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Civil War Harper's Weekly, July 9, 1864

During the Civil War, people on the home front relied on Harper's Weekly for news of the War. The paper was the most popular newspaper of the day, and was distributed across the country. Today, it is popular with students and researchers seeking a better understanding of the important people and issues in the war.

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Sleeper

Henry Sleeper

Lincoln Nomination

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Hays

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Virginia

Grant in Virginia

Grant's Movements

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Council of War

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HARPER'S WEEKLY.

[JULY 9, 1864.

442

GENERAL GRANT'S CAMPAIGN.

LAST week we presented before our readers a sketch of the pontoon bridge over which a portion of General GRANT'S army effected a crossing just above Fort Powhatan. We add this week on page 436 another sketch illustrating THE PASSAGE OF THE SECOND CORPS AT WILCOX'S LANDING, three miles below. The crossing at this point was effected by transports. The main interest of this sketch, however, centres in the group of general officers who are witnessing the operation from the shore. Among these General GRANT'S presence is easily detected by the " inevitable cigar :" the General is complacently resting in his saddle, surrounded by his aids and members of his staff. Near him General HANCOCK is seated, enfeebled by his old wounds, and unable to take the field ; and nearer the river stands Inspector-General BARNARD, an old man with gray hairs, who has served in all the great Virginia campaigns.

Another sketch on page 437 represents THE LANDING OF CATTLE FOR THE USE OF THE ARMY.

The transport is moored near the shore, the gangway opened, and the cattle then pushed out, falling one over another in all sorts of ludicrous positions, disappearing two or three at a time, but always rising and making their way to the shore. The bank is usually lined with soldiers whooping and shouting at the discomfort of the animals.

From these we turn to the series of pictures on pages 440 and 441, printed from photographs, and representing scenes of vivid interest connected with the progress of GRANT'S army from Spottsylvania Court House to the North Anna. In our description of these we follow the order of time.

The pictures of the CONFEDERATE DEAD carry us back to May 19th, when EWELL made his desperate attack on our right, but was repulsed with the loss of nearly two thousand men. These dead soldiers were found after the battle near Mrs. Alsop's, at Pine Forest, and were carefully buried by the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery.

BEVERLY HOUSE was the head-quarters of General WARREN on May 19, and BETHEL CHURCH of General BURNSIDE, May 21.

If we turn now to the central picture of the series we find seated before us the officers of the army holding a COUNCIL OF WAR AT MASSAPONAX CHURCH, on the 21st of May, the army being now fairly on its way southeastwardly from its former position. General GRANT is sitting on a bench at the right, with his back to the tree, smoking.

BRADDOCK'S COACH represents a relic of the past century found at Guines's Station.

The captured rifle-pits are those taken by BERRY'S brigade in the fight near Chesterfield or Taylor's Bridge, on the North Anna. This bridge and the Jericho are those over which our forces crossed the North Anna. Federal soldiers are sitting in the trenches. The REBEL REDOUBT is a work captured by our forces in the same neighborhood.

In addition to the above there are other pictures : one representing our engineers constructing a military road to Jericho Mills, on the North Anna ; another giving a view of these mills as seen from the south side, with a canvas pontoon bridge thrown across the river; and a third giving a view of

QUARLES MILL.

These pictures are all printed from photographs taken on the field by GARDNER, of Washington, to whom our readers are already indebted for other similar favors. Of course it is impossible for photography to lie, and we may therefore guard these portraitures as faithful to the minute it feature of the original scene. By the pictures here given of the Confederate dead we are brought face to face with scenes which are the daily incident of a soldier's life. It is doubtless true of both armies that the continual recurrence of' such scenes tends to harden the soldiers' sensibilities; but this induration is in a great measure prevented by the ministration which is daily so tenderly given by these same soldiers to the dead and wounded of the enemy.

We give on page 437 a VIEW ON THE PAMUNKEY. This river was lately the base of supplies for GRANT'S army, and was covered with a vast flotilla of transports.

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.

" CRYING again, Maggie ? Why what on earth ails the child?"

Miss Semantha West had just come in from the garden with a basket of freshly-gathered pease, and a mammoth sun-bonnet swinging from her arm, in-stead of being tied decorously under her chin, as it is the nature of sun-bonnets to be. She was one of those women from whom one instinctively receives the impression that they ought to have been born men—a tall, raw-boned female, with a step like a grenadier, a bass voice, and a very perceptible mustache bristling upon her upper lip. More-over, Miss Semantha was an- old maid—probably because no gentleman had ever yet mustered courage to address her matrimonially.

Altogether different was the slender girl who was drooping listlessly over a bit of needle-work in the shadow of the morning-glories, whose blue cups tossed to and fro at the window. Maggie West was twenty years younger than her tall sister, and as dissimilar as is a blush rose from a stalwart sun-flower : gentle and shrinking, with hair that looked as if it had been dipped in sunshine ; and large, wistful eyes, whose brown light trembled like the waters of a brimming spring. She did not look up at the spinster's resolutely-propounded question, but only bent closer over her work.

"I know how it is !" exclaimed Miss Semantha, setting down her basket of pease with an emphasis that sent the silver-green pods flying over the table in all directions. "You're just a-pinin' your life away alter that good-for-nothin', shilly-shallyin' feller, Harry Winder. That's what's you're a-do-

in' !"

" Semantha!" pleaded Maggie, shrinking back among the morning-glories. " Don't tell me !" ejaculated Miss Semantha,

clasping her hands behind her back, man-fashion, and striding up and down the room, while her gray eyes flashed grim determination. " I know how matters is goin'. He's playin' with you, off and on, jest as suits his convenience.. And I'd like to know what good sage tea, and tansy drinks, and new milk afore breakfast's goin' to do you, as long as this business goes on?"

"But, sister, I know—that' is, I think—he loves me."

" Why don't he say so, then, like a man, instead o' playin' fast and loose ? 'Twa'n't so in my day. If a man liked a gal he said so, and they got married."

"Wait, sister—only wait," urged Maggie, tear-fully. " It's only a little while since he began to come here."

"Only a little while, eh ? It's time enough for you to grow as white as a sheet and as thin as a shad ! Where's all your color, I'd like to know? The truth is, Maggie, a man has no business to steal a gal's heart away with his fine talk, and his poetry, and his gay uniform, and then toss it from him like a broken plaything."

Maggie West shuddered as if her sister's hand had touched a raw nerve.

" Perhaps he has not made up his mind yet," she faltered.

" Then it's high time he had," said Miss Semantha, nodding her head. " I wish I was a man ! I'd call him out afore you could say Jack Robinson, if he was a Lieutenant forty times over, and strutted about with twice as many shoulder-straps stickin' to him ! And I don't know but what I will, as it is," added the doughty maiden, glancing toward a rusty rifle that hung above the clock, sole relic of the departed Squire West's Revolutionary days.

"Semantha !"

"For of all things," went on Semantha, " I hate a male coquette, officer or no officer.' I'll tell you what, Maggie—I think it would be a good thing to ask him what his intentions is !"

" Oh, sister ! not for the world ! Promise me—please promise—that you won't !"

And Maggie clung to her masculine sister with a face of piteous entreaty.

"Well, then, I won't. But I'll be even with him some way—see if I'm not !"

Miss Semantha sat down to shell her pease with an iron resolve in her face that made poor Maggie tremble.

Ten minutes passed away, measured by the slow ticking of the clock, the ripple of yellow sunshine along the kitchen floor, and the monotonous rattle of pease into the tin pan on Miss Semantha's lap; when all of a sudden that lady brought her clenched hand down on the table with startling emphasis.

" I've got an idea !"

"An idea!" repeated Maggie, somewhat bewildered. " Tell me what it is !"

Miss Semantha shook her head inexorably.

"Look here, Maggie ; who should you say was the six humbliest gals in the village—not countin' me ?"   -

Maggie burst out laughing at the abrupt question. "Desire Jones is one, I should say; and Mercy Griggs, and Mary Ann Patterson—"

" Well ?" said Miss Semantha, counting the candidates on her fingers.

"And Juliet Smith, and Faithful Skirving, and Jane Abigail Sanders !"

"All old maids," commented Miss Semantha, "and all good friends o' mine, except Faithful, and we don't want her. Maggie, I'm goin' to ask 'e n all to tea to-night, and 'taint likely you'll he interested in our talk—"

" No," said Maggie, absently.

" So you can go over and spend the evening with Squire Jessup's darters. • And now you jest go to work and make the nicest strawberry short-cake you can get up, and a loaf of 'Lection-cake, and a lot o' cup custards ; that's a good gal, and I won't ask no more o' you!"

And Miss Semantha perched her sun-bonnet defiantly on the top of her head, and strode off to distribute the invitations for the banquet, while Maggie tied on a little white apron, and began to beat eggs into billows of snowy foam, and cull over bloomy raisins—while her thoughts, alas ! were far away.

Lieutenant Harry Winder, happily unconscious of Semantha West's very unfavorable opinion concerning him, was sitting in the law-office, which—by virtue of innumerable printed bills and several yards of bunting had been transformed into a Recruiting Station, with the legs of his chair inclined at an angle of forty-five degrees, and his feet among the books and papers on the table, while his hands were thrust cozily into his pockets.

And this was what the Lieutenant called "being driven to death with business."

As he shifted his feet among the debris on the table a bit of faded blue ribbon fluttered to the floor.

"Ah !" quoth Lieutenant Winder, following its descent with his eye, " pretty Maggie's souvenir ! Let me see—I stole it from her hair the night we walked in the moonlight—and how charmingly she blushed, to-be sure ! A nice little girl—very ; pity she's so desperately in love with me. If I were a marrying man, I should certainly find pretty Maggie dangerous ; but a fellow don't want to entangle himself at eight-and-twenty. The worst of the business is," pondered Harry, stroking his mustache complacently, " that you can't flirt with a girl but she makes a serious matter of it, taking for granted that you're in earnest. That isn't our fault though ; they must take the consequences of their own folly."

Lieutenant Winder's musings terminated in a prodigious yawn at this stage—a yawn whose length was only interrupted by a brisk knock at the door. He put down his feet, and assumed the air of a military hero at once.

"Come in !" he cried, beginning to rustle among his recruiting papers with a business like energy.

The door slowly opened, revealing a short, stout woman who might have seen forty-five summers—certainly no less—a woman who wore curl papers

and a dingy green veil, and was attired in faded calico and a print shawl. Lieutenant Winder moved his chair a little back as she advanced upon him. There was something of the uncompromising in her aspect that rather intimidated him.

"Take a seat, ma'am," he said, blandly. "What can I do for you this morning?"

The female dropped into a chair, and regarded him fixedly.

"You don't know me?" she began.

" I have not that pleasure, ma'am," said the re- 1 cruiting officer, with hypocritical politeness. " I'm Mercy Griggs," said the lady.

Harry did not know what to say, so he remarked, "Ah, indeed!" and tried to look interested in the statement.

"I don't know how. on airth I'm goin' to begin," simpered Miss Mercy, twisting the end of her lilac-bordered pocket handkerchief. " It's an awful ticklish sort o' thing to talk about !"

"Compose yourself, ma'am," said Harry, sup-posing he was about to become the confidant of the details of some desertion from his country's standard, or possibly the recipient of the awful fact of "bounty-jumping" among Miss Mercy's male relatives. " We soldiers are often called upon to discuss the most delicate points."

" Well, this 'en's powerful delicate," said Mercy, giggling spasmodically ; " but I don't know as there's. any use in beatin' about the bush. The fact is, Lieutenant Winder, I'm thinkin' about gettin' married!"

" Indeed !" said Harry, rather puzzled.

" I ain't young," admitted Mercy Griggs ; " and I find it's awkward without no man around, to split kindlins, and bring water, and do such like odd jobs ; and as it's Leap Year I thought a poor, lone woman might as well take advantage on't."

" Certainly," said Harry, assenting to the proposition, abstractly.

"Well, then, Lieutenant Winder, in plain English, will you hey me ?"

"Have you!" repeated Harry, starting as if a bullet had struck him.

"Yes, or no—take me or leave me," said the lady, independently.

'' No, ma'am, certainly not."

Miss Mercy Griggs rose up wrathfully.

"Then I'd like to know what you meant all these Sundays a-lookin' across to my brother Josiah's pew ? D'ye s'pose a lone woman's affections is to be trifled with this way ? I'll have the law o' you."

"Will you leave this office, ma'am?"

"Yes, I'll leave it. I won't stay here to be trampled on like the dust under your feet; but you'll hear from my brother Josiah afore long, and ye may just lay your calculations for that!"

Mercy Griggs slammed the door behind her, to the no small danger of hinge and latch, leaving Harry Winder wiping the cold dew from his fore-head.

" Is the woman demented ?" be at last muttered; " or—." A delicate tap at the door cut short his cogitations.

"Another female !" groaned Harry. " Walk in, ma'am. Miss Sanders, I believe."

Jane Abigail Sanders glided into the room with a languishing smile—a tall damsel with white eye-brows and eyelashes, flaxen hair, and a countenance deeply pitted with small-pox.

" You received my note this morning, Harry—I—I mean, Lieutenant Winder."

" Note ! No—what note ?"

" Dear, how embarrassing !" sighed Miss Sanders. " Must I then put its phrases into spoken words?"

"Well, I guess you'll have to," said Harry, be-ginning to feel desperate.

" Must I tell you," faltered Jane Abigail, fluttering her white eyelashes, " that depending on the propitious influences of the favoring season, I have determined to tell the love which has long consumed my heart ?"

"N—no—I wouldn't—upon my word, Miss Sanders, I wouldn't," interposed Harry, beginning to blush and edge off.

"My own Harry !" sobbed Jane Abigail.

"Not by a long sight," ejaculated Lieutenant Winder, setting his teeth together. " Are the women all mad?"

" Do you then reject my love, cruel one?" shrieked the lady.

" Of course I do !" responded Harry. doggedly.

Jane Abigail Sanders uttered a little choking wail, looked Lieutenant Winder in the face appealingly, and then—went into hysterics.

"Here's a pretty affair," groaned Harry Winder, emptying his cologne-bottle over the fair one's flax-en tresses, and vainly essaying to lift her from the hearth-rug. " A woman fainting on the floor—and an uncommonly heavy one, too—and some wretch knocking as if he would beat the panels of the door in ! Don't come in at present, please L I'm particularly engaged ! If I could only drop this crazy old maid long enough to lock the door !"

But he could not, so resolutely did Jane Abigail cling to him, and consequently the door flew open with a sudden explosion, and in walked a third single woman.

" Get up, Jane Abigail Sanders!" ejaculated the new- comer, "and don't lie whimpering there ! You've had your turn; now clear out and make room for the rest of us."

Jane Abigail uttered a feeble croak, to which Desire Jones paid no manner of attention. She was a ponderous woman, six feet high, and framed to correspond, with a Roman nose, and only one eye.

" You see, Lieutenant Winder," said Desire, familiarly taking him by the button, " there's six gals of us gettin' pretty well on in years, and so was a-thinkin' of betterin' ourselves, and men is awful scarce since the war began. The fact is, you're the only marriageable feller about town, and so we drawed lots for you !"

" Lots for me !" faltered Harry, with a singular sensation of no longer belonging to himself. " Only Semanthy West and Juliet Smith said the

lots wasn't fair, so we concluded to try you one *ter t'other ! Mercy and Jane Abigail hain't had no success, it seems, so what d'ye say to me, Harry Winder? I've got a good house and farm, and I'd be bound to support ye decent or I'd know the reason why ! Come, speak out like a man !"

"This can't be a horrible dream !" thought the bewildered recruiting officer, "for the sun is shining there on the table, and the clock has just struck twelve ; but it seems like one."

"Hey?" demanded Desire, inexorably urgent.

"I'm very much obliged to you, Miss Jones," said our hapless hero, wiping his dripping forehead; " but upon my word I can't—I really can't!"

" Oh, yes you can ; you're only bashful !" coaxed the one-eyed siren. "There ain't no reason on airth why you and I shouldn't hit it off. Name the day, and make it as early as possible."

" You really must excuse me," pleaded Harry, nervously stepping backward, as the Roman nose towered nearer and nearer.

" But why not ?" demanded Miss Jones, imperatively.

Harry mentally ransacked the store-houses of his giddy brain for some plausible excuse to assign to the gigantic wooer who was battering so determinedly at the citadel of his heart. Should he mention, casually, that he had recently been exposed to the small-pox ? or that he was secretly married already, or

The light of deliverance flashed across the chaos of his thoughts with instantaneous glimmer.

"Because, Miss Jones," he said, plucking up courage, "if I may mention it to you in confidence, I am already engaged."

"Engaged, eh ?" repeated Miss Desire ; "that alters the case. But who is the lady? I must have proof positive, or I don't give you up so easy as all this."

"Miss Maggie West holds my heart in her keeping," equivocated the hapless Lieutenant.

"Oh, well, that settles the matter, said Desire, coolly. " We ain't none of us the gals to get away little Maggy West's lover, only, you see,. we s'posed you was in the market yet. But why couldn't you have said so at first? Come along, Jane Abigail; we must look up some other feller. This one's spoke for."

And Miss Jones pulled the disconsolate Jane Abigail through the doorway, only lingering to shout back,

" If there's any quarrel, or any thing, and you don't marry her, remember I'm to have the second chance!"

" Oh, there will be nothing of the sort !" asserted Harry, fervently.

" And I'm to tell Semanthy, and Juliet, and Mary Ann Patterson not to come, be I ?"

' ' By all means, certainly !".reiterated the appalled recruiting officer.

No sooner had Desire's yellow muslin dress vanished through the portals than Lieutenant Winder locked, double locked, and bolted the door, and skill-fully descended into the garden from his open back window.

"Mars and Minerva!" he muttered between his set teeth, as he dodged behind a cluster of gooseberry bushes and sneaked toward the high-road—" a man must be careful, if he don't want to be married be-fore he knows it. Anti now for dear little Maggie."

"Harry !"

She was sewing, in the cool morning-glory shadows, the sunny hair twisted back with blue ribbons. And as she looked up she read something in his eye that sent the blood to her cheeks with a sudden, joyous Ieap.

"Yes, dearest," he said, taking the unresisting hand in his, "I have come to ask you to marry me!"

It was not until they had been married some days that Lieutenant Winder gave his wife rather an exaggerated account of the raid that had been made upon his office by the believers in Leap-Year privileges.

" Harry," she said, with downcast eyes and burning cheeks, "do you know that I fancy $emantha must have had something to do with that affair? I think it was an expedient of hers to—to cure you of flirting with poor little me."

Harry bit his lip, but his momentary chagrin was succeeded by hearty self-congratulation.

"I don't care whose expedient it was," he said, gallantly pressing his lips to Maggie's velvet smooth palm, " as long as it has gained me the sweetest little wife in America."

And the six old maids rejoiced in chorus over the success of their stratagem, with Brigadier-General Semantha West at their head.

HOW MISS AVOYELLES KEPT
HER PROMISE.

SHE stood on the piazza waiting for her carriage. Fair hair flew out like gold mist from under her gay little hat, and the pale-pink bloom of the face that beamed through the gold mist hair was of the purest blonde.

Two gentlemen walking up and down passed and repassed her, noting her with a gentleman's quiet observation, from the gold gleam of her eye-lash to the slim foot that heat in time to impatient thought beneath a ruffled petticoat. She made a beautiful picture. The younger man, looking at her, broke into the politics of the elder with the question,

Who is it, Hendrick ?"

"A Miss Avoyelles, from Louisiana."

"From Louisiana? Her nave might suggest it, but not her coloring. How fair she is!"

The elder went on talking. Ile was old enough to look at a lovely face and never lose the thread of his dryest thought. The younger was yet young enough to lose more than his dryest thought in such contemplation. And now, while his conrpanion went on with his argument, he forgot entirely to answer him.

Hendrick glanced at him and saw how it was. He shrugged his shoulders.


 

 

  

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