An Original Belle Part 39

"I'VE LOST MY CHANCE."

During the remainder of the 17th of June and for the next few days, the militia regiments of New York and Brooklyn were departing for the seat of war. The city was filled with conflicting rumors. On the 19th it was said that the invaders were returning to Virginia.

The questions "Where is Lee, and what are his purposes? and what is the army of the Potomac about?" were upon all lips.

On the 20th came the startling tidings of organized resistance to the draft in Ohio, and of troops fired upon by the mob. Mr. Vosburgh frowned heavily as he read the account at the breakfast-table and said: "The test of my fears will come when the conscription begins in this city, and it may come much sooner. I wish you to join your mother before that day, Marian!"

"No," she said, quietly,--"not unless you compel, me to."

"I may be obliged to use my authority," said her father, after some thought. "My mind is oppressed by a phase of danger not properly realized. The city is being stripped of its loyal regiments, and every element of mischief is left behind."

"Papa, I entreat you not to send me away while you remain. I a.s.sure you that such a course would involve far greater danger to me than staying with you, even though your fears should be realized. If the worst should happen, I might escape all harm. If you do what you threaten, I could not escape a wounded spirit."

"Well, my dear," said her father, gently, "I appreciate your courage and devotion, and I should indeed miss you. We'll await further developments."

Day after day pa.s.sed, bringing no definite information. There were reports of severe cavalry fighting in Virginia, but the position of the main body of Lee's army was still practically unknown to the people at large. On the 22d, a leading journal said, "The public must, with patience, await events in Virginia, and remain in ignorance until some decisive point is reached;" and on the 24th, the head-lines of the press read, in effect, "Not much of importance from Pennsylvania yesterday." The intense excitement caused by the invasion was subsiding. People could not exist at the first fever-heat. It was generally believed that Hooker's army had brought Lee to a halt, and that the two commanders were manoeuvring for positions. The fact was that the Confederates had an abundance of congenial occupation in sending southward to their impoverished commissary department the immense booty they were gathering among the rich farms and towns of Pennsylvania. Hooker was seeking, by the aid of his cavalry force and scouts, to penetrate his opponent's plans, meanwhile hesitating whether to fall on the rebel communications in their rear, or to follow northward.

Lee and his great army, flushed with recent victories, were not all that Hooker had to contend with, but there was a man in Was.h.i.+ngton, whose incapacity and ill-will threatened even more fatal difficulties.

Gen. Halleck, Commander-in-Chief, hung on the Union leader like the "Old Man of the Sea." He misled the n.o.ble President, who, as a civilian, was ignorant of military affairs, paralyzed tens of thousands of troops by keeping them where they could be of no practical use, and by giving them orders of which General Hooker was not informed. The Comte de Paris writes, "Lee's projects could not have been more efficiently subserved," and the disastrous defeat of General Milroy confirms these words. It was a repet.i.tion of the old story of General Miles of the preceding year, with the difference that Milroy was a gallant, loyal man, who did all that a skilful officer could accomplish to avert the results of his superior's blundering and negligence.

Hooker was goaded into resigning, and of the army of the Potomac the gifted French author again writes, "Everything seemed to conspire against it, even the government, whose last hope it was;" adding later: "Out of the 97,000 men thus divided (at Was.h.i.+ngton, Frederick, Fortress Monroe, and neighboring points) there were 40,000, perfectly useless where they were stationed, that might have been added to the army of the Potomac before the 1st of July. Thus reinforced, the Union general could have been certain of conquering his adversary, and even of inflicting upon him an irreparable disaster."

The fortunes of the North were indeed trembling in the balance.

We had to cope with the ablest general of the South and his great army, with the peace (?) faction that threatened b.l.o.o.d.y arguments in the loyal States, and with General Halleck.

The people were asking: "Where is the army of the Potomac? What can it be doing, that the invasion goes on so long unchecked?" At Gettysburg this patient, longsuffering army gave its answer.

Meanwhile the North was brought face to face with the direst possibilities, and its fears, which history has proved to be just, were aroused to the last degree. The lull in the excitement which had followed the first startling announcement of invasion was broken by the wildest rumors and the sternest facts. The public pulse again rose to fever-heat. Farmers were flying into Harrisburg, before the advancing enemy; merchants were packing their goods for s.h.i.+pment to the North; and the panic was so general that the proposition was made to stop forcibly the flight of able-bodied men from the Pennsylvanian capital.

As Mr. Vosburgh read these despatches in the morning paper, Marian smiled satirically, and said: "You think that Mr. Merwyn is under some powerful restraint. I doubt whether he would be restrained from going north, should danger threaten this city."

And many believed, with good reason, that New York City was threatened. Major-General Doubleday, in his clear, vigorous account of this campaign writes: "Union spies who claimed to have counted the rebel forces as they pa.s.sed through Hagerstown made their number to be 91,000 infantry and 280 guns. This statement, though exaggerated, gained great credence, and added to the excitement of the loyal people throughout the Northern States, while the disloyal element was proportionately active and jubilant." Again he writes: "There was wild commotion throughout the North, and people began to feel that the boast of the Georgia Senator, Toombs, that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill Monument, might soon be realized. The enemy seemed very near and the army of the Potomac far away." Again: "The Southern people were bent upon nothing else than the entire subjugation of the North and the occupation of our princ.i.p.al cities."

These statements of sober history are but the true echoes of the loud alarms of the hour. On the morning of the 20th of June, such words as these were printed as the leading editorial of the New York Tribune: "The rebels are coming North. All doubt seems at length dispelled. Men of the North, Pennsylvanians, Jerseymen, New-Yorkers, New-Englanders, the foe is at your doors! Are you true men or traitors? brave men or cowards? If you are patriots, resolved and deserving to be free, prove it by universal rallying, arming, and marching to meet the foe. Prove it NOW!"

Marian, with flas.h.i.+ng eyes and glowing cheeks, read to her father this brief trumpet call, and then exclaimed: "Yes, the issue is drawn so sharply now that no loyal man can hesitate, and to-day Mr. Merwyn cannot help answering the question, 'Are you a brave man or a coward?' O papa, to think that a MAN should be deaf to such an appeal and shrink in such an emergency!"

At that very hour Merwyn sat alone in his elegant home, his face buried in his hands, the very picture of dejection. Before him on the table lay the journal from which he had read the same words which Marian had applied to him in bitter scorn. An open letter was also upon the table, and its contents had slain his hope. Mrs.

Merwyn had answered his appeal characteristically. "You evidently need my presence," she wrote, "yet I will never believe that you can violate your oath, unless your reason is dethroned. When you forget that you have sworn by your father's memory and your mother's honor, you must be wrecked indeed. I wonder at your blindness to your own interests, and can see in it the influence which, in all the past, has made some weak men reckless and forgetful of everything except an unworthy pa.s.sion. The armies of your Northern friends have been defeated again and again. I have means of communication with my Southern friends, and before the summer is over our gallant leaders will dictate peace in the city where you dwell. What then would become of the property which you so value, were it not for my influence? My hope still is, that your infatuation will pa.s.s away with your youth, and that your mind will become clear, so that you can appreciate the future that might be yours. If I can only protect you against yourself and designing people, all may yet be well; and when our glorious South takes the foremost place among the nations of the earth, my influence will be such that I can still obtain for you rank and t.i.tle, unless you now compromise yourself by some unutterable folly. The crisis is approaching fast, and the North will soon learn that, so far from subduing the South, it will be subjugated and will gladly accept such terms as we may deem it best to give. I have fulfilled my mission here. The leading cla.s.ses are with us in sympathy, and it will require but one or two more victories like that of Chancellorsville to make England our open ally. Then people of our birth and wealth will be the equals of the English aristocracy, and your career can be as lofty as you choose to make it. Then, with a grat.i.tude beyond words, you will thank me for my firmness, for you can aspire to the highest positions in an empire such as the world has not seen before."

"No," said Merwyn, sternly, "if there is a free State left at the North, I will work there with my own hands for a livelihood, rather than have any part or lot in this Southern empire. Yet what can I ever appear to be but a shrinking coward? An owner of slaves all her life, my mother has made a slave of me. She has fettered my very soul. Oh! if there are to be outbreaks at the North, let them come soon, or I shall die under the weight of my chains."

The dark tide of invasion rose higher and higher. At last the tidings came that Lee's whole army was in Pennsylvania, that Harrisburg would be attacked before night, and that the enemy were threatening Columbia on the northern bank of the Susquehanna, and would have crossed the immense bridge which there spans the river, had it not been burned.

On the 27th, the Tribune contained the following editorial words: "Now is the hour. Pennsylvania is at length arousing, we trust not too late. We plead with the entire North to rush to the rescue; the whole North is menaced through this invasion. It we do not stop it at the Susquehanna, it will soon strike us on the Delaware, then on the Hudson."

"My chance is coming," Merwyn muttered, grimly, as he read these words. "If the answering counter-revolution does not begin during the next few days, I shall take my rifle and fight as a citizen as long as there is a rebel left on Northern soil."

The eyes of others were turned towards Pennsylvania; he scanned the city in which he dwelt. He had abandoned all morbid brooding, and sought by every means in his power to inform himself in regard to the seething, disloyal elements that were now manifesting themselves. From what Mr. Vosburgh had told him, and from what he had discovered himself, he felt that any hour might witness b.l.o.o.d.y co-operation at his very door with the army of invasion.

"Should this take place," he exclaimed, as he paced his room, "oh that it might be my privilege, before I died, to perform some deed that would convince Marian Vosburgh that I am not what she thinks me to be!"

Each new day brought its portentous news. On the 30th of June, there were accounts of intense excitement at Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore, for the enemy had appeared almost at the suburbs of these cities.

In Baltimore, women rushed into the streets and besought protection.

New York throbbed and rocked with kindred excitement.

On July 3d, the loyal Tribune again sounded the note of deep alarm: "These are times that try men's souls! The peril of our country's overthrow is great and imminent. The triumph of the rebels distinctly and unmistakably involves the downfall of republican and representative inst.i.tutions."

By a strange anomaly mult.i.tudes of the poor, the oppressed in other lands, whose hope for the future was bound up in the cause of the North, were arrayed against it. Their ignorance made them dupes and tools, and enemies of human rights and progress were prompt to use them. On the evening of this momentous 3d of July, a manifesto, in the form of a handbill, was extensively circulated throughout the city. Jeff Davis himself could not have written anything more disloyal, more false, of the Union government and its aims, or better calculated to incite b.l.o.o.d.y revolution in the North.

For the last few days the spirit of rebellion had been burning like a fuse toward a vast magazine of human pa.s.sion and intense hatred of Northern measures and principles. If from Pennsylvania had come in electric flash the words, "Meade defeated," the explosion would have come almost instantly; but all now had learned that the army of the Potomac had emerged from its obscurity, and had grappled with the invading forces. Even the most reckless of the so-called peace faction could afford to wait a few hours longer. As soon as the shattered columns of Meade's army were in full retreat, the Northern wing of the rebellion could act with confidence.

The Tribune, in commenting on the incendiary doc.u.ment distributed on the evening of the 3d, spoke as follows: "That the more determined sympathizers, in this vicinity, with the Southern rebels have, for months, conspired and plotted to bring about a revolution is as certain as the Civil War. Had Meade been defeated," etc.

The dramatic culmination of this awful hour of uncertainty may be found in the speeches, on July 4th, of ex-President Franklin Pierce, at Concord, N.H., and of Governor Seymour, in the Academy of Music, at New York. The former spoke of "the mailed hand of military usurpation in the North, striking down the liberties of the people and trampling its foot on a desecrated Const.i.tution."

He lauded Vallandigham, who was sent South for disloyalty, as "the n.o.ble martyr of free speech." He declared the war to be fruitless, and exclaimed: "You will take care of yourselves. With or without arms, with or without leaders, we will at least, in the effort to defend our rights, as a free people, build up a great mausoleum of hearts, to which men who yearn for liberty will, in after years, with bowed heads reverently resort as Christian pilgrims to the shrines of the Holy Land."

Such were the shrines with which this man would have filled New England. There is a better chance now, that a new and loyal Virginia will some day build a monument to John Brown.

Governor Seymour's speech was similar in tenor, but more guarded.

In words of bitter irony toward the struggling government, whose hands the peace faction were striving to paralyze, he began: "When I accepted the invitation to speak with others, at this meeting, we were promised the downfall of Vicksburg, the opening of the Mississippi, the probable capture of the Confederate capital, and the exhaustion of the rebellion. By common consent, all parties had fixed upon this day when the results of the campaign should be known. But, in the moment of expected victory, there came a midnight cry for help from Pennsylvania, to save its despoiled fields from the invading foe; and, almost within sight of this metropolis, the s.h.i.+ps of your merchants were burned to the water's edge. Parties are exasperated and stand in almost defiant att.i.tude toward each other."

"At the very hour," writes the historian Lossing, "when this ungenerous taunt was uttered, Vicksburg and its dependences and vast spoils, with more than thirty thousand Confederate captives, were in the possession of General Grant; and the discomfited army of Lee, who, when that sentence was written, was expected to lead his troops victoriously to the Delaware, and perhaps to the Hudson, was flying from Meade's troops, to find shelter from utter destruction beyond the Potomac."

Rarely has history reached a more dramatic climax, and seldom have the great scenes of men's actions been more swiftly s.h.i.+fted.

Merwyn attended this great ma.s.s-meeting, and was silent when the thousands applauded. In coming out he saw, while un.o.bserved himself, Mr. Vosburgh, and was struck by the proud, contemptuous expression of his face. The government officer had listened with a cipher telegram in his pocket informing him of Lee's repulse.

For the last twenty-four hours Merwyn had watched almost sleeplessly for the outburst to take place. That strong, confident face indicated no fears that it would ever take place.

A few hours later, he, and all, heard from the army of the Potomac.

When at last it became known that the Confederate army was in full retreat, and, as the North then believed, would be either captured or broken into flying fragments before reaching Virginia, Merwyn faced what he believed to be his fate.

"The country is saved," he said. "There will be no revolution at the North. Thank G.o.d for the sake of others, but I've lost my chance."

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

BLAUVELT.