The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner | Page 4

monotony of our lives. Occasionally some of the gunboats guarding the river would steam in, and exchange a few shots with us; and we witnessed frequent skirmishes between them and Walker's afterwards famous battery of flying artillery; but ammunition being extremely scarce at that period in the Confederacy, the orders to us were peremptory to be very sparing in the use of it.[1]
The battery at Acquia Creek was constructed at the terminus of the railroad from Fredericksburg, and was manned by an infantry company acting as artillerists. Besides this force, permanently stationed at the battery, and quartered near it, a company of infantry from military headquarters was sent every evening to guard against a night attack. A company called the "Tigers," took their turn at this service, and we would gladly have dispensed with their "protection." Utterly undisciplined, they were more dangerous to friends than to foes. Mutinous and insubordinate, they were engaged in constant collisions with each other and with the companies so unfortunate as to be quartered near them; and their camp was a pandemonium. In addition to other sources of quarrel and contention, several women (vivandi��res, they called themselves) followed the company. The patience of Gen. M.[2] who commanded the division, was finally exhausted. He summoned the Captain of the "Tigers" into his presence; and after severely reprimanding him for the misconduct of his men, insisted that the "vivandi��res" should be sent away. The captain urged many reasons for keeping them; the chief one being the good moral effect of their presence! but the General was inflexible. Even gallantry to the sex must be sacrificed to the truth; and a proper regard for the latter demands the statement that a reformation commenced with the departure of the women; and our friends the "Tigers" eventually became well-behaved soldiers.
We passed many months of inglorious inactivity here until the spring of 1862, when the line of the Potomac was abandoned. While the Federal forces had remained comparatively quiet in this part of the Confederacy, they had achieved many important successes elsewhere. Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River, and Roanoke Island in North Carolina had been captured, with large garrisons; and New Orleans and Savannah were threatened. General Joseph E. Johnston, who at the time commanded the Army of Northern Virginia, determined to fall back to the line of the Rappahannock; and all the batteries on the Potomac were abandoned between the 8th and 10th of March, 1862; the guns being removed to other quarters.
The monotonous service at the batteries had tried the patience of all who were attached to them; and we rejoiced at the prospect of more active duty. The reverses sustained by the Confederate arms were not to be disguised, nor were our convictions of great danger to the country to be removed by the politic proclamation issued by the Confederate Government, to the effect that a contraction of the lines could exercise no material influence upon the issue of the war. But as it was deemed necessary by the military authorities to abandon the situation, we were not at all sorry to depart; for although we had seen no active service, insatiate war had claimed many victims, who had perished ingloriously by the malarial fevers of that marshy district. The naval officers were especially elated at the change. Their duties and their authority being alike undefined, there resulted a deplorable want of harmony between them and the military. This was, indeed, the inevitable consequence of the anomalous position held by the former; and this want of concert of action subsequently contributed, in some measure at least, to the disastrous issue of the conflict below New Orleans.
We having been trained in the strict discipline of a man of war, wanted "savoir faire" in dealing with the fastidious young captains, and the equally sensitive "high privates"; while they no doubt looked upon us as a domineering, tyrannical set of exclusives and wished that we were on board the Federal gunboats in the river, or farther. My personal intercourse, however, was always very pleasant with them. Capt. Brown, commanding the company of North Carolinians at the battery, had graduated at the U. S. Naval School a year or two previous to the war, and was a strict disciplinarian. Two years after our separation, I fell in with him accidentally; and he then gave me a sad account of the changes wrought by death and disease in his fine company. He had risen to the rank of Colonel, and was then on his return to duty in the army of Northern Virginia after recovery from wounds received in battle. The graphic account given by him of the manner in which he was wounded and his narrow escape from death, may interest others as much as it did me. His regiment formed