The Mail

We came to the sea in the third week of August, and I smelled it before I saw it, a day before, on a wind from the east across the rice fields: salt and mud and marsh, the smell of the coast I had worked on for three years when I was young. I had not known until then how much I had missed it. My first sergeant, who was from Pittsburgh and had never seen the sea, asked me what the smell was, and I told him, and he said that he did not think much of it.

Savannah fell on the Saturday, the twenty-second.

It was not much of a fall. The rebels had a garrison in the city and in the works round it, but not enough of one to hold it against the column, and no hope of anybody coming to help them, since there was nobody left between them and Richmond who could; and on the Friday night they went out of the city across the river into South Carolina, quietly, in the dark, and in the morning the city’s own council came out and gave it up, as the council at Atlanta had done. The column marched in at noon with its bands. The people stood at their doors and watched, as the people of Atlanta had watched; and this time nothing burned, and nobody was ordered out, and I do not know why the one city and not the other, and I have never heard an explanation that I believed.

I had known Savannah well, in the years I was at Pulaski. I had dined in its houses and walked in its squares under the live oaks and been to its balls, and I knew some of the people who stood at their doors and watched us march in. One of them, an old gentleman in a white waistcoat on the steps of a house in one of the squares, who had given me dinner a dozen times in 1857, knew me as I rode by, and raised his hat to me, very slowly, and held it up, and did not put it back on his head until I had passed. I have never known whether it was courtesy or the opposite. I think that with that generation of Savannah gentlemen the two were not always distinguishable, and that he intended me not to know.

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The rebel state was cut in two. I should explain what that meant, because it was the thing that ended the war, and nobody in the column understood it at the time, least of all me.

Until that summer the polities in rebellion had been one country, after a fashion, joined by their railways: the Carolinas and the rebel half of Virginia on one side, Georgia in the middle, Alabama beyond it. The railways ran through Atlanta, and from Atlanta to the coast. Now Atlanta was ash and the railways were twisted round the trees for three hundred miles, and the column lay across Georgia from the mountains to the sea like a rope across a road, and nothing could pass from one half of the rebellion to the other. The armies in Virginia could get nothing from the west. The west could get no orders from Charles Town in South Carolina. And the coast was shut, the last of it, with Savannah gone; the blockade runners that had been coming in to Savannah and to Charles Town had nowhere left to come in to but Charles Town, and the fleet was outside Charles Town. I did not understand any of this in August. I understood it in October, when I saw what it had done.

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The first ships came up the river on the Monday, the twenty-fourth.

They came up from the sound in the morning, three steamers and a gunboat, past the batteries on the islands that the fleet had taken the year before and past Fort Pulaski, which had been the Crown’s since the April of 1862, flying the Crown’s flag from the staff above the angle I had helped to breach. I stood on the wharf at Savannah with half the column and watched them come round the last bend, and I could see the fort behind them down the river through my glass, low and red on its island in the marsh, with the patch of new brick in its south-east angle where the breach had been repaired. It looked very small. I had built part of it, and breached it, and now it was guarding the river for the ships that were coming to feed the army I had marched with. I did not know what I felt, and I do not know now. I set it down.

The ships brought rations, and shoes, which the column needed more than rations, and the mail. We had had no mail since the fifteenth of July, and no news, and no newspaper that we believed, and the ships brought six weeks of everything at once. The bags were opened on the wharf, and the newspapers were carried off by the armful, and men sat down where they stood, on the bales and the bollards and the edge of the wharf, and read.

I read about Gettysburg sitting on a coil of rope.

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It had been fought on the first three days of July, in Pennsylvania, at a small town in the south of the Province whose name I had never heard before, among farms and orchards and stone fences on a ridge. The rebels had gone north into Pennsylvania in June with everything they had, the last time they had everything, and they had been met there and broken, over three days, and had gone back into Virginia with what was left. It was the last time they came north. I do not need to tell Your Majesty about the battle; Your Majesty will have had it from better hands than mine, and I was a thousand miles away, on the road out of Atlanta with the wire cut behind me. I will tell you only what I read on the coil of rope, which was that Jackson was dead.

He had been killed at Gettysburg. The newspapers said different things about how, and where on the field, and when, and I will not give any of them, because none of the men who wrote them was there, and I have learned in this war to distrust every account of a fight given by anybody who was not in it. I only know that he was dead, and had been dead since the beginning of July, and that we had marched three hundred miles across Georgia with the rumour of it behind us and had not known.

I thought of the stake in the field in front of the northern fort, and the tall man on the little horse, eating his lemon and praising the ditch. I thought of my brother at the rail of the prison steamer, saying, “He would,” in the voice I had not heard since we were boys. I wondered whether anybody had told Edmund, in his prison in the north, and how, and decided that the newspapers would have told him, as they had told me, on a wharf or in a yard, from a page that a man beside him was reading. I did not know whether to write to him. In the end I did not.

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And then, in a newspaper three weeks old, at the bottom of a column of other news, I read that Stuart was dead.

He had been killed on the eleventh of August, at the head of the General’s cavalry, in Virginia, in a fight at a crossroads south of the Rappahannock whose name meant nothing to me, against the rebel cavalry that had been raiding the General’s lines all summer. The newspaper said that he had been shot from his horse while leading a charge, and had died the same evening, and that his last words were reported to have been some sentence or other, which I do not believe and will not repeat. He was thirty years old.

I sat on the coil of rope for a long time.

He was in my class at the Point. He was the best horseman in it, and the worst draughtsman, and the most cheerful man I ever knew, and he knew it, and did not mind anybody else knowing it. He had gone forward to the engine house at Harpers Ferry under a flag, and stood in front of the door with the muzzle of a carbine in the gap a foot from his face, and read the Colonel’s terms to John Brown, and argued with him, courteously, for as long as it took to understand that the old man meant no; and then he had stepped aside and waved his cap. He had stayed with the Crown in 1861 because the Colonel stayed, and had said so, and had said that he was glad not to have had to find out what he would have done otherwise. I had not seen him for a year. I had meant to write to him when the march was over and tell him about the rail yards, because he would have laughed at my first sergeant’s way with a hot rail, and I had not, and now there was nobody to write to.

I have said at the beginning of this account that I had not written his name from the day he was killed until the morning I began it. That is true. It was this day I meant, on the wharf at Savannah, when I learned it.

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There was one other thing in the mail, and I record it because it came in the same bag.

It was my majority. The department had gazetted it in July, while I was on the road from Atlanta, and the letter had been waiting in the capital for a ship, and it came up the river past Pulaski in the same mail as the news that Jackson and Stuart were dead. I opened it on the wharf. It said that I had been promoted major in the Corps of Engineers, for services at Arlington Heights and in the interior, and it was signed by a clerk. I read it through twice and put it in my pocket. I had wanted it, for a long time. I could not, that afternoon, remember why.

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I sent my report of the bridge north on the first ship that went back down the river, on the Wednesday.

I have said that I sent it to the Colonel and not to the department. I should say why, because the Colonel had no command over General Sherman, and no right to my report, and no means of doing anything about it, and I knew all of that. I sent it to him because he had told me to write to him, and to tell him exactly; and because I had written it exactly, and did not know who else would read it so; and because I did not want it to go into the department’s files, where my report on the camp by the river had gone, and be considered and put away. I wrote a covering letter. It said that the enclosed was a report of an occurrence on the march which I believed he should have. It did not say anything else, and I did not ask him to do anything, because I did not know what I wanted him to do. The general’s own report of the march would go to the department by the ordinary channel, and would say whatever it said; mine went to the Colonel.

He did not answer me. I did not expect him to. But I learned in the autumn, when I was back in the capital, that he had read it on the day it came, and that he had sat down the same evening at the table in the farmhouse on the crest and written to General Grant.

I did not see the letter until November. He showed it to me himself, in his own copy book, at the farmhouse, a week after I came home. He opened the book at the page and turned it round on the table so that I could read it, and said, “You had better see this, Mr Ashton. It is partly yours.” And then he went out of the room, and left me alone with it.

I am going to give it to Your Majesty entire, because it has not been printed, and I do not know whether it ever will be, and I read it in his hand and I know what it says:

I do not question that the rebellion must be broken and I do not suppose it can be broken gently. I question whether a city that has surrendered must be burned, and whether the people following General Sherman’s column are to be abandoned at the rivers. An army that does these things will win this war. It will also have to live afterwards among the people it did them to, and so will the Crown. I ask you to restrain him. I do not expect that you will.

It was dated at the Capital Works in September, and signed.

I read it three times. Then I closed the book and sat at the table until he came back in, and when he came in I stood up, and he looked at me, and I said that I had read it. He said, “Yes.” He put the book back on the shelf with the others. He did not say anything else about it then, and he has not since.

“At the rivers.” I had told him of one river. He had heard of the other, I suppose, from somebody else, or had read it in my report, where I had set down what I had been told; and he had put them together in two words, and put the city with them, and asked the General to restrain the man who had done both, and said that he did not expect it. The General did not. I do not think the Colonel was surprised.

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And I read the other thing in September, at Savannah, in a newspaper from the capital, which was the Prime Minister’s answer in the Commons.

He had been asked about Atlanta. I give it as I read it, in the newspaper’s report, because I was not there. He did not say that the burning had been ordered by the ministry, because it had not. He did not say that General Sherman had been right to order it without asking, and he did not say that he had been wrong. He said that the moral cost of hard war was real, and that he did not pretend otherwise; and that the moral cost of an inconclusive war was higher; and that a war which was killing men by thousands every month could not be shortened by a ministry that flinched from what shortening it required. And he sat down, and nobody was disciplined, and the House went on to other business.

I have set the two side by side, Sir, the Colonel’s letter and the Prime Minister’s answer, as I have set other things side by side in this account; and I find that I cannot choose between them, any more than I could choose between the men who told me that Atlanta shortened the war and the men who told me it was a crime. I think the Colonel was right. I think the Prime Minister was right. I think that both of them knew exactly what the other would say, and said their own thing anyway, and that this is perhaps the most that can be asked of anybody. And I think that I am not the man to judge between them, because I twisted the rails at Atlanta and took up the bridge at the river, and the man who did those things cannot also be the man who decides whether they should have been done.

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The people who had followed the column came into Savannah behind it, the ones who had got over the rivers, and camped along the river below the city, in their thousands, where the army could see them and did not know what to do with them. The sixty-one were among them, I suppose. I did not look for them. Some weeks later, I was told, some of the people in the camps were put on ships for the Sea Islands, where there was land and no masters, and people who had already learned how to live without either. I hope that some of them went to St Helena. I hope the woman in her field had neighbours.

The rebellion was ending. I did not know it, on the wharf at Savannah; nobody knew it; but it was ending all round us, and the newspapers that came up the river in September were full of the signs of it, if we had known how to read them. Jackson was dead. Atlanta was ash. Savannah had fallen, and the coast was shut. The rebel money was worth nothing; the prisoners we took that month had their government’s notes in their pockets, for sums that would once have bought a farm, and could not buy a loaf with them. And their armies were dissolving, not in battle but on the roads, as men who had heard that their homes were in the column’s path, or behind it, walked away from their regiments in the night and went home to see what was left, and to districts that could no longer feed them when they got there.

In September the column turned north, into South Carolina, towards Charles Town. And I went with it, a major of engineers, with my company and my pontoon train, towards the harbour where I had laid my first bricks, and the fort on the shoal where the war had begun.