USA > Maine > First Maine bugle, 1893 (history of 1st Maine Cavalry) > Part 7
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sion the contest would be carried on north of the Potomac and between the two great political parties in the free states, but they had been deceived, and deceived by such characters as the subject of this sketch, who were known in the north as " doughfaces," and who, during the war degenerated into bi- pedal reptiles and were called " copperheads," whose every political act, intended to weaken the armies of the Union, tended to prolong the war and make more certain and com- plete the destruction of the confederate armies and the mili- tary resources of the seceding States. Like our ancient mother they felt that they had been beguiled by the same creature in another form. Hence his isolation and their contempt for such a perfidious creature.
Pen Pictures of Prominent Confederates.
Comrade Albert E. Sholes, formerly of the Fourth Rhode Island Infantry, but who since the war has resided for the most part in the South, where he has served as Commander of the Department of Georgia, Grand Army of the Republic, re- cently read a paper before Tower Post at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, entitled. "Some Experiences of a Union Soldier in the South Since the War." From this paper, which was a most excellent one, the following sketches of prominent con- federates are taken, and they will be found wonderfully interest- ing :
It was in the fall of 1875 that I became acquainted with the chief of the confederacy, Jefferson Davis. In 1869 I had married a lady who was an invalid, and in a few months I was convinced that her life would be very short if I endeavored to remain in the North. I therefore decided to go to Louisville, Ky., where we made our home for six years. In 1875 I first went to Memphis and there formed an association with the publishing house of Boyle & Chapman, under the firm name
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of Boyle, Chapman & Co. It was only after I had been there some days that I learned that a silent partner of the firm, who was in Europe then in the interest of direct communication be- tween that country and the Mississippi Valley, and shortly ex- pected home, was the Hon. Jefferson Davis. A few weeks later I met at the store one morning a thin, gray-haired and bearded, hollow-checked gentleman, somewhat stoop-shoul- dered, plainly dressed in black, who took my hand with a pleasing smile and a courtly bow as I was introduced to " Mr. Davis." Our desks were side by side, and it became our cus- tom, after the morning mail was opened and the morning news scanned, to whirl our chairs for a pleasant half hour chat. He told me of the people he had met in Washington during his Congressional days and while Secretary of War, spoke in the high- est terms of Senator Anthony of my State, discoursed charm- ingly of his experiences in Russia, of his political campaign in his native State, and of his service in Mexico, but never, during all those months when we met every day, did he ever in any manner refer to the four years of his life as President of the confederacy, if I except the occasion when he introduced to me his little daughter, Winnie, then a child of eleven, and said, "She came to us while we lived in Richmond." He must have been a disappointed and sadly embittered man. I thought then, and have often thought since, that Winnie was all that came to him while he lived in Richmond, of which he could be proud. Life had been bright with promise for him until he had attained his prime. His people had heaped honors upon him, but from the hour when he had been induced to turn against the flag under which he had fought to assume the leadership in the effort to dismember the nation, his career had been downward. Now, in his old age he was made a scapegoat for all the mistakes and errors of the confederacy by the masses of his own people, was execrated by the people of the North, and yet, outwardly, he was genial, affable, agreeable, an up- right citizen, and a most companionable gentleman.
At my hotel I had observed a gentleman particularly who had a most pleasing face and kindly manner. He was tall and
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somewhat spare, with nearly white hair and beard, but with a very clear, white complexion, and the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen save those of a child. He sat beside me ot the table, chatted sociably with those who were seated with us, and occasionally addressed some remark to me, and I wondered who he might be, and yet had no convenient opportunity of satisfy- ing my curiosity. Finally one day we passed from the dining room almost together, and upon getting outside he turned and said, "Seems like everybody thinks we know each other, and I reckon we'd better get acquainted ; my name's Gineral .For- rest." I could scarcely believe my ears, and even upon assur- ing myself that I had heard aright, I still could not realize but that there must be two General Forrests. This handsome, gentle-eyed man surely could not be he of whom I had read as "the friend of Fort Pillow !" And yet it was, and an intimate association of many months, during which I read his life as written by his adjutant general, a few pages cach day, discuss- ing my readings with him at night, led me to admire and respect the man whom I should naturally have hated. Time softens animosities, and I can now tell you of this man whom I consider the most wonderful character developed upon the southern side during the war. Born of comparatively poor parents, at cleven years of age his father died, leaving an invalid mother and two smaller brothers, of whom he at once became the main- stay and support, working from early morn till late at night upon the little plantation which was his home. No time for study or for education for himself, although he would not per- mit his brothers to grow up in ignorance, and he worked the harder that they might receive a fair education. Arrived at man's estate an opportunity opened for him in the city of Mem- phis, to engage in perhaps the only mercantile business for which an illiterate man could be fitted, and about the year 1850 he established a slave market there. Not long thereafter he married the wife whom in 1876 I knew as a good, sweet, loving woman, and she taught her husband to read and to sign his name. The war came, and Bedford Forrest joined as a private a company of cavalry recruited in Memphis, and upon the
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muster into the service of the confederacy he was elected to the captaincy. By sheer force of natural military ability, by marvellous influence over men, by wonderful marches, by re- markable strategic talent, this rough, uncouth, uneducated man rose from the position of private to the rank of lieutenant gen- eral of the confederate army. His military history, whether written by friend or foe, reads like a romance. His capture of Col. Streight and his forces on his celebrated raid was as fine a bit of strategy as was exhibited during the war. Streight had something like thirty-five hundred men, if I mistake not, when he started on his trip through Northern Mississippi and Ala- bama, a very much larger force than Forrest was able to gather to chase him, and as day after day and night after night the chase was kept up, horses and men dropped by the wayside, others were sent to the rear with prisoners, until finally they came in sight of and opened fire upon Streight's main body. Forrest, after a few shots, sent a messenger across the river to Streight, demanding an unconditional surrender. His force was scattered along the road for miles, only a few hundred having kept up, but these few hundred, with two pieces of artillery, he kept marching around a bill into a pass behind a second hill, and then back behind the first, and around again in full view of Streight, until he, believing that he was in the power of an overwhelming force, unconditionally surrendered to a body hardly large enough to form a decent guard about his troops.
At the battle of Fort Pillow his youngest and pet brother was killed beside him, and I have been told by those who were with him there that for a time he was a very demon let loose. I have seen the tears roll down the general's cheeks in later years as he told me of that brother, and how he loved him. May not we after all these years, draw the mantle of charity a little, and believe that on account of this terrible grief he for a time lost control of himself and his men, and that he was not in full measure responsible for all the dreadful occurrences of that dreadful day. When I met him he had but recently be- come deeply impressed upon the subject of religion, and had finally made application for admission to the Cumberland
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Presbyterian Church, of which Mrs. Forrest was a member. Coming home very angry one day, after a sharp altercation with a prominent negro politician, whom he had reprimanded for insulting a very old and honored citizen, he met me, and after telling me of the occurrence, he said, "I want to be a Christian, and I am trying just as hard as I know how, to be one, but when I seen that no-account nigger pitching into that old man, I thought cussing was worth mor'n praying, and I cussed him just as good as I could a' done it twenty years ago. I reckon," he added, "the good Lord don't expect you to be good all the time, till he gets ye to heaven with him." The general crossed the river the following year, and has been judged ere this for the deeds done in the body, whether they were good, or whether they were evil.
Of Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, whom I met and knew at the same time, my principal remembrance is of a garrulous. little old gentleman, fond of narrating his exploits, both what he had done, and what he might have done. He still held a sort of Sewardian idea that the war might have been closed in ninety days, only it would have closed with the recognition of the confederacy, if Jefferson Davis had but followed his advice, if he had been given the command to which he was entitled, and if his suggestions had been followed. He could point out with unerring accuracy all the mistakes of Davis, Beauregard, Johnson, Lee, and every other officer of rank, and he would have avoided them all had he been in their place.
Nore .- The following, taken from Appleton's Encyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 11, p. 506. is of interest :
Some of Gen. Forrest's official documents are very amusing for their peculiar or- thography and phraseology. In his dispatch announcing the fall of Fort Pillow, the original of which is still preserved, he wrote : " We busted the fort at ninerelock and scatered the niggers. The men is still a cillanem in the woods."
Accounting for prisoners he wrote : "Them as was cotch with spoons and breast- pins andt sich was cilld and the rest of the lot was payrold and toll to git." -- Ev.
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Up the Shenandoah Valley AND ON TO APPOMATTOX. (Concluded.) BY GEN. J. P. CILLEY.
Saturday, Sept. 24, I was off on the Baltimore & Ohio Rail- road for Harper's Ferry as the five companies were off for the same place in April, 1861, only then we marched whereas I now went by rail over the very railroad on which I com- manded a train of cars in that same month of '61. Major Brown " was there" as in that first march, and with his usual power of making friends-he was taken a willing prisoner by . Major McDonald, of the Confederate service. Charles D. Jones of our regiment was also on the train. but unfortunately in a section that started later. The cars were crowded and in the rush for seats I found myself by good fortune by the side of an attractive lady and we were seated together.
Interested by a pleasing touch of Virginia accent we became acquainted by means of a copy of the BUGLE and I found my companion was the wife of George Clinton Hough, a well- known architect of Washington, that they had enjoyed a wed- ding trip to Maine this very summer, that she was a native of Louden Co., Va., that both her father and brother, Julius and Daniel Harper, had seen service in the Union Army as members of Means Volunteers of Virginia. She gave me many interesting accounts of the peculiar service of those volunteers, of the various fords of the Potomac they used to cross and the mountains on which they hid in guiding men back and forth and in visiting their own families, told me of the Confederate, Col. E. V. White, who lived near her father's residence-a man of much property, talented and a hard shell Baptist, who preached for pleasure and profit to others only. A man of but little education, who in one of
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huis official reports of an engagement said : "1 met the enemy and imputed them."
She left the car just above the Point of Rocks for her father's home in Virginia, and as I assisted in carrying her bundles from the cars she adroitly thanked me for the pleas- ant manner in which I had " chaperoned " her.
Forward through Weavertown and Sandy Hook to Harper's Ferry and by Martinsburg and Winchester to Middletown, all familiar places to the five companies who early campaigned in the valley. At Middletown I had an hour or more of conversation with John W. Willey, who as gunner in Cut- shaw's Battery, May 24, 1862, fired the shell that knocked a year or so out of my army life and forced me thereafter to draw sabre with the assistance of my left arm.
He was wounded at Winchester the next day in his head but kept with his battery doing no duty till he recovered. His battery was also known as Carpenter's Battery. At Gettys- burg he supported Picket's charge by being stationed near the extreme left of the rebel line and firing shot and shell towards the cemetery and Culp's Hill, was at the Bloody Angle at Spottsylvania, accompanied Gordon at the battle of Cedar Creek with instructions to take charge of the captured artil- lery and work it as he could, with any of the men he could find at hand or use. That the captured artillery was abundant and he could find plenty of men to assist him, but from every piece captured, the Yankees had carried away the rammers and lanyards and those cannon could not be used till their own artillery had crossed and come forward with rammers and lanyards to supply the lack.
Willey was an expert gunner and was frequently detailed with his gun to perform artillery sharp shooting. He remained in active service till the battle of Five Forks, April 1. 1865, when the men and horses of his battery fell before the bul- lets of Custer's men and there was nothing left for him to do except run. He saw a way out between two converging lines of our forces closing in upon them. He was summoned by a host of voices to surrender, but reasoned that no one
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would dare to fire at him because such one would fire towards his own men. Willey said he kept on going till he reached Lynchburg. when he learned Lee had surrendered and he came home to Middletown, where he has since been diligent- ly employed in raising a family of five boys and four girls.
By this time my horse was ready and I rode four miles out to Rockville and was greeted by Mrs. John W. Wright, who took care of me during the long weary months I lay wounded at her house in Middletown. The next day with a good horse and buggy and with her son-in-law, Smith Cooley, a member of the Twelfth Virginia Cavalry. I rode over the battle ground of Cedar Creek. Cooley was detailed as the special guide for Gen. Gordon in the day of the attack and was with him the entire day and thus had good opportunity to observe the fight. He took me near the ford where Gor- don crossed in the sheltering fog of Oct. 19, 1864, and fell upon the Eighth Corp in their tents shouting. " Another Union Victory."
My acquaintance with Gen. Stephen Thomas, of the Eightli Vermont and with so many officers of the Tenth Maine and the fact that I possessed the histories of both these gallant regiments, made the examination of their positions the most interesting part of the field. ] then returned to the village by the brick Methodist church and by the spot where "the sub- sequent proceedings of May 24. 1862, interested me no more " at least for that day, thence to where the dirt road from Front Royal entered the town, and down the road we advanced to find Jackson's men that memorable morning and on which we fell back again to the pike and hecatomb between its stone walls, halting in the field whence Willey, with his guns of Cutshaw's Battery caused mne to take a rest and become a res- ident of Middletown for nearly three months. It was reliving a life separated from my subsequent life by an unconscious gap of time that I have never been able to fill. In truth I never knew when I was hit or any circumstances of the occa- sion till some two days after the fact. It was rare good for- tune to have a guide, the courier, who was guide to Gordon and near him all the day of Oct. 19, '64.
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Cooley told me that near noon Early came to Gordon and ordered him to stop the pursuit, that Gordon replied that the only safe way was to continue to press the enemy or to fall , back and save captured artillery and stores. Cooley was con- vinced that had either of these suggestions been adopted the results of the day would have been different.
Cooley served largely as a scout and gave me many interest- ing accounts of his peculiar service; how at one time he got so entangled within the Union lines, that he dare not move in the darkness and stood by his horse all night in open field waiting for dawn to show him a way out; that on another occa- sion he was surprised while at the house of a friend by two union cavalry men. At first he proposed to fight it out with his pistol but the lady of the house beseeched him not to fire as it would cause the burning of her house and probably be use- less, that the two soldiers demanded his surrender and after some prolonged talk from opposite sides of the room between the Yanks and Johnnie, the latter agreed to deliver his two pistols into the hands of the lady of the house and surrender. if they would put up their pistols. This was done but Cooley managed in going out of the house to take one of the pistols from the lap of the lady and put it into his boot leg. The' three passed out of the house, mounted, and the captured Johnnie was escorted by the two Yanks toward the union lines. As they proceeded Cooley noticed the butt of a pistol in the boot leg of one of his escorts, and watching his chance seized it and with his other hand drew the pistol from his own boot leg all cocked.
He exclaimed, "throw up your hands. I have one of your pistols and at the least motion of the other to draw I shall fire. Now throw all your weapons to the ground, and about face and precede me to my own lines." He told me of his efforts in scouting during the campaign of Lee's surrender, that our cav- alry forces seemed to be on all sides of Lee and changed their position so often as to utterly confuse him in obtaining any in- formation of our position except that we were marching faster than Lee. That the morning of April 9th, 1865, he and another
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comrade were trying to cook something, when a shot from : cannon killed his companion. Appalled by such a shot from the Lynchburg road, on which they must advance, he conclude I he had enough of war and mounted and struck out for his home near Middletown and made such good progress that h: kept ahead of the news of Lee's surrender for several days.
The next day I was on my way up the valley by the north branch of the Shenandoah, I rode on the platform from Cedar Creek through Stausburg to beyond Woodstock and had an ex- cellent view of Fisher's Hill. We passed parallel and near the pike as we neared Woodstock and I fancied I could pick out our camping ground at Tom's Brook and the place where we halted and looked into Woodstock and where the charge of a portion of Co. B. was terminated by the fall of Lieut. Cutler's horse. In the same seat with me was J. D. Road of the Sev- enteenth Battery Indiana Light Artillery of Peru, Ind., who was No. I or rammer on his piece. At Cedar Creek Battle when the men and horses of his battery were so reduced that it could not be removed, he drove a priming wire in his gun with a stone and with a pair of horses, remaining, overturned two caissons and then hitched onto two limber chests joined together and by a left about wheel upset both in hopes of ex- ploding them. The confederates were then within twenty feet and his work ceased by a wound through his left lung. At a station near Staunton, I heard some young, sharp, merry voices shouting :
Hulla be lu, genac, genac, Hulla be lu, genac, genac, Hoora, Hoora, Rae Rae. 5 .-- M .- A. and asking the gentleman ahead of me the meaning of the yell, [ found I was speaking to Prof. A. M. Southen of Stanton Male Academy and that the yell was from a party of the students of that Academy en route for the commencing term.
In the same seat with me part of the way was C. K. Ober, Sec. of the National Committee, Y. M. C. A., who knew my son by name. He introduced me to H. O. Williams, State Secre- . tary of the Y. M. C. A., of Virginia. They were going to a
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meeting at Lexington and gave me a very interesting account of their work in the state. On the train also was B. B. Wilbur of Richard Borden Post, G. A. R., Fall River, Mass. And now we were at Lexington, noted for its monuments to Jackson and other confederate officers and its schools and colleges and the Southern end of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. I was just in season to catch the train on the Chesapeake and Ohio, and by a zig zag course without delay of trains reached the Natural Bridge Station, whence high on top a tally ho coach, driven by a col- ored George Washington Lewis, I ascended the mountainous road to the natural wonder of the world.
I passed the entrance to the grounds on the invitation given by the owner, Capt. Parsons of the First Vermont Cavalry, to his cavalry comrades. Alone I took the winding path down the hillside, blocked in by boulder and forest, I heard the sound of merry voices approaching me, all at once I came upon No. one, two and three of my set of fours, who had campaigned together from Penobscot Bay to Pennsylvania Avenue --- Dr. Wheeler and wife and Rev. Mr. Lock. Glad cheers shook the leaves and branches around us. Mrs. Wheeler said they had been on and on to the extreme end and to the "Maiden's Veil," and that it was "perfectly gorgeous."
I went on alone feeling perfectly gorgeous at our happy meeting and with wonder viewed the high gorge spanned by nature's hand in a manner more impressive and beautiful than any work of art.
I stood and adored it long, felt a strange desired to climb the path that Washington ascended and high overhead carved his name and the ascent of Henry Piper, who could not return but kept on till he reached the top, but realized sadly that my climbing days had ceased at Middletown in 1862. I went on to the end of the fascinating path, slowly as returning parties one after the other passed me, by the cave, by the little island and fountain, by the hidden river which I dimly saw but heard and felt below me, on and on through the gathering shades of evening till I reached the point where the Maiden's Veil said modestly-no further, and amid the deepening shades of night I
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retraced my steps. Trees and banks, heights and rushing water, all made their effects more deeply penetrating by the gathering darkness, a dog belated or lost from his party joined me, run- ning ahead constantly but as persistently returning for com- panionship and company. The cave which before looked meagre and disappointed me, now viewed from the opposite side in the gloom, appeared dark and mysterious. Finally the bridge joined again the heavens. above me, I could discern the huge dark sides frown from the shades of night around me. High, massive and unaccounted for, it symbolized a god-like passage above the deep narrow, tortuous stream of life, symbol- ically burrowing at my feet.
I must leave at 7 A. M., was up at four and at the earliest rays of daylight again walked with admiration the paths by the Veteran Arbor Vitae tree, having a circumference of eighteen fect and an age estimated at fifteen hundred years, and on to the ravine below. I could not awake the dream of the night before, but carried away a clear outline of Nature's wondrous work. I then went to the top and crept as near as I dared to , the edge of the grove near the bridge. The sense of insecurity and fear added to distances, and I looked down and down as though my sight could never reach the bottom. I then went out of the grounds and on to the top of the bridge and at Pulpit Rock from where you can look straight down, and from whose heights one fair maiden fell and a shapeless form was born from the stream below, but a grasp of the solid rails round the stony platform gave a sense of security that enabled you to lean over and look straight down calmly and figure the distance mathematically. Instead of fear a feeling of triumph and exultation permeated you-man can conquer chasms --
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