Armies of Deliverance: A New History

of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon

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Armies of Deliverance
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Armies
of Deliverance
A New History of the Civil War
zz
ELIZABETH R. VARON

1
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Varon, Elizabeth R., 1963–​author.
Title: Armies of deliverance : a new history of the Civil War /​Elizabeth R. Varon.
Other titles: New history of the Civil War
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028897 (print) | LCCN 2018029572 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190860615 (Updf ) | ISBN 9780190860622 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190860608 (hbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—​History—​Civil War, 1861–​1865. | Slavery—​United States—​
Public opinion. | Secession—​United States—​Public opinion.
Classification: LCC E468 (ebook) | LCC E468 .V37 2019 (print) | DDC 973.7—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018028897

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Map x

Introduction: “We Are Fighting for Them” 1

PART ONE: Loyalism

1. March of Redemption: First Bull Run to Fort Donelson 23

2. Ripe for the Harvest: To Shiloh   48

3. Sacred Soil: Virginia in the Summer of 1862   78

4. The Perils of Occupation   119

PART TWO: Emancipation

5. Countdown to Jubilee: Lincoln’s Hundred Days   153

6. The Emancipation Proclamation   184

7. Fire in the Rear: To Chancellorsville   210

8. Under a Scorching Sun: The Summer of 1863   241

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vi Contents

PART THREE: Amnesty

9. Rallying Point: Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan   285

10. Is This Hell? Fort Pillow to Atlanta   322

11. Campaign Season: The Election of 1864   356

12. Malice Toward None: The Union Triumphant   384

Conclusion: “Deliver Us from Such a Moses”:

Andrew Johnson and the Legacy of the Civil War   422

Notes 435
Index 489
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Acknowledgments

Of the many debts of gratitude I incurred in writing this book, none is

greater than my debt to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the
University of Virginia, and to the staff, colleagues, students, and interns who
make up the center’s uniquely supportive community. I am grateful, as always,
to my colleague and Nau Center founder and director Gary W. Gallagher.
He is a model of intellectual integrity and generosity, and it has been a priv-
ilege and joy to work with him. William Kurtz, the Nau Center’s managing
director and digital historian, has been a source of insight about nineteenth-
​century America and also about how our scholarship can engage with
the public. I have learned so much with and from our Civil War Seminar
participants—​students and former students including Frank Cirillo, Mikes
Caires, Tamika Nunley, Adrian Brettle, Willa Brown, Jack Furniss, Melissa
Gismondi, Jesse George-​ Nichol, Lauren Haumesser, Shira Lurie, Asaf
Almog, Clayton Butler, Stephanie Lawton, Brian Neumann, Katie Lantz,
Daniel Sunshine, Joshua Morrison, Brianna Kirk, and Stefan Lund—​and
I cherish them, as individuals and as a team. At the heart of our work is UVA’s
wonderful library system and its extensive collection of Civil War books,
manuscripts, and databases; I deeply appreciate the skill and helpfulness of
the library staff. And I deeply value the fellowship and scholarship of UVA
colleagues who work on early America and the nineteenth century, especially
Alan Taylor, Max Edelson, Justene Hill Edwards, Cynthia Nicoletti, Ervin
Jordan, Holly Shulman, Kirt Von Daacke, Carrie Janney, and Steve Cushman.
I am grateful to John L. Nau III for all he does to promote Civil War
scholarship. His remarkable archive of Civil War documents—including
thousands of unique, unpublished firsthand accounts by soldiers—​is a treas­
ure trove from which I drew much material for this book. The Nau Civil War
Collection’s curator, Sally Anne Schmidt, in Houston, Texas, was generous
with her time and expertise in navigating the collection.
vi

viii Acknowledgments

My friend Matt Gallman read the entire manuscript and offered invalu-
able advice for improving it. I very much appreciated the chance to workshop
parts of this book at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance, and Abolition, and I thank David Blight for the invitation to
speak at its annual conference in the fall of 2017; I am also grateful to have
received feedback at the Harvard University conference, that same fall, in
honor of my treasured graduate school mentor Nancy Cott.
Oxford University Press has been wonderful throughout this process, and
my thanks go to Susan Ferber and Charles Cavaliere for their editorial steward-
ship, and mapmaker George Chakvetadze for his expert work. The anonymous
readers who vetted the manuscript for Oxford made many helpful suggestions.
I am fortunate to live in a family of writers, and I rely on all of them for
inspiration: my husband, best friend, and all-​time favorite historian, Will
Hitchcock; our kids, Ben and Emma, whose strong voices fill us with pride
and hope; my brother, Jeremy, with his fierce social conscience; my father,
Bension, whose productivity leaves us all in the dust; and my late mother,
Barbara, to whose standard we still aspire.
Nothing buoyed me more in the final stages of writing this book than the
experience of watching my nephew Arlo, a Brooklyn sixth-​grader, become a
Civil War buff. Like I did at his age, he has become fascinated by the voices of
the war. But he has been exposed by his teachers to a far wider range of those
voices, and a more nuanced treatment of the war, than I was. His newfound
passion for the study of the Civil War makes me optimistic for the future of our
field, and serves as a reminder that we should never underestimate the capacity
of young people to handle the complexity of history. This book is for Arlo.
E.R.V.
Charlottesville, Virginia
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Armies of Deliverance
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Introduction
“We Are Fighting for Them”

In July 1864, in the fourth summer of the Civil War, the popular Northern
journal Harper’s Weekly featured an article entitled “Fighting for Our Foes.”
The article invoked the “terrorism under which the people of the rebellious
States have long suffered”—​the extortion, intimidation, and violence per-
petrated by elite slaveholders against the Southern masses in order to keep
“their white fellow-​citizens ignorant and debased.” The Union army, Harper’s
pledged, would bring liberation to the South:

Many of these wretched victims are in arms against us. But we are
fighting for them. The war for the Union and the rights secured by
the Constitution is a war for their social and political salvation, and
our victory is their deliverance. . . . It is not against the people of those
States, it is against the leaders and the system which have deprived
them of their fair chances as American citizens, that this holy war is
waged. God send them and us a good deliverance!1

A modern reader might be tempted to ask: could Harper’s Weekly have been
sincere? Surely Northerners had learned, after so much blood had been shed
on so many battlefields, that the Southern masses were diehard Confederates,
not unwilling dupes of slaveholding aristocrats. Surely Northerners had given
up waiting for Southern Unionism to come to the fore. Surely Northerners
no longer cherished the naive hope of changing Southern hearts and minds.
Of all the ongoing debates over the Civil War, perhaps none has proven
so difficult to resolve as the issue of Northern war aims. What was the
North fighting for? Some modern scholars emphasize Northerners’ bedrock
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2 Introduction

commitment to saving the Union, seeing that as the central point of con-
sensus among the majority of Republicans and Democrats. Other scholars
emphasize the growing power and momentum of antislavery Republicans,
and their role in establishing emancipation as the defining purpose and
achievement of the war. Each of these interpretations focuses on only part of
the broad Northern political spectrum. This book takes a different approach,
by asking how disparate Northerners, who disagreed about the fate of slavery
and the future shape of the Union, managed to form a powerful Unionist
coalition and to defeat disunionism. The answer lies in the political theme of
deliverance.2
Northerners imagined the Civil War as a war of deliverance, waged to
deliver the South from the clutches of a conspiracy and to deliver to it the
blessings of free society and of modern civilization. Northerners did not
expect white Southerners to rise up en masse and overthrow secession. But
they did fervently believe that as the Union army advanced across the South,
Southerners, especially from the non-​slaveholding majority, would increas-
ingly welcome liberation from Confederate falsehood and despotism.
This belief in deliverance was not a naive hope that faded, but instead a
deep commitment that grew stronger over the course of the war.3 That is be-
cause the idea resolved the tensions within the Union over war aims. A dis-
tinct politics of deliverance—​a set of appeals that fused “soft war” incentives
and “hard war” punishments, and sought to reconcile the liberation of white
Southerners with the emancipation of enslaved blacks—​unified a pro-​war
coalition in the Union and sustained its morale. “As the guns of Grant and
Sherman shake down their idols and clear the air,” the Harper’s essay prophe-
sied, “these men, deluded fellow-​citizens of ours, will see that in this country
whatever degrades labor injures every laboring man, and that equal rights be-
fore the law is the only foundation of permanent peace and union.” Grant and
Sherman, symbols of hard war, also stood at the head of powerful armies of
deliverance.4

Setting the Stage: The Secession Crisis in the North

The image of the Confederate people as the deluded dupes of scheming leaders
tapped a deep vein in antebellum politics: the charge that a “Slave Power con-
spiracy” of ambitious planter-​oligarchs and truckling Northern Democratic
politicians exercised unseemly control over national politics, subverting de-
mocracy and imposing their proslavery agenda on the majority of Americans,
North and South. Abolitionists warned of such a conspiracy as far back as
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Introduction 3

the 1830s, as slaveholders coalesced around an aggressive campaign to expand

slavery and to defend it as a “positive good” and a state’s right. The fledgling
Republican party took up and popularized the conspiracy theme in the mid-​
1850s, pointing to a series of proslavery victories, such as the 1850 Fugitive
Slave Law, the 1854 Kansas-​Nebraska Act, and the 1857 Dred Scott decision,
as proof that the Slave Power was ever more aggressive in its designs and
aimed at nothing less than nationalizing slavery, both spreading it westward
and reintroducing it in the free states. Republican politicians appealed to the
Northern mainstream by emphasizing slavery’s harmful effects on whites—​
the economic backwardness, lack of opportunity, and absence of free speech
in the South—​rather than by emphasizing the themes of racial justice and
equality. The party’s prescription for restoring majority rule was to restrict
slavery’s westward expansion while at the same time spreading the free labor
gospel in the South, so that white Southerners would gradually, over time, see
fit to dismantle the institution. Secessionist usurpers, so Republicans charged,
diverted history from its natural course, using fraud and violence to block this
peaceful evolution toward freedom and sectional harmony.5
Abraham Lincoln led the Republican party to victory in the 1860 election, a
contest in which Republicans capitalized on the recent split of the Democratic
party into Northern and Southern wings. In the free states, Lincoln prevailed
over his Democratic opponent and fellow Illinoisan Stephen Douglas, win-
ning 54 percent of the popular vote to Douglas’s 25 percent; two outlier
candidates, Southern rights Democrat James C. Breckinridge of Kentucky
and pro-​compromise John Bell of Tennessee, placed a distant third and fourth.
In the slave states, Breckinridge and Bell were the main attractions and Lincoln
and Douglas the outliers, with Breckinridge garnering 45 percent of the pop-
ular vote to Bell’s 40 percent; Douglas was third with 13 percent and Lincoln
a very distant fourth with only 2 percent of the Southern vote. Republicans
claimed a mandate based on the fact that Lincoln won more electoral votes
(180) than all the other candidates combined. But Deep South states, which
had been priming the pump for secession for the previous decade, rejected
Lincoln’s victory, seceded from the Union, and formed the Confederacy in
the winter of 1860–​61; four Upper South states followed them that spring,
while the four slaveholding border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and
Delaware) remained in the Union.6
As Lincoln took office, he faced the challenge of uniting Northerners
arrayed across a contentious political spectrum. On one end of that spectrum
were abolitionists and Radical Republicans who believed the federal govern-
ment should play an active role in dismantling slavery and in promoting black
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4 Introduction

citizenship. On the other end were conservative Democrats who rejected ab-
olition and black citizenship and were content for slavery to persist indefi-
nitely. Across the middle of the spectrum were moderates of various political
stripes who, like Lincoln himself, believed in the superiority of the free labor
system and resented the power of slaveholders but had a relatively patient atti-
tude toward slavery’s demise, wishing for its gradual extinction instead of im-
mediate abolition. From the start, antipathy to elite slaveholding secessionists
was a strong source of Northern unity. Republicans had long scorned Slave
Power oligarchs; Northern Democrats, bitter at the fracturing of their
party, felt betrayed by the leadership class of Southern Democrats. As his-
torian Martha Hodes notes, Northerners imagined a “simplistically divided
Confederacy” and did not carefully differentiate among the various strata of
non-​elite whites. The ambiguous category of the “deceived masses” lumped
together the South’s landholding yeomen farmers and landless poor whites.7
Very quickly, in the first months of the Civil War, the Slave Power con-
spiracy idea took on a new cast and increased potency. Northerners began
to argue that the Confederacy was a “military despotism” that herded white
Southerners into its ranks, seized private property for the war machine, and
suppressed dissent. This was the theme of Lincoln’s first wartime message to
Congress, delivered on July 4, 1861, nearly three months after the Confederate
firing on Fort Sumter had initiated war. After “drugging the public mind of
their section for more than thirty years,” the leaders of the secession move-
ment had relied on “ingenious sophistry” (the false doctrine of state sover-
eignty) and on coercion (votes in which “the bayonets are all on one side
of the question”) to bring “many good men to a willingness to take up arms
against the government,” Lincoln insisted. A small band of conspirators had
seemingly cowed the South into submission. But how deep did support for
disunion really run? “It may well be questioned whether there is, to-​day, a
majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South
Carolina, in favor of disunion,” Lincoln speculated. “There is much reason
to believe that the Union men are the majority in many, if not in every one,
of the so-​called seceded States.” The Union fought to uphold the principle of
majority rule—​that ballots, not bullets, should settle disputes—​and did not
intend “any coercion, any conquest, or any subjugation, in any just sense of
those terms.”8
Claims that white Southerners were “ripe for their deliverance from the
most revolting despotism on the face of the earth,” as an influential newspaper,
the New York Herald, put it in May 1861, were standard fare in the Northern
press and among politicians in the early months of the war. Sometimes words
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Introduction 5

such as “liberation,” “regeneration,” “redemption,” and “restoration” featured

in such rhetoric. But the core message remained the same. “The people of the
South are regarded as our brethren, deluded, deceived, betrayed, plundered of
their freedom of inquiry, of speech and of action; forced into opposition to
the Constitution and treason to the Union against their instincts, their sober
judgment and free volition, by bold bad men,” the New York Times editorial-
ized in June 1861, in a typical formulation.9
In Northern rhetoric, the treatment of anti-​Confederate Southerners
was a form of “terrorism.” While that word appears sporadically in ante-
bellum American political discourse, it became more prominent in 1861, as
Northerners accused secessionists of employing both force and intimidation
to get their way. An article entitled “Southern Terrorism” in the Milwaukee
Morning Sentinel, for example, quoted a U.S. army officer from the South
who had fled Virginia and who claimed to have seen citizens there “hung
for voting the Union ticket”: “He says there are thousands in Virginia, and
all through the South, who only wait to see Federal bayonets in order to
avow their loyalty.” Antislavery newspapers joined with mainstream papers
in publicizing the mistreatment of Southern Unionists as evidence of the
“terror which reigns in the rebel states.” The war was a “rebellion to extend
despotism—​despotism over white men’s minds as well as over black men’s
bodies,” the Liberator observed, in a May 31, 1861, article entitled “Slavery is
at the Bottom of It.” The border South, the New York Tribune opined in June,
was full of men who “will be ready to act when the hour of deliverance is
plainly at hand, but who dare not speak out at present.”10
In hindsight, Lincoln and other Northern political figures and writers
were clearly wrong about a Southern populace deceived and coerced into
supporting the secession movement. While evidence exists of the intimidation
and harassment of white Unionists, far greater evidence exists of the robust
support of white Southerners for secession on the eve of war. Unconditional
Unionism was in short supply among voters in the Deep South states during
the secession winter of 1860–​61; in the spring, the Lincoln administration’s
rejection of compromise proposals and willingness to use force against the
insurrection moved Upper South “conditional Unionists” off the fence and
into the Confederate camp.11
There were, nonetheless, clear military, political, diplomatic, and cultural
imperatives at work in Northerners’ emphasis on deliverance at the outset
of the war. The free states simply did not possess the military might or the
political will to conquer the Confederate South and impose a widespread
and lasting military occupation. The Union had considerable advantages in
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6 Introduction

manpower (a population of 18.5 million in free labor states in 1861, and an-
other 3 million in the slaveholding border states, compared to a population of
9 million, 3.5 million of whom were enslaved, in Confederate states) and re-
sources (90 percent of American industrial capacity lay in the North). But the
vast size of Confederate territory—​larger than all of Western Europe—​made
the prospect of winning and holding territory daunting.
As for political considerations, although Lincoln’s Republican party won
a resounding victory in 1860, the Democratic party represented about 40 per-
cent of the Northern electorate, and about that same percentage of Union
soldiers. Democrats intended to hold Lincoln to his promise of fighting a lim-
ited war for Union, not a revolutionary war for black citizenship and racial
equality. At the start of the war only roughly one in ten Union soldiers was an
abolitionist, committed to black freedom as a war aim. The other 90 percent
shared an animus against the Slave Power conspiracy but not necessarily an
animus against slavery itself—​or any deep sympathy for the enslaved.
Proslavery Unionism was especially dominant in the slaveholding border
states of Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware; keeping them in
the fold was a major strategic priority for Lincoln. Very early on, the Union
resorted to hard war measures in Maryland and Missouri, where secessionist
minorities brazenly defied the will of Unionist majorities. The attack by a
secessionist mob on Massachusetts regiments passing through Baltimore to
Washington, D.C., on April 19, 1861, and the destruction by Confederate-​
sympathizing saboteurs of railroad bridges and telegraph wires in Maryland
were met with stern measures on Lincoln’s part, including the military arrest
of rioters, saboteurs, and even several secessionist legislators, and the placing
of Baltimore under martial law. In Missouri that May, Union forces captured
a unit of secessionists who planned to attack the Federal arsenal in St. Louis;
secessionists in that city rioted in protest, resulting in the imposition of federal
martial law. Lincoln and his allies justified the suppression of dissent on the
grounds that the unscrupulous secessionist elite must not be permitted to ma-
nipulate the border state masses the way it had manipulated the Confederate
masses. Clashes in the border states gave rise to a “tandem strategy,” as his-
torian Christopher Phillips has put it, in which the president used political
means, particularly disavowals of antislavery radicalism, to reassure border
state Unionists, while selectively “allowing discretion to Federal commanders
to apply the hard hand of war against civilians” whose loyalty was in question.12
Diplomacy was also a factor. Lincoln’s administration was loath to grant
the Confederacy status as a sovereign belligerent, empowered to make treaties
or alliances and entitled to respect as a member of the family of nations, lest
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Introduction 7

European powers such as Britain and France openly take the Confederate
side. Union officials thus characterized secession as a “domestic insurrection”
within a sovereign nation and routinely referred to the seceded states as the
“so-​called Confederacy.” The deluded-​masses theory and emphasis on military
despotism were essential parts of the Union’s effort to cast the Confederates,
for an international audience, as usurpers rather than nationalists seeking
self-​determination.13
In nineteenth-​century Judeo-​Christian culture, the political meanings of
deliverance were inseparable from its religious meanings. The Old Testament
story of Israel’s exodus from Egyptian bondage was central to slave resist-
ance and to antislavery politics; so, too, were other biblical texts with deliv-
erance as their theme, such as the story of the year of jubilee from the Book
of Leviticus, in which slaves were proclaimed free. Antebellum abolitionists
such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison told the story of
the Israelites’ deliverance from Pharaoh as an “epic tale of liberation” and an
“ominous tale of divine judgment,” casting defenders of slavery such as John
C. Calhoun as modern Pharaohs. Once the war started, Northern preachers
applied biblical images to the redemption of the white South and of the na-
tion itself—​they described the white Southern majority as “crushed down
and silenced by an armed minority” and yearning for liberation from such
traitors, as the Reverend Horace Carter Hovey, a Massachusetts Presbyterian,
declared in an April 1861 sermon. Northerners’ biblical references often lik-
ened secessionists to satanic demons whose evil spell over the beguiled masses
must be broken.14
Deliverance rhetoric filled emotional needs, too, as it reflected the convic-
tion, pervasive among antebellum Americans, that the Union was designed
by the Founders to be “affective” and consensual rather than coercive—​“a po-
litical entity bound together not by force or interest, but by tender emotions
such as affection and love.” Americans associated the affective theory of
Union with Revolutionary forefathers such as George Washington and James
Madison and with antebellum heroes such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel
Webster, who in times of crisis had appealed to the strong emotional bonds
between American citizens. Bonds of affection were what made the Union
great, and beneficial, and indeed exceptional in the world: a shining beacon
of representative government, and of prosperity and progress. Secessionists
argued on the eve of war that political conflicts had broken the bonds of affec-
tion between South and North and that the Union could not persist without
such bonds. Unionists argued that they could reverse sectional alienation and
rekindle the mutual affection and respect of Northerners and Southerners.15
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8 Introduction

This belief system shaped Northern war aims. While Northerners

aligned themselves with the Founders’ ideals, it would be a mistake to see
their Unionism as nostalgic or backward-​looking. Northerners upheld and
defended a dynamic Union. For abolitionists and Republicans, that dyna-
mism was best represented in the moral and material progress of America—​
its railroads, factories, schools, newspapers, moral reform societies, and
other hallmarks of modernity. Republicans believed that they embodied the
nation’s free labor majority and free labor future. For Democrats the dyna-
mism was that of “Manifest Destiny,” of territorial expansion across the con-
tinent and beyond, spreading the agrarian ideal of Jefferson and Jackson.
Democrats believed that their party, which had long commanded support in
both North and South, was the nation’s bulwark against sectional extremism.
Visions of a loyal, regenerated South were at the heart of Northern nation-
alism during the war, and Northerners were engrossed with what Southerners
thought, how they felt, what they wanted. Northern nationalism was funda-
mentally didactic. To achieve victory, Unionists had to do more than effect
Confederate surrender: they had to teach the Southern rebels to trust them
and to love the Union again. Deliverance rhetoric, by distinguishing between
the guilty elite and the redeemable masses, permitted Northerners to main-
tain the “ideal of a consensual Union held together by heartstrings rather than
military coercion.”16
Northerners elaborated their visions of deliverance in the face of a relent-
less Confederate propaganda campaign aiming to show that the Union was
intent on the brutal conquest of the South, not its liberation. In secessionist
rhetoric, the North was in the hands of radical abolitionists who were com-
mitted to ruthless, remorseless war. “Blood, thunder, fire, smoke, rapine and
entire subjugation are now the favorite terms of the Northmen, who are bent
upon violence and extermination,” reported the Richmond Daily Dispatch in
early May 1861, adding, in a common trope, that Lincoln was mustering a
mercenary army of “cut-​throats, out laws, and vagabonds” motivated by greed
and bloodlust. Such rhetoric echoed among the Confederate-​sympathizing
“Peace Democrats” of the North, who, drawing on antebellum campaign tac-
tics, accused the Republicans of being abolitionist-​disunionists: the Lincoln
administration, they charged, never gave conciliation a chance, but instead
willfully alienated and provoked the South so that Republicans could im-
pose their radical social agenda on Southerners at bayonet point. These
“Copperheads” (as Peace Democrats came to be known) sought a return to
the status quo antebellum through a negotiated peace; some even accepted
the legality of secession and thought Confederate independence was better
9

Introduction 9

than Union on the Republicans’ terms. While this wing of the Democratic
party was in a decided minority in the early days of the war, its message—​that
emancipation would endanger the economic security and racial supremacy of
Northern whites as well as Southern ones—​served Lincoln notice that any
moves he took against slavery would meet with a fierce partisan backlash.17

Building a Wartime Unionist Coalition

Tracing the arc of the war from the first battle of Bull Run to Lee’s surrender
at Appomattox, this book will show that politics of deliverance contributed
materially to the Union’s military victory. Precisely because it could serve
so many ends, the theme of deliverance resonated broadly for Northerners.
Moderate Republicans who focused on disenthralling non-​ slaveholding
Southern whites from the domination of slaveholding oligarchs gradually
came to see the abolition of slavery as a means to that end, and they built
the argument that black freedom (defined as something less than full polit-
ical equality) should go hand in hand with amnesty to repentant Southern
whites. For abolitionists and Radical Republicans, the emancipation of the
enslaved was the key to the moral liberation of the South and the libera-
tion of the nation from the sins of slavery and racism; in antislavery rhet-
oric, African Americans, in resisting slavery and then joining the ranks of the
Union army, were agents of liberation, and true deliverance would bring black
citizenship and racial equality. For conservative “War Democrats,” the key to
reunion was rekindling the allegiance of conservative white Southerners by
disabusing them of the false notion that the Union was controlled by anti-
slavery extremists, and by reasserting the power of the Northern Democratic
party as a bulwark against radical change.
Northerners mobilized images of deliverance to refute the charge that
they were bent on subjugating the South. Crucially, they enlisted slave-​state
whites in making this case. Northerners saw the slaveholding border states as
Southern societies that the Union must wrest from the clutches of aspiring
secessionists; their redemption was proof that the politics of deliverance could
work. And so border state loyalists, such as prominent Kentucky Republicans
Cassius Clay and Robert J. Breckinridge, loomed large in Northern poli-
tics, as did border state victories, such as Maryland’s abolition of slavery in
November 1864. Pro-​war Northerners also relentlessly played up examples of
white Southern Unionism in the seceded states. White loyalists willing to risk
open defiance were a small minority of the population in the Confederacy.
But they, too, loomed large in Northern politics, as symbols of the potential
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10 Introduction

return of the Southern masses to the national fold. The most ardent and influ-
ential of these Unionists, such as Andrew Johnson and William G. “Parson”
Brownlow of Tennessee, called loudly for hard war measures against the
Confederates, even as they maintained that the war’s primary aim was white
Southern deliverance.
Deliverance politics also proved essential to establishing broad support
for emancipation. Rather than conceding to Confederates or Copperheads
that the advent of emancipation signaled a shift to war without mercy,
Lincoln and his allies worked to harmonize the case for black freedom with
the case for white Southern liberation. Each of the acts and proclamations
that implemented emancipation contained inducements—​ grace periods,
incentives, and exemptions—​intended to encourage voluntary compliance by
slaveholders and to reassure nervous whites that the demise of slavery was a
military necessity and served the overarching aim of reunion. Over the course
of the war supporters of emancipation would assiduously build the case that
slavery, as the source of Southern terrorism and despotism, was the obstacle to
national reunion, and that emancipation and black enlistment would benefit
Northern and Southern whites alike, morally, politically, and economically.
“We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,” Lincoln
asserted in his December 1862 Annual Message to Congress, connecting
emancipation to the survival of democracy. “In giving freedom to the slave,
we assure freedom to the free—​honorable alike in what we give, and what we
preserve.”18
Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper made their own distinct contributions to deliverance discourse. They
were less inclined than whites to portray the Confederate masses as victims
or to imagine that Union victory in the war would bring swift sectional rec-
onciliation. Instead they emphasized the broad complicity of whites in the
system of racial oppression, and the depths of the hatred and mistrust that
system had sowed. On the eve of the war, blacks made up less than 2 percent
of the population in the free states and were relegated there to a second-​class
citizenship. The vast majority of African Americans lived in the South and
were enslaved, deprived altogether of citizenship and basic rights. In order
to imagine an interracial democracy, black abolitionists had to work on two
fronts: to reform the North and transform the South. They protested the
persistent inequity in the North even as they acclaimed the achievements of
free black communities—​the infrastructure of churches, schools, businesses,
and reform societies Northern blacks had built in the face of adversity.
Highlighting the crucial role of slave resistance and black enlistment in
1

Introduction 11

undermining the Confederacy (roughly 80 percent of black Union soldiers

came from slave states), black leaders argued that the only sure way to regen-
erate the South and reclaim it for the Union was to grant full citizenship to
former slaves—​the truest of the South’s Unionists. Thus Frederick Douglass,
hailing slavery’s demise in his native Maryland in 1864, urged Marylanders to
take the next step and enfranchise black men. “The more men you make free,
the more freedom is strengthened, and the more men you give an interest in
the welfare of the State, the greater is the security of the State,” he reasoned,
laying out the “true path to permanent peace and prosperity.” Harper, his
fellow Marylander, agreed, declaring the lesson of the war to be “Simple jus-
tice is the right of every race.” African Americans expressed the cautious hope
that white Southern Unionists—​the diehard kind who had flatly rejected the
Confederacy—​could be potential allies in reshaping the region.19
At the heart of Lincoln’s effort to reconcile black deliverance and white
Southern deliverance was his program of amnesty, promulgated in December
1863. It offered forgiveness to any white Southerner who accepted aboli-
tion and pledged future allegiance to the Union, as well as readmission to
states that could form an electorate of such loyalists, equal to 10 percent of
the 1860 electorate. For Lincoln, emancipation and amnesty were two sides
of the same coin, and his linkage of them was integral to the success of his
newly christened National Union party in the presidential contest of 1864.
Calling Lincoln’s reelection the “great deliverance,” the Reverend Cornelius
Henry Edgar of the Reformed Dutch Church of Easton, Pennsylvania, mar-
veled at how the president’s conduct of the war had “magnetized—​blended—​
harmonized—​unified” the formerly discordant elements of Northern public
opinion. Quoting Psalm 144, he prayed that God would finish the work of
delivering the nation from “the hand of falsehood.”20
The rhetoric of politicians, editors, reformers, and ministers echoed
among Union soldiers, who believed that the Federal army, as it moved
through the South, was bringing civilization in its wake. Union soldiers
commented extensively on the Southern terrain, casting it by turns as a
natural paradise from which the rebels had unjustly barred their Northern
countrymen, a land of unmet potential that indolent slaveholders and igno-
rant poor whites had failed to cultivate and develop, or a wasteland rendered
barren by slavery and the slaveholders’ war. In a typical formulation, Union
brigadier general Alpheus S. Williams bemoaned, while stationed in Front
Royal, Virginia, in the summer of 1862, that the “beautiful valley with its
productive soil” showed so “few indications of prosperity,” and the houses
such an “air of neglect and dilapidation.” Sergeant Major Rufus Sibb Jones,
12

12 Introduction

a free black bricklayer from Pittsburgh serving in the 8th Regiment United
States Colored Troops (USCT), wrote in a hopeful vein about the future
prospects of Florida. “With a little capital and labor, on the yankee system,”
Florida could be “greatly improved; and in a short time, [made] . . . an
enviable State,” he mused while garrisoned in Jacksonville in the spring of
1864. The deliverance of the South meant reclaiming and regenerating the
Southern landscape.21
Deliverance rhetoric also served for soldiers as a counterweight to
feelings of bitterness, vengeance, and despair. Evidence abounds of soldiers
venting their grief and anger in calls for the conquest and even annihila-
tion of their Confederate foes. But retributive rhetoric never supplanted
the rhetoric of redemption. Unionists yearned to establish the justness
of their war by defining rules for “hard yet humane” warfare, waged with
surgical precision rather than indiscriminate hatred. The justness of the
Union war was measured not only by the actions soldiers took but also
by the spirit in which they took them: imagining themselves as liberators
of the South helped Union soldiers defend hard war tactics as righteous
and free of malice. The Union army, as Corporal James Henry Gooding
of the pioneering black regiment the 54th Massachusetts put it, would
replace “slavery and poverty” with “liberty and prosperity.” Moreover, as
Copperhead Democrats grew more militant in their critique of Union war,
and especially of emancipation and conscription, Northern soldiers increas-
ingly directed their anger at this fifth column. Unlike rebel soldiers, who
could be pitied on the grounds that the slaveholders’ elite had kept them in
ignorance, Copperheads, who lived amidst the blessings of free society, had
no excuse for their treason.22
Women and images of femininity played a key role in Union efforts to de-
fend hard war as humane. The armies of women who served as relief workers
and hospital workers prided themselves on mitigating the pain and hatred
of war and on demonstrating the moral superiority of free society, thus pre-
paring the way for reunion. Both in the public discourse of civilian patriotic
organizations such as the United States Sanitary Commission and in private
letters, diaries, and memoirs, women such as reformers Mary Livermore and
Harriet Jacobs contributed to a burgeoning literary genre in which tales of
the exemplary suffering of loyalist soldiers and civilians and of acts of mercy
to deluded rebels proved the righteousness of the Union cause. These same
Union women took elite Confederate women to task for complicity in
manipulating the Southern masses and perpetuating the horrors of slavery.
A small vanguard of loyalist women—​most notably the spies Elizabeth Van
13

Introduction 13

Harriet Tubman. Tubman, who fled bondage in Maryland as a young adult, earned a rep-
utation in the 1850s as a “Moses” figure among African Americans for leading enslaved
families to freedom in the North on the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War,
Tubman was a recruiter, spy, scout, and nurse for the Union army, and led a daring 1863 raid
to liberate slaves along the South Carolina coast. (Library of Congress LC-​USZ62-​7816)

Lew and Harriet Tubman—​contributed directly to Union military success

and entered the circle of liberators.23
Deliverance politics was thus an essential tool for building a coalition
that was not only Northern but broadly Unionist: that coalition brought to-
gether Northerners in the free states (pro-​war Republicans and Democrats,
and abolitionists, white and black), loyalists in the contested slaveholding
border states, and anti-​Confederate Southerners (African Americans and a
small but symbolically significant number of whites) in the seceded states.
The elements of the coalition argued with each other over exactly what poli-
cies would work best to defeat the rebellion. But they found in the theme of
deliverance—​with its emphasis on breaking the slaveholders’ conspiracy and
bringing the benefits of free society to the South—​a shared vocabulary for
battling disunionism.
14

14 Introduction

Across the Union political spectrum, loyal Americans turned to metaphors

to conjure how the Union war would save the South: Confederates were
pupils who needed teaching, patients who needed curing, children who
needed parenting, heathens who needed converting, drunkards who should
sober up, madmen who needed to come to their senses, errant brethren who
should return to the path of righteousness, prodigal sons who should re-
turn home. “We are actuated by love for our government and pity for our
foes—​a pity akin to the feelings for a misguided brother,” wrote Captain
Francis Adams Donaldson of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1862, as he strove
to reconcile himself to the realities of hard war. Oftentimes these metaphors
invoked the purifying, redemptive nature of suffering. Medical analogies, in
which Southerners would be saved “by the severity of the surgeon’s probe,”
as one Southern Unionist put it, were common and reflected the widespread
Victorian-​era belief that pain was a sign of the healing process. Religious
images of purification, in which Southerners would be “saved as by fire,” were
also common, and reflected the belief that suffering could bring religious
enlightenment.24
Such rhetoric can sound to modern ears either naively sentimental or
cynical. But the commitment of loyal Americans to Southern deliverance
persisted because that commitment was ideological. Unionists fit the facts to
conform to their belief system—​a belief system that emphasized the affective
Union and humankind’s capacity for moral and material progress.25 Loyalists’
hope in the possibility of changing rebel hearts and minds was renewed every
time a Southerner who had fled the Confederacy testified that he left behind
many fellow Unionists who yearned for liberation from Confederate des-
potism; every time the Federal army occupied a Southern town or city and
found that its war-​weary inhabitants welcomed Yankee rations and aid; every
time a border state politician conceded that the institution of slavery was no
longer salvageable; every time a wounded rebel prisoner expressed surprise
and gratitude for medical care he received at the hands of the Yankees; every
time deserters to Union lines told tales of demoralization in the rebel ranks;
every time Confederate critics of the Davis administration seemed to tender
the olive branch.26 Dreams of deliverance persisted because the theory that
the Southern masses awaited liberation was literally irrefutable until the work
of defeating the Confederate army and destroying the Confederate govern-
ment was completely done.
The longer the war ground on, the higher the toll in death and destruc-
tion, and the deeper the yearning among loyal Americans for a conversion
among their enemies that would hasten the end to the carnage. A November
Another random document with
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 CHAPTER II.
Cachar or Silchar—We are fêted there—The hill tribes: Kukis, Tongkhuls, etc.—
Their dress and habits—Rest houses, and difficulties therein—Manipuri
Sepoys: camp on the Makru River—Logtak Lake—Colonel Samoo Singh—
The Senaputti.

Cachar, or rather Silchar, deserves a description, as it has been of

such importance during the recent troubles at Manipur. The town is
about one hundred and thirty miles from the Manipur capital, but only
twenty-four miles from the boundary. The state of Manipur is
separated from the Cachar district by a river called the Jhiri, where
we have outposts garrisoned by troops. Silchar itself is not a very
large station, though it boasts of more Europeans than most Assam
districts, there being a regiment always quartered there besides the
usual civil authorities. The district has a very large planting
community, and abounds in tea-gardens; and as the planters are
constantly in and out, there is a very fair amount of gaiety, especially
in the winter months, when there are always two or three race
meets, each lasting for a week, which bring people in from far and
near.
Silchar has seen much trouble during the last year. In September,
1890, the Lushai disaster occupied everyone’s attention, and troops
poured through the place on their way to the hills about Fort Aïjal to
avenge the treachery of the tribes inhabiting those regions—
treachery which resulted in the loss of two valuable lives. A few
weeks later curiosity was rife to see the ex-Maharajah of Manipur,
who had been driven from his throne by his brother the Senaputti,
and was passing through on his self-imposed pilgrimage to the
sacred city of Brindhaban on the Ganges, accompanied by three of
his brothers. Christmas brought the usual round of races, dances,
and dinners with it; but the sound of the Christmas bells had scarcely
ceased when the New Year brought tidings of a disaster which
caused men’s faces to pale, and almost out-rivalled the horrors of
the mutiny. But I am anticipating events, and must return to
ourselves and our experiences three years earlier.
We stayed two or three days in Silchar on our first arrival there
and made some new friends, and were fêted, as is the custom when
new-comers arrive at a station in India. Hospitality is a law, and you
have only to be English to be assured of a welcome from your fellow-
countrymen, who are ready to put themselves, their houses, and
possessions all at your service. There are disadvantages, maybe, to
be met with in India which are many and great, and one loses much
by having to live out there; but one never meets with such true-
hearted kindness anywhere else as in India. The narrow prejudices
and questioning doubts as to who you are, and what your station in
life is, which assail you at home, vanish entirely when you need
hospitality out there. The civil list or the army list will tell your position
and income, and for the rest you are English, you come from the old
country, and all are glad to see you and be kind to you. I am happy
to think of the good friends made when I was out there too—friends
who were ready to share their pleasures with me, and who were still
more ready to help me when the dark days of trouble came and
human sympathy was so needed. Their names will ever live in my
heart, and may all good luck be theirs!
Our short stay in Silchar came to an end very soon, and we were
on our way to Manipur in real earnest by the end of the third day.
The first two marches out to the Jhiri were uneventful, and we then
found ourselves on the banks of the river, with a vast expanse of
forest jungle before us to be traversed the following day. Unluckily, it
rained all that night, and when the morning arrived it was still damp
and drizzling. We changed our coolies here, and got Nagas (hillmen)
to carry the baggage. They were fine-looking men, belonging to the
various hill tribes about Manipur. There were Kukis, Tongkhuls, and
Kupoës, and they seemed to my uninitiated eyes very alarming
people indeed. They wore very few clothes, and their necks were
adorned with many necklaces made of gaudily-coloured glass
beads. Their ears were split to a hideous extent, and in the loops
thus formed they stuffed all kinds of things—rolls of paper (of which
they are particularly fond), and rings of bamboo, which stretched
them out and made them look enormous.
Their hair was cut in different ways. The Tongkhuls’ heads were
shaved with the exception of a ridge along the top, which extended
to the nape of the neck, and gave them the appearance of
cockatoos.
The Kukis’ hair was long, and gathered up into a loose and very
untidy knot at the back of their heads, and the Kupoës had theirs cut
so that it stuck out all round their heads and made them look as
though they had fur hats on. They made no fuss over the
Memsahib’s trunks, and I was much amused at the way they all
rushed for the bath, which had a flat cover to it, and was easy to
carry and cool against their backs. It was a muggy kind of day in the
middle of April—a day that invariably brings out legions of horse-flies
and gnats and things of that species to worry you and your horses.
Worry us they most certainly did. They collected in rows under the
brims of our hats and stung our faces, and they settled in swarms on
our horses, and what with the dreadful state of the so-called road,
and the heat and the flies, we were dreadfully tormented. We had a
guard of Manipuri Sepoys with us, who marched along in front of us
and helped to lead our horses through the sea of deep mud which
covered the road. For seven miles we plodded on like this, and then
we came to the first range of high hills and got out of the mud. These
hills are the backbone of Assam, and the Manipur ranges are a
continuation of those known as the Naga Hills. The highest range on
the road to Manipur is about 6,000 feet, but they are all steep, and
the road over them is very rough, making riding difficult in places.
They are covered with bamboo jungle, and here and there you come
across villages, but they are not numerous.
At every five miles the Manipuris had Thanas for the purpose of
keeping a look-out against enemies, and acting as stages for the
dak-runners. These Thanas were not always fortified, but the larger
ones were, and they had been attacked more than once by Lushais
out on a head-hunting expedition. There was great excitement at our
advent at all the Thanas, and the Sepoys on guard at each stage
turned out in style and gave us the ‘General’s salute.’ They had a
particular fondness for bugling, and they exercised it on every
possible occasion; but I’m afraid they were not struck with our
appearance that day, as we were very tired and hungry, and covered
with mud.
We did not get to the end of our march till late in the evening, and
we then found we had to cross a river, as our camping-place was on
the left bank, and our horses had to be left on the other side. We
crossed by means of a bamboo suspension-bridge—a most
alarming-looking erection. These bridges are really curiosities. They
are made of wire twisted into thick ropes, and stretched from trees
on either side of the river at different heights. Bamboos are hung on
to the wires close together to form a kind of railing on each side, and
these are fastened with cane to the floor of the bridge, which is made
of bamboo also, woven into a kind of coarse matting, and although
they look most flimsy and airy erections, they are really very strong,
and can carry any number of men on them at once, and animals too,
if necessary. They are a great height from the water, which you can
see between the chinks of the matting as you walk across, and they
have an unpleasant fashion of swinging violently when you are in the
middle of them, making it very difficult to keep your footing. I did not
like going over it at all, and tumbled down in the most awkward
fashion more than once, much to the amusement of the Manipuris,
who laughed very heartily.
It began to rain shortly after we had arrived at the rest-house, a
large barn-like place built of bamboo also, with one doorway and no
windows of any kind, and a mud floor. Not an atom of furniture
graced this abode, and there was nothing to be done but to sit down
on the ground and wait until our luggage should arrive—very hungry,
and generally out of sorts. Nothing came in until nine at night, when
the cook arrived with the kitchen paraphernalia, and we had a sort of
dinner on the floor, and then had to wait until two in the morning for
our heavy baggage and beds, which were travelling on elephants. It
was a dreadful four hours, for in the meanwhile swarms of
mosquitoes and sandflies came out and attacked us—hands, faces,
and, in fact, any part of us that was not covered. The delay was
caused by the road being too steep and slippery for the elephants,
and their having to be unloaded five or six times—a most tedious
operation.
About three in the morning we got our beds put up and turned in,
longing for sleep, but I hadn’t been there an hour before the rain,
which had poured down in torrents ever since dinner, made its
appearance through the roof and descended upon my head. So we
had to get up and move everything, and then were able to sleep in
peace for the remainder of the night. Of course, all idea of going on
the next day was out of the question, as servants, coolies, and
elephants were all too tired, and, to add to this, the rain never
ceased, so I made the best of things and stayed in bed all day, while
the coolies busied themselves in making me a dooly out of bamboos,
as we found that my horse had got a sore back from his long climb
the day before, and my husband decided that it would be better to
have me carried the rest of the way. I had time to notice particularly
our escort of Manipuri Sepoys during our halt at this place. We were
supposed to have thirty men altogether, but I never saw more than
twelve. When marching, they had counted themselves over twice by
running on ahead directly they had presented arms once, and going
through the same performance round the corner, fondly imagining
that we should be under the impression that we had double the
number with us. Their uniforms were limited. There were about three
complete ones amongst them, and the remainder adorned
themselves in confections of their own. When halting, we were
provided with a sentry to keep guard over us all day, and he was
relieved about every three hours, which gave rise to a most amusing
scene. A dirty-looking individual came up to the Sepoy on duty, and
saluted him with the ordinary native salaam. The sentry then
proceeded to divest himself of his uniform coat, belt, etc., and rifle,
which he threw down on the ground; whereupon the dirty-looking
person picked them up, hastily put them on his own manly form, and,
having done so, came up to where we were sitting and saluted in
fine style. The other man had meanwhile disappeared. At night we
had two sentries, and they frequently asked us whether they might
mount guard in the veranda of our hut. This meant that before very
long they would both be fast asleep upon the floor, snoring so loud
that we were awakened.
 When marching, each man went as he pleased and whatever
route he pleased. If he were of a lazy turn of mind he slid down all
the short cuts, but we generally had one or two walking in front of us,
one of whom invariably possessed a bugle, which he made the most
of by giving us selections on it from his own imagination. I believe he
meant well. Their rifles were carried over their shoulders, and their
worldly possessions were done up in a cloth and slung on to the end
of them in large bundles. The Manipuri Sepoy was no doubt a very
funny animal indeed.
We left our wet camp at the Makru River the next day, very glad to
get out of it, and proceeded on our journey towards Manipur. Every
day was the same: up and down hill all day and a bamboo hut at
night; but our experiences of the first day had taught us wisdom, and
we put the things which we wanted most upon coolies, and the
elephants carried the rest, as they went so slowly. The Nagas used
to swarm out of their villages as we came along to see us, and they
were especially interested in me, as many of them had never seen
an English lady before. Seven days in the hills, and the eighth
brought us at last to the topmost ridge of the last range, and then I
had my first glimpse of the valley of Manipur lying beneath us,
looking delightfully calm and peaceful in the afternoon sunshine. It
looked so beautiful to us after the hills of the previous seven days,
stretching away smooth and even as far as the eye could see, and
we stopped on the top of the hill some time for the pleasure of
looking at it. We could distinguish far away in the plain the white
walls of the Maharajah’s palace, and the golden-roofed temple of his
favourite god. Just below us stretched the blue waters of the Logtak
Lake, studded with islands, each one a small mountain in itself.
Villages buried in their own groves of bamboo and plantain-trees
dotted the plain, and between each village there were tracts of rice-
fields and other cultivation. The whole valley looked rich and well
cared for, and we longed for the next day, which was to see us at our
journey’s end.
We were met at the foot of the hill by ten elephants and a guard of
fifty Sepoys, under the command of a high officer of state called
Colonel Samoo Singh, who was one of the most hideous old
gentlemen I have ever seen. However, he was politeness itself,
presenting us with large baskets of fowls and vegetables, and
escorting us to the rest-house, to which we all went mounted on
elephants gaily rigged out in red cloth. I wanted to go on the same
elephant as my husband, but the interpreter said ‘his Excellency the
Colonel Sahib’ would not like it if we did not make use of all the
elephants brought out for our glorification, so I proceeded in solemn
dignity behind my husband’s quadruped. The old colonel came up to
the house with us, as also did the guard of honour; and then after a
final salute they all departed and left us to our own devices.
Early next morning we were up and ready for the last seventeen
miles into Manipur. We had tried to smarten ourselves up as much
as possible, as we were to be met by some of the princes before we
reached our journey’s end, but, alas! a mischievous rat had busied
himself during the night by eating a large hole in my husband’s hat
and all the fingers off my right-hand glove, and we could not get at
our boxes to rummage for others, so we had to go as we were.
The old colonel rode with us, and seven miles from Manipur we
were met by four princes. They had had a small hut built, which was
nicely matted and arranged with chairs. As we rode up, the four
royalties came forward to meet us, amidst much blowing of trumpets
and presenting of arms by their several guards of honour. This was
my first introduction to the Senaputti of Manipur, and little did we
foresee the terrible influence he was destined to bear on our future!
He was not a very striking-looking personage. I should think he was
about five feet eight inches in height, with a lighter skin than most
natives, and rather a pleasing type of countenance. He had nice
eyes and a pleasant smile, but his expression was rather spoilt by
his front teeth, which were very much broken. We liked what we saw
of him on this occasion, and thought him very good-natured-looking.
The other brothers did not strike us at all, and there were so many
people there, including important officers of state, that I became
confused, and ended by shaking hands with a Sepoy, much to that
warrior’s astonishment.
We were escorted to the reception-barn by the princes. The
Senaputti was the only one who could speak Hindostani amongst
them, and my husband was able to talk to him; but the others only
knew Manipuri, so contented themselves with smiling continuously,
and I followed suit by smiling back, and it didn’t tire any of us. They
presented us with an enormous quantity of things, and I do not know
how many baskets of fowls, ducks, and vegetables they didn’t give
us, for they seemed unending. At last, after more hand-shaking,
which entirely ruined my already fingerless glove, some polite
speeches from my husband and more amiable smiles from me, we
mounted our horses and, accompanied by our four royal friends and
their retinue, rode into Manipur. A salute of twelve guns was fired on
our arrival, and after we had taken leave of the princes at the
entrance to the Palace we turned into the gates of the Residency,
and felt that our journey was really at an end.
 CHAPTER III.
Favourable impressions of our new home—The Residency—The Maharajah—His
brother the Jubraj—Polo with the Princes—The Senaputti a fine sportsman—
Visits us on Sunday afternoons—Shell-firing—Prince Zillah Singh—We try to
learn the Manipuri language.

I always think a great deal depends on one’s first impressions of

anything, be it place or people. One is struck with a house or a
garden if it looks pleasant at first sight, even though a closer
acquaintance with it may bring disappointment. My first impressions
of our house and surroundings on this occasion were of the most
favourable description. A long carriage-drive led up from the
entrance-gate to the house. There were trees each side, and a
delightful stretch of grassland dotted about with deodars and
flowering shrubs, with a tennis-court in the centre on the right. A
hedge of cluster roses all in blossom divided the outer grounds from
the flower-garden surrounding the house, at the end of which was a
small lake with an island in the middle of it, where, late as it was, a
few wild-duck were still swimming about. We cantered our horses up
the drive to the entrance, a long flight of steps covered by a porch,
over which grew a beautiful Bougainvillia, whose gorgeous purple
blossoms entirely hid the thatch with which the porch was
surmounted.
The Residency was a long low house with a thatched roof. The
walls were painted white, and the wood-work picked out in black. A
veranda surrounded it, comfortably matted and strewn about with
rugs and skins. In front of the house there was a circular lawn
covered with flower-beds blazing with colour, and at the end of the
lawn was the flagstaff of my dreams and the ensign of Old England
waving proudly in the breeze. To us, fresh from the jungles of the
previous nine days, the place seemed beautiful, and even after we
had grown accustomed to it, we always returned to it with a fresh
sense of pleasure. The inside of the house was equally charming,
and after our little hut at Sylhet it seemed a mansion. The red-coated
servants were all in attendance, and a couple of Ghoorka orderlies,
so that my aspirations in that direction were amply satisfied.

VIEW OF THE RESIDENCY AT MANIPUR.

In a very few days we had shaken down most comfortably. We had

brought with us everything we possessed, and I soon had as pretty a
drawing-room as anyone could wish for. The next thing my husband
had to do was to make friends with the Maharajah. For this purpose
a durbar was arranged, and it took place about two days after we
had been there, at eight in the morning. It was a very imposing
function indeed. Red cloth was spread all over the veranda and on
the front steps, and our whole escort of sixty Ghoorkas was drawn
up on the front lawn. The Maharajah arrived with a grand flourish of
trumpets, attended by all his brothers, and accompanied also by a
large following of Sepoys, slaves and ministers of state, each of the
latter with his own retinue. The Maharajah was a short, fat, ugly little
man, with a face something between that of a Burmese and a
Chinaman—rather fairer than the Bengal natives, but much scarred
with small-pox. He was dressed very simply in white—a white coat
with gold buttons, and a very fine white muslin Dhotee.[2] He had a
large white turban on his head, in which was stuck a spray of yellow
orchids. Gray woollen stockings covered his legs, fastened at the
knee with blue elastic garters with very fine brass buckles and little
bows, and his feet were encased in very large roughly-made laced
boots, of which he seemed supremely proud.
His eldest brother, the Jubraj, was a second edition of himself,
only stouter and uglier. Next in order rode the Senaputti, whom I
have already described, and he was followed by five younger
brothers. My husband had to go to the outer gate to meet his
highness with his hat off, where he shook hands with all the princes,
and then walked with the Maharajah back to the house and into the
durbar hall, which was in the centre of the Residency. The whole
durbar, being only a complimentary ceremony, did not last more than
ten minutes, but before he left the Maharajah expressed a wish to
see me; so I appeared and shook hands with them all, and smiled
amiably, as I did not know enough of the language then to speak to
them. They all stared at me very solemnly, as though I were a
curious kind of animal, and shortly afterwards they took their
departure.
I shall not attempt a detailed account of our life at Manipur, as it
was very monotonous and uneventful. We got to know the princes
very well. My husband played polo with them, and I frequently rode
with them. The Senaputti in particular was our very good friend.
There was something about him that is not generally found in the
character of a native. He was manly and generous to a fault, a good
friend and a bitter enemy. We liked him because he was much more
broad-minded than the rest. If he promised a thing, that thing would
be done, and he would take the trouble to see himself that it was
done, and not be content with simply giving the order. He was
always doing little courteous acts to please us. On one occasion I
mentioned to him that I had been very much frightened by a lunatic
in the bazaar, who was perfectly harmless, but dreadfully deformed
as well as insane. He used to spring out upon you suddenly, making
terrible grimaces, which was not pleasant, and he frightened me
several times. I noticed after speaking to the Senaputti about him
that he had not been in the bazaar for a long time, and afterwards I
was told that the prince had ordered him to be kept at home in the
evenings, at the time we usually went out for a walk.
Another time I had been very ill, and when I was getting better,
kind inquiries came every day from the Senaputti, accompanied by
half a dozen small birds which he thought were eatable, as he had
often seen my husband bring snipe home. The birds were useless,
of course, but I valued the kind thoughts which prompted him to send
them. If anything went amiss with my husband’s polo-ponies, the
Senaputti was quite ready to send him as many as he wanted of his
own, and he always mounted any visitor who might be staying with
us and wish for a game. He was a keen sportsman and a capital
shot. In the cold weather he often organized a week’s deer-shooting
for my husband, to which I always went, and very good fun it was.
The Senaputti would meet us at the place with a number of
elephants, and we used to start very early in the morning, and
generally returned with a good bag. Bigger game was scarcely
known in the valley. Occasionally a stray tiger would wander down
and kill a bullock or two, the news of which was immediately
conveyed to the Maharajah and a shooting-party organized.
A number of men kept for the purpose would start out to the spot
where the tiger was supposed to be with nets and enormous spears.
They surrounded the bit of jungle first with nets and afterwards with a
strong bamboo fence, which, when erected, enabled them to remove
the nets. The whole of the royal family then arrived and ourselves,
and ascended into little platforms built up very high off the ground to
be safely out of reach of the tiger should he escape; and then, with
much blowing of trumpets and shouting, the fun began. The jungle
inside the fence was then cut down, each cutter being protected by
another man armed with an enormous spear. By degrees all the
jungle was cut and the tiger forced to appear, when the occupants of
the platforms all shot at him at once and ended his career.
Sometimes the tiger was speared by the men inside the fence, but
the poor beast always had ten or twelve wounds in him when we
came to examine him. It was exciting, but it was not sport, and I
always felt sorry for the tiger. Whenever I was present the Maharajah
presented me with the skin and claws, and I got quite a collection in
my three years at Manipur.
The princes always seemed to like our taking an interest in their
concerns, and they frequently visited us, even sometimes on
Sundays with a small following, and without any ceremony. Their
people remained in the veranda, and they used to come into the
drawing-room and talk to us, and look at our photographs and my
husband’s guns.
Any new invention in the latter pleased them immensely, and they
immediately wished to know where the weapon was made and all
particulars. They generally stayed with us some time on these
occasions. Two or three days afterwards they would ask my husband
to shoot or ride with them, and we always saw something of them
during the week. On one occasion I mentioned to them that I had
never seen a shell fired, so they got the Maharajah to arrange for a
field-day, and we rode out to their own rifle-range, and saw their two
mountain-guns brought out with different kinds of shell, and fired by
the Senaputti himself.
When I think over the events of the last few months, it seems
difficult to realize the friendly terms on which we had ever been with
the Court at Manipur. How little we could foresee the terrible
destruction those same guns were to bring upon our peaceful home
in the near future! I was so delighted that day at watching the effect
of a shell on the hill we were firing at, and the Manipuris got the
range very well, almost every shot taking effect. We were out that
morning four or five hours, and all rode back together. The
Maharajah rode a beautiful pony on a gold saddle, with large flaps
on each side to protect his legs, also of gold. The pony’s bridle was
made of gold cord, and his head and back covered with balls of soft
white cotton. These saddles are really curiosities, and are peculiar to
Manipur. The balls of cotton are arranged to protect the pony’s sides
from being hit at polo, and the whole turn-out is very well made,
though rather heavy for the small steeds.
It was a fine sight to see the Senaputti play polo. He was very
strong; in fact, the Manipuris used to tell us that he was the strongest
man in the country. He could lift very heavy weights and throw long
distances, and to see him send the ball skimming half across the
ground with one hit was a very pretty sight. He could do strokes that
few Manipuris knew, which is saying a great deal, for an average
player at Manipur can beat most Englishmen. The Senaputti was a
magnificent rider, and he was always mounted on beautiful ponies.
He wore a very picturesque dress for polo—a green velvet zouave
jacket edged with gold buttons, and a salmon-pink silk Dhotee, with
white leather leggings and a pink silk turban. He had long hair, which
he used to twist up into a knot at the back of his neck, and he always
looked very nice on these occasions. All the princes played polo.
There was one called Zillah Singh, a boy of about seventeen,
whom we used to call the Poem. He was a slight, graceful-looking
lad, and he used to ride a tiny mite of a pony, and never troubled
himself with too many garments. His turban was always coming off,
and his long black hair streamed in the wind as he flew about all over
the ground. Even the little son of the Maharajah used to play. He was
a dear little fellow, of about eight years old, and once a week there
was generally a youngsters’ game, in which all the little royalties
used to perform, and remarkably well too, considering how young
most of them were. My husband played regularly twice a week, all
the year round. The Senaputti liked to play for stakes, which were
generally muslin cloths or turbans. These were all hung up at the
end of the ground, and when the game was ended, the winning side
were presented with them, and the losers had to pay for them, which
gave an interest to the game, and made both sides play up.
I have said more about the Senaputti than the other princes,
because he was the one of them all that we knew intimately. He
could speak Hindostani well, while the other princes spoke nothing
but their own language, and when we first went to Manipur my
husband, of course, didn’t know a word of Manipuri, so had to speak
to them through an interpreter. He did not lose much time in setting
to work to learn it, and he had an old pundit[3] who used to come
every day to give him lessons. This old gentleman was rather a
character. His name was Perundha Singh, and he deprived
Government of fifty rupees annually, by virtue of calling himself
‘Burmese Interpreter to the Political Agent,’ which designation he
had engraved on a brass plate which he wore on the front of his belt.
Whether he really knew Burmese was another matter, but he had
certainly been in Burmah, and had seen some fighting there and
even got wounded himself. He never turned up on wet days,
because the bullet, which, he affirmed, had never been extracted,
got affected by the damp and became rusty, causing him much pain
and preventing his sitting down.
I had a grand idea of learning Manipuri too, but the old pundit used
to pay me such florid compliments over the extreme rapidity with
which I was picking up the language, that my husband thought I
should learn it before he did, and said we must have our lessons at
different times, which I found rather dull work, so ceased them
altogether. The old pundit was a grand gossip. He had a thousand
stories of the good and evil deeds of all the Sahibs who had been
before us, and I must honestly confess the deeds seemed chiefly evil
ones. He invariably ended by saying that there never was, and never
would be, such a good and excellent Sahib as the present one,
which judicious piece of flattery he hoped would be productive of
great pecuniary results.
 CHAPTER IV.
Collect various animals around us—Habits of our pets—Our beautiful grounds—
The Nagas—Amusing incident—The liquor zu—Roast dog—Villages allotted
to us for food, labour, etc.—Women do the work—Children of the Maharajah
—A water-party—Every child dances in Manipur—The Manipuri women not
shut up.

Such was our life at Manipur. It seldom varied day by day. We

used to ride every morning, and directly after breakfast go the round
of the place, visit the stables and kitchen-garden, and feed all the
animals, from the horses down to the two little otters, which were so
tame that they followed us about like dogs. What would life in India
be without one’s animals, I wonder? We were never tired of
collecting around us all kinds of creatures, and the natives got to
know it, and used to bring us anything they caught. We had three
monkeys, little brown fellows, which were my delight. They lived
during the day in boxes nailed to posts, and were tied by ropes long
enough to enable them to run up and down. Sometimes they got
loose, and we had a long chase to get them again, as we could not
leave them to do their pleasure upon our garden. One of them was
so clever that we had to get him a chain to fasten him by, as he
could undo any knot, and gnaw any rope in half in no time. He used
to untie the rope and then look cautiously round, and if he saw
anyone watching him he would sit on the end he had undone and
pretend to be deep in the mysteries of his toilette; but if no one were
looking, he would rush off to a large bed of sunflowers on the front
lawn and snatch at the blossoms, tearing them to pieces, and
strewing the petals all over the place. After this he would make for
the house, and, if he were not discovered, run into whatever door or
window happened to be open and do dreadful damage to anything
that took his fancy. Directly he was seen there used to be a grand
hunt after him, when he would betake himself to a particular tree in
the grounds, clamber up to the very top, where the branches were
too thin to bear any man, and remain there making the most hideous
faces at us below. We had to station a man to watch him, as if
everyone disappeared he would immediately come down and do
more mischief. Sometimes it would be a whole day before the young
ruffian was caught, but he generally came down for his evening
meal, and then was captured. All three monkeys slept together on a
beam in the roof of my bedroom veranda, and they were as good as
any watch-dog, for if anything came into the veranda after dark they
would begin chattering and making a great commotion. Poor little
monkeys! I cannot bear to think of what their fate must have been.
We had a bear, two otters, a tame deer, and two large gray and
red cranes, besides the monkeys. The bear was a small ball of black
fluff when he came to us, with tiny teeth that could not hurt. We
brought him up on milk and rice, and he grew a huge beast. I was a
little afraid of him when he grew up. He was always getting loose,
and was almost as difficult to catch as Jacko. When he was caught,
it was very amusing to see him standing up behind his post playing
hide and seek with the servant who was tying him up. He used to put
his paw round the post and give the man’s bare leg a friendly pat,
which must have been very painful, and he stood all the while upon
his hind-legs. He got very fierce as he grew older, and one day I was
out in the garden gathering flowers and suddenly noticed the
Chupprassies and orderlies flying towards the house—a proceeding
that always happened directly the bear was at large. He very soon
spied me out, and came rushing towards me, and I began to run; but
long before I could get to the house he had overtaken me. I threw
the flowers I had collected behind me, hoping that he would stop for
them, but he just sniffed at them and then came on. He caught me
up in a moment and clawed at my back, and tore my jacket all the
way down. Fortunately it was a very cold day, and I had put on a
thick winter coat, which saved me from getting badly clawed; but he
gave me some nasty scratches. Luckily the Ghoorka orderly saw it
from the house, and ran up and beat him off; and then the other
servants came and captured him and chained him up. So my
husband said we must get rid of him, and the next day he was
conveyed away by four Nagas and a couple of Ghoorkas to a hill
covered with jungle about fifteen miles away and let loose there, with
a heap of rice and a lot of plantains to keep him going.
The next day we heard that the Manipuris had kept a holy festival
on the identical hill, but we never asked whether they had seen our
poor bear afterwards, and we never heard of him again. Our large
grounds were a great delight to us at Manipur. We had quite a park
at the back, with fine large trees and bushes of gardenias and roses
and oleanders. The kitchen-garden was separated from the rest of
the grounds by a wall which ran all round it. It always reminded me
of an English garden with fruit-trees growing on the wall, and English
vegetables all the year round. We had nine gardeners, or Malis, as
they are called in India.
Talking of them reminds me of an amusing incident which
happened in connection with them. They were Nagas belonging to
one of our villages which lay at the back of the Residency grounds,
between us and the river. The Nagas never burden themselves with
too many clothes, and these in particular wore little beside a
necklace or two. I mentioned this fact to a spinster lady friend of
mine on one occasion, and she was so horrified that she sent me
shortly afterwards nine pairs of bathing-drawers to be given to them.
They were very beautiful garments; some had red and white stripes,
and some blue, and they were all very clean. I presented them
gravely one morning to my nine Malis, and a few days after I went
into the garden in the evening and found two of the men at work.
One had made a hole in his bathing apparatus and had put his head
through it, while his arms went into the places for the legs, and he
was wearing it with great pride as a jacket; and the other had
arranged his with an eye for the artistic on his head as a turban.
After this I gave up trying to inculcate decency into the mind of the
untutored savage.
We had a good many Naga servants. My second Khitmutghar[4]
was a Naga, and a very excellent servant he was too, except when
he was drunk, which I am sorry to say was very often. If we were
going into camp, or if we had just returned, were the particular
occasions which, in his mind, were the ones of all others to be
celebrated with much spirituous fluid. A message would come from
the village to say that Mecandaï (the gentleman in question) was
very dangerously ill—in fact, that he was not expected to live through
the day. At first my sympathies were all aroused in his cause, but
after a little experience I discovered the nature of his illness, and had
him conveyed to the house. The native doctor was then sent for, and
if he said the man was ill he was put into the hospital; if not, he went
under military escort to the quarter-guard.
The Nagas will drink anything, but the stronger it is the better they
are pleased. They have a beverage of their own which they make of
fermented rice water. They can drink great quantities of it with no
bad effect at first, but they get very drunk on it if they go beyond a
certain limit. They call this liquor Zu, and I have heard my husband
say he found it very refreshing after a long hot march; but I never
had the courage to touch it, as they offered it to one out of a bottle
that was never cleaned and that everybody drank from. I suppose to
a Naga there is nothing more delicious than roast dog washed down
with quarts of this Zu. Poor doggies! They are only kept to be eaten.
They are well fed while they are growing up, and then, when they are
ready to be eaten, they are starved for a day. At the end of this they
are given an enormous feed of rice and the remains of a former
comrade, perhaps, which they eat up ravenously; and then the head
man of the village gives the victim a blow on the head and converts
him into curry and rice.
On one occasion we were going up to our hill bungalow, and our
village Nagas, wishing to do us honour, erected a triumphal arch at
the entrance to our garden. Fortunately I looked up at it before going
under, and saw, to my horror, the head of a dog, which had just been
cut off, hanging in the centre of the erection, whilst his four paws and
tail graced the sides, and the whole archway was so low that I
should have touched the top of it as I rode under. I dismounted,
however, and walked through.
The hill bungalow mentioned was situated about fifteen miles from
Manipur. It was about 6,000 feet above sea-level, with a delightfully
cool climate all the year round, though the rainfall was excessive
during the summer months, and damp mists came up from the valley
below, hiding even the garden round the house, and making the
place very cold. Still, it was pleasant to be able to get away up there
for a few days’ change from the heat at Manipur, and we generally
went up from Saturday till Tuesday every week. The village below
the house belonged to us, and rejoiced in the name of Khan-jhub-
khul. We had some five or six villages, which were given us by the
Maharajah, the inhabitants of which worked for us. They were
situated in different parts of Manipur, and we found it very
convenient. The Nagas preferred working for us to working for the
Maharajah, as we paid them for their labour, whereas the durbar
considered it as revenue, and gave them nothing. At the same time,
the way the Manipuris managed all the hill-tribes about them was
very creditable. Every village had to work for the Rajah so many
months in the year—about four. Some had to cut wood, and bring so
many bundles in for the palace; others had to give so much rice, or
go down to Cachar or to Kohima for trading purposes, and each tribe
had its own duties. This system extended throughout Manipur, and
not only amongst the hill-tribes, but also among the Manipuris
themselves, and was called ‘Lalup.’ In return for their services they
got their land rent free, and were not restrained from trading in their
own interests as soon as they had performed their ‘Lalup’ for the
Maharajah. It was a system that answered very well, and the people
seemed well-to-do and contented.
The women did all the hard work, as a rule. They wove all their
own and their husbands’ clothing, and cooked and looked after the
house generally, besides working in the fields and coming every
evening to the big bazaar[5] with merchandise for sale or exchange.
No men were allowed to sell in this bazaar with the exception of a
few Bengalee traders, who sat in a different part of the market and
sold cloths. It was a pretty sight in the evening to see all the women
hurrying along with their wares on their heads, and their little babies
slung on their backs. They sat in long rows in the bazaar, and it was
divided up in a most methodical way. Vegetables and fish occupied
one end, and cloths and jewellery the other, and the whole of the
female population turned out, and even the princesses occasionally
sold in the bazaar. The princesses were more numerous than the
princes, as each of the latter had several wives. The Senaputti was