My Diary North and South – William Howard Russell

Next day (20^th)I took the train, at Ellicott’s Mills, and went to Harper’s Ferry. There is no one spot, in the history of this extraordinary war, which can be well more conspicuous. Had it nothing more to recommend it than the scenery, it might well command a visit from the tourist; but as the scene of old John Brown’s raid upon the Federal arsenal, of that first passage of arms between the abolitionists and the slave conservatives, which has developed this great contest; above all, as the spot where important military demonstrations have been made on both sides, and will necessarily occur hereafter, this place, which probably derives its name from some wretched old boatman, will be renowned for ever in the annals of the civil war of 1861. The Patapsco, by the bank of which the rail is carried for some miles, has all the character of a mountain torrent, rushing through gorges or carving out its way at the base of granite hills, or boldly cutting a path for itself through the softer slate. Bridges, viaducts, remarkable archways, and great spans of timber trestle work leaping from hill to hill, enable the rail to creep onwards and upwards by the mountain side to the Potomac at Point of Rocks, whence it winds its way over undulating ground, by stations with eccentric names to the river’s bank once more. We were carried on to the station next to Harper’s Ferry on a ledge of the precipitous mountain range which almost overhangs the stream. But few civilians were in the train. The greater number of passengers consisted of soldiers and sutlers, proceeding to their encampments along the river. A strict watch was kept over the passengers, whose passes were examined by officers at the various stations. At one place an officer who really looked like a soldier entered the train, and on seeing my pass told me in broken English that he had served in the Crimea, and was acquainted with me and many of my friends. The gentleman who accompanied me observed, “I do not know whether he was in the Crimea or not, but I do know that till very lately your friend the Major was a dancing master in New York.” A person of a very different type made his offers of service, Colonel Gordon of the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment, who caused the train to run on as far as Harper’s Ferry, in order to give me a sight of the place, although in consequence of the evil habit of firing on the carriages in which the Confederates across the river have been indulging, the locomotive generally halts at some distance below the bend of the river.

Harper’s Ferry lies in a gorge formed by a rush of the Potomac through the mountain ridges, which it cuts at right angles to its course at its junction with the river Shenandoah. So trenchant and abrupt is the division that little land is on the divided ridge to build upon. The precipitous hills on both sides are covered with forest, which has been cleared in patches here and there on the Maryland shore, to permit of the erection of batteries. On the Virginian side there lies a mass of blackened and ruined buildings, from which a street lined with good houses stretches up the hill. Just above the junction of the Shenandoah with the Potomac, an elevated bridge or viaduct 300 yards long leaps from hill side to hill side. The arches had been broken—the rails which ran along the top torn up, and there is now a deep gulf fixed between the shores of Maryland and Virginia. The rail to Winchester from this point has been destroyed, and the line along the Potomac has also been ruined.

But for the batteries which cover the shoal water at the junction of the two rivers below the bridge, there would be no difficulty in crossing to the Maryland shore, and from that side the whole of the ground around Harper’s Ferry is completely commanded. The gorge is almost as deep as the pass of Killiecranckie, which it resembles in most respects except in breadth and the size of the river between, and if ever a railroad finds its way to Blair Athol, the passengers will find something to look at very like the scenery on the route to Harper’s Ferry. The vigilance required to guard the pass of the river above and below this point is incessant, but the Federals possess the advantage on their side of a deep canal parallel to the railway and running above the level of the river, which would be a more formidable obstacle than the Potomac to infantry or guns. There is reason to believe that the Secessionists in Maryland cross backwards and forwards whenever they please, and the Virginians coming down at their leisure to the opposite shore, inflict serious annoyance on the Federal troops by constant rifle practice.

Looking up and down the river the scenery is picturesque, though it is by no means entitled to the extraordinary praises which American tourists lavish upon it. Probably old John Brown cared little for the wild magic of streamlet or rill, or for the blended charm of vale and woodland. When he made his attack on the arsenal now in ruins, he probably thought a valley was as high as a hill, and that there was no necessity for water running downwards—assuredly he saw as little of the actual heights and depths around him when he ran across the Potomac to revolutionize Virginia. He has left behind him millions either as clear-sighted or as blind as himself. In New England parlours a statuette of John Brown may be found as a pendant to the likeness of our Saviour. In Virginia his name is the synonym of all that is base, bloody, and cruel.

Harper’s Ferry at present, for all practical purposes, may be considered as Confederate property. The few Union inhabitants remain in their houses, but many of the Government workmen and most of the inhabitants have gone off South. For strategical purposes its possession would be most important to a force desiring to operate on Maryland from Virginia. The Blue Ridge range running up to the Shenandoah divides the country so as to permit a force debouching from Harper’s Ferry to advance down the valley of the Shenandoah on the right, or to move to the left between the Blue Ridge and the Katoctin mountains towards the Manassas railway at its discretion. After a false alarm that some Secesh cavalry were coming down to renew the skirmishing of the day before, I returned, and travelling to Relay House just saved the train to Washington, where I arrived after sunset. A large number of Federal troops are employed along these lines, which they occupy as if they were in a hostile country. An imperfectly formed regiment broken up into these detachments and placed in isolated posts, under ignorant officers, may be regarded as almost worthless for military operations. Hence the constant night alarms—the mistakes—the skirmishes and instances of misbehaviour which arise along these extended lines.

On the journey from Harper’s Ferry, the concentration of masses of troops along the road, and the march of heavy artillery trains, caused me to think a renewal of the offensive movement against Richmond was immediate, but at Washington I heard that all M^cClellan wanted or hoped for at present, was to make Maryland safe and to gain time for the formation of his army.

The Confederates appear to be moving towards their left, and M^cClellan is very uneasy lest they should make a vigorous attack before he is prepared to receive them.

In the evening the New York papers came in with the extracts from the London papers containing my account of the battle of Bull’s Run. Utterly forgetting their own versions of the engagement, the New York editors now find it convenient to divert attention from the bitter truth that was in them, to the letter of the foreign newspaper correspondent, who, because he is a British subject, will prove not only useful as a conductor to carry off the popular wrath from the American journalists themselves, but as a means by induction of charging the vials afresh against the British people, inasmuch as they have not condoled with the North on the defeat of armies which they were assured would, if successful, be immediately led to effect the disruption of the British empire. At the outset I had foreseen this would be the case, and deliberately accepted the issue; but when I found the Northern journals far exceeding in severity anything I could have said, and indulging in general invective against whole classes of American soldiery, officers, and statesmen, I was foolish enough to expect a little justice, not to say a word of the smallest generosity.

Next day (19^th) the rain fell incessantly. The mail was brought in by a little negro boy on horseback, and I was warned by my letters that an immediate advance of M^cClellan’s troops was probable. This is an old story. “Battle expected to-morrow” has been a heading in the papers for the last fortnight. In the afternoon I was driven over a part of the estate in a close carriage, through the windows of which, however, I caught glimpses of a beautiful country, wooded gloriously, and soft, sylvan, and well-cultivated as the best parts of Hampshire and Gloucestershire, the rolling lands of which latter county, indeed, it much resembled in its large fields, heavy with crops of tobacco and corn. The weather was too unfavourable to admit of a close inspection of the fields; but I visited one or two tobacco houses, where the fragrant Maryland was lying in masses on the ground, or hanging from the rafters, or filled the heavy hogsheads with compressed smoke.

(18^th) On the day after my arrival the rain fell in torrents. The weather is as uncertain as that of our own isle. The torrid heats at Washington, the other day, were succeeded by bitter cold days; now there is a dense mist, chilly and cheerless, seeming as a sort of strainer for the even down pour that falls through it continuously. The family after breakfast slipped round to the little chapel which forms the extremity of one wing of the house. The coloured people on the estate were already trooping across the lawn and up the avenue from the slave quarters, decently dressed for the most part, having due allowance for the extraordinary choice of colours in their gowns, bonnets, and ribbons, and for the unhappy imitations, on the part of the men, of the attire of their masters. They walked demurely and quietly past the house, and presently the priest, dressed like a French cure, trotted up, and service began. The negro houses were of a much better and more substantial character than those one sees in the south, though not remarkable for cleanliness and good order. Truth to say, they were palaces compared to the huts of Irish labourers, such as might be found, perhaps, on the estates of the colonel’s kinsmen at home. The negroes are far more independent than they are in the south. They are less civil, less obliging, and, although they do not come cringing to shake hands as the field hands on a Louisianian plantation, less servile. They inhabit a small village of brick and wood houses, across the road at the end of the avenue, and in sight of the house. The usual swarms of little children, poultry, pigs, enlivened by goats, embarrassed the steps of the visitor, and the old people, or those who were not finely dressed enough for mass, peered out at the strangers from the glassless windows.

When chapel was over, the boys and girls came up for catechism, and passed in review before the ladies of the house, with whom they were on very good terms. The priest joined us in the verandah when his labours were over, and talked with intelligence of the terrible war which has burst over the land. He has just returned from a tour in the Northern States, and it is his belief the native Americans there will not enlist, but that they will get foreigners to fight their battles. He admitted that slavery was in itself an evil, nay, more, that it was not profitable in Maryland. But what are the landed proprietors to do? The slaves have been bequeathed to them as property by their fathers, with certain obligations to be respected, and duties to be fulfilled. It is impossible to free them, because, at the moment of emancipation, nothing short of the confiscation of all the labour and property of the whites would be required to maintain the negroes, who would certainly refuse to work unless they had their masters’ land as their own. “Where is white labour to be found? Its introduction must be the work of years, and meantime many thousands of slaves, who have a right to protection, would canker the land.

In Maryland they do not breed slaves for the purpose of selling them as they do in Virginia, and yet Colonel Carroll and other gentlemen who regarded the slaves they inherited almost as members of their families, have been stigmatised by abolition orators as slave-breeders and slave-dealers. It was these insults which stung the gentlemen of Maryland and of the other Slave States to the quick, and made them resolve never to yield to the domination of a party which had never ceased to wage war against their institutions and their reputation and honour.

A little knot of friends and relations joined Colonel Carroll at dinner. There are few families in this part of Maryland which have not representatives in the other army across the Potomac; and if Beauregard could but make his appearance, the women alone would give him welcome such as no conqueror ever received in liberated city.

On the 17th August I returned to Baltimore on my way to Drohoregan Manor, the seat of Colonel Carroll, in Maryland, where I had been invited to spend a few days by his son-in-law, an English gentleman of my acquaintance. Leaving Baltimore at 5.40 P.m., in company with Mr. Tucker Carroll, I proceeded by train to Ellicott’s Mills, a station fourteen miles on the Ohio and Baltimore railroad, from which our host’s residence is distant more than an hour’s drive. The country through which the line passes is picturesque and undulating, with hills and valleys and brawling streams, spreading in woodland and glade, ravine, and high uplands on either side, haunted by cotton factories, poisoning air and water; but it has been a formidable district for the engineers to get through, and the line abounds in those triumphs of engineering which are generally the ruin of shareholders.

All these lines are now in the hands of the military. At the Washington terminus there is a guard placed to see that no unauthorised person or unwilling volunteer is going north; the line is watched by patrols and sentries; troops are encamped along its course. The factory chimneys are smokeless; half the pleasant villas which cover the hills or dot the openings in the forest have a deserted look and closed windows. And so these great works, the Carrolton viaduct, the Thomas viaduct, and the high embankments and great cuttings in the ravine by the river side, over which the line passes, have almost a depressing effect, as if the people for whose use they were intended had all become extinct. At Ellicott’s Mills, which is a considerable manufacturing town, more soldiers and Union flags. The people are Unionists, but the neighbouring gentry and country people are Seceshers.

This is the case wherever there is a manufacturing population in Maryland, because the workmen are generally foreigners, or have come from the Northern States, and feel little sympathy with States rights’ doctrines, and the tendencies of the landed gentry to a Conservative action on the slave question. There was no good-will in the eyes of the mechanicals as they stared at our vehicle; for the political bias of Colonel Carroll was well known, as well as the general sentiments of his family. It was dark when we reached the manor, which is approached by an avenue of fine trees. The house is old-fashioned, and has received additions from time to time. But for the black faces of the domestics, one might easily fancy he was in some old country house in Ireland. The family have adhered to their ancient faith. The founder of the Carrolls in Maryland came over with the Catholic colonists led by Lord Baltimore, or by his brother, Leonard Calvert, and the colonel possesses some interesting deeds of grant and conveyance of the vast estates, which have been diminished by large sales year after year, but still spread over a considerable part of several counties in the State.

Colonel Carroll is an immediate descendant of one of the leaders in the revolution of 1776, and he pointed out to me the room in which Carroll, of Carrolton, and George Washington, were wont to meet when they were concocting their splendid treason. One of his connections married the late Marquis Wellesley, and the colonel takes pleasure in setting forth how the daughter of the Irish recusant, who fled from his native country all but an outlaw, sat on the throne of the Queen of Ireland, or, in other words, held court in Dublin Castle as wife of the Viceroy. Drohoregan is supposed to mean “Hall of the Kings,” and is called after an old place belonging, some time or other, to the family, the early history of which, as set forth in the Celtic authorities and Irish antiquarian works, possesses great attractions for the kindly, genial old man—kindly and genial to all but the Abolitionists and black republicans; nor is he indifferent to the reputation of the State in the Revolutionary War, where the “Maryland line” seems to have differed from many of the contingents of the other States in not running away so often at critical moments in the serious actions. Colonel Carroll has sound arguments to prove the sovereign independence and right of every State in the Union, derived from family teaching and the lessons of those who founded the Constitution itself.

I remained in Baltimore a few days, and had an opportunity of knowing the feelings of some of the leading men in the place. It may be described in one word—intense hatred of New England and black republicans, which has been increased to mania by the stringent measures of the military dictator of the American Warsaw, the searches of private houses, domiciliary visits, arbitrary arrests, the suppression of adverse journals, the overthrow of the corporate body—all the acts, in fact, which constitute the machinery and the grievances of a tyranny. When I spoke of the brutal indifference of the police to the poor officer previously mentioned, the Baltimoreans told me the constables appointed by the Federal general were scoundrels who led the Plug Uglies in former days—the worst characters in a city not sweet or savoury in repute—but that the old police were men of very different description. The Maryland Club, where I had spent some pleasant hours, was now like a secret tribunal or the haunt of conspirators. The police entered it a few days ago, searched every room, took up the flooring, and even turned up the coals in the kitchen and the wine in the cellar. Such indignities fired the blood of the members, who are, with one exception, opposed to the attempt to coerce the South by the sword. Not one of them but could tell of some outrage perpetrated on himself or on some members of his family by the police and Federal authority. Many a delator amici was suspected but not convicted. Men sat moodily reading the papers with knitted brows, or whispering in corners, taking each other apart, and glancing suspiciously at their fellows.

There is a peculiar stamp about the Baltimore men which distinguishes them from most Americans — a style of dress, frankness of manner, and a general appearance assimilating them closely to the upper classes of Englishmen. They are fond of sport and travel, exclusive and high-spirited, and the iron rule of the Yankee is the more intolerable because they dare not resent it, and are unable to shake it off.

I returned to Washington on 15th August. Nothing changed; skirmishes along the front; M^cClellan reviewing. The loss of General Lyon, who was killed in an action with the Confederates under Ben McCullough, at Wilson’s Creek, Springfield, Missouri, in which the Unionists were with difficulty extricated by General Sigel from a very dangerous position, after the death of their leader, is severely felt. He was one of the very few officers who combined military skill and personal bravery with political sagacity and moral firmness. The President has issued his proclamation for a day of fast and prayer, which, say the Baltimoreans, is a sign that the Yankees are in a bad way, as they would never think of praying or fasting if their cause was prospering. The stories which have been so sedulously spread, and which never will be quite discredited, of the barbarity and cruelty of the Confederates to all the wounded, ought to be set at rest by the printed statement of the eleven Union surgeons just released, who have come back from Richmond, where they were sent after their capture on the field of Bull Run, with the most distinct testimony that the Confederates treated their prisoners with humanity. Who are the miscreants who tried to make the evil feeling, quite strong enough as it is, perfectly fiendish, by asserting the rebels burned the wounded in hospitals, and bayoneted them as they lay helpless on the field?

The pecuniary difficulties of the Government have been alleviated by the bankers of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, who have agreed to lend them fifty millions of dollars, on condition that they receive the Treasury notes which Mr. Chase is about to issue. As we read the papers and hear the news, it is difficult to believe that the foundations of society are not melting away in the heat of this conflict. Thus, a Federal judge, named Garrison, who has issued his writ of habeas corpus for certain prisoners in Fort Lafayette, being quietly snuffed out by the commandant, Colonel Burke, desires to lead an army against the fort and have a little civil war of his own in New York. He applies to the commander of the county militia, who informs Garrison he can’t get into the fort as there was no artillery strong enough to breach the walls, and that it would require 10,000 men to invest it, whereas only 1400 militiamen were available. What a farceur Judge Garrison must be! In addition to the gutting and burning of newspaper offices, and the exercitation of the editors on rails, the republican grand juries have taken to indicting the democratic journals, and Fremont’s provost marshal in St. Louis has, propria motu, suppressed those which he considers disaffected. A mutiny which broke out in the Scotch Regiment 79th N. Y. has been followed by another in the 2nd Maine Regiment, and a display of cannon and of cavalry was required to induce them to allow the ringleaders to be arrested. The President was greatly alarmed, but M^cClellan acted with some vigour, and the refractory volunteers are to be sent off to a pleasant station called the “Dry Tortugas” to work on the fortifications.

Mr. Seward, with whom I dined and spent the evening on 16th August, has been much reassured and comforted by the demonstrations of readiness on the part of the people to continue the contest, and of confidence in the cause among the moneyed men of the great cities. “All we want is time to develope our strength. We have been blamed for not making greater use of our navy and extending it at once. It was our first duty to provide for the safety of our capital. Besides, a man will generally pay little attention to agencies he does not understand. None of us knew anything about a navy. I doubt if the President ever saw anything more formidable than a river steamboat, and I don’t think Mr. Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, knew the stem from the stern of a ship. Of the whole Cabinet, I am the only member who ever was fairly at sea or crossed the Atlantic. Some of us never even saw it. No wonder we did not understand the necessity for creating a navy at once. Soon, however, our Government will be able to dispose of a respectable marine, and when our army is ready to move, co-operating with the fleet, the days of the rebellion are numbered.”

“When will that be, Mr. Secretary?”

“Soon; very soon, I hope. We can, however, bear delays. The rebels will be ruined by it.”