The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
Travis, now Captain of Artillery, followed, with Grant's army, to
Pittsburgh Landing. And finding himself within a day's journey of his
old home, he lost no time in slipping through the lines to see Alice,
whom he had not seen since her return.
He went first to her, and the sight of his blue uniform threw Colonel
Westmore into a rage.
"To march into our land in that thing and claim my daughter--" he
shouted. "To join that John Brown gang of abolitionists who are
trying to overrun our country! Your father was a Southern gentleman
and the bosom friend of my youth, but I'll see you damned before you
shall ever again come under my roof, unless you can use your pistols
quicker than I can use mine."
"Oh, Tom," said Alice when they were alone--"how--how could you do
it?"
"But it is my side," he said quietly. "I was born, reared, educated
in the love of the Union. My grandfather himself taught it to me. He
fought with Jackson at New Orleans. My father died for it in Mexico.
I swore fidelity to it at West Point, and the Union gave me my
military education on the faith of my oath. Farragut is a
Tennessean--Thomas a Virginian--and there are hundreds of others, men
who love the Union more than they do their State. Alice--Alice--I do
not love you less because I am true to my oath--my flag."
"Your flag," said Alice hotly--"your flag that would overrun our
country and kill our people? It can never be my flag!"
She had never been angry before in all her life, but now the hot
blood of her Southern clime and ancestry surged in her cheeks. She
arose with a dignity she had never before imagined, even, with Cousin
Tom. "You will choose between us now," she said.
"Alice--surely you will not put me to that test. I will go--" he
said, rising. "Some day, if I live, you can tell me to come back to
you without sacrificing my conscience and my word of honor--my sacred
oath--write me and--and--I will come."
And that is the way it ended--in tears for both.
Thomas Travis had always been his grandsire's favorite. His other
grandson, Richard Travis, was away in Europe, where he had gone as
soon as rumors of the war began to be heard.
That night the old man did not even speak to him. He could not. Alone
in his room, he walked the floor all night in deep sorrow and
thought.
He loved Thomas Travis as he did no other living being, and when
morning came his great nature shook with contending emotions. It
ended in the grandson receiving this note, a few minutes before he
rode away:
"All my life I taught you to love the Union which I helped to make,
with my blood in war and my brains in peace. I gave it my beloved
boy--your father's life--in Mexico. We buried him in its flag. I sent
you to West Point and made you swear to defend that flag with your
life. How now can I ask you to repudiate your oath and turn your back
on your rearing?
"Believing as I do in the right of the State first and the Union
afterwards, I had hoped you might see it differently. But who, but
God, controls the course of an honest mind?
"Go, my son--I shall never see you again. But I know you, my son, and
I shall die knowing you did what you thought was right."
The young man wept when he read this--he was neither too old nor too
hardened for tears--and when he rode away, from the ridge of the
Mountain he looked down again--the last time, on all that had been
his life's happiness.
It was an hour afterwards when the old General called in his
overseer.
"Watts," he said, "in the accursed war which is about to wreck the
South and which will eventually end in our going back into the Union
as a subdued province and under the heel of our former slaves, there
will be many changes. I, myself, will not live to see it. I have two
grandsons, as you know, Tom and Richard. Richard is in Europe; he
went there following Alice Westmore, and is going to stay, till this
fight is over. Now, I have added a codicil to my will and I wish you
to hear it."
He took up a lengthy document and read the last codicil:
"_Since the above will was written and acknowledged, leaving The
Gaffs to be equally divided between my two grandsons, Thomas and
Richard Travis, my country has been precipitated into the horrors of
Civil War. In view of this I hereby change my will as above and give
and bequeath The Gaffs to that one of my grandsons who shall
fight--it matters not to me on which side--so that he fights. For The
Gaffs shall never go to a Dominecker. If both fight and survive the
war, it shall be divided equally between them as above expressed. If
one be killed it shall go to the survivor. If both be killed it shall
be sold and the money appropriated among those of my slaves who have
been faithful to me to the end, one-fifth being set aside for my
faithful overseer, Hillard Watts._"
In the panel of the wall he opened a small secret drawer, zinc-lined,
and put the will in it.
"It shall remain there unchanged," he said, "and only you and I shall
know where it is. If I die suddenly, let it remain until after the
war, and then do as you think best."
CHAPTER II
THE REAL HEROES
The real heroes of the war have not been decorated yet. They have not
even been pensioned, for many of them lie in forgotten graves, and
those who do not are not the kind to clamor for honors or emoluments.
On the last Great Day, what a strange awakening for decorations there
will be, if such be in store for the just and the brave: Private
soldiers, blue and gray, arising from neglected graves with tattered
clothes and unmarked brows. Scouts who rode, with stolid faces set,
into Death's grim door and died knowing they went out unremembered.
Spies, hung like common thieves at the end of a rope--hung, though
the bravest of the brave.
Privates, freezing, starving, wounded, dying,--unloved, unsoothed,
unpitied--giving their life with a last smile in the joy of
martyrdom. Women, North, whose silent tears for husbands who never
came back and sons who died of shell and fever, make a tiara around
the head of our reunited country. Women, South, glorious Rachels,
weeping for children who are not and with brave hearts working amid
desolate homes, the star and inspiration of a rebuilded land. Slaves,
faithfully guarding and working while their masters went to the
front, filling the granaries that the war might go on--faithful to
their trust though its success meant their slavery--faithful and
true.
O Southland of mine, be gentle, be just to these simple people, for
they also were faithful.
Among the heroic things the four years of the American Civil War
brought out, the story of Captain Thomas Travis deserves to rank with
the greatest of them.
The love of Thomas Travis for the preacher-overseer was the result of
a life of devotion on the part of the old man for the boy he had
reared. Orphaned as he was early in life, Thomas Travis looked up to
the overseer of his grandfather's plantation as a model of all that
was great and good.
Tom and Alice,--on the neighboring plantations--ran wild over the
place and rode their ponies always on the track of the overseer. He
taught them to ride, to trap the rabbit, to boat on the beautiful
river. He knew the birds and the trees and all the wild things of
Nature, and Tom and Alice were his children.
As they grew up before him, it became the dream of the
preacher-overseer to see his two pets married. Imagine his sorrow
when the war fell like a thunderbolt out of a harvest sky and, among
the thousand of other wrecked dreams, went the dream of the overseer.
The rest is soon told: After the battle of Shiloh, Hillard Watts,
Chief of Johnston's scouts, was captured and sent to Camp Chase.
Scarcely had he arrived before orders came that twelve prisoners
should be shot, by lot, in retaliation for the same number of Federal
prisoners which had been executed, it was said, unjustly, by
Confederates. The overseer drew one of the black balls. Then happened
one of those acts of heroism which now and then occur, perhaps, to
redeem war of the base and bloody.
On the morning before the execution, at daylight, Thomas Travis
arrived and made arrangements to save his friend at the risk of his
own life and reputation. It was a desperate chance and he acted
quickly. For Hillard Watts went out a free man dressed in the blue
uniform of the Captain of Artillery.
The interposition of the great-hearted Lincoln alone saved the young
officer from being shot.
The yellow military order bearing the words of the martyred President
is preserved to-day in the library of The Gaffs:
"_I present this young man as a Christmas gift to my old friend, his
grandsire, Colonel Jeremiah Travis. The man who could fight his guns
as he did at Shiloh, and could offer to die for a friend, is good
enough to receive pardon, for anything he may have done or may do,
from_
"A. LINCOLN."
Afterwards came Franklin and the news that Captain Tom had been
killed.
CHAPTER III
FRANKLIN
But General Jeremiah Travis could not keep out of the war; for toward
the last, when Hood's army marched into Tennessee the Confederacy
called for everything--even old age.
And so there rode out of the gates of The Gaffs a white-haired old
man, who sat his superb horse well. He was followed by a negro on a
mule.
They were General Jeremiah Travis and his body-servant, Bisco.
"I have come to fight for my state," said General Travis to the
Confederate General.
"An' I am gwine to take keer of old marster suh," said Bisco as he
stuck to his saddle girth.
It was the middle of the afternoon of the last day of November--and
also the last day of many a gallant life--when Hood's tired army
marched over the brow of the high ridge of hills that looked down on
the town of Franklin, in front of which, from railroad to river,
behind a long semicircular breastwork lay Schofield's determined
army. It was a beautiful view, and as plain as looking down from the
gallery into the pit of an amphitheatre.
Just below them lay the little town in a valley, admirably situated
for defense, surrounded as it was on three sides by the bend of a
small river, the further banks of which were of solid rocks rising
above the town. On the highest of these bluffs--Roper's Knob--across
and behind the town, directly overlooking it and grimly facing Hood's
army two miles away, was a federal fort capped with mighty guns,
ready to hurl their shells over the town at the gray lines beyond.
From the high ridge where Hood's army stood the ground gradually
rolled to the river. A railroad ran through a valley in the ridge to
the right of the Confederates, spun along on the banks of the river
past the town and crossed it in the heart of the bend to the left of
the federal fort. From that railroad on the Confederate right, in
front and clear around the town, past an old gin house which stood
out clear and distinct in the November sunlight--on past the Carter
House, to the extreme left bend of the river on the left--in short,
from river to river again and entirely inclosing the town and facing
the enemy--ran the newly made and hastily thrown-up breastworks of
the federal army, the men rested and ready for battle.
There stands to-day, as it stood then, in front of the town of
Franklin, on the highest point of the ridge, a large linden tree, now
showing the effects of age. It was half-past three o'clock in the
afternoon, when General Hood rode unattended to that tree, threw the
stump of the leg that was shot off at Chickamauga over the pommel of
his saddle, drew out his field glasses and sat looking for a long
time across the valley at the enemy's position.
Strange to say, on the high river bluff beyond the town, amid the
guns of the fort, also with field glass in hand anxiously watching