Twenty Years in Europe

    “W. T. SHERMAN.”

When I went through the flat, sandy region of North Germany, to take the Bremen steamer, I thought I had never seen so desolate a country in my life. It was a rainy, windy day, and the train was slow, the scene sad; everybody looked poor. Women by hundreds, with red handkerchiefs on their heads, were out in the fields, digging potatoes in the rain and wind. The villages were sorry-looking places. Some day, when the Mojave desert in America has villages scattered all over it, and a poor American peasantry, the descendants of our children, dig potatoes from the drifting sand, the scene will be like that long stretch of ugliness in the rear of Bremen.

Our steamer stopped at Southampton for a day and a night. So Dr. Terry and I took a run over to the Isle of Wight. To this hour, I think, I never saw so lovely an island or a place where I should so like to live. Its clean roads and pretty hedges and beautiful trees, its quiet English villages, its rambles, interested us much. And then there was the blue sea beating all around it, and, passing it in the near distance, the ships of all nations. At the point was the lighthouse and the rocks, and nearer, the noble downs. Here were the rocks and the waves that Tennyson had looked at and walked beside for half his life-the scenes that made his poetry. Not far away was Farringford, the poet’s home. The whole island, that sunny day, seemed like a dream.

The next evening, at twilight, on our vessel’s deck, far out at sea, I lingered and looked at the Isle of Wight, the lighthouse and the dim, gray crags, with the waves beating against them.

We were twelve days reaching New York, and had storms and hurricanes half the way over. The “Deutschland” survived them all, only to go to the bottom, on a later voyage, with three hundred people. That was in the Channel. One day, on this, our New York voyage, everything seemed to be going to pieces, and for an hour or so I knew how it felt to be very close to death. I was more alarmed than I had ever been in any battle. In war, one expects death almost. Here it was different. Not a human being could keep his feet a moment. There was more than one said good-by to comrades that day, as he supposed, forever. I had but one friend on board, Dr. C. T. Terry of New York, who lived in Zurich for many years, and with whom I had made hundreds of foot excursions in the mountains. He was a dentist, possibly in his calling not second to Dr. Evans in Paris. He had come to Switzerland a poor youth, and, by honor, skill and diligence, had amassed a fortune. He, like myself, had left a wife and child behind in Zurich. In the midst of the hurricane, we shook hands, and in a few words agreed what should be done, should either survive. Had that ship gone down, I would certainly not be writing here. No lifeboat there but was being torn to pieces; nothing of human hands could have withstood that sea’s fury another hour. But it was a grand sight spite of the terror. It was ten in the morning, snowing, and the sun shining, every minute, turn about.

As the hurricane eased up, I hung on to a rope by the bridge, and miles away could see lofty white-caps, their shining crowns lighted by the sun, lift themselves and thunder together, or roll on toward us till they would strike the ship. The sea was rolling in deep, green valleys, and, as the ship would leap across these watery gorges, the view right and left was indescribably grand. I looked at the awful ocean, and thought of Switzerland. It was as if the valleys of the Alps had turned to green, rushing waters, and the mountains had commenced falling. I would almost take the risk again, to see so grand a sight.

October, 1872.-The morning after the storm, the sea was still running high, but passengers could keep their feet and, if well enough, talk together.

Pretty soon, a very large, grand-looking man, with a sea cloak about him, came on deck. “And who is he?” I said to the captain. “Why, that’s your greatest American,” he replied. “That’s the man who cared for the Germans in the siege of Paris. That’s Minister Washburne, the friend of Germany.” Sure enough, on a day’s notice, Mr. Washburne had come aboard when we touched at Southampton. He had been sick in his cabin till this moment. He guessed the storm had shaken the bile out of him, he said, when I introduced myself to him. He had been too sick to know the danger we had been in. Now he stayed on deck and was well. Mr. Washburne was General Grant’s first and truest friend. Without his tireless support, from Galena to Appomattox, the name of General Grant had not gone farther than his father’s tannery. Genius must have somebody to open the door for it. Washburne did it for Grant. John Sherman, in the House and Senate, did it for his illustrious brother. Barras did it for Napoleon. Even a cannon ball, rolling down hill, has to be started by somebody.

*****

It is the last day of the voyage. The captain gave a banquet last night to Mr. Washburne. All Germans are deep in their gratitude to him for his work in Paris.

Many speeches were made at the table, many toasts drunk. When Mr. Washburne rose to speak, he looked like the picture of Daniel Webster. The same large head, the same intellectual countenance. He looked like a statesman, not a politician. He was of the kindest manners, and loved to talk of the people he had known. I had the pleasure of walking for hours daily with him, up and down the deck, sometimes far into the night. He had been Lincoln’s friend, as well as Grant’s, and there was no end to the incidents he could tell of the great President. I regret now that I did not write them down. He also talked of the Commune in Paris, whose horrors he had witnessed. He believed socialism and mobism a disease. In Paris it was infectious. He told me much of his youth out West. He went to Galena a poor boy, and when he studied law in an office, making fires as pay for use of books, he had nothing but a buffalo robe to sleep on, spread on the office floor. Later, he was a Cabinet Minister. He was a true Republican, through and through. Hobnobbing with the nobility of France had made no snob of him. He asked me to make him acquainted with Terry. “I like and honor such men,” he said; “they are the salt of the earth, these self-made Americans. They are what makes a republic possible.”

A very rich American lady on the steamer with us was carrying in her trunks several dozen kid gloves, and asked him to help her get “easy” through the Custom House. He refused indignantly, adding, “And what right have you, a rich woman, madame, more than my wife, who never owned so many gloves in her whole life, to slip things through the custom-house? The law expects, compels, her to pay duty on her two or three pairs, and, trust me to see to it, you shall pay duty on your trunk full.” She left him in high dudgeon, when he turned to me and said: “It is just such rich, ostentatious people evading law that is making the poorer classes mad and discontented with government.”

“Lincoln,” he said, “has been the people’s friend more than any other man since Jesus Christ.”

On reaching New York, Mr. Arthur and others of the custom-house came out with a tug to meet him, and take him ashore. I was asked to go along in the tug.

Mr. Washburne went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “Now don’t you go because I do,” he said to me. “It is a useless waste of money. I go because I have to. Come and see me there to-morrow.” I went on the morrow and was introduced to Mr. Blaine, who had, I thought, the most magnetic personality of any man I ever saw. I thought, when he grasped my hand, he had mistaken me for some old-time friend, but shortly I saw the same hearty good-will toward all who entered the room. He knew how to make friends, and to keep them. What a golden secret! I never forgot that handshake.

November, 1872.-For a week or so now I was in Washington, a guest in General Sherman’s home, then on I Street, corner of 3rd. He and Mrs. Sherman cordially insisted that whenever I came to Washington, I should make their house my home. This I often did, not at Washington only, but later at St. Louis and New York as well. Mrs. Sherman was always one of my sincerest and firmest friends.

“Don’t talk religion with her, though,” said the General to me one morning in his study, after breakfast. “She is a very zealous Catholic, and you-” “I am a zealous nothing,” I interrupted. “I like Catholics the same as other good Christians, and have gotten over the notion that all the salt of the earth is in the creed I accidentally was born in.” “Then you are all right. As for myself, it’s no difference,” he went on. “Why, I guess, I don’t believe in anything; so in this room talk as you please.” Mrs. Sherman was a thousand times more than a good Catholic. She was in every sense a good woman. Here, as at her other later homes, she had a little room arranged as an office, where she worked and studied out plans for helping the poor. Probably no woman in the United States ever spent more time and money in doing good. Few had more true friends. Her religious zeal was well known, and never abated. She thoroughly believed the Catholic church the best church.

She was extremely bright and kind in her ways. The army officers all liked her, and her house stood open to every friend.

I recall one evening how she and the General gave a supper to the staff. All were in uniform. She had not invited them to come; she had just told them to come, and they came with their wives. Two or three civilians were present, Mr. Church, a famous war-song singer, and myself among them. After the supper there was some instrumental music in the drawing-room. “And now,” said Mrs. Sherman, “Mr. Church is going to honor us with a song.” My verses, “Sherman’s March to the Sea,” were still popular in the country, being sung everywhere. Mr. Church stepped to the front of the piano and sang the song in such a voice as I had never heard it sung in before. The splendid rendering of the music, his great, fine, patriotic tones, that sounded like the coming of an army with banners, moved everyone in that room deeply. For a moment, I entirely forgot that the words were my own. All applauded, so did I; why not? So did the General. Then a guest stepped forward and made a little speech. “I am happy,” said he; “I speak for all. What a pleasure we have had-the first song of the war, sung by the first war-song singer in the land, in the presence of the one who wrote it, and in the home of the Commander who made the March.”

General Sherman, too, made a little speech, praising the music, the words, the singer, and then he added: “Without this song, the campaign never would have had its picturesque name. Now,” said he, “I want Mr. Church to sing that other favorite song of mine, ‘Old Soldier, You’ve Played Out Your Time.’”

They were rugged verses Mr. Church now sang, and striking music, but, privately, I almost thought it a little cynical in the General to agree with the words that declared an unknown grave in a ditch a desirable ending for the true soldier. “But that’s it, that’s it,” said the General. “Do your duty, have a good time and win glory, but don’t kick when the end comes. That song is the true picture of a soldier’s life.”

It was a memorable evening, but, I fear, not half a dozen of that happy company are on earth now. Yet it seems so few years back. The voices of all of them still seem to sound in my ear. I write down the little record before the last memory fades. That night at General Sherman’s house was an echo of the war days.

When the company left that night, the General asked me up to his little room. He was smoking constantly. The conversation turned on the origin of the “March to the Sea.” “Yes, I know,” he said, “some of Grant’s friends are claiming that he suggested that, but no one ever heard Grant himself utter one word to claim it. True, he was chief commander over all the armies, when I cut loose for the South; but it would be just as senseless to attribute it to the President, who was over all of us, as to attribute it to Grant. Lincoln’s letter to me, after the event, shows how completely he knew who originated the idea of my changing base and putting my army down by the ocean; and a letter from Lee, written after the war, shows what he thought of the importance of my getting this water base, and of its sequence, the march north in the Carolinas. ‘The moment he reaches the Roanoke,’ said Lee, ‘Richmond is untenable, and I leave it.’”

One May morning (1864), away back by Chattanooga, a certain General Warner asked General Sherman, privately, what he was going to do when he got his army away down to Atlanta, without supplies, and with a lot of rebels behind. General Sherman suddenly stopped his pacing the floor, knocked the ashes from his cigar, and said, “Salt water.” “Do you mean Savannah or Charleston?” said the astonished staff officer. “Yes,” replied Sherman, “I do.” That was the origin of the “March to the Sea.”

General Warner related the whole details of this conversation, in a letter to General Sherman’s wife. Lincoln congratulated the great leader, and added, “None of us, I believe, went further than to acquiesce.” One of the interesting autograph letters of the war is that one to Sherman, saying: “I congratulate you on the splendid results of your campaign, the like of which is not heard of in past history. (Signed) U. S. Grant.”

“Well,” said the General at last, laughing, as he gave the fire a great stir with the poker: “I suppose they won’t hardly doubt as to who really made the march.”

*****

November, 1872.-Went out to my home in Iowa and visited my relatives. While there, received a couple of notes from General Sherman, saying Miss Sherman was getting ready to join me on my trip back to Europe, the 14th of December, by the “Celtic.”

    “Washington, D. C., Nov. 5, 1872.

“Dear Byers: I wrote to Mr. Sparks, agent, of the White Star Line, soon after you left us, but he had gone out on the plains. He is just back, and writes me promptly, offering the most liberal terms, more than I deem it prudent to accept. He offers the best rooms in any of his ships, and ‘to accept your ticket on the Bremen Line in exchange.’ I knew he would be glad to favor me, but I always prefer to pay the usual price, and to accept as a favor ‘preferable accommodations.’ Now, I have written to Sparks that I prefer to pay full passage for Minnie, and merely suggest for you that he charge you the usual fare to Paris, $95, and take your ticket at its cost, $63. This would leave you $32 to pay, and this will embrace railroad tickets from Liverpool to Paris. I also named the ‘Celtic,’ the finest ship afloat, which sails Dec. 14, and I guarantee she will put you in Liverpool in 8½ days, and in Paris Dec. 24, giving you barely time to take Christmas dinner with Mrs. Byers at Zurich. Write me as soon as you can that I may close the bargain. We will expect you to come to stay with us as long as you please before starting.

“I take it for granted you vote to-day, and will then have a full month to see your folks and come to us. Of course, I don’t like to hurry you, but this programme seems so fair I trust it will suit your convenience.

“My best regards to your father.

    Truly yours,
    “W. T. Sherman.”

*****

    “Washington, D. C., Nov. 22, 1872.

“Dear Byers: I now have a letter from Mr. Sparks, agent of the White Star Line, saying he has all ready for your and Minnie’s most comfortable passage in the ‘Celtic.’ Dec. 14, next. So I shall expect you here by the 10th of December, and will accompany you to New York and see you off.

“He also reports that the ‘Celtic’ has just made the run from New York to Queenstown in 8 days and 12 hours, with bad coal. So you may safely count on reaching Paris inside of ten days. Truly yours,

    W. T. Sherman.”

Shortly, I went back to the General’s home at Washington. He took me to see President Grant. He seemed to have free access wherever he pleased to go, for, although others were waiting in the reception-room, he passed them with a bow, and conducted me into the cabinet-room. General Grant sat quite alone at the end of the historic table. The warmth of his reception showed very quickly how intimate the two great leaders were.

*****

The President asked me some questions about the service abroad, and my replies seemed to gratify him. Then there was a hint that Mr. Horace Rublee, the American Minister at Bern, was about to resign and come home. I had known that from Mr. Rublee direct, and I had quite an ambition to secure the place. Why not? I had performed the duties more than once in the Minister’s absence, and the proposed promotion seemed perfectly natural. General Grant gave me every encouragement to believe that I should shortly have the post.

Shortly the President arose and asked General Sherman to let him know at once when the resignation of Rublee should be sent in. He saw no reason why I should not be promoted to the post.

“It looks like a very sure thing,” said the General to me as we left the White House.

Alas, and alack! Mr. Rublee went home on a leave, found his affairs different from what he had anticipated, and did not resign at all. He simply got his leave extended and extended, and drew the pay, nearly to the end of Grant’s term. My best good chance was gone.

December 9, 1872.-Went with the General and Mrs. Sherman to hear McDonald, the Scotch novelist, lecture on Burns. General Sherman introduced the speaker, and, in a little speech, showed his own familiarity with the Scotch bard. I knew this well enough, for I had seen him reading Burns by the hour. McDonald commenced with great feeling and enthusiasm. Once I had heard Charles Dickens read, but it seemed to me here, to-night, was a man more sincere with his subject. There was no effort at effect. I recall Dickens in his dress suit, his enormous white shirt front, his big, red rose on his lapel, his dainty, foppish movements on the stage, his undisguised pauses and signals for applause, as much as to say: “That is good; now clap your hands.” With McDonald, all was different, all sincere. Burns seemed to be there in person that night.

After the lecture we sat up till midnight, telling reminiscences of the war. The year before, in our home at Zurich, we had spoken of an escape I had once made from the prison pen at Macon, and of how near I had come to changing the whole siege of Atlanta. He asked me for some more of the details. I had been captured from his army in the assault on Missionary Ridge, and had endured many months of imprisonment at Libby. When they put us in the stockade at Macon, I resolved on getting away. The first time I tried it, the guards fired and killed another officer, who happened to be near me, in the dark. Then, by hook and crook, I got hold of a gray rebel uniform, and in this disguise, one bright July morning, walked over the dead line, past the guards, and, eventually, got off into the rebel army at Atlanta, a hundred miles away. For ten days I walked up and down among the troops, the forts, observing the position of the besieged army. I dared not stop, or rest, or sleep. If spoken to, or stopped, I was forever just going to the Ninth Alabama, where I claimed to belong. Naturally, I never went near that regiment. My intent was to collect all information possible concerning the rebel troops and forts, and then, in the excitement of the first battle, escape through the lines. I well knew the value my knowledge now could be to Sherman. I had dozens of incidents every day that for a moment put my life in peril. Once I saw the lines of the enemy so thinned, Sherman’s army could have entered almost without a shot. Then came the terrible battle of the 22d of July. I followed the Rebel troops in the attack on Sherman’s rear, but failed to make my escape. The next morning I changed my course, and, passing their left flank, and down close by the Chattahoochie river, there in the woods, within sight of the Union banners, was captured as a spy. Every stitch of my clothing was searched. I was brutally treated and sent to Hood’s headquarters for trial. Unfortunately for me, some of the very officers who captured me had seen me in one of the forts the preceding Sunday. Army headquarters were fixed on the green lawn of a city mansion. The officers’ desks were out on the grass, and the papers describing me as a dangerous spy were put into one of the pigeonholes. These had been shown to me on my way to headquarters by a foolish guard. All was excitement, for fighting was still going on. As for me, I was put into a little tent, with two deserters, who were to be shot the next morning. During the night, one of these condemned boys got out of the tent on some pretext, and, when morning came, and I was brought out for a hearing, all the incriminating papers were gone. There was not a particle of proof as to who I was. I instantly acknowledged myself to be a Union soldier, and claimed the rights of a prisoner of war. The astonished officials reminded me that they had a right to shoot me, I being discovered inside their lines in their uniform; that only a few months previous our General Rosecrans had shot two Southern officers for doing what I was now doing. I was in great peril, when a Colonel Hill, Chief Provost Marshal of their army, said, for the present, anyway, I should be put back among the prisoners at Macon. Almost the same night, I was selected, with some two hundred others, to be taken to Charleston, to be put under the fire of the Yankee fleet, then bombarding the city. The barbarism of the act, the excitement and confusion soon following, led to a complete forgetfulness of me. I never heard again of the charges against me.

General Sherman had listened to the story in perfect silence. Then rising and giving the coals in the fire a violent stir with the poker, he exclaimed: “By God! that was an experience. Had you gotten through the lines that day, it might have changed everything. It might have saved ten thousand lives.”[2 - A detailed description of the incidents of the adventure within the lines of the enemy appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, May, 1880, and is repeated in Mr. Byers’ “Last Man of the Regiment.”]

Christmas Eve.-The voyage on the “Celtic” is over, and to-night finds Miss Sherman and myself in Merry England.

I soon left Miss Sherman with friends in Paris, and hurried home to Switzerland. Later, after some rambling in Italy, she came and spent a month with us in our home by the lake. Two or three letters from her father at this time, though purely personal, are not without interest: