Victory and Grief

1865

The winter was hard everywhere, though not everywhere in the same fashion. In Maine it came as a hard, snowy winter, and in the camps it was brutal. In Virginia it pressed upon Lee’s hungry Confederate army, trapped by Grant’s siege upon Petersburg.

For southerners it came with empty if not burned barns, railroads broken, and Sherman’s army turning north. That year winter seemed to have joined the war, its cold cutting like a blade on an empty stomach.

When Fort Fisher, the Gibraltar of the South, fell, every man who understood shipping knew what it meant. The fort guarded the Cape Fear and the road by water into Wilmington, the last great door left to the Confederacy’s outside trade. Once that door was shut, powder, cloth, medicine, and all manner of supplies had one less way in.

February brought no single end to the war, but it brought the sound of it. Peace commissioners met with Lincoln at Hampton Roads. Lincoln’s terms were Union and freedom for the enslaved. The Confederate terms were separation and slavery. No peace could be made from such contrary cargo.

Sherman and his army turned northward into South Carolina, the very cradle of secession, with rifles, cannon, axes, torches, and all the abuses that followed armies in the field.^⁠[1] A hard thing to read of, and harder still to endure, but by then the war itself had become a hard teacher. Columbia fell in flames. Charleston, where the first guns had fired on Sumter, was abandoned soon after. Then Wilmington was taken, and with it the Confederacy’s last great door to the sea was shut. The South was no longer merely losing ground. It was losing the means to keep fighting.

In March, Lincoln took the oath again. He did not crow over the South, though by then many another man might have done so. He spoke instead as if the whole nation stood under judgment, North and South together, for the sin that had brought the war upon us. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right…”

Sherman had burned his way through South Carolina and was pushing on through North Carolina, where Johnston tried to check him, but by then the Confederacy was coming apart faster than any general could hold it together. Lee still held before Petersburg, but pressed hard. On March 25th he struck at Fort Stedman in one last desperate effort to break Grant’s hold. His men got in for a little while, but they could not stay. The Union lines closed again, tighter than before, and Lee had spent strength he could not replace. His men had been deserting all winter—now they were slipping away from a cause that had nothing left to give.

By the end of March, suspense itself seemed to have taken up residence in the county. Planting had not yet begun in earnest, and the Pathfinder was already off on her steady course southward out of Rockland on March 11, bound for New Orleans with Maine lumber in her hold.^⁠[2]  There was work enough still, for there is always that, but men found reasons to pass by the wharf, the store, the post office, or wherever the latest telegraph dispatch might be repeated. No one stood idle waiting on a newspaper. Yet no one went about his business quite free of the question either. Every errand had an ear turned toward Virginia, and any man who caught wind of news carried it home to share with his neighbors.

April opened like a door kicked from its hinges. Five Forks fell, Petersburg broke, and Richmond — that city whose name had filled four years of newspapers — was abandoned at last. The Confederate government fled in the night, and fires rose behind them. By the third of April, Union troops were walking the burned out streets of Richmond.

On April 9^th, Lee surrendered. Two words, and yet they seemed to hold every grave dug since Sumter.

Lee’s surrender did not put every Confederate musket on the ground, and we knew it. Johnston’s army still faced Sherman, and others had yet to yield. But Lee was the great pillar. Richmond had fallen. The war might still have embers, but no living fire.

We were still celebrating Lee’s surrender when the news came to us that Lincoln had been shot the evening of April 14^th. I had been reading the Rockland Gazette. Its columns were crowded with the last days of the war: Grant’s terms to Lee, Lee’s answer, the movements around Petersburg, the fall of Richmond.^⁠[3] A man could sit with that paper all the day and half the night, reading the words over and over, letting himself believe the country had at last come through, but the last we had heard, Lincoln was fighting a battle to live. By evening, we learned he had lost it.

I do not know how to tell what that news did to us. The bells that had rung for victory seemed suddenly to belong to a funeral. Flags that had been raised in triumph were lowered and draped in black. Men who had spoken loudly the day before, now stood quiet in doorways and on corners, as if words had failed them. We had thought the country was coming out of the war. Instead, grief met us at the threshold.

Mercy and the girls wept openly. I found myself in the fields longer hours, trying to make sense of it. The news struck harder because it came while joy was still in our hearts, spilling out on the streets. We had been ringing bells, lighting windows, reading every scrap of news that came our way. With Lincoln’s death all that gladness went silent.

The assassin was not taken at once. He fled southward and hid as long as men would shelter him, until Union cavalry found him in a tobacco barn in Virginia twelve days later. The man who had struck down Lincoln would not come out when called. The barn was set on fire, and John Booth was shot when he hobbled outside. He had not acted alone, and for a little while it seemed the murder might prove only the first blow of a larger design.

Lee’s surrender did not end the war in one stroke, but it set the rest falling. Johnston yielded to Sherman before April was out. Taylor followed in May, and Kirby Smith beyond the Mississippi in June. The Confederacy did not die all at once. It came apart in sections, like a house whose main beam had failed.

We received a letter from Louisa in Illinois informing us that our sister Sophia had married a Union officer by the name of Richard Realf on June 9th. When Sophia wrote, we learned that her husband had gone South on government business connected with the close of the war, leaving her at Louisa and Edwin’s home in Furnessville.

The war was over, but not the reckoning. Men came home. Taxes remained. Debts remained. Wages, prices, freight, and markets all had to find their footing again. Shipbuilding was no longer the easy promise it once had been, though Rockland still had lime and the South still needed lumber, hay, and casks by the thousands. Peace, like war, had its own uncertainties.

My ships still sailed, notably the Pathfinder, which found a ready trade between Penobscot Bay, New Orleans, and Providence, Rhode Island. Providence had not invented the use of cotton seed, but it was one of the few northern places where men had learned to make trade of it. Before the war there were only a handful of cottonseed-oil mills in the country, most of them south or west, with one at Providence. So when Pathfinder carried cotton seed north by the hundreds of tons, she was not hauling refuse to a strange market. She was feeding a new trade born from cotton’s leavings. Crushed, the seed yielded oil for machines and meal to dress a farmer’s soil.^⁠[4]

From Providence she sailed back to Rockland, then south again with lime, hay, lumber, and potatoes for New Orleans, returning north with cotton seed for Providence.^⁠[5]

When the Pathfinder sailed from Thomaston late in the year, Captain Ira Ellems had taken her command. She and the brig Daphne went south together, carrying between them 6,000 casks of lime, 124 bales of hay, and 1,149 barrels of potatoes, making New Orleans before the middle of December.^⁠[6]

And so, 1865 closed with the war ended, though not with all its accounts settled. The country had peace, but it was a bruised peace, full of debts, widows, wounded men, and questions no surrender paper could answer. My ships still sailed, the lime trade held, and men did what men have always done after calamity — they went back to work because there was nothing else to do.

Southern ports opened under federal authority, but the country behind them was unsettled. Cotton could no longer be raised by enslaved hands, and no man yet knew what free labor, contracts, tenancy, wages, and credit would make of the old plantation country. The Freedmen’s Bureau set itself to overseeing labor agreements between planters and freedpeople, but paper contracts could not at once mend what slavery and war had broken. Furthermore, we did not have Abraham Lincoln at the helm.

At home, Leland tried to keep up with his sisters, making his best attempt at it with more will than balance. Mercy had begun to look pale in the mornings and was not always able to take breakfast. We did not speak too soon of such things, but I knew the signs. Another child was on the way.

The nation had come through war. In our own house, life was beginning again.

NOTES

¹ Newspapers of the period seldom named sexual violence plainly. Reports of armies moving through civilian communities often used euphemisms such as “outrages,” “insults,” or “abuses,” and Black women’s vulnerability was especially underreported. Union military courts did prosecute sexual-crime cases during the war, but ordinary readers were far more likely to encounter accounts of destroyed railroads, barns, mills, and bridges than of assaults on women. This silence should not be mistaken for absence.

² New York Daily Herald, March 24, 1865: Rockland, March 11—Sailed bark Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans; New Orleans Tribune, April 12, 1865: Arrived Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, 25 days from Rockland, (Me) to master—3d dist.; The Times Democrat, April 26, 1865: LUMBER—90,000 feet Ascribed Pine Lumber, just landed ex Bark Pathfinder and ex Bark Minnesota, at Auction. By Montgomery & Bro.—N. M. Montgomery, Auctioneer—Will be sold on Thursday, April 27, at 11 o'clock, ex bark Pathfinder, Post 34, Third District. Immediately afterwards, ex bark Minnesota, Post 36, third district.

55,095 feet 1 inch Pine Planed Boards

8,717 feet 3/4 inch Pine Tongue and Grooved Boards

18,071 feet of assorted Pine Scattling]

³ Rockland Gazette, April 15, 1865 see https://digitalmaine.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1220&context=rockland_gazette

⁴ New Orleans Tribune, May 2, 1865: Cleared Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, for Providence R.I.  G A Fosdick; Daily True Delta, May 2, 1865: Exports. Providence, R I—Bark Pathfinder 306 tons of cotton seed

⁵ Portland Daily Press, May 15, 1865: New Orleans—Cld 1st, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Providence; May 29, 1865: Providence—Ar 26th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans; Portland Daily Press, June 12, 1865: Rockland—Ar 8th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Providence; New York Daily Herald, September 1, 1865: Rockland, sailed 20th bark Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans; Portland Press Herald, September 1, 1865: Rockland—Sailed (Aug) 20th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans; The Times Democrat, September 13, 1865: The Gladiator towed in bark Harriet, from New York, and a three masted schooner. The W.L. Burroughs went up with them and brig San Antonio. The Rio Grande towed in bark R. Allen and Pathfinder, and is now trying to get ship Worthington on; The Times Democrat, September 14, 1865: Outside the Bar Waiting Steam. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, from Rockland (Me.); New Orleans Price Current and Commercial Intelligencer, September 15, 1865: Rockland, Me. Per bark Pathfinder, 3,440 barrels lime, 28 tons hay to order; The Daily Summer Star, September 16, 1865: bark Jasper and schrs Garibaldi and Camille—brought up barks Pathfinder and R.A. Allen…; Daily Southern Star, September 15, 1865: Arrived Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, from Rockland (Me.), to Russell & Hall, 3d dist. 35; New Orleans Tribune, September 15, 1865: Arrived Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, 18 days from Rockland, (Me.) to Russell & Hall; The Times Democrat, September 20, 1865: ROCKLAND LIME—3000 CASKS CHOICE ROCKLAND LIME, per bark Pathfinder. for sale by Russell & Hall; Portland Daily Press, September 25, 1865: New Orleans—Arrived 14th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Rockland; L’abeille De La Nouvelle-Orléans, October, 6 1865: Cleared Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, for Providence (R.I.); The Daily Southern Star, October 6, 1865: Exports. PROVIDENCE—Per bark Pathfinder 330 tons cotton seed; Portland Press Herald, October 27, 1865: Providence—Ar 25th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, from New Orleans; November 6, 1865: Providence—Sailed, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Rockland; Portland Daily Press, November 8, 1865: Holmes's Hole—ar. 4th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Providence for Rockla

⁶ Portland Daily Press, December 3, 1865: New Orleans—Ar 11th, barque Pathfinder, Ellems, Rockland; brig Daphne, Young, Thomaston; New Orleans Price Current and Commercial Intelligencer, December 13, 1865: Imports by Sea. Thomaston, Me. Per bark Pathfinder—3286 casks lime 24 bales hay 885 barrels potatoes. Per brig Daphne—2500 casks lime 100 bales hay 269 barrels potatoes