Soldiers' record, 1869-04-21

              IDevotod. to tlio Ittterests ot the Soldiers omd. Sailoirs of the Icite IJVa*'.
VOL. I. HARTFORD, OOI^N., SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 1869. NO. 42.
i o i r a at f o m e.
M Y A I N C O R A M E E .
I am far frae my hamo, an' I'm weary oftenwhilca
For the langed-for hame-bringing, aa' my Father's
welcoino smiles;
I'll ne'er bo f u' contcnt until my cen do see
The gowden gates o' Heavcu, an' my ain countreo.
The eartli is flecked wi' flowers, mony-tiuted, fresli
an' gay,
The birdies warble blithely, for my Father made them
sae;
But these sights an' these soun's will as naetliing be
When Ito h einare the angels singing in my ain conntree.
I've his gude word of promise, that some gladsome
day tiic King
To his ain royal palare his banished hame will bring,
Wi' ecu an' wi' hearts running owre we shall see
The King in his beauty an' our ain conntree.
My sins hae been mouy, an' my sorrows hae been
sair,
But there they'll never vex me, nor be remembered
mair;
His bluid hath made mo white, his hand shall dry
When mhoi nber ieneg,s me hame at last to my ain conntree
Like a bairn to its mither, a wee birdie to its nest,
I wad fain be ganging noo unto my Saviour's breast;
For he gathers in his bosom witless, worthless lambs
like me,
An' carries them liimsel' to his ain countree.
He's faithful that hath promised; he'll surely come
again;
He'll keep his tryst wi' me, at what hour I dinna ken.
But he bids me still to watch, and ready aye to bo
To gang at ony moment to my ain countree.
So I'm watching aye an' singing o' my hame as I
wait
For tbe soun'ing o' his foot fa' this side the gowder
gate,
God gi'e his grace to ilk ane wha listens noo to me,
That we a' may gang in gladiiess to our ai^ countree.
A G L I M P S E A T P K E D E R I G K S B U E G .
While you were suffering appalling wind
and icy pavements, I was lying on a knoll
on Fredericksburg slopes,and listening to
the black-bird's singing. Hundreds of
them went swooping skyward in little
flocks, or now and then shooting swiftly
over some old battery—'just as the cannon-fruit
flew seven years ago. The day was
rich with calm—perfect in a warm, yet
bracing atmosphere—with zephyrs which
spoke of spring. More than that, the ne-gro
laborers were ploughing a field, and
the cows and pigs were venturing to get
their' subsistence in the pastures. Pigs
penetrate every where in the South, even
into the cemeteries ; and have so learned
to resent any interference with their rights
that they will not get out of your way
A Southern landscape would hardly be
picturesque, in a native's eye, without a
pig. Animals are more active in the
thoroughfares of many a hamlet south of
Washington than are men. The streets
have a deserted, plague stricken air ; peo-ple
seem to have gone to church, or a-fish-ing,
or to be taking a noon siesta. No
bustle—no strife. No one seems to be
loafing in the hotels ; even the bar-rooms
are quiescent. Ouco in a while some
active Northern man turns up, in a va
cant lot, punching the soil with his cane
and the land agent in his ribs, to get in
formation about investments; but the
multitudes of investors who come and go
can hardly serve to give a lively appear-ance
to the irregularly laid out streets
and the coffin-like house. Yet the people
are wonderfully anxious, earnest, to im
prove their advantages—and will, in due
time.
Fredericksburg lies in a bcantiful val-ley.
From the eminences on either side
of the Rappahannock the eye is at once
charmed with perfect landscapes. At Ful
mouth, iit Miirye's Hill, from the cemetery
and from the heights where our batteries
were placed in the December fight, nature
has done more thun the soldier's hand to
make a visit worth the traveller's while
liut few, however, would have made
Fredericksburg an objective point in
Virginian ti'ip had not its bloody baptism
of December I3th, 1862, occurred,
puts one- in a sombre mood to mount the
slopes beyond the little town, and note
what sheer s icrifice of life was necessary
oven in the trial attack. Almost every
inhabitant of the town who was there
when the first advance was made, whom
chanced to meet, said that he took to
the woods, and I don't wonder at it.
They thought the capture of the town in-volved
its total destruction, as they could
not conceive how human beings could have
the courage to march up the slopes in the
I'ace of such butteries. They hardly knew
what prodigies of valor America's adopt-ed
sons could do. They had not hear dof
the 63d, 69th, and SSthNew York, nor of
the 28th Massachusetts, nor the 116th
Pennsylvania ; regiments composed of as
stern stuff as ever trod a battle field.
Marye's heights seemed to them invinci-ble
; they did not believe Burnside would
urge the mad slaughter of his men, but as
soon after the battle as they could get
newspapers they road hosts of such reports
as that of Gen Meagher, "Of 1200 men
whom I commanded in the attack, only
280 came out alive." And even to-day,
when they talk of the two memorable bat-tles
fought only a mile beyond their town,
they seem amazed at the personal daring
which finally broke the most advantageous
intrenchments in Virginia.
Starting from the little railway station
0:1 the Richmond line, and turning to the
left, a walk of a mile brought me to the
spot where the fighting first began. Tiiis,
pointed out by residents, differs somewhat
from the historian's dictum, but is quite as
likely to be correct. It is a level plateau,
now impressed everywhere with old graves
whence soldiers' bodies have been trans-ferred
to the new cemetery. Ascending
the hill directly in front, I entered a well
made road, which leads to the terraced
cemetery where 30,000 soldiers lie buried.
Here I turned and looked back, taking in
the whole valley with its various impor-tant
military positions, thus : Falmouth,
away in the distance ; the peaceful Rap-pahannock,
flowing silently through the
tortuous valley ; the Lacey plantation,
where our generals had their headquar-ters,
away Ijcyond on the other side the
river ; long lines of grass-grown'breast-works
on the steep bluff over there,
whence Burnside first began his bombard
ment, when he had.madeup his mind that
the Mississippi sharp-shooters meant to
hold Fredericksburg ; the relative points
on the river where ihe poiitoon bridges
were successfully laid under the enemy's
murderous fire ; then, glancing at either
side, the long line of fortifications behind
which Lee's army of 80,000 men was en-trenched,
behind the Rappahannock's
southern bluds, for miles above and below
the town. At the right from where I
stood arose Marye's Hill, steep and pic-turesque,
with the square, :mtique man-sion
crowning it, and the "stone wall"
which has become so famous a redoubt in
history, stretchiiig along its base. The
houses and trees all around it are riddled
with bullets ; and now and then a great
gnarled monarch of the valley m^y be
found with a huge cannon ball still im-bedded
in its centre. Who does not re-call
the history of the gallant deeds of
that day, when Jackson's and Longstreet's
corps, holding the right and lel't of the
great defensive line, raked with their
three hundred heavy guns the noble di-visions
of Franklin, Hooker and Sumner ;
when soldiers used their dead comrades
for breastworks, and pushed forward to
sure death with heroic smiles upon their
faces; when Burnside demonstrated so
strongly that he did not know the value of
human life ?
Marye'iS Hill is an excellent point of
observation, and commands a good por-tion
of the town. A soldier of the regu-lar
army, on duty with forty or fifty dis
gusted comrades, in the valley, support-ing
the provisional government, came UP
Hs 1 paced the breezy eminence, and told
the story of Sedgwick's charge in the May
fight of 1863, on this position, which the
rebels^ hod still more strongly fortified
than in December. It was an easy vic-tory,
he thought, but the first ap])roach,
in December, to the hill, was the most dar-ing
folly ever known. The stone wall
behind which the sharpshooters were in-tVenched
is only four feet high, but serv-ed
as a most efiectual shelter. One of the
spots thickest strewn with dead after the
December battle, is now occupied by the
so-called rebel cemetery, and had been
surrounded by a brick wall, but the flimsy
structure has been levelled by the wind.
It is most singular that the rebel dead
should not ref>ose in the national cemetery
on the slopes above. It is with absolute
pain that any candid lover of his country
must view the condition of the grounds in
which the rebels are laid to rest. Above,
the white head boards of even the "Un-known"
gleam in the sunlight, in the rest-ing
place the nation has prepared for them;
below, in a dull-colored plain, are hun-dreds
of graves with merely sticks stuck
at the head and foot of each, and in some
cases absolutely not dirt enough thrown
into them to conceal the rough wooden
coffins. Hundreds'of the dead were bur-ied
in gardens, about the city, immediate);
ly after the December battle, and these
graves, whether of rebel or Unionist, were
always respected and carefully kept sa-cred'until
orders came to remove the Un-ion
dead to the new cemetery. The reb-el
yard is a more unsightly place than any
non-civilized nation would give its dead,
and poverty has something to do with the
fact that those who have friends buried
there, do not better care for it. The sol-dier
who was with me leaped into one of
these rebel graves, and disclosed to me a
coffin lid, fast decaying from exposure.
Over these dead no roses blow, no violets
bloom : but the bitter perfume of the rank
weed smites the air, and no tender hand
has trained the grass to grow symmetri-cally
upon the mounds. But since the
dead on the hill above, and the dead in the
plain below are of one common country,
why shall they not be buried together ?
Among all the ex-confederates I met, I
could not find one who dissented to this
proposition. All called it appropriate,
just, and all half-hinted that there was no
other manner in which proper justice
could be done hosts of brave soldiers.
I have been in battle-stricken towns
before, but Fredericksburg is the most re-markable
one I have yet seen. The peo-ple
have an Italian rapacity for monopoli-zing
strangers, but they do not carry out
the parallel by asking them for small con-tributions.
Enter any public place, and
broach the subject of the great battles,
and you have touched the vital topic.
The majority of the towns-people still
move and think amid the frightful scenes
of seven years ago. Their normal facul-ties
are deadened to the present. The
boys employ their time digging up bullets,
and continue to find an unfailing store, al-though
the ground has been pretty
thoroughly dug over. There is a skull, or
a thigh bone, in almost every shop win-dow.
The church stetiples show curious
patchwork, which testifies that they were
not spared by the shot Every merchant
who was there in 1862 has some dismal
soldier mean to do with so much sweeten-ing
? Money has been dropped hilter-skil-ter
in the streets, by the inhabitants, in
their flight; and kitchen utensils and par
lor furniture strewed the fields for miles.
One old man, who has been in the town
twenty years, and now keeps a little res-taurant
on the very street corner round
which our trooj s, as they came up to the
charge, were (ompelled to appear, gave
me a very grapliic story o ' his troubles.
Just as fast as he could bar up his saloon
door, it would be knocked down by new-come
soldiers, who insisted on "something
to drink" before they went up to the bat-tle.
He watched them start out, and
said that in many cases they were not gone
ten minutes before they were brought back
maimed and crushed, to be laid on ghastly
doors, in the extemporized hospitals.
The sight at the principal church, after
the battle had been in progress an hour,
was horrible beyond description, and the
whole village echoed to the wailing of the
wounded. The old ferryman, who took
us across to the hills opposite Fredericks-burg,
gave a glowing picture of the la.y-ing
of ihe pontoon bridges, and alluded
especially to the fact that the guns of our
own batteries, too far off, killed many of
our soldiers as they advanced up the
slopes. Stonewall Jackson was his pet
hero, and In? r egaled us with anecdotes of
that queer but valiant general. He was
in the Wilderness when Jackson fell, and
confirmed the accepted story that he was
shot by his own men. How he knew I
could not make him tell; he only respond-ed
by leaning on the boat rail, and saying,
with mysterious information, "I was tharJ^
It was very hard to find any one at
Fredericksburg who would acknowledge-that
he was not in the battle, either of
December or May. The repulse of Burn-side's
was mentioned by almost every man
with whom I had any conversation. Old
people delighted to go over the ground,
and point out where such and such heaps
of federal dead had lain. One man told,
with much glee, how he spent all the night
after the battle in looking over a pile of
soldiers, and taking out of their pockets
the whisky bottles they had stolen from
him on the morning previous.
"I got back all but three pints," said he,
"and them helped swell the general cour-age."
Picket firing across the river at Fred-ericksburg,
say some historians, was in-dulged
in to a barbarous extent. Barks-dale's
Mississippi sharpshooters are ac-cused
of having taken the lives of our
soldiero on every occasion possible when
it was directly in opposition to the laws
of war. But the townspeople tell a differ-ent
story. They say that no pickets ever
fired upon each other save at the begin-ning
of the December battle. One old ne-gro
informed me tliat the above mention-ed
Mississippi marksmen were wont to
send invitations to our officers to cross the
river in the night, and, disguised in con-federate
clothes, attend the extemporized
balls which frequently occurred in the
town, and the invitations were accepted.
tale to tell. Those same Irishmen who ' When the breeze was right, the pickets
could fight so gallantly, those Americans would trade tobacco for newspapers by
who could face death without blenching, sending across little wooden boats with
behaved rather rudely to the towns-people. | paper sails, and the oflicers used to send
One old man told me, with evident delight, j billets doux to the ladies whom they had
how two men robbed his shop of its stock met at the balls. The sharpshooters didn't
of tobacco, and threatened to shoot him so grossly misuse their chances as they
when he remonstrated. "In less'n an might have done, for both Hooker and
hour, they was both back here on this
very floor, shot through and througii.
One ef'em begged my pardon, before ho
died, for what he stole—he did." An
old lady, who tells so complete and graphic
Franklin often appeared on the river bank,
near the federal pickets, excellent targets
for even the poorest marksman.
I am iacliiied to think that the section
of Virginia just above and below Frcder-a
story of the battle that 1 suspect she has ' icksburg will be filled up with northern
posted up on it since the terrible day, to ' men quicker than any other part of the
accommodate travelers, said that the South. Loyalty predominates, and loyalty
morning after Burnside attacked the rebel and water power are the oidy things a
lines, one could go over the battle-lield, ! Yankee tries to find when he goes that
and pick up anything he might wish for. I way to invest. In due time the town may
"Why," said she, "one man fell dead in-1 become of much importance. Its natural
side my door hei e, with a four-quart jug advantages are great; in history it will bo
of molasses in his hand." What did the known as the scene of a battle which for