by Lynn Austin
Sally and I hugged each other in joy, knowing that we wouldn’t be able to truly celebrate this good news until we learned whether or not Charles and Jonathan were safe. Any victory, especially a hard-fought one, meant casualties. After receiving the news, we returned home—while many of Richmond’s citizens began making preparations for the avalanche of casualties that was certain to follow.
On Tuesday I went to the central depot with all the other women to await news of our soldiers. Rumors circulated that a list would be posted, company by company, naming the men who had been wounded, who were missing, and who had died in battle. Sally and I waited, clutching each other’s hand.
The train from Manassas finally arrived, returning President Davis to the city from the battlefield. Along with him came the first victims of the conflict. The dead arrived in pine boxes, stacking up at the depot in alarming numbers, awaiting shipment home. The wounded arrived on crutches and on stretchers and on makeshift pallets—more and more of them every hour. As I stood scanning their shocked, pale faces, praying that I wouldn’t see Charles’ among them, I overheard one of the doctors pleading with Mrs. Goode’s husband, a city official, to find more places to care for them all.
“The Medical College Hospital is full,” the doctor insisted. “You can’t send us any more.”
“All of the other hospitals are overflowing, too,” Mr. Goode replied. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You must find more places for them.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know . . . take them to homes or schools or hotels, even warehouses—someplace where they’re out of the sun and the dust. Someplace where they can rest and get a drink of water.”
Everywhere I looked the wounded men lay, waiting on the train platform and on sidewalks and even on the city streets. Some of the men moaned and wept and begged for morphine or a drink of water, men with missing limbs and savage wounds and filthy, blood-soaked bandages. I was staggered by the knowledge that we didn’t have enough hospitals to care for them all, enough ambulances to transport them there, enough doctors or nurses or beds or medicine.
Sally closed her eyes against the terrible sight, refusing to budge from our place near the ticket office as we waited for the casualty list to be posted. I longed to run home, but my greater need was to search for Charles and Jonathan among the mangled bodies. I forced myself to walk between the rows, searching each exhausted face, looking for a Richmond Blues insignia on each uniform. Some of the men grabbed the hem of my skirt as I passed, pleading for help, for mercy, for the assurance that they weren’t going to die. By the time the list arrived, and I learned that neither Charles St. John nor Jonathan Fletcher was on it, I knew that it would be a long time before I could erase the horror of this day from my mind.
As I clung to Sally, weeping and thanking God for Charles’ safety, the doctor I’d seen earlier suddenly interrupted us. “Ladies, please. I need your help . . . these men need your help.”
“We’re not nurses—” Sally began.
“You don’t need to be. Please, just help me. Talk to the men, reassure them.” I saw the fatigue on the doctor’s distraught face, the bloodstains on his hands and coat. From what little I’d seen on the platform, I knew that he faced an overwhelming task.
Sally backed away from him. “I can’t . . .”
He gripped her arm, refusing to let go. “I noticed that you were looking for someone’s name a moment ago. A boyfriend? Husband? Brother? Suppose he was one of these wounded souls, lying on a train platform in a strange city.Wouldn’t you want some kind, compassionate woman to help him? I’m not asking you to tend their wounds. Just give a soldier a drink of water. Help someone write a letter home—especially the ones who are dying. Help me feed the men who can’t feed themselves. Talk to them, encourage them. . . . Please.”
“Sally, we have to help him,” I said. “You know we do.”
The doctor’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank you.” He relinquished Sally’s arm, and after directing us to the City Almshouse where a makeshift hospital was being organized, he hurried away to intercept another group of women and beg for their help.
The scene at the City Almshouse so overwhelmed me that I staggered against the doorframe for support. Mutilated men lay wall-to-wall on the bare floor, leaving scarcely enough room to walk down the rows between them. Every square inch of floor space was filled, yet still more injured men continued to arrive, filling the yard outside, waiting for someone to die and make a space for them inside. Blood stained the soldiers’ bandages, their clothing and faces, the floors, even the doorposts as bodies flowed in and out in a steady stream. I’d never seen so much blood in my life.
The matron seemed grateful to see us, but she had little time to spare for instructions, let alone pleasantries. “Start with that room,” she said, pointing to a smaller room off the main hallway. “Most of them haven’t eaten in two days, a lot of them need water. You’ll have to help some of them feed themselves.” She appraised Sally, whose beautiful face had turned the color of paper, and added, “Talk to them, miss . . . smile for them.”
We rolled up our sleeves, fetched the food and water, and set to work. But less than a minute passed after we’d entered the stifling room before the mingled smells of sweat and blood and sickness made my gorge rise. I battled to hold it down. As soon as the injured men saw us, they began clamoring for our help, moaning, whimpering. Dozens of them had survived amputations at the field hospitals, and as the morphine finally wore off, they screamed in shock and pain at the loss of their arms, their legs.
The first soldier Sally approached broke into anguished sobs, weeping, “My leg! Oh, God! They cut off my leg!” and Sally collapsed in a faint on top of him.
I ran into the hallway, calling for the matron. “Please, somebody help my friend, she’s fainted!”
The nurse gave me a withering look. “Push her aside and help the injured man.” She hurried past me toward another room.
I found smelling salts in Sally’s reticule and revived her. When she finished vomiting into her handkerchief, I rinsed her face with the washcloth meant for the soldiers.
“I can’t do this,” Sally wept. “I can’t look at those horrible amputated arms and legs. . . .”
“Don’t. Look at his face. Pretend that he’s Jonathan or one of your other beaux.” My voice gentled. “Because someday he might be.”
In the end, Sally stayed. We worked until late that afternoon, until neither of us could stand on our feet for another moment. If we had stayed until we were no longer needed, we would have been there for weeks.
That terrible day, I watched men die for the first time. Some of them struggled and grasped to hold on to life until the very end; others relinquished it with a peaceful sigh, a final exhaled breath. As Sally and I finally stepped outside into the thick July heat, I recognized that my own life hung from God’s hand by a slender silver thread. Its fragility made it no less precious in His eyes, but it pointed to the need to treasure it, to protect life at all costs.
Injured men crammed the yards and sidewalks outside the almshouse, some of them too weak to swat away the flies that swarmed around their wounds. Like so many other Richmond ladies that day, I gave an ambulance driver my address, and by nightfall my drawing room was filled with wounded men to nurse and feed.
“Lord have mercy on their souls!” Esther said when she saw their wretched condition. Luella and Eli carried every mattress and cushion in the house down to the drawing room, every pillow and blanket they could find. Esther cooked gallons of soup, which was all that many of the invalids could manage to eat. Ruby tore some of our linen bed sheets into strips for clean bandages, and Tessie volunteered to change and dress their wounds, nearly fainting herself the first time she saw the damage that a Minie ball could inflict. Eli spent the next several nights sleeping on the floor alongside the men, the only one of us strong enough to help a man turn over.
Along with my work at the almshouse, I
now endured allnight vigils at home by the soldiers’ bedsides, making sure that no one had to spend the last hours of his life alone. On one such night, I sat with a young soldier named Wade, from Mississippi. I knew from the fetid smell of his shoulder wound and the ominous streaks that radiated from it like spokes that he would probably die. Wade knew it, too, and he struggled to die manfully, without weeping. He’d told me he was eighteen, but I didn’t believe him. The soft fuzz on his cheeks and his trembling youthful limbs told me that he couldn’t possibly be more than sixteen. Lying down made it difficult for Wade to breathe, so Eli helped him sit up, supporting him in his strong arms.
“Would you like us to pray with you?” I asked.
“I used to go to Sunday meetings. . . .” Wade mumbled. “Haven’t been in a long time. . . .”
“That doesn’t matter right now. God is always willing to hear your prayers.”
Wade nodded weakly and closed his eyes. I held his hand in mine and signaled to Eli to pray.
“Oh, Lord Jesus,” Eli began, “we ask you to—”
“No . . . no . . .” The boy began thrashing, tossing his head from side to side.
“Wade, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want that nigger praying for me!”
I was too outraged to speak. I dropped Wade’s hand, waiting for Eli to drop the boy to the floor and leave him there to die. Instead, Eli rested his hand on my shoulder to calm me.
“Go on, Missy Caroline, you pray for him.”
“I can’t.” My voice shook with fury and contempt.
“Yes, you can, and you best do it quick.”
Somehow, I managed to do it. I prayed and recited the Twenty-third Psalm until Wade finally grew calm and slipped into unconsciousness. Then I stood and fled to Daddy’s library. I was trembling from head to toe. Eli followed a few minutes later, carrying the lamp.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I don’t understand people like him. How could he say such a thing to you? And why did you make me pray for him after what he said?”
Eli set the lamp down on Daddy’s desk. “That boy will have to face God pretty soon and give an accounting for all the hate he storing away in his heart. But you and I better not be storing any in ours. Let it go, Missy Caroline—right away, before it take root. Else we be just as bad as he is. The devil wants us to be like himself— telling lies and hating people. Jesus wants us to be like He is—loving our enemies and praying for them. Who you gonna be like?”
I sank into the chair behind my daddy’s desk, then leaned forward to rest my elbows on it and covered my face. “It’s too hard,” I mumbled. “All this work, night and day, with scarcely a moment’s rest—and then some of them are so ungrateful . . . insulting!” I exhaled, expelling my anger in a rush of air. When I felt calmer, I said, “Listen, Eli, you don’t have to do this anymore. Go home and go to bed. You’ve been working harder than any servant should be expected to work.”
I waited for him to leave, but Eli didn’t move. When I finally lowered my hands and looked up, he was standing in the same place in front of the desk, gazing down at me.
“Some of these men never once thought about Jesus their whole life,” he said. “But they crying out to Him now cause they hurt and afraid. Jesus wants to answer them. He wants to help that poor dying boy out there, but the only arms and the only voice He has is ours.”
I covered my face again, feeling very small and ungracious compared to Eli. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“You have to,” Eli said.
“Why?” I sounded like a petulant child, but I didn’t care. “Who says I have to?”
“Jesus is our Massa, and He say so. We’re here to serve Him, not the other way around. Your daddy ain’t saying to me, ‘Sit yourself down, Eli. Tell me what you want to eat. Let me wait on you.’ ”
“I thought the Bible says I’m God’s child.”
“Comes a time when every child has to grow up and get about his father’s business. Cousin Jonathan and Massa Charles . . . didn’t they grow up and go to work for their daddies? Time you grow up, Missy Caroline. Your heavenly Father needs you to be His servant.”
I was exhausted and demoralized and discouraged. All I could think to say was, “It’s too hard.”
“You bet it’s hard. Even Jesus struggled all night in the Garden. He didn’t want to die. But He prayed, ‘Not my will, but thine, be done.’ A servant does what his massa says and goes where his massa sends him and doesn’t quit until the job is done.”
I closed my eyes, thinking, Tomorrow. I’ll start all over again tomorrow. But Eli wasn’t finished.
“Every day a servant goes to his massa and finds out what he supposed to do that day. If a servant is in the middle of something and Massa calls his name, he don’t say ‘just a minute’—he drop whatever he doing and he run to stand before the massa and he say, ‘Here I am.’ Every morning we need to ask the Lord, ‘This where you want me today? This what you want me to do?’ If it is, then that’s where you have to be, and that’s what you have to do.”
“All right, Eli,” I said with a sigh. I knew he was right. And I knew I would have to pray about everything he’d said. But right then I simply wanted to be alone, to lay my head down on the desk and weep. “You may go now,” I told Eli. “I need some time alone.”
“No, Missy Caroline,” he said gently. “You coming with me. That poor boy gonna die, and Massa Jesus wants you and me to be with him.”
Eventually, the deluge of wounded soldiers receded, the makeshift beds in our drawing room emptied. The nursing shortage in Richmond’s hospitals eased when women arrived from all over the South to nurse their wounded husbands, sweethearts, and sons. Tessie and I read in the news that the Confederate Congress had given credit to “The Most High God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, for the triumph at Manassas.” Congress was convinced that the Union would never continue the war after this stunning defeat.
But the war did continue, slowly spreading to other parts of the country. We read of another Confederate victory at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri and then a victory at Ball’s Bluff, here in Virginia. More captured Yankee prisoners arrived in Richmond, adding to the hundreds that had been captured at Manassas. No one knew what to do with them all. Some of the vacant tobacco warehouses on the waterfront near Daddy’s warehouses had been converted into prisons, but when they quickly overflowed, the prisoners were confined on Belle Isle in the middle of the James River. From Mother’s grave site in Hollywood Cemetery, I could see row upon row of tents and makeshift shacks dotting the six-acre island and thousands of wretched, blue-uniformed men milling around.
In August, Union forces captured Fort Hatteras in North Carolina. This meant that our blockade-runners could no longer use this important route, cutting off the flow of much-needed supplies. I didn’t worry as much about the rising prices or the empty store shelves as I did about Daddy. His work had become even more dangerous now. And we hadn’t heard from him since he’d left home in July.
“Your father has an important job to do overseas,” Mr. St. John assured me as we walked home from St. Paul’s one beautiful fall day. We had been walking a lot more since the war began, but Richmond enjoyed a long spell of beautiful Indian summer weather that year, making our walks pleasant. “It’s more than just English rifles he’s after,” Mr. St. John continued. “England and France depend on the South for their supplies of cotton and tobacco. If we can convince those nations to back our cause and join the war on our behalf, the North will have to concede defeat.”
“You think my father is part of this effort?”
“President Davis is preparing to send diplomats to Europe to negotiate an alliance. But he needs men like your father to keep the trade ships running in the meantime. He’s doing a very important job.”
In November, the Union Navy intercepted the British mail steamer Trent on the high seas and captured the two Confederate diplomats, James Mason and John Slidell, en route to
Great Britain for President Davis. The British were so outraged by this assault on one of their ships that it seemed as though the Trent affair might finally persuade Great Britain to support the South. But President Lincoln recognized the danger of such an alliance and ordered the two diplomats to be released with an apology to England. The Rebels’ hopes were disappointed once more. The war continued. Gilbert returned home again, his digging finished for the winter, and we welcomed him as a hero. But I still heard no word from Daddy.
When wintry weather finally arrived, bringing bone-chilling rain and frigid blankets of snow, the women in Mrs. St. John’s sewing society turned to knitting. I had never knitted in my life, but I learned how to that winter; the need for warm hats, gloves, scarves, and socks for our soldiers was critical. As we crowded around the fireplace in the St. Johns’ smaller parlor, I pictured Charles and Jonathan huddling inside their leaking tents, shivering beneath thin blankets. Hospitals began filling with soldiers again— not casualties of battle but victims of diseases such as pneumonia, typhoid, and dysentery, which spread through the army camps like biblical plagues.
Two years ago, Jonathan and I had celebrated Christmas together at Sally’s party. Last Christmas, Charles and I had celebrated our engagement. This Christmas, Esther sent our turkey and all the trimmings to Jonathan, Charles, and the other “Richmond Blues,” dug in for the winter in northern Virginia. I tried to put on a brave face in public as my clumsy fingers gripped the slender knitting needles and wrestled to master the basics of knitting and purling. I managed to turn skeins of yarn into oddly misshapen socks and mittens, but only Tessie knew how many tears I silently shed in my room.
Chapter Fifteen
March 1862
A gust of wind rattled the shutters outside my bedroom window one cold morning in March, then whistled down the chimney. But it was the words that Tessie had just read from the book of Philippians that made me pause in my knitting to look up at her, not the blustery wind. “Wait . . . read that again, Tessie.”