Daily Observations from The Civil War

May Day.—Not unworthy of the best effort of English fine weather before the change in the calendar robbed the poets of twelve days, but still a little warm for choice. The young American artist Moses, who was to have called our party to meet the officers who were going to Fort Pulaski, for some reason known to himself remained on board the Camilla, and when at last we got down to the river-side I found Commodore Tatnall and Brigadier Lawton in full uniform waiting for me.

The river is about the width of the Thames below Gravesend, very muddy, with a strong current, and rather fetid. That effect might have been produced from the rice-swamps at the other side of it, where the land is quite low, and stretches away as far as the sea in one level green, smooth as a billiard-cloth. The bank at the city side is higher, so that the houses stand on a little eminence over the stream, affording convenient wharfage and slips for merchant vessels.

Of these there were few indeed visible—nearly all had cleared out for fear of the blockade; some coasting vessels were lying idle at the quay side, and in the middle of the stream near a floating dock the Camilla was moored, with her club ensign flying. These are the times for bold ventures, and if Uncle Sam is not very quick with his blockades, there will be plenty of privateers and the like under C. S. A. colors looking out for his fat merchantmen all over the world.

I have been trying to persuade my friends here they will find very few Englishmen willing to take letters of marque and reprisal.

The steamer which was waiting to receive us had the Confederate flag flying, and Commodore Tatnall, pointing to a young officer in a naval uniform, told me he had just “come over from the other side,” and that he had pressed hard to be allowed to hoist a Commodore or flag-officer’s ensign in honor of the visit, and of the occasion. I was much interested in the fine white-headed, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked old man—who suddenly found himself blown into the air by a great political explosion, and in doubt and wonderment was floating to shore, under a strange flag in unknown waters. He was full of anecdote too, as to strange flags in distant waters and well-known names. The gentry of Savannah had a sort of Celtic feeling towards him in regard of his old name, and seemed determined to support him.

He has served the Stars and Stripes for three fourths of a long life—his friends are in the North, his wife’s kindred are there, and so are all his best associations — but his State has gone out. How could he fight against the country that gave him birth! The United States is no country, in the sense we understand the words. It is a corporation or a body corporate for certain purposes, and a man might as well call himself a native of the common council of the city of London, or a native of the Swiss Diet, in the estimation of our Americans, as say he is a citizen of the United States; though it answers very well to say so when he is abroad, or for purposes of a legal character.

Of Fort Pulaski itself I wrote on my return a long account to the “Times.”

When I was venturing to point out to General Lawton the weakness of Fort Pulaski, placed as it is in low land, accessible to boats, and quite open enough for approaches from the city side, he said, “Oh, that is true enough. All our sea-coast works are liable to that remark, but the Commodore will take care of the Yankees at sea, and we shall manage them on land.” These people all make a mistake in referring to the events of the old war. “We beat off the British fleet at Charleston by the militia—ergo, we’ll sink the Yankees now.” They do not understand the nature of the new shell and heavy vertical fire, or the effect of projectiles from great distances falling into open works. The Commodore afterwards, smiling, remarked, “I have no fleet. Long before the Southern Confederacy has a fleet that can cope with the Stars and Stripes my bones will be white in the grave.”

We got back by eight o’clock P.M., after a pleasant day. What I saw did not satisfy me that Pulaski was strong, or Savannah very safe. At Bonaventure yesterday I saw a poor fort called “Thunderbolt,” on an inlet from which the city was quite accessible. It could be easily menaced from that point, while attempts at landing were made elsewhere as soon as Pulaski was reduced. At dinner met a very strong and very well informed Southerner—there are some who are neither — or either — whose name was spelled Gourdin and pronounced Go-dine—just as Huger is called Hugeë— and Tagliaferro, Telfer in these parts.

April 30th.—At 1·30 P.M. a small party started from Mr. Green’s to visit the cemetery of Bonaventure, to which every visitor to Savannah must pay his pilgrimage; difficiles aditus primos habet—a deep sandy road which strains the horses and the carriages; but at last “the shell road” is reached—a highway-several miles long, consisting of oyster shells—the pride of Savannah, which eats as many oysters as it can to add to the length of this wonderful road. There is no stone in the whole of the vast alluvial ranges of South Carolina and Maritime Georgia, and the only substance available for making a road is the oyster shell. There is a toll gate at each end to aid the oyster shells. Remember they are three times the size of any European crustacean of the sort.

A pleasant drive through the shady hedgerows and bordering trees lead to a dilapidated porter’s lodge and gateway, within which rose in a towering mass of green one of the finest pieces of forest architecture possible; nothing to be sure like Burnham Beeches, or some of the forest glades of Windsor, but possessed, nevertheless, of a character quite its own. What we gazed upon was, in fact, the ruin of grand avenues of live oak, so well-disposed that their peculiar mode of growth afforded an unusual development of the “Gothic idea,” worked out and elaborated by a superabundant fall from the overlacing arms and intertwined branches of the tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a weeping, drooping, plumaceous parasite, which oes to the tree what its animal type, the yellow fever—vomito prieto—does to man—clings to it everlastingly, drying up sap, poisoning blood, killing the principle of life till it dies. The only differ, as they say in Ireland, is, that the tillandsia all the time looks very pretty, and that the process lasts very long. Some there are who praise this tillandsia, hanging like the tresses of a witch’s hair over an invisible face, but to me it is a paltry parasite, destroying the grace and beauty of that it preys upon, and letting fall its dull tendrils over the fresh lovely green, as clouds drop over the face of some beautiful landscape. Despite all this, Bonaventure is a scene of remarkable interest; it seems to have been intended for a place of tombs. The Turks would have filled it with turbaned white pillars, and with warm ghosts at night. The French would have decorated it with interlaced hands of stone, with tears of red and black on white ground, with wreathes of immortelles. I am not sure that we would have done much more than have got up a cemetery company, interested Shillibeer, hired a beadle, and erected an iron paling. The Savannah people not following any of these fashions, all of which are adopted in Northern cities, have left everything to nature and the gatekeeper, and to the owner of one of the hotels, who has got up a grave yard in the ground. And there, scattered up and down under the grand old trees, which drop tears of Spanish moss, and weave wreathes of Spanish moss, and shake plumes of Spanish moss over them, are a few monumental stones to certain citizens of Savannah. There is a melancholy air about the place independently of these emblems of our mortality, which might recommend it specially for picnics. There never was before a cemetery where nature seemed to aid the effect intended by man so thoroughly. Everyone knows a weeping willow will cry over a wedding party if they sit under it, as well as over a grave. But here the Spanish moss looks like weepers wreathed by some fantastic hand out of the crape of Dreamland. Lucian’s Ghostlander, the son of Skeleton of the Tribe of the Juiceless, could tell us something of such weird trappings. They are known indeed as the best bunting for yellow fever to fight under. Wherever their flickering horsehair tresses wave in the breeze, taper end downwards, Squire Black Jack is bearing lance and sword. One great green oak says to the other, “This fellow is killing me. Take his deadly robes off my limbs!” “Alas ! See how he is ruining me! I have no life to help you.” It is, indeed, a strange and very ghastly place. Here are so many querci virentes, old enough to be strong, and big, and great, sapfull, lusty, wide armed, green-honoured — all dying out slowly beneath tillandsia, as if they were so many monarchies perishing of decay—or so many youthful republics dying of buncombe brag, richness of blood, and other diseases fatal to overgrown bodies politic.

The void left in the midst of all these designed walks and stately avenues, by the absence of any suitable centre, increases the seclusion and solitude. A house ought to be there somewhere you feel—in fact there was once the mansion of the Tatnalls, a good old English family, whose ancestors came from the old country, ere the rights of man were talked of, and lived among the Oglethorpes, and such men of the pigtail, school who would have been greatly astonished at finding them selves in company with Benjamin Franklin or his kind. I don’t know anything of old Tatnall. Indeed who does? But he had a fine idea of planting trees, which he never got in America, where he would have received scant praise for anything but his power to plant cotton or sugar cane just now. In his knee reeches, and top boots, I can fancy the old gentleman reproducing some home scene, and boasting to himself, “I will make it as fine as Lord Nihilo’s park.” Could he see it now?—A decaying army of the dead. The mansion was burned down during a Christmas merrymaking, and was never built again, and the young trees have grown up despite the Spanish moss, and now they stand, as it were in cathedral aisles, around the ruins of the departed house, shading the ground, and enshrining its memories in an antiquity which seems of the remotest, although it is not as ancient as that of the youngest oak in the Squire’s park at home.

I have before oftentimes in my short voyages here, wondered greatly at the reverence bestowed on a tree. In fact, it is because a tree of any decent growth is sure to be older than anything else around it; and although young America revels in her future, she is becoming old enough to think about her past.

In the evening Mr. Green gave a dinner to some very agreeable people, Mr. Ward, the Chinese Minister— (who tried, by-the-bye, to make it appear that his wooden box was the Pekin State carriage for distinguished foreigners)—Mr. Locke, the clever and intelligent editor of the principal journal in Savannah, Brigadier Lawton, one of the Judges, a Britisher, owner of the once renowned America which, under the name of Camilla, was now lying in the river (not perhaps without reference to a little speculation in running the blockade, hourly expected), Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall, so well known to us in England for his gallant conduct in the Peiho affair, when he offered and gave our vessels aid, though a neutral, and uttered the exclamation in doing so,— in his despatch at all events,—”that blood was thicker than water.” Of our party was also Mr. Hodgson, well known to most of our Mediterranean travelers some years back, when he was United States’ Consul in the East. He amuses his leisure still by inditing and reading monographs on the languages of divers barbarous tribes in Numidia and Mauritania.

The Georgians are not quite so vehement as the South Carolinians in their hate of the Northerners; but they are scarcely less determined to fight President Lincoln and all his men. And that is the test of this rebellion’s strength. I did not hear any profession of a desire to become subject to England, or to borrow a prince of us; but I have nowhere seen stronger determination to resist any reunion with the New England States. “They can’t conquer us, Sir?” “If they try it, we’ll whip them.”