Read CHAPTER IX - “HO, FOR THE GUNBOATS, HO!” of Charles Carleton Coffin, War Correspondent, free online book, by William Elliot Griffis, on ReadCentral.com.

His first letter from the Army of the West, he dated, Cincinnati, December 28, 1861. Instead of a comparatively circumscribed Utica (on the Potomac), to confine his powers, our modern Ulysses had a line a thousand miles long, and a territory larger than several New Englands to look over. His first work, therefore, was to invite his readers to a panorama of Kentucky and the Mississippi Valley. Thus far in the war there had been no masterly moves, but, on the contrary, masterly inactivity. With such splendid chances for heroes, who would improve them? Neither Wolfe nor Washington had played Micawber, but had created opportunities. Carleton wrote, “Now is the time for the highest order of military genius.... We wait for him who shall improve the propitious hours.” So in waiting went out the gloomy year of 1861. At Louisville, Ky., Carleton made the acquaintance in detail of General Buell’s army. The commander, Don Carlos Buell, did not enjoy the presence of correspondents, and those from Cincinnati and New York papers had been expelled from the camp; nor was Carleton’s letter from the Secretary of War, asking that “facilities consistent with public interests” be granted him, of any avail. He wrote on New Year’s day, “No more troops are needed here, or on the Potomac at present; what is wanted is activity, activity, activity.”

Following Horace Greeley’s advice, Carleton went West. On January 4th, having surveyed the land and people, he sent home two letters, then moved on to Rolla, in the heart of Missouri, and, having got out of St. Louis with his passes, he found himself, January 11th, at Cairo. There the New England men were warm in their welcome of the sole representative of the press of the Eastern States, though St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York journals were also represented. Among these were A. D. Richardson, of the New York Tribune, and Whitelaw Reid, of the Cincinnati Gazette. Unlike General Don Carlos Buell, General U. S. Grant, in command at Cairo, had no horror of newspaper correspondents, and granted them all reasonable facilities. For the first time Carleton looked upon the gunboats, “three being of the coal-transport pattern, and five of the turtle style,” with sides sloping inward, both above and below the deck. A shot from the enemy would be likely either to fly up in the air or “go into the realms of the catfish.” As to the army, Carleton noticed that, as compared with the Army of the Potomac, discipline was much more severe in the East, while real democracy was much more general in the West. Men seemed less proud of their shoulder-straps. The rules of military etiquette were barely observed.

“There is but very little of the soldier about these Western troops. They are armed citizens, brave, active, energetic, with a fine physique, acquainted with hardships, reared to rough life ... but it is by no means certain that they will not be quite as effective in the field. The troops here are a splendid set of men, all of them young.... There is more bone and muscle here, but less culture ... I have heard far less profanity here than on the Potomac, among officers and men.” He believed there were fewer profane words used and less whiskey drunk than among the troops in the East. There was not as much attention paid to neatness and camp hygiene.

It was at Cairo that Carleton made the personal acquaintance, which he retained until their death, of General Ulysses S. Grant and Commodore Foote. The latter had already made a superb reputation as a naval officer in Africa and China. Before Foote was able to equip and start his fleet, or Grant could move his army southward, on what proved to be their resistless march, Carleton made journeys into Kentucky, wrote letters from Cincinnati and Chicago, and arrived back in time to join General Grant’s column. He went down the river, seeing the victorious battle and siege operations. First from Cairo, and then from Fort Donelson, he penned brilliant and accurate accounts of the capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, which opened the Southern Confederacy to the advance of the Union army. While Grant beat the rebels, Carleton beat his fellow correspondents, even though he had first to spend many hours among the wounded. The newspaper men from New York had poked not a little fun at the “Boston man,” chaffing him because they thought the New England newspapers “slow” and “out of date in methods.” They fully expected that Carleton’s despatches would be far behind theirs in point of time as well as in general value. Their boasting was sadly premature. Carleton beat them all, and their humiliation was great.

The matter was in this wise. He had hoped by taking the first boat from Fort Donelson to Cairo to find time to write out an account of the siege and surrender of the great fortresses; but during his travel of one hundred and eighty miles on the river, the steamer had in its cabin and staterooms two hundred maimed soldiers and officers with their wounds undressed. Instead of occupation with ink-bottle, pen, and paper, Carleton found himself giving water to the wounded, and holding the light for surgeons and nurses. Then, knowing that no other correspondent had the exact and copious information possessed by himself, he took the cars, writing his letters on the route from Cairo to Chicago, where he mailed them.

No doubt at this time, while Carleton was writing so brilliantly to a quarter of a million readers, many of them envied him his opportunities. Distance lent enchantment to the view. “But let me say,” wrote Carleton, “if they were once brought into close contact with all the dreadful realities of war, if they were obliged to stand the chances of getting their heads knocked off, or blown to atoms by an unexpected shell, or bored through with a minie ball, to stand their chances of being captured by the enemy, to live on bread and water, and little of it, as all of the correspondents have been obliged to do the past week, to sleep on the ground, or on a sack of corn, or in a barn, with the wind blowing a gale, and the snow whirling in drifts, and the thermometer shrunk to zero, and then, after the battle is over and the field won, to walk among the dying and the dead, to behold all the ghastly sights of trunkless heads and headless trunks, to see the human form mutilated, disfigured, torn, and mangled by shot and shell, to step in pools of blood, to hear all around sighs, groans, imprecations, and prayers from dying men, they would be content to let others become historians of the war. But this is not all; a correspondent must keep ever in view the thousands that are looking at the journal he represents, who expect his account at the earliest possible moment. If he is behindhand, his occupation is gone. His account must be first, or among the first, or it is nothing. Day and night he must be on the alert, improving every opportunity and turning it to account. If he loses a steamboat trip, or a train of cars, or a mail, it is all up with him. He might as well put his pencil in his pocket and go home.”

Carleton had a hearty laugh over a letter from a friend who advised him “to take more time and rewrite his letters,” adding that it would be for his benefit. To Carleton, who often wrote amid the smoke of battle or on deck amid bursting shells, or while flying over the prairies at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, in order, first of all, to be ahead of his rivals, this seemed a joke. In after-years of calm and leisure, when writing his books, he painted word pictures and finished his chapters, giving them a rhetorical gloss impossible when writing in haste against the pressure of rushing time. Although Boston was two hundred miles farther from Cairo than New York, yet all New England had read Carleton’s account in the Journal before any correspondent’s letters from Fort Donelson or Henry appeared in the newspapers of Manhattan.

After the fall of Columbus, the next point to which army and navy were to give attention was the famous Island Number Ten. Here the Confederates were concentrating all that were available in men and cannon. Thousands of negroes were at work upon the trenches, and it was believed that the fight would be most desperate. After long waiting for his armament and the training of his men, Commodore Foote was ready. Carleton wrote at Cairo, March 10, 1862, in the exhilaration of high hopes:

“Like the waves of the Atlantic is the tide of events. How they sweep! Henry, Donelson, Bowling Green, Nashville, Roanoke, Columbus, Hampton Roads, Manassas, Cedar Creek, wave upon wave, dashing at the foundation of a house built upon the sand.

... The gigantic structure is tottering. A few more days like that of the immediate past, and the Confederacy will have a name and a place only in history. And what a history it will be! A most stupendous crime. A conspiracy unparalleled, crushed out by a free people, and the best government of all times saved to the world! How it sends one’s blood through his veins to think of it! Who would not live in such an age as this? Before this reaches you, the telegraph, I hope, will have informed you that the Mississippi is open to New Orleans.”

So thought Carleton then. Who at that time was wiser than he?

Island Number Ten, so named quite early in history, by the pilots descending the river, was a place but little known in the East. To the writer it was one of interest, because here had lived for a year or so a beloved sister whose letters from the plantation and home at which she was a guest were not only frequent, but full of the fun and keen interest about things as seen on a slave plantation by a bright young girl of twenty from Philadelphia. Well do I remember the handsome planter of commanding form and winning manners who had made my sister’s stay in the family of the Merriwethers so pleasant, and who at our home in Philadelphia told of his life on the Mississippi. This was but two or three years before the breaking out of the war. This same plantation on Island Number Ten was afterwards sown thickly with the seed of war, shot, and shell. In front of it took place the great naval battle, which Carleton witnessed from the deck of the gunboat Pittsburg, which he has described not only in his letters but also in the books written later. After the destruction of the rebel fleet followed the heavy bombardment which, after many days of constant rain of iron, compelled the evacuation of the forts early in April. Even after these staggering blows at the Confederacy, Carleton expatiated on the mighty work that yet remained to be done before Secessia should become one of the curiosities of history in the limbo of things exploded.

A month of arduous toil and continuous activity on foot, on deck, and on horseback followed. On the river and in Tennessee and in Mississippi the tireless news-gatherer plied his tasks. Then came tidings of the capture of New Orleans, the evacuation of Fort Pillow, in or near which Carleton wrote two of his best letters; the retreat of the Confederates from Memphis, and the annihilation of the rebel fleet in a great water battle, during which Carleton had the very best position for observation, only two other journalists being present to witness it with him. Owing to a week’s sickness, he did not see the battle of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, but he arrived on the ground very soon after, and went over the whole field with participants in the struggle and while the debris was still fresh. He made so thorough a study of this decisive field of valor, that he was able to write with notable power and clearness both in his letters at the time and later in his books.

We find him in Chicago, June 17th, in Boston, June 21st, where, in one of his letters, numbering probably about the two hundredth, he welcomes the sweet breezes of New England, her mountains, the deep-toned diapason of the ever-sounding sea, the green fields, the troops of smiling children, the toll of church bells, and the warm grasp of hands from a host of kind-hearted friends; and, best of all, the pure patriotism, the true, holy devotion of a people whose mighty hearts beat now and ever “for union and liberty, one and inseparable.”