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THE
SONG OF GRANT'S
SOLDIERS.
PILE on the rails ! Come,
comrades, all, We'll sing a song to-night;
To-morrow, when the bugles call,
Be ready for the fight.
Be ready then with loud hurrah
To battle or to die;
When Grant shall yield, the
Northern star Will fade from out the sky.
Hurrah ! hurrah ! hurrah !
Before us lies the rebel host,
Their watch-fires we can see;
We laugh to hear the traitor
boast
Of Southern victory.
Three cheers for Grant, and one
more cheer, Until the woods ring back !
Ah, well the rebel chief may fear
The blood-hound on his track.
Hurrah ! hurrah ! hurrah !
In Freedom's cause our blades
were drawn ;
The traitor yet shall feel
Before the day of Peace shall
dawn
How strong is Northern steel.
Three cheers for Grant, my
gallant men,
Give three loud, roaring cheers !
Until the foe within his den
Shall tremble while he hears.
Hurrah ! hurrah ! hurrah !
Thus far we've come through fire
and flood, Still further on we'll press,
Although the way be red with
blood As through the wilderness.
Then cheer, brave comrades, let
the night Ring with your loud hurrahs,
For Grant, who knows so well to
fight, And for the Stripes and Stars.
Hurrah ! hurrah ! hurrah !
Our longing eyes shall yet behold
Proud Richmond's slender spires;
Our children's children will be
told
How fought their valiant sires.
Look well to cap and cartridge,
too; And as we onward press
We'll cheer for Grant, who
brought us through The bloody wilderness.
Hurrah ! hurrah ! hurrah !
Brave soldiers of the Lord are
we, In solid ranks we come !
The Southern traitors yet shall
see
How fight the "Northern scum." Be
ready, then, with loud hurrah,
To battle or to die;
When Grant shall yield, the
Northern star Will drop from out the sky. Hurrah ! hurrah ! hurrah !
HARPER'S WEEKLY.
SATURDAY, MAY 28, 1864.
OUR
ARMIES.
THE history of the last fortnight
is the story of a tremendous battle between the armies of the Union and of the
rebellion. No man will complain that we are not now making war in earnest. The
rebels fight with valor and tenacity, and their own papers no longer deride the
loyal army as the scum of creation, but confess that it fights with nerve and
desperation. The face of
General GRANT, of whom we publish a portrait
today, is itself a victory. Its fixed resolution is terrible. And his career is
the commentary upon it. At the West, and conspicuously at
Vicksburg, when foiled in one way he tried
another. He did every thing but doubt or despond, and always carried his point
at last.
At the end of May, last year,
GRANT made his brilliant march inland from the Mississippi. At once our papers
announced the fall of Vicksburg. It was a premature exultation, and was followed
by a corresponding doubt and depression. But on the 4th of July he finished his
work, and Vicksburg fell. There has been the same eagerness now, and the same
impatient hurrah. If the morning papers did not record a new victory there was a
general inclination toward the same doubt. Yet every body knew that GRANT had
entered upon a campaign which would be long and must be bloody. Every body knew
that
LEE had expected the assault and had prepared
himself for it, and would contest the ground inch by inch. At the end of ten
days the advantage unquestionably remained with us. "But he has not taken
Richmond !" whispered the desponding. No, for
he aimed at LEE. LEE was Richmond. When LEE is driven, Richmond totters. When
LEE is over come, Richmond falls.
And what blows he has dealt ! How
grand the spectacle of the Potomac army, officers and men, inspired by one
sublime purpose, and all worthy of each other ! " Turn my face to the enemy,"
said the dying General RICE, and every living soldier said the same thing in his
heart, and kept and keeps his face turned there. Every soldier trusts his
commander, and every commander the General-in-Chief. There is a unity which that
army has never known, a confidence which is unprecedented. It is based not
merely upon the prestige of success which surrounds
the Lieutenant-General, but upon
the result of his operations. If at the end of ten days GRANT had not outfought
LEE, certainly LEE had not outgeneraled GRANT. The rebel was forced by arts as
well as arms from two chosen positions. The strong hand of the Union army obeys
irresistibly its clear head, and whatever the immediate result of this campaign
may be, the army of LEE has been terribly shattered and its prestige is
destroyed forever.
THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND
ALTHOUGH so much nearer to Virginia than to Georgia that we have had daily more
copious details of military movements from
MEADE than from
SHERMAN, our friends of the Western army must
not suppose that their course has not been followed with a sympathy and interest
proportioned to the importance of their struggle. The crowds which have gathered
at morning and evening around the bulletin boards have beheld with the same joy
and pride the big black letters which announced Sherman's successful progress;
the withdrawal from Dalton ; the evacuation of Resaca ; the capture of
prisoners, guns, and trains. The public confidence in the quality of the Army of
the West has never been shaken by any event ; nor will it be disturbed by any
result. The names of SHERMAN, of THOMAS, of McPHERSON, and the rest, are names
of heroes and soldiers. Remembered in the same prayers with their brethren of
the Potomac, the same national confidence in the final triumph of liberty and
law over anarchy follows from day to day the men of the Cumberland. Upon the
green hills through which they press the roses already bloom ; and beautiful
upon those mountains will be their feet of victory !
THE
DEAD HEROES.
THE friends of the heroes who
have fallen in the late battles in the East and West need no assurance of the
universal sympathy with which the whole nation mourns with them, for they see
and hear every where the tokens of a common sorrow. Death for the country makes
the citizen especially the country's child, and it is not a private but a public
grief which now solemnizes the land. Every one of those brave men, officers and
soldiers, died that all our homes may be happy and all our liberties secure.
Smitten by a foe who took arms not because any right or liberty of his had been
endangered, but only that he might endanger the rights and liberties of others,
the dead of these battles of ours have a sweet and holy memory; for they have
saved more than their country, they have befriended human nature. "Wherefore,"
says PERICLES in his discourse over the Peloponnesian dead, " to the parents of
the dead, as many of them as are here among you, I will not offer condolence so
much as consolation......For while collectively they gave the country their
lives, individually they received that renown which never grows old, and the
most distinguished tomb they could have ; not so much that in which they are
laid as that in which their glory is left behind them, to be everlastingly
recorded on every occasion for doing so, either by word or deed, that may from
time to time present itself."
But this universal public and
private grief sees something else than blood and suffering in the great field of
national glory. It will leave to those who burn orphan asylums ; who ferociously
slaughter the most innocent men, women, and children ; who have no tear for the
living death of millions, and no sigh for the awful massacres of Pillow and
Wagner, to call themselves "peace" men, and to affect regret at the horrors of
war. Why they should deplore the loss of life, who would willingly sell all that
makes life honorable, will be always a question. Vultures and snakes will take
one view of a field on which the battle of national regeneration has been fought
; God and good men another.
On the 17th of June, 1775, JOSEPH
WARREN, a young man who had every thing to live for, who might have had ease and
quiet and "peace," if he had only counseled submission and compromise with the
great British empire instead of advising a silly struggle of Yankee farmers with
the trained troops of Great Britain, " after discharging his duty in the
Committee of Safety resolved to take part in the battle. He was entreated by
ELBRIDGE GERRY," says BANCROFT, " not thus to expose his life. ' It is pleasant
and becoming to die for one's country,' was his answer." At two o'clock he
crossed Bunker Hill alone with a musket in his hand. The foolish farmers were
fighting instead of sending commissioners to the enemy to propose compromise.
They fought until they had spent all their ammunition. They fought until they
were forced back. They lost 145 killed and 304 wounded ; and "just at the moment
of the retreat fell JOSEPH WARREN, the last in the trenches." Did he die as the
fool dieth ? No, no ; he died as all our brave and dear ones in the late
battles, East and West, and in all the battles of this war, have died. " Sorrow
could now no more come nigh him, and he went to dwell in men's memories with
HAMPDEN." It
is true of WARREN. It is true of
every faithful ' brother of his who has now fallen ; and it is not his wounds,
his blood, his suffering, that we see, but his immortal heroism and the cause
which it helps to secure.
What the President said upon the
field of
Gettysburg in that speech, whose rare felicity
not PERICLES nor any orator ever equaled, is said by every faithful American
heart as it contemplates the battle-fields of the last fortnight in Virginia and
Georgia : " It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that
from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they
gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these
dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new
birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth."
THE
EARLY HOPES OF THE
REBELS.
DURING our present occupation of
Fredericksburg one of our correspondents
discovered in the office of the Fredericksburg News in that city a large number
of letters written during the maturing of the great conspiracy against the
Union. From these we select for present publication the two following, written
by that infinite charlatan, M. F. MAURY, who, finding his efforts to " stir up"
the British Government against us futile, has now returned to the head-quarters
of rebellion at Richmond for further orders. The letters were addressed to
ALEXANDER LITTLE, who was at that time the editor and proprietor of the News.
They show three things: first, that the rebellion was long and carefully
plotted; second, that its object was to secure the ascendency of slavery; and
third, that it counted upon Northern assistance, especially from New Jersey.
That little State, by the favor of Heaven and her good citizens, has kept
herself unstained from all complicity in the stupendous crime. These letters
show only more clearly the deadly peril which this country has escaped ; and
reveal the true character of those arch criminals against their country and
human nature whom the Copperheads are now anxious to propitiate after they have
desolated the land with the blood of her noblest children, by conceding the very
conditions which the rebels prescribed before they began the war. The man who
would consent now to compromise would have heartily worked with MAURY and his
masters three years ago.
How far MAURY and his fellow
conspirators were justified in their hopes of seducing New Jersey into the
rebellion, may be gathered from the correspondence that took place in the spring
of 1861 between Ex-Governor PRICE of New Jersey, who was one of the
representatives from that State in the Peace Congress, and L. W. BURNET, Esq.,
of Newark. Mr. PRICE, in answering the question what ought New Jersey to do,
says: "I believe the Southern Confederation permanent. The proceeding has been
taken with forethought and deliberation—it is no hurried impulse, but an
irrevocable act, based upon the sacred, as was supposed, ' equality of the
States ;' and in my opinion every Slave State will in a short period of time be
found
united in one Confederacy Before that event happens we can not act,
however much we may. suffer in our material interests. It is in that
contingency, then, that I answer the second part of your question--' What
position for New Jersey will best accord with her interests, honor, and the
patriotic instincts of her people ?' I say emphatically she should go with the
South from every wise, prudential, and patriotic reason." Ex-Governor PRICE
proceeds to say that he is confident the States of Pennsylvania and New York
will " choose also to cast their lot with the South," and after them the Western
and Northwestern State.
"[PRIVATE.]
"OBSERVATORY, WASHINGTON, 21st
Dec., 1860.
" DEAR SANDY,—FRANK MINOR tells
me that the BISHOP OTEY letter has been published. Of course you will see it,
and there is no occasion for my sending you my copy. See the inclosed from
BRODIE HERNDON. Doesn't BRODIE know—please make him understand—that those
meetings at the North who are sending Commissioners down South are, the moment
they adjourn, like Macbeth's witches, thin air ; that what we want is to get
into communication with the people of the South in their sovereign capacity ;
and there is no way of doing this except by getting the State of New Jersey and
her people to go down there in their sovereign capacity, and in the person of
their Commissioners ask them for their proposition? I have written to Dr. CABELL
to stir up ALEXANDER: you write to him as if on your own hook, and get a
town-meeting to encourage New Jersey to act. She has got clean hands : we'll
welcome her.
" In haste, yours truly, M.
F. MAURY. " ALEXANDER LITTLE, Esq., Fredericksburg, Va." ("PRIVATE.]
" OBSERVATORY, Jan. 18, 1861.
" DEAR SANDY,--The OTEY letter is
out of date, and the New Jersey plan is ' no go,' I reckon. Too much politician.
" But we must change plans as
circumstances change. See my Tennessee letter, and do with it any thing you
please.
" If Virginia accept the
CRITTENDEN proposition, without any power of veto against sectional majorities,
you and she will be in honor bound, if the North say so, to shoulder your musket
and go down South to fight South Carolina and other seceding States back into
the Union. Does not the North claim the power to coerce under the Constitution ?
Will not the North have the power to make the laws, and to make you help execute
them?
"Where is the 'courageous wisdom'
of Virginia now ? With the CRITTENDEN and PRICE proposisition alone the South is
at the mercy of the North; and such a settlement can't stand.
" Don't you see, SANDY?--Suppose
you make all south of 36° 30' a Slave State, won't the North have the entire
control, through Congress, of the public lands there ? Won't the North give them
away to poor white settlers from Europe? and then you'll have a Slave State in
name only. She will send to Congress worse men than Missouri and Maryland have
sent.
" No, Sir. We can have, and ought
to have, no settlement that is not based on the fact that the country is
divided, and the Union is to be made up of two sections—two peoples—as
antagonistic as two nations ; and if you put one section at the mercy of the
other, we are obliged to have another blow up.
" Yours, M. F. MAURY. A.
LITTLE, Esq., Fredericksburg, Virginia."
A
FRIENDLY ACT OF DENMARK.
DURING the absorbing interest in
the domestic events of the last two or three weeks, a sign of friendly regard
from Denmark to this country may have been overlooked. Struggling like ourselves
for national existence, and attacked by Austria and Prussia because of her
declared policy of a free constitutional government, the ancient and valiant
little Denmark, at the request of our Government, has permitted the Bremen and
Hamburg steamers plying to New York to pass free of seizure by her cruisers,
although they are the ships and the ports of an enemy. This is a most unusual
act of amity, and is done by Denmark, as her Government expressly states, from
her friendly feeling for this country. Nor is it likely to be soon forgotten.
The exigency of our own affairs
has prevented that general attention to the Danish question, and clear
apprehension of it, which in a time of peace it would certainly have received
from us. But it is enough to determine our sympathies to know that liberal
Denmark is attackea by reactionary and despotic Austria and Prussia. The cry of
" nationality" is one by which the absolutist rulers of Germany lead the German
people to a war upon free institutions ; and we have now the melancholy and
absurd spectacle of liberal Germans cheering an Austro-Prussian army in
destroying the hope of constitutional government upon the Continent. Doubly
cordial, therefore, is the grasp of the hand of friendship which Denmark
stretches to us out of her cloud of war. Her fate is almost sure. The impending
extinction of that old kingdom can hardly be averted. But, in some form, the
spirit of Danish constitutionalism will survive and be felt in European affairs.
Meanwhile the people of the United States will remember, with a gratitude which
may one day be serviceable, an act so friendly in the midst of their great
struggle.
AUTOGRAPH LEAVES.
WE mentioned a few weeks since
the beautiful book of facsimile autographs prepared by JOHN P. KENNEDY and
Lieutenant-Colonel ALEXANDER BLISS for the Baltimore Fair. Since then it has
appeared, and it is certainly one of the most unique and interesting collections
possible. Every noted American author is represented by some perfectly faithful
specimen of his writing, and in almost every instance by some poem, a page or
pages from a familiar work. It is not often that the promise of such a book is
so fully and faithfully kept, and the six dollars for which it is sold goes
straight to help the soldiers. It is published, our readers will remember, for
the benefit of our great national charity, the Sanitary Commission, and copies,
may yet be had upon application to CUSHINGS & BAILEY, Baltimore.
DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE.
CONGRESS.
SENATE.—May 11. The Rev. Mr.
Bowman, Methodist, was elected Chaplain. A resolution was introduced by Mr. Lane
calling for an investigation, by the Committee on the Conduct of the War, into
the causes of the late reverses on the
Red River. Amended so as to comprehend
Banks's entire administration.—A resolution was
passed appropriating $30,000 for the relief of the commander, officers, and crew
of the Mississippi River gun-boat Essex, which destroyed the rebel ram Arkansas,
and which was commanded at that time by the late Commodore William D.
Porter.—The bill to equalize the grades of naval officers was passed; as were
also the bills making an appropriation for the relief of the friendly
Sioux; allowing Surgeon Sharp, of the United
States Army, to receive a testimonial from the English Government; providing for
the better organization of the Quarter-master's Department of the army; and
granting lands to Iowa for railroad purposes. The Judiciary Committee asked to
be relieved front further consideration of the joint resolution to repeal the
resolution which was adopted in March, 1861, to the effect that no amendment for
the abolition of slavery shall be made to the Constitution.—A preamble and
resolution condemning the President's action in the cases of Generals Blair and
Schenck were introduced by Mr. Davis, of Kentucky, but were not disposed of.—A
joint resolution providing relief for the machinery contractors of the
double-ender gun-boats was adopted.—The Conference Committee's report in
reference to volunteer naval officers, requiring their confirmation by the
Senate, was agreed to. Without transacting further business the Senate
adjourned. --May 12. Mr. Wilson reported in favor of the bill to facilitate
communication between the several States.—Mr. Wilson submitted the joint
resolution calling for informa- (Next
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