Soldiers' record, 1868-10-17

              I>e-votc<l to tlie Intd'essfts of tlio Soldiers micl Sailoi-s of tlio late Wai*.
VOL 1. HARTFORD, CONN., OCTOBER 17, 1808. NO. 15
[From the Atlantic.
THE BLUE AND THE GRAY.
" The women of Columbus, Mississippi, animated
by nobler sentiments than are many ot their sisters,
have shown themselves impartial in their offerings
made to the memor^' of the dead- They strewed flow-ers
alike on the graves of tlie Confederate and of the
National soldiers."—iVieic Torh Tribune.
By the flow of the inhind river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead;—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day :—
Under the one, the Blue;
Under the other, the Gray.
These in the robiugs of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat.
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;—
Under the sod and the dew.
Waiting the judgment day ;—
Under tlie laurel, the Blue;
Under the willow, the Gray.
Erom the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and the foe;—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting tlie jdudgment day ;—
Under the roses, the Blue ;
Under with lilies, the Gray.
So with an equal splendor
The morning sun-rays fall,
With a touch, impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all;
Under the sod and the dew.
Waiting the judgment day;—
Broidered with gold, the Bluo ;
Mellowed the gold, the Gray,
So, when the summer calleth.
On forest and tfeld of grain
With an equal murmur falleth
The cooling drip of the rain ;—
Under the sod and the dew.
Waiting thcjudgment day ;—
Wet with the rain, the Blue ;
Wet with the rain, the Gray.
Sadly, but not with upbraiding,
The generous deed was done,
In the storm of the years that are fading.
No braver battle was won ;—
Under the sod and the dew.
Waiting the judgment day ;—
Under the blossoms, the Blue,
Under the garlands, the Gray.
No more shall the war-cry sever.
Or the winding rivers be red ;
They banish oar anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead !
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Love and tears for the Blue,
Tears and love for the Gray,
telling this poor creature's story. Reas-on
enough there has been till now, ever
since Madison's Administration went out
in 1817, for very strict secrecy, the se-crecy
of honor itself, among the gentle-men
of the navy who have had Nolan in
successive charge. And certainly it
speaks well for the esjn'it de coiys of the
profession and the personal honor of its
members, that to the press this man's
story has been wholly unknown,—and, I
think, to the country at large also. I
have reason to think, from some investi-gations
I made in the Naval Archives
when I was attached to the Bureau of
Construction, that every official re-port
relating to him was burned when
Ross burned the public buildings at Wash-ington.
One of the Tuckers, or possibly
one of tile Watsons, had Nolan in charge
at the end of the war ; and when, on re-turning
from his cruise, he reported at
Washington to one of the Giownin-shields,—
who was in the Navy Depart-ment
when he came home,—he lound that
the Department ignored ihe whole busi-ness.
Whether they really knew nothing
about it, or whether it was a '' Non mi ri-cordo,''
determined on as a piece of poli-cy,
I do not know. But this I do know,
that since 1817, and possibly before, no
naval officer has mentioned Nolan in his
report of a cruise.
But as 1 say, there is no need for se-cresy
any . longer. And now the poor
creature is dead, it seems to me worth
while to tell a little of his story, by way
of showing young Americans of to-day
what it is to be •
of the lesser fry in that distant Mississippi
Valley, which was farther from us than
Puget's Sound is to-day; introduced the
like novelty on their provincial stage, and,
to while away the monotony of the sum-
States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshal,
make my respects to Lieutenant Mitchell
at Orleans, and request him to order that
no one shall mention the United States to
the prisoner while he is on board ship.
mer at Port Adams', got up, for spectacles, You will receive your written oi-ders from
a string of court-martials on the officers
there. One and another of the colonels
and majors were tried, and, to fill out the
list, little Nolan against whom, Heaven
knows, there was evidence enough,—that
he was sick of the service, had been wil-ling
to be false to it, and would have obey-ed
any order to march any-Avhither with
any one who would follow him, had the
order only been signed, " By command of
His Bxc. A. Burr." The courts dragged
on. The big flies escaped,—rightly for
the officer on duty here this evenmg.
The court is adjourned without dtiy."
I have always supposed that Colonel
Morgan himself took the proceeding of the
court to Washington City, and explained
them to Mr. Jefferson. Certain it is that
the President approved them,—certain,
that is, if I may believe the men who say
they have seen his signature. , Before the
Nautilus got. round from New Orleans to
the Northern Atlantic coast with the pris-oner
on board,^the sentence had been ap-all
I know. Nolan was proved guilty j proved, and* he was a man with out a coun-enough,
as I say; yet you a u d i would try.
§mxs at iomt
THE MAN WITHOUT A COUN"-
TRY.
I suppose that very few casual readers
of the " N e w York Herald" of August
13th observed, in an obscure corner
among the deaths," the announcement^
" Nolan. Died, on board U. S. Cor-vette
Levant, Lat. 11' S , , Long. 131®
W. ,on the 11th of May, Philip Nolan."
I happened to observe it, because I was
stranded at the old Mission-House in
Maeinac, waiting for a Lake-Superior
eteanier which did not choose to come,
and 1 was devouring, to the very stubble,
all the current literature I could get
hold of, even down to the deaths and
marriages in the " Herald.^^ My mem-ory
for names and people is good, and
the reader Avill see, as he^'goes on, that I
had reason* enough to remember Philip
Nolan. There are hundreds of readers
who would have paused at that annonnco-ment,
if the officer of the Levant who re-ported
it had chosen to make it thus .—
" Died, May l l t h . THE MAN WITHOUT A
CouNTiiY." For it was as "^The Man
without a Country " that poor Philip No-lan
had generally been known by the offi-cers
who had him in charge during some
fitty years, as, indeed, by all the men who
Bailed under them. I dare say there is
many a man who has taken wine with him
once a fortnight, in a three years' cruise,
who never knew that his name was " No-lan,"
orwhetner the poor wretch had aiiy
name at all.
There can now bo no possible harm in
A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.
Philip Nolan was as line a young offi-cer
as there was in the " Legion of the
West," as the Western division of our
army was then called. When Aaron Burr
made his first dashing expedition down
to New Orleans in 1805, at Port Massac,
or somewhere above on the river, he met
as the Devil wonld have it, this gay,
dashing, bright young fellow, at some din-ner-
party, r think. Burr marked him,
talked to him, walked with him, took him
a day or two's voyage in his flat-boat, and,
in short, l\iscinated him. For the next
year, barrack-life was very tame to poor
Nolan. He occasionally made use of tne
permission the great man had given him
to write to him. Long, high-worded,
stilted letters the poor boy wrote and re-wrote
and copied. But never a line did
ho have in reply from the gay deceiver.
The other boys in the garrison sneered
at him, because he sacrificed in this unre-quited
aftection for a politician the time
which they devoted to Monongahela,
sledge, and high-low-jack. Bourbon, eu-chre,
and poker were still unknown. But
one day Nolan had his revenge. This
tiuie Burr came down the river, not as an
attorney seeking a place /'or his office,
but as a disguised conqueror. He had
defeated I know not how many district-attorneys
; he had dined at I know not how
many public dinners: he had been heral-ded
in I know not how many Weekly Ar-guses
; and it was rumored that he had
an army behind him and an empire before
him. It was a great day—his arrival—to
poor Nolan. Burr had not been at the
tort an hour before he sent for him. That
evening he asked Nolan to take him out
in his ski If, to show him a caneljrake or
a cotton-wood tree, as ]ie said,—really
to seduce him ; and by the time the sail
was over, Nolan was enlisted body and
Boul. From that time, though he did not
yet know it, ho lived as A MAN WITHOUT
A COUNTRY.
What Burr meant to do I know no more
than yoU; dear reader. It is none of our
business just now. Only, when the grand
cauistroplie came, and JeHerson and the
House of Virginia of that day undertook
to break on the wheel all the possible
Clarences of the then House of York, by
the great treason-trial at llichmoud, some
never have heard oi him, reader, but that,
when the prepident of the court asked
him at the close, whether he wished to say
anything to show that he had always been
faithful to the United States, he cried out,
in a fit of frenzy.—
" D—n the United States ! I I
may never hear of the United States
again!"
I suppose he did not know how the
words shocked old Colonel Morgan, who
was holding the court. Half the officers
who sat in it had served through the Rev-olution,
and thtsir lives, not to say their
necks, had been risked for the very idea
which he so cavalierly cursed in his mad-ness.
He, on his part, had grown up in
the West of those days, in the midst of
" Spanish plot," and all the rest. He
had been educated on a pluntation, where
the finest company was a Spanish officer
or a French mercluint from Orleans. His
education,such as it was, had been perfec-ted
in commercial expeditions to Vera
Cruz, and 1 think he told me his father
once liired an Englishman to be a private
tutor for a winter on the plantation. He
had spent half his youth with an older
brother, hunting horses in Texas ; and,
in a word, to him " United States " was
scarcely a reality. Yet he had been fed
by " United States " for all the years
since he had been in the army. He had
sworn on his faith as a Christian to bo
true to " United States " It was " United
States " which gave him the uniform he
wore, and the sword by his side. Nay,
my poor Nolan, it was only bccause
" United States" had picked you out first
as one of her own conlidential men ofhon-that
" A. B u r r " cared for you a straw
The plan they adopted was substan-tially
the same which was necessarily fol-lowed
ever after. Perhaps it was sug-gested
by the necessity of sending him by
waterjfrom Fort Adams and Orleans. The
Secretary of the Navy—it must have been
the first Crowninshield, though he is a man
I do not remember—was requested to put
Nolan on board a Government vessel,
bound on a long cruise,and to direct that
he should be only so far confined there as
to make it certain that he never saw or
heard of the country. We had few long
cruises then, and the navy was very much
out of favor; and as almost all of this sto-ry
is traditional, as I have explained,! do
not know certainly what his first cruise
was. But the commander to whom he
was intrusted—perhaps it was Tingley or
Shaw, though I think it was one of the
younger men,—we are all old enough now
—regulated the etiquette and the precau-tions
of afi"air, and according to his scheme
they were carried out, I suppose, till No-lan
died.
I To be continued. I
or,
more than for tlie flat-boat men ^vho
sailed his ark for him. I do not excuse
Nolan ; 1 only explain to the reader why
he dammed iiis country, and wished he
might never hear her name again.
He never did hear her name but once
again. From that moment, September
23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11,
18(38, he never hoard her name again.
For that half century and more he was a
man without a country.
Old Morgan, as 1 said, was terribly
shocked, if Nolan had compared George
Washington to Benedict Arnold, or hud
cried, " God save King George," Morgan
would not have felt worse. He called
the court into his private room,and re-turned
in fifteen minuets, with a face like
a sheet,to say,—
Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court.
The Court decides, subject to the appro-val
of the President, that you never
near the name of the United States again
Nolan laughed. But nobody else laugh-ed.
Old Morgan was too solemn, and
the whole room was hushed dead as night
for a minute. Even Nolan lost his swag-ger
in a moment Then Morgan added,—
'•Mr. Marshal, take the prisoner to Or-leans
in an armed boat, and deliver him
10 the naval commander there."
The marshal gave his orders, and the
prisoner was taken out of court.
" ^Ir. Marshal," continued old Morgan,
''see that no one mentions the United
" What makes the gas so vaccinating?
said Mrs. Partington, endeavoring to
thread her needle as the gas light rose
and fell ; now springing up to a brilliant
flame, and now almost going out. It be-came
steady at last when Ike slowly
emerged from the cellar.
Where have you been, inquired she
looking around at him. ' Been to try
the meter wench,' he replied,
'Where have you been? inquired she
looking around at him. 'Been try the
mcer wrench ! ' you disgraceful boy^ how
dare you say such a thing ? I am almost
tempted to take corrosive measures, and
punish you within an inch of your Skin.
Sucfi a fragrant outrage Fnever knew in
one so young. Boys that show such.
moral turpentine never come to any good
end.
She ceased suddenly like a horse car
brought up by a drawbridge,and rocked
back and forth much excited.
' I didn't do nothing , ' s a i d Ike, 'only
tried this long thiug the man gave
me on the gas, ' and held out to her a
small wrench used to turn the gas oif
with, which he had boon trying in the
cellar.
Mrs Partington blushed just like a
maple tree in October; and, [)atting the
boy on the head, she sent him out with
a three cent [)ieco that lie had been for an
i hour tcasinff lor in vain.
Artenuis Ward joked as much in his
Avill as in other writings. Ho set aside
a sum for building a homo for poor and
feeble printers,and made donations for
other benevolent objects ; but he loft only
cash enough to i)ay his funeral expenses.
Probaply he meant to show what ho
would have done with money if he had
had any.
Gen Logan gra])hically speaks of Gen.
Grant as the man who never made a mis-take,
and Seymour as the man who never
did anything else.