While at the school, the young duke had been provided with a guide, philosopher, and friend, in the person of an accomplished ex-officer of the French navy, who had been obliged to quit that service, under the Empire, because of his attachment to the exiled monarchy. I knew this gentleman very well at Newport, exchanging with him occasional visits, though he was much my senior in years. His name was Fauvel, which the midshipmen, or other, had promptly Anglicized into Four Bells—a nautical hour-stroke. I suppose this propensity to travesty foreign or difficult names is not merely maritime; but naturally enough my reading has brought me more in contact with it in connection with naval matters. Thus the Ville de Milan, captured into the British service, became to their seamen the "Wheel 'em along;" and the Bellerophon, originally their own, is historically reported to have passed current as the "Bully Ruffian." Captain Fauvel accompanied us in the Macedonian; but after arriving in England, as we were to go to Cherbourg, his charge and he left us, neither being persona grata at that date in a French harbor. When we reached Cherbourg, Fauvel's wife was there, either resident or for the moment, and at our captain's invitation visited the ship to see where her husband had been living, and would again be when we reached a more friendly port. As contrary luck would have it, while she was on board, the French admiral and the general commanding the troops came alongside to return the official call paid them. The awkwardness, of course, was merely that her presence obtruded the fact, otherwise easily and discreetly ignored, that when out of French waters we were hospitably entertaining persons politically distasteful to the French government, the courtesies of which we were now accepting; and there was a momentary impulse to keep her out of sight. A better judgment prevailed, however, and a very courteous exchange of French politeness ensued between the officials and the lady, to whom doubtless political significance attached. A more notable circumstance, in the light of the then future, was that during our few days in Cherbourg arrived the news of the capture of the city of Mexico by the French troops; and before our departure took place the official celebration, with flags and salutes, of that crowning event in an enterprise which in the end proved disastrous to its originator, and fatal to his protégé, Maximilian.
The Macedonian, for a sailing-vessel, had a quite rapid run across from Newport to Plymouth, eighteen days from anchor to anchor, though I believe one of our frigates, after the war, made it in twelve. This was the only occasion, during my fairly numerous crossings, that. I have ever seen icebergs under a brilliant sky. Usually the scoundrels come skulking along masked by a fog, as though ashamed of themselves, as they ought to be. They are among the most obnoxious of people who do not know their place. This time we passed several, quite large, having a light breeze and perfectly clear horizon. After that it again set in thick, with the usual anxiety which ice, unseen but surely near, cannot but cause. Finally we took a very heavy gale of wind, which settled to southwest, hauling gradually to northwest and sending us rejoicing on our way a thousand miles in four days, much of this time under close-reefed topsails.
I am not heedless of the great danger of merely prosing along in the telling of the days of youth, so I will shut off my experience of the Macedonian with an incident which amused me greatly at the time, and still seems to have a moral that one needs not to point. While lying at Spithead, a number of the midshipmen were sent ashore to visit the dock yard,—professional improvement. When they returned, the lieutenants in charge were full of the block-making processes. The ingenuity of the machinery, the variety and beauty of the blocks, the many excellences, had the changes rung upon them, meal after meal, till I could hear the whir of the wheels in my head and see the chips fly. Meantime, our captain went to London, having completed his official visiting, and an English captain came on board to return a call. Declining my invitation to enter the cabin, he walked up and down the quarter-deck with me, discussing many things; under his arm his sword. Suddenly he stopped short, and pointing with it to a big iron-strapped leading-block, he said, "Now that is what I call a sensible block; I wonder why it is we cannot get blocks like that in our ships." I was not prepared with a reason for their defects, then or since; but my unreadiness has not marred my enjoyment of these divergent points of view. Perhaps the captain was a professional malcontent; for, looking at a Parrott rifled hundred-pounder gun which we carried on the quarter-deck, he said, interrogatively, "Not breech-loading?" "No," I answered, "breech-loading is not in favor with us at present." "And very right you are," he rejoined. I think they then (1863) still had the Armstrong breech-loading system. This incident may deserve a place in the palæontology of gun-making. There are now, I presume, no muzzle-loaders left; unless in museums, as specimens.
Very shortly after the Macedonian's return home I was sent to New Orleans, for a ship on the Texas blockade; transportation being given me on one of the "beef-boats," as the supply-vessels were familiarly known. Among fellow-passengers was one of my class; for a while, indeed, my room-mate at the Academy. When we reached New Orleans the chief of staff said to me, "There is a vacancy on board the Monongahela," a ship larger and in every way better than the Seminole to which I was ordered; moreover, she was lying off Mobile, a sociable blockade, instead of at a jumping-off place, the end of nowhere, Sabine Pass, where the Seminole was. He advised me to apply for her, which I did; but Commodore Bell, acting in Farragut's absence in the North, declined. I must go to the ship to which the Department had assigned me, and for which it doubtless had its reasons. So my classmate was ordered to her instead, and on board her was killed in the passage of the Mobile forts the following August. I can scarcely claim a miraculous escape, as it does not appear that I should have got in the way of the ball which finished him; but for him, poor fellow, who had not been long married, the commodore's refusal to me was a sentence of death.
I shall not attempt to furbish up any intellectual entertainment for readers from the excessively dry bones of my subsequent blockading, especially off the mouth of the Sabine. Only a French cook could produce a passable dish out of such woful material; and even he would require concomitant ingredients, in remembered incidents, wherein, if there were any, my memory fails me. Day after day, day after day, we lay inactive—roll, roll; not wholly ineffective, I suppose, for our presence stopped blockade-running; but even in this respect the Texas coast had largely lost importance since the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the previous summer, had cut off the trans-Mississippi region from the body of the Confederacy. We used to see the big, light-draught steamers coming up the river, or crossing the lagoon-like bay, sometimes crowded with people; and the possibility was discussed of their carrying troops, and of their coming out to attack us, as not long before had been successfully done against our vessels inside Galveston Bay. In a norther, possibly, such a thing might have been tried, for the sea was then smooth; but in the ordinary ground-swell I imagine the soldiers would have been incapacitated by sea-sickness. The chances were all against success, and no attempt was ever made; but it was something to talk about.
The ensuing twelve or fifteen months to the close of the war were equally uneventful. Long before they ended I had got back to the South Atlantic coast. To this I was indebted for the opportunity of being present when the United States flag was ceremoniously hoisted again over what then remained of Fort Sumter, by General Robert Anderson, who, as Major Anderson, had been forced to lower it just four years before. Henry Ward Beecher delivered the address, of which I remember little, except that, citing the repeated question of foreigners, why we should wish to re-establish our authority over a land where the one desire of the people was to reject it, he replied, "We so wish, because it is ours." The sentiment was obvious enough, one would think, to any man who had a country to love and objected to seeing it dismembered, but to many of our European critics it then seemed monstrous in an American; at least they said so. The orator on such an occasion has only to swim with the current. The enthusiasm is already there; he needs not to elicit it. Here and again a blast of eloquence from him may start the fire roaring, but the flame is already kindled. The joy of harvest, the rejoicing of men who divide the spoil, the boasting of them who can now put off their harness, need not the stimulation of words.
The exact coincidence of raising the flag over Sumter on the anniversary of its lowering was artificial, but the date of the surrender of Charleston, February 18th, was just opportune to complete the necessary arrangements and preparations without holding back the ceremony, on the night of which—Good Friday—within twelve hours, President Lincoln was murdered. Joy and grief were thus brought into immediate and startling contrast. A perfectly natural and quite impressive coincidence came under my notice in close connection with these occurrences. I was at this time on the staff of Admiral Dahlgren, commander-in-chief of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the last two years of the war, and accompanied him when he entered Charleston Harbor, which he had so long assailed in vain. The following Sunday I attended service at one of the Episcopal churches. The appointed first lesson for the day, Quinquagesima, was from the first chapter of Lamentations, beginning, "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!… She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!" Considering the conspicuous, and even leading, part played by Charleston in the Southern movement, "the cradle of secession," her initiation of hostilities, her long successful resistance, and her recent subjugation, the words and their sequence were strikingly and painfully applicable to her present condition; for the Confederate troops in evacuating had started a large destruction of property, and the Union forces on entering found public buildings, stores, warehouses, private dwellings, and cotton, on fire—a scene of distress to which some of them also further contributed.11 I myself remember streets littered with merchants' correspondence, a mute witness to other devastation. My recollection is that the officiating clergyman saw and dodged the too evident application, reading some other chapter. Many still living may recall how apposite, though to a different mood, was the first lesson of the Sunday—the third after Easter—which in 1861 followed the surrender of Sumter and the excited week that witnessed "the uprising of the North,"—Joel iii., v. 9: "Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles: Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all men of war draw near; let them come up. Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am strong." I was not in the country myself at that time, and my attention was first drawn to this in 1865 by a clergyman, who told me of his startled astonishment upon opening the Book. In the then public temper it must have thrilled every nerve among the hearers, already strained to the uttermost by events without parallel in the history of the nation.
Being on Dahlgren's staff gave me also the opportunity of seeing, gathered together in social assembly, all the general officers who had shared in the March to the Sea. This was at a reception given by Sherman in Savannah, within a week after entering that city, which may be considered the particular terminus of one stage in his progress through the heart of the Confederacy. The admiral had gone thither in a small steamer, which served as flag-ship, to greet the triumphant chief. Few, if any, of the more conspicuous of Sherman's subordinates were absent from the rooms, thronged with men whose names were then in all mouths, and who in honor of the occasion had changed their marching clothes for full uniform, rarely seen in campaign. From the heads of the two armies, the union of which under him constituted his force, down through the brigade commanders, all were there with their staffs; and many besides. The tone of this gathering was more subdued than at Fort Sumter, if equally exultant. Success, achievement, the clear demonstration of victory, such as the occupation of Savannah gave, uplifts men's hearts and swells their breasts; but these men had worked off some of their heat in doing things. Besides, there yet remained for them other and weighty things to do. It could be felt sympathetically that with them the pervading sensation was relaxation—repose. They had reached their present height by prolonged labor and endurance, and were enjoying rather the momentary release from strain than the intoxication of triumph.
In expectation of the victorious arrival of the army in Savannah, I had been charged with two messages, in pathetic contrast with each other. The first was from my father to Sherman himself, who twenty years before had been under his teaching as a cadet at the Military Academy. I cannot now recall whether I bore with me a letter of congratulation which my father wrote him, and to which he pleasantly replied that he had from it as much satisfaction as when in far-away days he had been dismissed from the blackboard with the commendation, "Very well done, Mr. Sherman." My reception by him, however, was in the exact spirit of this remark, and characteristic of the man. When I mentioned my name he broke into a smile—all over, as they say—shook my hand forcibly, and exclaimed, "What, the son of old Dennis?" reverting instinctively to the familiar epithet of school-days.
My other errand was to a former school-mate of my mother's, resident in Savannah, with whom she had long maintained affectionate relations, which the war necessarily suspended. The next day I sought her out. When I found the house, she was at the door, in conversation with some of the subordinate officials of the invading army, probably with reference to the necessity of yielding rooms for quarters. The men were perfectly respectful, but the situation was perturbing to a middle-aged lady brought for the first time into contact with the rough customs of war, and she was very pale, worried in look, and harassed in speech; evidently quite doubtful as to what latent possibilities of harm such a visit might portend—whether ultimately she might not find herself houseless. I made myself known, but she was not responsive; courteous, for with her breeding she could not be otherwise, but too preoccupied with the harsh present to respond to the gentler feelings of the past. It was touchingly apparent that she was trying hard to keep a stiff upper lip, and her attempted frame of mind finally betrayed itself in the words, uttered tremulously, with excitement or mortification, "I don't admit yet that you have beaten us." I could scarcely contest the point, but it was very sad. At the moment I could almost have wished that we had not.
At the mouths of the Georgia rivers Sherman's soldiers struck tide-water, many of them for the first time in their lives; and a story was current that two, foraging, lay down to sleep by the edge of a stream, and were astounded by waking to find themselves in the water. To consider the tide, however, is an acquired habit. Sherman's approach to the Atlantic had given rise to a certain amount of naval and military activity on the part of the forces already stationed there. In connection with this I had been sent on some staff errand that caused me to spend a couple of days on board the Pawnee, which had just been carrying about army officers for reconnoissances. "By George!" said her captain, laughing and bringing down his fist on the table, "you can't make those fellows understand that a ship has to look out for the tide. I would say to them, 'See here, the tide is running out, and if we don't move very soon we shall be left aground, fast till next high-water.' 'Oh yes, yes,' they would reply, 'all right'; and then they would forget all about it, and go on as if they had unlimited time." But of course the captain did not forget.
The fall of Richmond and Charleston, and the surrender of Lee's army, assuring the early termination of hostilities on any grand scale, the admiral had kindly transferred me from his staff back to the ship on board which I had joined the squadron a year before, and which was soon to return North. War service, nominal at least, was not, however, quite over; for after some brief repairs we were sent down to Haïti to take up the duty of convoying the Pacific Mail steamers from the Windward Passage (between Cuba and Haïti) some distance towards Panama. It is perhaps worth recording that such an employment incident to the war was maintained for quite a while, consequent upon the capture of the Ariel, before mentioned. Upon my personal fortunes it had the effect of producing a severe tropical fever, engendered probably during the years of Southern service, and brought to a head by the conditions of Haïti. Whatever its cause, this led to my being invalided for six months, at the expiration of which, to my grievous disappointment, I was again assigned to duty in the Gulf of Mexico. The War of Secession then—December, 1865—was entirely over; but the Mexican expedition of Napoleon III., the culminating incident of which, the capture of Mexico, we had seen celebrated at Cherbourg in 1863, was still lingering. Begun in our despite, when our hands were tied by intestine troubles, it now engaged our unfriendly interest; and part of the attention paid to it was the maintenance of a particular squadron in those waters—observant, if quiescent. Here again sickness pursued, not me, but my ship; from the mouth of the Rio Grande we returned to Pensacola, with near a hundred men, half the ship's company, down with fever. It was not malignant—we had but three deaths—but one of those was our only doctor, and we were sent to the far North, and so out of commission, in September, 1866. The particular squadron was continued till the following spring, when, under diplomatic pressure, the French expedition was withdrawn; but by then I was again in Rio de Janeiro on my way to China.
The headquarters of this temporary squadron was at Pensacola; but until her unlucky visit to the Rio Grande my ship, the Muscoota, one of the iron double-ender paddle steamers which the war had evolved among other experiments, lay for some months at Key West, then, as always from its position, a naval station of importance. I suppose most people know that this word "Key," meaningless in its application to the low islands which it designates, is the anglicized form of the Spanish "Cayo." Among the valued acquaintances of my life I here met a clergyman, whose death at the age of eighty I see as these words pass from my pen. As chaplain to the garrison, he had won the esteem and praise of many, including General Sherman, for his devotion during an epidemic of yellow-fever, and he was now rector of the only Episcopal parish. He told me an anecdote of one of his flock. Key West, from its situation, had many of the characteristics of an outpost, a frontier town, a mingling of peoples, with consequent rough habits, hard drinking, and general dissipation. The man in question, a good fellow in his way, professed to be a very strong churchman, and constantly so avowed himself; but the bottle was too much for him. The rector remonstrated. "–, how can you go round boasting yourself a churchman when your life is so scandalous? You are doing the Church harm, not good, by such talk." "Yes, Mr. Herrick," he replied, "I know it's too bad; it is a shame; but, you see, all the same, I am a good churchman. I fight for the Church. If I hear a man say anything against her, I knock him down." It was at Mr. Herrick's table I heard criticised the local inadequacy of the prayer-book petition for rain. "What we want," said the speaker, "is not 'moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth,' but a hard down-pour to fill our tanks." Key West and its neighbors then depended chiefly, if not solely, upon this resource for drinking-water.