Volume I Part 7 (2/2)

It had been promised to us that we should start from La Crosse by the river steamer immediately on our arrival there; but on reaching La Crosse we found that the vessel destined to take us up the river had not yet come down. She was bringing a regiment from Minnesota, and under such circ.u.mstances some pardon might be extended to irregularities. This plea was made by one of the boat clerks in a very humble tone, and was fully accepted by us. The wonder was that at such a period all means of public conveyance were not put absolutely out of gear. One might surmise that when regiments were constantly being moved for the purposes of civil war, when the whole North had but the one object of collecting together a sufficient number of men to crush the South, ordinary travelling for ordinary purposes would be difficult, slow, and subject to sudden stoppages.

Such, however, was not the case either in the northern or western States. The trains ran much as usual, and those connected with the boats and railways were just as anxious as ever to secure pa.s.sengers.

The boat clerk at La Crosse apologised amply for the delay, and we sat ourselves down with patience to await the arrival of the second Minnesota regiment on its way to Was.h.i.+ngton.

During the four hours that we were kept waiting we were harboured on board a small steamer, and at about eleven the terribly harsh whistle that is made by the Mississippi boats informed us that the regiment was arriving. It came up to the quay in two steamers, 750 being brought in that which was to take us back, and 250 in a smaller one.

The moon was very bright, and great flaming torches were lit on the vessel's side, so that all the operations of the men were visible.

The two steamers had run close up, thrusting us away from the quay in their pa.s.sage, but doing it so gently that we did not even feel the motion. These large boats--and their size may be understood from the fact that one of them had just brought down 750 men,--are moved so easily and so gently that they come gliding in among each other without hesitation and without pause. On English waters we do not willingly run s.h.i.+ps against each other; and when we do so unwillingly, they b.u.mp and crush and crash upon each other, and timbers fly while men are swearing. But here there was neither cras.h.i.+ng nor swearing, and the boats noiselessly pressed against each other as though they were cased in muslin and crinoline.

I got out upon the quay and stood close by the plank, watching each man as he left the vessel and walked across towards the railway.

Those whom I had previously seen in tents were not equipped, but these men were in uniform and each bore his musket. Taking them all together they were as fine a set of men as I ever saw collected. No man could doubt on seeing them that they bore on their countenances the signs of higher breeding and better education than would be seen in a thousand men enlisted in England. I do not mean to argue from this that Americans are better than English. I do not mean to argue here that they are even better educated. My a.s.sertion goes to show that the men generally were taken from a higher level in the community than that which fills our own ranks. It was a matter of regret to me, here and on many subsequent occasions, to see men bound for three years to serve as common soldiers, who were so manifestly fitted for a better and more useful life. To me it is always a source of sorrow to see a man enlisted. I feel that the individual recruit is doing badly with himself--carrying himself and the strength and intelligence which belongs to him to a bad market. I know that there must be soldiers; but as to every separate soldier I regret that he should be one of them. And the higher is the cla.s.s from which such soldiers are drawn, the greater the intelligence of the men so to be employed, the deeper with me is that feeling of regret. But this strikes one much less in an old country than in a country that is new. In the old countries population is thick, and food sometimes scarce. Men can be spared, and any employment may be serviceable, even though that employment be in itself so unproductive as that of fighting battles or preparing for them. But in the western States of America every arm that can guide a plough is of incalculable value.

Minnesota was admitted as a State about three years before this time, and its whole population is not much above 150,000. Of this number perhaps 40,000 may be working men. And now this infant State with its huge territory and scanty population is called upon to send its heart's blood out to the war.

And it has sent its heart's best blood. Forth they came--fine, stalwart, well-grown fellows, looking to my eye as though they had as yet but faintly recognised the necessary severity of military discipline. To them hitherto the war had seemed to be an arena on which each might do something for his country, which that country would recognise. To themselves as yet--and to me also--they were a band of heroes, to be reduced by the compressing power of military discipline to the lower level, but more necessary position of a regiment of soldiers. Ah me! how terrible to them has been the breaking up of that delusion! When a poor yokel in England is enlisted with a s.h.i.+lling and a promise of unlimited beer and glory, one pities and if possible would save him. But with him the mode of life to which he goes may not be much inferior to that he leaves.

It may be that for him soldiering is the best trade possible in his circ.u.mstances. It may keep him from the hen-roosts, and perhaps from his neighbours' pantries; and discipline may be good for him.

Population is thick with us, and there are many whom it may be well to collect and make available under the strictest surveillance. But of these men whom I saw entering on their career upon the banks of the Mississippi, many were fathers of families, many were owners of lands, many were educated men capable of high aspirations,--all were serviceable members of their State. There were probably there not three or four of whom it would be well that the State should be rid.

As soldiers fit, or capable of being made fit for the duties they had undertaken, I could find but one fault with them. Their average age was too high. There were men among them with grizzled beards, and many who had counted thirty, thirty-five, and forty years. They had, I believe, devoted themselves with a true spirit of patriotism. No doubt each had some ulterior hope as to himself,--as has every mortal patriot. Regulus when he returned hopeless to Carthage, trusted that some Horace would tell his story. Each of these men from Minnesota looked probably forward to his reward; but the reward desired was of a high cla.s.s.

The first great misery to be endured by these regiments will be the military lesson of obedience which they must learn before they can be of any service. It always seemed to me when I came near them that they had not as yet recognized the necessary austerity of an officer's duty. Their idea of a captain was the stage idea of a leader of dramatic banditti, a man to be followed and obeyed as a leader, but to be obeyed with that free and easy obedience which is accorded to the reigning chief of the forty thieves. ”Wa'll Captain,”

I have heard a private say to his officer, as he sat on one seat in a railway-car with his feet upon the back of another. And the captain has looked as though he did not like it. The captain did not like it, but the poor private was being fast carried to that destiny which he would like still less. From the first I have had faith in the northern army; but from the first I have felt that the suffering to be endured by these free and independent volunteers would be very great. A man to be available as a private soldier must be compressed and belted in till he be a machine.

As soon as the men had left the vessel we walked over the side of it and took possession. ”I am afraid your cabin won't be ready for a quarter of an hour,” said the clerk. ”Such a body of men as that will leave some dirt after them.” I a.s.sured him of course that our expectations under such circ.u.mstances were very limited, and that I was fully aware that the boat and the boat's company were taken up with matters of greater moment than the carriage of ordinary pa.s.sengers. But to this he demurred altogether. ”The regiments were very little to them, but occasioned much trouble. Everything, however, should be square in fifteen minutes.” At the expiration of the time named the key of our state-room was given to us, and we found the appurtenances as clean as though no soldier had ever put his foot upon the vessel.

From La Crosse to St. Paul, the distance up the river is something over 200 miles, and from St. Paul down to Dubuque, in Iowa, to which we went on our return, the distance is 450 miles. We were therefore for a considerable time on board these boats; more so than such a journey may generally make necessary, as we were delayed at first by the soldiers, and afterwards by accidents, such as the breaking of a paddle-wheel, and other causes to which navigation on the Upper Mississippi seems to be liable. On the whole we slept on board four nights, and lived on board as many days. I cannot say that the life was comfortable, though I do not know that it could be made more so by any care on the part of the boat-owners. My first complaint would be against the great heat of the cabins. The Americans as a rule live in an atmosphere which is almost unbearable by an Englishman. To this cause, I am convinced, is to be attributed their thin faces, their pale skins, their unenergetic temperament,--unenergetic as regards physical motion,--and their early old age. The winters are long and cold in America, and mechanical ingenuity is far extended. These two facts together have created a system of stoves, hot-air pipes, steam chambers, and heating apparatus so extensive that from autumn till the end of spring all inhabited rooms are filled with the atmosphere of a hot oven. An Englishman fancies that he is to be baked, and for a while finds it almost impossible to exist in the air prepared for him. How the heat is engendered on board the river steamers I do not know, but it is engendered to so great a degree that the sitting-cabins are unendurable. The patient is therefore driven out at all hours into the outside balconies of the boat, or on to the top roof,--for it is a roof rather than a deck,--and there as he pa.s.ses through the air at the rate of twenty miles an hour, finds himself chilled to the very bones. That is my first complaint. But as the boats are made for Americans, and as Americans like hot air, I do not put it forward with any idea that a change ought to be effected. My second complaint is equally unreasonable, and is quite as incapable of a remedy as the first. Nine-tenths of the travellers carry children with them. They are not tourists engaged on pleasure excursions, but men and women intent on the business of life. They are moving up and down, looking for fortune, and in search of new homes. Of course they carry with them all their household goods. Do not let any critic say that I grudge these young travellers their right to locomotion. Neither their right to locomotion is grudged by me, nor any of those privileges which are accorded in America to the rising generation. The habits of their country and the choice of their parents give to them full dominion over all hours and over all places, and it would ill become a foreigner to make such habits and such choice a ground of serious complaint. But nevertheless the uncontrolled energies of twenty children round one's legs do not convey comfort or happiness, when the pa.s.sing events are producing noise and storm rather than peace and suns.h.i.+ne. I must protest that American babies are an unhappy race. They eat and drink just as they please; they are never punished; they are never banished, snubbed, and kept in the back ground as children are kept with us; and yet they are wretched and uncomfortable. My heart has bled for them as I have heard them squalling by the hour together in agonies of discontent and dyspepsia. Can it be, I wonder, that children are happier when they are made to obey orders and are sent to bed at six o'clock, than when allowed to regulate their own conduct; that bread and milk are more favourable to laughter and soft childish ways than beef-steaks and pickles three times a day; that an occasional whipping, even, will conduce to rosy cheeks? It is an idea which I should never dare to broach to an American mother; but I must confess that after my travels on the western continent my opinions have a tendency in that direction. Beef-steaks and pickles certainly produce smart little men and women. Let that be taken for granted. But rosy laughter and winning childish ways are, I fancy, the produce of bread and milk. But there was a third reason why travelling on these boats was not as pleasant as I had expected. I could not get my fellow-travellers to talk to me. It must be understood that our fellow-travellers were not generally of that cla.s.s which we Englishmen, in our pride, designate as gentlemen and ladies. They were people, as I have said, in search of new homes and new fortunes.

But I protest that as such they would have been in those parts much more agreeable as companions to me than any gentlemen or any ladies, if only they would have talked to me. I do not accuse them of any incivility. If addressed, they answered me. If application was made by me for any special information, trouble was taken to give it me. But I found no apt.i.tude, no wish for conversation; nay, even a disinclination to converse. In the western States I do not think that I was ever addressed first by an American sitting next to me at table. Indeed I never held any conversation at a public table in the West. I have sat in the same room with men for hours, and have not had a word spoken to me. I have done my very best to break through this ice, and have always failed. A western American man is not a talking man. He will sit for hours over a stove with his cigar in his mouth, and his hat over his eyes, chewing the cud of reflection.

A dozen will sit together in the same way, and there shall not be a dozen words spoken between them in an hour. With the women one's chance of conversation is still worse. It seemed as though the cares of the world had been too much for them, and that all talking excepting as to business,--demands for instance on the servants for pickles for their children,--had gone by the board. They were generally hard, dry, and melancholy. I am speaking of course of aged females,--from five and twenty perhaps to thirty, who had long since given up the amus.e.m.e.nts and levities of life. I very soon abandoned any attempt at drawing a word from these ancient mothers of families; but not the less did I ponder in my mind over the circ.u.mstances of their lives. Had things gone with them so sadly, was the struggle for independence so hard, that all the softness of existence had been trodden out of them? In the cities too it was much the same. It seemed to me that a future mother of a family in those parts had left all laughter behind her when she put out her finger for the wedding ring.

For these reasons I must say that life on board these steam-boats was not as pleasant as I had hoped to find it, but for our discomfort in this respect we found great atonement in the scenery through which we pa.s.sed. I protest that of all the river scenery that I know, that of the Upper Mississippi is by far the finest and the most continued.

One thinks of course of the Rhine; but, according to my idea of beauty, the Rhine is nothing to the Upper Mississippi. For miles upon miles, for hundreds of miles, the course of the river runs through low hills, which are there called bluffs. These bluffs rise in every imaginable form, looking sometimes like large straggling unwieldy castles, and then throwing themselves into sloping lawns which stretch back away from the river till the eye is lost in their twists and turnings. Landscape beauty, as I take it, consists mainly in four attributes: in water, in broken land, in scattered timber,--timber scattered as opposed to continuous forest timber,--and in the accident of colour. In all these particulars the banks of the Upper Mississippi can hardly be beaten. There are no high mountains; but high mountains themselves are grand rather than beautiful. There are no high mountains, but there is a succession of hills which group themselves for ever without monotony. It is perhaps the ever-variegated forms of these bluffs which chiefly const.i.tute the wonderful loveliness of this river. The idea constantly occurs that some point on every hillside would form the most charming site ever yet chosen for a n.o.ble residence. I have pa.s.sed up and down rivers clothed to the edge with continuous forest. This at first is grand enough, but the eye and feeling soon become weary. Here the trees are scattered so that the eye pa.s.ses through them, and ever and again a long lawn sweeps back into the country, and up the steep side of a hill, making the traveller long to stay there and linger through the oaks, and climb the bluffs, and lie about on the bold but easy summits. The boat, however, steams quickly up against the current, and the happy valleys are left behind, one quickly after another.

The river is very various in its breadth, and is constantly divided by islands. It is never so broad that the beauty of the banks is lost in the distance or injured by it. It is rapid, but has not the beautifully bright colour of some European rivers,--of the Rhine for instance, and the Rhone. But what is wanting in the colour of the water is more than compensated by the wonderful hues and l.u.s.tre of the sh.o.r.es. We visited the river in October, and I must presume that they who seek it solely for the sake of scenery should go there in that month. It was not only that the foliage of the trees was bright with every imaginable colour, but that the gra.s.s was bronzed, and that the rocks were golden. And this beauty did not last only for a while and then cease. On the Rhine there are lovely spots and special morsels of scenery with which the traveller becomes duly enraptured.

But on the Upper Mississippi there are no special morsels. The position of the sun in the heavens will, as it always does, make much difference in the degree of beauty. The hour before and the half-hour after sunset are always the loveliest for such scenes. But of the sh.o.r.es themselves one may declare that they are lovely throughout those 400 miles which run immediately south from St. Paul.

About half-way between La Crosse and St. Paul we came upon Lake Pepin, and continued our course up the lake for perhaps fifty or sixty miles. This expanse of water is narrow for a lake, and by those who know the lower courses of great rivers, would hardly be dignified by that name. But, nevertheless, the breadth here lessens the beauty.

There are the same bluffs, the same scattered woodlands, and the same colours. But they are either at a distance, or else they are to be seen on one side only. The more that I see of the beauty of scenery, and the more I consider its elements, the stronger becomes my conviction that size has but little to do with it, and rather detracts from it than adds to it. Distance gives one of its greatest charms, but it does so by concealing rather than displaying an expanse of surface. The beauty of distance arises from the romance,--the feeling of mystery which it creates. It is like the beauty of woman which allures the more the more that it is veiled.

But open, uncovered land and water, mountains which simply rise to great heights with long unbroken slopes, wide expanses of lake, and forests which are monotonous in their continued thickness, are never lovely to me. A landscape should always be partly veiled, and display only half its charms.

To my taste the finest stretch of the river was that immediately above Lake Pepin; but then, at this point, we had all the glory of the setting sun. It was like fairy land, so bright were the golden hues, so fantastic were the shapes of the hills, so broken and twisted the course of the waters! But the noisy steamer went groaning up the narrow pa.s.sages with almost unabated speed, and left the fairy land behind all too quickly. Then the bell would ring for tea, and the children with the beef-steaks, the pickled onions, and the light fixings would all come over again. The care-laden mothers would tuck the bibs under the chins of their tyrant children, and some embryo senator of four years old would listen with concentrated attention, while the negro servant recapitulated to him the delicacies of the supper-table, in order that he might make his choice with due consideration. ”Beef-steak,” the embryo four-year old senator would lisp, ”and stewed potato, and b.u.t.tered toast, and corn cake, and coffee,--and--and--and--; mother, mind you get me the pickles.”

St. Paul enjoys the double privilege of being the commercial and political capital of Minnesota. The same is the case with Boston in Ma.s.sachusetts, but I do not remember another instance in which it is so. It is built on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, though the bulk of the State lies to the west of the river. It is noticeable as the spot up to which the river is navigable. Immediately above St.

Paul there are narrow rapids up which no boat can pa.s.s. North of this, continuous navigation does not go; but from St. Paul down to New Orleans, and the Gulf of Mexico, it is uninterrupted. The distance to St. Louis in Missouri, a town built below the confluence of the three rivers, Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois, is 900 miles; and then the navigable waters down to the gulf wash a southern country of still greater extent. No river on the face of the globe forms a highway for the produce of so wide an extent of agricultural land. The Mississippi with its tributaries carried to market, before the war, the produce of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This country is larger than England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Belgium, France, Germany and Spain together, and is undoubtedly composed of much more fertile land. The States named comprise the great centre valley of the continent, and are the farming lands and garden grounds of the western world. He who has not seen corn on the ground in Illinois or Minnesota, does not know to what extent the fertility of land may go, or how great may be the weight of cereal crops. And for all this the Mississippi was the high road to market. When the crop of 1861 was garnered this high road was stopped by the war. What suffering this entailed on the South, I will not here stop to say, but on the West the effect was terrible. Corn was in such plenty, Indian corn that is, or maize, that it was not worth the farmer's while to prepare it for market.

When I was in Illinois the second quality of Indian corn when sh.e.l.led was not worth more than from eight to ten cents a bushel. But the sh.e.l.ling and preparation are laborious, and in some instances it was found better to burn it for fuel than to sell it. Respecting the export of corn from the West, I must say a further word or two in the next chapter; but it seemed to be indispensable that I should point out here how great to the United States is the need of the Mississippi. Nor is it for corn and wheat only that its waters are needed. Timber, lead, iron, coal, pork, all find, or should find, their exit to the world at large by this road. There are towns on it, and on its tributaries, already holding more than one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The number of Cincinnati exceeds that, as also does the number of St. Louis. Under these circ.u.mstances it is not wonderful that the States should wish to keep in their own hands the navigation of this river.

It is not wonderful. But it will not, I think, be admitted by the politicians of the world, that the navigation of the Mississippi need be closed against the West, even though the southern States should succeed in raising themselves to the power and dignity of a separate nationality. If the waters of the Danube be not open to Austria, it is through the fault of Austria. That the subject will be one of trouble no man can doubt; and of course it would be well for the North to avoid that, or any other trouble. In the meantime the importance of this right of way must be admitted; and it must be admitted also that whatever may be the ultimate resolve of the North, it will be very difficult to reconcile the West to a divided dominion of the Mississippi.

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