by John Jakes
Gus remarked that she couldn’t feel happy about the recent riots, which had claimed the lives of blacks as well as whites in New York City. Over two million dollars’ worth of property had been ruined before units of Meade’s army arrived from Pennsylvania to quell the disturbances. Those statements—more specifically, Charles’s response to them—started an argument.
“You ought to feel happy about it, Gus. We need help wherever we can find it.”
“You can’t be serious. That was butchery, not war. Women knifed to death. Little children stoned—”
“Nasty, I’ll admit. But we can’t be tender hearts any longer. Even when we win, we lose. In every battle, both sides expend men, horses, ammunition. The Yanks can afford it—they have plenty of everything. We don’t. If they ever find a general who catches on to that, it will be all over for our side.”
She shivered. “You sound so bloodthirsty—”
His temper gave way. “And you sound disapproving.”
The old defense, a brittle smile, went into place. “Mr. Pope and I wonder about the cause of your bad disposition.”
“My disposition’s no concern of—”
But she quoted right on top of that: “‘Perhaps was sick—’” an instant’s hesitation. “‘—in love, or had not dined?’”
Gnawing a chicken wing, Jim asked, “Who’s Mr. Pope? Some farmer around here?”
“A poet Mrs. Barclay favors, you dunce.”
“Charles, that’s rude,” she said.
He sighed, “Yes. I’m sorry, Jim.”
“Oh—don’t matter,” Jim answered, his eye on the bone.
“I’d still like to know why you’re so disagreeable, Charles.”
“I’m disagreeable because we’re losing, goddamn it!” On the last word he knocked his pipe against the hearth so hard the stem snapped.
They smoothed over the quarrel later—she took the initiative—and made love twice between midnight and morning. But damage had been done.
Next afternoon, the clouds cleared as the men started their return ride to camp below the Rapidan, where the infantry had retired behind a cavalry screen. All of the commands in the mounted service were to be evaluated again, and possibly reorganized. As if Charles gave a damn.
The sky, suffused with deep orange as the day waned, had a forlorn quality. Autumnal. Cantering beside the young scout, Charles noticed that the turkey feather in Jim’s hat band, bent over behind him a few minutes ago, now bent forward, toward the road in front of them.
Jim noticed his companion’s stare. “What’s wrong, Charlie?”
“The wind’s changed.”
So it had, sharp and cold now, from the northwest. Too chilly for summer. Jim waited for further explanation, but none came. He scratched his stubbly beard. Strange man, Charlie. Brave as the devil. But mighty unhappy these days.
Buffeted by the stiff north wind that flattened the grasses of the fields and creaked the trees, they rode on through the orange evening.
Book Five
The Butcher’s Bill
I cannot describe the change nor do I know when it took place, yet I know that there is a change for I look on the carcass of a man now with pretty much such feeling as I would were it a horse or hog.
A CONFEDERATE SOLDIER, 1862
89
A MILD WINTER SOFTENED Virginia’s tortured look. Softened but could not erase it. Too many fields lay stripped. Too many trees showed raw circles where limbs had been cut. Too many roads had hoof craters and wheel canyons. Too many farms had walls pitted by musket balls, windows knocked out, a fresh grave that revealed itself like a sugared loaf whenever a light snow fell.
The snow melted and the ditches filled, creating freakish sights. The head of a dead horse appeared to float on tranquil water, resembling some salvered delicacy offered at a medieval feast. The winter soil grew strange crops: shell casings; splintered axles and wheels with spokes missing; thrown-away suits of long underwear patched beyond wearing; broken brown bottles; paper scraps thick as a fall of flower petals.
Haymows were empty. Livestock pens were empty. Larders were empty. So were chairs once occupied by uncles and brothers, fathers and sons.
Three years of asking too much of the earth had inevitably marked it. The fields and glens, the creeks and ponds, the hillsides and blue mountain summits exhaled thin mist in the pale sunshine. It was the breath of a sick land.
In the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, Charles had become a minor legend. His courage and concern for others made him something more than other men, his lack of ambition something less. It was said, behind his back, that the war had done things to his head.
He developed odd habits. He spent long hours with his gray gelding, currycombing and brushing him. He was sometimes seen holding lengthy conversations with the animal. Every once in a while during the winter he galloped off to see a girl near Fredericksburg, but always returned in a state of moody silence. He roamed the camps regularly in search of yellow-backed Beadle novels to buy or borrow. He read only one kind, Jim Pickles noticed—those dealing with the Western plains and the scouts and trappers who inhabited them.
“How long was you in that part of the country?” Jim asked over their cook fire on a night in January. They were dining on cush they had prepared themselves from hoarded bacon grease and scraps of leftover beef that they stewed in a little water with week-old corn bread crumbled into it. The dish was a favorite in the army and a lot tastier than the purpling meat and field peas comprising the regular ration;
“Long enough to fall in love with it.” Charles used his bowie to lift stew to his mouth. Jim had no implements except a stick and could get none from army sources; the two scouts had taken a canteen off a dead Yankee and split it into a plate for each of them.
After another bite, Charles added, “I’d go back out there tomorrow if we didn’t have to fight.”
Startled, Jim said, “What about Miss A’gusta?”
“Yes, there’s that, too,” Charles said. He stared into the fire for a while.
From the darkness, another of the scouts called, “Charlie? I think your gray’s loose.”
He leaped up, spilling his food. He went charging through leafless underbrush in the direction indicated by the other man. Sure enough, he came on his horse frantically chewing a triangle of gray cloth; Sport had snapped his tether.
Angrily, Charles yanked the blanket out of Sport’s mouth. The gray whinnied, peeled back his lips, and nipped at Charles’s hand. “Goddamn it, Sport, what’s wrong with you?” Of course he knew. There was no longer any forage; the horses were wild with hunger.
As he led Sport back to the customary boards and straw of winter—having publicly threatened to put bullets into the head of anybody who even thought of stealing them—he saw by the light of another fire that the gray’s ribs showed regular as rail ties.
He swore again, filthy oaths. He had known for weeks that Sport was losing weight. He guessed the gray was down thirty or forty pounds from his weight at the time of purchase. The wasting away filled Charles with pain and rage, as did, to a lesser degree, the fate of other animals in the cavalry. Many were dying. Why not? The cause was dying, too. Almost every day, Hampton dispatched mounted parties to hunt for fodder, but they seldom found any. Both sides had picked the state clean.
Charles’s malaise came to the attention of Hampton, promoted to major general and given a division in the latest reorganization. Fitz Lee had received a similar promotion and the other division. One night Hampton invited Charles to his tent to dine on camp beef, which neither of them would touch.
By the deep gold light of lanterns, Wade Hampton still looked fit, remarkable in view of the severity of the wounds from which he had recovered. His beard, thick and curling, had grown even longer than Charles’s, and he waxed his mustaches to points. Yet Charles saw lines that hadn’t been there when Hampton raised the legion. A new solemnity draped the general like a mantle.
They gossiped
a while. About the unpopularity of Bragg, rewarded for his Western failures by an appointment as military adviser to the President. About the resulting demands from certain newspapers that Mr. Davis be removed in favor of a military dictator; Lee was mentioned. About reports that big John Hood had been ingratiating himself with Davis by frequently going horseback riding with him in Richmond.
Charles had the feeling all this was preparation for something else. He was right.
“I want to say something to you which I know you’ve heard before, from many others, including your friend Fitz.”
Wary, Charles waited. Hampton swirled a little remaining whiskey in his tin cup while his black orderly cleared away battered tin plates and bent forks. “You should be nothing less than a brigadier, Charles. You have the experience. The ability—”
“But not the desire, sir.” Why not tell the truth? He was sick of keeping it to himself, and if he could trust anyone to understand, he could trust the general. “I’m coming to detest this war.”
Not a trace of reproof; only a brief sigh. “No one wants peace more than I. Why, I wouldn’t trade the joys of it for all the military glories of Bonaparte”—points of lantern light showed in his solemn eyes—“but we mustn’t deceive ourselves as some do.
Vice President Stephens and many others in the government believe peace will simply mean a cessation of the war. It won’t. We have come too far. Too much blood has flowed. We’ll be fighting as hard afterward, in a different way, as we are fighting right now.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to Charles. He examined it a few seconds, finding it both realistic and depressing. His response was a shrug, and the playing of a theme only Jim Pickles had thus far heard.
“Then maybe I’ll scoot for Texas and find myself a cabin and a patch of farmland.”
“I would hope not. The South will need men of strength and sense to look after her interests. In this life, we are called to use our talents responsibly.”
Quietly said, it still stung, as Hampton had intended. Having gotten a refusal and answered it, the general let his remarks simmer. He stretched out his powerful booted legs and smiled in the way that won him so many friends; even Stuart had begun to thaw toward him, although everyone knew Fitz Lee would be forever jealous and resentful of the older general.
“Ah, but I suppose we won’t have to confront peace for a long time yet,” said Hampton presently. “And I do believe we shall win.”
Charles kept his face in repose; such lies were required of those belonging to the senior staff. Only occasionally did such men let down. A while back, Charles and Tom Rosser—younger, now a brigadier—had discussed the war over whiskey. After one round too many, the pugnacious Texan opened up and said he saw but one feasible strategy left for the South now: hold Atlanta and hold Richmond and hope to hell that George McClellan ran in the Northern election in the autumn and whipped Old Abe. Then a fair peace could be negotiated.
Hampton, however, continued his discussion of winning. Giving his great brown beard a stroke or two, he mused, “You will go west when we’ve done it, you say. How does that young lady in Fredericksburg feel about your plans? I have heard your affair of the heart is quite serious.”
Somehow, the teasing nettled Charles. “Oh, no, sir. Times like these, I can barely look after my horse. I’ve got no business trying to look after a woman, too.”
Soon they said good night, Hampton shaking his hand warmly, then accepting his salute and again urging him to think about commanding a brigade. Charles promised he would, but it was only politeness.
Blowing out breath plumes in the dark, he trudged through the eternal mud to see Sport. Although he had spoken about Gus in a joking way, he had said what he believed. Ab and Brandy Station had started the thought process, which had reached a definite conclusion. He loved Gus more than he had ever loved another human being. But he needed to break it off, for both their sakes.
Charles wasn’t the only member of his family with a growing sense that the death of the Confederacy was inevitable. Cooper believed it, though he never said it aloud, not even to Judith.
Cooper and his family were in Charleston, sent there the preceding fall by Secretary Mallory. Lucius Chickering had accompanied his superior.
The city to which Cooper had come home was no longer the charming seaport of lamplight, good manners, and chiming church bells with which he had fallen in love after his father exiled him there. Charleston was still scarred from the great fire of ’61, exhausted by blockade and siege, menaced by the enemy on water and on land. The graceful old town was hated throughout the North like no other. Above all, the Yankees wanted to recapture Fort Sumter or obliterate it, for purposes more symbolic than military.
Cooper found that the old waterfront complex of the Main family firm, the Carolina Shipping Company, no longer existed as such. The military had taken it over, enlarging the warehouses and permitting the piers to sag and rot because Charleston could not be supplied by sea. The cool, high house on Tradd Street had escaped the fire, although Cooper and Lucius were forced to arm themselves to drive out half a dozen white squatters. It then took brooms, paint, and fumigation to restore the house to something like its former condition. Not that the effort was really worth it, Judith thought scarcely a week after their arrival. Her husband spent every day and a good part of each night in his office or that of General Beauregard, in both places trying to lend needed direction and confidence to the testing and launching of the submersible boat Hunley.
A central fact of existence in Charleston was the federal blockade, which took the form of an inner ring of ironclad monitors, a chain barrier, and an outer perimeter of wooden ships. Here, as everywhere, the blockade was proving cruelly effective, and not merely because it continued to isolate the South from sources of essential goods. With the Yankees in virtual control of the Atlantic from the Chesapeake to Florida, it was deemed necessary to spread troops thinly along the entire coast, to cover all points that might be subject to attack. Scott’s Anaconda was no longer a theory to be mocked. The coils were crushing the South to death.
A second nerve-wearing reality in the new Charleston was the continuing Yankee pressure to reduce or capture the city. Since coming home, Cooper had heard the terrible story again and again. The preceding spring, Du Pont had tried to take Charleston with a naval assault and failed. After that, the Union had adopted a mixed strategy. Early in July, Federals under Brigadier Quincy Gillmore had established beachheads on Morris Island and begun installation of their batteries among the dunes. Then, on July 18, some six thousand Union infantry had surged forward and surmounted the parapets of Battery Wagner, a Cummings Point fortification whose guns commanded the harbor entrance.
By evening the Yanks had been driven back to their lines, and with particular fury because Shaw’s Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored infantry had been in the van of the attack. Black faces swarming over bastions held by white soldiers made the whole town remember old names: Nat Turner; Denmark Vesey.
The failure to keep Battery Wagner galled the Yanks, but it had no significant effect on the siege campaign or the speed with which it took shape. Union artillerists kept working, in scorching sunlight all day and beneath calcium flares all night, to place siege mortars and great breeching guns in their sand batteries. Charleston lived in special dread of one eight-inch, two-hundred-pound Parrott nicknamed “the Swamp Angel.” The great monster of a gun was intended to send incendiary shells on a low trajectory of eight thousand yards—right into the city. Cooper had read of the Swamp Angel in Richmond, thinking what an irony it would be if Hazard’s had any part in its manufacture.
After days of practice firing, the massed guns opened the bombardment in mid-August. Since that time there had been three periods of heavy shelling, each lasting several days. Sumter now resembled a stone heap, though a garrison of five hundred, manning thirty-eight guns, still held on in the ruins. As for the Swamp Angel, it had done hardly any damage, had in fact blown up soon aft
er discharging its first rounds.
The city withstood the bombardments and took relatively little damage. Sumter still flew the Confederate and state flags. Yet the enemy had neither given up nor gone away; the Yanks were out there in the haze beyond James Island, where Cooper had started his fledgling shipyard. To boost morale, President Davis had visited the city last November, on his way back to Richmond from the endangered West. Crowds gave Mr. Davis loud and friendly welcomes at each of his appearances. Cooper chose not to attend any of them. Only deeds, not patriotic homilies, could help now. His job was Hunley.
The fish-ship had been transported from Mobile last summer and since then had been plagued by misfortune. Docked with one hatch left open, she had been swamped when a much larger vessel passed nearby. All of her eight-man crew, including the skipper, Lieutenant Payne, were aboard. Only Payne escaped drowning.
During a test of the submersible with a replacement crew, five more men lost their lives. Old Bory gave up on Hunley, but changed his mind when Mallory reaffirmed his faith in the design, pleaded for patience, and promised that two of his trusted aides would be sent to supervise her testing and operation.
Meanwhile, on October 5, the torpedo boat David scored a hit on U.S.S. New Ironsides, a bark-rigged steamer with armor plating on her sides. David’s spar torpedo successfully detonated six feet below the enemy’s waterline, and although the sixty-pound charge was not enough to sink her, it did enough damage to force her to retire to Port Royal for repairs.
Cooper and Lucius arrived then. They pointed out to Beauregard that Hunley offered one advantage that David did not: silence. The official reports showed that David’s engine had alerted New Ironsides to danger before the torpedo boat struck. Beauregard protested that he had had no time to scrutinize the reports, else he would have drawn the same conclusion. Cooper suspected the pompous little Creole was lying but settled for the general’s promise of encouragement and cooperation. It was needed, he discovered. Hunley had already been nicknamed “the Peripatetic Coffin.”