Chapter XVII

SURRENDER OF GENERAL LEE--WHY NORTH-CAROLINA COULD NOT HAVE TAKEN MEASURES TO SEND COMMISSIONERS--REVIEW--THE COAL-FIELDS RAILWAY--DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSPORTATION--PROVISIONS--THE LAST CALL--RECREANTS--PRIVATIONS--THE CONDITION OF THE PRESS.

Not till we had seen General Lee's farewell to his army, printed on a slip from the Danville _Register_ office, and read in household circles with tears and sobs--not till then did we finally and fairly give up the Southern cause, and feel that it was indeed lost. That (for us) dismal fact once established, the large majority--I may say, the great body of Southern people--surrendered with their beloved and trusted leader. Here and there were doubtless some resolved still to blind themselves, to hope against hope, who talked wildly of collecting the scattered fragments of our armies, and prolonging the war beyond the Mississippi--or somewhere; but they were the exceptions, few and far between--_rari nantes_--who took counsel of their desperation rather than of their reason. For all men knew now, what had long been feared and suspected, that the ground on which we stood was hollow, and had given way hopelessly and forever, and that now we were to pay the reckoning of our four years' madness.

If North-Carolina had, through her Executive, anticipated the final crash, and after the failure of the peace mission to Fortress Monroe, had endeavored to treat separately with the United States Government, and be the first to tender her submission, (as there were some who would fain have had her try the experiment,) if our State had taken this step, four generations would not have heard the last of it. The whole failure of the cause would in time have been attributed to the treachery and faint-heartedness of Old Rip, as there are even now those who say it was the croakers who ruined us, and that Generals Lee and Johnston should not have surrendered so lightly. Besides the infamy, we should have gained _absolutely nothing_, as is plainly indicated by the course pursuing and pursued of the United States Government.

Governor Graham, as our representative in the Confederate Senate, and from his position, high _prestige_, and extended reputation, commanding the entire confidence of our people, might very well recommend that some steps should be taken, _if possible_, to avert the approaching crash, and spare the State the horrors of military subjugation. This it was his duty to do; for to him more than any other man in the State, our people looked for guidance, and for some indication of the policy proper to be pursued in circumstances so critical and so desperate. But if Governor Vance had moved in the matter of sending commissioners to General Sherman one week sooner than he did, or had taken one step looking toward reconciliation, or submission, or negotiation, at any time previous to the second week of April, 1865, he would in all probability have been arrested by our military authorities as a traitor. There was positively nothing that with honor or credit could have been done to meet the United States army sooner than it was done. Our affairs were at a dead-lock from the time of the adjournment of the Confederate Congress. Let those, therefore, who may yet be inclined to deplore that certain steps were not taken by our Executive, be satisfied that the course pursued was the only one possible. There is no room for misconstruction or misrepresentation in the future. Inaction in certain great and supreme moments is the highest wisdom, the truest dignity, as the Indian who finds his bark within the sweep of the rapids, and on the verge of the abyss, folds his arms and awaits the inevitable plunge with self-possession and calmness.

North-Carolina had nothing to retract, nothing to unsay, no pardon to beg. She had acted deliberately in joining the Southern cause. She had given her whole strength to it, with no lukewarm adherence; and now, in the hour of acknowledged defeat and failure, she did not attempt to desert, or abjectly bespeak any favors for herself on the ground of her anti-secession record or proclivities. And when the negotiations were completed and peace was finally announced, it would not be difficult to say what feelings most predominated amongst us. We had desired peace--an end to the bloodshed and to the impending starvation of women and children. Peace we had longed and prayed for; but not _this_ peace. The reünion was not _this_ reünion. With all her former attachment to the old Union--with all her incredulity as to the stability or possibility of a separate independent Confederacy of the Southern States, even in case of its triumphant establishment--with all her sober conservative principles--I will venture to say, that there were not five hundred decent men within the limits of North-Carolina who could be found to rejoice in her military subjugation, or who, under such circumstances, welcomed the reäppearance of the Stars and Stripes as our national emblem. I have never yet seen one who did, or who was, at any rate, willing to avow it. At the same time, I must say, I have never seen one who evinced any intention of other than an honest acceptance of the situation, and a determination to do their whole duty and make the best of the inevitable.

Looking back at our delusions, errors, and miscalculations for the four years of the war, the wonder is, that the Confederacy lasted as long as it did. The last six mouths of its existence were indeed but mere outside show of seeming. That Richmond was doomed, was patent to all shrewd observers in the fall of 1864; and there was probably not a member of the Confederate Congress who did not know it when he took his seat at the beginning of its last session. It certainly reflects very little credit on the wisdom or the patriotism of that body that they did not, before adjourning, take some steps in concert to notify their respective constituents of their opinion as to the situation, and give some indication of the course they judged their States should pursue. Respect for President Davis, who was well known to be extremely averse to any movement looking toward reconstruction, and who refused to contemplate the event of our subjugation as possible--due respect for him may have influenced the extraordinary reticence of our Congress; but it is more probable that an undue regard for their own political reputation and influence was the prime object with most of them. Whatever it was, history will point with a dubious expression to our representatives, each nudging his neighbor and desiring him to go forward--all convinced of the hopelessness of the cause, yet almost no man bold enough to say so publicly.

The Confederacy did not fail for want of genius to direct our military operations, nor for lack of the best qualities that go to make good soldiers in our armies, nor for lack of devotion and self-sacrifice among our people; for they who most doubted the wisdom of our policy or of our success gave as freely as the most sanguine. The history of the rise and fall of the Confederate currency will be a singularly interesting and instructive lesson if it should ever be honestly written. Its steady, unchecked decline but too surely marshaled us the way we were going, and in the successive stages of its destruction we may read as in a mirror the story of our own facile descent.

After General Grant had succeeded in cutting the Petersburg Railroad, the authorities at Richmond looked with anxiety to the Deep River coal-fields in our State as the point where workshops could be located. Before that time there was but little interest felt or expressed in the struggle North-Carolina was making to get a road opened to them; but when the Richmond coal-fields were almost surrounded by the enemy, Chatham county, in our State, became an object of great interest to the Government. All the heads of departments were at once willing to lend a helping hand to the Raleigh and Chatham Coal-fields road. The iron from the Danville road, which had been taken up on account of the necessity of relaying that road with a more heavy rail, (taken from the Charlotte and Statesville road,) was granted to it, and a part of it was already on the way when Sherman arrived in Raleigh.

It is an interesting and suggestive fact connected with the want of transportation facilities in our last days, and showing the dire extremity to which we were reduced, that coal was carried from Deep River by rail and river past Fayetteville to Wilmington, thence by rail _via_ Goldsboro, Raleigh, and Greensboro, to supply the government workshops in Salisbury and Charlotte. South-Carolina also sent trains for it to Wilmington. This coal was pronounced to be of the first quality, equal to the Cumberland coal, and one hundred per cent superior to the Richmond for blacksmith purposes. This want of transportation was one of the many stumbling-blocks in the way of the fainting Confederacy, and connected with the scarcity of provisions, and the strict military surveillance established in every district, brought many of us to the verge of starvation. Provisions were confined by military order to particular districts, each general taking care of his own. I have been told by Kemp P. Battle, Esq., our present State Treasurer, at that time President of the Raleigh, and Chatham road, that on one occasion he was compelled--though he could have bought an abundance of provisions in Eastern Carolina--to send for bacon to South-western Georgia. He had to go to Richmond to see Secretary Seddon himself, and send an agent to General Beauregard at Charleston, in order to get permission to move it to North-Carolina. He was endeavoring; on one occasion to get some corn for his own family up to Raleigh from his plantation in Edgecombe county, when the general in command of that department seized it, and in reply to application for it said, "If the owner is in the field, he may have his corn; if otherwise, not." In this connection what were called "the bonded plantations" were a curious institution in those latter days, which greatly added to the distress of our non-producers. For instance, the owner of a large estate with slaves, in order to keep an overseer out of the army to attend to it, gave bond with good security to deliver to the Government, or to soldiers' families, all his surplus produce at Government prices. By this arrangement of course our large planters could only sell their produce at much below the market price, and in fact for almost nothing, considering the value of our currency. And even this the Government did not pay. It died in debt to many: to Mr. Battle for nearly his whole crop of 1864. With great difficulty he got from a quartermaster, in March, 1865, six thousand dollars, which he immediately exchanged for fifty-seven dollars in gold. Besides this the Government impressed half the working mules, a source alone of no little vexation and distress among our small farmers. Our quartermasters were not always fair in their assessment, nor competent to decide.

The difficulties in the way of procuring provision can hardly be imagined by any but those who lived through that time. One of the last resorts was to smuggle cotton to the Chowan country in exchange for bacon, pound for pound. The greatest irregularities, of course, prevailed in different parts of the South. In some of the central counties of the Gulf States provisions were almost a drug in the market, (there being no transportation,) while here and in the army we were starving.

One of the last desperate expedients of our Government, and which bore as hardly on our people as any other, was the calling out of men between the ages of forty-five and fifty, and the Junior Reserves, mere children who should have been at home with their mothers. When the heads of families were taken away, often leaving a houseful of girls only to assist the mother to make bread, the distress and trouble were most piteous. At first the Government was inclined to be liberal in exemptions, but in the last ninety days all were taken.

On some counties of our State there was a disposition to resist or evade this wholesale conscription, and there were in consequence many deserters, many of whom lived by plundering their neighbors, and thus added to the general confusion and anxiety and peril of the times. Many acts of violence were committed in certain localities. Their expedients to escape capture, the modes of living they resorted to, the singular hiding-places they improvised or elaborated, would make an amusing and curious chapter in the history of the war--only these are the points which historians who desire to represent a people as unanimous in a great national struggle for rights and liberty do not generally care to present. If any of the immortal three hundred faltered on the way to Thermopylæ we have never been told of it. I know that we were greatly mortified to hear the stories that were told by those who were sent in search of our recreants. It was a severe shock to our high-strung theories of Southern chivalry and patriotism, to think of Southerners hiding in dens and caves of the earth, resolved with great constancy NOT to be martyrs, having to be unearthed in these burrows and dragged out to the fight. One warrior lived for weeks in a hollow tree, fed by his wife; another was conscripted from beneath his own hen-house, where he had dug out a sort of grave, into which, well supplied with blankets, he descended in peace every morning. One took possession of an old, deserted, and forgotten mine in his neighborhood, and by a skillful disposal of brush and rubbish at the entrance, kept house quite comfortably for months, plying his trade of shoemaker meanwhile, and supplied with food from home. The women, in such cases, were the instigators of the skulking. One soldier returning to his regiment, after a furlough at home in a certain county, said "He'd be d----d if Jeff Davis wouldn't desert too if he were to stay at ---- awhile."

The history of our personal privations, our household expenses, our public donations, and our taxes, will be a curious study of domestic and political economy combined. People who before the war had lived up fully to incomes of two thousand dollars a year, were reduced to less than one tenth of that sum, and are fully qualified now to give an answer to the question of how little one can live on. Fifty dollars in gold would have been gladly taken in exchange for many a whole year's salary in Confederate currency for the last year or two. Even now it is an inexplicable mystery to me how people with moderate salaries lived who had families to feed and clothe. It was done only by confining themselves strictly to the most common and coarsest articles, and by an entire renunciation of all the luxuries and most of the comforts of life. When tallow was thirty dollars per pound, people necessarily sat in darkness. I have walked from end to end of our town at night and not observed half a dozen lights. If we did not realize Charles Lamb's notion of society, as it must have existed before the invention of lights, when people had to feel about for a smile, and handle a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he understood a joke, it was because lightwood-knots were plentiful, and turpentine easy of access.

The condition of the press was a striking commentary on the state of things among us. Some pains have been taken to secure an accurate list of our State papers from an entirely reliable source. At the commencement of the war there were but two daily papers in the State; at the close, there were four in the city of Raleigh alone. Of fifty-seven papers in existence in May, 1861, twenty-six ceased during the war. There are thirty-three now in the State, of which ten are dailies. People who had never taken more than their own county weekly in all their lives, found the Richmond dailies a necessity during the war, so great was the general anxiety to have the latest news, and above all from the army. The post-offices were besieged for the dingy half-sheets that came freighted with momentous intelligence for us. The _Fayetteville Observer_ and the _North-Carolina Presbyterian_ were the only two papers in the State whose dimensions were not reduced to a half-sheet. The _Fayetteville Observer_ had been for forty years one of the most ably edited, most sterling, and most influential journals in the State, and I may add, in the whole Southern country.[19] Its influence for good all through that long period can hardly be overrated. The editor, E.J. Hale, was an old-line whig in politics--a conservative of the strictest sort. His paper ranged side by side with the _National Intelligencer_, the _Richmond Whig_, and the other noble old journals of that school which had stood as breakwaters for more than a generation against the incoming tide of radicalism North and South, but were swept away at last in the great flood. Mr. Hale opposed the doctrine of secession, and resisted its movement as long as it was possible to do so. Mr. Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand men to coerce the South first aroused his opposition to the United States Government; and after this State had gone over he supported her Act, and supported the war with all his power, giving his sons, giving most liberally of all his substance, and devoting his paper enthusiastically to the benefit of the army, and the upholding of the State and general government. For though no admirer in past times of Mr. Davis's record as a Democrat politician, yet when he was elevated to the post of President of the Confederacy, and became the representative of the Southern people, no man gave him a more generous support. His paper was published weekly and semi-weekly without intermission, and with a constantly increasing circulation and influence, until the appearance in Fayetteville of General Sherman's army, on the twelfth of April, 1865, when the office was entirely destroyed, and the fruits of a lifetime of labor scattered to the winds. The office of the _North-Carolina Presbyterian_ was also destroyed at the same time.

The _Raleigh Standard_, edited by W.W. Holden, was for many years the leading organ of the Democratic party in the State; indeed it may be said to have been the creator and preserver of that party, and was perhaps the most widely-circulated and influential of all our journals, for its reputation was not confined to the State. It was edited with marked ability by a man, unsurpassed as a party tactician, who thoroughly understood his business, and who always kept his powder dry. During the first two years of the war all parties seemed melted down and fused into one by the general ardor and excitement of the times; and our heretofore antagonist papers presented a most edifying spectacle of concord and agreement. In 1863, Mr. Holden seeing no prospect of a favorable end to the war by fighting, began to advocate a resort to negotiation upon the basis of possible reconstruction. This speedily rendered him obnoxious to those of us who desired the war to go on, preferring even military subjugation to peaceful reconstruction; while it drew more closely to his support those who desired peace on any terms. The state of feeling between these two parties came to be such that an internecine war among ourselves might have broken out at any time. It was excessively difficult and dangerous for our public men to move either way. A party of soldiers passing through Raleigh, in September, 1863, mobbed the _Standard_ office, and the compliment was returned, by the friends of Mr. Holden mobbing the office of the war paper, conducted at that time by John Spelman, under the title of the _State Journal_. Mr. Holden deemed it prudent to suspend the issue of his paper for two months in the spring of 1864 in consequence of the passage of the act suspending the writ of _habeas corpus_--suspended also for a day or two on the arrival of General Sherman's army.

The _State Journal_ changed hands and name in 1864. Under the title of _The Confederate_, and edited by Colonel D.K. McRae, it became the daily organ of the Confederate Government in this State, and continued to advocate the policy of our chief and the indefinite continuance of the war till within three days of General Sherman's entrance into Raleigh, when the office was entirely destroyed. It was edited with much spirit and ability, but with singular audacity and bitterness.

The organ of Governor Vance's administration was _The Conservative_, established in 1864 as a daily, and continuing till General Sherman's arrival, when it shared the fate of the _Confederate_, being utterly destroyed, except one small press, which General Slocum carried away with him. _The Progress_, daily, followed the lead of the _Standard_ in politics, and like the _Standard_, was suspended for only a day or two on the occupation of Raleigh. It had the reputation of being the earliest and sprightliest retailer of news--generally ahead of its competitors in that department. All these, as well as all others in the Confederacy, with a few exceptions, were printed on half-sheets of exceedingly dingy paper, and their price ranged from twenty-five dollars to fifty dollars for six months. No subscriptions were taken for a longer period, in consequence of the steady decline in value of our currency. The typography and general appearance, to say nothing of their matter, would have rendered them objects of curiosity in any part of the civilized world, and afford a close resemblance to the journals published in the days of the Revolution of 1776. Such was the scarcity of paper among us, that they disappeared as fast as they were received; and a complete file of one of our Confederate papers, which would be an invaluable possession for an historical society fifty years hence, is probably even now an impossibility.

All literary influences were of course greatly checked and straitened, while our people held their breath in suspense as to the issue of the war. Colleges were closed, schools went on lamely for want of teachers, who were in the army, and for want of text-books. An effort was made here and there to supply the increasing demand for grammars, arithmetics, readers, and primers; but the paper was coarse and dark, and the type was old and worn--the general getting up of these home-made books affording the clearest evidence of the insurmountable difficulties under which our people labored in endeavoring to make books while struggling for bread. Some of them ran the blockade, being sent abroad to be stereotyped. Some of them need only a new dress to take their place as standards in any school in the country now; but the majority of them may be set down as failures. The common-schools, kept going at first, shared at last in the general decline and relaxation of order, and were hardly in existence at all at the close. As to books from abroad--magazines, papers, etc.--it may well be imagined that in the interior of the Confederacy at least, we were at a standstill in regard to all such means of improvement or information. Occasionally a copy of the _London Times_, or one or two of the leading New-York journals found its way from Richmond, or Wilmington, or Charleston, and was sent from house to house until utterly worn out. Occasionally some enterprising publishing house, getting hold of a copy of the latest English novel, would issue a reprint of it, solitary copies of which circulated through a county, and soon shared the fate of the papers. Northern magazines or books were but little in request, and little read if obtained.[20] I am by no means certain that the loss of the current "light literature" of the day was a loss much to be deplored. Such privations may rather be classed among the benefits of the war.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: The writer might have added--or in America. Its editor, Mr. Hale, is a gentleman of broad intellect, large information, and rare journalistic ability.--Ed. Watchman.]

[Footnote 20: But one number of _Harper's Magazine_ was seen at Chapel Hill during the war; this ran the blockade from Nassau: and one number of the _London Quarterly Review_, found among the effects of Mrs. Rosa Greenhow, which floated ashore from the wreck in which she perished. Among such of her books as were recovered, much damaged and stained with sea-water, was her narrative of her imprisonment in Washington, just published in London, and the MS. of her private journal kept during her visit to London and Paris. Her elegant wardrobe was sold at public sale in Raleigh, by order of the Confederate Government, for the benefit of her daughter in Paris.]