34 A Man of Heart

I had been gone from Washington only a year and a half, but I found great changes at the capital. There was an increase in warlike appearance; it was the centre of a circle of bayonets; line after line of intrenchments curved away, and I noticed that most of them faced the south; thousands of troops occupied these, and their tents were more numerous than the houses of the inhabitants. It was soldiers, soldiers everywhere, and the rule of the republic had become the rule of the sword.

Washington was no longer a capital, but it was half camp, half hospital, and huge in either aspect; a hundred and fifty forts encircled it, and fifteen hundred cannon stood sentinel, facing every point from which a foe could come; within the rim of cannon rose the hospitals, and these hospitals, always more to-day than they were yesterday, never went unfilled; the battlefields of Virginia, so prolific in cannon balls, saw to that, and the current of the wounded flowed northward in an unbroken stream.

Although I knew that I had no right to expect anything else—for how could the war work otherwise?—this aspect of the capital gave me a shock. I had shared in the Jeffersonian dream of a republic always at peace, and I still believed it a beautiful dream.

Another change in the capital was the disappearance of all things Southern save its sunshine. The tall, thin, smooth-shaven men, in black clothes, coat-tails very long, and wide-brimmed soft black hats, who frequented the hotels and public buildings, and loved to talk politics and government in flowing and soft speech, were gone, and the liquid Southern accent so pleasing to me was seldom heard.

I chafed at my assignment to garrison duty at Washington, wishing to join the Army of the Potomac, and also to secure Elinor’s transfer from the capital of the South to the capital of the North, setting my right as her husband against Mrs. Maynard’s right as her aunt. But I could not escape the Washington service, and making the best of it, I went at the first opportunity to see Elinor’s uncle, Paul Warner, her uncle by marriage, not blood, and therefore with less claim upon her than Mrs. Maynard.

The great double brick house in which Paul Warner lived showed even more numerous signs of splendour and opulence than it boasted at the opening of the war. The way of an army contractor who knew the ways of men was not paved with roses, but with something very much more substantial and welcome—namely, gold dollars; and no one was shrewder in his own business than Paul Warner. There were tales in the army of shoes with pasteboard soles and uniforms that fell to pieces in the winter rains, and I doubted not that Paul Warner could tell some of their secrets; but he was Elinor’s uncle nevertheless. He was proud of her and he loved her in his way. He would care for her if I could bring her to Washington.

He looked at me in surprise when he entered the parlour where I was sitting.

“I heard a report somewhere that you had been killed in the West,” he said.

“But you see that it is not true,” I replied.

“I am glad,” he said, and I believe that he spoke the truth. Moreover, he shook hands with me heartily.

“Mr. Warner,” I said, “I am happy to tell you that since I last saw you I have become your kinsman.”

“My kinsman?”

“Yes, your nephew.”

His heavy face stirred with a look of the deepest interest, and then I told him all our long and strange story.

“I did not choose you as my nephew,” he said when I finished. “Men seldom choose their relations, whether by blood or marriage, or they might do worse; but since it is done I must accept you, and Elinor is a good girl. Her choice of you is at least in your favour, and she must come to Washington, if a way can be found. But it is an affair for me to conduct. I have more influence than you.”

I was willing enough that he should act, but I did not intend to relax my own exertions meanwhile. I was not able, however, to get a message through the lines to Richmond, nor was he, so far as I could hear. But I had the great pleasure, however, of receiving a letter from my grandmother. I had written to her immediately upon my arrival in Washington, telling her the whole history of Elinor and myself, or at least as much as I knew of it, since our flight on the night of our marriage.

“I feel that all things will come out right with you both,” said Madam Arlington in conclusion, “but I fear for you, Henry, in that wicked city, among all those Yankees who will certainly suffer the continued defeats that they deserve. It is best that Elinor remain in Richmond amid such inspiring surroundings until the war is over, when you can claim her. Perhaps your action in this war will not then be held against you, and your Southern relatives and friends may be influential enough to convince all that you were misguided and not wicked. Never fear that Elinor will not be able to take care of herself in Richmond. Women are not so weak and defenceless as men think they are—which belief flatters man’s pride in his own strength—although they like to feel that they have protectors within call.

“Our affairs here, by God’s will, progress favourably. We have not been annoyed since your departure, either by regular troops or guerrillas. The spring rains were abundant and the crops promise well. I see no change in William Penn; I tell him that he is growing older, but he replies that it is not important. Remember, Henry, in all your campaigning to keep your head cool and your feet warm.

“Your loving grandmother,

“Caroline Arlington.”

A day or two after the receipt of this letter I met Mason, just come out of hospital from a wound received at Chancellorsville. He gave me news of Shaftoe, who he said had secured a transfer to the Army of the Potomac shortly after Shiloh. The veteran, so Mason told me, was sure that the great theatre of the war was to be in the East, and because of that he wished to come. I was walking along Pennsylvania Avenue only three days after this when a heavy hand fell upon my shoulder, and a loud voice said in my ear:

“As many lives as a cat and swaggering through the town as if you owned it! Is there anything so big as the pride of youth?”

It was Shaftoe, the same trim soldier as of old, gladness showing in his eyes. I shook hands with him with the greatest joy, and when we began to exchange stories I found that he too had been on garrison duty in Washington for a longer period than I. He had fought at Chancellorsville, but had been sent to the capital with his brigade immediately after the defeat, when it was feared that the Army of Northern Virginia might move on the city.

“And you see I was here when you came,” he said with twinkling eyes. “It was strange that I did not hear of your arrival and the mighty re-enforcement it made for our armies; but so it was.”

I felt as usual the tonic cheerfulness of his presence. There was something in this man, his quiet confidence, his unfailing optimism—or shall I rather call it a determination to make the best of everything?—that rendered discouragement impossible among those whom he honoured with his friendship; I use the word “honoured” purposely. I told him the entire story of my marriage, our flight and recapture, and my escape from Libby Prison. He was thoughtful, and for a little while made no comment. Then he said:

“I do not think that you have heard the last of Varian. He is one of the best soldiers on American soil to-day. He has every quality that a cavalry commander ought to have. He’s been giving us every sort of trouble, but all the same I’m glad he’s on their side and not ours. There’s a particular kind of man that thinks the world was made for him to squeeze like an orange. If he’s beat just once he gets mad at everybody, friends and enemies alike. Now, this General Varian has lost what he wanted most, and the claws will begin to show.”

Shaftoe gave me more good advice, and I was confident both of his judgment and his friendship. I managed to procure an exchange into the company to which he belonged, but both of us were held a further period on garrison duty.

While I was waiting I was made a lieutenant, and Shaftoe became a sergeant under me. It seemed a jest to me that this man, who knew twenty times as much about war as I, should be under my command; but he was kind enough to say that I was as good as the average lieutenant.

I was informed shortly after that I was to keep the last night watch over a deserter who was to be hanged the next day. It was a duty that had none of the flush and glory of war, and though I would have chosen anything else in preference, I knew too much to protest.

The quarters of the condemned man were on a skirt of the city, where the fringe of houses became thin and the tents of the camp rose in lines in the darkness like white ghosts. The deserter had been placed in a tent alone, and, stationing my guard at the entrance and around it, I walked back and forth, often looking from the hillside upon the city which lay almost at my feet, in all its armour, like a mailed knight of old.

It was a warm spring night like that other warm spring night at Shiloh, now more than a year gone, when the Southern army rose out of the darkness like an apparition, and naturally my mind went back to the battle. It seemed to me that the object for which my comrades and I had fought was even more distant now than then. Paraphrasing an old saying, I said to myself that much blood had flowed under the bridge since Shiloh, but its flowing had been to no purpose, so far as I could see.

The city was unrolled like a picture at my feet; the gleam of white in the darkness came from the marble of the Capitol and the cloth walls of tents; a light shining through the foliage marked the White House, and the sombre shapes, almost as dark as the darkness, told where stood the other buildings of the Government. Some built-up street showed dimly, but everywhere, in the city and around it, dominating all things, burned the fires of the army. A vast circle of little flames sprang from forts, hospitals, and camp fires, and their light rising high formed a luminous cloud which floated over the capital and inclosed it in a rosy mist. But I knew that beneath that mist was the unseen flash of many bayonets, now furnishing the chief light for the peaceful capital of Jefferson.

The night was silent, yet not strangely so; the noisy period of the war, the time for loud talking and the rattling of unused arms, had passed, and men fought, suffered, and waited, without tumult. I heard distinctly my own footsteps as I walked up and down, and presently another’s, faint and far away, but approaching. The figure of a man showed dimly through the darkness, and then advanced more clearly into outline. It was the clergyman, come to pay the last visit of consolation to the condemned—tall, old, and kindly. I passed him into the tent and waited without.

The old man remained an hour inside, and when he came out stopped a moment with me.

“A solemn duty for you,” he said.

“I could have wished anything else.”

“More folly than guilt,” continued the clergyman, pointing to the tent.

I thought it very likely, but the military law in such cases was stern and of age-long use. It was approved by none more than by soldiers, and I merely nodded.

“Only a boy,” said the clergyman.

“But a boy who is old enough to fight must know the laws of war,” I replied.

The clergyman was silent for a few moments, and then he said:

“Seems to have been a case of homesickness.”

“There have been too many such. Examples must be made.”

He did not reply, and, sighing once, walked away in the darkness.

I resumed my walk, but my mind returned presently to the words of the clergyman and the sympathy of his manner. Examples were needed, undoubtedly; but if the deserter was only a boy, and homesickness had been the cause of his fall, his fate was hard. Yet the laxity toward such offences had been already too great. I felt much pity for the boy, but I knew that I could not alter his sentence.

“Is the man asleep?” I asked presently of one of the soldiers who stood at the tent flap.

“He must be; he has not stirred in an hour.”

A candle was burning in the tent and its dim light fell on the ground without, but the figure of the deserter inside was not revealed. I listened a little while, and not hearing him move, walked on. But I came back presently and entered the tent. The deserter was on my mind.

The candle rested on an empty box, but its light was so feeble that I stood for a few moments, until my eyes grew strong enough for the dusk.

The deserter was sitting on another box, his head sunk between his shoulders, his chin fallen low, his whole form crushed, and his face hopeless; nothing moved except his fingers, which opened and shut automatically against the palms of his hands. He seemed to me a sitting figure of blank and wordless despair He was not more than eighteen years old.

The boy moved slightly and turned his vacant gaze upon me. He stared at the intruder, not as if I were a man, but as he would have stared at a stone wall, and with as little interest. He neither spoke nor made further movement.

He was an ordinary farm lad; nothing bad in his face, but one who knew that he was going to die, and, knowing it, was dying in advance—a boy who had invited death by thoughtlessness.

Pity rose up in my soul. The lad’s silence, his submission, his fearful gaze, as if he expected to see Death approaching him in corporeal and visible form, a genuine old man with the scythe, impressed me with the terrors of an execution in such a case and the pitiless demands of war. Here was a boy who was neither a thief nor a coward; who, with comrades to right and left, and the battle flame before, would be as brave as any; who was as good as other boys; who loved his father and mother, and whose fault had been merely homesickness, certainly not in itself a crime, and often at other times esteemed a merit and the mark of a true heart. He was to be made a sacrifice for a huge machine, but how was he ever to be paid back? The thought troubled me, and while trying to find a solution I stared unconsciously into the prisoner’s eyes, which were looking at me so vacantly.

Then I remembered myself, and, fearing that my presence there was an insult to the boy’s dumb fear, I went outside, glad to feel the cool night air on my face again.

The night advanced, and many of the lights died, but enough still burned to stud the city as if with stars. It was just midnight, when I heard an approaching footstep again, and a tall, ungainly man, walking awkwardly, came to the tent.

“I wish to talk to the deserter,” he said.

I was about to demand his authority, but, seeing his face and melancholy eyes, took him into the tent without a word, and withdrew.

I waited a long time, hearing occasionally the low murmur of voices inside, but never a loud tone. Though more of the lights in tent and hospital had vanished, the night was not dark. The rosy mist of the fires below, thin but luminous, still floated over the city; the river, a long sinuous band of burnished silver, coiled among the hills; and stone and marble walls shed a white light.

“Walk a little with me, lieutenant. I wish to speak with you.”

The tall man had come out of the tent, and I saluted with deep respect. Instructing my men to keep a good watch, I walked away with my visitor in the indicated path.

“You will return him to his regiment in the morning, and tell him that a double obligation to be a good and true soldier now rests upon him,” said the tall man, pointing over his shoulder toward the tent in which the deserter sat.

“But the execution!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“There will be no execution.”

“But he is a deserter; it is the law of war and a necessity.”

“He is a deserter, and it is the law of war, but it is not a necessity; no such execution shall occur while I am President. I will pardon every offender. Look!”

He pointed to the city that lay below and the wide sweep of lights gleaming from hospital and tent.

“Can not we kill enough men on the battlefield?” he continued, the deep, melancholy eyes lighting up. “The hospitals there are full of the wounded; the dead are taken out every day, and the tents are crowded with men getting ready to furnish more dead and wounded. It is my business to make war by wholesale, and I shall not turn aside from it to kill a few poor lads of our own army in Washington.”

Then we were silent for a little while, and I watched the face of that strange man which seemed to have in it some of the prophetic light possessed by the seers and fearless preachers of the Western woods. Then the eyes began to twinkle, and another phase of his character appeared.

“You are a Kentuckian?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I thought so. One can not mistake that accent, the haughty snubbing of the poor little letter ‘r,’ and the general air of a speaking acquaintance with God.”

“In Kentucky we are as good as anybody, and that accounts for our manner.”

“I do not criticise it; how could I? I am a Kentuckian by birth and family stock, and so is Davis, who is now at the head of those down there.”

He waved his hands toward the South.

“The Kentuckian is always a problem to me,” he continued, “and none the less so because I am one myself; sometimes I think he is not an American at all, but just a Kentuckian, which perhaps includes the American character, but also gives something above and beyond. I do not know whether to consider his State a projection of the North into the South, or a projection of the South into the North; whether to rank the Kentuckians as Southerners turned Northerners, or Northerners turned Southerners, or perhaps a compromise, or a mixture, containing much of one and a little of the other, or much of the other and a little of the one.”

He stopped and looked inquiringly at me.

“We are what we are,” I said with pride.

The President laughed.

“So are most other people,” he continued; “besides, your claim is not wholly original, though it sounds well enough. Another Kentuckian whom I heard make the claim in almost the same language had never walked on a carpet in his life. He lived in a log hut, and he could not read, but he was just as sincere as you, and perhaps as much justified. When he knocks at the heavenly gates and St. Peter asks him what good he has done, he will not mention anything, but say, ‘I am from Kentucky,’ and push right in.”

“It ought to count,” I said.

The President laughed again.

“You thought you were jesting then,” he said, “but you were not. Do you know why that man was proud of being a Kentuckian? Do you know why all Kentuckians are? It is not because Kentucky is the most beautiful and most fertile State in the Union—for it is neither; not because it has the most glorious history—for it has not; not because it is the most advanced and enlightened of the States—for it is not, and you know it as well as I. Then why?”

“‘Lives there a man with soul so dead,’” I quoted.

“It is that in part only, but when you get through with man’s pride in his literature, his art, his good laws, his industry, and his justice to other people and himself, you find down at the bottom the solid bed-rock upon which all rests—his pride in his fighting ability. I do not say that it ought to be so, but it is so. I knew an old revivalist preacher out in Illinois, a genuinely good man, and the only man I ever met who could really forgive his enemies; but if you were to intimate to him that an American army could not whip an equal army of any other nation, you would have him to fight; yet he truly described himself as a humble follower of Christ. That is the temper of you Kentuckians; you are always fighting, and in your hearts you are proud of it. You are afraid that when you get to heaven no fighting will be allowed there, and you are trying to get enough of it here.”

“Look at our history,” I said in defence. “We had to fight from necessity and not from choice. Was not Kentucky the Dark and Bloody Ground? Even before the white men came we had to fight the Indians for twenty years; then we fought all the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico in the second war with Great Britain, and then in more Indian wars in the Northwest. The fighting man got to be considered the most valuable person among us, and the feeling has been handed on. Besides, we have it in our blood, by fair inheritance: we are mostly descended from the Scotch, and I have never read of anybody who fought more and with more enjoyment than the Scotch. How could we escape the fighting feeling? We are not neglecting our part in this war, either. Eighty thousand of us in the Northern army, forty thousand in the Southern; and there are only a little more than a million people in the State—men, women, and children, counting the blacks—who don’t take part.”

“You have said several things with pride, but that last sentence with more pride than any other. You would rather be thought a fool or a villain than a coward.”

The President ceased to jest and was silent, the melancholy look habitual with him deepening. I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him for active service, and he replied with some significance that he thought the chance would come soon; then he bade me a fatherly good night, and walked away in the darkness.

I watched his figure until it disappeared, and I thought that this strange man was truly alone in the darkness in more senses than one. He seemed to have scarcely a friend just now. All cried out against him, because the war was not going well.

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