When Lee and his army, leaving the
front of the Union army and becoming invisible, when
President and people, general and chief and privates,
Cabinet officers and correspondents, were wondering
what had become of the rebel hosts, and when the one
question in the North was, “Where is General
Lee?” Carleton, divining the state of affairs,
took the railway to Harrisburg. Once more he
was an observer in the field. His first letter
is dated June 16th, and illuminates the darkness like
an electric search-light.
General Lee, showing statesmanship
as well as military ability, had chosen a good time.
The Federal army was losing its two years’ and
nine months’ men. Vicksburg was about to
fall. Something must be done to counterbalance
this certain loss to the Confederates. Paper money
in the South was worth but ten per cent. of its face
value. Recognition from Europe must be won soon,
or the high tide of opportunity would ebb, nevermore
to return. Like a great wave coming to its flood,
the armed host of the Confederacy was moving to break
at Gettysburg and recede.
Yet, at that time, who had ever thought
of, or who, except the farmers and townsmen and students
in the vicinity, had ever seen Gettysburg? At
first Carleton supposed that Harper’s Ferry might
be the scene of the coming battle. Again he imagined
it possible for Lee to move down the Kanawha, and
fall upon defenceless Ohio. He wrote from Harrisburg,
from Washington, from Baltimore, from Washington again,
from Baltimore once more, from Frederick, where he
learned that Hooker had been superseded, and Meade,
the Pennsylvanian, put in command. On June 30th,
writing from Westminster, Md., he described
the rapid marching of the footsore and hungry Confederates,
and the equally rapid pedestrianism of the Federals.
He revels in the splendors of nature in Southern Pennsylvania,
which the Germans once hailed as a holy land of comfort
and liberty, and which, by their industry, they had
made “fair as the garden of the Lord.”
As Carleton rode with the second corps from Frederick
to Union Town, and thence to Westminster, he penned
prose poems in description of the glorious sight, so
different from his native and stony New Hampshire.
“The march yesterday was almost like passing through
paradise. Such broad acres of grain rustling in the breeze; the hills and
valleys, bathed in alternate sunlight and shade; the trees so green; the air so
scented with clover-blossoms and new-made hay; the cherry-trees ruby with
ripened fruit, lining the roadway; the hospitality of the people, made it
pleasant marching.”
Thus like the great forces of the
universe, which make the ocean’s breast heave
to and fro, and send the tides in ebb and flood, were
the great energies which were now to bring two hundred
thousand men in arms, on the field of Gettysburg,
in Adams County, Pennsylvania. Forty years before,
as it is said, a British officer surveying the great
plain with the ranges of hills confronting each other
from opposite sides, with many highroads converging
at this point, declared with admiration that this
would be a superb site for a great battle. Now
the vision of possibility was to become reality, and
Carleton was to be witness of it all. Since mid-June
he had been on the rail or in the saddle. He
was now to spend sleepless nights and laborious days
that were to tax his physical resources to their utmost.
With his engineer’s eye, and
from the heights overlooking the main field, he took
in the whole situation. From various points he
saw the awful battles of July 2d and 3d, which he
described in two letters, written each time after
merciful night came down upon the field of slaughter.
He saw the charges and defeats, the counter-charges
and the continued carnage, and the final cavalry onset
made by the rebels. He was often under fire.
An impression that lasted all his life, and to which
he often referred, was the result of that great movement
of Pickett’s division across the field, after
the long bombardment of the Federal forces by the
Confederate artillery. Retiring before the heavy
cannonade, Carleton had remained in the rear, until,
hearing the cheers of the Union soldiers, he reached
the slope in time to see the gray and brown masses
in the distance.
As the great wave of human life receded,
that for a moment had pierced the centre of the Union
forces, only to be hurled back and broken, Carleton
rode out down the hill and on the plain into the wheat
field. Then and there, seeing the awful debris,
came the conviction that the rebellion had seen its
highest tide, and that henceforth it would be only
ebb.
When is a battle over, and how can
one know it? That night, Friday, and the next
day, Saturday, Carleton felt satisfied that Lee was
in full retreat, though General Meade did not seem
to think so. Carleton’s face was now set
Bostonwards. Not being able to use the army telegraph,
he gave his first thought to reaching the railroad.
The nearest point was at Westminster, twenty-eight
miles distant, from which a freight-train was to leave
at 4 P. M.
Rain was falling heavily, but with
Whitelaw Reid as companion, Carleton rode the twenty-eight
miles in two hours and a half. Covered with mud
from head to foot, and soused to the skin, the two
riders reached Westminster at 3.55 P. M. As the train
did not immediately start, Carleton arranged for the
care of his beast, and laying his blanket on the engine’s
boiler, dried it. He then made his bed on the
floor of the bumping car, getting some sleep of an
uncertain quality before the train rolled into Baltimore.
At the hotel on Sunday morning he
was seized by his friend, E. B. Washburn, Grant’s
indefatigable supporter and afterwards Minister to
France, who asked for news. Carleton told him
of victory and the retreat of Lee. “You
lie,” was the impulsive answer. Washburn’s
nerves had for days been under a strain. Then,
after telling more, Carleton telegraphed a half-column
of news to the Journal in Boston. This
message, sent thence to Washington, was the first news
which President Lincoln and the Cabinet had of Gettysburg.
After a bath and hoped-for rest, Carleton was not
allowed to keep silence. All day, and until the
train was entered at night for New York, he was kept
busy in telling the good news.
The rest of the story of this famous
“beat,” as newspaper men call it, is given
in Carleton’s own words to a Boston reporter,
a day or two before the celebration of his golden
wedding in February, 1896:
“Monday I travelled by train
to Boston, writing some of my story as I rode along,
and wiring ahead to the paper what they might expect
from me. When I reached the office I found Newspaper
Row packed with people, just as you will see it now
on election night, and every one more than anxious
for details.
“It was too late, however, for
anything but the morning edition of Tuesday, but the
paper wired all over New England the story it would
have, and the edition finally run off was a large one.
“I locked myself in a room and
wrote steadily until the paper went to press, seeing
no one but the men handling the copy, and, when the
last sheet was done, threw myself on a pile of papers,
thoroughly exhausted, and got a few hours’ sleep.
I went to my home in the suburbs, the next day, but
my townspeople wouldn’t let me rest. They
came after me with a band and wagon, and I had to get
out and tell the story in public again.
“The next day I left for the
front again, riding forward from Westminster, where
I had left my horse, and thus covering about 100 miles
on horseback, and 800 miles by rail, from the time
I left the army until I got back again.
“Coffee was all that kept me up during that time, but my
nerves did not recover from it for a long time. In fact, I don’t think I could
have gone through the war as I did, had I not made it a practice to take as long
a rest as possible after a big battle or engagement.”
In his letter written after the decisive
event of 1863, Carleton pays a strong tribute of praise
to the orderly retreat which Lee made from Pennsylvania.
He was bitterly disappointed that the defeated army
should have been allowed to escape. With the soldiers,
he looked forward with dread to another Virginia campaign.
Nevertheless, he was all ready for duty. Having
found his horse and resumed his saddle, he spent a
day revisiting the Antietam battle-field. It was
still strewn with the debris of the fight: old
boots, shoes, knapsacks, belts, clothes all mouldy
in the dampness of the woods. He found flattened
bullets among the leaves, fragments of shells, and,
sickening to the sight, here and there a skull protruding
from the ground, the bleaching bones of horses and
men. The Dunkers’ church and the houses
were rent, shattered, pierced, and pitted with the
marks of war.
Even until July 15th, when he sent
despatches from Sharpsburg, he nourished the hope
that Lee’s army could still be destroyed before
reaching Richmond. This was not to be. Like
salt on a sore, and rubbed in hard, Carleton’s
sensibilities were cut to the quick, when, on again
coming home, he found the people in Boston and vicinity
debating the question whether the battle of Gettysburg
had been a victory for the Union army or not.
Some were even inclined to consider it a defeat.
Carleton’s letter of July 24th, written in Boston,
fairly fumes with indignation at the blind critics
and in defence of the hard work of the ever faithful
old Army of the Potomac, “which has had hard
fighting, terrible fighting, and little
praise.” He lost patience with those staying
at home depreciating the army and finding fault with
General Meade. He wrote: “Frankly and
bluntly, I cannot appreciate such stupidity.
Why not as well ask if the sun rose this morning?
That battle was the greatest of the war. It was
a repulse which became a disastrous defeat to General
Lee.” He sarcastically invited critics, “instead of staying at home to weaken
the army by finding fault, to step into the ranks and help do the ‘bagging,’ the
‘cutting up,’ and the ‘routing’ which they thought ought to have been done.”