The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story

"Most of them have been made hardened criminals solely by society's blundering way of dealing with them. It has sent them to jail, for small first offences, committed in ignorance perhaps. It has thus declared war upon them, and with the instincts of manhood they have taken up the gage of battle. In other words, it is my sincere belief that quite nine in ten of the criminal class are criminal only because of society's neglect at first and blundering afterward. They need education and discipline; we give them resentful punishment instead, and there is a world of difference between the two things.

"However, I did not mean to deliver a lecture on penology. And after all I am no longer one of the ruffians, you know. All the officers of the battery are gentlemen, while none of the men happens to be anything of the kind. There is, therefore, as sharp a line of demarcation drawn in our battery, between officers and enlisted men, as there is in any regular army. This makes things pleasant for the officers, and I fancy they are not unpleasant for the men. It is a case of aristocracy where the upper class enjoys itself and the lower class is content. It is quite different from service in an ordinary Confederate company of volunteers. There the enlisted men are socially quite as good as their officers and sometimes distinctly better. Under such circumstances it is difficult to maintain more of distinction and discipline than the enlisted men may voluntarily consent to. Socially, with us Southern people, it is quite as honourable to be an enlisted man in such a battery as yours as to be a commissioned officer. That's a good enough thing in its way, but it isn't military, and it is distinctly bad for the service."

"I don't know so well about that," said Baillie. "We have at least the advantage of knowing that, discipline or no discipline, every man in the ranks, equally with every officer, has a personal reputation at home to sustain by good conduct. Even your desperadoes couldn't fight better than the young fellows I had with me on the skirmish-line at Manassas, though they had never had anything resembling discipline to sustain them. Every man of them knew that if he 'flunked' he could never go home again – unless all flunked at once and so kept each other company. That very nearly happened while we were falling back across Bull Run."

"Precisely. And it happened to the whole Federal army a few hours later. Discipline, with a ready pistol-shot behind it, would have prevented that in both cases. 'Man's a queer animal,' you know, if you remember your reading, and one of the queerest things about him is that when he has once accustomed himself to accept orders unquestioningly, and to obey them blindly, as every soldier does in drilling, he becomes far more afraid of mere orders than he is of the heaviest fire. Personal courage and high spirit among the men are admirable in their way, but for the purposes of battle, discipline and the habit of blind obedience are very much more trustworthy. If you want to make soldiers of men, you must teach them, morning, noon, and night, that blind, unquestioning obedience is the only virtue they can cultivate. That isn't good for the personal characters of the men, of course, but it is necessary in the case of soldiers, and our volunteers will all of them have to learn the lesson before this war is over. More's the pity, for I can't imagine how a whole nation of men so trained to submission can ever again become a nation of – oh, confound it! I'm running off again into a psychological speculation. Fortunately, here comes a letter for you."

A servant approached, bearing upon a tray a missive from The Oaks ladies, which had been delivered at the house a few minutes earlier. The grand dames assured Mr. Baillie Pegram of their highest respect and esteem, but suggested that, to the very great satisfaction of the anxiety they had so long felt on his account, they were convinced by his assurances to that effect, that he was now so far advanced on the road to complete recovery as perhaps to excuse them from the necessity of making their thrice a week journey to Warlock to inquire concerning his welfare. If they were mistaken in this assumption, would not Mr. Baillie Pegram kindly notify them? And if the daily inquiries which they intended to make hereafter through a trusty servant, should at any moment bring to them news of a relapse, they would instantly resume their personal and most solicitous inquiries.

To this Baillie laughingly wrote a reply equally formal, in which he assured the good ladies that their tender concern for him during his illness had been a chief factor in a recovery which was now practically complete.

Meantime Sam had come with the mail-pouch from the post-office, and it held two letters for Baillie.

One of these was a formal and official communication from the War Department, informing him that upon General J. E. B. Stuart's recommendation, he had been appointed captain of artillery with authority to raise a mounted battery of from fifty to one hundred men, for service with the cavalry. His commission, dating from the day of his wound at Manassas, accompanied the document, and with it an order for him to proceed, as soon as he should be fit for service, to enlist and organise the company thus authorised, and to make the proper requisitions for arms and equipments.

Baillie's second letter was a personal one from Stuart. It was scribbled in pencil on the envelopes of some old letters and such other fragments of paper as the cavalier could command at some picket-post. It read:

"I have asked the War Department to commission you as a captain, to raise a company of mounted artillery to serve with me in front. I understand that you have a healthy liking for the front. The War Department lets me choose my own men for this service, and I have chosen you first, for several reasons. One is that you know what to do with a gun. Another is that you fought so well at Manassas. Another is that you are very strongly recommended to me by a person whose judgment is absolutely conclusive to my mind.

"Now get to work as quickly as you can. Enrol fifty or seventy-five, or better still a hundred men if you can find them. Put them in camp and instruct them, and report to me the moment you are ready. Make requisition for guns – six of them if you can secure a hundred men – and drill your men at the piece. For a hundred men in mounted artillery you will need about 170 horses – 100 for the cannoniers to ride and 70 for the guns, etc. There is likely to be your difficulty. Can't you help yourself out a bit? I am told that you have influence. Can't you persuade your neighbours to contribute some at least of the horses you need? The quicker your battery is horsed the quicker you'll get a chance to practise your men in gunnery with the enemy for a target. Please send me a personal line, telling me how soon you will be ready to join me. It will take a month or two, of course, but I hope it won't take more."

Twelve hours later Baillie Pegram sent an answer to General Stuart's letter. In it he said:

"Thank you. I'll have the men and the horses within twenty-four hours. If the guns are promptly forthcoming on my requisition, I'll be ready within two days to receive orders to join you. As for drill, I can attend to that in front of Washington as well as in camp of instruction at Richmond."

But before sending that note, which delighted Stuart's soul when it came, Baillie Pegram had done a world of earnest work.

First of all there was the problem of getting the men. The able-bodied citizens of the county had already volunteered for the most part, but some were still waiting for one reason or another, and Baillie, who knew everybody, sent hurried notes to all of these, by special negro messengers, asking each to send an immediate reply to him at the Court-house. On this service he employed all his young negroes, mounting them on all his mules. The men appealed to responded almost to a man, for the master of Warlock was a man under whose command his neighbours eagerly wanted to serve, and Baillie found more than half of them awaiting him at the county seat, when he got there in mid-afternoon.

Still better, he found a messenger there from one of the men whom he had summoned. This messenger came from a camp at a little distance, where were assembled about sixty or seventy men and boys peculiarly situated. These men and boys had belonged to a company composed mainly of college students, which had gone out with the earliest volunteers. The company had been captured at Rich Mountain, and the men composing it had been sent home on parole. Within the two days preceding Baillie Pegram's call for volunteers, official notification had come of the discharge of all these men from parole by virtue of an exchange of prisoners. Thereupon the men, thus left free to volunteer again, had met in camp to consider what should be done. Their company had been officially disbanded, and there were now not enough of them left to secure its reorganisation. When Baillie Pegram's call for volunteers came, therefore, the men were called together, and in pursuance of a resolution, unanimously adopted, a messenger was sent to the Court-house to say that sixty-two men of the disbanded company offered themselves for enrolment under Captain Pegram, and that they would report for duty on the following morning at the Court-house.

Thus before four o'clock Baillie was assured of his hundred men or more. The next problem was to secure horses. He called together such of his men as were present, and said:

"Each of you is mounted. We shall need your horses. The government will have them valued, and will pay the assessed price for any that may die in the service. It will pay monthly for their services. How many of you will enlist your horses as well as yourselves, as all our cavalrymen have done?"

The response was general, and many of the planters offered additional horses on the same terms, so that, before night fell Baillie Pegram had more than a hundred men and about a hundred and thirty horses secured. Forty or fifty more horses must be had, but Baillie knew how to secure them, and so he sent off his note to Stuart. Then he turned to Marshall Pollard, and said:

"I want you to go to Richmond by the midnight train, old fellow, and return by the noonday train to-morrow. I've a mind to complete this business at a stroke. I've a few thousand dollars in bank and a few thousand more in the hands of my commission merchant. The money is worth its face now. Heaven only knows what it will be worth a year hence. I'm going to spend it now for the rest of the horses I need, and I want you to go to Richmond and bring it to me. In the meanwhile I'll bargain with a drover who is not very far away, for the horses."

Then, weak as he was, Baillie planned to ride the dozen miles that lay between the Court-house and the point where the drover was camping with his horses, but one of his friends, who had just enlisted with him, bade him to go to the tavern and to bed, saying:

"I'll have the drover and his horses here before noon to-morrow, and I shall know something about the horses by that time, too, for I'll come back in company with them, and I'll keep my eyes open."

No sooner was Baillie comfortably stretched upon a lounge in his hotel room, than Sam presented himself.

"Mas' Baillie," the negro boy broke in, without waiting for his master to ask how he came to be there, "Mas' Baillie, you's a-gwine to be one o' de officers now, jes' as you ought to ha' been fust off. Now you'll need Sam wid you, won't you?"

"I'll need somebody, I suppose," the young man answered, with a laugh at Sam's enthusiasm, "but if I take you along where I am going, you'll stand a mighty good chance of getting a bullet-hole through you, or having your black head knocked off your shoulders by a shell. Have you thought of that?"

"Co'se I'se thought o' dat, an' I ain't de leas' bit afeard nuther. I'se a Pegram nigga from Warlock, I is, an' a Pegram nigga from Warlock ain't got no more business to be afeared o' bullets when his duty brings 'em in his way, dan a white folks Pegram hisself is. Ef ye'll jes' take Sam along of you, you sha'n't never have no 'casion to be shamed o' yer servant."

"Very well, Sam," answered the master; "now go back to Warlock, and tell your mammy you're going to the war. By the way, you may have that old velveteen and corduroy hunting suit of mine to wear. Get it from the closet in the chamber, and tell your mammy to shorten the trousers legs by seven or eight inches."

Sam was fairly dancing for joy, and as he mounted his mule for the homeward journey, he began to sing a dismal ditty which he had composed as an expression of his feelings at the time of his master's first departure from Warlock to serve as a soldier. Unhappily only a fragment of the song remains to us. It began:

"Dey ain't no sun in de mawning,Dey ain't no moon shine in de night,'Case the war's done come an' de mahstah's done gone,Fer to git hisse'f killed in de fight."Oh, Moses!Holy Moses!Can't you come back 'cross de ribber?Can't you let Gabrel blow his horn?"

What lines were to follow, and what words rhymed with "ribber" and "horn," we are not permitted to know. For at this point, Sam, whose self-education included a considerable proficiency in profanity, broke off his singing, reined in his mule, and said:

"Dat's too dam dismal fer de 'casion!" Then addressing the mule, he reproachfully asked:

"What for you done let me sing dat? Don' you know Sam's a-gwine to de wah wid Mas' Baillie?"

As the mule made no reply, the conversation ceased at this point, and the remainder of the homeward journey was made in complete silence.

XV

Agatha's venture

After a month or two of cautious correspondence with friends and others who were to aid her in carrying out her purpose, Agatha Ronald set out one day, and drove with Martha, her maid, to Winchester, where she had friends. After a week's stay there, she made her way to a little town on the Potomac, again taking up quarters with friends.

From this point, she communicated through her friends with intimates of theirs who lived in Maryland. Finally she had arrangements made by which a succession of houses was open to her, all of them the homes of people strongly in sympathy with the South. But she must first manage to get through the Federal lines unobserved, and in this a Federal commander unwittingly aided her. He threw a small force one day into the little town in which she was staying, meaning to hold possession of it as a part of the loosely drawn lines on the upper river. This left Agatha within Federal domain – a young gentlewoman visiting friends, and in no way attracting attention to herself. Presently she moved on into Maryland, and by short stages made her way to the house of a very ardent Southern family, near the Pennsylvania border. From there it was easy for her to go to Harrisburg, and thence by rail to Baltimore.

The chief purpose of her journey was now practically accomplished. She had established what she called her "underground railroad," with a multitude of stations, and a very roundabout route. But it would serve its purpose all the better for that, she thought, as the chief condition of its successful operation was that its existence should at no time be suspected.

In Baltimore, proceeding with the utmost caution, she put herself into indirect communication with a large number of "Dixie girls" – as young women in that city whose hearts were with the South were called. It would not do for her to meet these young women personally. That might excite suspicion, especially as most of them had brothers in the Southern army. But through others she succeeded in organising them secretly into a band prepared to do her work.

That work was the purchase of medicines – chiefly morphine and quinine – and the smuggling of them through the lines into the Confederacy for the use of the armies there. For it is one of the barbarisms of war which civilisation has not yet outgrown, that medicines, even those which are imperatively necessary for the saving of life and the prevention of suffering, are held to be as strictly contraband as gunpowder itself is.

Agatha's plan was to have her associates in Baltimore purchase medicines and surgical appliances in that city and elsewhere – buying only in small quantities in each case, in order to avoid suspicion, but buying large quantities in the aggregate – and forward them to her in Virginia by way of her underground railroad; that is to say, passing them from hand to hand over the route by which she had herself reached Baltimore.

Having perfected these arrangements, her next task was herself to get back to her home, whither she did not mean to go empty-handed. She had gowns made for herself and Martha, using two thicknesses of oiled silk as interlining. Between these she bestowed as much morphia as could be placed there without attracting attention.

This done, she was ready for her return journey, which presented extraordinary difficulty. She could not return by the way she had come, lest the purpose of her journey should be discovered, and her plans for the future be thwarted. She must find some other way.

At first she thought of making her way southward to the lower reaches of the Potomac, and depending upon chance for means of getting across the river there, but this was rendered impracticable by the news that the Confederates had retired from their advanced outposts to Manassas and Centreville, with the Fairfax Court-house line as their extreme advance position. This meant, of course, that they no longer held in any considerable force the posts along the lower river. Moreover, Agatha learned that both the Potomac below Washington, and the navigable part of the Rappahannock were closely patrolled now, by night and by day, by a numerous fleet of big and little Federal war-ships. There seemed no course open to her but to try in some way to get through to Stuart's pickets, if in any way or at any risk she could manage that. That she determined to attempt.

Her first step was to visit friends on the Potomac above Washington. There she learned minutely what the situation was. With some difficulty she secured permission to go as a guest to a house near Falls Church, in Virginia. She had hoped there to find Confederate picket-posts, and to work her way to some one of them by stealth or strategy, or by boldly taking risks. She found instead that the nearest Confederate outpost was at Fairfax Court-house, nine miles away, while the inner Federal lines lay on the route from Falls Church to Vienna, and stretched both ways from those points. Stuart was no longer at Mason's and Munson's Hills. With the approach of winter the Confederates had retired to their fortified line, and Stuart, with the cavalry, had established himself at Camp Cooper and other camps, three or four miles in rear of the Fairfax Court-house line, which now constituted his extreme advance.

Moreover, the Federal army, under McClellan's skilled and vigilant command, had been completely reorganised, drilled, disciplined, and converted from the chaotic mass described in his report – quoted in a former chapter – into an alert and trustworthy army, destined, during later campaigns, to cover itself with glory. At present, McClellan, who had no thought of advancing upon Centreville and Manassas, where the Confederates were strongly fortified, was at any rate manifesting spirit by continually pressing the Confederate outposts, and now and then making considerable demonstrations against them.

His inner picket-lines, as already explained, were drawn very near the house in which Agatha was sojourning. His advanced posts – where the skirmishing was frequent – were along the Fairfax Court-house line. Between these two lines lay eight or ten miles of thick and difficult country, held by the Federals, and scouted over every day, but not regularly picketed.

Thus, instead of a mile or two of difficulty, Agatha had before her ten miles of trouble, with a prospect of worse at the end of it.

Time and extraordinary care were necessary to meet these new difficulties. Agatha's first problem was to find out all she could of facts, to gather exact and trustworthy information. In this endeavour she had a shrewdly intelligent co-adjutor in Martha.

By way of avoiding suspicion – for the family with whom she was staying were known to be strongly Southern in their sympathies, and the Federal officers had begun to understand the devoted loyalty of the negroes to the families that owned them – Agatha established Martha in a cabin of her own a mile or more from the house. There Martha posed as a free negro woman, who was disposed to make a living for herself by selling fried chickens, biscuits, and pies to the Federal soldiers on the interior picket-lines, and a little later to those posted farther in advance.

Martha was a sagacious as well as a discreet person. At first she showed a timid reluctance to go farther toward the front than the inner lines from Falls Church to Vienna. While peddling her wares there, she took pains to learn all the foot-paths, and the location of all the picket-posts in that region. Then little by little she allowed herself to be persuaded to go farther toward the outer lines, for the soldiers found her fried chicken and her biscuits and her pies particularly alluring.

It was only after she had mastered both the topography of the country between, and the exact methods of its military occupation, that she so far overcame her assumed timidity as to push on with her basket to the picket-posts immediately in front of Fairfax Court-house itself. She raised her prices as she went, lest by selling out her stock in trade she should leave herself no excuse for going to the extreme front at all. For the same reason she came at last to pass by many posts where she had formerly had good customers, retaining her wares professedly for the sake of the higher prices that the men at the front gladly paid for something better to eat than the contents of their haversacks.

Within a week or two Martha had learned and reported to her mistress quite all that any officer on either side knew of the country, its roads, its foot-paths, its difficulties, and the opportunities it afforded. In the middle of every night, Martha made her way to her mistress, or her mistress made her way to Martha, until at last, Agatha, who had directed her inquiries, was equipped with all necessary information, and ready for her supreme endeavour. It involved much of danger and incredible difficulty. But the courageous young woman was prepared to meet both danger and difficulty with an equable mind. She knew now whither she was going and how, but the journey through a difficult country must be made wholly on foot and wholly by night.

Agatha was ready for the ordeal. As for Martha, the earth to the very ends of it held no terrors that could cause even hesitation on her part in the service of her mistress.

XVI

Canister

It was a little after midnight when Agatha and her maid, stripped of all belongings that could impede them on their way, set out on foot upon their perilous journey. Agatha was deliberately exposing herself to far worse dangers than any that the soldier is called upon to brave in the work of war. She could carry little in the way of food, and of course could not replenish her supplies until she should succeed in entering the Confederate lines, if indeed that purpose were not hopeless of accomplishment at all. But the danger of starvation which these conditions involved, was the very least of the perils she must encounter. At any moment of her stealthy progress she might be shot by a sentinel. Far worse than that, she might be seized with her tell-tale medicines upon her person, while hiding within the forbidden lines of the enemy. In that case, there would be no question whatever as to her status in military law, or as to her fate. If she should fall into the enemy's hands under such circumstances, by forcible capture or even by voluntary surrender, she must certainly be hanged as a spy. She was armed against that danger only by the possession of the means of instant self-destruction, – her little six-shooter.

It was comparatively easy for her to find her way during the first night, through the slender interior picket-line, and into the forbidden region that lay between that and the outposts in front. Every roadway leading toward the Confederate positions was, of course, securely guarded, and all of them were thus completely closed to Agatha's use. She must steal through the thickets of underbrush that lay between the roads, making such progress as she could without at any time placing herself within sight or hearing of a sentinel. Sometimes this involved prolonged waiting in constrained positions, and several times she narrowly missed discovery.