The Agitators by Dorothy Wickenden

Author:Dorothy Wickenden [Wickenden, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps

His day is marching on…

In late May, Frances received a long, detailed letter from Frederick, offering the most vivid picture she’d had of occupied Virginia. It was based on an excursion with his father and Anna, headed by Navy Secretary Welles, who had invited the Sewards and Attorney General Edward Bates and his family on a six-day river trip along the coast. The party set off on May 13, on the City of Baltimore, a steamboat adapted for patrol and blockade duty, traveling down the Potomac into Chesapeake Bay, and then up the York River, stopping at McClellan’s field headquarters, thirty-five miles east of Richmond. Frederick evoked the vast tent city along the water: “At night, the long lines of lights on the shore, the shipping and bustle in the river, made it almost impossible to believe we were not in the harbor of Philadelphia or New York.” As Henry, Welles, and Bates reviewed the troops, McClellan said that if he was sent the men he asked for, he could conduct “one of the great historic battles of the world.” Henry, one of the few members of the administration who retained any confidence in McClellan, sent Lincoln a telegram urging him to order General Irvin McDowell’s I Corps to the York River. The president agreed, but the next day, learning that “Stonewall” Jackson had attacked Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley, he sent the corps there instead.

At Portsmouth, the successful naval Battle of Hampton Roads, in March, had blown up the docks and left acres of wrecked vessels. As Frederick walked through a forlorn assemblage of roofless brick buildings, he came upon a Massachusetts regiment camped in the ruins. He showed his eye for small encounters that told larger truths, confirming Frances’s belief that he was a writer, not a politician. A soldier standing guard asked him if he remembered reading in the newspapers eighteen months earlier about a Boston shoemaker in Savannah who had been beaten and tarred and feathered, for supposed “abolitionism.” Frederick replied that he had published the story while working at Weed’s Evening Journal. The soldier said, “I am that shoemaker.” He had enlisted with the goal of returning to Savannah, “to see those gentlemen again.”

After the Baltimore stopped by Jamestown, the officers spotted a rowboat approaching from the direction of rebel lines. They pulled out their spyglasses, and one announced, “I think they are all black, sir.” The boat contained thirteen men, one woman, and two children, who silently pulled up to the gangway. Frederick wrote that an officer called down, “Who are you? Where are you going?” The leader replied: “Going along with yous, Massa!” They explained that they were enslaved by two colonels in the Confederate Army. Learning that they were to be sent to North Carolina to work

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