The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864

But, although, for the time being, the excitement of actual war silences the murmurs of the Progress party, the substantial occasion for them is not removed. On the contrary, there is reason to expect that the contest will become still more earnest. Only one turn of events can avert this: the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark in consequence of the present war. If this is not the result, if nothing more is accomplished than the restoration of the duchy to its former condition, the king will lose the support of many Conservatives, and be still more bitterly opposed by the Liberals. In addition to this is to be considered that the war is carried on in spite of the refusal of the diet to authorize the requisite loan; that, moreover, after vainly seeking to secure this vote from the delegates, Minister Bismarck, in the name of the king, prorogued the diet on the 25th of January, 1864, telling the Delegates plainly that the money must be had, and accordingly that, if its use were not regularly authorized, it must be taken by the Government without such authority. His spirit may be gathered from a single remark among the many bitter things which he had to say in the closing days of the session: 'In order to gain your confidence, one must give one's self up to you; what then would the ministers in future be but Parliamentary ministers? To this condition, please God, we shall not be reduced.' The spirit of the delegates is expressed in the question of one of their number: 'Why does the Minister of State ask us to authorize the loan, if he has no need of our consent—if we have not the right to say

No

?' Brilliant successes of the Prussian arms, accomplishing substantially the result for which the German people are all earnestly longing, may restore the Government to temporary favor, and weaken the Progress party; otherwise, as many Conservatives themselves confess, the king will have paralyzed the arms of his own friends.

What is to be the end of this conflict between the Prussian Government and the Prussian people? Without attempting to play the prophet's part, we close by mentioning some considerations which must be taken into account in forming a judgment. Although we have little doubt that the present policy of the Government will not be permanently adhered to, we do not anticipate any speedy or violent rupture. The case is in many respects parallel to that of the quarrel between Charles I. and his Parliaments; but the points of difference are sufficient to warrant the expectation of a somewhat different result. Especially these: Charles had no army of such size and efficiency that he could bid defiance to the demands of his Parliament; on the contrary, the Prussian army is, in times of peace, two hundred thousand strong, and can, in case of need, be at once trebled; moreover, soldiers must take an oath of allegiance to the king, not, however, to the constitution. Of this army the king is the head, and with it under his control he can feel tolerably secure against the danger of a popular outbreak. Again, the English revolutionists had little to fear from Continental interference; Prussia, on the contrary, is so situated that a revolution there could hardly fail to provoke neighboring monarchies to assist in putting it down. There is no such oppression weighing the people down that they would be willing to run this risk in an attempt to remove it. Again, the Liberals hope, and not without reason, that they will eventually secure what they wish by peaceable means. There is little doubt that, if they pursue a moderate course, neither resorting to violence nor threatening to do so, themselves avoiding all violations of the constitution, while compelling the Government, in case it will not yield, to commit such violations openly, their cause will gradually grow so strong that the king will ultimately see the hopelessness of longer resisting it. Or, once more, even if the present king, whose self-will is such that he may possibly persevere in his present course through his reign, does not yield, it is understood that the heir apparent is inclined to adopt a more liberal policy whenever he ascends the throne, an event which cannot be very long distant. Were he supposed fully to sympathize with his father, the danger of a violent solution of the difficulty would be greater. But, as the case stands, it may not be considered strange if the conflict lasts several years longer without undergoing any essential modification.

There is no prospect that the dissension will be ended by mutual concessions. This might be done, if mutual confidence existed between the contending parties; but of such confidence there is a total lack. So great is the estrangement that the original occasion of it is lost sight of. Neither party cares so much about securing the success of its favorite measures as about defeating the measures of its opponent. Either the possibility of such a relation of the king to the Parliament was not entertained when the constitution was drawn up, or it is a great deficiency that no provision was made for it; or (as we should prefer to say) the difficulty may have been foreseen and yet no provision have been made for it, simply because none could have been made consistently with Frederick William IV.'s maxim, 'A free people under a free king'—a maxim which sounds well, but which, when the people are bent on going in one way and the king in another, is difficult to reconcile with the requirement of the constitution that both must go in the same way. In a republic, where the legislature and chief magistrate are both chosen representatives of one people, no protracted disagreement between them is possible. In a monarchy where a ministry, which has lost the confidence of the legislature, resigns its place to another, the danger is hardly greater. But in a monarchy whose constitution provides that king and people shall rule jointly, yet both act freely and independently, nothing but the most paradisiacal state of humanity could secure mutual satisfaction and continued harmony. Prussia is now demonstrating to the world that, if the people of a nation are to have in the national legislation anything more than an advisory power, they must have a determining power. To say that the king shall have the unrestricted right of declaring and making war, and at the same time that no money can be used without the free consent of Parliament, is almost fit to be called an Irish bull. Such mutual freedom is impossible except when king and Parliament perfectly agree in reference to the war itself. But, if this agreement exists, there is either no need of a Parliament or no need of a king. It makes little difference how the constitution is worded in this particular, nor even what was intended by the author of this provision. What is in itself an intrinsic contradiction cannot be carried out in practice. Whether any formal change is made in the constitution or not, a different mode of interpreting it, a different conception of the relation of monarch to subject, must become current, if the constitution is to be a working instrument. Prussia must become again practically an absolute monarchy or a constitutional monarchy like England. Nor is there much doubt which of these possibilities will be realized. And not the least among the causes which will hasten the final triumph of Liberalism there, is the exhibition of the strength of republicanism here, while undergoing its present trial. When one observes how many of the more violent Prussian Conservatives openly sympathize with the rebels, and most of the others fail to do so only because they dislike slavery; when one sees, on the other hand, how anxiously the Prussian Liberals are waiting and hoping for the complete demonstration of the ability of our Government to outride the storm which has threatened its destruction, the cause in which we are engaged becomes invested with a new sacredness. Our success will not only secure the blessings of a free Government to the succeeding generations of this land, but will give a stimulus to free principles in every part of the globe. If 'Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell' at the hands of despotism, a longer and sadder wail would mark the fall of American republicanism, wounded and slain in the house of its friends.

'YE KNOW NOT WHAT YE ASK.'

One morn in spring, when earth lay robed

In resurrection bloom,

I turned away my tear-veiled eyes,

Feeling the glow but gloom,

And asked my God one boon I craved,

Or earth were living tomb.

One autumn morn, when all the world

In ripened glory lay,

I turned to God my shining eyes,

And praised Him for that day,

When asking

curses

 with my lips,

He turned His ear away.

COMING UP AT SHILOH

The rain, which had been falling steadily since shortly after midnight, ceased at daybreak. The morning dawned slowly and moodily, above the wooded hilltops that rose steeply from the farther bank of the creek close by, right over against the cornfield, in which, on the preceding evening, we had comfortably pitched our camp. The bugle wound an early reveille; then came the call to strike tents, though one half of the brigade was yet busy in hurried preparations for breakfast, and presently the assembly sounded. We were on the march again by the time the sun would have liked to greet us with his broad, level-thrown smile for 'good morning,' if the sky had been clear and open enough, instead of covered, as it was on this damp, chilly April morning, with dull, sullen masses of cloud that seemed still nursing their ill humor and bent on having another outbreak. The road was heavy; an old, worn stage-coach road, of a slippery, treacherous clay, which the trampings of our advanced regiments speedily kneaded into a tough, stiff dough, forming a track that was enough to try the wind and bottom of the best. For some miles, too, the route was otherwise a difficult one—hilly, and leading by two or three tedious crossings in single file over fords, where now were rushing turbid, swollen streams, gorging and overflowing their banks everywhere in the channels, which nine months out of the twelve give passage to innocent brooklets only, that the natives of these parts may cross barefoot without wetting an ankle. Spite of these drawbacks, the men were in fine spirits; for this was the end of our weary march from Nashville, and we were sure now of a few days' rest and quiet.

A few minutes after midday we reached Savannah, and were ordered at once into camp. By this time the sky had cleared, the sun was shining brightly, though, as it seemed, with an effort; the wind, which had been freshening ever since morning, was blowing strong and settled from out the blue west, and the earth was drying rapidly. The Sixth Ohio and a comrade regiment of the Tenth Brigade pitched their tents in an old and well-cleared camping ground, on a gently sloping rise looking toward the town from the southeastward; a little too far from the river to quite take in, in its prospect, the landing with its flotilla of transports and the gunboats which they told us were lying there, yet not so far but we could easily discern the smoke floating up black and dense from the boats' chimney stacks, and hear the long-drawn, labored puffs of the escape pipes, and the shrill signals of the steam whistles. Altogether our camping ground was eligible, dry, and pleasant.

It was on Saturday, the fifth day of April, 1862, that the Fourth division, being the advance corps of the Army of the Ohio, came thus to Savannah, and so was brought within actual supporting distance of the forces under General Grant at Pittsburg Landing, twelve miles up the farther bank of the Tennessee. General Crittenden's division encamped that evening three hours' march behind us. Still farther in the rear were coming in succession the divisions of McCook, Wood, and Thomas. It was well that such reënforcements were at hand; otherwise, unless we disregarded the best-established laws of probabilities in deciding the question, the Army of the Tennessee was even then a doomed one, and the story of Shiloh must have gone to the world a sad, tragic tale of the most crushing defeat which had ever fallen upon an army since the days of Waterloo. No mean service, then, was rendered the national cause, and all which that cause will stand out as the embodiment of, in all the ages to come, when Shiloh was saved, and Treason was forced to turn, faint, and stagger away from the field to which it had rushed with a fiend's exultant eagerness, having there met only its own discomture. The meed due for that service is a coronal of glory, that may never, probably, be claimed as the desert of any

one

 individual exclusively; nor is it likely that the epitaph, enchiselled upon whose tombstone soever it might be, 'Here lies the saviour of Shiloh,' would pass one hour unchallenged. Yet impartial history can scarcely be at fault in recognizing as preëminent the part taken by one officer, in the events, whose results, at least, permit so much of eulogy to be written, with other significance than merely that of a wretched burlesque. That officer was General Nelson, the commander of our own division. Iron-nerved, indomitable, willfull, disdainful of pleasing with studied phrase of unmeant compliment, but with a great, manly heart beating strong in his bosom, and a nature grandly earnest, brave, and true—with the very foremost of Kentucky's loyal sons will ever stand the name of General William Nelson.

Our column had marched from Nashville out on the Franklin turnpike, nearly three weeks previous. General McCook, as the senior divisional commander, had claimed the advance, and had held it in our march through that beautiful, cultivated garden spot of Middle Tennessee, as far as Columbia, a distance of nearly fifty miles. Here the turnpike and the railroad bridges over Duck river had both been destroyed by the rebels in their forlorn retreat from the northward. To replace the former even with a tottering wooden structure, was a work of time and labor. Meanwhile the army waited wearily, General Nelson chafed at the delay, and the rebel leaders Beauregard and Sidney Johnston were concentrating their forces at Corinth with ominous celerity. It was their purpose to crush, at one blow, so suddenly and so surely dealt that succor should be impossible, the National army, which had established itself on the borders of one of the southernmost States of the Confederacy, and was menacing lines of communication of prime necessity to their maintenance of the defensive line within which those commanders had withdrawn their discomfited armies. At length, one evening, on dress parade, there were read 'General orders, headquarters Fourth division,' for a march at daylight the next morning. Some days would yet be required to complete the bridge, but permission had been wrung from the 'commanding general' to cross the river by fording, and comically minute the detailed instructions of that order were for accomplishing the feat.

So on Saturday, the twenty-ninth of March, we passed over Duck river. Other divisions immediately followed. By his importunity and characteristic energy, General Nelson had thus secured for us the advance for the seventy-five miles that remained of the march, and, incalculably more than this, had gained days of precious time for the entire army. How many hours later the Army of the Ohio might have appeared at Shiloh in season to stay the tide of disaster and rescue the field at last, let those tell who can recall the scenes of that awful Sabbath day there on the banks of the Tennessee.

General Grant had established his headquarters at Savannah, and there immediately upon our arrival our commander reported his division. Long before night, camp rumors had complacently decided our disposition for the present. Three days at Savannah to allow the other corps of our army to come up with us, and then, by one more easy stage, we could all move together up to Pittsburg Landing, and take position beside the Army of the Tennessee. It was a very comfortable programme, and not the least of its recommendations was the earnest of its faithful carrying out, which appeared in the unusual regard to mathematical precision that our officers had shown in 'laying off camp,' and the painstaking care they had required on our part in establishing it.

There was but an inconsiderable force here, composed for the most part of new troops from two or three States of the Northwest. I remember, especially, one regiment from Wisconsin, made up of great, brawny, awkward fellows—backwoodsmen and lumbermen chiefly—who followed us to Shiloh on the next evening, and through the whole of Monday fought and suffered like heroes, as they were. Our first inquiries, quite naturally, were concerning our comrade army, and the enemy confronting it at Corinth. Varied and incongruous enough was the information that we gleaned, and in some details requiring a simple credulity that nine months of active campaigning had quite jostled and worried out of us. It seemed settled, however, that our comrades up the river were a host formidable in numbers and of magnificent armament and

material

; altogether very well able to take care of themselves, at least until we could join them at our leisure.

There were some things which, if we had more carefully considered them, might, perhaps, have abated somewhat this pleasant conviction of security. The enemy had lately grown wonderfully bold and venturesome—skirmishing with picket outposts, bullying reconnoitring parties, and picking quarrels upon unconscionably slight provocation almost daily. He had even challenged our gunboats, disputing the passage up the river in an artillery duello at the Bluffs, not far above the Landing, whose hoarse, sullen rumbling had reached us where we were resting on that Thursday afternoon, at the distance of thirty miles back toward Nashville. But, then, on how few fields had Southern chivalry ever yet ventured to attack; how seldom, but when fairly cornered, had its champions deemed discretion

not

 the better part of valor! What other possibility was there which was not more likely to become an actuality than that the enemy would here dare to assume the aggressive? Who that had the least regard for the dramatic proprieties, could ever assign to him any other part in the tragedy than one whose featliest display of skill and dexterity should be exhibited in executing the movements of guard and parry, and whose noblest performance should be to stand at bay, resolutely contending upon a hopeless field to meet a Spartan death? So we cast aside all serious thought of immediate danger at Pittsburg Landing, the sanguine temperaments pronouncing these demonstrations of a foe who had shown our army only his heels all the way from Bowling Green and Fort Donelson, really diverting from their very audacity.

At sunset, the Sixth held dress parade—the first since our march from Columbia; but I, on duty that day as one of the 'reserve guard,' was merely a looker-on. I was never prouder of the old regiment; it went through with the manual of arms so well—and then there were so many spectators present from other regiments. Orders were given to prepare for a thorough inspection of arms and equipments at ten o'clock on the next morning, then parade was dismissed, and so the day ended. The wind died away, and the night deepened, cool, tranquil, starlit, on a camp of weary soldiery, where contentment and good will ruled for the hour over all.

Beautifully clear and calm the Sabbath morning dawned, April 6th, 1862; rather chilly, indeed, for it was yet in the budding time of spring. But the sky was so blue and cloudless, the air so still, and all nature lay smiling so serene and fair in the glad sunshine—it was a day such as that whereon the Creator may have looked upon the new-born earth, and 'saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good;' a day as if chosen from all its fellows and consecrated to a hallowed quiet, the blessedness of prayer and thanksgiving, praise and worship.

Hardly a man in our division, I believe, but awoke that morning with a happy consciousness of long hours that this day were to be his own, and a clear idea of just how he should improve them. My programme was the general one, and simple enough it was. First, of course, to make ready for inspection, and, that ceremony well gotten through with, to enact the familiar performance of every man his own washerwoman and seamstress: the remainder of the day should be devoted to the soldier's sacred delight of correspondence—to completing a letter to Wynne, begun back at Columbia, and writing home. Out by the smouldering fire, where the cooks of our mess had prepared breakfast nearly two hours before, I was busily at work furbishing with the new dust-fine ashes the brasses of my accoutrements, when the boom of cannon burst on the air, rolling heavily from away to the southward up from what we knew must be the neighborhood of the camps at Pittsburg Landing. It was after seven o'clock. The sun was mounting over the scrubby oak copse behind our camp, and the day grew warm apace. Another and still another explosion followed in quick succession.

What could it mean? Only the gunboats, some suggested, shelling guerillas out of the woods somewhere along the river bank. Impossible; too near, too far to the right, for that. It could hardly be artillery practice merely; for to-day was the Sabbath. And the youngest soldier among us knew better than to give those rapid, furious volleys the interpretation of a formal military salute. Could it really be—battle?

Every man almost was out and listening intently. Louder and fiercer the reports came, though still irregular. Now and then, in the intervals, a low, quick crepitation reached us, an undertone that no soldier could fail to recognize as distant musketry. Ominous sounds they were, portending—what? What, indeed, if not actual battle? If a battle, then certainly an attack by the enemy. Were our comrades up at the Landing prepared for it?

The first cannon had been fired scarcely ten minutes, when General Nelson rode by toward headquarters, down in the busiest part of the town, aides and orderlies following upon the gallop. Presently came orders:

'Three days' rations in haversacks, strike tents, and pack up. Be ready to move at a moment's notice. They are fighting up at the Landing.'

There was no need for further urging. By ten o'clock every disposition for the march had been completed. Nearly three long hours more we waited with feverish anxiety for the final command to start, while the roar of that deathly strife fell distantly upon our ears almost without intermission, and a hundred wild rumors swept through the camp. General Grant had gone up the river on a gunboat soon after the cannonading began. It was not long after midday when we struck tents, were furnished with a new supply of cartridges and caps for our Enfields, and waited several minutes longer. At length, however, the column formed, and, though still without orders, except those which its immediate commander had assumed the responsibility to give, the Fourth division was on the march for Shiloh. The Tenth brigade had, as usual, the advance, and, in our regular turn, the Sixth came the third regiment in the column. We had just cleared the camping grounds, I well remember, when General Nelson rode leisurely down the line, his eye taking note with the quiet glance of the real soldier of every minutia of equipments and appearance generally. Some natures seem to find in antagonism and conflict their native element, their chief good—yet more, almost as much a necessity of their moral organism as to their animal being is the air they breathe. Such a nature was Nelson's. His face to-day wore that characteristic expression by which every man of his command learned to graduate his expectation of an action; it was the very picture of satisfaction and good humor. He wheeled his horse half around as the rear of our brigade passed him, and a blander tone of command I never heard than when, in his rapid, authoritative manner, he rang out:

'Now, gentlemen, keep the column well closed up!' and passed on toward the next brigade.

Gentlemen! how oddly the title comes to sound in the ears of a soldier!

From Savannah to the Tennessee, directly opposite Pittsburg Landing, is, by the course we took, perhaps ten miles. The route was only a narrow wagon-path through the woods and bottoms bordering the river, and the wisdom was soon apparent which had beforehand secured the services of a native as guide. Most of the latter half of the distance was through a low, slimy swamp land, giving rank growth to an almost continuous forest of sycamore, cottonwood, and other trees which love a damp, alluvial soil, whose massive trunks were yet foul and unsightly with filth and scum deposited by the receding waters at the subsidence of the river's great spring freshet a month before. Stagnant ponds and mimic lagoons lay all about us and in our very pathway, some of the deeper ones, however, rudely bridged. Very rapid progress was impossible. It had already been found necessary to send our artillery back to Savannah, whence it would have to be brought up on the transports. The afternoon wore on, warm and sultry, and the atmosphere in those dank woods felt close, aguish, and unwholesome. Not a breath of air stirred to refresh the heated forms winding in long, continuous line along the dark boles of the trees, through whose branches and leafless twigs the sunlight streamed in little broken gleams of yellow brightness, and made a curious checkerwork of sheen and shadow on all beneath. Burdened as we were with knapsacks and twenty extra rounds of ammunition, the march grew more and more laborious. But the noise of battle was sharpening more significantly every few minutes now, and the men pushed forward. It was no child's game going on ahead of us. We

might

 be needed.

We

were

 needed. A loud, tumultuous cheer from the Thirty-sixth Indiana came surging down through the ranks of the Twenty-fourth Ohio to our own regiment, and away back beyond to the Twenty-second and Nineteenth brigades in the rear. 'Forward!' and we were off on the double quick. General Nelson was at the head of the column; there a courier had met him—so at least runs the tradition—with urgent orders to hasten up the reënforcements: the enemy were pressing hard for the Landing. Unmindful of all impediments—trees and fallen logs, shallow ponds and slippery mire shoetop deep; now again moderating our pace to the route step to recover breath and strength; even halting impatiently for a few minutes now and then, while the advance cleared itself from some entanglement of the way—so the remainder of our march continued. It seemed a long way to the Landing, the battle dinning on our ears at every step. At length it sounded directly ahead of us, close at hand; and looking forward out through the treetops, a good eye could easily discover a dark cloud of smoke hanging low in mid air, as though it sought to hide from the light of heaven the deeds that were being done beneath it. Suddenly we debouched into a level cornfield, extending quite to the river's verge. The clearing was not a wide one, and the farther bank of the Tennessee was in plain sight—the landings, the bluff, and the woods above stretching away out and back beyond.

What a panorama! The river directly before us was hidden by a narrow belt of chaparral and the drift that had lodged along the banks, but the smoke stacks of three or four transports were visible