in a company, according to this system, is able to master the business of any mercantile house or banking establishment. The system is as minute and inexorable as a balance-sheet. When I was a boy, just out of West Point and in command of a company on the Indian frontier, I took part in a skirmish. I was as vain over my first fight as a kitten over its first mouse. I thought the fame of it must illuminate Washington and dazzle the clerks in the department offices. In my next return I accounted for three missing ball-screws as lost in the engagement of Trapper's Bluff. I supposed the army accountability system would bow to a second-lieutenant who had been under fire. But, gentlemen, it did no such thing. I got a letter from the Chief of Ordnance informing me that I must state circumstantially and on honor how the three ball-screws were lost. I couldn't do it, couldn't make out a satisfactory certificate, and had them taken out of my pay. I, the hero of an engagement, who had personally shot a Pawnee, was charged thirty-nine cents for three ball-screws."
Emboldened by the Colonel's smiles of grim humor the audience burst into a laugh.
"I knew another case," he proceeded. "A young fellow was appointed quartermaster at Puget Sound. About a year after he had sent in his first return he was notified by the Quartermaster General that it did not properly account for certain cap letters, value five cents. Indignant at what he considered such small-beer fault-finding, he immediately mailed five cents to Washington, with a statement that it was intended to cover the deficiency. Six months later he received a sharp note from the Quartermaster General, returning him his five cents, informing him that the department was not accustomed to settle accounts in that manner, and directing him to forward the proper papers concerning the missing property under penalty of being reported to the Adjutant General. The last I knew of him he was still corresponding on the subject, and hoping that the rebels would take enough of Washington to burn the quartermaster's department. Now, gentlemen, this is not nonsense. It is business and sense, as any bank cashier will tell you. Red-Tape means order, accuracy, honesty, solvency. A defalcation of five cents is as bad in principle as a defalcation of a million. I tell you these stories to give you an idea of what will be exacted of you some time or other, it may be soon, but certainly at last. I wish you to complete your returns as soon as possible. They ought to have gone in long since. That is all, gentlemen."
"I talked to them like a Dutch uncle," said Carter to the captain of the transport, after relating the above interview. "The fact is that in the regular army we generally left the returns to the first sergeants. When I was in command of a company I gave mine the ten dollars monthly for accountability, and hardly ever saw my papers except when I signed them, all made up and ready to forward. But here the first sergeants, confound them! don't know so much as the officers. The officers must do every thing personally, and I must set them the example."
So much at present for Carter as chief of a volunteer regiment which it was his duty and pride to transform into a regiment of regulars. Professionally if not personally, as a soldier if not as a man, he had an imperious conscience; and his aristocratic breeding and tolerably hard heart enabled him to obey it in this matter of discipline without hesitation or pity. And now, in the calm leisure of this winter voyage over summer seas, let us go back a little in his history, and see what kind of a life his had been outside of the regulations and devoirs of the army.
"How rapidly times change!" he said to Colburne in a moment of unusual communicativeness. "Three years ago I expected to take a regiment or so across this gulf on a very different errand. I was, by (this and that) a filibuster and pro-slavery champion in those days; at least by intention. I was closeted with the Lamars and the Soules—the Governor of South Carolina and the Governor of Mississippi and the Governor of Louisiana—the gentlemen who proposed to carry the auction-block of freedom into Yucatan, Cuba, the island of Atalantis, and the moon. I expected to be a second Cortez. Not that I cared much about their pro-slavery projects and palaverings. I was a soldier of fortune, only anxious for active service, pay and promotion. I might have been monarch of all I surveyed by this time, if the world had turned as we expected. But this war broke up my prospects. They saw it coming, and decided that they must husband their resources for it. It was necessary to take sides for a greater struggle than the one we wanted. They chose their party, and I chose mine."
These confessions were too fragmentary and guarded to satisfy the curiosity of Colburne; but he subsequently obtained information in the South from which he was able to piece out this part of Carter's history; and the facts are perhaps worth repeating as illustrative of the man and his times. Our knowledge is sufficiently complete to enable us to decide that the part which he played in the filibustering conspiracy was not that of a Burr, but of a Walker, which indeed might be inferred from the fact that he was not intellectually capable of making himself head of a cabal which included some of the cleverest of the keen-sighted (though not far-sighted) statesmen of the south. It is no special reflection on the Colonel's brains to say that they were not equal to those of Soule and Jefferson Davis. Moreover a soldier is usually a poor intriguer, because his profession rarely leads him to appeal to any other influence than open authority: he is not obliged to learn the politician's essential arts of convincing, wheedling and circumventing; he simply says to his man Go, and he goeth. Carter, then, was to be the commander of the regiment, or brigade, or division, or whatever might be the proposed force of armed filibusters. There appears to have been no doubt in the minds of the ringleaders as to his fidelity. He was a Virginian born, and of a family which sat in the upper seats of the southern oligarchy. Furthermore, he had married a wife and certain appertaining human property in Louisiana; and although he had buried the first, and dissolved the second (as Cleopatra did pearls) in the wine cup, it was reasonable to suppose that they had exercised an establishing influence on his character; for what Yankee even was ever known to remain an abolitionist after having once tasted the pleasure of living by the labor of others? Moreover he had become agent and honorary stockholder of a company which had a new patent rifle to dispose of; and it was an item of the filibustering bargain that the expeditionary force should be armed with ordnance furnished by this Pennsylvania manufactory. Finally, having melted down his own and his wife's patrimony in the crucible of pleasure, and been driven by debts to resign his lieutenancy for something which promised, but did not provide, a better income, he was known to be dreadfully in need of money.
It is impossible to make the whole conspiracy a matter of plain and positive history. Colburne thought he had learned that at least two or three thousand men were sworn in as officers and soldiers, and that the Governors of several Southern States had pledged themselves to support it, even at the risk of being obliged to bully the venerable public functionary who then occupied the White House. It is certain that councils of state and war were held in the Mills House at Charleston and in the St. Charles Hotel at New Orleans. It is even asserted that a distinguished southern divine was present at some of these sessions, and gave his blessing to the plan as one of the most hopeful missionary enterprises of the day; and the story, ironical as it may seem to misguided Yankees, becomes seriously credible when we remember that certain devout southerners advocated the slave-trade itself as a means of christianizing benighted Africans. Where the expedition was to go and when it was to sail are still points of uncertainty. Carter himself never told, and perhaps was not let into the secret. His part was to draw over as many of his old comrades as possible; to organize the enlisted men into companies and regiments, and to command the force when it should once be landed. Concerning the causes of the failure of the enterprise we know nothing more than what he stated to Colburne. The arch conspirators foresaw the election of Lincoln, and resolved to save the material and enthusiasm of the South for war at home. It is pretty certain, however, that they sought to bring Carter's courage and professional ability into the new channel which they had resolved to open for such qualities; and we can only wonder that a man of such desperate fortunes, apparently such a mere Dugald Dalgetty, was not seduced into treason by their no doubt earnest persuasions and flattering promises. He may have resisted their blandishments merely because he knew that the other side was the strongest and richest; but if we are charitable we will concede that it argued in him some still uneradicated roots of military honor and patriotism. At all events, here he was, confident, cheerful and jealous, going forth to fight for his old flag and his whole country. This vague and unsatisfactory story of the conspiracy would not have been worth relating did it
