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.”