After four years of strenuous activity
of body and brain, it was not easy for Carleton to
settle down at once to commonplace routine. Having
exerted every nerve and feeling in so glorious a cause
as our nation’s salvation, every other cause
and question seemed trivial in comparison. Succeeding
such a series of excitements, it was difficult to
lessen the momentum of mind and nerve in order to live,
just like other plain people, quietly at home.
One could not be drinking strong coffee all the time,
nor could battle shocks come any longer every few
weeks. The sudden collapse of the Confederacy,
and the ending of the war, was like clapping the air-brakes
instantaneously upon the Empire State Express while
at full speed. While the air pressure might stop
the wheels, there was danger of throwing the cars off
their trucks.
It took Carleton many months, and
then only after strong exertion of the will, careful
study of his diet and physical habits, to get down
to the ordinary jog-trot of life and enjoy the commonplace.
He occupied himself during the latter part of 1865
in completing his first book, which he entitled “My
Days and Nights upon the Battle Field.”
This was meant to be one in a series of three volumes.
He had written most of this, his first book, in camp
and on the field. In form, it was an illustrated
duodecimo of 312 pages, and was published by Ticknor
and Fields, and later republished by Estes and Lauriat.
It carries the story of the war, and
of Carleton’s personal participation in it in
the Potomac and Mississippi River regions, down to
the fall of Memphis in the summer of 1862.
After this, followed another volume,
entitled “Four Years of Fighting,” full
of personal observation in the army and navy, from
the first battle of Bull Run to the fall of Richmond.
This was a more ambitious work, of five hundred and
fifty-eight, with an introduction of fifteen, pages.
It contained a portrait and figure of the war correspondent,
with pencil and note-book in hand. Published by
Ticknor and Fields, it was reissued in 1882, by Estes
and Lauriat, under the title of “Boys of ’61.”
Carleton completed a careful revision of this work
about a fortnight before his golden wedding, for another
edition which appeared posthumously in October, 1896.
Meanwhile, Mr. Coffin had reentered
the work of journalism in Boston. This, with
his books and public engagements, as a lecturer and
platform speaker, occupied him fully. In the summer
of 1866 the shadows of coming events in Europe began
to loom above the horizon of the future. The
great Reform movement in England was in progress.
The triumph of the American war for internal freedom,
the vindication of Union against the pretensions of
State sovereignty, the release of four million slaves,
the implied honor put upon work, as against those
who despised workmen as “mudsills,” had
had a powerful reaction upon the people of Great Britain.
These now clamored for the rights of man, as against
privileged men. British liberty was once more
“to broaden down from precedent to precedent.”
In France, the World’s Exposition was being
held. Prussia and Austria had rushed to arms.
The evolution of a modern German empire
had begun. Austria and Hungary were being drawn
together. Should Prussia humble her Austrian foe,
then Italy would throw off the yoke, and the Italians,
once more united as a nation, would see the temporal
power of the Pope vanish. Victor Emmanuel’s
troops would enter Venice and perhaps even the Eternal
City.
To tell the story of storm and calm,
of war and peace, Carleton was again summoned by the
proprietors of the Boston Journal, and at a
salary double that received during the war. This
time his wife accompanied him, to aid him in his work
and to share his pleasure. On one of the hottest
days of the summer, they sailed on the Cunard steamer
Persia, from New York. This was to be Carleton’s
first introduction to a foreign land. The chief
topic of conversation during the voyage was the Austro-Prussian
War, which, it was generally believed, would involve
all Europe. The storm-cloud seemed to be vast
and appalling.
They arrived in Liverpool, the cloud
had burst and disappeared, and the sky was blue again.
The battle of Sadowa had been fought. Prussian
valor and discipline in handling the needle-gun had
won on the field. Bismarck and diplomacy were
soon to settle terms of peace, and change the map
of Europe.
Carleton hastened on to London to hear the debate in
Parliament on the extension of the suffrage, to see the uprising of the people,
and to notice how profoundly the great struggle in America and its results had
affected the English people. Great Britain’s millions were demanding cheaper
government, without so many costly figureheads, both temporal and spiritual, and
manhood suffrage. The long period of nearly constant war from 1688 to 1830 had
passed. In area of peace, men were thinking of, and discussing openly, the
relation of the middle classes and the laboring men to the nobility and landed
estates. Agitated crowds thronged the streets, singing “John Brown’s Soul is
Marching on.”
Mr. Gladstone’s bill was defeated.
Earl Russell was swept out of office, and Disraeli
was made chancellor. It was a field-day in the
House of Commons when Carleton heard Gladstone, Bright,
Lowe, and the Conservative and Liberal leaders.
These were the days when such men as Governor Eyre,
after incarnating the most brutish principle of that
worse England, which every American and friend of humanity
hates, could be defended, lauded, and glorified.
Indeed, Eyre’s bloody policy in Jamaica was
approved of by such men as John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley,
and other literary men, to the surprise and pain of
Americans who had read their books. On the other
hand, the men of science and thinking people in the
middle and laboring classes condemned the red-handed
apostle of British brutishness. All through this,
his first journey in Great Britain, as in other countries
years afterward, Carleton clearly distinguished between
the Great Britain which we love, and the Great Britain
which we do not love, the one standing
for righteousness, freedom, and progress; the other
allied with cruelty, injustice, and bigotry.
After studying British finance, political
corruption, the army, and the system of purchasing
commissions then in vogue, and visiting the homes
of the Pilgrims in Lincolnshire, and the county fairs,
the land of Burns, and the manufactures of Scotland,
Carleton turned his face towards Paris. Before
leaving the home land of his fathers, he dined and
spent an afternoon with the great commoner, John Bright.
Mrs. Coffin accompanied him and enjoyed Mrs. Bright,
who was as modest, unassuming, kind, and genial as
her husband. John Bright listened with intense
interest and profound emotion to Carleton’s personal
reminiscences of Mr. Lincoln, and of his entrance into
Richmond. Before leaving for France, on the 5th
of September, Carleton wrote:
“The thunder of Gettysburg is
shaking the thrones of Europe. English workmen
give cheers for the United States. The people
of Germany demand unity. Louis Napoleon, to whom
Maximilian had said, ’Mexico and the Confederacy
are two cherries on one stalk,’ was already sending
steamers to Vera Cruz, to bring back his homesick soldiers.
Monarchy will then be at an end in North America.”
Maximilian’s wife was in France, expecting soon
to see her husband. In a few weeks, the corpse
of the bandit-emperor, sustained by French bayonets
and shot by Mexican republicans, and an insane widow
startled Carleton, as it startled the world.
The Journal correspondent passed
over to Napoleon’s realm, spending a few weeks
in Paris, Dijon, and other French cities. In Switzerland
he enjoyed mightily the home of Calvin and its eloquent
memories, Mont Blanc and its associated splendors,
the mountains, the glaciers, the passes, and valleys,
and, above all, his study of the politics of “The
freest people of Europe.” How truly prophetic
was Carleton, when he wrote, “This republic,
instead of being wiped off from the map, ... will
more likely become a teacher to Europe,” a
truth never so large as now. He rode over the
Spluegen pass, and saw Milan and Verona. From
the city of Romeo and Juliet, he took a carriage in
order to visit and study, with the eye of an experienced
engineer and veteran, the details of the battle of
Custozza, where, on June 24th, 1866, the Archduke
Albert gained the victory over the Italian La Marmora.
He reached Venice October 13th. In the old city proudly
called the Queen of the Adriatic, and for centuries a republic, until ground
under the heel of Austrian despotism, Carleton arrived in time to see the people
almost insane with joy. The Austrian garrison was marching out and the Italian
troops were moving in. The red caps and shirts of the Garibaldians brightened
the throng in the streets, and the old stones of Venice, bathed in salt water at
their bases, were deluged with bunting, flags, and rainbow colors. When King
Victor Emmanuel entered, the scenes of joy and gladness, the sounds of music,
the gliding gondolas, the illuminated marble palaces and humble homes, the
worshipping hosts of people in the churches, and the singing bands in the
streets, taxed to the utmost even Carleton’s descriptive powers. The burden of
joy everywhere was “Italy is one from the Alps to the Adriatic, and Venice is
free.”
Turning his attention to Rome, where
French bayonets were still supporting the Pope’s
temporal throne, Carleton discussed a question of
world-wide interest, the impending loss
of papal power and its probable results. Within
a fortnight after his letter on this subject, the
last echoes of the French drum-beat and bugle-blast
had died away. The red trousers of the Emperor’s
servants were numbered among Rome’s mighty list
of things vanished. In the Eternal City itself,
Carleton attended mass at St. Peter’s, and then
re-read and retold the story of both the Roman and
the Holy Roman Empire. Some of his happiest days
were passed in the studios of American artists and
sculptors. There he saw, in their beginning of
outlines and color, on canvas or in clay, some of
the triumphs of art which now adorn American homes
and cities. Fascinated as he was in Pompeii and
in Rome with the relics and revelations of ancient
life, he was even more thrilled by the rapid strokes
of destiny in the modern world. The separation
of church and state was being accomplished while Italy
was waking to new life. The Anabaptists were
avenged and justified.
About the middle of February, Carleton
was again in Paris, seeing the Exposition and the
Emperor of the French and his family. Then crossing
to England, he heard a great debate over the Reform
measures, in which Disraeli, Lowe, Bright, and Gladstone
spoke. The results were the humiliation of Disraeli,
and the break-up of the British ministry. Re-crossing
the channel to Paris, he spent eight weeks studying
the Exposition and the country, writing many letters
to the Journal. After examination of the
great fortresses in the Duchy of Luxembourg, he went
into Germany, tarrying at Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Munich,
and Vienna. He then passed down “the beautiful
blue Danube” to Buda-Pesth, where, having been
given letters and commendations from J. L. Motley,
the historian of the Netherlands and our minister at
Vienna, he saw the glittering pageant which united
the crowns of Austria and Hungary. This was performed
in the parish church in Buda, an edifice built over
six hundred years ago. It had been captured by
the Turks and made into a mosque, where the muezzin
supplanted the priest in calls of prayer. After
the great victory won by John Sobieski, cross and altar
were restored. Here, amid all the glittering
and bewildering splendor of tapestry, banners, dynastic
colors, national flags, jewels, and innumerable heraldic
devices, “the iron crown of Charlemagne,”
granted by Pope Sylvester II. in the year 1000, and
called “the holy and apostolic crown,”
was placed by Count Andrassy upon the head of the
Emperor Francis Joseph. The ruler of Austria practically
acknowledged the righteousness of the revolution of
1849, and his own mistake, when he accepted the crown
from the once rebel militia-leader and then exiled
Andrassy, having already given to the Hungarians the
popular rights which they clamored for. Most
gracious act of all, Francis Joseph contributed, with
the Empress (whom Mrs. Coffin thought the handsomest
woman in Europe), 100,000 ducats ($200,000) to
the widows and children of those who were killed in
1849, while fighting against the empire. At this
writing, December, 1896, we read of the unveiling,
at Kormorn, of a monument to Klapka, the insurgent
general of 1849.
In Berlin, Carleton saw a magnificent
spectacle, the review of the Prussian army
in welcome to the Czar. He studied the battle-fields
of Leipsig and Lutzen, and the ever continuing gamblers’
war at Weisbaden. Then sailing down the Rhine,
he revisited Paris to see the distribution of prizes
at the Exposition, the array of Mohammedan and Christian
princes, and the grand review of the French troops
in honor of the Sultan. In England once more,
he looked upon the great naval review of the British
fleets of iron and wood. He studied the ritualistic
movement. He attended the meeting of anti-ritualists
at Salisbury, where, midway between matchless spire
and preancient Cromlech, one can meditate on the evolution
of religion. He was at the Methodist Conference
of Great Britain in the city of Bristol, whence sailed
the Cabots for the discovery of America, now four
centuries ago. He read the modern lamentations
of Thomas Carlyle, who, in his article, “Shooting
the Niagara and After,” foretold the death of
good government and religion in the triumph of democracy.
At the British Scientific Association’s
gathering in Dundee, he heard Murchison, Baker, Lyell,
Thomson, Tyndall, Lubbock, Rankine, Fairbairn, and
young Professor Herschell. He was at the Social
Science Congress held in Belfast, meeting Lord Dufferin,
Dr. James McCosh, Goldwin Smith, and others.
Two months more were given to study and observation
in the countries Ireland, England and Scotland, Holland
and Belgium. Of his frequent letters to the Journal
a score or so were written especially to and for young
people, though all of them interested every class
of readers. He kept a keen watch upon movements
in Italy and in Spain, where the Carlists’ uprising
had begun.
In this manner, nearly sixteen months
slipped away in parts of Europe, and amid scenes so
remote as to require hasty journeys and much travelling.
Carleton received further directions to continue his
journey around the world. He was to visit the
Holy Land, Egypt, India, China, and Japan, to cross
the Pacific, and to traverse the United States as
far as possible on the Pacific railway, then in course
of construction. This was indeed “A New
Voyage Around the World,” not exactly in the
sense of Defoe; but was, as Carleton called it in the
book describing it, which he afterwards wrote, “Our
New Way Around the World.” No one before
his time, so far as known, had gone around the globe,
starting eastward from America, crossing continents,
and using steam as the motor of transportation on
land and water all the way.
Making choice of three routes to the
Orient, Carleton left Paris December 9th, 1867, for
Marseilles. He found much of the country thitherward
nearly as forbidding as the hardest regions of New
Hampshire. The climate was indeed easier than
in the Granite State, but from November to March the
people suffered more from cold than the Yankees.
They lived in stone houses and fuel was dear.
At Marseilles the vessels were packed so closely in
docks, that the masts and spars reminded him of the
slopes of the White Mountains after fire had swept
the foliage away. Although innumerable tons of
grain were imported here, he saw no elevators or labor
saving appliances like those at Buffalo, which can
load or empty ships’ holds in a few half hours.
Many of the imports were labelled “Service
Militaire,” and were for the support of
that army of eight hundred thousand men, which the
impoverished French people, even with a decreasing
population, were so heavily taxed to support.
Carleton noticed that merchants of France were planning
to lay their hands on the East and win its trade.