House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

“That shouldn’t have been necessary. You were in friendly country.”

  “We were supposed to be, but it didn’t work out that way.” Trav added thoughtfully: “We’re going to miss Major Moses. He’s gone to Georgia to see if he can get supplies for the army.”

  “The Georgia regiments say there’s plenty there.”

  “Major Moses will get whatever there is,” Trav predicted. “He knew of one district commissary who runs a distillery in Macon and seizes corn in the name of the Government and uses it to make whiskey and sells it for his own profit; and he impresses wheat or flour or tobacco at Government prices and ships it to Mobile and sells it for his own account. Major Moses plans to seize his shipments in transit.”

  “The Major sounds like a good man.”

  “He is. I wish we had more like him. They’d keep this army fed.” Trav smiled. “You look as though you needed a square meal yourself, Brett.”

  “I was sick in December,” Brett admitted. “But a month at home straightened me out.” He said the Howitzers, except for an encounter with Dahlgren’s Yankee horsemen on their way to Richmond, had had a quiet spring. “We’re shorthanded, though. A lot of men are away on recruit furloughs.”

  Trav had not heard the phrase. “Recruit furloughs?”

  “Yes, we’re desperate for men, so up to a month ago, if a man brought in a recruit, General Lee gave him thirty days furlough as a reward.”

  “I see. We’re short too. The First Corps had twenty thousand men at Gettysburg last summer; but with Pickett still in North Carolina, we haven’t half that, now. And Hood’s gone, and McLaws; and Law’s brigade was left in Tennessee.” He added: “They’ve been ordered back to us with Law in command; but the General says he’ll arrest General Law again if he comes, threatens to resign if Richmond insists on sending him.”

  “Lee will support Longstreet, won’t he?”

  “Yes, they can’t spare Longstreet.”

  Brett made sure they were not overheard. “How does he feel about things?”

  “He’s all right now, thinks we’ll do good work this summer. But he was discouraged last winter. He opened a correspondence with General Schofield; thought they might initiate something that would lead toward honorable peace. He still thinks the armies will have to make the peace, that the politicians got us into war and now don’t know how to get us out.”

  Brett nodded. “I suppose the soldiers will have to keep on dying till the politicians are satisfied.”

  “I wonder why they don’t all desert, Brett. Not five men out of a hundred have anything to gain, even if we win.”

  “Oh, some of them enjoy the excitement. What would they be doing if they weren’t in the army?”

  “Working on their farms. Happy with their families.”

  Brett said thoughtfully: “Well, I suppose that’s true of any war. The men who do the fighting have nothing to gain.”

  “How’s Burr?”

  “Oh, he’s well. But he’s ashamed to call himself a South Carolinian since the South Carolina cavalry regiments tried to avoid coming to this army. He was raging at them for cowards and renegades, last time I saw him.”

  “But he’s well? That’s the main thing.”

  “Yes. He’s drawn fine by hard work, but he’s well. Stuart’s headquarters are at Orange Court House; and when Burr can he rides over to see me. But Stuart keeps his men pretty busy watching Meade’s army.”

  “It’s Grant’s army now,” Trav reminded him, and Brett asked:

  “What does General Longstreet think of Grant?”

  “Why, he says Grant will be hard to stop. He thinks we can beat him, but he says beating Grant won’t stop him.”

  “Mosby’s raising Cain behind Grant’s lines,” Brett reported. “I saw Faunt two weeks ago.” Trav’s jaw set. He could not forget what Enid had told him about Faunt and Mrs. Albion. For Faunt, who had always been the pattern of gentleness and valor, to involve himself in a shabby affair was base and shameful. Brett went on: “Mosby’s handful of partisans manages to keep four or five thousand of the Yankee cavalry tied down to guarding their lines.” He chuckled. “Faunt says he and Mosby are planning to go to Washington some time this month. Mosby sent Lincoln a lock of his hair and promised to call in person.”

  Trav grinned. “I expect Lincoln would be glad to see him; but what can Mosby do in Washington?”

  “He has a friend there, an actor named Booth. Remember him? He was in Richmond at the time of the John Brown business.”

  Trav shook his head. “I was at Great Oak, didn’t come to Richmond.”

  Brett nodded. “Well, anyway, Booth’s hot for the South, sends morphine and medicines through the lines; and he wants to ride with Mosby on one of his raids.” He spoke in dry distaste: “That’s an ugly game they play, Trav; not much decency on either side. At Dranes-ville, a Yankee captain named Reed surrendered to Baron von Massow; but the Prussian neglected to disarm him, and the Yank shot him in the back. The Yankees consider Mosby’s men guerrillas, and Faunt says he personally never takes prisoners.” Trav met his eye, not speaking, and Brett said absently: “Faunt’s not well, you know; he has lung trouble. He was sick last winter for weeks, stayed with friends.”

  “Where?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Trav thought he could guess, but he did not speak his thought.

  General Longstreet had his way about General Law. Lee supported Longstreet against the authorities in Richmond; and as a further mark of his esteem he came on the twenty-ninth to review the First Corps.

  That day stirred Trav profoundly. The review was held in a broad and level valley along the South Anna river, near Green Springs; and the day was fine. Peters Mountain rose boldly a few miles to the westward, and through the gaps west of Gordonsville the summits of the Blue Ridge were pale against the distant sky. Before General Lee arrived, Longstreet’s two divisions of infantry and General Alexander’s battalion of artillery took formation. The fences had long since gone to feed campfires, so there were no obstacles to interfere with movement. The waiting lines faced a wood through which a country road approached the reviewing ground from the highway that led to Boswell Tavern; and Trav, in the interval after they were ready, watching them, felt his eyes sting and smart. There was in those silent ranks an expectancy that seemed to sing in the warm spring air.

  He heard hoofbeats as General Lee at the head of his staff rode through the woodland toward where the road debouched on a knoll above the field. When the commanding general emerged from the wood, the bugles sounded, the cannons roared their salute. A light breeze bore the smoke away, and General Lee bared his head; and from the long lines of ragged men arose one hoarse glad shout, and then the shrill yipping yell that had been heard upon so many glorious battlefields. General Lee sat his horse and waited for a moment; and as he rode down toward his men a sudden silence swept them all, and silence lay across the sunny levels so that even on the heavy turf the hoofs were loud.

  General Lee rode slowly the long length of the lines, so close that every man could see him plain and he could see every man; and the soft whipping of battle flags and the muffled thudding of hoofbeats were only an accent in the silence like a sacrament. Trav thought of Hill’s corps and of Ewell’s, waiting along the Rapidan; he thought of Grant’s hosts poised upon the northern banks. Soon now these men here must dam with their bodies that oncoming flood of enemies: these tattered, bearded, grimed, half-starved thousands; these planters and small farmers and poor whites welded together into a flaming sword; these valiant ones, these loyal ones. This hour was like an absolution before the terrible affray.

  He fell to wondering about the individuals in the ranks. Before they lost their identity, what was their way of life? This was a question the answer to which might be expressed in figures; and when after the review the men were dispersed to their camps again, Trav spent two or three days going from one company commander to another, checking muster rolls and questioning individuals. Before he was done
he came to some conclusions; they might be faulty, but they were suggestive. At least six men out of ten called themselves farmers; but Trav, talking with them, guessed that fully half of these professed farmers were indolent men whose wives did most of the work upon the worthless acres where they made their slovenly homes. The rest were like his neighbors in Martinston; hard-working and self-respecting, but only one step above abject poverty. Of the men who were not farmers, most called themselves clerks or mechanics, and a few were students who had left the class room for the army. Companies like the Third Howitzers had doctors, teachers, lawyers; but Trav calculated that not five percent of this army were men of a station in life that matched his own. Certainly not five percent of them were of families that had ever owned a slave, or that would gain any fruits from victory.

  The thought made his heart beat the more strongly, and intensified his pride in those thousands he had seen on parade, their worn gear polished, their uniforms as clean and as nearly whole as it was possible to make them, standing to be inspected by the commanding general. If this war bore no other fruit, certainly it had proved the dignity and the nobility of the ordinary man.

  Yet he himself had in the past agreed with those who felt that the reins of government could only be trusted to aristocratic hands. He too had believed that wealth was a measure of a man’s fitness for a voice in politics. In 1850, when the Virginia convention fought out the question of manhood suffrage as opposed to suffrage based on the ownership of property, Trav had been unquestioningly sure that unless a man owned land or slaves he had no right to vote; but during his years at Chimneys, though even among his neighbors at Martinston there were only a few whose political judgment he would trust, he had begun to suspect that he was wrong.

  Now he was sure of it. The very men whom he had considered unfit to have a voice in public affairs were the backbone of the army now; and if this army was—as he believed—the finest group of soldiers ever brought together, it was these men who made it so.

  Did this mean that he was coming to believe in the rule of the majority? No man in public life in the South trusted the majority; and the fact that President Lincoln had faith in the united wisdom of the common man, and said so, was one of the unadmitted reasons why Southern leaders hated him and refused allegiance to the nation that had elected him its head.

  Yet Trav’s own half-acceptance of this belief was now astonishingly comforting, giving him a peace of mind which for a long time he had not known. For if ordinary men could be trusted, then it did not greatly matter if their governments were overthrown; they would in time make better ones.

  His thoughts turned to Ed Blandy. Ed’s regiment, the Eleventh North Carolina, was in camp beyond Orange Court House; and Trav found time to ride that way. Lieutenant Colonel Martin, who had come into the command of the regiment, was a Virginian by birth; but he had before the war been a professor of mineralogy at the University of North Carolina. He was a bearded man who made Trav think of Stonewall Jackson, of grave demeanor with a frowning eye. His regiment, he told Trav, was far below its fighting strength; he himself was the only field officer left. “The Pennsylvania campaign weakened us so much we never recovered, and we were badly shot up at Bristoe Station last fall. We attacked what we thought was one Union corps and found two in front of us.” He told Trav where to find J Company. “But I doubt if your friend is there. We’ve had a lot of men slip away and go home.”

  Trav found this prediction true. Tom Shadd and Lonn Tyler were the only ones remaining of those he had known. “And if us-uns wasn’t plain damn fools,” Lonn Tyler said cheerfully, “we wouldn’t be here ourselves. My belly’s been flapping agin’ my backbone all winter, till the spring sprouts come; and there ain’t nothing in me now only pokeberry shoots and wild onions. Yes sir, of all the wars I ever fit, this here’s the damnedest. Legging it all over the country just to git ourselves an empty gut and a bullet into us!” He grinned, demanded: “What are you doing in it, Major? The rich men ain’t supposed to do this fighting.”

  Trav smiled. “I’m as poor as anyone now; but I’m not much of a fighter.” He asked the question he had come to ask.

  “Ed Blandy?” Lonn tossed his head. “Ed had some sense. He’s went along home.”

  Trav looked inquiringly at Tom Shadd. You could never be sure how much truth lay behind Lonn’s fooling, but Tom spoke simple facts in simple words. Tom said slowly: “Ed got word Mrs. Blandy was dead.” His eyes fell, and Trav suspected he knew how Mrs. Blandy died. “They give him a furlough to go see about it,” Tom said. “But he ain’t come back.”

  “When did he go?”

  “Way back before Christmas.”

  So Ed was a deserter. Probably he had stayed at home to take care of the farm and the children, dodging into hiding whenever men from the conscript bureau came into the neighborhood; and Ed would hate that furtive life. For Mrs. Blandy’s death, and so for Ed’s shame, Tony was responsible. Trav promised himself that some day he would have a reckoning with Tony.

  He stayed awhile, asking news of other men he once had known; and some were dead, and some had deserted, and some like Bob Grimm had gone home so maimed that they could fight no more. Riding back to headquarters he thought again that such men as Tom and Lonn were what made this army great; simple men who scratched a bare living out of the soil, watering their fields with their own sweat. Of course, yeomen farmers and poor whites fought no harder, fought perhaps not so hard nor so well, as the sons of wealth. But there were so many more of them.

  If many of them deserted, it was hard to blame them. To desert was their only recourse. Richmond was full of able-bodied men in easy positions in the Government; clerks complaining when they were mustered to defend Richmond against raiding Yankees, and forever demanding higher pay, and living secure and safe. But men like these soldiers, and their sons, could not arrange to be detailed to safe work far behind the lines. Their only escape from battle and death was to desert, to run away, to hide in the forests and the mountains like so many animals. It was a proud and splendid thing that for a cause in which they had no selfish interest at all, they stayed and fought and died.

  As presently, when Grant’s army began to move, more of them would fight, and more of them would die.

  Clark’s Mountain, four or five miles beyond Rapidan Station toward Raccoon Ford, overlooked all the rolling plain toward Brandy Station where Grant’s army was encamped. After that review of Longstreet’s First Corps, the signal station on the summit was manned by night as well as by day; and on Monday, the second of May, the watchers there reported the smoke of an abnormally large number of fires rising from the enemy camps. That, since it meant the Yankees were cooking rations for three or four days, was a sign every private in the ranks could recognize. Grant was about to move.

  Till his march began, it was impossible to be sure in which direction he would strike. If he came up river toward Liberty Mills, the First Corps would receive the first shock of his advance. Tuesday, dust clouds along distant roads marked troops making toward the upper fords; but this proved to be no more than a feint, for next daylight revealed the whole army of the enemy on the march down river toward the Confederate right.

  General Longstreet set the men to cook rations, to break camp, and to discard all unnecessary burdens. The headquarters tents were struck and cut up into pieces, and the tents of officers, too; and the fragments of canvas were distributed to the nearest men for use as bed or shelter in the days that were to come. Before Lee’s orders reached them, they were almost ready; and at four o’clock in the afternoon the head of the column began to move.

  While Lee awaited Grant’s advance, Ewell’s corps had formed the Confederate right, Hill’s the center, Longstreet’s the left. Now they must regroup. Two roads served them. Ewell’s corps would follow the northernmost, the turnpike that ran from Orange Court House to Fredericksburg. Hill, using the Orange Plank Road, would cross Ewell’s rear and come into position on his right. Longstreet and the First Corps mu
st pass behind them by whatever highways and byways were available, and come into battle as the right flank of the Confederate line.

  The orders were to march all night, with only brief rests. Colonel Taylor of Longstreet’s staff rode ahead to find a guide for them. His home at Meadow Farm, beyond Orange Court House toward the tangled tract of second growth and scrub called the Wilderness, had been their rendezvous after their return from Gettysburg. He promised to meet them at Brock’s Bridge.

  “We’ll come into action somewhere near the Brock Road,” he predicted. “That’s the road Jackson took to flank Hooker at Chancellorsville, so we’ll be on ground that brings us success. Call it a good omen.”

  To the bridge where they would meet him was about twenty miles. When night forced a halt they were well on the way; and the head of the column reached Negro Run next day to find Colonel Taylor and Mr. Robinson, who had for years been sheriff of the county, ready to lead them on.

  That evening they heard the guns; and when they came upon some skirmishing Yankee troopers who scattered before them, Longstreet halted the men for a rest and sent Trav and Captain Goree to discover and report back to him the results of the first clash.

  “General Lee’s orders to the others are to avoid battle till we are up,” he said. “But if ’Lys Grant finds us, he will strike without waiting our pleasure.”

  Trav returned to him late that night, with a guide sent by General Lee to lead the First Corps through the forest to the plank road. “There’s been hard fighting, General,” he said. “They hit General Ewell, and then struck General Hill’s advance on the plank road. Heth and Wilcox had hard work. They’ll need you as quickly as you can get there.”

  Trav spoke urgently, for he had seen that need. Black Nig, as always when he heard the song of battle, had fretted at the bit; and Trav felt in himself that dry-throated wrath which he had learned to recognize. He spoke more strongly than he knew, and Longstreet smiled and said :