by John Jakes
“They aren’t worth our time, lads,” Ambrose Pell cried. “Wish our niggers were here. They could chase ’em.”
A single musket shot from a dark part of the grove punctuated the last of his sentence. Charles instinctively ducked down close to Dasher’s neck. The bay seemed nervous, uncertain, even though, like all of the legion’s horses, she’d been drilled to the sound of shotgun and artillery fire in camp in Columbia.
A ball whizzed past. Sergeant Peterkin Reynolds yelled. Charles fired both barrels into the trees. Immediately, he heard a cry of pain.
He yanked Dasher’s head hard, turning back. “Reynolds—?” The sergeant, pale but grinning, held up his cadet gray sleeve to show a tear near the cuff and only a small spot of blood.
Friends of Reynolds treated the wounding less lightly. “Goddamn tailors and shoemakers on horseback,” one man shouted as he galloped past Charles, who vainly ordered him back.
Through a gap in the trees Charles saw a laggard from the Union patrol, a plump blond fellow with no control of his horse, one of the heavy draft plugs typical of the hastily assembled Northern cavalry. The man kicked the animal and cursed. German.
The Dutchman was such a poor horseman, the trooper who’d shot past Charles had no trouble riding up to him and pulling him sideways. He fell out of his saddle and hit the ground, wailing till he freed his boot from the left stirrup.
The young man from South Carolina had drawn his forty-inch, six-pound, two-edged, straight-bladed sword, bigger than regulation and forged in Columbia to the colonel’s specifications. Hampton had equipped his legion using his own money.
Ambrose rode up beside Charles. He pointed. “Look at that, will you, Charlie? Scared as a treed coon.”
Ambrose didn’t exaggerate. On his knees, the Yank trembled as the trooper climbed down, took a two-handed grip and raised the blade over his head. Charles yelled, “Manigault! No!”
Private Manigault turned and glared. Charles shoved his shotgun into his lieutenant’s hand and dismounted in a leap. He dashed to the trooper, seizing the still-raised sword arm.
“I said no.”
Defiant, the trooper struggled and strained against Charles’s grip. “Let go of me, you damned puppy, you damned West Point son of a bitch, you damned—”
Charles let go, then smashed his right fist into Manigault’s face. Bleeding from his nose, the young man crashed backward into a tree trunk. Charles wrenched the trooper’s sword away from him and turned to confront the glowering men on horseback. He stared right back.
“We’re soldiers, not butchers, and you’d better remember that. The next man who disobeys my order or curses me or calls me by my first name goes up for court-martial. After I deal with him personally.”
He let his eyes drift past a few hostile faces, then threw the sword down and reclaimed his shotgun. “Form them up, Lieutenant Pell.”
Ambrose avoided his eyes but got busy. Charles heard plenty of grumbling. The joy in the morning was gone; he’d been stupid to believe in it anyway.
Discouraged, he wondered how his men could survive in a real battle if they considered a skirmish somewhat less serious than a fox hunt. How could they win if they refused to learn to fight as a unit—which first of all meant learning to obey?
His long-time friend from his West Point days, Billy Hazard, of the federal engineers, knew the importance of taking war seriously. Cousin Orry Main and his closest friend, Billy’s older brother George, knew it, too. All Academy men did. Maybe that explained the gulf between the professional officers of the old regular army and the amateur hotspurs. Even Wade Hampton sometimes mocked men from the Point—
“No worse than bees buzzing, was it?” Charles overheard a trooper say while Ambrose re-formed the troop by twos on the road.
Charles withheld comment and rode to the soiled, cringing prisoner. “You’ll have to walk a long way back with us. But you won’t be harmed. Understand?”
“Ja, versteh’—onderstand.” The Dutchman pronounced the English word with difficulty.
The troopers considered all Yankees mere mudsills or mechanics; unworthy opponents. Studying the poor tun-bellied captive, Charles could understand the viewpoint. Trouble was, there were hundreds of thousands more mudsills and mechanics in the North than in the South. The Carolina boys never considered that.
The North reminded him of his friend Billy. Where was he? Would Charles ever lay eyes on him again? The Hazard and Main families had grown close in the years before the war; would they ever be close again, even with Cousin Brett now married to Billy?
Too many questions. Too many problems. And as the double column headed south again, the sun was all at once too cool for summertime. A half mile from the site of the skirmish, Charles heard and felt Dasher cough. Saw her nostrils excessively damp when she turned her head.
A discharge beginning? Yes. The coughing persisted. God, not the strangles, he thought. It was a winter disease.
But she was a young horse, more susceptible. He realized he had another problem, this one potentially disastrous.
3
EACH OF THE YOUNG man’s shoulder straps bore a single bar of silver embroidery. His coat collar displayed the turreted castle within a wreath of laurel, the whole embroidered in gold on a small black velvet oval. Very smart, that uniform of dark blue frock coat and stovepipe trousers.
The young man wiped his mouth with a napkin. He had eaten a delicious meal of beefsteak, browned onions, and fried oysters, which he was just topping off with a dish of blancmange—at ten after ten in the morning. You could order breakfast here until eleven. Washington was a bizarre town. A frightened town, too. Across the Potomac on the Arlington Heights, Brigadier General McDowell was drawing up war plans in the mansion the Lees had abandoned. While awaiting new orders, the young man had hired a horse and ridden over there day before yesterday. He had not been encouraged to find army headquarters a crowded, noisy place with a distinct air of confusion. Awareness that Confederate pickets stood guard not many miles away seemed very real there.
Federal troops had crossed the Potomac and occupied the Virginia side in late May. Regiments from New England crowded the city now. Their presence had partially lifted the burden of terror Washington had borne during the first week after Fort Sumter fell; then, telegraph and even rail connections to the North had been cut for a time. An attack had been expected any hour. The Capitol had been hastily fortified. Some of the relief troops were presently bivouacked there; a military bakery operated in the basement. Tensions had lessened a little, but he still felt the same confusion he’d detected at McDowell’s headquarters. Too many new and alarming things were happening, too fast.
Late yesterday, he had picked up his orders at the office of old General Totten, the chief of engineers. Brevet First Lieutenant William Hazard was assigned to the Department of Washington and instructed to report to a Captain Melancthon Elijah Farmer for temporary duty until his regular unit, Company A—all there was of the United States Army Corps of Engineers—returned from another project. Billy had missed the departure of Company A because he’d been recuperating at his home in Lehigh Station, Pennsylvania, where he’d taken his new bride, Brett. He’d married her at the Main plantation in South Carolina and then nearly been murdered for it by one of her former suitors.
Charles Main had saved his life. Billy’s left arm occasionally ached from the derringer ball that could have killed him but didn’t. The ache served a useful purpose. It reminded him that he would forever be Charles Main’s debtor. That was true even though the friends had taken opposite sides in this peculiar, half-unwanted, still-unstarted war.
The breakfast had appeased his hunger, but it hadn’t relieved his foreboding. Billy was a good engineer. He excelled in mathematics and liked the predictability of equations and such things as standard recipes for construction mortar. Now he faced a future neither neat nor predictable.
What’s more, he faced it in isolation. He was cut off from his fellow engineers
; from his wife, whom he loved deeply; and, by choice, from one of his older brothers. Stanley Hazard lived in the city with his disagreeable wife, Isabel, and their twin sons. Stanley had been taken along to the War Department by his political mentor, Simon Cameron.
Billy loved his older brother George, but toward Stanley he felt a certain nameless ambiguity that had no respect in it but plenty of guilt, and—shamefully—no affection. He didn’t know a single person in Washington, but that wouldn’t force him to see Stanley. In fact, he’d chosen to eat breakfast here at the National Hotel because a large part of its clientele was still pro-Southern, and there was little chance of encountering Stanley, who was anything but.
He paid his bill and handed a tip to the waiter. “Thank you, sir—thank you. That’s much more than I ever get from all those cheap Westerners traipsing into town to get jobs from their nigger-loving President. Luckily, we don’t get many of the Western crowd here. They scarcely drink, I doubt they fornicate, and they all carry their own bags. Some of my friends at other hotels can’t earn—”
Billy walked away from the complainer, whose accent suggested he’d migrated from a Southern or border state. There seemed to be plenty like him in the capital. Yankees, but only nominally. If the city fell, as well it might, they’d be in the streets waving the Stars and Bars to welcome Jeff Davis.
Outside, on the corner of Sixth and Pennsylvania, he discovered that the muggy gray sky had produced a drizzle. He put on his dress hat of black felt; one side of its braided brim was turned up against the crown and held by a bright brass eagle. The drizzle wouldn’t impede a brisk walk.
Billy, a year older than his friend Charles, was a powerfully built young man with the dark hair and pale, icy eyes that ran in the Hazard family. A blunt chin lent him an air of dependability, a look of strength. He’d recently succumbed to the new craze for mustaches; his, from which he now flicked a crumb of breakfast roll, was almost black, thick and darker than his hair.
Since Billy suspected this Captain Farmer of being a political appointee, he wasn’t anxious to report early. He decided to spend a few more hours exploring the city—the parts of it well removed from the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, the respectable, fashionable side.
He soon regretted his decision. War had swollen the town’s population of forty thousand to three times that number. You couldn’t cross a main street without dodging omnibuses, rowdy soldiers reeling drunk, teamsters beating and cursing their mules, flash gentlemen slipping up to whisper the address of some quack who cured the French pox in twenty-four hours—even stray hogs or a flock of noisy geese.
Worse, the town smelled. The worst odors came from sewage floating in slimy lumps in the City Canal, which Billy came upon by walking straight south on Third. He paused on one of the footbridges leading across to the southwest section known as the Island. He looked down on someone’s dead terrier floating among spoiled lettuce leaves and excrement.
He reswallowed some bit of his breakfast and got away fast, heading east to the Capitol, which still lacked its dome. Soldiers and politicians swarmed on the grounds and along the porticoes. Workmen scurried around stacks of lumber, piles of iron plates, and huge blocks of marble littering the area. Billy rounded the corner of one such block and bumped into an old overweight whore in dirty velvet and feathers. She offered him a choice of herself or her gray-faced daughter, no more than fourteen, who huddled at her side.
Billy strove to be polite. “Ma’am, I have a wife in Pennsylvania.”
The whore failed to appreciate the courtesy. “Kiss my ass, shoulder straps,” she said as he walked on. He laughed, but not heartily.
A few minutes later he gazed across the canal to the weeds around the monument to President Washington, unfinished due to a lack of interest and subscriptions. A cattle herd pastured near the forlorn obelisk. The drizzle turned to rain, fell harder, so he gave up. He struggled past some noncoms loudly singing “Sweet Evelina” and headed north across the avenue into the crowded area where he’d taken a boardinghouse room. On the way, he bought a copybook at a stationer’s, paying for it with silver half-dimes.
Later, while twilight deepened, he whittled a point on a pencil. In shirt sleeves, he bent over the first blank page of his copybook lit by a lamp whose flame never wavered in the heavy air. He inscribed the day and date, then wrote:
My dear wife—I begin this journal, and will keep it, to let you know what I have done, other than miss you constantly, on this day and those to come. Today I explored the national capital—not a pleasant or heartening experience, for reasons which delicacy prevents me from conveying to this page—
Thinking of Brett—her face, her hands, her ardor in the privacy of their bed—he felt the physical need of her. He closed his eyes a moment. When he was again in control, he scribbled on.
The city is already heavily fortified, which I would take as a sign of a long war were there not such a pervasive general opinion that it will be short. A short war is greatly to be desired for many reasons—not the least of which is the most obvious, viz., my desire for us to live together as husband and wife wherever duty takes me in time of peace. Speaking not of personal matters but political ones, however, a war of short duration will make it easier to restore things as they were. Today on a public thoroughfare I encountered a negro—either a freedman or a contraband, General Butler’s term for a Southern runaway. The black man would not vacate the sidewalk to permit me to pass. Memory of the incident has unsettled me all day. I am as fervent as any citizen about ending the disgrace of slavery, but the black man’s liberty is not license. Although I know my long-lost sister would contradict me, I do not consider myself unjust or immoral for holding that belief. To the contrary—I feel I reflect a majority view. Speaking only of the army, I know that to be absolutely true. It is said that even our President still speaks of the urgent need to resettle freed blacks to Liberia. Hence my fear of a protracted war, which could well bring the havoc of too many rapid changes in the social order.
He stopped, pencil poised on the same level as the steady flame. How wet, how weighty the air felt; drawing deep breaths took great effort.
What he had just written produced unexpected flickerings of guilt. He was already coming to loathe the war’s ideological confusion. Perhaps by the time he and Brett were together again and she read all of the journal, including passages yet unwritten, answers, including his own, would be clearer than they were this evening.
Do forgive the strange philosophizing. The atmosphere of this place produces curious doubts and reactions, and I have no one with whom to share them save the one with whom I share all—you, my dearest wife. Good night and God keep you——
Closing the passage with a long dash, he shut the copybook. Soon after, he undressed and blew out the lamp. Sleep wouldn’t come. The bed was hard, and his need of her, his lonesome longing, kept him tossing a long time, while hooligans broke glass and fired pistols in nearby streets.
“Lije Farmer? Right there, chum.”
The corporal pointed out a Sibley tent, white and conical, one of many. He gave Billy’s back a cheery slap and went away whistling. Such breaches of discipline among the volunteers were so common Billy paid no attention. At the entrance to the tent he cleared his throat. He folded his gauntlets over his sash and, orders in his left hand, walked in.
“Lieutenant Hazard reporting, Captain—Farmer—”
Astonishment prolonged and hushed the last word. The man was fifty or better. Pure white hair; a patriarchal look. He stood in his singlet, with his galluses down over his hips and a Testament held in his right hand. On a flimsy table Billy saw a couple of Mahan’s engineering texts. He was too stunned to notice anything else.
“A hearty welcome, Lieutenant. I have been anticipating your arrival with great eagerness—nay, excitement. You discover me about to render thanks and honor to the Almighty in morning prayer. Will you not join me, sir?”
He dropped to his knees. Dismay replaced astonishm
ent when Billy realized that Captain Farmer’s question was an order.
4
WHILE BILLY REPORTED FOR duty in Alexandria, another of the government’s continual round of meetings took place in the War Department building at the west side of President’s Park. Simon Cameron, former boss of Pennsylvania politics, presided at his unspeakably littered desk, though it wasn’t the secretary who had called the meeting but the elderly and egotistical human balloon who purported to command the army. From a chair in a corner where Cameron had ordered two assistants to sit as observers, Stanley Hazard watched General Winfield Scott with a contempt he had to work to hide.
Stanley, approaching forty, was a pale fellow. Paunchy, yes, but a positive sylph compared to the general long ago nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers.” Seventy-five, with a torso resembling a swollen lump of bread dough, Winfield Scott hid most of the upper part of the largest chair that could be found in the building. Braid crusted his uniform.
Others at the gathering were the handsome and pompous Treasury secretary, Mr. Salmon Chase, and a man in a plainly cut gray suit who sat in the corner opposite Stanley’s. The man had barely spoken since the start of the meeting. With a polite, attentive air, he listened to Scott hold forth. When Stanley had first met the President at a reception, he had decided there was but one word to describe him: repulsive. It was a matter of personal style as well as appearance, though the latter was certainly bad enough. By now, however, Stanley had assembled a list of other, equally apt, descriptions. It included clownish, oafish, and animal.
If pressed, Stanley would have admitted that he didn’t care for any of those present at the meeting, with the possible exception of his superior. Of course his job demanded that he admire Cameron, who had brought him to Washington to reward him for a long record of lavish contributions to Cameron’s political campaigns.
Though a departmental loyalist, Stanley had quickly discovered the secretary’s worst faults. He saw evidence of one in the towers of files and the stacks of Richmond and Charleston newspapers—important sources of war information—rising high from every free section of desk or cabinet top. Similar collections covered the carpet like pillars erected too close together. The god who ruled Simon Cameron’s War Department was Chaos.