A Tide Turns

1864

The winter held Maine in its teeth. The cold did not come and go so much as settle in, hardening the roads, sealing the ponds, and making every chore bite the fingers. While we fed the stoves and read the papers by lamplight, the great armies seemed to be waiting. But the war had not stopped for winter. It had only changed its shape — into raids, probes, cavalry actions, and hard campaigning in the South and West.

The Pathfinder sailed from Rockland on January 19^th⁠[1]  with potatoes, apples, hay, lime and 23,000 feet of lumber.^⁠[2]  She made good time in heavy winter seas, and after twenty-eight days in sail, reached New Orleans.^⁠[3]

The Maine papers took satisfaction in Longstreet’s troubles in East Tennessee. He had gone west with a great name and come away from Knoxville looking less like Lee’s strong right arm than a general lost in the winter hills.

Sherman’s winter march toward Meridian showed the war changing before our eyes. He was not only after Confederate soldiers. He was after the roads beneath them, the rails behind them, the depots that fed them, and the bridges that carried their orders and supplies. Meridian was a railroad center, and Sherman went at it as a man might go at the keel of a vessel — not for show, but because once that was broken, the whole craft lost its strength.

When word came to us that officers had escaped from Libby Prison with terrible accounts of Richmond captivity, the news struck Northern homes like another casualty list. The first reports reached us unevenly, as war news often did. Later we learned the truth was larger than twenty-six officers having escaped. More than a hundred officers had tunneled out from under Libby itself, and near sixty reached the Union lines alive.

Their escape was brave enough, but what they told mattered more. Libby, which had once been a tobacco factory and supply complex was crowded, foul, and hungry. It was a place where prisoners were processed and enlisted men moved to a worse place—Belle Isle was colder and crueler still — an island prison in the James River where enlisted men lay behind a stockade with little shelter but thin canvas between their starving bodies and the frozen ground beneath them.

So when word came that General Kilpatrick had ridden toward Richmond, meaning to strike the city and open its prisons, the object did not seem foolish. It seemed desperate, yes, and dangerous beyond measure, but not foolish. If men were starving within sight of the Confederate capital, then some bold hand must try to reach them.

Kilpatrick’s plan was to move fast, cut the railroads, communications near Richmond, and force his way to the prisons if he could. Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, young and daring man who’d lost a leg at Gettysburg led a separate column meant to strike the city from another direction. But winter roads, swollen streams, bad guides, scattered commands, and Confederate resistance broke the design apart. What had looked bold on paper became confusion in the saddle.

Kilpatrick reached the outer defenses of Richmond but could not break through. Dahlgren’s column lost its way, fought in the dark, and was driven off. Dahlgren himself was killed, and papers found on his body — or said to have been found there—turned the raid from a failed rescue into a storm of accusation.^⁠[4] The prisoners remained behind. The riders came back worn, scattered, and empty-handed.

Still, I do not think the North judged the purpose harshly. The raid failed, but it had been born of something every household understood: imprisoned Union soldiers were suffering in Richmond, and the thought of leaving them there was harder to bear than the thought of a reckless ride.

By March, Lincoln had made his choice. Grant was raised to Lieutenant General and put over all the armies of the Union. By then, men had seen enough of generals who waited for certainty. McClellan had built a fine army and then handled it as if it were too precious to risk. Grant was different. He did not mistake caution for wisdom, nor movement for victory. He understood that war, once begun, had to be pressed until the thing itself gave way.

Out west, Banks went up the Red River with soldiers and gunboats, aiming for Shreveport and the cotton country beyond. It had the look of war and commerce tangled together, as so much of this war had from the beginning. But the country was hard, the water uncertain, and the Confederates struck him sharply enough that the whole expedition came to grief.

Captain Robinson brought the Pathfinder into Philadelphia in early April, and within twelve days she had cleared again for New Orleans. A vessel might make such a turn in ordinary trade if her freight were ready and her orders plain. Still, in that spring of 1864, little along the coast was ordinary. Grant had been put over all the armies, Union campaigns were gathering force, and every port, railroad, warehouse, and wharf seemed drawn into the work of war. I could not look at such a quick turn between Philadelphia and New Orleans and think she was merely wandering after chance cargo.

That was the month that state agents began roaming the counties of Maine, visiting furloughed soldiers in hopes of finding at least some who were fit to return to service. There was no shortage of young men newly come to the age of twenty, but after the bloodshed of the year before, conscription alone could not fill the ranks.

The war was paid for in every way a government could contrive—by taxes, by loans, by bonds sold to men with savings, by paper money printed in Washington, and by debt laid against the future. The old ways of paying the nation’s bills were not enough. Before the war, customs duties and tariffs had carried much of the load. Now the country needed armies, railroads, rifles, ships, horses, shoes, blankets, powder, and pay for hundreds of thousands of men.

I planted that spring, hoping that it would be the last in the shadow of war. Mercy was heavy with child, Annie her mother’s helper when she and Millie were not at the schoolhouse. Soon baby Edna who was almost three, would have to share her mother’s attentions.

In May, Grant crossed the Rapidan, and from that hour the waiting was over. He did not go in to make a show of fighting and then fall back as others had done. He went at Lee as if he meant to hold him fast and wear him down.

The first great collision came in the Wilderness, where armies fought among scrub, second-growth timber, smoke, and flame. It was no clean field where a man could see the shape of battle. Men were lost in thickets, wounded men burned where the woods caught fire, and still Grant did not turn back.

After the Wilderness, men waited to see whether Grant would do as others had done and draw back. He did not. He moved south. That one motion told the country something. Whatever the cost, he meant to keep hold of Lee.

While Grant moved against Lee in Virginia, Sherman set out from Tennessee into Georgia, and the two movements belonged to one design. A man who had followed trade could understand it. Strike one port only, and goods may be shifted through another. Block every channel, break every road, threaten every depot, and the whole system begins to fail. Grant meant to do something like that with armies. Lee was to be held fast in Virginia while Johnston was pressed back toward Atlanta. Neither could spare men to the other without weakening himself.

It was no longer one army fighting while the rest watched from a distance. The whole map seemed to tighten at once — Virginia, Georgia, the railroads, the river routes, the depots, the granaries, the bridges. The war had become a contest not only of courage in the field, but of movement, supply, and endurance. Grant meant to keep the Confederacy under pressure until something gave way.

It was some time before I knew that the Pathfinder took on coal in Philadelphia under contract of the U.S. Quartermaster, reaching New Orleans on May 18th after a twenty-eight day voyage.^⁠[5]

Our second son we named Leland was born on May 22, 1864. The weather turned unseasonably warm and early June we were having summer weather. Before the first week was out however, we were building warming fires, wearing our coats and gloves. Mercy mourned the loss of some of her tender garden plants who’d succumbed to the cold. Thankfully, it did not last and there was time to plant again, so long as an early frost did not come.

The Pathfinder cleared New Orleans on the first of June, first reported for Cárdenas and elsewhere as Havana, and by the seventeenth she was in Cárdenas harbor. She did not linger. The next day Robinson had her outward bound again for Philadelphia. A day and a night in port tells its own story. Whatever business took her there had been arranged before her anchor touched bottom.^⁠[6] Cárdenas was no idle Cuban harbor. It lay in the sugar country of Matanzas, with rail lines drawing the inland crop toward the coast. Sugar, molasses, and Caribbean trade moved through such places, and Cuba’s plantations, still hungry for enslaved labor, made plain enough that trade, slavery, and war did not keep separate accounts. The Pathfinder may have sailed there for an ordinary cargo. But she moved too cleanly, too quickly, from New Orleans to Cárdenas to Philadelphia for me to think she had gone merely in search of chance freight and more likely that her cargo waited her arrival.

The war no longer seemed to move by fits and starts. Grant held Lee in Virginia and forced him back toward Petersburg. Sherman pushed through Georgia toward Atlanta. The Shenandoah flared again, and even Washington had felt the alarm of Early’s raid. On the Gulf, Farragut had struck at Mobile Bay, closing one more door by which the Confederacy reached the world. It was not the clean victory men had once imagined, but the Union had more motion than retreat. Even so, the war had worn us thin.

The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor—those names came north one after another, each darker than the last. The Army of the Potomac had not been destroyed, but neither had Lee been beaten in any manner a common reader could recognize. Grant kept moving, which was more than could be said of some commanders before him, but he left behind such lists of dead and wounded that even loyal Union papers printed them with a kind of grim restraint.

Grant was before Petersburg, but Petersburg still held. Sherman was pressing toward Atlanta, but Atlanta had not fallen. Mobile Bay had been forced, but the city itself remained in Confederate hands. Every rumor from the Gulf had to be weighed against the next. In the counting rooms, at the wharves, and in the newspapers, men spoke of war, freights, insurance, cotton, and the election as parts of the same unsettled business.

Mr. Lincoln’s name stood at the center of it all. His friends defended him, his enemies mocked him, and even some loyal men questioned whether the country would bear four more years of war. The peace men promised negotiation. The war men answered that negotiation, if it left slavery untouched and the rebellion unbroken, would only put the old danger back into the hold and call the vessel sound.

A shipowner knew better than that. Rotten timber could be painted over, bad seams could be hidden for a season, and a vessel might still make harbor in fair weather. But send her out again into heavy seas, and the weakness would show. So it was with the Union. If the thing that had split the country was left in place, then peace would be only a fair-weather repair, and the next storm would find it out.

August brought no clean peace and no clean victory, but it brought signs a shipowner could read. Farragut forced Mobile Bay on the fifth, driving past torpedoes, forts, and Confederate fire to close one more southern passage to the sea. Mobile itself did not fall, but the bay was no longer the Confederacy’s open road. To men who watched trade as closely as battle, that mattered. Ports were the lungs of the rebellion. Close them, and the body labored.

Yet the news from Virginia gave little comfort, and Maine had its own names printed in those lists. Grant held Petersburg in siege before Petersburg, and Petersburg remained before Grant. The war there had settled into earthworks, batteries, raids against railroads, and assaults that seemed to spend men faster than they spent distance.

The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor were not yet old news; Maine regiments had been in that terrible advance, and their casualty lists still lay behind every fresh report. Grant had not turned back, but neither had the country been spared the cost of his going forward.

Sherman, too, was before Atlanta, and every northern paper watched that city as though the election itself sat behind its walls. Maine may have been far from Georgia, but no loyal state was far from Atlanta that summer. If Atlanta fell, Lincoln might yet stand. If it held, the peace men would have their argument ready. By late August, men did not read war news and political news as separate columns. They belonged to the same account.

The Democratic convention gathered at Chicago with the war still unresolved, and talk of negotiation gained strength from every casualty list. Peace sounded merciful when printed beside the names of the dead. But peace that left slavery standing would be patchwork over rotten seams.

We in the North had no clean hands merely because we held no slaves. Our ships had carried slave-grown cotton. Our mills had spun it. Our merchants had bought and sold it. Our tables had been sweetened by sugar raised under systems no honest man could defend. The war did not invent that truth. It exposed it.

The Pathfinder’s movements in the summer of 1864 had a different cast from the far-ranging voyages of her earlier years. Once she had made the world feel wide—Galveston, Havana, Smyrna, Palermo, Pernambuco, the River Plate, whatever port promised a cargo and a return. Now her notices drew a tighter wartime circle.

My own world had changed in something the same way. Once, I had known distance by the feel of it—the Caribbean sun, the crossing Mexico, Panama, San Francisco rising out of the bay, Hangtown in its rougher name before maps and manners softened it into Placerville. By 1864 I knew distance mostly by print. The Pathfinder moved across the columns while I tended fields in South Thomaston, watched the weather, followed accounts, and counted children instead of miles.

I was forty-one that summer. Mercy was twenty-seven, nursing our second son. The girls were in their summer term. The house was no longer a stopping place between ventures but the center from which all ventures were measured. My vessels sailed,^⁠[7] but I had become a shore man in earnest, tied to land, wife, children, and whatever profit or loss the sea sent home.

From New Orleans the Pathfinder touched Cárdenas on the seventeenth of June and sailed the next day for Philadelphia. From Philadelphia she cleared for Boston, waited out an easterly wind at the Delaware Breakwater, and then went on. By the first of August she had cleared Boston for Gardiner, there to load hay and ice for New Orleans; by the eleventh, she was southbound again.

That summer her route tightened into a wartime circuit: New Orleans to Cárdenas, Cárdenas to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to Boston, Boston to Gardiner, and Gardiner back toward New Orleans. It was not the old free-ranging trade of her first years. It was business under constraint, shaped by blockade, permits, military rule, shortages, and prices. A vessel could still earn her keep, but the world through which she moved had grown harsher, more watchful, and less innocent.^⁠[8] Hay and ice were not glamorous cargoes, but war made useful things dear. A conquered city still needed horses fed and bodies cooled, hospitals supplied and markets steadied. Gardiner could furnish such things from the farms and icehouses of the Kennebec. The barque was not chasing romance now. She was carrying what war had made necessary.^⁠[9]

That was not chance wandering. It was trade under pressure. The old ocean freedom had narrowed into routes shaped by blockade, military rule, permits, prices, and war. A bark could still earn her keep, but every voyage now seemed to ask not only what cargo she carried, but what kind of world made that cargo possible.

All summer the papers had watched Sherman’s army move through Georgia as though the election itself lay somewhere along the railroad tracks. At the beginning of September, Hood abandoned the city, and Sherman entered it. Atlanta had fallen. Men who had grown careful in their hopes allowed themselves, for a moment, to speak more plainly. The Confederacy had not collapsed, and Hood’s army had not been destroyed, but a great southern rail center was in Federal hands. The news gave Mr. Lincoln what no speech could give him: proof that the war still moved forward.

In Virginia, there was no such clean report. Grant remained before Petersburg. The army had taken hold of the Weldon Railroad, cutting deeper into Lee’s lines of supply. Grant’s war was not quick victory. It was pressure — steady, costly, and unrelenting.

So September brought two kinds of news. From Georgia came the kind the public could understand: a city taken, a map changed, a victory large enough to print in bold type. From Virginia came the kind a shipowner might understand better than most: not a dramatic capture, but the tightening of lines, the cutting of roads, the slow closing of every channel by which the enemy could be supplied.

That was the war by then. Ports closed. Railroads cut. Harbors forced. Cities occupied. Cargoes watched. Armies fed or starved according to what could reach them. The country was learning, at terrible cost, that triumph did not always come as one great blow. Sometimes it came as tightening—one road, one port, one rail line, one harbor at a time.

The harvest came all the same. War or no war, apples ripened, hay needed housing, potatoes had to be dug, and a man could not tell a field to wait until the papers brought better news. The fairs went on, with cattle, roots, fruit, sewing, baking, plowing, and pulling, as they had before. Mercy and I had our son to show off, and there was no shortage of arms to hold him.

I think it was that autumn my sister Margareta came with her family from Appleton, Elizabeth came from Massachusetts, and Mary came down from Presque Isle.

Yet no gathering was free of the war. Men standing beside a pen of oxen spoke of Petersburg as readily as prices. A wounded soldier home on furlough, or a discharged man carrying the war in his step or empty sleeve, could make the news from Virginia seem less distant than print.

Women carried their own reckonings in silence, measuring absence of so many men as surely as they measured cloth, flour, butter, or preserves. Children still laughed over apples and fairground noise, but the older people heard other sounds beneath it—the press of armies, the roll of casualty lists, and the question of November.

By October, after Atlanta and Mobile Bay, the war seemed to have turned in the Union’s favor. Lee still held before Petersburg, and Confederate armies remained in the field. But the question had begun to change. Men no longer asked only whether the Union could win. They asked how long victory would take, and what further price it would demand.

The Pathfinder sailed from New Orleans for Philadelphia at the end of the month of October.^⁠[10]

The weeks before the federal election had been full of meetings, newspaper quarrels, printed tickets, speeches, and returns from state contests watched as closely as weather signs. Maine had voted in September and stood with the Union men, but the nation was larger than Maine, and no man could read November with certainty. Soldiers voted from camps and fields. Civilians argued in stores, at post offices, on wharves, and beside church doors. Each war report was treated like campaign news. Atlanta strengthened Lincoln. Petersburg sobered every boast.

The peace men spoke of negotiation; the war men answered that peace without Union and emancipation would only leave the old wound covered, not healed.

On the eighth of November the votes were cast; by the following day, the telegraph carried the answer far enough for the papers to speak plainly. Mr. Lincoln had been returned to office. The electors and Congress would do their formal work in due season, but the country already understood the meaning of it. There would be no peace bought by leaving the rebellion and slavery standing.

Sherman left Atlanta that same month and moved eastward through Georgia. To a man accustomed to thinking in cargoes and supply, the boldness of it was plain. He cut loose from his own long supply line and turned the enemy’s country into the army’s provision road. Railroads were torn up, depots burned, mills and bridges destroyed, barns emptied, livestock driven off, cotton gins wrecked, crops and fodder taken or put to the torch, and plantations stripped of the wealth and order that had sustained the rebellion. It was not battle in the old sense alone. It was war against the machinery that kept the Confederacy alive.

General Grant, meanwhile, still held before Petersburg. The siege did not loosen. The victory in November did not spare the men in the trenches, nor the families waiting on their letters. But after the election, the war had a different sound.

Here in Maine, the cold came in hard and fierce and we held a dread that the winter would be a hard one. The Pathfinder sailed from Philadelphia to Boston, then Boston for Philadelphia for the remainder of the year.^⁠[11] 

December brought news enough to make men speak more boldly, though not yet carelessly. Grant still lay before Petersburg, and Lee still held the lines before Richmond, worn thin but not yet broken, his army hungry and hard-driven after six months of siege. The Confederacy held Virginia as a damaged vessel holds her last sound spar—once Richmond fell, there was little left to carry her forward.

But from the South and West came heavier tidings. Word came from Tennessee that Union General George H. Thomas had struck Confederate General John Bell Hood at Nashville and broken him. Hood had carried the Confederate Army of Tennessee north in one last desperate venture, but after the slaughter at Franklin and the rout at Nashville, that army was scarcely fit to be called an army at all.

Thomas paid dearly for the victory—more than three thousand Union casualties, nearly four hundred of them dead—but Hood paid ruinously more. Some six thousand Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or otherwise made casualties, and thousands more were taken prisoner as the broken army retreated. One of the South’s last great field armies was left in pieces.

Sherman, having cut loose from Atlanta, reached Savannah before Christmas. The city fell on the twenty-first, and with it another Confederate door to the sea was closed. Ports, railroads, depots, plantations, armies—the things that fed the rebellion were being struck one after another.

Nor was it only soldiers who moved with Sherman. Thousands of formerly enslaved people followed his army across Georgia, carrying bundles, children, and whatever hope freedom had placed in their hands. To the generals they posed a growing logistical problem—how to feed, guard, and order so many people on the march; to themselves they were walking out of the old world.

To a shipowner, Savannah’s fall had meaning beyond the flags raised over its public buildings. A port was not merely a place on a map. It was breath, credit, cargo, cotton, insurance and communication with the world. Close enough such doors,and even a stubborn enemy must begin to labor for air.

Still, the war was not over—not while Lee held Petersburg and Confederate troops remained in the field. We once wondered whether the North would endure. Now we wondered how long the Confederacy could.

NOTES

¹ New York Daily Herald, January 26, 1864: Rockland, Jan 19—Sailed bark Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans

² The Era, February. 24, 1864: New Orleans—Imports. Rockport Me.—Per bark Pathfinder—1091 bbls (barrels) potatoes, 29 bbls apples 774 bbls lime 450 bales hay 23,000 feet lumber to Geo A Fosdick

³ The Era (New Orleans), February 22, 1864: Arrived Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, 28 days from Rockport, Me., to master—Point; Portland Press Herald, February 19, 1864: New Orleans— Below 20th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson,  from Rockport

⁴ The so-called “Dahlgren Papers” were said to have been found on Col. Ulric Dahlgren’s body after the failed Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid on Richmond in March 1864. They allegedly called for Richmond to be burned and Jefferson Davis and his cabinet killed. Confederate authorities published them as proof of Union barbarity, while Union officials denied authorizing such orders; their authenticity remains disputed.

⁵ Portland Press Herald, April 21, 1864: Philadephia—Cld 19th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson N Orleans; Times Democrat (New Orleans) May 18, 1864: Below—Coming Up. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, from Philadelphia; Times Democrat, May 24, 1864: Arrived Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson,  28 days from Philadelphia, to master, 1st district; The Era, May 24, 1864: Imports—Philadelphia—Per bark Pathfinder—473 tons of coal to U S Quartermaster; Portland Press Herald, May 30, 1864: New Orleans—Below 18th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson; Portland Press Herald, May 31, 1864: New Orleans—Arrived 23rd, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Philadelphia]

⁶ The Era (New Orleans), June 2, 1864: Cleared Yesterday—New Orleans for Cardenas; Portland Press Herald, June 13, 1864: New Orleans—June 1, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Havana; Portland Daily Press, July 1, 1864: Ar June 30th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Cardenas; New York Daily Herald, July 4th, 1864: Cardenas — Arrived June 17, bark Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans, and sailed 18th for Philadelphia; Portland Daily Press, July 4th, 1864: Philadelphia—Arrived June 30, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Cardenas; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 6, 1864: Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, at Cardenas 17th June from New Orleans, and sailed 18th for Philadelphia

⁷ Edward S. Graves is documented as one of the principal owners of the barque Pathfinder and schooner Charles Richard in Cyrus Eaton’s history. His obituary suggests he had interests in other vessels as well, but those ships have not yet been identified. Further research in vessel enrollment records, customs-house documents, and contemporary shipping notices may clarify the full extent of his ownership and deserving of future study.

⁸ Philadelphia Inquirer, July 6, 1864: Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, at Cardenas 17th June from New Orleans, and sailed 18th for Philadelphia; The Evening Telegraph, July 16, 1864: Philadelphia— Cleared this Morning. Barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Boston, J.E. Bazley & Co.; Portland Press Herald, July 19, 1864: Philadelphia—Cld 16th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson; Boston; The Evening Telegraph, July 20, 1864: Lewes Delaware, July 19—The easterly wind has detained the following fleet at the Breakwater, ... Pathfinder for Boston (dozens of ships listed); Portland Daily Press, July 19, 1864: Philadelphia—cld 16th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Boston; Portland Press Herald, August 1, 1864: Boston—Cld barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Gardiner, to load for New Orleans; New York Daily Herald, August 21, 1864: Gardiner, Sailed August 11th, bark Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans; Philadelphia Inquirer, August 22, 1864: Memoranda. Barque Pathfinder, Robinson, sailed from Gardiner 11th inst. for New Orleans; The Times Record (Brunswick, Maine), August 23, 1864: Port of Bath, sailed August 22, Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, New Orleans; The Era (New Orleans), September 6, 1864: Local Intelligence. The bark Pathfinder, Capt. Robinson, sailed from Gardiner, Me., on the 11th of August for New Orleans

⁹ The Era, September 24, 1864: Arrived Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, 25 days from Bath Me., to Geo A Fosdick—2d district, 26; Imports. BATH—Per bark Pathfinder—180 bales hay Geo A. Fosdick—430 tons ice to order; Portland Daily Press, October 1, 1864: New Orleans—Ar September 23d, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Rockland; The Times Picayune, October 4, 1864: The consignee of 430 tons of Ice, consigned to order, per the bark PATHFINDER, Robinson, master, from Bath, should please make himself known to Geo A. Fosdick, 43 Natchez St.

¹⁰ The Era, October 30, 1864: Cleared Yesterday. Bark Pathfinder, Robinson, for Philadelphia, G.A. Fosdick; Portland Daily Press, November 9, 1864: New Orleans—Cld Oct 29th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Philadelphia

¹¹ The Evening Telegraph, November 19, 1864: Arrived This Morning. Barque Pathfinder, Robinson, 10 days from Pensacola in ballast to J.E. Bazley & Co.; Portland Daily Press, November 21, 1864:  Philadelphia—Below 18th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, from Pensacola.; Philadelphia Inquirer, December 2, 1864: Cleared Yesterday. Pathfinder, Robinson, Boston, J E Bazley & Co.; Portland Press Herald, December 10, 1864: At Delaware Breakwater 6th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, from Philadelphia for Boston; Portland Daily Press, December 14, 1864: Newport—Arrived December 12, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Philadelphia for Boston.; Portland Press Herald, December 27, 1864: Port of Boston. Arrived 26th, Pathfinder, Robinson, Philadelphia