Ellsworth Had Shown Himself To Be Brave
And Foolish.
Let his folly be pardoned on the score of his courage,
and there, I think, should have been an end of it.
I found afterward that Mount Vernon was accessible, and I rode
thither with some officers of the staff of General Heintzelman,
whose outside pickets were stationed beyond the old place. I
certainly should not have been well pleased had I been forced to
leave the country without seeing the house in which Washington had
lived and died. Till lately this place was owned and inhabited by
one of the family, a Washington, descended from a brother of the
general's; but it has now become the property of the country, under
the auspices of Mr. Everett, by whose exertions was raised the money
with which it was purchased. It is a long house, of two stories,
built, I think, chiefly of wood, with a veranda, or rather long
portico, attached to the front, which looks upon the river. There
are two wings, or sets of outhouses, containing the kitchen and
servants' rooms, which were joined by open wooden verandas to the
main building; but one of these verandas has gone, under the
influence of years. By these a semicircular sweep is formed before
the front door, which opens away from the river, and toward the old
prim gardens, in which, we were told, General Washington used to
take much delight. There is nothing very special about the house.
Indeed, as a house, it would now be found comfortless and
inconvenient. But the ground falls well down to the river, and the
timber, if not fine, is plentiful and picturesque. The chief
interest of the place, however, is in the tomb of Washington and his
wife. It must be understood that it was a common practice
throughout the States to make a family burying-ground in any
secluded spot on the family property. I have not unfrequently come
across these in my rambles, and in Virginia I have encountered
small, unpretending gravestones under a shady elm, dated as lately
as eight or ten years back. At Mount Vernon there is now a cemetery
of the Washington family; and there, in an open vault - a vault
open, but guarded by iron grating - is the great man's tomb, and by
his side the tomb of Martha his wife. As I stood there alone, with
no one by to irritate me by assertions of the man's absolute
supremacy, I acknowledged that I had come to the final resting-place
of a great and good man, - of a man whose patriotism was, I believe,
an honest feeling, untinged by any personal ambition of a selfish
nature. That he was pre-eminently a successful man may have been
due chiefly to the excellence of his cause, and the blood and
character of the people who put him forward as their right arm in
their contest; but that he did not mar that success by arrogance, or
destroy the brightness of his own name by personal aggrandizement,
is due to a noble nature and to the calm individual excellence of
the man.
Considering the circumstances and history of the place, the position
of Mount Vernon, as I saw it, was very remarkable. It lay exactly
between the lines of the two armies. The pickets of the Northern
army had been extended beyond it, not improbably with the express
intention of keeping a spot so hallowed within the power of the
Northern government. But since the war began it had been in the
hands of the seceders. In fact, it stood there in the middle of the
battle-field, on the very line of division between loyalism and
secession. And this was the spot which Washington had selected as
the heart and center, and safest rallying homestead of the united
nation which he left behind him. But Washington, when he resolved
to found his capital on the banks of the Potomac, knew nothing of
the glories of the Mississippi. He did not dream of the speedy
addition to his already gathered constellations of those Western
stars - of Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa; nor did he dream
of Texas conquered, Louisiana purchased, and Missouri and Kansas
rescued from the wilderness.
I have said that Washington was at that time - the Christmas of 1861-
62 - a melancholy place. This was partly owing to the despondent
tone in which so many Americans then spoke of their own affairs. It
was not that the Northern men thought that they were to be beaten,
or that the Southern men feared that things were going bad with
their party across the river; but that nobody seemed to have any
faith in anybody. McClellan had been put up as the true man -
exalted perhaps too quickly, considering the limited opportunities
for distinguishing himself which fortune had thrown in his way; but
now belief in McClellan seemed to be slipping away. One felt that
it was so from day to day, though it was impossible to define how or
whence the feeling came. And then the character of the ministry
fared still worse in public estimation. That Lincoln, the
President, was honest, and that Chase, the Secretary of the
Treasury, was able, was the only good that one heard spoken. At
this time two Jonahs were specially pointed out as necessary
sacrifices, by whose immersion into the comfortless ocean of private
life the ship might perhaps be saved. These were Mr. Cameron, the
Secretary of War, and Mr. Welles, the Secretary of the Navy. It was
said that Lincoln, when pressed to rid his cabinet of Cameron, had
replied, that when a man was crossing a stream the moment was hardly
convenient for changing his horse; but it came to that at last, that
he found he must change his horse, even in the very sharpest run of
the river. Better that than sit an animal on whose exertions he
knew that he could not trust.
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