A Southern Traveler's Diary in 1840.—Wills.

431

Wheeling, Whack, Whack-Whack Whack, phiz, phiz, phiz, hough hough, and the high pressure engines are at work, our boat begins to move, and off we slip at 15 knots to the hour. The Pensacola is smaller than many of the eastern steamboats but her accommodations are good. Her rooms are what they term state rooms having two berths to each. There are four of these rooms aft the wheel and being quick I secured the best berth of one of these which is considered safe in blowing up or accidents of the kind—We had from 30 to 40 passengers. Here we are on the Ohio, the far famed

OHIO RIVER AND SCENERY.

the beautiful Ohio. At Wheeling I was disappointed in the stream, being scarcely as wide as the Roanoke at Halifax and frequently capable of being waded. Indeed a gentleman told me that the past summer it was only 18 in water at Louisville & 30 In water 25 ms. above its mouth. It gradually widens however until at Louisville it gets to be from 8 to 1200 yds wide. We had not proceeded a great way down the river before I concluded the scenery was justly entitled to the fame it had acquired, and a month later will materially alter the appearance of things. Soon after leaving Washington Spring seemed to have lost its influence and from Balt. to Wheeling & indeed for 500 ms. down the Ohio, stern Winter reigned, and no verture was to be seen, hence the beauty that 4 weeks later will reveal was hidden from my View.-The Ohio for several hundred miles runs in a valley while on either side the banks rise abruptly and sometimes almost perpendicularly for two hundred feet all along the sides of which is thickly set with trees & shrubbery; these when having all their clothing on must be a prospect fine indeed:-The valley of the river sometimes spreads itself perhaps a mile in width and along its banks dwellings are to be seen. Many of these are huts, some merely dug in the sides of the hills, but many more are hand

somely improved residences and farms. For about 200 Miles down the river the Coast of Virginia stretches itself on the left, and Ohio for near 400 ms. on the right. There are a great number of Towns & villages on both sides, some of them pretty and flourishing places among them I must notice Portsmouth Ohio containing perhaps 2500 inhabitants and one of the prettiest places on the river, Big Sandy river (not as large as fishing creek) runs into the Ohio at Burlington O. & seperates Va. from Kentucky. Old Kaintuck now holds on the coast for near seven hundred Miles running nearly west to the Miss: and down that river 75 ms. the Ohio thus dividing that state on the left from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri

(To be continued.)

CONFEDERATE NAVAL BOOKS AND OTHERS.1

Of the writing of books on our Civil War there is no end; but books dealing with phases of the life of the Confederacy other than fife and drum are still rare. The inner life of the people, the way they lived, what they ate, and what they paid for it, what they read and how it was obtained, their efforts to educate their children and the success of at least one of the States in maintaining a system of public schools while the enemy were thundering at her gates-in a wider sense, the culturgeschichte, the social history of the Confederacy, is as yet largely unwritten. The materials for it are abundant, but scattered. As these are gradually accumulated in public and private collections it will be possible for the student to appear in the field. As yet the writers have been mostly participants in the struggle. It is infinitely easier to write a volume of memoirs, to evolve a book out of the inner consciousness, than it is to grub among manuscripts, newspapers and other disjecta membra for sources. But as we get further from the time of the war we shall have necessarily more and more the work of special students.

Another phase of the Civil War which has received slight attention is that of the Confederate navy. Many books have been written on the naval side by Northern men, but the

Recollections of a Naval Life, including the Cruises of the Confederate Steamers, Sumter and Alabama. By John McIntosh Kell. (Washington: The Neale Company. 1900. O. pp. 307, I part, cloth.)

Life of Rear Admiral John Randolph Tucker. By Captain James Henry Rochelle. (Washington: The Neale Publishing Company. 1903. O. pp. 112, 2 parts, cloth.)

Confederate Books. By Yates Snowden. Charleston Sunday News, Aug. 9, 1903. 5 cols.

Lee at Appomattox and other Papers. By Charles Francis Adams. Second edition, enlarged. (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903. O. pp. v+il.+442, cloth, $1.50.)

number of sources contributed by Southerners to this side of the controversy is limited.

We have the brilliant and fascinating work of Admiral Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat in the Civil War, which because of the charm of its style and its value as an authority must be put into a class by itself. Then there is C. E. Hunt's The Shenandoah, or, The Last Confederate Cruiser (N. Y., 1867), a book which was very unsatisfactory to Confederates. Unfortunately Commander Waddell passed from the stage of action without recording for himself and in his own way the cruise of the Shenandoah as Semmes had done for the Alabama. Waddell's vessel, while less known to fame than the Alabama, was none the less spectacular in its career and hardly less destructive to Federal maritime interests. To the Alabama it was granted to go down in the blaze of battle while Waddell's ship has the unique distinction of bearing the Confederate flag at her masthead till August 29, 1865. But she is without a history save so far as it is found in the book of Hunt. Is it idle to hope that books worthy of the Shenandoah and the Florida and of their heroic commanders, Waddell and Moffitt, will yet appear?

The work of Captain Kell is the more welcome also since Scharf's History of the Confederate Navy gives little space to the cruisers. It devotes much space to the history of the war on the water, taking the struggles in the various States seriatim, and devotes a long chapter to the blockade, but to all of the criusers only 40 pages are given,—much less than Admiral Porter gives to the same subject in his Naval History of the Civil War.

Captain Kell is a Georgian and was appointed to the Naval Academy from his native State. He saw twenty years of service in the old navy and went with it into most parts of the world, including the naval conquest of California and

Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan. He devotes a considerable part of his book to these ante-bellum experiences and dwells with delight on the fortunes and friendships formed there. With the outbreak of the Civil War he resigned and was invited by Semmes to join him on the Sumter. The fortunes of the two men were the same till the sinking of the Alabama, when Kell returned to the Confederate States and saw some service on ironclads below Richmond. The end of the war found him a physical wreck and without a profession. Since that time he has been a farmer and adjutant general of his native State.

Captain Kell was the executive officer of both the Sumter and the Alabama. He was the personal friend of Admiral Semmes and has shown himself most loyal to the memory of his chief. His book is written in a plain, unpretentious fashion and without appeal to the graces of rhetoric. It has the evident stamp of truthfulness and is full of proofs of devotion to the cause he served. While neither designed nor expected to rank with the work of Semmes, it will serve as a useful commentary and supplement to that book. It has no index and seems to have been written mostly from memory without appeal to manuscript or printed sources, although a few contemporary letters are inserted.

The Life of Rear Admiral John Randolph Tucker is a sketch of a Virginian who rose to the rank of commander in the navy of the United States, served as captain and flag officer in that of the Confederate States and after the end of that war went to Peru as rear admiral, where he reorganized the combined navies of Peru and Chili during their war with Spain. Later, as president of the Peruvian Hydrographical Commission, he explored and charted the Peruvian branches of the Amazon. Captain Rochelle, the author, was Tucker's neighbor and companion in all of these services and his little book, really an account of the lives of two hon