Triumph and Death

The Eighty-eighth’s last great battle was Nashville, in December of 1864. After that, there were marches, pursuit, and duty in Tennessee and Alabama, but the heavy fighting appeared to be behind them.

Through those years, while armies moved and newspapers carried their long columns of killed, wounded, and missing, his letters came. I knew his hand before I knew the daily presence of him. I knew the turns of his mind, the warmth and force of his language, the way he could make distance feel less like absence than expectation.

When word reached us that General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia on April 9th of 1865, the war ended for us in ringing bells and flags. For a few days the country seemed hardly able to contain its joy. Men who had carried grief for four years allowed themselves to speak of peace as though it had truly come. Richard’s poem, “To Triumphe,” was written after the surrender.^⁠[1]

Not ever, in all human time,

Did any man or nation

Plant foot upon the peaks sublime

Of Mount Transfiguration,

But first, in long preceding hours

Of dread and solemn Being,

Crashed battle ’gainst Satanic powers,

Alone with The All-Seeing.

God’s glory lights no mortal brows

Which sorrow hath not wasted;

No wine hath He for lips of those

His lees who never tasted.

Nor ever, till in bloodiest stress

The heart is well approved,

Does the All-brooding Tenderness

Cry, This is my Beloved!

O land through years of shrouded nights

In triple blackness groping

Toward the far prophetic lights

That beacon the world’s hoping,—

Behold! no tittle shalt thou miss

Of that transforming given

To all who, dragged to hell’s abyss,

Hold fast their grip on heaven.

The Lord God’s purpose throbs along

Our stormy turbulences;

He keeps the sap of nations strong

With hidden recompenses.

The Lord God sows His righteous grain

In battle-blasted furrows,

And draws from present days of pain

Large peace for calm to-morrows.

Brothers! beneath our brimming tears

Lies nobler cause for singing

Than ever in the shining years

When all our vales were ringing

With happy sounds of mellow Peace,

And all our cities thundered

With lusty echoes, and our seas

By freighted keels were sundered.

For lo! the branding flails that drave

Our husks of foul self from us,

Show all the watching heavens we have

Immortal grain of promise;

And lo! the dreadful blasts which blew

In gusts of fire amid us,

Have scorched and winnowed from the true

The Falseness that undid us.

No floundering more, for mind or heart,

Among the lower levels;

No welcome more for moods that sort

With satyrs and with devils;

But over all our fruitful slopes,

On all our plains of beauty,

Fair temples for fair human hopes,

And altar-thrones for Duty.

Wherefore, O ransomed people, shout;

O banners, wave in glory;

O bugles, blow the triumph out,

O drums, strike up the story.

Clang! broken fetters, idle swords

Clap hands, O States, together;

And let all praises be the Lord’s,

Our Savior and our Father!

Then, before our joy had settled into anything steady, came the terrible news from Washington. President Lincoln had been shot on Good Friday evening and died the next morning, April 15th. It was as if the nation had drawn one breath of relief and then been struck through the heart.

I do not know how any of us understood those days. We had prayed for the war to end, and when it did, the man who had borne so much of its sorrow was taken from us. Flags that had been raised in triumph were lowered in mourning. The same mouths that had shouted victory now spoke in grief-struck whispers.

By early May, Richard was at Nashville, serving on the staff of Brevet Major General John F. Miller, military commander of the city. Richard’s duties were to receive the numerous visitors, both officials and refugees, and sort out the chaos.

Richard came to Furnessville and on Friday, the ninth of June we were married in Louisa and Edwin’s home by our friend, Rev. H. H. Morgan of Kalamazoo.^⁠[2]

Not long after our wedding, Richard was obliged to return to Nashville where he wrote to General O. O. Howard, not merely as a soldier asking favor, but as a man who believed the work of the war was unfinished. He had already sought an appointment in the Regular Army, and had been recommended by officers whose names carried weight.^⁠[3] Yet he feared, as he said, that in the general rush for such placement, his application might fail.

If that should be so, he asked Howard for some subordinate position in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.^⁠[4] It was work for which he thought himself fitted, and perhaps he was. He had long spoken for the enslaved and the poor; and now, wished to have some hand in guiding the freed people toward education, labor fairly rewarded, and citizenship.

Richard was mustered out of the 88^th in Nashville and came home by way of Washington^⁠[5] and was with us on the Fourth of July. There was celebration everywhere that summer. The Union was preserved, the armies were coming home, flags were displayed and red, white and blue decorations covered the town, as if the loss of Lincoln, the sorrow that remained in our hearts could be covered in bunting. Richard spoke that day at the lake shore with all the power that had made men listen to him long before I ever knew him. He could rise before a crowd and seem made for history.

But a man may be grand before the public and lost in the private room.

There was a darkness in him that no cause, however noble, could wholly command. At times drink brought it nearer the surface, and I was frightened by what marriage revealed that courtship through letters had concealed. When I realized his intemperate appetite for liquor, I was terrified beyond measure. I belonged to a temperate, sin-fearing fold, and Richard’s recklessness in many matters made me dumb with fear of the consequences, both to him and to myself.^⁠[6]

But I know that in his best moments he made friends of some of the best of people — little children and the aged loved him. My sister had friends of both classes, and he seemed much attached to them and they to him.^⁠[7]

At summer’s end he left for Washington once more. I received letters, very brief and unsatisfied, as if he were much troubled. Finally, though, he was given duty with the Fiftieth United States Colored Infantry. It was not the permanent place in the Regular Army for which he had hoped, nor was it the Bureau appointment he had asked of General Howard, yet it kept him in uniform. It kept him, in some measure, near the people for whom he had spoken so often and so fervently.

He found his regiment in North Carolina. I could imagine him there among men already speaking of restoration, revenue, commerce, and peace above justice. They were not wrong, perhaps. The country had debts to pay, ports to open, railroads to mend, and a government to set again in motion. But Richard could not hear such talk without asking what would become of the people for whom the war had at last opened the door of freedom. To him, a peace that restored trade but left justice uncertain was only another kind of surrender.

He wrote me from North Carolina in November. He said that they were ordered to Vicksburg.

Before he had left for the South, it was intended that I should join him speedily. My own judgment, or perhaps some truer instinct, urged me to go South and take my place beside my husband. But Richard and my friends advised me to wait.^⁠[8] His regiment was moving through the South and it was unsettled and far from peaceful.

While at Vicksburg, he wrote several poems, among them “An Old Man’s Idyl.” It did not appear in The Atlantic until March, but he had written it during that winter,^⁠[9] and it touched my heart deeply.

AN OLD MAN’S IDYL

By Richard Realf

By the waters of Life we sat together,

Hand in hand in the golden days

Of the beautiful early summer weather,

When skies were purple and breath was praise;

When the heart kept tune to the carol of birds,

And the birds kept tune to the songs which ran

Through shimmer of flowers on grassy swards,

And trees with voices aeolian.

By the rivers of Life we walked together,

I and my darling unafraid;

And lighter than any linnet’s feather

The burdens of being on us weighed.

And love’s sweet miracles o’er us threw

Mantles of joy outlasting time,

And up from the rosy morrows grew

A sound that seemed like a marriage chime.

In the gardens of Life we strayed together;

And the luscious apples were ripe and red,

And the languid lilac and honeyed heather

Swooned with the fragrance which they shed.

And under the trees the angels walked,

And up in the air a sense of wings

Awed us tenderly while we talked

Softly in sacred communings.

In the meadows of Life we strayed together,

Watching the waving harvests grow;

And under the benison of the Father

Our hearts, like the lambs, skipped to and fro.

And the cowslips, hearing our low replies,

Broidered fairer the emerald banks,

And glad tears shone in the daisies’ eyes,

And the timid violets glistened thanks.

Who was with us, and what was round us,

Neither myself nor my darling guessed;

Only we knew that something crowned us

Out from the heavens with crowns of rest;

Only we knew that something bright

Lingered lovingly where we stood,

Clothed with the incandescent light

Of something higher than humanhood.

O the riches Love doth inherit!

Ah, the alchemy which doth change

Dross of body and dregs of spirit

Into sanctities rare and strange!

My flesh is feeble and dry and old,

My darling’s beautiful hair is gray;

But our elixir and precious gold

Laugh at the footsteps of decay.

Harms of the world have come unto us,

Cups of sorrow we yet shall drain;

But we have a secret which doth show us

Wonderful rainbows in the rain.

And we hear the tread of the years move by,

And the sun is setting behind the hills;

But my darling does not fear to die,

And I am happy in what God wills.

So we sit by our household fires together,

Dreaming the dreams of long ago:

Then it was balmy summer weather,

And now the valleys are laid in snow.

Icicles hang from the slippery eaves;

The wind blows cold,—’tis growing late;

Well, well! we have garnered all our sheaves,

I and my darling, and we wait.^⁠[10]

It was dangerous work, and the city unsettled and so; I did not join him. I and my darling, and we wait.

His letters were frequent and full of plans for our future — of his literary ventures and of his trials while investigating cases against the Negroes. He wrote that he was learning to be economical and was saving his means to begin life when he returned.

Vicksburg carried the sense of a place where the war had ended without bringing peace. I saw it first through him: the river city under military rule, the heat, the confusion, the Black soldiers in uniform, the freedpeople pressing toward the army for protection and a future. Only later did the numbers give shape to what his words had suggested. As many as 20,000 formerly enslaved people had come into and around Vicksburg after Union victory. Thousands of United States Colored Troops were stationed there too, with one estimate placing 5,000 Black soldiers in the garrison.

There, emancipation was not an idea but a daily struggle. Freedpeople needed wages, schools, legal marriages, land, and the recovery of family. Planters wanted labor. Bureau officers made contracts and heard grievances. Black troops stood guard over a promise the country had not yet decided to keep. For Richard, serving with the 50th United States Colored Infantry, Vicksburg was not a quiet post. It was on the raw edge of Reconstruction.

When he wrote from Vicksburg on February 24, 1866, he told me not to trouble myself with an answer, for the troops were to be immediately disbanded and he should be with me in two or three weeks.^⁠[11]

That was the last letter I ever received from him.

NOTES

¹ Poems by Richard Realf: Poet, Soldier, Workman, ed. Richard J. Hinton, 1898; newspapers began to publish it by June, Bradford Reporter, Towanda, Pennsylvania, June 22, 1865

² Sophia to R. Hinton, March 18, 1879

³ Chicago Tribune,, June 26, 1865

⁴ Richard Realf to Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard, June 17, 1865, Headquarters, Post of Nashville, Nashville, Tenn., Oliver Otis Howard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library. The docket identifies Realf as “Lt 88th Ills Vols.” and notes that he “Asks to be assigned to Bureau of R F & AL”; received Bureau Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, June 21, 1865.

⁵ Richard’s postwar journey to Washington was likely connected to his effort to secure continued service.

⁶ Sophia to R. Hinton, March 29, 1879

⁷ Sophia to Sarah Realf Whapham, March 31, 1879

⁸ Sophia to her sister-in-law, Sarah Realf Whapham, March 28, 1879

⁹ Sophia to R. Hinton, March 18, 1879

¹⁰ Richard Realf, “An Old Man’s Idyl,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1866; reprinted in Poems by Richard Realf: Poet, Soldier, Workman, ed. Richard J. Hinton (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1898). Sophia mentioned the poem in her letter to R. J. Hinton, March 18, 1879.

¹¹ Sophia to her sister-in-law, Sarah Realf Whapham, March 28, 1879; Sophia to R. Hinton, March 8, 1879