and bad stirred in together, as if the crowd had been sowed with German, French, English and Ethiopian lexicons, and was just being harvested; "hard tack" and hard talk struggling l6 PICTURES OF LIFE in and out together at the same mouths, and hurry- treading on the heels of haste. Upon the sidewalks is a ceaseless play of blue legs with an unending proces- sion of blue coats ; humanity seems done in indigo, dotted with sutlers, clerks out of livery, correspondents and faded-out natives. And on all this multitude you may look all day, and not see one woman of the noble race that put men upon their honor and make the world braver and purer. To be sure, there is Aunt Chloe in turban all afire, like a very sooty chimney red- hot at the top ; and there is Dinah " larding the lean earth " and looking as if Goodyear might have a patent for her among his rubber goods ; and there too is a colorless native from the rural districts, whom I saw an hour ago, dressed in white, un-crinolined, un- flounced, unwashed, as limp as a wet napkin. She stood by the post-office door apparently spitting at a mark tobacco juice at that and she delivered her fire with great accuracy. But it was not that stronghold among the mountains that I went to see. It was to find the neighbor I had missed out of the summer-fallow, where I had seen him plodding year after year, without knowing him at all ; who had been walking through the world in disguise all his days ; whose heart had grown large with the grand- est of all loves, that sweeps like a great horizon around all meaner passion ; had turned into a hero in the IN CAMP AND FIELD. 17 twinkling of an eye, as the dead shall be raised ; had put on the martyr's thorny crown with a smile, or had gone up, like the Prophet in a chariot of fire. It was to see the old deeds packed away in history step out from the silent lines of the printed page, and stand unsandaled on the ground, to make room for the new, that have illustrated the year just dead tangible, ear- nest, solemn, glorious. THREE NOVEMBER DAYS. The smiting of the enemy's crescent front at Mission Ridge on the twenty-third of November, 1863, the cap- ture of Lookout Mountain on the twenty-fourth, and the storming of Mission Ridge on the twenty-fifth, were really the three acts of one splendid Drama. The letters describing them are placed upon these pages, perhaps unwisely, just as they were written dim and Imperfect pictures taken by the flash of great guns. The play was grand, but what could be grander than THE THEATRE. SUNDAY TWENTY-SECOND. Sunday by the calendar Sunday by the sweet Sab- bath bells of the peaceful North, but what shall I name it here ? Men are busy wrenching up and carry- 18 PICTURES OF LIFE ing away seats in a church near by, and leaving a clear area for a hospital ; pallets for pews, the dead for the word of mercy. And why not ? The worshipers that gathered there are scattered and gone. You may ask for the leaves of autumn as well. The old psalm has died out along the walls, and fancy halts at the thought of what may be heard in its stead. Yesterday was gloomy with clouds and rain. To-day dawned out of Paradise. Would you have the pic- ture? Stand with me as I stood this morning, near Major-General Granger's Headquarters, here in the heart of Chattanooga. As the sun comes up, the mists lift grandly, trail along the tops of the mountains, and are folded up in heaven. The horizon all around rises and falls like the waves of the sea. Stretching along the east and trending slightly away to the southwest, you see an undulating ridge edged with a thin fringe of trees. Along the sides, which have been shorn of their woods for the play of the battle-hammers, if you look closely, you shall see camps sprinkled like flocks away on till the ridge melts out of sight ; you shall see guns and men in gray. That is Mission Ridge, and you are looking upon what your heart does not warm to. You are in the presence of tlie enemy. Now, turning to the right, you look south upon the lowlands, and the farther edge of the picture is dotted IN CAMP AND FIELD. 19 with more tents and more men in gray. Away in the distance, a cone rises ambitiously, not far enough off to be blue, but you forget -it in an instant as the eye climbs bravely up a wooded line, higher and higher, to a craggy crown, wrinkled with ravines, and crested with trees, that, hanging like a great frown between earth and heaven, then dropping abruptly away, as you turn southwestward, subsides into a valley through which the wandering Tennessee creeps into this Federal stronghold. Midway of the gigantic side, shorn of. its oaks, like the Ridge, you see a house, a checker of white upon the brown swell of earth and stones. Lookout Mountain is before you, grim and grand. The glorious glimpses of five States granted to them who stand upon the mighty threshold between this world and that, are denied to us just now, and we must bide our time. You can look upon Tennessee, Georgia, Ala- bama ; you can see the dim looming of the Blue Ridge and Bald Peak, and the smoky ranges of the " old North State," the shadow of whose King's Moun- tain is sacred for all time, since thence came that first whisper for independence which, at last, broke out aloud around the British throne. The morning has worn away to eight o'clock, when from the very tip of the crest rolls a little gray cloud, as if unseen hands were about to wind the rugged brow with a turban. 20 PICTURES OK LIFE In an instant, a heavy growl and the rebel gun has said " good morning " to Hooker's camps in the Valley beyond. You cannot get out of sight of Lookout. Go where you will within all this horizon, yet, turning southward, there frowns the mountain. It rises like an everlasting thunder-storm that will never pass over. Satan might have offered the kingdoms of the world from that summit. Seen dimly through the mist, it looms up with its two thousand feet and recedes, but when the sun shines strongly out it draws so near as to startle you, and you feel as if you were beneath the eaves of a roof whence drips an iron rain. And yet, from the spot where we stand, it is three miles to its summit, three' miles to Mission Ridge, and three miles to Moccasin Point. But your eyes are not weary, and so they follow down the faltering line of Lookout, dip into the gate- way of the Tennessee, and rise again to a red ridge, that seems to you, where you stand, like a vast tumulus big with the dead of an elder time. From it, even while you look, comes the Federal " good morning " back again. You hear the gun as it utters the shell, and then, traveling after it, the crash of the iron egg as it hatches on Lookout. That red ridge is Moccasin Point, whose sharp talk is a proverb. Glancing north- ward up the western horizon, is Raccoon Range, and IN CAMP AND FIELD. 21 upon a peak of it, just opposite and west of us, is a Federal signal-station. Then away to the northwest and across the north, the mountain-edges trace the * line of beauty, curving and blending until the graceful profile of the horizon is complete. But within this sweep of grandeur lies a thing whose name shall endure when yours and mine have been effaced by Time, like a writing upon a slate by a wet finger CHATTANOOGA. Once a town with one main business street to give it a little commercial pulsation ; residences, some of them beautiful, a few of them stately, sprinkled all around upon the acclivities, interspersed with more structures built up in the true Southern architecture, holes in the middle, or balconies, or the chimneys turned out of doors. A stinted, rusty-looking market-house subdued beneath a chuckle-headed belfry, four or five churches of indifferent fashion, two or three hotels whose enter- tainment has departed with the Boniface, and strag- gling tenements " of low degree " are pretty nearly all that remain. As you pass along the central street, the clingy signs of old dead business catch the eye. Where " A. Baker, attorney-at-law," once uttered oracles and tobacco-juice, Federal stores have taken Blackstone's place ; where ribbons ran smoothly over the salesman's fingers, boxes of hard-tack are piled, like Ossa and Pelion come again. Fences have gone lightly up in 22 PICTURES OF LIFE camp-fires ; tents are pitched like mushrooms in the flower-beds, trees have turned to ashes, shrubbery is trampled under foot, gardens are nothing better than mule-pens, shot and shell have left a token here and there, and, across the whole, War has scrawled his auto- graph. But never think you have seen the town at one glance ; it is down here and up there and over yonder ; the little hills swell beneath it like billows ; you will gain the idea if I say it is a town gone to pieces in a heavy sea. But a new architecture has sprung up ; slopes, val- leys, hills, as far as you can see, are covered with Federal camps. Smoky cones, grander wall-tents, nar- row streets of little stone and board kennels, chinked with mud like beavers' houses, snugly tucked into the hill-sides, and equipped with bits of fire-places that sometimes aspire to the dignity of marble, are every- where. It is nothing but camps, and then more camps. I wrote about "dead business," but I was too fast. It is all business, but conducted by the new firm of " U. S." The anvils ring, the stores are filled, wagons in endless lines and hurrying crowds throng all the streets, but the workman and the clerk is each a boy in blue. Chattanooga is as populous as an ant-hill. And there is more of the new architecture : breast- works, rifle-pits, forts, defenses of every name, crown IN CAMP AND FIELD. 23 the slopes. Here, at your left elbow, is Fort Wood that can talk to Mission Ridge : and there are Negley and Palmer, and so on around the horizon. And then, as if they had been poured out of the town like water, spreading away to left and right and south, as you stand facing Lookout, are Federal camps, drifting on almost to the base of the Mountain, and lying bravely beneath its grim shadow. The more you look, the more you wonder how it can all be. It overturns your notions of hostile armies, this neighborly nearness. You see two thin picket-lines running parallel and a few rods apart not so far as you can jerk a peach- stone. They pass lovingly together from your left, down Mission Ridge, curve to the right along the low- lands and past the foot of the great mountain. They are the line of blue and the line of gray. And just there, in those lowlands, but sloping up the side of Lookout, lies the mass of the enemy ; then curving away to the east and north it lines Mission Ridge, thus presenting a crescent front five miles in length, and throughout all we are snug up to them, breast to breast. What effect do you think it would have upon that hostile phase, to strike it near its north- ern horn and turn it back on Mission Ridge away from its railroad communications, and strike it where it is wedged into the foot of Lookout, thus doubling it back upon itself ? 24 PICTURES OF LIFE Signal-lights are features in celestial scenery that, like the jewels in the Southern Cross, never appear in your peaceful Northern skies. Now, had the reader who has stood beside me all the morning, been out with me upon the hills last night, he would have seen, just over the edge of the highest lift of Raccoon Range, a crazy planet, bigger than Venus at the full, waltzing after a mad fashion about another soberer light. But had he watched it for a while, he would have discovered there was " method in that madness" after all. The antic light describes a quadrant, makes a semi-circle, stops, rises, falls, sweeps right, sweeps left, rounds out an orbit, strikes off at a tangent. The Lieutenant of the Signal Corps is talking to somebody behind Lookout. Turning towards Mission Ridge, you would have seen lights of evil omen, for the hostile signals were working too ; blazing, disappearing, show- ing here and there and yonder ; now on the Mountain, now all along the Ridge, like wills-of-the-wisp. To- day the army telegraph gesticulates like Roscius, but it is flags and not lights that have gone crazy, and so the talk goes on around the sky. At ten o'clock this morning, you were standing in front of Colonel Sherman's headquarters, and as you looked eastward you saw, without a glass, a column of the enemy moving slowly up the Ridge and a wagon- IN CAMP AND FIELD. 25 train creeping on after it. You took a glass and held the fellows as if by the button-hole. Just then a roar from Fort Wood, close above you, and a long, rushing, shivering cry quivers through the air ; the shell crosses the intervals, strikes the Ridge at the heels of the lazy column, and its rate of motion is wonderfully acceler- ated. No steed was ever more obedient to the touch of the rowels. Again the " Rodman " speaks, and down comes the carriage of an angry gun for kindling-wood. It can toss its compliments as lightly over to Mission Ridge as you can toss an apple over the orchard fence. The shriek of a shell, if you have no musketry to soften it, is terrible, unearthly, the wail of a lost spirit. A solid shot has a soberer way with it, is attended by but one syllable of loud talk, plunges like a big beetle into the earth, and there's an end of it ; while a shell, that does its duty, has thunder and a cloud at both ends of its line of flight. There goes Fort Wood again. Listen a few beats of the pulse, and yonder, well up the side of the Ridge, lies a fleece of smoke that was not there an instant ago, and here bomb comes the sound of the burning missile. A shell is a dissyllable. And how about the rebel shells from Lookout, that drop now and then into town ? Well, not much at least not yet. Five minutes ago the gun flung a shell over the mountain's left shoulder, and growled at its 26 PICTURES OF LIFE brisk neighbor below, on Moccasin Point, or at our camps on its other side. It has, indeed, thrown shell beyond these Headquarters and struck a house, but they are plunging shots and the casualties have been few, unless a fragment, an ounce or so too heavy for your hat, may hit you on the head. They have gener- ally exploded mid-air, and are regarded with perfect indifference by the boys. If one of them is laughing he finishes out the frolic ; if he is a vicious Yankee, and whittling, he never looks up ; if he is singing a stave of " Rally round the flag, boys," he does not intermit a syllable but keeps right on. The unaffected indifference to this description of heavy rain would, I think, set you wondering. If Braxton Bragg, our neigh- bor over the way, is doing his best, and showing us all his teeth on Lookout, he needs a repetition of what old "Rough and Ready" migJit have said to his namesake, if not to him, a long time ago: "A little more grape, Captain Bragg!" But he has a fashion of sending a flag occasionally, with the injunction to remove non- combatants from the city, as he is going to shell. He sent such word again, a night or two ago, and word is pretty much all. We get direct news from " Dixie " daily. A Lieuten- ant and a couple of Sergeants came into our lines last night. The first-named, an intelligent young man, IN CAMP AND FIELD. 27 stated that the army was making a grand move, though he did not know its meaning, wherein he told us only what we knew before, by the sight of the eyes. An- other officer, belonging to a regiment in the front, came across the neutral ground, the other day, and while standing with our picket until he could be brought in, actually heard them calling the roll of his company, and when his name was reached, cried out, "here ! " THE SMITING OF THE SHIELD. MONDAY TWENTY-THIRD. The battle has been given and won ; the dear old flag streams like a meteor from the craggy crown of Lookout Mountain ; Mission Ridge has been swept with fire and steel as with a broom ; the grim crescent of the enemy, curving away along the range, from the far northeast, south to the base of Lookout, has been bent back upon itself and crushed like a buzzard's egg; the terrible arc of iron, five miles long, that bent like a quadrant around half of our horizon, is broken and scattered ; the key has at last been turned in the Chat- tanooga lock ; the enemy must fly from East Tennes- see, like shadows before the morning ; the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad is once more true to its name ; the Tennessee River is all clear to its landing ; 28 PICTURES OF LIFE our communications are perfected and confirmed, and to the Federal army Chattanooga is no longer the end, but the beginning of things ; the step put forward is not to be withdrawn ; our eyes may now be lifted and look beyond Chattanooga. Thanks be to GOD and the Boys in Blue ! I sit down utterly unequal to a task in which pride and grief are strangely blended ; and yet, in an instant, a half-cheer, exultant, triumphant, comes to my lip, and to-night, under this cloudless sky, the way swept clean to Heaven for our boys going there, I turn to the painted emblem that blossomed so strangely upon Lookout at break of day, a thousand times more dear for their dear sake who died, and say: Oh, Flag, that would make us bankrupt but that thy folds are priceless ! Last Friday morning, at daylight, the battle was to begin. Sherman's splendid columns, moving on from Bridgeport through Shell Mound and Whiteside among the hills to Brown's Ferry, crossing in the night ; then on the north side of the Tennessee to the mouth of Cilico Creek, and there, bridging the river, and having taken position upon our extreme left, five miles to the northeast, were to attain Mission Ridge and roll the enemy before them. At the same moment, Hooker, whose camps lay along the western side of the moun- IN CAMP AND FIELD. 2t; tain, at our extreme right, was to make a demonstration upon Lookout, with a portion of the Twelfth Army Corps and a Division of the Fourth ; Granger was to swing round toward Rossville, with the Fourteenth Corps at his right ; and Johnson, commanding Rous- seau's old Division of the Fourteenth Corps, and How- ard's command of the Eleventh, were to hold the town and act as reserves. Thus, our completed line, reading, English fashion, from left to right, by corps, would be Generals Sherman, Howard, Granger, Palmer, Hooker. But a heavy rain setting in, the terrible roads were rendered almost impassable, and Sherman, with his ponderous trains of artillery, struggled on ; but Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, came and went, and his journey was undone. General Grant, with his ster- ling sense, had ordered a body of cavalry to remove every resident, whether friend or foe General Grant very wisely taking nothing for granted from Sherman's route, that no tidings of his precise destination might reach the enemy. But the delay, at once so unavoida- ble and lamented, marred a plan that was masterly, being nothing less than to strike at the same hour the two horns of the lurid crescent and double it back upon itself. It was, indeed, a gigantic piece of mechanism, but the rain came, rusted, if I may say so, the wheels on their axles, and the mechanism was motionless. 30 PICTURES OF LIFE What a strange problem is a battle, dependent, some- times, upon a breath of wind or a drop of water ! Meanwhile it was apparent that the enemy appre- hended coming danger, for on Sunday morning two divisions moved northward along Mission Ridge and took position on his extreme right. All that beautiful Sunday, the rebel lines were restless ; trains were mov- ing, brigades passing and repassing, like the sliding pic- tures in a camera obscura ; there was " a fearful looking for ' of coming judgment. All that beautiful Sunday there was anxious expectation in Chattanooga ; field- glasses were everywhere sweeping the mountains ; I walked through the camps and the boys were a shade less merry than is their wont ; the hush of the coming storm was in the air. And so the Sabbath wore away. Then Federal signals flashed from hill to hill along the west, like " the writing on the wall," and through the dusk Howard's columns moved like deeper shadows across the town. All night long I heard the tramp of the men and the hollow rumbling of artillery, and as the moon came up, the sentinels looked down upon it all, like sentries from a tower. Deserters, both officers and men, came into our picket lines that night ; the enemy was astir ; rations had been issued ; baggage sent to the rear ; they were making ready for business. Monday, cloudy and dull, dragged through its morning. IN CAMP AND FIELD. 31 Let me show you a landscape that shall not fade out from " the lidless eye of time " long after we are all dead. A half-mile from the eastern border of Chatta- nooga is a long swell of land sparsely sprinkled with houses, flecked thickly with tents, and checkered with two or three grave-yards. On its summit stand the red earthworks of Fort Wood, with its great guns frowning from the angles. Mounting the parapet and facing eastward you have a singular panorama. Away to your left is a shining elbow of the Tennessee, a lowland of woods, a long-drawn valley, glimpses of houses. At .your right you have wooded undulations with clear intervals extending down and around to the valley at the eastern base of Lookout. From the Fort the smooth ground descends rapidly to a little plain, a sort of trough in the sea, then a fringe of oak woods, then an acclivity, sinking down to a second fringe of woods, until full in front of you and three-fourths of a mile distant, rises Orchard Knob, a conical mound, perhaps an hundred feet high, once wooded, but now bald. Then ledges of rocks and narrow breadths of timber, and rolling sweeps of open ground, for two miles more, until the whole rough and stormy landscape seems to dash against Mission Ridge, three miles distant, that lifts like a sea-wall eight hundred feet high, wooded, rocky, precipitous, wrinkled with ravines. This is, in 32 PICTURES OF LIFE truth, the grand feature of the scene, for it extends north as far as you can see, with fields here and there cut down through the woods to the ground, and lying on the hillsides like brown linen to bleach ; and you feel, as you look at them, as if they are in danger of slipping down the Ridge into the road at its base. And then it curves to the southwest, just leaving you a way out between it and Lookout Mountain. Alto- gether the rough, furrowed landscape looks as if the Titans had plowed and forgotten to harrow it. The thinly fringed summit of the Ridge varies in width from twenty to fifty feet, and houses looking like cigar- boxes are dotted along it. On the top of that wall are rebels and batteries ; below the first pitch, three hun- dred feet down, are more rebels and batteries, and still below are their camps and rifle-pits, sweeping five miles. At your right, and in the rear, is Fort Negley, the old "Star" Fort of Confederate regime; its next neighbor is Fort King, under the frown of Lookout ; yet to the right is the battery of Moccasin Point. Finish out the picture on either hand with Federal earthworks and saucy angles, fancy the embankment of the Charleston and Memphis Railroad drawn diagonally, like an awk- ward score, across the plain far at your feet, and I think you have the tremendous Theatre, and now what next, if not, in Hamlet's words, "the play's the thing! " IN CAMP AND FIELD. 33 The Federal forces lay along the ridgy slope to the right and left of Fort Wood ; the enemy's advance held Orchard Knob in force, and their breastworks and rifle-pits seamed the landscape. At half-past twelve o'clock, Major-General Granger received an order to make a reconnoissance in force towards the base of Mission Ridge, and feel the enemy, supposed to be massing in our immediate front and on Lookout Moun- tain. It was a strange scene. There was to be no more use for the two lines of pickets that for so many days and nights had stood in friendly neighborhood, exchanged the jest and the daily news, and sat at each other's fires. Ours were to be recalled ; theirs were to be thrust back, and the thin veneering of battle's double front rudely torn away. At half-past twelve the order came ; at one, two divisions of the Fourth Corps made ready to move ; at ten minutes before two, twenty-five thousand Federal troops were in line of battle. The line of skirmishers moved lightly out, and swept true as a sword-blade into the edge of the field. You should have seen that splendid line, two miles long, as straight and unwavering as a" ray of light. On they went, driving in the pickets before them ; shots of musketry, like the first great drops of summer rain upon a roof, pattered along the line. One fell here, another there, but still like joyous heralds before a 34 PICTURES OF LIFE royal progress, the skirmishers passed on. From wood and rifle-pit, from rocky ledge and mountain-top, sixty- five thousand rebels watched these couriers bearing the gift of battle in their hands. The bugle sounded from Fort Wood, and the divisions of Wood and Sheridan began to move ; the latter, out from the right, threat- ened a heavy attack ; the former, forth from the left, dashed on into the rough road of the battle. Black rifle-pits were tipped with fire ; sheets of flame flashed out of the woods; the spatter of musketry deepened into volleys and rolled like muffled drums ; hostile bat- teries opened from the ledges; the "Rodmans" joined in from Fort Wood ; bursting shell and gusts of shrap- nel filled the air; the echoes roused up and growled back from the mountains, the rattle was a roar, and yet those gallant fellows moved steadily on ; down the slope, through the wood, up the hills, straight for Orchard Knob as the crow flies, moved that glorious wall of blue. The air grew dense and blue ; the gray clouds of smoke surged up the sides of the valley. It was a terrible journey they were making, those men of ours ; and three-fourths of a mile in sixty minutes was splen- did progress. They neared the Knob ; the enemy's fire converged ; the arc of batteries poured in upon them lines of fire, like the rays they call a " glory" about the INCAMPANDFIELD. 35 head of Madonna and the Child, but they went up the rugged altar of Orchard Knob at the double-quick with a cheer ; they wrapped, like a cloak, round an Alabama regiment that defended it, and swept them down on our side of the mound. Prisoners had begun to come in before ; they streamed across the field like files of geese. Then on for a second altar, Brush Knob nearly a half-mile to the northeast and bristling with a bat- tery ; it was swept of foes and garnished with Federal blue in thirty minutes. The Third Division of the Fourth Corps had made a splendid march ; they had bent our line outward to the enemy like Apollo's bow, and so Howard at Wood's right, and Sheridan at his left, swung out to cut new swaths and leave the edges even, as we went right through this harvest-field of splendid valor and heroic death. At four o'clock, Granger's headquarters were on Orchard Knob, and the cruel storm beat on. On the left, fronting the section of the Eleventh Corps led by General Schurz, was a range of rifle-pits whence the stubborn enemy were not driven, and the General, whose quick eye nothing on that broad field escaped, ordered two brisk twelve-pound Parrotts of Bridges' Battery, planted upon Orchard Knob, to give them an enfilading fire where, on his left, the ends of their rifle- pits showed in the edge of the wood like the mouth of 36 PICTURES OF LIFE a wolf's burrow. You should have seen that motley crew climb out as the splendid fire swept through, and scurry out of sight. It was their ditch, indeed, but they were not quite ready to die in it. The left of the Federal line not advancing to occupy the work, its old tenants crept back one by one, and lay snug as ever. Thrice did Granger sweep the rifle-pits, and General Beattie was ordered round with three regiments to re-enforce the left, and the line came squarely up. At four o'clock the gallant Hazen, at the head of his brigade, charged the rifle-pits at the right of Orchard Knob, up the hill, carried them at the point of the bayonet, and swooped up three hundred prisoners. Here Major Buck of the 93d Ohio fell mortally wounded, and the 93d and I24th Ohio lost thirty killed and one hundred wounded. While the terrible play was going on here, there was neither silence nor inactivity there. Moccasin Point thundered at the camps in the valley at the south, and Lookout growled at the Point, Fort King uttered a word on its own account, and Wood laid its shells about where it pleased, their little rolls of smoke lying on the Ridge like fleeces of wool. If you have glance or thought for anything but the grand action of the drama, you can see the signals fluttering like white wings from Fort Wood, from away IN CAMP AND FIELD: 37 to the left of the line, from the brow of Orchard Knob, from the left of Raccoon Range across the town. On the summit of Mission Ridge, a little to the southeast of Fort Wood, is a cluster of buildings ; a glass will bring them so near that you can discern the gray horse ready saddled at the door. You are looking upon the headquarters of Braxton Bragg. All these hours, he has been watching the impetuous surge of Federal gallantry that swept his smoky legions out of their rifle-pits, off from their vantage-ground, over the swells, through the selvedge of woods, into their rifle-pits and behind their defenses. Listening with his heart to all the tumult of that terrible afternoon, no man can tell how three little figures can truthfully express the Federal loss, but he must believe and be glad when I tell him that "420" are those figures. The enemy must keep counting on to seven hundred before his bloody roll is called. Of the heroic coolness of our army, how can I say enough ? Moving against thirty thousand men, pos- sessing every advantage of position, defenses, numbers engaged everything, indeed, but having chosen a day of battle all men will take up the words of General Howard, and pass them round the land : " I knew that Western men would fight well, but I did not know that they went into battle and stormed strong works like 38 PICTURES OF LIFE men on dress parade ! " And will the Illinois reader who has faithfully borne me company look over the regiments that compose that splendid corps the Fourth and see how many of them belong to him. All through the brigades of Beattie and Willich, Hazen and Wagner, Harkner and Colonel Sherman, he will find something from ihf /rairie State that will make true over and over the name that has passed from a perished race of kings, and set, like the seal of the covenant forever, upon a broad realm, now in these battle years, to be worn once more by them that dwell therein ILLINI we are MEN ! The battle ends with the ended day, the command- ing General is in the center of his new front far out in the field ; the pickets assume their old proximity in a new neighborhood ; no musket-shot startles the silence, and behind the fresh breastworks that have carried the heavy labors of soul and sinew far on into the night, the Federal forces sleep upon their arms ; to dream, perchance, of fierce assault and sweeping triumph ; to wake, perhaps, to a half-reluctant sense of another heavy day of struggle and of blood, for the threshold of approach is only swept, and there before them waits the enemy. IN CAMP AND FIELD. 39 THE CAPTURE OF LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. TUESDAY TWENTY-FOURTH. I am looking down upon three boys that lie side by side on the ground. Three bits of twine bind those willing feet of theirs, that shall never again move at ; 'the double-quick" to the charge. They were among the heroes of Lookout Mountain. They were killed yesterday. And to-day let me think what is to-day. Away there at the North, there were song and sermon ; and the old family table, that had been drooping in the corner, spread its wide wings ; and the children came flocking home "like doves to their windows;" and the threshold made music to their feet alas, for the three pairs beside me ! and the welcome went round the bright hearth. It is THANKSGIVING to-day! Let the mothers give thanks, if they can, for the far-away feet that grew beautiful as they hastened to duty and halted in death. Even while the heart of the loyal land was lifted in a psalm for the blessings it had numbered, anotJier was winging its way northward the tidings of triumph from the mountains of the Cumberland ! Tuesday broke cold and cheerless ; it was a Scottish morning, and the air was dim with mist. I crossed fhe ground over which our boys had marched so grandly on 40 PICTURES OF LIFE Monday afternoon, down into the valley of death and glory, where they had lain all night in line of battle. Brave hearts ! They were ready and eager for a second day's journey ; they had put their hands to the burning plowshare, and there was no thought of looking back. Beyond them lay the hostile camps, and Mission Ridge with its three furrows of rifle-pits, and the enemy swarming like gray ants on the hills. You would have wondered, as I did, at the formidable line of defense the boys had thrown up when they came to a halt, and the terrible music they marched to had died out with the day. Rocks and logs had been piled in great wind- rows, filled in with earth, and could have withstood a stout assault. There had been a great deal of sneering among the Generals who " shoulder the pen and show how fields are won," about fighting with shovels. The man fit to command no more forgets the pickaxe than he forgets the powder. The Fourth Corps is remarka- ble for "making ready" before it takes aim, and among the Generals I may name Sheridan, as a man who never marches without the tools and never halts without intrenching. Semper paratu s always prepared is the motto. Such men, it is, among the Federal chiefs, that give the following little colloquy its point : After the battle of Chicamauga, General Johnston of Mississippi, thus accosted Bragg : " Having beaten the enemy, IN CAMP AND FIELD. 4! why didn't you pursue the advantage?" "Well," replied Bragg, "my losses were heavy, you see, and my line was pretty long, and by the time I could get under motion the - Yankees would have been ten feet under ground 7" A splendid compliment, look at it in any way yov please, and competent testimony to the wisdom of numbering pickaxe and shovel among weapons of war. But reader and writer were out together along the lines in the gray of the morning. Our wicked little battery on Orchard Knob had " ceased from troubling ;" Fort Wood was dumb, and not a voice from the " Parrott " perches anywhere. Stray ambulances those flying hospitals were making their way back to the town, and soldiers were digging graves on the hill-sides. Interrogation points glittered in men's eyes as they turned an ear to the northeast and listened for Sher- man. By and by a little fleet of soldier-laden pontoon boats came drifting down the river, and I hastened to meet them as they landed. The boys in high feather tumbled out, the inevitable coffee-kettle swinging from their bayonets. If a Federal soldier should be fellow- traveler with Bunyan's Pilgrim, I almost believe that tin kettle of his would be heard tinkling after him to the very threshold of the " Gate Beautiful." " Well, boys what now?" "We've put down the pontoon 42 PICTURES OF LIFE taken nineteen rebel pickets without firing a gun run the rebel blockade drawn a shot nobody hurt Sher- man's column is half over bully for Sherman ! " Those fellows had been thirty hours without rest, and were as fresh-hearted and dashing as so many thorough-breds. They had wrought all night long with their lives in their hands, and not a trace of hardship or a breath of complaining. The heavy drudgery of army life, with- out which campaigns could never bear the red blossom of battle, seldom, I fancy, elicits the thanks of com- manding Generals. Perhaps it was eleven o'clock on Tuesday morning, when the rumble of artillery came in gusts from the valley to the west of Lookout. Climbing Signal Hill, I could see volumes of smoke rolling to and fro, like clouds from a boiling caldron. The mad surges of tumult lashed the hill till they cried aloud, and roared through the gorges till you might have fancied all the thunders of a long summer tumbled into that Valley together. And yet the battle was unseen. It was like hearing voices from the under-world. Meanwhile it began to rain ; skirts of mist trailed over the woods and swept down the ravines, but our men trusted in Providence, kept their powder dryland played on. It was the second day of the drama ; it was the second act I was hearing; it was the touch on the enemy's left. IN CAMP AND FIELD. 43 The assault upon Lookout had begun ! Glancing at the mighty crest crowned with a precipice, and now hung round about, three hundred feet down, with a curtain of clouds, my heart misgave me. It could never be taken. But let me step aside just here from the simple story of what I saw, to detail, as concisely as I can, Hooker's admirable design. His force consisted of two brigades of the Fourth Corps, under the command of General Cruft, General Whittaker's and Colonel Grose's having in them five Illinois regiments, the 5Qth, 75th, 84th, 96th, and iiSth; the First Division of the Twelfth Corps under General Geary, and Osterhaus in reserve. It was a formidable business they had in hand : to carry a mountain and scale a precipice near two thou- sand feet high, in the teeth of a battery and the face of two intrenched brigades. Hooker ordered Cruft to move directly south along the western base of the mountain, while he would remain in the valley close under Lookout, and make a grand demonstration with small-arms and artillery. The enemy, roused out by all this "sound and fury," were to come forth from their camps and works, high up the western side of the mountain, and descend to dispute Hooker's noisy pas- sage ; Cruft, when the roar behind him deepened into "confusion worse confounded," was to turn upon his 44 PICTURES OF LIFE heel, move obliquely up the mountain upon the enemy's camps, in the enemy's rear, wheel round the monster, and up to the white house I have already described, and take care of himself while he took Lookout. Hooker thundered and the enemy came down like the Assyrian, while Whittaker on the right, and Colonel Ireland of Geary's command on the left, having moved out from Wauhatchie, some five miles from the moun- tain, at five in the morning, pushed up to Chattanooga Creek, threw over it a bridge, made for Lookout Point, and there formed the right under the shelf of the moun- tain, the left resting on the creek. And then the play began ; the enemy's camps w r ere seized, his pickets sur- prised and captured, the strong works on the Point taken, and the Federal front moved on. Charging upon him, they leaped over his works as the wicked twin Roman leaped over his brother's mud-wall, the 4