When the long gathering clouds broke
in the storm at Sumter, and war was precipitated in
a rain of blood, Charles Carleton Coffin’s first
question was as to his duty. He was thirty-seven
years old, healthy and hearty, though not what men
would usually call robust. To him who had long
learned to look into the causes of things, who knew
well his country’s history, and who had been
educated to thinking and feeling by the long debate
on slavery, the Secession movement was nothing more
or less than a slaveholders’ conspiracy.
His conviction in 1861 was the same as that held by
him, when more than thirty years of reflection had
passed by, that the inaugurators of the Civil War of
1861-65 were guilty of a gigantic crime.
In 1861, with his manhood and his
talent, the question was not on which side duty lay,
or whether his relation to the question should be
active or passive, but just how he could most and best
give himself to the service of his country. Whether
with rifle or pen, he would do nothing less than his
best. He inquired first at the recruiting office
of the army. He was promptly informed that on
no account could he be accepted as an active soldier,
whether private or officer, on account of his lame
heel. Rejected here, he thought that some other
department of public service might be open to him
in which he could be more or less directly in touch
with the soldiers. While uncertain as to his
future course, he was, happily for his country, led
to consult his old friend, Senator Henry Wilson, who
immediately and strenuously advised him to give up
all idea of either the army, the hospital, the clerical,
or any other government service, but to enter at once
actively upon the work of a war correspondent.
“Your talent,” said Wilson, “is with the pen, and you can do
the best service by seeing what is going on and reporting it.”
The author of the “Rise and
Fall of the Slave Power in America” intimated
that truth, accurately told and published throughout
the North, was not only extremely valuable, but absolutely
necessary. It would not take long for a thoroughly
truthful reporter to make himself a national authority.
The sympathizers with disunion would be only too active
in spreading rumors to dishearten the upholders of
the Union, and there would be need for every honest
pen and voice.
After this conversation, Carleton
was at peace. He would find his work and ask
no other blessedness. But how to find it, and
to win his place as a recognized writer on the field
was a question. Within our generation, the world
has learned the value of the war correspondent.
He has won the spurs of the knighthood of civilization.
He wears in life the laurel wreath of fame. He
is respected in his calling. He goes forth as
an apostle of the printed truth. The resources
of wealthy corporations are behind him. His salary
is not princely, but it is ample. Though he may
lose limb or life, he is honored like the soldier,
and after his death, the monument rises to his memory.
In the great struggle between France and Germany,
between Russia and Turkey, between Japan and China,
and in the minor wars of European Powers against inferior
civilizations, in Asia and Africa, the “war
correspondent” has been a striking figure.
He is not the creation of our age; but our half of
this century, having greater need of him, has equipped
him the most liberally. He has his permanent place
of honor. If the newspaper is the Woden of our
century and civilization, the war correspondent and
the printer are the twin Ravens that sit upon his
shoulder. The one flies afar to gather the news,
the other sits at home to scatter the tidings.
In 1861 it was very different.
The idea of spending large sums of money, and maintaining
a staff-corps of correspondents who on land and sea
should follow our armies and fleets, and utilize horse,
rail car, and telegraph, boat, yacht, and steamer,
without regard to expense, had not seized upon newspaper
publishers in the Eastern States. Almost from
the first, the great New York journals organized bureaus
for the collection of news. With relays of stenographers,
telegraphers, and extra printers, they were ready
for all emergencies in the home office, besides liberally
endowing their agencies at Washington and cities near
the front, and equipping their correspondent, in camp
and on deck. In this, the New England publishers
were far behind those on Manhattan Island. Carleton,
when in Washington, wrote his first letters to the
Boston Journal and took the risk of their being
accepted for publication. He visited the camps,
forts, and places of storage of government material.
He described the preparations for war and life in
Washington with such spirit and graphic power, that
from June 15 to July 17, 1861, no fewer than twenty-one
of his letters were published in the Journal.
The great battle of Bull Run gave
him his opportunity. As an eye-witness, his opportunity
was one to be coveted. He wrote out so full,
so clear, and so interesting an account, that the proprietors
of the Journal engaged him as their regular
correspondent at a salary of twenty-five dollars a
week, with extra allowance for transportation.
His instructions were to “keep the Journal
at the front. Use all means for obtaining and
transmitting important information, regardless of
expense.” This, however, was not to be
interpreted to mean that he should have assistants
or be the head of a bureau or relay of men, as in
the case of the chief correspondent of at least three
of the New York newspapers. It meant that he was
to gather and transmit the news and be the whole bureau
and staff in himself. Nevertheless, during most
of the war, the Boston Journal was the only
New England paper that kept a regular correspondent
permanently not only in Washington, but at the seat
of war. Carleton in several signal instances
sent news of most important movements and victories
ahead of any other Northern correspondent. He
achieved a succession of what newspaper men call “beats.”
In those days, on account of the great expense, the
telegraph was used only for summaries of news, and
rarely, if ever, for long despatches or letters.
The ideas and practice of newspaper managers have greatly
enlarged since 1865. Entering upon his work at
the very beginning of the war, he was, we believe,
almost the only field correspondent who continued
steadily to the end, coming out of it with unbroken
health of body and mind.
How he managed to preserve his strength
and enthusiasm, and to excel where so many others
did well and nobly, is an open secret. In the
first place, he was a man of profoundest religious
faith in the Heavenly Father. Prayer was his
refreshment. He renewed his strength by waiting
upon God. His spirit never grew weary. In
the darkest days he was able to cheer and encourage
the desponding. He spoke continually, through
the Journal, to hundreds of thousands of readers,
in tones of cheer. Like a great lighthouse, with
its mighty lamps ever burning and its reflectors and
lenses kept clean and clear, Carleton, never discouraged,
terrified, or tired out, sent across the troubled
sea and through the deepest darkness the inspiriting
flash of the light of truth and the steady beam of
faith in the Right and its ultimate triumph.
He was a missionary of cheer among the soldiers in
camp and at the front. His reports of battles,
and his message of comfort in times of inaction, wilted
the hopes of the traitors, copperheads, cowards, and
“nightshades” at home, while they put new
blood in the veins of the hopeful.
Carleton was always welcome among
the commanders and at headquarters. This was
because of his frankness as well as his ability and
his genial bonhomie and social qualities. He
did not consider himself a critic of generals.
He simply described. He took care to tell what
he saw, or knew on good authority to be true.
He did probe rumors. From the very first he became
a higher critic of assertions and even of documents.
He quickly learned the value of camp reports and items
of news. By and by his skill became the envy
of many of less experienced readers of human nature,
and judges of talk and despatches. While shirking
no hard work in the saddle, on foot, on the rail, or
in the boat, he found by experience that by keeping
near headquarters he was the better enabled to know
the motions of the army as a whole, to divine the
plans of the commanding general, and thus test the
value of flying rumors. He had a genius for interpreting
signs of movement, whether in the loading of a barge,
the riding of an orderly, or the nod of a general’s
head. His previous training as an engineer and
surveyor enabled him to foresee the strategic value
of a position and to know the general course of a
campaign in a particular district of country.
With this power of practical foresight, he was often
better able even than some of the generals to foresee
and appraise results. This topographical knowledge
also gave him that power of wonderful clearness in
description which is the first and best quality necessary
to the narrator of a series of complex movements.
A battle fought in the open, like that at Gettysburg,
or one of those which took place during the previous
campaigns, on a plain, along the river, and in the
Peninsula, is comparatively easy to describe, especially
when viewed from an eminence. These battles were
like those in ordinary European history; but after
Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac, a reversion
to something like the American colonial methods in
the forest took place. The heaviest fighting
was in the woods, behind entrenchments, or in regions
where but little of the general scheme, and few of
the operations, could be seen at once. In either
case, however, as will be seen by reading over the
thousand or so letters in Carleton’s correspondence,
his power of making a modern battle easily understood
is, if not unique, at least very remarkable. With
his letters often went diagrams which greatly aided
his readers.
Carleton’s personal courage
was always equal to that of the bravest. Too
sincerely appreciative of the gift of life from his
Creator, he never needlessly, especially after his
first eagerness for experience had been satiated,
exposed himself, as the Dutch used to say, with “full-hardiness,”
or as we, corrupting the word, say, with “foolhardiness.”
He got out of the line of shells and bullets where
there was no call for his presence, and when the only
justification for remaining would be to gratify idle
curiosity. Yet, when duty called, when there
was need to know both the facts, and the truth to
be deduced from the facts, whistling bullets or screeching
shells never sufficed to drive him away. His
coolness with pen and pencil, amid the dropping fire
of the enemy, made heroes of many a soldier whose
nerves were not as strong as was the instinct of his
legs to run. The lady librarian of Dover, N.
H., thus writes:
“An old soldier whom I was once
showing through the library stopped short in front
of Coffin’s books and looked at them with much
interest. He said that at his first battle, I
think it was Fredericksburg, but of this I am not
sure, he was scared almost to death.
He was a mere boy, and when his regiment was ordered
to the front and the shot was lively around him, he
would have run away if he had dared. But a little
distance off, he saw a man standing under the lee
of a tree and writing away as coolly as if he were
standing at a desk. The soldier asked who he
was, and was told it was Carleton, of the Journal.
‘There he stood,’ said the man, ’perfectly
unconcerned, and I felt easier every time I looked
at him. Finally he finished and went off to another
place. But that was his reputation among the men
all through the war, perfectly cool, and
always at the front.’”
Carleton was able to withstand four
years of mental strain and physical exposure because
he knew and put in practice the right laws of life.
His temperance in eating and drinking was habitual.
Often dependent with the private soldier, while on
the march and in camp, on raw pork and hardtack; helped
out in emergencies with food and victuals, by the
quartermaster or his assistants; not infrequently
reaching the verge of starvation, he did not, when
reaching city or home, play the gourmand. He
drank no intoxicating liquor, always politely waving
aside the social glass. He was true to his principles
of total abstinence which had been formed in boyhood.
It would have been easy for him to become intemperate,
since in early boyhood he acquired a fondness for
liquors, through being allowed to drink what might
remain in the glass after his sick mother had partaken
of her tonic. He demonstrated that man has no
necessity for alcoholic drinks, however much he may
enjoy them.
Only on one occasion was he known
to taste strong liquor. In the Wilderness, when
in a company of officers on horseback, the bloodcurdling
Confederate yells were heard but a short distance off,
and it seemed as though our line had been broken and
the day was lost for the Union army. At that
dark moment, one of the officers on General Meade’s
staff produced a flask of brandy, and remarking with
inherited English prejudice that he would
fortify his nerves with “Dutch courage,”
to tide over the emergency, he quaffed, and then handed
the refreshment to his companion. In the momentary
and infectious need for stimulant of some sort, Mr.
Coffin took a sip and handed it on. Though himself
having no need of and very rarely making use of spirits,
even medicinally, he was yet kindly charitable towards
his weaker brethren. It is too sadly true that
many of the military officers, who yielded to the
temptation of temporarily bracing their nerves at
critical moments, became slaves to the bottle, and
afterwards confirmed drunkards. Carleton made
no use of tobacco in any form.
Carleton’s wonderful prescience
of coming events, and his decisions rightly made as
to his own whereabouts in crises, enabled him to concentrate
without wasting his powers. He then gave himself
to his work with all ardor, and without sparing brain
or muscle, risking limb and life at Bull Run, on the
Mississippi, at Fort Donelson, at Antietam and Gettysburg,
in the Wilderness, at Savannah, and in Richmond.
His powers in toil were prodigious. He could turn
off an immense amount of work, and keep it up.
When the lull followed the agony, he went home to
rest and recruit, spending the time with his wife
and friends, everywhere diffusing the sunshine of hope
and faith. When rested and refreshed, he hied
again to the front and the conflict. The careers
of most army correspondents in the field were short.
Carleton’s race was long. His was the promise
of the prophet’s glorious burden in Isaiah x-31.
It was between his thirty-eighth and
forty-second year, when in the high tide of his manly
strength, that Carleton pursued the profession of
letters amid the din of arms. His pictures show
him a handsome man, with broad, open forehead and
sunny complexion, standing nearly six feet high, his
feet cased in the broad and comfortable boots which
he always wore. Over his ordinary suit of clothing
was a long and comfortable overcoat with a cape, around
which was a belt, to which hung a spy-glass.
Later in the war he bought a fine binocular marine
glass. He gave the old “historic spy-glass”
to his nephew Edmund, from under whose head it was
stolen by some camp thief. In his numerous and
capacious pockets, besides a watch and a pocket compass,
was a store of note-books, in which he was accustomed
to jot his rapid, lightning-like notes, which meant
“reading without tears” for him, but woe
and sorrow to those who had to knit their brows in
trying to decipher his “crow-tracks.”
During the first part of the war he bought horses
as often as he needed them, and these were not always
of the first quality as to flesh or character.
He usually found it difficult to recover his beast
after having been away home. In the later campaigns
he possessed finer animals for longer spaces of time,
taking more pains, and spending more money to recover
them on his return from absences North.
Nevertheless, in order to beat other
correspondents, to be at the front, in the right moment,
in order to satisfy the need for news, he counted
neither the life nor the ownership of his horse as
worth a moment’s consideration. In comparison
with the idea of stilling the public anxiety, and
giving the news of victory, he acted upon the principle
of his Master, “Ye are of more value
than many sparrows.” One man, using plain English, says, “Uncle Carleton got the
news, goodness knows how, but he got it always and truly. He was the cheekiest
man on earth for the sake of the Journal, and the people of New England. He used
to ask for and give news even to the commander-in-chief. Often the staff
officers would be amazed at the cheek of Carleton in suggesting what should be
done. His bump of locality and topography was well developed, and he read the
face of the country as by intuition. He would talk to the commander as no
civilian could or would, but Meade usually took it pleasantly, and Grant always
welcomed it, and seemed glad to get it. I have seen him (Grant) in long
conversations with Mr. Coffin, when no others were near.”