Sidney Lanier - A Confederate Soldier

From his dreams of music and poetry, Lanier was awakened by the guns of Fort Sumter and by the agitation everywhere in Georgia.

At Milledgeville he heard some of the great speeches made for and against secession, for, from November to January, the conflict throughout the State and especially in the capital was a severe one.

He himself, like his father, hoped that the Union might be preserved, but the forces of discord could not be stayed. The people of Macon, on November 8, 1860, passed a declaration of independence, setting forth their grievances against the North.

When secession was declared in Charleston on December 1, a hundred guns were fired amidst the ringing of bells and the shouts of the people. At night there was a procession of fifteen hundred people with banners and transparencies.

When on January 16 the Georgia convention voted to secede from the Union, Milledgeville was in "rapturous commotion".

"Tears of joy fell from many eyes, and words of congratulation were uttered by every tongue. The artillery from the capitol square thundered forth the glad tidings, and the bells of the city pealed forth the joyous welcome to the new-born Republic."

Lanier described the war fever as it swept over the South. The winds of war were blowing:

"Like a great wind it drew on, and blew upon men, women, and children. Its sound mingled with the serenity of the church organs and arose with the earnest words of preachers praying for guidance in the matter. It sighed in the half-breathed words of sweethearts, conditioning impatient lovers with war services. It thundered splendidly in the impassioned appeals of orators to the people. It whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked glasses in bar-rooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms. This wind blew upon all vanes of all the churches of the country and turned them one way, - toward war.

It blew, and shook out as if by magic a flag whose device was unknown to soldier or sailor before, but whose every flap and flutter made the blood bound in our veins.

It arrayed the sanctity of a righteous cause in the brilliant trappings of military display.

It offered tests to all allegiances and loyalties, - of church, of state, of private loves, of public devotion, of personal consanguinity, of social ties."

Ardent opponents of secession, like Alexander H. Stephens, threw in their lot with the new Confederacy. States like Virginia, which hesitated to disrupt a Union with which they had had so much to do, were as enthusiastic as the more ardent Southern States. Old men vied with young men in their military ardor.

Scotch-Irish opponents of slavery marched side by side with the Cavaliers, to whom slavery was the very cornerstone of a feudal aristocracy. The fact is, the whole South was animated by a passion for war. To young men like Lanier the Southern cause was one of liberty, of resistance to despotism and fanaticism, of the protection of homes.

It was not given to many men on either side to divine the true issues of the war. Lanier afterwards rejoiced in the overthrow of slavery, and knew that it was the belief in the soundness and greatness of the American Union among the millions of the North and of the great Northwest which really conquered the South.

"As soon as we invaded the North," he said, "and arrayed this sentiment against us, our swift destruction followed."

In a note-book of 1867 he pointed out with touches of humor the folly of many of the ideas formerly held by himself and other Southerners.

He is writing an essay on the Devil's Bombs, "some half-dozen of which were exploded between the years 1861 and 1865 over the Southern portion of North America with widespread and somewhat sad results: namely, a million of men slain and maimed; a million of widows and orphans created; several billions of money destroyed; several hundred thousand of ignorant schoolboys who could not study on account of the noise made by the shells; and a large miscellaneous mass of poverty, starvation, recklessness, and ruin precipitated so suddenly upon the country that many were buried beneath it beyond hope of being extricated."

This universal tragedy he attributes in part to the conceit of the Southern people.

He himself became "convinced of his ability to whip at least five Yankees.

He did not know by what course of reasoning he arrived at this said conviction; in the best of his judgment he did not reason it out at all, rather absorbed it, from the press of surrounding similar convictions.

He was also confident, not only that he personally could whip five Yankees, but ANY Southern boy could do it.

"The whole South was satisfied it could whip five Norths. The newspapers said we could do it; the preachers pronounced anathemas against the man that didn't believe we could do it; our old men said at the street corners, if they were young they could do it, and by the Eternal, they believed they could do it anyhow; the young men said they'd be blanked if they couldn't do it, and the young ladies said they wouldn't marry a man who couldn't do it."

This arrogant perpetual invitation to draw and come on, this idea which possessed the whole section, which originated no one knows when, grew no one knows how, was a devil's own bombshell, the fuse of which sparkled when Mr. Brooks struck Mr. Sumner upon the head with a cane.*

"Of course we laugh at it NOW, laugh in the hope that our neighbors will attribute the redness of our cheeks to that and not to our shame. The conceit of an individual is ridiculous because it is powerless. The conceit of a whole people is terrible, it is a devil's bombshell, surcharged with death, plethoric with all foul despairs and disasters."

So Lanier spoke in the sober maturity of his manhood of the great tragedy through which he with his section passed. But during the war there was but one idea in his mind, and that was that he might take part in the establishment of a Confederacy.

He dreamed with his people of a nation that might be the embodiment of all that was fine in government and in society, that the "new Confederacy was to enter upon an era of prosperity such as no other nation, ancient or modern, had ever enjoyed, and that the city of Macon, his birthplace and home, was to become a great art centre."

In this hope, soon after finishing the year's work at Oglethorpe, he volunteered for service and went to Virginia to join the Macon Volunteers, who had left Georgia early in April - the first company that went out of the State to Virginia. It was an old company that had won distinction in the Mexican War, and was the special pride of the city of Macon.

The company was stationed for several months near Norfolk, where Lanier experienced some of the joys of city life in those early days when war was largely a picnic - a holiday time it was - "the gay days of mandolin and guitar and moonlight sails on the James River."

In the main, however, they played "Marsh-Divers and Meadow-Crakes", their principal duties being to picket the beach, and their "pleasures and sweet rewards-of-toil consisting in agues which played dice with our bones, and blue-mass pills that played the deuce with our livers."

The company was sent in 1862 to Wilmington, N.C., where they experienced a pleasant change in the style of fever, "indulging for two or three months," continues Lanier, "in what are called the 'dry shakes of the sand hills', a sort of brilliant, tremolo movement, brilliantly executed upon 'that pan-pipe, man', by an invisible but very powerful performer."

From here, where they were engaged in building Fort Fisher, they were called to Drewry's Bluff; and from there to the Chickahominy, participating in the seven days' fighting around Richmond.

Just before the battle of Malvern Hill they marched all night through drenching rain, over torn and swampy roads. These were the only important battles in which Lanier took part. Soon afterwards he was in a little gunboat fight or two on the south bank of the James River. On August 26 they were sent to Petersburg to rest. While there he enjoyed the use of the city library.

He and his brother and two friends were transferred to the signal corps, which was considered at that time the most efficient in the Southern army, and, becoming soon proficient in the system, attracted the attention of the commanding officer, who formed them into a mounted field squad and attached them to the staff of Major-General French.

"Often Lanier and a friend," says the latter officer, "would come to my quarters and pass the evenings with us, where the 'alarums of war' were lost in the soft notes of their flutes, for Lanier was an excellent musician."

Lanier tells in a letter written to his father at that time of four Georgia privates with one general, six captains, and one lieutenant, serenading the city.

One of the most precious memories of Lanier's war career was that of General Lee attending religious services in Petersburg.

The height of every Confederate soldier's ambition was to get a glimpse of the beloved general, who was the idol of his soldiers. Lanier reverenced him as one of the greatest of men.

In his "Confederate Memorial Address" he speaks of Lee as "stately in victory, stately in defeat, stately among the cannon, stately among the books, stately in solitude, stately in society, stately in form, in soul, in character, and in action."

Fortunately he had the chance to see him under specially interesting circumstances. He afterwards related the incident to the Confederate veterans in Macon:

"The last time that I saw with mortal eyes the scene was so beautiful, the surroundings were so rare, time and circumstance did so fitly frame him, that I think the picture should not be lost.

It was at fateful Petersburg, on one glorious Sunday morning, whilst the armies of Grant and Butler were investing our last stronghold there. It had been announced, to those who happened to be stationed in the neighborhood of General Lee's headquarters, that religious services would be conducted on that morning by Major-General Pendleton. At the appointed time I strolled over to Dunn's Hill, where General Lee's tent was pitched, and found General Pendleton ensconced under a magnificent tree, and a small party of soldiers, with a few ladies from the dwelling near by, collected about him.

In a few moments, General Lee appeared with his camp chair, and sat down. The services began. That terrible battery, Number Five, was firing, very slowly, each report of the great guns making the otherwise profound silence still more profound. I sat down on the grass and gazed, with such reverence as I had never given to mortal man before, upon the grand face of General Lee. He had been greatly fatigued by loss of sleep.

"As the sermon progressed, and the immortal words of Christian doctrine came to our hearts and comforted us, sweet influences born of the liberal sunlight which lay warm upon the grass, of the moving leaves and trembling flowers, seemed to steal over the General's soul. Presently his eyelids gradually closed, and he fell gently asleep. Not a muscle of him stirred, not a nerve of his grand countenance twitched; there was no drooping of the head, nor bowing of the figure. As he slumbered so, sitting erect, with arms folded upon his chest, in an attitude of majestic repose, such as I never saw assumed by mortal man before; as the large and comfortable word fell from the preacher's lips; as the lazy cannon of the enemy anon hurled a screaming shell to within a few hundred yards of where we sat, as finally a bird flew into a tree overhead and sat and piped small blissful notes in unearthly contrast with the roar of the war engines; it seemed to me as if the present earth floated off through the sunlight, and the antique earth returned out of the past, and some majestic god sat on a hill, sculptured in stone, presiding over a terrible yet sublime contest of human passion."

During 1863 and a large part of 1864 the two brothers served as scouts in Milligan's Corps along the James River. The duties were unusually dangerous and onerous, from the fact that their movements had to be concealed, and that they were in constant danger of being captured. In this work of hard riding Lanier displayed a cool and collected courage; he was untiring in his energy, prudent and cautious. Notwithstanding the dangers and hardships, he looked upon the period of life at Fort Boykin on Burwell's Bay - their headquarters - as "the most delicious period of his life in many respects."

Writing of it later he said:

"Our life was as full of romance as heart could desire. We had a flute and a guitar, good horses, a beautiful country, splendid residences inhabited by friends who loved us, and plenty of hairbreadth 'scapes from the roving bands of Federals who were continually visiting that Debatable Land. Cliff and I never cease to talk of the beautiful women, the serenades, the moonlight dashes on the beach of fair Burwell's Bay, and the spirited brushes of our little force with the enemy."

The two brothers were inseparable; slender, gray-eyed youths, full of enthusiasm, Clifford grave and quiet, Sidney, the elder, playful with a dainty mirthfulness.

He was, in August, 1864, transferred to Wilmington, N.C., where he became a signal officer on the blockade-runners. Wilmington was the port which, late in the war, was the scene of the most brilliant successes of these swift vessels and the most strenuous efforts of the blockaders.

"Long after every other port was closed, desperate, but wary sea pigeons would evade the big and surly watchers on the coast, and ho! for the open sea."

This was a service of keen excitement and constant danger, demanding a clear head and iron nerves. In the latter part of 1864 it became more and more difficult for the blockade-runners to make their way to Bermuda.

On November 2, a stormy night, Lanier was a signal officer on the Lucy, which made its way out of the harbor, but fourteen hours later was captured in the Gulf Stream by the Federal cruiser Santiago-de-Cuba.

He was taken to Point Lookout prison, where he spent four months of dreary and distressing life. To this prison life Lanier always attributed his breakdown in health.

In "Tiger Lilies" he afterwards attempted to give a description of the prison and the life led by prisoners, but turned with disgust from the harrowing memories. The few pages he did write serve as a counterpart to Walt Whitman's strictures on Southern prisons in his "Specimen Days in America".

Here, too, he found comfort for himself and his companions in the flute which he had carried with him during the entire war. One of his comrades gives the following account of Lanier's playing:

"Late one evening I heard from our tent the clear sweet notes of a flute in the distance, and I was told that the player was a young man from Georgia who had just come among us. I forthwith hastened to find him out, and from that hour the flute of Sidney Lanier was our daily delight. It was an angel imprisoned with us to cheer and console us. Well I remember his improvisations, and how the young artist stood there in the twilight. (It was his custom to stand while he played.) Many a stern eye moistened to hear him, many a homesick heart for a time forgot its captivity. The night sky, clear as a dewdrop above us, the waters of the Chesapeake far to the east, the long gray beach and the distant pines, seemed all to have found an interpreter in him. In all those dreary months of imprisonment, under the keenest privations of life, exposed to the daily manifestations of want and depravity, sickness and death, his was the clear-hearted, hopeful voice that sang what he uttered in after years."

The purity of Lanier's soul was never better attested than in a letter written by a fellow-prisoner, Mr. John B. Tabb, to Charles Day Lanier, the oldest son of the poet, trying to impress upon his mind the character of his father as exhibited in this prison life at Point Lookout:

"To realize what our surroundings were, one must have lived in a prison camp. There was no room for pretense or disguise. Men appeared what they really were, noble or low-minded, pure or depraved; and there did one trait of your father's character single him out. In all our intercourse I can remember no conversation or word of his that an angel might not have uttered or listened to. Set this down in your memory. It will throw light upon other points, and prove the truth of Sir Galahad's words, `My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.'"

Lanier secured his release from prison through some gold which a friend of his had smuggled into the prison in his mouth.

He came out "emaciated to a skeleton, down-hearted for want of news from home, down-headed for weariness."

On his voyage to Fortress Monroe an incident occurred which, is a fitting climax to his career as a soldier.

The story of his rescue from death, is graphically told by the lady herself who was the good Samaritan on this occasion.

"She was an old friend from Montgomery, Ala., returning from New York to Richmond; and her little daughter, who had learned to call him Brother Sid, chanced to hear that he was down in the hold of the vessel dying.

On application to the colonel in command permission was promptly given to her to minister to his necessity, and she made haste to go below.

"Now my friends in New York," continued she, "had given me a supply of medicines, for we had few such things in Dixie, and among the remedies were quinine and brandy. I hastily took a flask of brandy, and we went below, where we were led to the rude stalls provided for cattle, but now crowded with poor human wretches. There in that horrible place dear Sidney Lanier lay wrapped in an old quilt, his thin hands tightly clenched, his face drawn and pinched, his eyes fixed and staring, his poor body shivering now and then in a spasm of pain.

Lilla fell at his side, kissing him and calling: "Brother Sid, don't you know me? Don't you know your little sister?"

But no recognition or response came from the sunken eyes. I poured some brandy into a spoon and gave it to him. It gurgled down his throat at first with no effort from him to swallow it. I repeated the stimulant several times before he finally revived. At last he turned his eyes slowly about until he saw Lilla, and murmured:

"Am I dead? Is this Lilla? Is this heaven?"

To make a long story short, the colonel assisted us to get him above to our cabin.

I can see his fellow prisoners now as they crouched and assisted to pass him along over their heads, for they were so packed that they could not make room to carry him through. Along over their heads they tenderly passed the poor, emaciated body, so shrunken with prison life and benumbed with cold. We got him into clean blankets, but at first he could not endure the pain from the fire, he was so nearly frozen. We gave him some hot soup and more brandy, and he lay quiet till after midnight. Then he asked for his flute and began playing. As he played the first few notes, you should have heard the yell of joy that came up from the shivering wretches down below, who knew that their comrade was alive. And there we sat entranced about him, the colonel and his wife, Lilla and I, weeping at the tender music, as the tones of new warmth and color and hope came like liquid melody from his magic flute."

Thus closes his war period. His name does not appear in any of the official records, but no private soldier had a more varied experience.

One scarcely knows which to admire most, - the soldier, brave and knightly, the poet, preparing his wings for a flight, or the musician, inspiriting his fellow-soldiers in camp and in prison.

Seeking a Vocation Lanier reached Macon March 15, after a long and painful journey through the Carolinas. Immediately upon his arrival, losing the stimulus which had kept him going so long, he fell dangerously ill, and remained so for nearly two months.

Early in May, just as he was convalescing, General Wilson captured Macon, and Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay were brought to the Lanier House, whence they were to start on their way as prisoners to Fortress Monroe.

Clifford Lanier reached home May 19. He had, after the blockade was closed at Wilmington, gone to Cuba. From there he sailed to Galveston and walked thence to Macon. He arrived just in time to see his mother, who a few days after died of consumption. She had kept herself alive for months by "a strong conviction, which she expressed again and again, that God would bring both her boys to her before she died." Sidney spent the summer months with his father and his sister, ministering to them in their sorrow.

The action is resumed at Burwell's Bay, where we meet the hero again with "a light rifle on his shoulder, with a good horse bounding along under him, with a fresh breeze that had in it the vigor of the salt sea and the caressing sweetness of the spring blowing upon him."

With him are "five friends, tried in the tempests of war, as well as by the sterner tests of the calm association of inactive camp life."

The story here is strictly autobiographical, and is filled with some stirring incidents taken from Lanier's life as a scout. Perhaps the most striking scene in the book is the one in which Cain Smallin finds out that his brother is a deserter. Never did Lanier come so near creating a scene of real dramatic power.

"We was poor. We ain't never had much to live on but our name, which it was as good as gold. And now it ain't no better'n rusty copper; hit'll be green and pisenous. An' whose done it? Gorm Smallin! My own brother, Gorm Smallin!"

When he finds his brother he says to him:

"Ef ye had been killed in a fa'r battle, I mought ha' been able to fight hard enough for both of us; for every time I cried a-thinkin' of you, I'd ha' been twice as strong, an' twice as clear-sighted as I was buffore. But - sich things as these burns me an' weakens me and hurts my eyes that bad that I kin scarcely look a man straight furard in the face. Hit don't make much difference to me now whether we whips the Yanks or they whips us. We is kin to a deserter! I cain't shoot ye hardly. The same uns raised us and fed us. I cain't do it; an' I am sorry I cain't."

He then makes him swear a vow:

"God A'mighty's a-lookin at you out o' the stars yon, an' he's a-listenin' at you out o' the sand here, and he won't git tired by mornin'."

From: Sidney Lanier (a biography), Edwin Mims, Trinity College, Durham, NC, 1905

* Preston Brooks is famous in the Confederate Pantheon for his violent canning of Charles Sumner, Senator of Massachusetts, in the U.S. Senate Chambers. Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, upset with Charles Sumner's famous anti-slavery "Bleeding Kansas" speech, May 1859, caught him while seated and caught in his desk and so violently canned that Sumner spent 3 ½ years recuperating.

Sidney Lanier, Soldier and Poet, by Jacquelyn Cook

Sidney Lanier, renowned as a poet and musician, was also a soldier of the South who, in a very real sense, gave his life for the Confederacy.

Lanier was born of a well-to-do family in Macon, Georgia, on February 3, 1842. He was a carefree young man nearly nineteen, who had graduated from Oglethorpe College and immediately begun teaching, when Georgia seceded on January 19, 1861. Lanier resigned his position and enlisted as a private in the Macon Volunteers.

Shortly thereafter, on April 19, Macon’s Rifles and Volunteers received a call from President Jefferson Davis to come to Virginia. The inexperienced soldiers rushed to leave the next day, eager for the distinction of being the first troops from another state to come to Virginia’s aid. Lanier marched off with his younger brother Clifford at his side.

For the first year the Lanier boys considered the War a lark. They had picket duty on a Norfolk beach, but there was ample time to visit the young ladies on the Virginia plantations. Sidney began composing music for his ever-present flute. He organized his army buddies into a band that played for military occasions and also for dances in some of the fine homes.

When Sidney received a furlough, all of these girls paled in comparison to the one he met in Macon, Mary Day. He instantly fell in love, but he had to persuade Mary through letters when he returned to the battlefield.

On May 15, 1862, Lanier was fighting at Drury’s Bluff. The Monitor advanced up the river and fired on the small fort his company was defending. Next his regiment was ordered to Chickahominy, where it participated in the Seven Day’s Battles around Richmond. Lanier experienced warfare at its worst, Just before the July first battle of Malvern Hill, the men marched all night through drenching rain over swampy roads.

In August they were ordered to Petersburg to rest. While there, Sidney and Clifford transferred to Major Milligan’s battalion of the Mounted Signal Service.

Sidney attracted the attention of the officers with his proficiency, his good spirits and his flute playing. He was often invited into the company of the general and his staff to pass an evening in music.

In August of 1864 the brothers were separated when they were made signal officers on separate blockade runners out of Wilmington, North Carolina.

In the downpour of a November storm, Sidney Lanier stood on the bridge of the Lucy, bobbing in the Atlantic south of Wilmington. He was waiting to signal to pick up a vital cargo of meat, medicine and shoes. Concealed by the rain, the Lucy had left her haven up the Cape Fear River and ventured into the lair of the Federal armada. Five ironclads, disclosing the location of their guns by constant muzzle flashes, bombarded Fort Fisher as the Lucy silently floated by. The small ship made it safely into the Gulf Stream. Then the storm ceased, and the moon sailed out from behind a cloud. The Santiago-de-Cuba loomed into sight. The Lucy ran up canvas and fled, but the cruiser steamed in pursuit. It was quickly over. Sailors in blue peacoats swarmed the deck of the captured Lucy.

Sidney was taken to Point Lookout, Maryland, where thousands of Confederate inmates were housed in shabby tents on the damp sand beside the Chesapeake Bay. Winter wind whipped the prisoners. Lacking clean water or food, prisoners killed rats to eat. Yet, through it all Lanier sustained himself and others by faith and courage. By Christmas Sidney was extremely ill, but he still played his flute. As Christmas carols spun out a melody of hope, they drew others from their tents to gather around his consolation.

Tuberculosis consumed Sidney, and his friends feared he was dying, but someone secreted gold into the prison and bribed a guard, who let a few escape. The escapees, including Sidney Lanier, made it to a ship bound for Fortress Monroe. Sidney, who was deathly ill, lay in the hold of the ship until a motherly lady aboard ship took him into her care. Her deceiving appearance allowed her to smuggle medicine, contraband of war, from New York into Dixie. Lavishing her supply upon Sidney, she brought him to feeble strength.

Lanier began a slow, painful journey through the Carolinas, reaching Macon, Georgia, on March 15, 1865. Completely broken in health, he tried to release Mary from her promise to marry him, but she vowed eternal love. The War ended, but with the family fortune destroyed and Oglethorpe College forced to close, Lanier had no way to support her. Mary’s father, Clarence Day, refused consent for them to marry.

After they parted, Sidney wrote and published his first novel, Tiger Lilies. He secured a teaching position in Prattville, Alabama, and at last, on December 19, 1867, Sidney and Mary married. For two weeks the Lanier home was filled with bliss; then he began hemorrhaging from his lungs. Sidney described the next two years, saying: With us of the younger generation of the South, since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been not dying.

Recognition of Lanier’s musical genius came in December of 1873, when he became first flutist for the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore. Paid the princely sum of $60.00 per month, he was at last able to put his time to writing. Books for boys, critical studies of English and poetry as musical as his flute flowed from his pen. "The Song of the Chattahoochee" and "The Marshes of Glynn" extolled the beauty of his native state of Georgia.

Lanier knew that his time was short, He was appointed lecturer in English literature at Johns Hopkins University, but he was coping with constant hemorrhages. Lanier died on September 7, 1881, no longer able to battle the disease that had crushed his body, but not his spirit, since his days as a prisoner. He was only thirty-nine years old.

Bitterness never tarnished Sidney Lanier’s soul. He clung always to strong faith in God. Lanier dictated his greatest poem, "Sunrise", with his dying breath.