The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 46, August, 1861

In college his favorite studies were Greek and mental philosophy. He never lost the scholarly taste and habit. A wide reader, he retained knowledge with little effort, and often surprised his friends by the variety of his information. Yet it was not strange, for he was born a scholar. His mother was the great-granddaughter of old President Edwards; and among his ancestors upon the maternal side, Winthrop counted seven Presidents of Yale. Perhaps also in this learned descent we may find the secret of his early seriousness. Thoughtful and self-criticizing, he was peculiarly sensible to religious influences, under which his criticism easily became self-accusation, and his sensitive seriousness grew sometimes morbid. He would have studied for the ministry or a professorship, upon leaving college, except for his failing health.

In the later days, when I knew him, the feverish ardor of the first religious impulse was past. It had given place to a faith much too deep and sacred to talk about, yet holding him always with serene, steady poise in the purest region of life and feeling. There was no franker or more sympathetic companion for young men of his own age than he; but his conversation fell from his lips as unsullied as his soul.

He graduated in 1848, when he was twenty years old; and for the sake of his health, which was seriously shattered,—an ill-health that colored all his life, he set out upon his travels. He went first to England, spending much time at Oxford, where he made pleasant acquaintances, and walking through Scotland. He then crossed over to France and Germany, exploring Switzerland very thoroughly upon foot,—once or twice escaping great dangers among the mountains,—and pushed on to Italy and Greece, still walking much of the way. In Italy he made the acquaintance of Mr. W.H. Aspinwall, of New York, and upon his return became tutor to Mr. Aspinwall's son. He presently accompanied his pupil and a nephew of Mr. Aspinwall, who were going to a school in Switzerland; and after a second short tour of six months in Europe he returned to New York, and entered Mr. Aspinwall's counting-house. In the employ of the Pacific Steamship Company he went to Panama and resided for about two years, travelling, and often ill of the fevers of the country. Before his return he travelled through California and Oregon,—went to Vancouver's Island, Puget Sound, and the Hudson Bay Company's station there. At the Dalles he was smitten with the small-pox, and lay ill for six weeks. He often spoke with the warmest gratitude of the kind care that was taken of him there. But when only partially recovered he plunged off again into the wilderness. At another time he fell very ill upon the Plains, and lay down, as he supposed, to die; but after some time struggled up and on again.

He returned to the counting-room, but, unsated with adventure, joined the disastrous expedition of Lieutenant Strain, during which his health was still more weakened, and he came home again in 1854. In the following year he studied law and was admitted to the bar. In 1856 he entered heartily into the Fremont campaign, and from the strongest conviction. He went into some of the dark districts of Pennsylvania and spoke incessantly. The roving life and its picturesque episodes, with the earnest conviction which inspired him, made the summer and autumn exciting and pleasant. The following year he went to St. Louis to practise law. The climate was unkind to him, and he returned and began the practice in New York. But he could not be a lawyer. His health was too uncertain, and his tastes and ambition allured him elsewhere. His mind was brimming with the results of observation. His fancy was alert and inventive, and he wrote tales and novels. At the same time he delighted to haunt the studio of his friend Church, the painter, and watch day by day the progress of his picture, the Heart of the Andes. It so fired his imagination that he wrote a description of it, in which, as if rivalling the tropical and tangled richness of the picture, he threw together such heaps and masses of gorgeous words that the reader was dazzled and bewildered.

The wild campaigning life was always a secret passion with him. His stories of travel were so graphic and warm, that I remember one evening, after we had been tracing upon the map a route he had taken, and he had touched the whole region into life with his description, my younger brother, who had sat by and listened with wide eyes all the evening, exclaimed with a sigh of regretful satisfaction, as the door closed upon our story-teller, "It's as good as Robinson Crusoe!" Yet, with all his fondness and fitness for that kind of life, or indeed any active administrative function, his literary ambition seemed to be the deepest and strongest.

He had always been writing. In college and upon his travels he kept diaries; and he has left behind him several novels, tales, sketches of travel, and journals. The first published writing of his which is well known is his description, in the June number of this magazine, of the March of the Seventh Regiment of New York to Washington. It was charming by its graceful, sparkling, crisp, off-hand dash and ease. But it is only the practised hand that can "dash off" effectively. Let any other clever member of the clever regiment, who has never written, try to dash off the story of a day or a week in the life of the regiment, and he will see that the writer did that little thing well because he had done large things carefully. Yet, amid all the hurry and brilliant bustle of the articles, the author is, as he was in the most bustling moment of the life they described, a spectator, an artist. He looks on at himself and the scene of which he is part. He is willing to merge his individuality; but he does not merge it, for he could not.

So, wandering, hoping, trying, waiting, thirty-two years of his life went by, and they left him true, sympathetic, patient. The sharp private griefs that sting the heart so deeply, and leave a little poison behind, did not spare him. But he bore everything so bravely, so silently,—often silent for a whole evening in the midst of pleasant talkers, but not impertinently sad, nor ever sullen,—that we all loved him a little more at such times. The ill-health from which he always suffered, and a flower-like delicacy of temperament, the yearning desire to be of some service in the world, coupled with the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature and paralyzes action, overcast his life and manner to the common eye with pensiveness and even sternness. He wrote verses in which his heart seems to exhale in a sigh of sadness. But he was not in the least a sentimentalist. The womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression. It was like a delicate carnation upon the cheek of a robust man. For his humor was exuberant. He seldom laughed loud, but his smile was sweet and appreciative. Then the range of his sympathies was so large, that he enjoyed every kind of life and person, and was everywhere at home. In walking and riding, in skating and running, in games out of doors and in, no one of us all in the neighborhood was so expert, so agile as he. For, above all things, he had what we Yankees call faculty,—the knack of doing everything. If he rode with a neighbor who was a good horseman, Theodore, who was a Centaur, when he mounted, would put any horse at any gate or fence; for it did not occur to him that he could not do whatever was to be done. Often, after writing for a few hours in the morning, he stepped out of doors, and, from pure love of the fun, leaped and turned summersaults on the grass, before going up to town. In walking about the island, he constantly stopped by the roadside fences, and, grasping the highest rail, swung himself swiftly and neatly over and back again, resuming the walk and the talk without delay.

I do not wish to make him too much a hero. "Death," says Bacon, "openeth the gate to good fame." When a neighbor dies, his form and quality appear clearly, as if he had been dead a thousand years. Then we see what we only felt before. Heroes in history seem to us poetic because they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry. Winthrop was one of the men who represent the manly and poetic qualities that always exist around us,—not great genius, which is ever salient, but the fine fibre of manhood that makes the worth of the race.

Closely engaged with his literary employments, and more quiet than ever, he took less active part in the last election. But when the menace of treason became an aggressive act, he saw very clearly the inevitable necessity of arms. We all talked of it constantly,—watching the news,—chafing at the sad necessity of delay, which was sure to confuse foreign opinion and alienate sympathy, as has proved to be the case. As matters advanced and the war-cloud rolled up thicker and blacker, he looked at it with the secret satisfaction that war for such a cause opened his career both as thinker and actor. The admirable coolness, the promptness, the cheerful patience, the heroic ardor, the intelligence, the tough experience of campaigning, the profound conviction that the cause was in truth "the good old cause," which was now to come to the death-grapple with its old enemy, Justice against Injustice, Order against Anarchy,—all these should now have their turn, and the wanderer and waiter "settle himself" at last.

We took a long walk together on the Sunday that brought the news of the capture of Fort Sumter. He was thoroughly alive with a bright, earnest forecast of his part in the coming work. Returning home with me, he sat until late in the evening talking with an unwonted spirit, saying playfully, I remember, that, if his friends would only give him a horse, he would ride straight to victory.

Especially he wished that some competent person would keep a careful record of events as they passed; "for we are making our history," he said, "hand over hand." He sat quietly in the great chair while he spoke, and at last rose to go. We went together to the door, and stood for a little while upon the piazza, where we had sat peacefully through so many golden summer-hours. The last hour for us had come, but we did not know it. We shook hands, and he left me, passing rapidly along the brook-side under the trees, and so in the soft spring starlight vanished from my sight forever.

The next morning came the President's proclamation. Winthrop went immediately to town and enrolled himself in the artillery corps of the Seventh Regiment. During the two or three following days he was very busy and very happy. On Friday afternoon, the 19th of April, I stood at the corner of Courtland Street and saw the regiment as it marched away. Two days before, I had seen the Massachusetts troops going down the same street. During the day the news had come that they were already engaged, that some were already dead in Baltimore. And the Seventh, as they went, blessed and wept over by a great city, went, as we all believed, to terrible battle. The setting sun in a clear April sky shone full up the street. Mothers' eyes glistened at the windows upon the glistening bayonets of their boys below. I knew that Winthrop and other dear friends were there, but I did not see them. I saw only a thousand men marching like one hero. The music beat and rang and clashed in the air. Marching to death or victory or defeat, it mattered not. They marched for Justice, and God was their captain.

From that moment he has told his own story in these pages until he went to Fortress Monroe, and was made acting military secretary and aid by General Butler. Before he went, he wrote the most copious and gayest letters from the camp. He was thoroughly aroused, and all his powers happily at play. In a letter to me soon after his arrival in Washington, he says,—

"I see no present end of this business. We must conquer the South. Afterward we must be prepared to do its police in its own behalf, and in behalf of its black population, whom this war must, without precipitation, emancipate. We must hold the South as the metropolitan police holds New York. All this is inevitable. Now I wish to enroll myself at once in the Police of the Nation, and for life, if the nation will take me. I do not see that I can put myself—experience and character—to any more useful use….. My experience in this short campaign with the Seventh assures me that volunteers are for one purpose and regular soldiers entirely another. We want regular soldiers for the cause of order in these anarchical countries, and we want men in command who, though they may be valuable as temporary satraps or proconsuls to make liberty possible where it is now impossible, will never under any circumstances be disloyal to Liberty, will always oppose any scheme of any one to constitute a military government, and will be ready, when the time comes, to imitate Washington. We must think of these things, and prepare for them….. Love to all the dear friends….. This trip has been all a lark to an old tramper like myself."

Later he writes,—

"It is the loveliest day of fullest spring. An aspen under the window whispers to me in a chorus of all its leaves, and when I look out, every leaf turns a sunbeam at me. I am writing in Viele's quarters in the villa of Somebody Stone, upon whose place or farm we are encamped. The man who built and set down these four great granite pillars in front of his house, for a carriage-porch, had an eye or two for a fine site. This seems to be the finest possible about Washington. It is a terrace called Meridian Hill, two miles north of Pennsylvania Avenue. The house commands the vista of the Potomac, all the plain of the city, and a charming lawn of delicious green, with oaks of first dignity just coming into leaf. It is lovely Nature, and the spot has snatched a grace from Art. The grounds are laid out after a fashion, and planted with shrubbery. The snowballs are at their snowballiest….. Have you heard or—how many times have you used the simile of some one, Bad-muss or Cadmus, or another hero, who sowed the dragon's teeth, and they came up dragoons a hundred-fold and infantry a thousand-fold? Nil admirari is, of course, my frame of mind; but I own astonishment at the crop of soldiers. They must ripen awhile, perhaps, before they are to be named quite soldiers. Ripening takes care of itself; and by the harvest-time they will be ready to cut down.

"I find that the men best informed about the South do not anticipate much severe fighting. Scott's Fabian policy will demoralize their armies. If the people do not bother the great Cunetator to death before he is ready to move to assured victory, he will make defeat impossible. Meanwhile there will be enough outwork going on, like those neat jobs in Missouri, to keep us all interested…… Know, O comrade, that I am already a corporal,—an acting corporal, selected by our commanding officer for my general effect of pipe-clay, my rapidity of heel and toe, my present arms, etc., but liable to be ousted by suffrage any moment. Quod faustum sit, … I had already been introduced to the Secretary of War….. I called at –'s and saw, with two or three others,– on the sofa. Him my prophetic soul named my uncle to be….. But in my uncle's house are many nephews, and whether nepotism or my transcendent merit will prevail we shall see. I have fun,—I get experience,—I see much,—it pays. Ah, yes! But in these fair days of May I miss my Staten Island. War stirs the pulse, but it wounds a little all the time.

"Compliment for me Tib [a little dog] and the Wisterias,—also the mares and the billiard-table. Ask – to give you t'other lump of sugar in my behalf…. Should – return, say that I regret not being present with an unpremeditated compliment, as thus,—'Ah! the first rose of summer!'…. I will try to get an enemy's button for –, should the enemy attack. If the Seventh returns presently, I am afraid I shall be obliged to return with them for a time. But I mean to see this job through, somehow."

In such an airy, sportive vein he wrote, with the firm purpose and the distinct thought visible under the sparkle. Before the regiment left Washington, as he has recorded, he said good-bye and went down the bay to Fortress Monroe. Of his unshrinking and sprightly industry, his good head, his warm heart, and cool hand, as a soldier, General Butler has given precious testimony to his family. "I loved him as a brother," the General writes of his young aid.

The last days of his life at Fortress Monroe were doubtless also the happiest. His energy and enthusiasm, and kind, winning ways, and the deep satisfaction of feeling that all his gifts could now be used as he would have them, showed him and his friends that his day had at length dawned. He was especially interested in the condition and fate of the slaves who escaped from the neighboring region and sought refuge at the fort. He had never for an instant forgotten the secret root of the treason which was desolating the land with war; and in his view there would be no peace until that root was destroyed. In his letters written from the fort he suggests plans of relief and comfort for the refugees; and one of his last requests was to a lady in New York for clothes for these poor pensioners. They were promptly sent, but reached the fort too late.

As I look over these last letters, which gush and throb with the fulness of his activity, and are so tenderly streaked with touches of constant affection and remembrance, yet are so calm and duly mindful of every detail, I do not think with an elder friend, in whom the wisdom of years has only deepened sympathy for all generous youthful impulse, of Virgil's Marcellus, "Heu, miserande puer!" but I recall rather, still haunted by Philip Sidney, what he wrote, just before his death, to his father-in-law, Walsingham,—"I think a wise and constant man ought never to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part truly."

The sketches of the campaign in Virginia, which Winthrop had commenced in this magazine, would have been continued, and have formed an invaluable memoir of the places, the men, and the operations of which he was a witness and a part. As a piece of vivid pictorial description, which gives the spirit as well as the spectacle, his "Washington as a Camp" is masterly. He knew not only what to see and to describe, but what to think; so that in his papers you are not at the mercy of a multitudinous mass of facts, but understand their value and relation. Immediately upon his arrival at Fort Monroe he had commenced a third article, which was to have occupied the place of this. It is inserted here just as he left it, with one brief addition only to make his known meaning more clear. The part called "Voices of the Contraband" was written previously, and is not paged in the manuscript. It was to have been introduced into the article; but it is placed first here, that the sequence of the paper, as far as the author had written it, may remain undisturbed.

VOICES OF THE CONTRABAND

Solvuntur risu tabulae. An epigram abolished slavery in the United States. Large wisdom, stated in fine wit, was the decision. "Negroes are contraband of war." "They are property," claim the owners. Very well! As General Butler takes contraband horses used in transport of munitions of war, so he takes contraband black creatures who tote the powder to the carts and flagellate the steeds. As he takes a spade used in hostile earthworks, so he goes a little farther off and takes the black muscle that wields the spade. As he takes the rations of the foe, so he takes the sable Soyer whose skilful hand makes those rations savory to the palates and digestible by the stomachs of the foe and so puts blood and nerve into them. As he took the steam-gun, so he now takes what might become the stoker of the steam part of that machine and the aimer of its gun part. As he takes the musket, so he seizes the object who in the Virginia army carries that musket on its shoulder until its master is ready to reach out a lazy hand, nonchalantly lift the piece, and carelessly pop a Yankee.

The third number of Winthrop's Sketches of the Campaign in Virginia begins here.

PHYSIOGNOMY OF FORTRESS MONROE

The "Adelaide" is a steamer plying between Baltimore and Norfolk. But as Norfolk has ceased to be a part of the United States, and is nowhere, the "Adelaide" goes no farther than Fortress Monroe, Old Point Comfort, the chief somewhere of this region. A lady, no doubt Adelaide herself, appears in alto rilievo on the paddle-box. She has a short waist, long skirt sans crinoline, leg-of-mutton sleeves, lofty bearing, and stands like Ariadne on an island of pedestal size, surrounded by two or more pre-Raphaelite trees. In the offing comes or goes a steamboat, also pre-Raphaelite; and if Ariadne Adelaide's Bacchus is on board, he is out of sight at the bar.

Such an Adelaide brought me in sight of Fortress Monroe at sunrise, May 29, 1861. The fort, though old enough to be full-grown, has not grown very tall upon the low sands of Old Point Comfort. It is a big house with a basement story and a garret. The roof is left off, and the stories between basement and garret have never been inserted.

But why not be technical? For basement read a tier of casemates, each with a black Cyclops of a big gun peering out; while above in the open air, with not even a parasol over their backs, lie the barbette guns, staring without a wink over sea and shore.

In peace, with a hundred or so soldiers here and there, this vast inclosure might seem a solitude. Now it is a busy city,—a city of one idea. I seem to recollect that D'Israeli said somewhere that every great city was founded on one idea and existed to develop it. This city, into which we have improvised a population, has its idea,—a unit of an idea with two halves. The east half is the recovery of Norfolk,—the west half the occupation of Richmond; and the idea complete is the education of Virginia's unmannerly and disloyal sons.

Why Secession did not take this great place when its defenders numbered a squad of officers and three hundred men is mysterious. Floyd and his gang were treacherous enough. What was it? Were they imbecile? Were they timid? Was there, till too late, a doubt whether the traitors at home in Virginia would sustain them in an overt act of such big overture as an attempt here? But they lost the chance, and with it lost the key of Virginia, which General Butler now holds, this 30th day of May, and will presently begin to turn in the lock.

Three hundred men to guard a mile and a half of ramparts! Three hundred to protect some sixty-five broad acres within the walls! But the place was a Thermopylae, and there was a fine old Leonidas at the head of its three hundred. He was enough to make Spartans of them. Colonel Dimmick was the man,—a quiet, modest, shrewd, faithful, Christian gentleman; and he held all Virginia at bay. The traitors knew, that, so long as the Colonel was here, these black muzzles with their white tompions, like a black eye with a white pupil, meant mischief. To him and his guns, flanking the approaches and ready to pile the moat full of Seceders, the country owes the safety of Fortress Monroe.

Within the walls are sundry nice old brick houses for officers' barracks. The jolly bachelors live in the casemates and the men in long barracks, now not so new or so convenient as they might be. In fact, the physiognomy of Fortress Monroe is not so neat, well-shorn, and elegant as a grand military post should be. Perhaps our Floyds, and the like, thought, if they kept everything in perfect order here, they, as Virginians, accustomed to general seediness, would not find themselves at home. But the new régime must change all this, and make this the biggest, the best equipped, and the model garrison of the country. For, of course, this must be strongly held for many, many years to come. It is idle to suppose that the dull louts we find here, not enlightened even enough to know that loyalty is the best policy, can be allowed the highest privilege of the moral, the intelligent, and the progressive,—self-government. Mind is said to march fast in our time; but mind must put on steam hereabouts to think and act for itself, without stern schooling, in half a century.

But no digressing! I have looked far away from the physiognomy of the fortress. Let us turn to the

PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE COUNTRY

The face of this county, Elizabeth City by name, is as flat as a Chinaman's. I can hardly wonder that the people here have retrograded, or rather, not advanced. This dull flat would make anybody dull and flat. I am no longer surprised at John Tyler. He has had a bare blank brick house, entitled sweetly Margarita Cottage, or some such tender epithet, at Hampton, a mile and a half from the fort. A summer in this site would make any man a bore. And as something has done this favor for His Accidency, I am willing to attribute it to the influence of locality.

The country is flat; the soil is fine sifted loam running to dust, as the air of England runs to fog; the woods are dense and beautiful and full of trees unknown to the parallel of New York; the roads are miserable cart-paths; the cattle are scalawags; so are the horses, not run away; so are the people, black and white, not run away; the crops are tolerable, where the invaders have not trampled them.

Altogether the whole concern strikes me as a failure. Captain John Smith & Co. might as well have stayed at home, if this is the result of the two hundred and thirty years' occupation. Apparently the colonists picked out a poor spot; and the longer they stayed, the worse fist they made of it. Powhattan, Pocahontas, and the others without pantaloons and petticoats, were really more serviceable colonists.

The farm-houses are mostly miserably mean habitations. I don't wonder the tenants were glad to make our arrival the excuse for running off. Here are men claiming to have been worth forty thousand dollars, half in biped property, half in all other kinds, and they lived in dens such as a drayman would have disdained and a hod-carrier only accepted on compulsion.

PHYSIOGNOMY OF WATER

Always beautiful! the sea cannot be spoilt. Our fleet enlivens it greatly. Here is the flag-ship "Cumberland" vis-à-vis the fort. Off to the left are the prizes, unlucky schooners, which ought to be carrying pine wood to the kitchens of New York, and new potatoes and green peas for the wood to operate upon. This region, by the way, is New York's watermelon patch for early melons; and if we do not conquer a peace here pretty soon, the Jersey fruit will have the market to itself.

Besides stately flag-ships and poor little bumboat schooners, transports are coming and going with regiments or provisions for the same. Here, too, are old acquaintances from the bay of New York,—the "Yankee," a lively tug,—the "Harriet Lane," coquettish and plucky,—the "Catiline," ready to reverse her name and put down conspiracy.

On the dock are munitions of war in heaps. Volunteer armies load themselves with things they do not need, and forget the essentials. The unlucky army-quartermaster's people, accustomed to the slow and systematic methods of the by-gone days at Fortress Monroe, fume terribly over these cargoes. The new men and the new manners of the new army do not altogether suit the actual men and manners of the obsolete army. The old men and the new must recombine. What we want now is the vigor of fresh people to utilize the experience of the experts. The Silver-Gray Army needs a frisky element interfused. On the other hand, the new army needs to be taught a lesson in method by the old; and the two combined will make the grand army of civilization.

THE FORCES

When I arrived, Fort Monroe and the neighborhood were occupied by two armies.

1. General Butler.

2. About six thousand men, here and at Newport's News.

Making together more than twelve thousand men.

Of the first army, consisting of the General, I will not speak. Let his past supreme services speak for him, as I doubt not the future will.

Next to the array of a man comes the army of men. Regulars a few, with many post officers, among them some very fine and efficient fellows. These are within the post. Also within is the Third Regiment of Massachusetts, under Colonel Wardrop, the right kind of man to have, and commanding a capital regiment of three-months men, neatly uniformed in gray, with cocked felt hats.