Santa Anna considered it the key to the city, and awaited the attack in perfect confidence with thirty thousand men. The defences were simple. On the west, in the direction of Coyacan, stood the large stone convent of San Pablo, which, as well as the wall and breastworks in front, was filled with infantry, and which contained seven heavy guns. A breastwork connected San Pablo with the tete de pont over the Churubusco River, four hundred yards distant. This was the easternmost point of defence, and formed part of the San Antonio causeway leading to the city. It was a work constructed with the greatest skill—bastions, curtain, and wet ditch, everything was complete and perfect—four guns were mounted in embrasure and barbette, and as many men as the place would hold were stationed there. The reserves occupied the causeway behind Churubusco. Independently of his defences, Santa Anna's numbers—nearly five to one—should have insured the repulse of the assailants.

By eleven—hardly seven hours having elapsed since the Contreras camp had been stormed, five miles away—Twiggs and Pillow were in motion toward the San Antonio causeway. Nothing had been heard of Worth, who had been directed to move along the east side of the Pedregal on San Antonio, but it was taken for granted he had carried the point, and Scott wished to cut off the retreat of the garrison. Twiggs was advancing cautiously toward the convent when a heavy firing was heard in advance. Supposing that a reconnoitring party had been attacked, he hastily sent forward the First Artillery, under Dimmick, through a field of tall corn, to support them. No sooner had they separated from the main body than a terrific discharge of grape, canister, and musketry assailed them from the convent. In the teeth of the storm they advanced to within one hundred yards of that building, and a light battery under Taylor was brought up on their right, and opened on the convent.

More than an hour the gunners stood firm to their pieces under afire as terrible as troops ever endured; one-third of the command had fallen before they were withdrawn. Colonel Riley meanwhile, with the stormers of Contreras, had been despatched to assail San Pablo on the west, and, like Dimmick, was met by a murderous rain of shot. Whole heads of companies were mowed down at once. Thus Captain Smith fell, twice wounded, with every man beside him; and a single discharge from the Mexican guns swept down Lieutenant Easley and the division he led. It was the second time that day the gallant Second had served as targets for the Mexicans, but not a man fell back. General Smith ordered up the Third in support, and these, protecting themselves as best they could behind a few huts, kept up a steady fire on the convent. Sallies from the works were continually made, and as continually repelled, but not a step could the assailants make in advance.

By this time the battle was raging at three different points. Worth had marched on San Antonio that morning, found it evacuated, and given chase to the Mexicans with the Fifth and Sixth Infantry. The causeway leading from San Antonio to the tete de pont of Churubusco was thronged with flying horse and foot; our troops dashed headlong after them, never halting till the advance corps—the Sixth—were within short range of the Mexican batteries. A tremendous volley from the tete de pont in front, and the convent on the flank, then forced them to await the arrival of the rest of the division. This was the fire which Twiggs heard when he sent Dimmick against the convent.

Worth came up almost immediately; and directing the Sixth to advance as best they could along the causeway in the teeth of the tete de pont, despatched Garland's and Clarke's brigades through the fields on the right to attack it in flank. Every gun was instantly directed against the assailants; and though the day was bright and clear, the clouds of smoke actually darkened the air. Hoffman, waving his sword, cheered on the Sixth; but the shot tore and ripped up their ranks to such a degree that in a few minutes they had lost ninety-seven men. The brigades on the right suffered as severely. One hundred men fell within the space of an acre. Still they pressed on, till the Eighth (of Clarke's brigade) reached the ditch. In they plunged, Lieutenant Longstreet bearing the colors in advance; he scrambled out on the other side, dashed at the walls without ladders or scaling implements, and bayoneted the defenders as they took aim. At last, officers and men mixed pell-mell, some through the embrasures, some over the walls, rushed or leaped in and drove the garrison helter-skelter upon their reserves.

The tete de pont gained, its guns were turned on the convent, whence the Mexicans were still slaughtering our gallant Second and Third. Duncan's battery, too, hitherto in reserve, was brought up and opened with such rapidity that a bystander estimated the intervals between the reports at three seconds! Stunned by this novel attack, the garrison of San Pablo slackened fire. In an instant the Third, followed by Dimmick's artillery, dashed forward with the bayonet to storm the nearest bastion. With a run they carried it, the artillery bursting over the curtain; but at that moment a dozen white flags waved in their faces. The whole fortified position of Churubusco was taken.

Meantime, however, a conflict as deadly as either of these was raging behind the Mexican fortifications. Soon after the battle commenced, Scott sent Pierce's and Shields's brigades by the left, through the fields, to attack the enemy in the rear. On the causeway, opposed to them, were planted Santa Anna's reserves—four thousand foot and three thousand horse—in a measure protected by a dense growth of maguey. Shields advanced intrepidly with his force of sixteen hundred. The ground was marshy, and for a long distance—having vainly endeavored to outflank the enemy—his advance was exposed to their whole fire. Morgan, of the Fifteenth, fell wounded. The New York regiment suffered fearfully, and their leader, Colonel Burnett, was disabled. The Palmettos of South Carolina, and the Ninth under Ransom, were as severely cut up; and after a while all sought shelter in and about a large barn near the causeway. Shields, in an agony at the failure of his movement, cried imploringly for volunteers to follow him.

The appeal was instantly answered by Colonel Butler, of the Palmettos: "Every South Carolinian will follow you to the death!" The cry was contagious, and most of the New Yorkers took it up. Forming at angles to the causeway, Shields led these brave men, under an incessant hail of shot, against the village of Portales, where the Mexican reserves were posted. Not a trigger was pulled till they stood at a hundred fifty yards from the enemy. Then the little band poured in their volley, fatally answered by the Mexican host. Butler, already wounded, was shot through the head and died instantly. Calling to the Palmettos to avenge his death, Shields gives the word to charge. They charge—not four hundred in all—over the plain and down upon four thousand Mexicans securely posted under cover. At every step their ranks are thinned. Dickenson, who succeeded Butler in command of the Palmettos, seizes the colors as the bearer falls dead; the next moment he is down himself, mortally wounded, and Major Gladden snatches them from his hand.

Adams, Moragne, and nearly half the gallant band are prostrate. A very few minutes more and there will be no one left to bear the glorious flag.

But at this very moment a deafening roar is heard in the direction of the tete de pont. Round shot and grape, rifle-balls and canister, come crashing down the causeway into the Mexican ranks from their own battery. Worth is there, the gallant fellow, just in time. Down the road and over the ditch, through the field and hedge and swamp, in tumult and panic the Mexicans are flying from the bayonets of the Sixth and Garland's brigade. A shout, louder than the cannon's peal; Worth is on their heels with his men. Before Shields reaches the causeway he is by his side driving the Mexican horse into their infantry, and Ayres is galloping up with a captured Mexican gun. Captain Kearny, with a few dragoons, dashes past, rides straight into the flying host, scatters them right and left, sabres all he can reach, and halts before the gate of Mexico. Not till then does he perceive that he is alone with his little party, nearly all of whom are wounded; but, despite the hundreds of escopetas that are levelled at him, he gallops back in safety to headquarters.

The sun, which rose that morning on a proud army and a defiant metropolis, set at even on a shattered, haggard band, and a city full of woe-stricken wretches who did nothing all night but quake with terror, and cry, at every noise, "Aqui viene los Yanquies!" ("Here come the Yankees!") All along the causeway, and in the fields and swamps on either side, heaps of dead men and cattle intermingled with broken ammunition-carts, marked where the American shot had told. A gory track leading to the tete de pont, groups of dead in the fields on the west of Churubusco, over whose pale faces some stalks of tattered corn still waved; red blotches in the marsh next the causeway, where the rich blood of Carolina and New York soaked the earth, showed where the fire of the heavy Mexican guns and the countless escopetas of the infantry had been most murderous. Scott had lost, in that day's work, more than a thousand men in killed and wounded, seventy-nine of whom were officers. The Mexican loss, according to Santa Anna, was one-third of his army, equal probably to ten thousand men, one-fourth of whom were prisoners, the rest killed and wounded. As the sun went down the troops were recalled to headquarters; but all night long the battlefield swarmed with straggling parties seeking some lost comrade in the cold and rain, and surgeons hurrying from place to place and offering succor to the wounded.

It would have been easy for Scott to march on the city that night, or next morning, and seize it before the Mexicans recovered from the shock of their defeat. Anxious to shorten the war, and assured that Santa Anna was desirous of negotiating; warned, moreover, by neutrals and others, that the hostile occupation of the capital would destroy the last chance of peaceable accommodation and rouse the Mexican spirit to resistance all over the country, the American general consented, too generously perhaps, to offer an armistice to his vanquished foe. It was eagerly accepted, and negotiations were commenced which lasted over a fortnight. In the mean time General Scott had the satisfaction of hanging several of the Irishmen who had deserted to the Mexicans, and, serving as the battalion of San Patricio, had shot down so many of their old comrades at Buena Vista and Churubusco. This act of justice was approved by the army and the nation. Early in September the treachery of the Mexicans became apparent. No progress had been made in the negotiations; and, in defiance of the armistice, an American wagon, proceeding to the city for provisions, had been attacked by the mob and one man killed and others wounded. Scott wrote to Santa Anna, demanding an apology, and threatening to terminate the armistice on the 7th if it were not tendered. The reply was insulting in the extreme; Santa Anna had repaired his losses and was ready for another fight.

On the evening of September 7th Worth and his officers were gathered in his quarters at Tacubaya. On a table lay a hastily sketched map showing the position of the fortified works at Molino del Rey, with the Casa Mata on one side and the castle of Chapultepec on the other. The Molino was occupied by the enemy; there was reason to believe it contained a foundry in full operation, and Worth had been directed to storm it next morning. Over that table bent Garland and Clarke, eager to repeat the glorious deeds of August 20th at the tete de pont of Churubusco; Duncan and Smith, already veterans; Wright, the leader of the forlorn hope, joyfully thinking of the morrow; famous Martin Scott, and dauntless Graham, little dreaming that a few hours would see their livid corpses stretched upon the plain; fierce old M'Intosh, covered with scars; Worth himself, his manly brow clouded, and his cheek paled by sickness and anxiety. Each officer had his place assigned to him in the conflict; and they parted to seek a few hours' rest.

At half-past two on the morning of the 8th the division was astir. 'Twas a bright starlight night whose silence was unbroken as the troops moved thoughtfully toward the battlefield. In front, on the right, about a mile from the encampment, the hewn-stone walls of the Molino del Rey—a range of buildings five hundred yards long, and well adapted for defence—were distinctly visible, with drowsy lights twinkling through the windows. A little farther off, on the left, stood the black pile of the Casa Mata, the arsenal, crenelled for musketry, and surrounded by a quadrangular field work. Beyond the Casa Mata lay a ravine, and from this a ditch and hedge ran, passing in front of both works, to the Tacubaya road. Far on the right the grim old castle of Chapultepec loomed up darkly against the sky. Sleep wrapped the whole Mexican line, and but few words were spoken in the American ranks as the troops took up their respective positions: Garland, with Dunn's battery and Huger's 24-pounders, on the right, against the Molino; Wright, at the head of the stormers, and followed by the light division under Captain Kirby Smith, in the centre; M'Intosh, with Duncan's battery, on the left, near the ravine looking toward the Casa Mata; and Cadwallader, with his brigade, in reserve.

Night still overhung the east when the Mexicans were roused from their slumbers by the roar of Huger's 24-pounders, and the crashing of the balls through the roof and walls of the Molino. A shout arose within their lines, spreading from the ravine to the castle; lights flashed in every direction, bugles sounded, the clank of arms rang from right to left, and every man girded himself for the fray. With the first ray of daylight Major Wright advanced with the forlorn hope down the slope. A few seconds elapsed; then a sheet of flame burst from the batteries, and round shot, canister, and grape hurtled through the air. "Charge!" shouted the leader, and down they went, with double-quick step, over the ditch and hedge, and into the line, sweeping everything before them. The Mexicans fell from their guns, but soon, seeing the smallness of the force opposed to them and reassured by the galling fire poured from the azoteas and Molino on the stormers, they rallied, charged furiously, and drove our men back into the plain. Here eleven out of the fourteen officers of Wright's party, and the bulk of his men, fell killed or wounded. All of the latter who could not fly were bayoneted where they lay by the Mexicans.

Captain Walker, of the Sixth, badly shot, was left for dead; he saw the enemy murdering every man who showed signs of life, but the agony of thirst was so insupportable that he could not resist raising his canteen to his lips. A dozen balls instantly tore up the ground around him; several Mexicans rushed at him with the bayonet, but at that moment the light division, under Kirby Smith, came charging over the ditch into the Mexican line and diverted their attention.

Garland meanwhile moved down rapidly on the right with Dunn's guns, which were drawn by hand, all the horses having been wounded and become unmanageable. These soon opened an enfilading fire on the Mexican battery; and some of the gunners flying, the light division charged, under a hot fire, and carried the guns for the second time. Their gallant leader was shot dead in the charge. But the enemy could afford to lose the battery. From the tops of the azoteas, from the Casa Mata and the Molino, a deadly shower of balls was rained crosswise upon the assailants. Part of the reserve was brought up; and Dunn's guns and the Mexican battery were served upon the buildings without much effect at first. Lieutenant-Colonel Graham led a party of the Eleventh against the latter; when within pistol-shot a terrific volley assailed him, wounding him in ten places. The gallant soldier quietly dismounted, pointed with his sword to the building, cried "Charge!" and sank dead on the field.

As fiercely raged the battle at the other wing where Duncan and M'Intosh had driven in the enemy's right toward the Casa Mata. M'Intosh started to storm that fort, and, in the teeth of a tremendous hail of musketry, advanced to the ditch, only twenty-five yards from the work. There a ball knocked him down; it was his luck to be shot or bayoneted in every battle. Martin Scott took the command, but as he ordered the men forward he rolled lifeless into the ditch. Major Waite, the next in rank, had hardly seen him fall before he too was disabled. By whole companies the men were mowed down by the Mexican shot; but they stood their ground. At length some one gave the word to fall back, and the remnants of the brigade obeyed. Many wounded were left on the ground; among others Lieutenant Burnell, shot in the leg, whom the Mexicans murdered when his comrades abandoned him. After the battle his body was found, and beside it his dog, moaning piteously and licking his dead master's face.

At the head of four thousand cavalry, Alvarez now menaced our left. Duncan watched them come, driving a cloud of dust before them, till they were within close range; then opening with his wonderful rapidity, he shattered whole platoons at a discharge. Worth sent him word to be sure to keep the lancers in check. "Tell General Worth," was his reply, "to make himself perfectly easy; I can whip twenty thousand of them." So far as Alvarez was concerned, he kept his word.

On the American right the fight had reached a crisis. Mixed confusedly together, men of all arms furiously attacked the Molino, firing into every aperture, climbing to the roof, and striving to batter in the doors and gates with their muskets. The garrison never slackened their terrible fire for an instant. At length Major Buchanan, of the Fourth, succeeded in bursting open the southern gate; and almost at the same moment Anderson and Ayres, of the artillery, forced their way into the buildings at the northwestern angle. Ayres leaped down alone into a crowd of Mexicans—he had done the same at Monterey—and fell covered with wounds. Our men rushed in on both sides, stabbing, firing, and felling the Mexicans with their muskets. From room to room and house to house a hand-to-hand encounter was kept up. Here a stalwart Mexican hurled down man after man as they advanced; there Buchanan and the Fourth levelled all before them. But the Mexicans never withstood the cold steel. One by one the defenders escaped by the rear toward Chapultepec, and those who remained hung out a white flag. Under Duncan's fire the Casa Mata had been evacuated, and the enemy was everywhere in full retreat. Twice he rallied and charged the Molino; but each time the artillery drove him back toward Chapultepec, and parties of the light infantry pursued him down the road. Before ten in the morning the whole field was won; and, having blown up the Casa Mata, Worth, by Scott's order, fell back to Tacubaya.

With gloomy face and averted eye the gallant soldier received the thanks of his chief for the exploits of the morning. His heart was with the brave men he had lost—nearly eight hundred out of less than thirty-five hundred and among them fifty-eight officers, many of whom were his dearest friends. All had fallen in advance of their men, with sword in hand and noble words on their lips. 'Twas a poor price for these to have stormed Molino del Rey, and cut down nearly a fifth of Santa Anna's fourteen thousand men. Sadly the General returned to his quarters.

The end was now close at hand. Reconnoissances were carefully made, and, the enemy's strength being gathered on the southern front of the city, General Scott determined to assail Chapultepec on the west. By the morning of the 12th the batteries were completed, and opened a brisk fire on the castle, without, however, doing any more serious damage than annoying the garrison and killing a few men. The fire was kept up all day; and at night preparations were made for the assault, which was ordered to be made next morning.

At daybreak on the 13th the cannonade began again, as well from the batteries planted against Chapultepec as from Steptoe's guns, which were served against the southern defences of the city in order to divert the attention of the enemy. At 8 A.M. the firing from the former ceased, and the attack commenced. Quitman advanced along the Tacubaya road, Pillow from the Molino del Rey, which he had occupied on the evening before. Between the Molino and the castle lay first an open space, then a grove thickly planted with trees; in the latter, Mexican sharpshooters had been posted, protected by an intrenchment on the border of the grove. Pillow sent Lieutenant-Colonel Johnston with a party of voltigeurs to turn this work by a flank movement; it was handsomely accomplished; and just as the voltigeurs broke through the redan, Pillow, with the main body, charged it in front and drove back the Mexicans. The grove gained, Pillow pressed forward to the front of the rock; for the Mexican shot from the castle batteries, crashing through the trees, seemed even more terrible than it really was, and the troops were becoming restless.

The Mexicans had retreated to a redoubt half way up the hill; the voltigeurs sprang up from rock to rock, firing as they advanced, and followed by Hooker, Chase, and others, with parties of infantry. In a very few minutes the redoubt was gained, the garrison driven up the hill, and the voltigeurs, Ninth, and Fifteenth were in hot pursuit after them. The firing from the castle was very severe. Colonel Ransom, of the Ninth, was killed, and Pillow himself was wounded. Still the troops pressed on till the crest of the hill was gained. There some moments were lost owing to the delay in the arrival of scaling-ladders, during which two of Quitman's regiments and Clarke's brigade reenforced the storming party. When the ladders came, numbers of men rushed forward with them, leaped into the ditch, and planted them for the assault.

Lieutenant Selden was the first man to mount. But the Mexicans collected all their energies for this last moment. A tremendous fire dashed the foremost of the stormers into the ditch, killing Lieutenants Rogers and Smith and clearing the ladders. Fresh men instantly manned them, and, after a brief struggle, Captain Howard, of the voltigeurs, gained a foothold on the parapet. M'Kenzie, of the forlorn hope, followed; and a crowd of voltigeurs and infantry, shouting and cheering, pressed after him, and swept down upon the garrison with the bayonet. Almost at the same moment, Johnston, of the voltigeurs, who had led a small party round to the gate of the castle, broke it open and effected an entrance in spite of a fierce fire from the southern walls. The two parties uniting, a deadly conflict ensued within the building.

Maddened by the recollection of the murder of their wounded comrades at Molino del Rey, the stormers at first showed no quarter. On every side the Mexicans were stabbed or shot down without mercy. Many flung themselves over the parapet and down the hillside and were dashed in pieces against the rocks. More fought like fiends, expending their breath in a malediction, and expiring in the act of aiming a treacherous blow as they lay on the ground. Streams of blood flowed through the doors of the college, and every room and passage was the theatre of some deadly struggle. At length the officers succeeded in putting an end to the carnage; and the remaining Mexicans having surrendered, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted over the castle of Chapultepec by Major Seymour.

Meanwhile Quitman had stormed the batteries on the causeway to the east of the castle, after a desperate struggle in which Major Twiggs, who commanded the stormers, was shot dead at the head of his men. The Mexicans fell back toward the city. General Scott, coming up at this moment, ordered a simultaneous advance to be made on the city, along the two roads leading from Chapultepec to the gates of San Cosme and Belen, respectively. Worth was to command that on San Cosme, Quitman that on Belen. Both were prepared for defence by barricades, behind which the enemy were posted in great numbers. Fortunately for the assailants an aqueduct, supported by arches of solid masonry, ran along the centre of each causeway. By keeping under cover of these arches, and springing rapidly from one to another, Smith's rifles and the South Carolina regiment were enabled to advance close to the first barricade on the Belen road, and pour in a destructive fire on the gunners. A flank discharge from Duncan's guns completed the work; the barricade was carried; and without a moment's rest Quitman advanced in the same manner on the garita San Belen, which was held by General Torres with a strong garrison.

It too was stormed, though under a fearful hail of grape and canister; and the rifles moved forward toward the citadel. But at this moment Santa Anna rode furiously down to the point of attack. Boiling with rage at the success of the invaders, he smote General Torres in the face, threw a host of infantry into the houses commanding the garita and the road, ordered the batteries in the citadel to open fire, planted fresh guns on the Paseo, and infused such spirit into the Mexicans that Quitman's advance was stopped at once. A terrific storm of shot, shell, and grape assailed the garita, where Captain Dunn had planted an 8-pounder. Twice the gunners were shot down, and fresh men sent to take their places. Then Dunn himself fell, and immediately afterward Lieutenant Benjamin and his first sergeant met the same fate. The riflemen in the arches repelled sallies; but Quitman's position was precarious, till night terminated the conflict.

Worth meanwhile had advanced in like manner along the San Cosme causeway, driving the Mexicans from barricade to barricade, till within two hundred fifty yards of the garita of San Cosme. There he encountered as severe a fire as that which stopped Quitman. But Scott had ordered him to take the garita, and take it he would. Throwing Garland's brigade out to the right and Clarke's to the left, he ordered them to break into the houses, burst through the walls, and bore their way to the flanks of the garita. The plan had succeeded perfectly at Monterey, nor did it fail here. Slowly but surely the sappers passed from house to house, until at sunset they reached the point desired. Then Worth ordered the attack. Lieutenant Hunt brought up a light gun at a gallop, and fired it through the embrasure of the enemy's battery, almost muzzle to muzzle; the infantry at the same moment opened a most deadly and unexpected fire from the roofs of the houses, and M'Kenzie, at the head of the stormers, dashed at the battery and carried it almost without loss. The Mexicans fled precipitately into the city.

At one that night two parties left the citadel and issued forth from the city. One was the remnant of the Mexican army, which slunk silently and noiselessly through the northern gate, and fled to Guadalupe-Hidalgo; the other was a body of officers who came under a white flag, to propose terms of capitulation.

The sun shone brightly on the morning of September 14th. Scores of neutral flags float from the windows on the Calle de Plateros, and in their shade beautiful women gaze curiously on the scene beneath. Gayly dressed groups throng the balconies, and at the street-corners dark-faced men scowl, mutter deep curses, and clutch their knives. The street resounds with the heavy tramp of infantry, the rattle of gun-carriages, and the clatter of horses' hoofs. "Los Yanquies!" is the cry, and every neck is stretched to obtain a glimpse of the six thousand bemired and begrimed soldiers who are marching proudly to the Grand Plaza. On him especially is every eye intently fixed, whose martial form is half concealed by a splendid staff and a squadron of dragoons, as he rides, with flashing eye and beating heart, to the National Palace of Mexico. But six months before, Winfield Scott had landed on the Mexican coast; since then he had stormed the two strongest places in the country, won four battles in the field against armies double, treble, and quadruple his own, and marched without reverse from Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico; losing fewer men, making fewer mistakes, and creating less devastation, in proportion to his victories, than any invading general of former times. Well might the Mexicans gaze upon his face!



(1847) FAMINE IN IRELAND, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy

From the fact that its immediate cause was the almost complete failure of the potato crop, due to the rot, the great Irish famine is known as the "potato famine." The crop that suffered so was that of 1845, and the famine began in the following year and reached its climax in 1847. It is estimated that by this calamity two hundred thousand persons perished. Many compensating features in connection with this appalling distress have been pointed out. Some writers friendly toward Ireland have declared that the famine proved one of the greatest blessings to the country; that it hastened free trade, better drainage of the island, and the passage of the Land Improvement Act; that it relieved the overcrowded labor market, led to more scientific farming, and in other ways produced changes that have been of lasting benefit. But though all this be true, the misfortune itself gave to modern history one of its most harrowing chapters.

The population of Ireland in 1845 is supposed to have been nearly nine millions. The manufactures were small, and the people depended on the potato crop, and had no other resource in time of scarcity. For several years the potato yield had been abundant, the country was comparatively prosperous, and the temperance movement led by Father Mathew promised a happier future. A great harvest was expected in 1845, but almost at a single stroke this expectation was blasted; for although the crop was large the greater part of it was destroyed in the ground, and the potatoes that were gathered "rotted in pit and storehouse." The farmers taxed all their means and energies to secure even a larger crop in 1846, but the blight of that year was even more fatal than the last. To pinching want was added discouragement, and the people sat in the shadow of a frightful catastrophe. In vain the British Government was called upon to give relief through Parliament, until, in the autumn of 1846, parliamentary authority was obtained to grant baronial loans. But these and every local endeavor to mitigate the suffering failed, and the destructive work of the famine continued, the number of victims increasing, to the end of that fatal year. The horrors of 1846 were more than equalled by those of the year that followed, and the woful picture presented by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, the distinguished Irish patriot, statesman, and historian, is but too amply justified by the accepted records of the time.

The condition of Ireland at the opening of the year 1847 is one of the most painful chapters in the annals of mankind. An industrious and hospitable race were in the pangs of a devouring famine. Deaths of individuals, of husband and wife, of entire families, were becoming common. The potato-blight had spread from the Atlantic to the Caspian; but there was more suffering in one parish of Mayo than in all the rest of Europe. From Connaught, where distress was greatest, came batches of inquests with the horrible verdict "died of starvation." In some instances the victims were buried "wrapped in a coarse coverlet," a coffin being too costly a luxury. The living awaited death with a listlessness that was at once tragic and revolting. Women with dead children in their arms were seen begging for a coffin to bury them.

Beranger has touched a thousand hearts by the picture of Pauvre Jacques, who, when the tax-gatherer came in the King's name, was discovered dead on his miserable pallet. But at Skibbereen, in the fruitful County Cork whose seaports were thronged with vessels laden with corn, cattle, and butter for England, the rate collector told a more tragic tale. Some houses he found deserted; the owners had been carried to their graves. In one cabin there was no other occupant than three corpses; in a once prosperous home a woman and her children had lain dead and unburied for a week; in the fields a man was discovered so fearfully mangled by dogs that identification was impossible. The relief committee of the Society of Friends described the state of the town in language which it was hard to read with dry eyes. The people were dying of the unaccustomed food which mocked their prayer for daily bread, and were carried to the graveyard in a coffin from which the benevolent strangers who had come to their relief had to drop them, like dead dogs, that there might be a covering for the next corpse in its turn.

"This place is one mass of famine, disease, and death. The poor creatures, hitherto trying to exist on one meal a day, are now sinking under fever and bowel complaints, unable to come for their soup, which is not fit for them. Rice is what their whole cry is for, but we cannot manage this well, nor can we get the food carried to the houses, from dread of infection. I have got a coffin constructed with movable sides, to convey the bodies to the churchyard, in calico bags prepared, in which the remains are wrapped up. I have just sent it to bring the remains of a poor creature to the grave, who having been turned out of the only shelter she had, a miserable hut, perished the night before last in a quarry."

The people saw the harvest they had reared carried away to another country without an effort, for the most part, to retain it. The sole food of the distressed class was Indian-meal, which had paid freight and storage in England, and had been obtained in exchange for English manufactures. Under a recent law a peasant who accepted public relief forfeited his holding, and thousands were ejected under this cruel provision. But landowners were not content with one process alone; they closed on the people with ejectments, turned them out on the roads, and plucked down their rooftrees. In more than one county rents falling due in November for land that no longer yielded food to the cultivator, were enforced in January. In the southwest the peasantry had made some frantic efforts to clutch their harvest and to retaliate for their sufferings in blind vengeance, but the law carried a sharp sword. Eight counties, or parts of counties, were proclaimed, and a special commission, after a brief sitting in Clare and Limerick, left eleven peasants for the gallows. Chief Justice Blackburn took occasion to note that "The state of things in 1847 was exactly that described by an act passed in 1776." The disease was permanent, so were the symptoms. One well-head of Irish discontent was English prejudice, which refuses to listen to any complaint till it threatens to become dangerous.

It was a fearful time for men who loved their country, not only with deep affection, but with a wise and forecasting interest. A revolution of the worst type was in progress. Not the present alone, but the future, was being laid waste. The marvellous reform accomplished by Father Mathew, the self-reliance which had grown up in the era of monster meetings, and the moral teachings of Davis and his friends were being fast swallowed up by this calamity. The youth and manhood of the middle classes were scrambling for pauper places from the Board of Works, and the peasants were being transformed into mendicants by process of law. These calamities, related of a distant and savage tribe, would move a generous heart; but seeing them befall our own people, the children of the same mother, and foreseeing all the black, unfathomable misery they foreshadowed, it was hard to preserve the sober rule of reason.

The gentry, who were responsible in the first place for the protection of the people from whom they drew their income, insisted that the calamity was an imperial one and ought to be borne out of the exchequer of the empire. It was an equitable claim. If there was no irresistible title of brotherhood, at lowest the stronger nation had snatched away from the weaker the power of helping itself, and still drew away during this terrible era half a million pounds every month in the shape of absentee rents. The demand was put aside contemptuously. The claim of the Nationalists to reenter on the management of their own affairs, since it was plain England could not manage them successfully, was treated as sedition. We were proffered, instead of our own resources, which were ample—

"Alms from scornful hands, to hands in chains, Bitterer to taste than death."

All the nations of the earth were appealed to and they gave generously; but the result was far from being proportionate to the need. During the year 1846 the contributions fell short of two thousand pounds a week. And it was not forgotten that after the great fire of London, when the citizens were in deep distress, the Irish contributed twenty thousand fat cattle for their relief, which at their present value would amount to a sum greater than England and Europe sent to the aid of Ireland in 1846.

To lie down and die, like cattle in a murrain, was base. No people are bound to starve while their soil produces food cultivated by their own hands. No other people in Europe would have submitted to such a fate. But the leader whom they were accustomed to follow had involved himself in a tangle of false doctrines by his unhappy "Peace Resolutions," and he exhorted them to endure all with patience and submission. His son had the amazing assurance to add that if they starved with complete resignation the repeal of the union was near at hand.

On the relief committees, doctors, clergymen, and country gentlemen bore the burden of the work, but a multitude of the gentry stood apart as if the transaction did not concern them. They were busy in transferring the harvest to England or clearing the population off their estates. The English officials in Ireland accused them of jobbing in public works, or quartering their relations and dependents on the Relief Fund, as overseers, and, in some extreme cases, of obtaining grants for their own families of money designed for the suffering poor on their estates. The benevolence of the minority could not counterbalance these odious offences, and deadly hatred was sown, which has since borne an abundant harvest.

The state of the country grew worse from day to day. It is difficult now to realize the condition of the western population in the autumn of 1847; but a witness of unexceptionable impartiality has painted it in permanent colors. A young Englishman representing the Society of Friends, who in that tragic time did work worthy of the Good Samaritan, reported what he saw in Mayo and Galway in language which for plain vigor rivals the narratives of Defoe. This is what he saw in Westport:

"The town of Westport was in itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-stricken look; a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poorhouse clamoring for soup tickets; our inn, the headquarters of the road-engineer and pay-clerks, beset by a crowd begging for work."

As he approached Galway, the rural population were found to be in a more miserable condition: "Some of the women and children that we saw on the road were abject cases of poverty and almost naked. The few rags they had on were with the greatest difficulty held together, and in a few weeks, as they are utterly unable to provide themselves with fresh clothes unless they be given them, they must become absolutely naked." And in another district: "As we went along our wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have no doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to want in which the Irish peasant has been trained, and by that lovely, touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbor."

The fishermen of the Cladagh, who were induced to send the Whig Attorney-General to Parliament a few months before, had to pledge the implements of their calling for a little daily bread. "Even the very nets and tackle of these poor fishermen, I heard, were pawned, and, unless they be assisted to redeem them, they will be unable to take advantage of the herring shoals, even when they approach their coast. In order to ascertain the truth of this statement, I went into two or three of the largest pawnshops, the owners of which fully confirmed it and said they had in pledge at least a thousand pounds' worth of such property and saw no likelihood of its being redeemed."

In a rural district which he revisited after an interval, he paints a scene which can scarcely be matched in the annals of a mediaeval plague: "One poor woman whose cabin I visited said, 'There will be nothing for us but to lie down and die.' I tried to give her hope of English aid, but alas! her prophecy has been too true. Out of a population of two hundred forty I found thirteen already dead from want. The survivors were like walking skeletons; the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. When there before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides many sheep and pigs owned in the village. But now all the sheep were gone, all the cows, all the poultry killed, only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared; no potatoes; no oats."

The young man pointed the moral, which these horrible spectacles suggested, with laudable courage: "I would not now discuss the causes of this condition, nor attempt to apportion blame to its authors; but of this one fact there can be no question: that the result of our social system is that vast numbers of our fellow-countrymen—of the peasantry of one of the richest nations the world ever knew—have not leave to live. Surely such a social result as this is not only a national misfortune but a national sin crying loudly to every Christian citizen to do his utmost to remove it. No one of us can have a right to enjoy either riches or repose until to the extent of his ability he strive to wash himself of all share in the guilt of this fearful inequality, which will be a blot in the history of our country and make her a byword among the nations."

The weekly returns of the dead were like the bulletins of a fierce campaign. As the end of the year approached, villages and rural districts, which had been prosperous and populous a year before, were desolate. In some places the loss amounted to half the resident population. Even the poorhouses shut up, and paupers did not escape. More than one in six perished of the unaccustomed food. The people did not everywhere consent to die patiently. In Armagh and Down groups of men went from house to house in the rural districts and insisted on being fed. In Tipperary and Waterford corn stores and bakers' shops were sacked. In Donegal the people seized upon a flour-mill and pillaged it. In Limerick five thousand men assembled on Tory Hill and declared that they would not starve. A local clergyman restrained them by the promise of speedy relief. "If the Government did not act promptly, he himself would show them where food could be had." In a few cases crops were carried away from farms.

The offences which spring from suffering and fear were heard of in many districts, but they were encountered with instant resistance. There were thirty thousand men in red jackets, carefully fed, clothed, and lodged, ready to maintain the law. Four prisoners were convicted at the Galway assizes of stealing a filly, which they killed and ate to preserve their own lives. In Enniskillen two boys under twelve years of age were convicted of stealing one pint of Indian-meal cooked into "stirabout," and Chief Justice Blackburn vindicated the outraged law by transporting them for seven years. Other children committed larcenies that they might be sent to jail where there was still daily bread to be had. In Mayo the people were eating carrion wherever it could be procured, and the coroner could not keep pace with the inquests; for the law sometimes spent more to ascertain the cause of a pauper's death than would suffice to preserve his life.

The social disorganization was a spectacle as afflicting as the waste of life; it was the waste of whatever makes life worth possessing. All the institutions which civilize and elevate the people were disappearing, one after another. The churches were half empty; the temperance reading-rooms were shut up; the Mechanics' Institute no longer got support; only the jails and the poorhouses were crowded. A new generation, born in disease and reared in destitution, pitiless and imbecile, threatened to drag down the nation to hopeless slavery. Trade was paralyzed; no one bought anything which was not indispensable at the hour. The loss of the farmers in potatoes was estimated at more than twenty millions sterling; and with the potatoes the pigs, which fed on them, disappeared. The seed, procured at a high price in spring, again failed; time, money, and labor were lost, and another year of famine was certain. All who depended on the farmer had sunk with him; shopkeepers were beggared; tradesmen were starving; the priests living on voluntary offerings were sometimes in fearful distress when the people had no longer anything to offer.

The poor-rate was quite inadequate to support the burden thrown upon it by the suspension of public works, but there was another claim upon it which could not wait. When the elections were over and the Government majority secure, the Treasury called on the poor-law guardians to levy immediately a special rate for the repayment of a million and a quarter lent by the State in a previous year. They were warned that, if they refused, their boards would be dissolved and the rates levied by the authority of the Commissioners. The guardians in many districts declared that an additional rate could not be collected. All that could be got would be too little to support the distressed class. But the Treasury would listen to no excuse, and a dozen boards were dissolved and paid guardians put in their place. The Treasury had lent seven millions sterling in 1846; five millions of it had been spent in making roads which were not needed nor desired, and one million was diverted from the wages fund to purchase land for this experiment. The aid which the stronger country proposed to give to the weaker, from the Treasury to which both contributed, was the remission of one-third of this debt. A blunder in foreign policy, the escapade of an ambitious minister in India or Africa, has cost the British taxpayer more in a month than he spent to save millions of fellow-subjects beyond the Irish Sea.

When the increased mortality was pressed on the attention of the Government, Lord John Russell replied that the owners of property in Ireland ought to support the poor born on their estates. It was a perfectly just proposition if the ratepayers were empowered to determine the object and method of the expenditure; but prohibiting productive work, and forcing them to turn strong men into paupers and keep them sweltering in workhouses instead of laboring to reclaim the waste lands—this was not justice. The Times, commenting on the new policy, declared that Ireland was as well able to help herself as France or Belgium, and that the whole earth was doing duty for inhuman Irish landlords. An unanswerable case, if Ireland, like France and Belgium, had the power of collecting and applying her own revenue; otherwise not difficult to answer.

The people fled before the famine to England, America, and the British colonies. They carried with them the seed of disease and death. In England a bishop and more than twenty priests died of typhus, caught in attendance on the sick and dying. The English people clamored against such an infliction, which it cannot be denied would be altogether intolerable if these fugitives were not made exiles and paupers by English law. They were ordered home again, that they might be supported on the resources of their own country; for though we had no country for the purpose of self-government and self-protection, we were acknowledged to have a country when the necessity of bearing burdens arose.

More than a hundred thousand souls fled to the United States and Canada. The United States maintained sanitary regulations on shipboard which were effectual to a certain extent. But the emigration to Canada was left to the individual greed of shipowners, and the emigrant-ships rivalled the cabins of Mayo or the fever-sheds of Skibbereen. Crowded and filthy, carrying double the legal number of passengers, who were ill-fed and imperfectly clothed, and having no doctor on board, the holds, says an eyewitness, were like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and deaths occurred in myriads. The survivors, on their arrival in the new country, continued to die and to scatter death around them.

At Montreal, during nine weeks, eight hundred emigrants perished, and over nine hundred residents died of diseases caught from emigrants. During six months the deaths of the new arrivals exceeded three thousand. No preparations were made by the British Government for the reception or the employment of these helpless multitudes. The Times pronounced the neglect to be an eternal disgrace to the British name. Ships carrying German emigrants and English emigrants arrived in Canada at the same time in a perfectly healthy state. The Chief Secretary for Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons that of a hundred thousand Irishmen who fled to Canada in a year, six thousand one hundred perished on the voyage, four thousand one hundred on their arrival, five thousand two hundred in the hospitals, and one thousand nine hundred in the towns to which they repaired. The Emigrant Society of Montreal paints the result during the whole period of the famine in language not easily to be forgotten:

"From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great river, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of immigration has extended are to be found one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a commingled heap—no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upward have gone down to their graves!"

This was the fate which was befalling our race at home and abroad as the year 1847 closed. There were not many of us who would not have given our lives cheerfully to arrest this ruin, if we could only see a possible way—but no way was visible.



(1848) MIGRATIONS OF THE MORMONS, Thomas L. Kane

Among the numerous religious bodies that have grown up in the United States, the sect of Mormons, officially called "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," is perhaps the most unique in its origin and organization, and the most singular in its history. The sect was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, of Vermont. He declared that he had discovered one of its authoritative writings, the Book of Mormon, at Cumorah, New York. This book, he said, was found by him buried in the earth at a place revealed to him by an angel. According to the Mormons, the book, written in mystic characters on golden plates, is a record of certain ancient people—-"the long-lost tribes of Israel," Smith declared—inhabiting North America. This book is said to have been abridged by the prophet Mormon, and translated by Smith. By anti-Mormons it is supposed to be based on a manuscript romance written by Solomon Spaulding.

The Mormon Church is governed by a hierarchy with two orders of priesthood, a president, two counsellors, twelve apostles, and elders and other officers. Peculiar as their polity appears, it has proved remarkably successful in the development of their church and community, notwithstanding stern hostility and widespread disapproval. They present an impressive example of shrewdness, thrift, and administrative skill, resulting in great material prosperity. Besides their separate books, they accept the Bible as authoritative, and many of their doctrines and rites resemble those common to the Christian sects. More than anything else, their teaching and their practice of polygamy have brought them into collision with "Gentiles" and with the United States Government.

The first Mormon settlement was at Kirtland, Ohio, the next was in Missouri. From those States they were expelled, and in 1840 they founded Nauvoo in Illinois. Their later experience, up to their permanent establishment in Utah, is recounted in the following narrative of the hardships endured and surmounted by this extraordinary people. But it should be added that the cause of the exodus was not, as is generally supposed, religious persecution. The leaders of the sect at Nauvoo had set up a bank without capital and passed thousands of its worthless notes upon the unsuspecting farmers and traders; and it was this and other crimes that exasperated the inhabitants of that region to the point of driving away the whole community of Mormons.

Once, while ascending the upper Mississippi in the autumn, when its waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of the rapids. My road lay through the "Half-Breed Tract," a fine section of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land titles had appropriated as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws. I had left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming flies, the only scavengers of the locality. From this place to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere sordid, vagabond, and idle settlers, and a country marred, without being improved, by their careless hands.

I was descending the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new dwellings set in cool green gardens ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill which was crowned by a noble marble edifice whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background, spread a fair rolling country, checkered by symmetrical lines of fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable evidences of industry, enterprise, and educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most striking beauty.

It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a skiff and rowing across the river landed at the principal wharf of the city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one: I heard no movement: though the stillness everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the ripples break against the shallows of the beach. I walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness from which I almost feared to wake it. Plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing in the paved ways and rain had not washed away the prints of footsteps in the dust. Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty ropewalks, workshops, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his workbench and left his sash and casing unfinished. Fresh bark was in the tanner's vat, and the fresh chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his coal-heap and ladling-pool and crooked water-horn were all there, as if he had just gone off for a holiday. No workpeople, anywhere, looked to know my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady's-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunting among the beds for cucumbers and love-apples—no one called out to me from any opened window; no dog sprang forward to bark an alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered, I found dead ashes cold upon the hearth, and had to tread on tiptoe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors.

On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard. But there was no record of plague there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black inscriptions glossy in the hardly dried lettering-ink. Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot hard by where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been torn down, the still smoldering embers of a barbecue fire that had been constructed of rails from the fencing around it. It was the latest sign of life there. Fields upon fields of heavy-headed grain lay rotting ungathered upon the ground. No one was at hand to take in their rich harvest. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away—they, sleeping too in the hazy air of autumn.

Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude. In the southern suburb the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered woodwork and walls battered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a destructive cannonade. And in and around the splendid temple, which had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance. These challenged me to render an account of myself, and to tell the reason why I had had the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader of their band.

Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits, after I had explained myself as a passing stranger they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion. They told me the story of the "dead city": that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart, sheltering over twenty thousand persons; that they had waged war with its inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in the ruined suburb; after which, they had driven them forth at the point of the sword. The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the third day's bombardment.

They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured walls of the curious temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building, which, having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had as matter of duty sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed sites of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed, and various sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well constructed, they believed, with a dreadful design. Besides these, they led me to see a large and deeply chiselled marble vase, or basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble and of life size, and of which they told some romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their deity countenanced their reception here of a baptism of regeneration as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come: that here parents "went into the water" for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers: that thus the great vase came to be associated with all their most cherished memories, and was therefore the chief object of all others in the building, upon which they bestowed the greatest degree of their idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors had so diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in.

They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple to see where it had been struck by lightning on the Sabbath before; and to look out, east and south, on wasted farms—like those I had seen near the city—extending till they were lost in the distance. Close to the scar left by the thunderbolt were fragments of food, cruses of liquor and broken drinking-vessels, with a bass-drum and a steamboat signal-bell, of which, with pain, I learned the use.

It was after nightfall when I was ready to cross the river on my return. The wind had freshened since sunset and, the water beating roughly into my little boat, I headed higher up the stream than the point I had left in the morning, and landed where a faint glimmering light invited me to steer. Among the rushes—sheltered only by the darkness, without roof between them and the sky—I came upon a crowd of several hundred human creatures whom my movements roused from uneasy slumber.

Dreadful indeed was the suffering of these forsaken beings. Cowed and cramped by cold and sunburn alternating as each weary day and night dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not minister to the needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all alike were clothed in tatters, lacking even sufficient covering for the fever-stricken sufferers.

These were the Mormons, famishing, in Lee County, Iowa, in the fourth week of the month of September, 1846. The deserted city was Nauvoo, Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city and the smiling country around it. And those who had stopped their ploughs, who had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles and the wheels of their workshops; those who had put out their fires, who had eaten their food, spoiled their orchards, and trampled under foot their thousands of acres of unharvested grain—these were the keepers of their dwellings, the carousers in their temple, the noise of whose drunken rioting insulted the ears of the dying.

They were, all told, not more than six hundred forty persons who were thus lying on the river-flats. But the Mormons in Nauvoo and its environs had been numbered the year before at over twenty thousand. Where were they? They had last been seen, carrying in mournful trains their sick and wounded, halt and blind, to disappear behind the western horizon, pursuing the phantom of another home. Hardly anything else was known of them; and people asked with curiosity, "What had been their fate—what their fortunes?"

The party encountered by me at the river shore were the last of the Mormons that left the city. They had all of them engaged the year before that they would vacate their homes and seek some other place of refuge. It had been the condition of a truce between them and their assailants; and, as an earnest of their good faith, the chief elders, and some others of obnoxious standing, with their families, were to set out for the West in the spring of 1846. It had been stipulated in return that the rest of the Mormons might remain behind, in the peaceful enjoyment of their Illinois abode, until their leaders, with their exploring party, could, with all diligence, select for them a new place of settlement beyond the Rocky Mountains, in California, or elsewhere, and until they had opportunity to dispose to the best advantage of the property which they were then to leave.

Some renewed symptoms of hostile feeling had however determined the pioneer party to begin their work before the spring. It was of course anticipated that this would be a perilous service; but it was regarded as a matter of self-denying duty. The ardor and emulation of many, particularly the devout and the young, were stimulated by the difficulties it involved; and the ranks of the party were therefore filled up with volunteers from among the most effective and responsible members of the sect. They began their march in midwinter; and by the beginning of February nearly all of them were on the road, many of their wagons having crossed the Mississippi on the ice.

Under the most favoring circumstances, an expedition of this sort, undertaken at such a season of the year, could scarcely fail to be disastrous. But the pioneer company had to set out in haste, and were very imperfectly supplied with necessaries. The cold was intense. They moved in the teeth of keen-edged northwest winds, such as sweep down the Iowa peninsula from the icebound regions of the timber-shaded Slave Lake and Lake of the Woods. Along the scattered watercourses, where they broke the thick ice to give their cattle drink, the annual autumn fires had left but little firewood. To men, insufficiently furnished with tents and other appliances of shelter, wood was almost a necessary of life. After days of fatigue their nights were often passed in restless efforts to prevent themselves from freezing. Their stock of food also proved inadequate; and as their constitutions became more debilitated their suffering from cold increased. Afflicted with catarrhal affections, manacled by the fetters of dreadfully acute rheumatism, some contrived for a while to get over the shortening day's march and drag along some others. But the sign of an impaired circulation soon began to show itself in the liability of all to be dreadfully frost-bitten. The hardiest and strongest became helplessly crippled. About the same time the strength of their draught animals began to fail. The small supply of provender they could carry with them had given out. The winter-bleached prairie straw proved devoid of nourishment; and they could only keep them from starving by seeking for the "browse," as it is called, this being the green bark and tender buds and branches of the cottonwood and other stunted growths in the hollows.

To return to Nauvoo was apparently the only escape; but this would have been to give occasion for fresh mistrust and so to bring new trouble to those they had left there behind them. They resolved at least to hold their ground, and to advance as they might, were it only by limping through the deep snows a few slow miles a day. They found a sort of comfort in comparing themselves to the exiles of Siberia, and sought consolation in earnest prayers for the spring.

The spring came at last. It overtook them in the Sac and Fox country, still on the naked prairie, not yet half way over the trail they were following between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But it brought its own share of troubles with it. The months with which it opened proved nearly as trying as the worst of winter.

The snow and sleet and rain which fell, as it appeared to them, without intermission, made the road over the rich prairie soil as impassable as one vast bog of heavy black mud. Sometimes they would fasten the horses and oxen of four or five wagons to one, and attempt to get ahead in this way, taking turns; but at the close of a day of hard toil for themselves and their cattle, they would find themselves a quarter or a half a mile from the place they left in the morning. The heavy rains raised all the watercourses; the most trifling streams were impassable. Wood, fit for bridging, was often not to be had, and in such cases the only resource was to halt for the freshets to subside—a matter in the case of the headwaters of the Chariton, for instance, of over three weeks' delay.

These were dreary waitings upon Providence. The most spirited and sturdy murmured most at their forced inactivity. And even the women, whose heroic spirits had been proof against the severest cold, confessed their tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations of the barometer. They complained too that the health of their children suffered more. It was the fact that the damp winds of March and April brought with them more mortal sickness than the sharpest freezing weather.

The frequent burials discouraged and depressed the hardiest spirits; but the general hopefulness of human nature was well illustrated by the fact that even the most provident were found unfurnished with burial necessaries, and as a result they were often driven to the most melancholy makeshifts.

The usual expedient adopted was to cut a log of some eight or nine feet long, and slitting the bark longitudinally, strip it off in two half-cylinders. These, placed around the body of the deceased and bound firmly together with withs made of alburnum, formed a rough sort of tubular coffin, which surviving relatives and friends, with a little show of black crape, could follow to the hole or bit of ditch dug to receive it in the wet ground of the prairie. The name of the deceased, his age, the date of his death, and the surrounding landmarks were all registered with care. His party was then ready to move on. Such graves mark all the line of the first years of Mormon travel—dispiriting milestones to failing stragglers in the rear.

The hardships and trials which they had suffered developed a spirit of self-sacrifice among these indomitable people. Hale young men gave up their own food and shelter to the old and helpless, and worked their way back to parts of the frontier States, chiefly Missouri and Iowa where they were not recognized, and hired themselves out for wages, to purchase more. Others were sent there to exchange for meal and flour, or wheat and corn, the table-and bed-furniture and other remaining articles of personal property which a few had still retained.

In a kindred spirit of fraternity, others laid out great farms in the wilds and planted the grain saved for their own bread; that there might be harvests for those who should follow them. Two of these, in the Sac and Fox country and beyond it, Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah, included within their fences about two miles of land each, carefully planted with grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in the neighborhood of each.

Through all this the pioneers found comfort in the thought that their own suffering was the price of immunity from similar hardships their friends at home, in following their trail, would otherwise have had to pay. But the arrival of spring proved this a delusion. Before the warm weather had made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came in from Nauvoo to overtake the party with fear-exaggerated tales of outrage, and to urge the chief men to hurry back to the city that they might give counsel and assistance there. The enemy had only waited until the emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return to interfere with them, and then renewed their aggressions.

The Mormons outside Nauvoo were indeed hard pressed, but inside the city they maintained themselves very well for two or three months longer. Strange to say, the chief part of this respite was devoted to completing the structure of their quaintly devised but beautiful temple. Since the dispersion of Jewry, probably, history affords us no parallel to the attachment of the Mormons for this edifice. Every architectural element, every most fantastic emblem it embodied, was associated, for them, with some cherished feature of their religion. Its erection had been enjoined upon them as a most sacred duty: they were proud of the honor it conferred upon their city, when it grew up in its splendor to become the chief object of the admiration of strangers upon the upper Mississippi. Besides, they had built it as a labor of love; they could count up to half a million the value of their tithings and freewill offerings laid upon it. Hardly a Mormon woman had not given up to it some trinket or pin-money; the poorest Mormon man had at least served the tenth part of his year on its walls; and the coarsest artisan could turn to it with something of the ennobling attachment an artist has for his own creation.

Therefore, though their enemies drove on them ruthlessly, they succeeded in parrying the last sword-thrust, till they had completed even the gilding of the angel and trumpet on the summit of its lofty spire. As a closing work, they placed on the entablature of the front, like a baptismal mark on the forehead, these words:

THE HOUSE OF THE LORD:

BUILT BY THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS.

HOLINESS TO THE LORD!

Then, at high noon, under the bright sunshine of May, the next after its completion, they consecrated it to divine service. There was a carefully studied ceremonial for the occasion. It was said the high elders of the sect travelled furtively from the camp of Israel in the wilderness, and, throwing off ingenious disguises, appeared in their own robes of office to give it splendor.

For that one day the temple stood resplendent in all its typical glories of sun, moon and stars, and other abounding figured and lettered signs, hieroglyphs, and symbols; but that day only. The sacred rites of consecration ended, the work of removing the sacrosancta proceeded with the rapidity of magic. It went on through the night, and when the morning of the next day dawned all the ornaments and furniture, everything that could provoke a sneer, had been carried off; and except some fixtures that would not bear removal, the building was dismantled.

This day saw the departure of the last of the elders, and the largest band that moved in one company together. The people of Iowa have told me that from morning to night they passed westward like an endless procession. They did not seem greatly out of heart, they said; but, at the top of every hill, before they disappeared, they were to be seen looking back, like banished Moors, on their abandoned homes and the distant temple and its glittering spire.

After this consecration, which was construed to indicate an insincerity on the part of the Mormons as to their stipulated departure, or at least a hope of return, their foes set upon them with renewed bitterness. As many fled as were at all prepared; but by the very fact of their so decreasing the already diminished forces of the city's defenders, they encouraged the enemy to greater boldness. It soon became apparent that nothing short of an immediate emigration could save the remnant.

From this time onward the energies of those already on the road were engrossed by the duty of providing for the fugitives who came crowding in after them. At a last general meeting of the sect in Nauvoo, there had been passed a unanimous resolution that they would sustain one another, whatever their circumstances, upon the march; and this, though made in view of no such appalling exigency, they now with one accord set themselves together to carry out.

The host again moved on. The tents which had gathered on the hill summits, like white birds hesitating to venture on the long flight over the river, were struck one after another, and the dwellers in them and their wagons and their cattle hastened down to cross it at a ferry in the valley, which they made by night and day. A little beyond the landing they formed their companies and made their preparations for the last and longest stage of their journey.

Though the season was late, when they first crossed the Missouri, some of them moved forward with great hopefulness, full of the notion of viewing and choosing their new homes that year. But the van had only reached Grand Island and the Pawnee villages, when they were overtaken by more ill news from Nauvoo. Before the summer closed, their enemies set upon the last remnant of those who were left behind in Illinois. They were a few lingerers, who could not be persuaded but there might yet be time for them to gather up their worldly goods before removing. Some weakly mothers and their infants, a few delicate young girls, and many cripples and bereaved and sick people—these had remained under shelter, according to the Mormon statement at least, by virtue of an express covenant in their behalf. If there was such a covenant, it was broken. A vindictive war was waged upon them, from which the weakest fled in scattered parties, leaving the rest to make a reluctant and almost ludicrously unavailing defence, till September 17th, when one thousand six hundred twenty-five troops entered Nauvoo and drove all forth who had not retreated before that time.

Like the wounded birds of a flock fired into toward nightfall, they came straggling on with faltering steps, many of them without bag or baggage, beast or barrow, all asking shelter or burial, and forcing a fresh repartition of the already divided rations of their friends. It was plain now that every energy must be taxed to prevent the entire expedition from perishing. Further emigration for the time was out of the question, and the whole people prepared themselves for encountering another winter on the prairie.

Happily for the main body, they found themselves at this juncture among Indians who were amicably disposed. The lands on both sides of the Missouri in particular were owned by the Pottawottomis and Omahas, two tribes whom unjust treatment by our United States Government had the effect of rendering most hospitable to strangers whom they regarded as persecuted like themselves.

They were pleased with the Mormons. They would have been pleased with any whites who would not cheat them, nor sell them whiskey, nor whip them for their poor gypsy habits, nor conduct themselves indecently toward their women, many of whom among the Pottawottomis—especially those of nearly unmixed French descent—are singularly comely, and some of them educated. But all Indians have something like a sentiment of reverence for the insane, and admire those who sacrifice, without apparent motive, their worldly welfare to the triumph of an idea. They understand the meaning of what they call a great vow, and think it the duty of the right-minded to lighten the votary's penance under it. To this feeling they united the sympathy of fellow-sufferers for those who could talk to them of their own Illinois, and tell the story of how they also had been ruthlessly expelled from it.

Their hospitality was sincere, almost delicate. Fanny le Clerc, the spoiled child of the great brave Pied Riche, interpreter of the nation, would have the paleface Miss Devine learn duets with her on the guitar; and the daughter of substantial Joseph la Framboise, the United States interpreter for the tribe (she died of the fever that summer) welcomed all the nicest young Mormon women to a party at her father's house, which was probably the best cabin in that village. They made the Mormons at home, there and elsewhere. Upon all their lands they formally gave them leave to remain as long as suited their own good pleasure.

The affair, of course, furnished material for a solemn council. Under the auspices of an officer of the United States their chiefs were summoned, in the form befitting great occasions, to meet in the yard of a Mr. P.A. Sarpy's log trading-house. They came in grand costume, moving in their fantastic attire with so much aplomb and genteel measure that the stranger found it difficult not to believe them high-born gentlemen, attending a fancy-dress ball. Their aristocratically thin legs, of which they displayed fully the usual Indian proportion, aided this illusion. There is something too at all times very mock-Indian in the theatrical French millinery tie of the Pottawottomi turban; while it is next to impossible for a sober white man, at first sight, to believe that the red, green, black, blue, and yellow cosmetics, with which he sees such grave personages so variously dotted, diapered, cancelled, and arabesqued are worn by them in any mood but one of the deepest and most desperate quizzing. From the time of their first squat upon the ground to the final breaking up of the council circle they sustained their characters with equal self-possession and address.

I will not take it upon myself to describe their order of ceremonies; indeed, I ought not, since I have never been able to view the habits and customs of our aborigines in any other light than that of a sorrowful subject of jest. Besides, in this instance, the powwow and the expected flow of turgid eloquence were both moderated probably by the conduct of the entire transaction on temperance principles. I therefore content myself with observing generally that the proceedings were such as in every way became the dignity of the parties interested, and the magnitude of the interests involved. When the red men had indulged to satiety in tobacco-smoke from their peace-pipes, and in what they love still better—their peculiar metaphoric rhodomontade, which, beginning with the celestial bodies, and coursing downward over the grandest sublunary objects, always managed to alight at last on their "Great Father," Polk, and the tenderness with which his affectionate red children regarded him. All the solemn funny fellows present, who played the part of chiefs, signed formal articles of convention with their unpronounceable names.

The renowned chief Pied Riche—he was surnamed Le Clerc on account of his remarkable scholarship—then rose and said: "My Mormon brethren, the Pottawottomi came, sad and tired, into this unhealthy Missouri bottom, not many years back, when he was taken from his beautiful country, beyond the Mississippi, which had abundant game and timber and clear water everywhere. Now you are driven away, the same, from your lodges and lands and the graves of your people. So we have both suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. You are now free to cut and use all the wood you may wish. You can make all your improvements, and live on any part of our actual land not occupied by us. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, is no reason he shall suffer always: I say, we may live to see all right yet. However, if we do not, our children will. Bon jour!"

And thus ended the powwow. I give this speech as a morsel of real Indian. It was recited to me after the treaty by the Pottawottomi orator in French, which language he spoke with elegance. Bon jour ["good day"] is the French, Indian, and English hail, and farewell of the Pottawottomis.

Upon the Pottawotomi lands, scattered through the border regions of Missouri and Iowa, in the Sac and Fox country, a few among the Ioways, among the Poncas, in a great company upon the banks of the l'Eau qui Coulee (or Running Water) River, and at the Omaha winter quarters, the Mormons sustained themselves through the heavy winter of 1846-1847. It was the severest of their trials. This winter was the turning-point of the Mormon fortunes. Those who lived through it were spared to witness the gradual return of better times; and they now liken it to the passing of a dreary night, since which they have watched the coming of a steadily brightening day.

In the spring of 1847, a body of one hundred forty-three picked men, with seventy wagons, drawn by their best horses, left the Omaha quarters, under the command of the members of the high council who had wintered there. They carried with them little but seed and farming implements, their aim being to plant spring crops at their ultimate destination. They relied on their rifles to give them food, but rarely left their road in search of game. They made long marches, and moved as rapidly as possible.

Against the season when ordinary emigration passes the Missouri, they were already through the South Pass, and after a couple of short days' travel beyond it entered upon the more arduous part of their journey, which now lay through the Rocky Mountains. They passed Fremont's Peak, Long's Peak, The Twins, and other summits, but had great difficulties to overcome in forcing their way over other mountains of the rugged Utah range, sometimes following the stony bed of torrents, the headwaters of some of the mightiest rivers of our continent, and sometimes literally cutting their road through heavy and ragged timber. They arrived at the grand basin of the Great Salt Lake, much exhausted, but without losing a man, and in time to plant for a partial autumn harvest. Another party started after these pioneers from the Omaha winter quarters, in the summer. They had five hundred sixty-six wagons, and carried large quantities of grain, which they were able to sow before it froze.

The same season these were joined by a part of the battalion and other members of the Church who came eastward from California and the Sandwich Islands. Together they fortified themselves strongly with sun-dried brick walls and blockhouses, and, living safely through the winter, were able to reap crops that yielded ample provision for the ensuing year.

In 1848, nearly all the remaining members of the Church left the Missouri country in a succession of powerful bands, invigorated and enriched by their abundant harvests there; and that year saw fully established their commonwealth of the "New Covenant," the future State of "Deseret." [Footnote: The Mormons repeatedly tried to secure the admission of Deseret into the Union as a State under that name—said to mean "virtue and industry."]

When Utah was organized as a Territory (1850), the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, was made governor. In 1857 President Buchanan appointed a non-Mormon to succeed Young. This act led the Mormons to rebel, but after a display of military force by the Government they acknowledged allegiance. In 1896, polygamy having been prohibited by Congress, Utah was admitted to the Union. Since the settlement of the Mormons upon the Great Salt Lake there has been a large immigration into Utah. [The Mormons have spread beyond that State into Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, and other parts of the West and Southwest—ED.]



(1848) THE REFORMS OF PIUS IX, Francis Bowen

In the long roll of pontiffs the name of Pius IX stands conspicuous among those of popes, who have greatly exerted their power for effect upon the papacy itself. But the influence of Pius IX was not less marked in Italian and European politics. An account of the reforms which he undertook and of the obstacles he had to confront, cannot fail to convey, directly or by implication, matters of much importance in modern history. That a pope who signalized the beginning of his official career by a series of liberal reforms should soon have been driven from his see by revolutionists is one of the historical paradoxes for which even the "philosophy of history" finds it difficult to account. But, as one writer tells us, "The revolutionary fever of 1848 spread too fast for a reforming pope, and his refusal to make war upon the Austrians finally cost him the affections of the Romans."

Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti) who at the age of fifty-four brought the power of his papal throne to advance the cause of Young Italy—led by Mazzini and other patriots—was born at Sinigaglia May 13, 1792. He was descended from a noble family, and his early education was received at the College of Volterra. Throughout the years of his youth he suffered from infirm health, but before reaching thirty he gained much in strength, and in 1827 became Archbishop of Spoleto. In 1840 he was made cardinal by Pope Gregory XVI. Gregory died June 1, 1846, and after being two days in conclave the cardinals elected their colleague Ferretti to succeed him. The cardinals felt the advisability of choosing for pope a native of the Papal States, a man not too far advanced in years, and one "who would see the necessity of correcting abuses and making some reforms."

Francis Bowen, whose review of Pope Pius's career, from his entrance upon the papal office until his temporary withdrawal from Rome, is here presented, is a well-known authority in this as also in other fields of history, and his recital is based upon the best contemporary accounts.

When Pius IX was elected Pope his course did not long remain doubtful. He limited the expenses of the court at once, dispensed alms in abundance, set aside one day of each week for giving audiences, and commanded that political inquisitions should be stopped immediately. These few steps, taken before he had had time to consult with others, afford perhaps a better indication of the mild and kind character of the new pontiff than the grave political acts which were subsequently performed. These show us the man, the others reveal only the sovereign. Just one month after his election, a manifesto of amnesty for all political offenders was published at Rome, including the exiles, those awaiting trial, and those undergoing sentence. The only conditions imposed were that the individuals pardoned should give their word of honor never to abuse the indulgence, and would fulfil every duty of a good citizen.

The news of this act flew like the wind through the Papal States, and caused everywhere a burst of exultation and gratitude toward the new sovereign. It carried joy to thousands of households, bringing back to them the long-separated brother or parent, and it was a token of future peace and contentment. In the city, says Farini, [Footnote: Luigi Carlo Farini, who is freely quoted by Bowen, was an Italian historian and statesman. His principal work is Storia dello stato Romano dall' anno 1814 al 1830.—ED.] the hosannas were countless; each citizen embraced his neighbor like a brother; thousands of torches blazed in the evening; the multitude ran to the palace of the Pope, called for him, threw themselves prostrate on the earth before him, and received his blessing in devout silence. Many of the pardoned offenders were still more extravagant in their demonstrations of joy and thankfulness. Among them was Galletti, of Bologna, afterward one of the Pope's ministers, and most active in those measures which ended in the assassination of Rossi and in driving Pius into exile. He had been sentenced to imprisonment for life, and was kept in the castle of Sant' Angelo. When released, he threw himself at the Pope's feet, and swore, by his own heart's blood and that of his children, that he would be grateful and faithful. Some of the exiles, however, among whom was Mamiani, refused to subscribe the proposed engagement, simple as it was; but they returned after a time to their homes, merely promising allegiance. Every time that the Pope left his palace he was surrounded by a sort of triumphal procession. The whole length of the Corso was decorated when he passed through it, and hundreds of likenesses of him, and of panegyrical compositions, covered the walls. Foremost in getting up these popular celebrations was Angelo Brunetti, afterward so well known by his nickname of "Ciceruacchio." "He was a person of single mind, rustic in manners, proud and at the same time generous, as is common with Romans of the lower class." By his industry he had acquired considerable property, and by his liberal use of it had become a leader of the populace, whom he now fired with his own enthusiasm for Pius IX.