Part 35 (1/2)
ANDOVER, Ma.s.s., _August 15, 1862_.
CAPTAIN HUNT,--My eldest son has enlisted in your company. I send you his younger brother. He is, and always has been, in perfect health, of more than the ordinary power of endurance, honest, truthful, and courageous. I doubt not you will find him on trial all you can ask, except his age, and that I am sorry to say is only sixteen; yet if our country needs his service, take him.
Your obedient servant,
SAMUEL RAYMOND.
The boy went forth to real service, and to successive battles at Kingston, at Whitehall, and at Goldsborough; and in all this did his duty bravely and faithfully. He met the temptations and dangers of a soldier's life with the pure-hearted firmness of a Christian child, neither afraid nor ashamed to remember his baptismal vows, his Sunday-school teachings, and his mother's wishes.
He had pa.s.sed his promise to his mother against drinking and smoking, and held it with a simple, childlike steadiness. When in the midst of malarious swamps, physicians and officers advised the use of tobacco.
The boy writes to his mother: ”A great many have begun to smoke, but I shall not do it without your permission, though I think it does a great deal of good.”
In his leisure hours, he was found in his tent reading; and before battle he prepared his soul with the beautiful psalms and collects for the day, as appointed by his church, and writes with simplicity to his friends:--
”I prayed G.o.d that he would watch over me, and if I fell, receive my soul in heaven; and I also prayed that I might not forget the cause I was fighting for, and turn my back in fear.”
After nine months' service, he returned with a soldier's experience, though with a frame weakened by sickness in a malarious region. But no sooner did health and strength return than he again enlisted, in the Ma.s.sachusetts cavalry service, and pa.s.sed many months of constant activity and adventure, being in some severe skirmishes and battles with that portion of Sheridan's troops who approached nearest to Richmond, getting within a mile and a half of the city. At the close of this raid, so hard had been the service, that only thirty horses were left out of seventy-four in his company, and Walter and two others were the sole survivors among eight who occupied the same tent.
On the sixteenth of August, Walter was taken prisoner in a skirmish; and from the time that this news reached his parents, until the 18th of the following March, they could ascertain nothing of his fate. A general exchange of prisoners having been then effected, they learned that he had died on Christmas Day in Salisbury Prison, of hards.h.i.+p and privation.
What these hards.h.i.+ps were is, alas! easy to be known from those too well-authenticated accounts published by our government of the treatment experienced by our soldiers in the Rebel prisons.
Robbed of clothing, of money, of the soldier's best friend, his sheltering blanket,--herded in s.h.i.+vering nakedness on the bare ground,--deprived of every implement by which men of energy and spirit had soon bettered their lot,--forbidden to cut in adjacent forests branches for shelter, or fuel to cook their coa.r.s.e food,--fed on a pint of corn-and-cob-meal per day, with some slight addition of mola.s.ses or rancid meat,--denied all mental resources, all letters from home, all writing to friends,--these men were cut off from the land of the living while yet they lived,--they were made to dwell in darkness as those that have been long dead.
By such slow, lingering tortures,--such weary, wasting anguish and sickness of body and soul,--it was the infernal policy of the Rebel government either to wring from them an abjuration of their country, or by slow and steady draining away of the vital forces to render them forever unfit to serve in her armies.
Walter's const.i.tution bore four months of this usage, when death came to his release. A fellow sufferer, who was with him in his last hours, brought the account to his parents.
Through all his terrible privations, even the lingering pains of slow starvation, Walter preserved his steady simplicity, his faith in G.o.d, and unswerving fidelity to the cause for which he was suffering.
When the Rebels had kept the prisoners fasting for days, and then brought in delicacies to tempt their appet.i.te, hoping thereby to induce them to desert their flag, he only answered, ”I would rather be carried out in that dead-cart!”
When told by some that he must steal from his fellow sufferers, as many did, in order to relieve the pangs of hunger, he answered, ”No, I was not brought up to that!” And so when his weakened system would no longer receive the cobmeal which was his princ.i.p.al allowance, he set his face calmly towards death. He grew gradually weaker and weaker and fainter and fainter, and at last disease of the lungs set in, and it became apparent that the end was at hand.
On Christmas Day, while thousands among us were bowing in our garlanded churches or surrounding festive tables, this young martyr lay on the cold, damp ground, watched over by his dest.i.tute friends, who sought to soothe his last hours with such scanty comforts as their utter poverty afforded,--raising his head on the block of wood which was his only pillow, and moistening his brow and lips with water, while his life ebbed slowly away, until about two o'clock, when he suddenly roused himself, stretched out his hand, and, drawing to him his dearest friend among those around him, said, in a strong, clear voice:--
”I am going to die. Go tell my father I am ready to die, for I die for G.o.d and my country,”--and, looking up with a triumphant smile, he pa.s.sed to the reward of the faithful.
And now, men and brethren, if this story were a single one, it were worthy to be had in remembrance; but Walter Raymond is not the only n.o.ble-hearted boy or man that has been slowly tortured and starved and done to death, by the fiendish policy of Jefferson Davis and Robert Edmund Lee. No,--wherever this simple history shall be read, there will arise hundreds of men and women who will testify, ”Just so died my son!” ”So died my brother!” ”So died my husband!” ”So died my father!” The numbers who have died in these lingering tortures are to be counted, not by hundreds, or even by thousands, but by tens of thousands.
And is there to be no retribution for a cruelty so vast, so aggravated, so cowardly and base? And if there is retribution, on whose head should it fall? Shall we seize and hang the poor, ignorant, stupid, imbruted semi-barbarians who were set as jailers to keep these h.e.l.ls of torment and inflict these insults and cruelties? or shall we punish the educated, intelligent chiefs who were the head and brain of the iniquity?
If General Lee had been determined not to have prisoners starved or abused, does any one doubt that he could have prevented these things?
n.o.body doubts it. His raiment is red with the blood of his helpless captives. Does any one doubt that Jefferson Davis, living in ease and luxury in Richmond, knew that men were dying by inches in filth and squalor and privation in the Libby Prison, within bowshot of his own door? n.o.body doubts it. It was his will, his deliberate policy, thus to destroy those who fell into his hands. The chief of a so-called Confederacy, who could calmly consider among his official doc.u.ments incendiary plots for the secret destruction of s.h.i.+ps, hotels, and cities full of peaceable people, is a chief well worthy to preside over such cruelties; but his only just t.i.tle is President of a.s.sa.s.sins, and the whole civilized world should make common cause against such a miscreant.
There has been, on both sides of the water, much weak, ill-advised talk of mercy and magnanimity to be extended to these men, whose crimes have produced a misery so vast and incalculable. The wretches who have tortured the weak and the helpless, who have secretly plotted to supplement, by dastardly schemes of murder and arson, that strength which failed them in fair fight, have been commiserated as brave generals and unfortunate patriots, and efforts are made to place them within the comities of war.
It is no feeling of personal vengeance, but a sense of the eternal fitness of things, that makes us rejoice, when criminals who have so outraged every sentiment of humanity are arrested and arraigned and awarded due retribution at the bar of their country's justice. There are crimes against G.o.d and human nature which it is treason alike to G.o.d and man not to punish; and such have been the crimes of the traitors who were banded together in Richmond.