Twenty Years at Sea: Leaves from my old log-books by Frederic Stanhope Hill - HTML preview

CHAPTER XI
 THE END OF THE STRUGGLE

ON the 9th of the following April, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Virginia to General U. S. Grant, beneath the famous Appomattox apple-tree, and our long civil war was practically closed.

For months afterward, straggling bands of Confederates would come riding down to the banks of the river on the Mississippi and Arkansas coasts, and, waving flags of truce, ask for confirmation of the news they had heard, that “the old man had surrendered.” The gunboats had been supplied with official printed copies of the terms of capitulation accepted by Lee, and we gave these out freely.

It was an interesting sight to watch these war-worn veterans as, with varying emotions, they read the documents that proved to them that the cause for which they had fought so long and so well was irretrievably lost.

 Most of them frankly accepted the situation at once; some seemed relieved that the disastrous struggle was at last over; all were surprised and gratified to find that they were to have Grant’s liberal terms,—permission to retain their side-arms, horses, and saddles.

So they went their way to their several plantations, saddened men, but with an evident determination to devote themselves in the future much more closely to their own private affairs and to give politics the go-by.

In the summer of 1865 the Navy Department issued a circular to the large body of volunteer officers in the navy, notifying them that as hostilities had ceased, the department would accept the resignations of such as desired to return to private life.

And so in July, I, with many other of my brother officers, sent in my resignation, which was accepted with the thanks of the department “for long and faithful service,” and I received my honorable discharge, a document which, duly framed, now hangs over my library fireplace, crossed by the sword which I had worn during the four eventful years of the civil war.

 Since 1865 the old sailor whose career you have followed has had no more hairbreadth ’scapes by field or flood, such as have been here set down, and, barring a couple of peaceful passages to and from Europe in a passenger steamer, he has seen nothing more of the sea than could be observed from the rocks of Nahant or Mt. Desert on a summer afternoon. He meets his old shipmates occasionally at the dinners of the Loyal Legion, and enjoys listening to a good yarn on these occasions with as much zest as he did a full half century ago, when as a boy in the old Bombay he used to coil himself up near the windlass bitts on his first voyage to sea.

And now, after closing this record of more than twenty busy years of a sailor’s life in both branches of the service, the writer, from his cosy chimney corner, bids his readers reluctantly that saddest of all words, good-by.

END