The last days of his life at Fortress Monroe were doubtless also the happiest. His energy and enthusiasm, and kind, winning ways, and the deep satisfaction of feeling that all his gifts could now be used as he would have them, showed him and his friends that his day had at length dawned. He was especially interested in the condition and fate of the slaves who escaped from the neighboring region and sought refuge at the fort. He had never for an instant forgotten the secret root of the treason which was desolating the land with war; and in his view there would be no peace until that root was destroyed. In his letters written from the fort he suggests plans of relief and comfort for the refugees; and one of his last requests was to a lady in New York for clothes for these poor pensioners. They were promptly sent, but reached the fort too late.
As I look over these last letters, which gush and throb with the fulness of his activity, and are so tenderly streaked with touches of constant affection and remembrance, yet are so calm and duly mindful of every detail, I do not think with an elder friend, in whom the wisdom of years has only deepened sympathy for all generous youthful impulse, of Virgil’s Marcellus, “Heu, miserande puer!” but I recall rather, still haunted by Philip Sidney, what he wrote, just before his death, to his father-in-law, Walsingham, — “I think a wise and constant man ought never to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part truly.”
The sketches of the campaign in Virginia, which Winthrop had commenced in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, would have been continued, and have formed an invaluable memoir of the places, the men, and the operations of which he was a witness and a part. As a piece of vivid pictorial description, which gives the spirit as well as the spectacle, his “Washington as a Camp” is masterly. He knew not only what to see and to describe, but what to think; so that in his papers you are not at the mercy of a multitudinous mass of facts, but understand their value and relation.
* * * * *
The disastrous day of the 10th of June, at Great Bethel, need not be described here. It is already written with tears and vain regrets in our history. It is useless to prolong the debate as to where the blame of the defeat, if blame there were, should rest. But there is an impression somewhat prevalent that Winthrop planned the expedition, which is incorrect. As military secretary of the commanding general, he made a memorandum of the outline of the plan as it had been finally settled. Precisely what that memorandum (which has been published) was, he explains in the last letter he wrote, a few hours before leaving the fort. He says: “If I come back safe, I will send you my notes of the plan of attack, part made up from the General’s hints, part my own fancies.” This defines exactly his responsibility. His position as aid and military secretary, his admirable qualities as adviser under the circumstances, and his personal friendship for the General, brought him intimately into the council of war. He embarked in the plan all the interest of a brave soldier contemplating his first battle. He probably made suggestions some of which were adopted. The expedition was the first move from Fort Monroe, to which the country had been long looking in expectation. These were the reasons why he felt so peculiar a responsibility for its success; and after the melancholy events of the earlier part of the day, he saw that its fortunes could be retrieved only by a dash of heroic enthusiasm. Fired himself, he sought to kindle others. For one moment that brave, inspiring form is plainly visible to his whole country, rapt and calm, standing upon the log nearest the enemy’s battery, the mark of their sharpshooters, the admiration of their leaders, waving his sword, cheering his fellow-soldiers with his bugle voice of victory, — young, brave, beautiful, for one moment erect and glowing in the wild whirl of battle, the next falling forward toward the foe, dead, but triumphant.
On the 19th of April, 1861, he left the armory-door of the Seventh, with his hand upon a howitzer; on the 21st of June his body lay upon the same howitzer at the same door, wrapped in the flag for which he gladly died as the symbol of human freedom. And so, drawn by the hands of young men lately strangers to him, but of whose bravery and loyalty he had been the laureate, and who fitly mourned him who had honored them, with long, pealing dirges and muffled drums, he moved forward.
Yet such was the electric vitality of this friend of ours, that those of us who followed him could only think of him as approving the funeral pageant, not the object of it, but still the spectator and critic of every scene in which he was a part. We did not think of him as dead. We never shall. In the moist, warm midsummer morning, he was alert, alive, immortal.
STILLFLEET AND HIS NEWS
Home!
The Arago landed me at midnight in mid-winter. It was a dreary night. I drove forlornly to my hotel. The town looked mean and foul. The first omens seemed unkindly. My spirits sank full fathom five into Despond.
But bed on shore was welcome after my berth on board the steamer. I was glad to be in a room that did not lurch or wallow, and could hold its tongue. I could sleep, undisturbed by moaning and creaking woodwork, forever threatening wreck in dismal refrain.
It was late next morning when a knock awoke me. I did not say, “Entrez,” or “Herein.”
Some fellows adopt those idioms after a week in Paris or a day in Heidelberg, and then apologize, — “We travellers quite lose our mother tongue, you know.”
“Come in,” said I, glad to use the vernacular.
A Patrick entered, brandishing a clothes-broom as if it were a shillalah splintered in a shindy.
“A jontlemin wants to see yer honor,” said he.
A gentleman to see me! Who can it be? I asked myself. Not Densdeth already! No, he is probably also making a late morning of it after our rough voyage. I fear I should think it a little ominous if he appeared at the threshold of my home life, as my first friend in America. Bah! Why should I have superstitions about Densdeth? Our intimacy on board will not continue on shore. What’s Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba?”
“A jontlemin to see yer honor,” repeated the Pat, with a peremptory flourish of his weapon.
“What name, Patrick?”
“I misremember the name of him, yer honor. He’s a wide-awake jontlemin, with three mustasshes, — two on his lip, and one at the pint of his chin.”
Can it be Harry Stillfleet? I thought. He cannot help being wide-awake. He used to wear his beard à la three-moustache mode. His appearance as my first friend would be a capital omen. “Show him up, Pat!” said I.
“He shows himself up,” said a frank, electric voice. “Here he is, wide-awake, three moustaches, first friend, capital omen. Hail Columbia! beat the drums! Robert Byng, old boy, how are you?”
“Harry Stillfleet, old boy, how are you?”
“I am an old boy, and hope you are so too.”
“I trust so. It is the best thing that can be said of a full-grown man.”
“I saw your name on the hotel book,” Stillfleet resumed. “Rushed in to say, ‘How d’ ye do?’ and ‘Good-bye!’ I’m off to-day. Any friends out in the Arago?”
“No friends. A few acquaintances, — and Densdeth.”
“Name Densdeth friend, and I cut you bing-bang!”
“What! Densdeth, the cleverest man I have ever met?”
“The same.”
“Densdeth, handsome as Alcibiades, or perhaps I should say Absalom, as he is Hebrewish?”
“That very Alcibiades, — Absalom, — Densdeth.”
“Densdeth, the brilliant, the accomplished, — who fascinates old and young, who has been