Of course, his true love was the war itself. He was about to choose a woman who would bring him intimately into contact with its true meaning. She was not a family member, not a romantic interest, still less a future wife, but a young woman born into an entirely different world from Monroe, Michigan.
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HER WORLD WAS INVISIBLE until the moment she destroyed it. She spent most of her time in the outer world, the white world, where time was not hers at all; it belonged to the man who called himself her owner, or to his wife, their son, or their daughters, for whatever purpose suited them. Only after a long day of serving them—perhaps on Sundays or late on Saturdays—came a precious few hours when she could disappear.
She would later say her name was Eliza Brown. It might not have been a birth name, but one she gave herself after she had washed herself clean of slavery. Whatever it was on July 10, 1860, the census taker ignored it. She went nameless onto the slave schedule on a list headed by the slaveholder Robert H. Pierce, a citizen of Rappahannock County, high in Virginia’s piedmont, edged to the west by the Blue Ridge Mountains. Above and below her line came those for two women, aged fifty and thirty; two men, forty and thirty-seven; a boy, sixteen, a girl, twelve, and a boy of one. Eliza was listed as a fourteen-year-old female. She was identified as black, not mulatto, as was the one-year-old boy.39
Twenty years later, another census would show her to be thirty-five, living with a husband she had not yet met in 1860, as well as a twenty-year-old black man named John Brown, listed as her son. The boy of 1860 and young man of 1880 may have been the same person, her natural-born child, or they may have been different people—one or both unrelated to her by blood. The life hidden in the single slave cabin on the Pierce farm was often mysterious and always uncertain. The sixty-year-old Pierce may have ordered Eliza, at thirteen, to lift her skirt for his entry; or she may have been raped by Pierce’s only son, William, then in his mid-twenties; or she may have been raped by a male slave on that farm or another; or she may have willingly laid down with one; or she may not have been the mother at all, but in later years would take an entirely different boy into her home to raise as her own.
Family was survival for Africans chained in America, but at any moment a family could be rent by rental, sale, or death, so they stretched and adapted the concept beyond their blood kin. The one-year-old boy may not have been born on the Pierce farm, but could have been purchased for investment or taken as payment for a debt. He may have been orphaned by the death or sale of his genetic mother. He may have died soon after the census, since mortality rates among enslaved children ran as high as 45 percent. Only one thing is certain: for a decade after the call of the census taker in 1860, John Brown remained seemingly invisible to the white men and women who saw Eliza Brown. If he was there, the outside world never remarked on his presence.40
Living on one of the small slaveholding farms that predominated in upper piedmont country, she found little time to withdraw into her own sphere. Unlike the large gang-labor plantations of the Deep South, where scores of slaves formed villages of their own, where the number of hands allowed more specialization by gender, here labor demands were many and varied, and fell upon all. Child slaves went to work at about six years of age. Women as well as men hoed, harvested, and even plowed; they tended livestock, milked, churned butter, and smoked meat as well as cleaned, cooked, sewed, wove fabric, and cared for children. Neighbors comparable to the Pierces sometimes had one or two dedicated house slaves, or else rotated the chores. In this region slaveholders tended to own more adult women than men or children, perhaps because adult male field hands sold for high prices in the Deep South, feeding a busy and heartrending interstate trade. And women still had to perform duties for their own families, from washing clothes to feeding babies to tending garden plots.41
African Americans also took advantage of the relative absence of large plantations in Rappahannock County. Instead of being trapped in large, insular fiefdoms, they found opportunities to visit other farms or towns, forming social and kinship networks that spread across the countryside. They met other slaves when sent on errands or when they were rented out—or perhaps when they rented themselves out, as slaveholders sometimes allowed their hands to work elsewhere for wages on Sunday, their free day, and keep what they earned. In this way bond servants built ties to free black communities in northern Virginia as well. Slaves found spouses on other farms; if they received their masters’ permission, as they often did, they held ceremonies for these “abroad” marriages (though they lacked any official standing, since a slave could have no legal relationship with anyone but the master). Keenly attuned to those who ruled them, they swiftly discovered and spread news of important events, including the election of 1860, secession, and developments in the Civil War.
The black world, then, was not completely invisible to the white world, but it was wider, more intricate, and more connected than the masters knew. Out of countless African nations, the enslaved made a new people, with distinct customs and dialect. They invented or adapted music, ceremonies, and religious worship for themselves. They abided by their own etiquette with each other, and operated according to their own rules of status.42
On the smallholdings of Rappahannock and nearby counties, black women possessed authority. Where they were, their families were. Children remained with their mothers (until death or sale); black fathers often lived on other farms or were sold or rented to distant places, and white fathers rarely acknowledged their slave offspring at all. Women “occupied the least volatile niche available, and so they became the chief keepers and transmitters of the community’s culture,” writes Steven Hahn.43
When Eliza Brown turned fifteen in 1860, she lived under the oversight of the women listed as thirty and fifty years old in the census slave schedule. She later called one of them her mother; the relationship, genetic or not, gave Brown support, but also placed her down the social hierarchy in the slave quarters.44
In a stroke of luck, Robert Pierce fell sick. Brown was called in to care for him. She entered the white, two-story house with a high-pitched roof and four columns across the front. Brown now cooked, cleaned, washed clothing, and changed the linens; if necessary, she spoon-fed Pierce and helped him with a bedpan or chamber pot. Such were the ironies, or horrors, of slavery: Pierce might well have raped her or allowed her to be raped, and could sell her or her mother without notice; yet she had to take every care for his recovery.
But the assignment was indeed lucky. With access to the kitchen, she could pilfer food for herself and others. As one female house slave told the white mistress of a different Southern home, “Dey gets a little of all dat’s going,” referring to her children. Becoming a supplier of food gave her influence and status in the slave quarters, as did her access to information about the white family and news of the outer world. And her growing skill as a cook elevated her in black and white households alike.
Perhaps the most important benefit to working inside the big house was the talent she developed for managing relationships with the master and his family. To a slave, survival depended on knowing how to handle whites, who held the power of life and death. In the kitchen, the master’s bedroom, or the parlor, Brown learned subtleties that gave her critical advantages. Her domestic skills, too, gave her a special status among those she served; she pleased them and gained their trust, for every Southerner had heard stories of slaves who poisoned food or contaminated it with shattered glass.
She learned how to manipulate with “a soft, appealing voice,” as one woman later wrote of her, “coddling, crooning,” then hectoring or scolding when appropriate. How she spoke mattered. “I suppose you take notice that I has a different way of speaking from the other servants and the field hands,” she later remarked. She would attribute it to her time tending Pierce, when she listened closely to the white family. By adapting her speech when among white people she won a degree of respect and could better negotiate in the countless adjustments of the
master-slave relationship. She learned when to drop the “whar and thar,” as she later put it, spoken in the fields.45
No sooner had she found her footing and a little bit of leverage than the war unsettled her life. The fighting hovered just over the horizon; Amissville, the nearest village, was less than thirty miles from the battles of Manassas. Rappahannock County lay directly between Richmond and the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley, where Stonewall Jackson marched to distract the Union army during the Peninsula Campaign. Almost the entire Army of Northern Virginia moved into the valley to stage its invasions of the North in 1862 and 1863.
At the best of times, the Confederate supply system barely functioned. So rebel troops stripped the country of grain, horses, chickens, pigs, and cattle—often with direct orders to do so under the policy of impressment. Soldiers removed fence rails and even doors for firewood and shelter; polluted wide swathes around their camps with human and animal waste; swarmed around wells and springs; stirred up streams and ponds as they bathed and washed clothing; trampled crops and tore up roads. As one Confederate remarked (albeit in a different location), “They talk about the ravages of the enemy in their marches through the country, but I do not think that the Yankees are any worse than our own army.”46
If hunger were not enough of a threat, slaves faced the possibility of themselves being impressed. Men in particular were hauled off farms and plantations to labor for the Confederate forces. Those who remained faced a subtler problem: their sentiments about the war were the opposite of those of white Virginians. The slave quarters and free black communities had sparkled with news of Lincoln’s candidacy and election, of the outbreak of war. They quickly learned of the escapes to Union army lines and the contraband policy. The advance of Union armies defined the boundary between slavery and freedom; all their hopes rested on federal victories in the field.
African Americans had to serve exuberant slaveholders and hide their dejection after Confederate victories at Manassas, Ball’s Bluff, the Seven Days, and Second Manassas. Sharpsburg, as the rebels called the Battle of Antietam, promised to reverse the momentum; instead, stalemate ensued.
Yet Antietam also brought the Emancipation Proclamation, which jolted the black South. Some African American leaders saw the previous Union defeats as a necessary prelude in a divine plan. The freedman George Payne spoke to a meeting at a contraband camp near Washington, D.C., on December 31, 1862, moments before the Proclamation went into effect. “Friends, don’t you see de han’ of God in dis?” he asked. “I shall rejoice that God has placed Mr. Lincum in de president’s chair, and dat he wouldn’t let de rebels make peace until after dis new year. De Lord has heard de groans of de people, and has come down to deliver!”47
The trials continued until Gettysburg, a Union triumph that sent the Confederate army on a rapid retreat into the Shenandoah Valley. This time the Union army followed, not in an annihilating pursuit, to be sure, but still a hard chase. The federal troops, too, consumed the earth as they marched into Virginia. “We are in the land of plenty,” one soldier wrote home. “When the army is on the march we have a regiment to drive the sheep and oxen that we pick up on the farms.”48
The slaves kept each other informed as Union forces drew nearer—crossing the Potomac, marching into Loudoun Valley, moving closer, closer. At five o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday, July 23, 1863, the 3rd Cavalry Division of the Army of the Potomac occupied the village of Amissville.49 Scores of black men, women, and children fled toward the Union tents, leading federal officers to establish a contraband camp.
It was an opportunity, and Eliza Brown took it. She fled with the others, destroying the world they had made within the world the slaveholders ruled. She hoped to destroy the latter world as well. In later years she found it exasperating that white people from both North and South did not understand that. “Everybody keeps asking why I left,” she would say. “I can’t see why they can’t recollect what the war was for, and that we was all bound to try and see for ourselves how it was. After the ’mancipation, everybody was a-standin’ up for liberty, and I wasn’t goin’ to stay home when everybody else was a-goin’. The day I came into camp, there was a good many other darkeys from all about our place.”50 What the war was for: the slaves knew long before political leaders that, in the end, the war was about freedom. Brown knew what she left behind, but she had no idea what lay before her. She soon learned, as Hahn writes, that “when slaves ran away from Southern plantations, they ran toward a war.”51
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TO GET FROM GETTYSBURG to the contraband camp at Amissville, Custer rode over corpses. At least one was a man he killed himself. His soldiers killed others. And, of course, some of the bodies that cobbled the road were his men. Custer very nearly joined them under hoof thanks to his insistence on leading charges—and his commander’s insistence on foolish charges.
Custer’s disobedience on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg was fortunate as well as wise. When he remained with General Gregg on the right flank of the Army of the Potomac, he kept his brigade away from his division commander, Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick. That day Kilpatrick ordered his other brigade leader, Brig. Gen. Elon Farnsworth, to charge well-placed Confederate infantry. Farnsworth acted precisely as Custer did, riding at the head of his troops. But it was a mounted assault against fortified riflemen and artillery, for no particular purpose. Kilpatrick ordered it over Farnsworth’s protests. Farnsworth died with seventy of his men.52
“All are glad to be away from the battlefield, where all we could see were dead and wounded,” wrote Victor Comte, one of Custer’s troopers, to his wife, Elise, after Gettysburg. A small-framed French immigrant in a company in the 5th Michigan filled with Frenchmen, Comte was that most unfortunate of men, a sensitive soldier. “You would have wept if you’d seen 2 or 3 thousand prisoners marching four abreast, three-fourths of whom were wounded and leaving…the roads covered with blood. One with an arm missing, another a bullet having pierced his leg, well never has there ever been such wholesale slaughter before.” But he felt hope. He believed that the Union would win the war within three months, and then he could come home. “That’s what I’m longing for with all my heart.”53
The Michigan Brigade fought nearly continually in pursuit of the retreating Army of Northern Virginia as the Union infantry trudged behind. On the night of July 4, Kilpatrick pushed Custer and his men against a Confederate rear guard in solid blackness in a ravine at Monterey Pass of South Mountain, southwest of Gettysburg. At about three o’clock the next morning, they broke through and destroyed scores of wagons loaded with supplies and captured some 1,400 wounded rebels. Repeated skirmishing cost lives as they rode through terrain Custer knew from the Antietam Campaign—Hagerstown, Boonsboro, Antietam Creek—racing Lee to the Potomac. The fighting grew so intense that Custer had three horses shot from underneath him in a single day. On July 11, at a place called Falling Waters, the Confederates dug a formidable line with their backs to the river.54
Custer and his men splashed onward through “rain which has fallen in torrents for a week without ceasing,” Comte wrote. The Union infantry finally caught up behind them, as the rebel army frantically worked to replace a pontoon bridge destroyed previously in a raid. Everyone expected a climactic battle; but General Meade saw the strength of the Confederate position, and hesitated.55
Before dawn on July 14, scouts reported to 3rd Cavalry Division headquarters that the enemy had escaped. Custer and Kilpatrick rode ahead with the 6th Michigan, the closest regiment, “as fast as our horses could carry us through mud nearly a foot deep,” wrote James H. Kidd, an officer in the 6th. A rebel infantry division still occupied the enemy fortifications. A messenger arrived from Gen. John Buford, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, asking Kilpatrick to cooperate in a maneuver to capture or destroy those remaining rebels. Instead, Kilpatrick ordered an immediate attack by the single regiment on hand. Wary, Custer ordered 100 men to dismount and approach on foot. No, Kilpatrick sai
d, he wanted them to charge on horseback.56
The assault was doomed—only it wasn’t—only it was. Mistaking the filthy, unrecognizable Union cavalry for their own men, the rebels allowed this small force to ride up into their works, where the Michigan horsemen began to slash at the defenders with their sabers. The Confederates recovered their wits and killed the officer who led the charge along with twenty-nine of his men, and wounded or captured forty more.
To cope with the mess Kilpatrick had created, Custer deployed the survivors on foot once again and renewed the attack as his other regiments came up. Intense, confused fighting ensued as they finally drove the Confederates out of their works and toward the river. “The 5th Michigan made a charge which released the prisoners and took 52 rebels,” Comte wrote to his wife. “General Koster [sic] of Monroe commanded in person and I saw him plunge his saber into the belly of a rebel who was trying to kill him. You can guess how bravely soldiers fight for such a general.”
With Buford’s men attacking from another direction, they captured hundreds of prisoners and killed Confederate General J. Johnston Pettigrew, “leaving the ground literally covered with rebel dead and wounded,” Kidd observed. But the men knew the initial attack had been bungled, and who had bungled it. Kidd wrote home, “Gen. Kilpatrick is called here Gen. ‘Kill-Cavalry’ which is about as appropriate as his real name.”57
Custer faced what might be the soldier’s worst conundrum: his superior officer was a danger to his brigade and himself. But the problem disappeared—for a few weeks, at least. On July 15, Kilpatrick went home on leave, and Custer took over the 3rd Cavalry Division. He led it over the Potomac in pursuit of the rebels, who marched south through the Shenandoah Valley.
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Page 18