1862.] THE "GIBRALTAR OF THE WEST." 221 drinking and gambling, nothing to excite National feeling or prick the bubble of their State pride. Naval officers, going all over the world, had acquired the liberality which only travel imparts, and learned that, abroad, their country was not known as Virginia or Mississippi, but the United States of America. With them, it was the Nation first, and the State afterward. Hence, while nearly all southerners holding commissions in the regular army joined the Rebellion, the navy almost unanimously remained loyal. The low, flat, black iron-clads crept down the river like enormous turtles. Each had attending it a little pocket edition of a steamboat, in the shape of a tug, capable of carrying fifty or sixty men, and moving up the strong current twelve miles an hour. They were constantly puffing about among the unwieldy vessels like breathless little errand-boys. Nearing Columbus, we found that the Rebels had evacuated it twelve hours before. The town was already held by an enterprising scouting party of the Second Illinois Cavalry, who had unearthed and raised an old National flag. Our colors waved from the Rebel Gibraltar, and the last Confederate soldier had abandoned Kentucky. The enemy left in hot haste. Half-burned barracks, chairs, beds, tables, cooking-stoves, letters, charred guncarriages, bent musket-barrels, bayonets, and provisions were promiscuously lying about. The main fortifications, on a plateau one hundred and fifty feet high, mounted eighty-three guns, commanding the river for nearly three miles. Here, and in the auxiliary works, we captured one hundred and fifty pieces of artillery. Fastened to the bluff, we found one end of a great 222 SCENES IN COLUMBUS, KENTUCKY. [1862. chain cable, composed of seven-eighths inch iron, which the brilliant Gideon J. Pillow had stretched across the river, to prevent the passage of our gunboats! It was worthy of the man who, in Mexico, dug his ditch on the wrong side of the parapet. The momentum of an iron-clad would have snapped it like a pipe-stem, had not the current of the river broken it long before. We found, also, enormous piles of torpedoes, which the Rebels had declared would annihilate the Yankee fleet. They became a standing jest among our officers, who termed them original members of the Peace Society, and averred that the rates of marine insurance immediately declined whenever the companies learned that torpedoes had been planted in the waters where the boats were to run! In the abandoned post-office I collected a bushel of Rebel newspapers, dating back for several weeks. At first the Memphis journals extravagantly commended the South Carolina planters for burning their cotton, after the capture of Port Royal, and urged universal imitation of their example. They said: : "Let the whole South be made a Moscow; let our enemies find nothing but blackened ruins to reward their invasion!" But when the capture of Donelson rendered the early fall of Memphis probable, the same journals suddenly changed their tone. They argued that Moscow was not a parallel case; that it would be highly injudicious to fire their city, as the Yankees, if they did take it, would hold it only for a short time; that those who urged applying the torch should be punished as demagogues and public enemies! But they abounded in frantic appeals like the following from The Avalanche: "For the sake of honor and manhood, we trust no young unmarried 1862.] EXTRACTS FROM REBEL NEWSPAPERS. 223 man will suffer himself to be drafted. He would become a by-word, a scoff, a burning shame to his sex and his State. If young men in pantaloons will sit behind desks, counters, and molasses-barrels, let the girls present them with the garment proper to their peaceable spirits. He that would go to the field, but cannot, should be aided to do so; he that can go, but will not, should be made to do so." The Avalanche was a great advocate of what is termed the "aggressive policy," declaring that: ** * "The victorious armies of the South should be precipitated upon the North. Her chief cities should be seized or reduced to ashes; her armies scattered, her States subjugated, and her people compelled to defray the expenses of a war which they have wickedly commenced and obstinately continued. Fearless and invincible, a race of warriors rivaling any that ever followed the standard of an Alexander, a Cæsar, or a Napoleon, the southerners have the power and the will to carry this war into the enemy's country. Let, then, the lightnings of a nation's wrath scathe our foul oppressors! Let the thunder-bolts of war be hurled back upon our dastardly invaders, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, until the recognition of southern independence shall be extorted from the reluctant North, and terms of peace be dictated by a victorious southern army at New York or Chicago." General Jeff. Thompson, a literary Missouri bushwhacker, was termed the "Swamp Fox" and the "Marion of the Southern Revolution." I found one of his effusions, entitled "Home Again," in that once decorous journal, The New Orleans Picayune. Its transition from the pathetic to the profane is a curious anticlimax. "My dear wife waits my coming, My children lisp my name, To my own home again. My father's grave lies on the hill, I love each rock and murmuring rill, 224 INMATES OF THE UNION HOSPITALS. I'll suffer hardships, toil, and pain, My freedom and my home. I will return, though foes may stand My own dear home, my native land, I'll win you yet, by!" [1862. Our hospitals at Mound City, Illinois, contained fourteen hundred inmates. A walk along the double rows of cots in the long wards revealed the sadder phase of war. Here was a typhoid-fever patient, motionless and unconscious, the light forever gone out from his glazed eyes; here a lad, pale and attenuated, who, with a shattered leg, had lain upon this weary couch for four months. There was a Tennessean, who, abandoning his family, came stealthily hundreds of miles to enlist under the Stars and Stripes, with perfect faith in their triumph, and had lost a leg at Donelson; an Illinoisan, from the same battle, with a ghastly aperture in the face, still blackened with powder from his enemy's rifle; a young officer in neat dressing-gown, furnished by the United States Sanitary Commission, sitting up reading a newspaper, but with the sleeve of his left arm limp and empty; marines terribly scalded by the bursting boiler of the Essex at Fort Henry, some of whose whole bodies were one continuous scar. Sick, wounded, and convalescent were alike cheerful; and twenty-five Sisters of Mercy, worthy of their name, moved noiselessly among them, ministering to their wants. 1862.] STARTING DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI. 225 CHAPTER XVIII. Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death.-TEMPEST. If it should thunder as it did before, I know not where to lay my head.—IBID. On the 14th of March, the flotilla again started down the Mississippi, steaming slowly by Columbus, where Venus followed close upon Mars, in the form of two women disbursing pies and some other commodities to sailors and soldiers. The next day we anchored above Island Number Ten, where Beauregard had built formidable fortifications. A fast little Rebel gunboat, called the Grampus, ran screeching away from the range of our guns. Below her we could read with glasses the names painted upon the many steamers lying in front of the enemy's works, and see the guns upon a great floating battery. Our gunboats fired one or two experimental shots, and the mortar-rafts, with tremendous explosions, began to throw their ten-inch shells, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds each. Great results were expected from these enormous mortars, but they proved inaccurate. Our shots fell among the batteries and steamboats of the enemy, throwing up clouds of dirt and sheets of water. The Rebel guns replied with great puffs of smoke; but their missiles, bounding along the river, fell three-quarters of a mile short. Light skirmishing in closer range continued for several days. My own quarters were on the Benton, Commodore Foote's flagship. She was the largest of the iron |