It was about 4:30 p.m. On Lee’s hill, General Lee advised couriers to send the word to commanders to be ready for an attack.
But when night fell, he was still watching the river, where more and more men were pouring across. But the frozen night was not dark, for the entire scene was lit with a lurid orange glow. Fredericksburg was burning.
General Lee finally retired to get some rest, telling his aides to awaken him at once if it looked as if General Burnside was making a move. But General Lee could have slept late on the morning of December 12th, if he had chosen to. On that day he stood on Lee’s Hill and watched through his field glasses as thousands of Union soldiers vandalized and looted the little town.
Appalled, Morgan tied up the horses and came to the crest of the hill to use his own field glasses. The looting was vicious. Every house still standing was broken into, and everything of value was stolen.
But it was the vandalism that was so needless and cruel that it became almost bizarre. Soldiers dragged furniture out into the streets and built huge bonfires. Pianos were danced on until they fell apart, and some were filled with water to use as horse troughs. Paintings were dragged out and slashed with bayonets and then stamped on. Large alabaster vases were smashed to bits. Even picket fences surrounding little gardens were yanked up and set on fire.
Morgan was so angry that he made an inarticulate growling sound in his throat then quickly looked guiltily at General Lee, who was standing only a few feet from him.
Lee’s face showed no anger. Instead he looked disgusted, as if someone had said an obscene word to a group of ladies.
The looting went on all day, because it took all day for General Burnside to get his eighty thousand men across the Rappahannock, and it became evident that that was the only plan for December 12th.
The next day dawned, a cold, foggy morning. About 10:00 a.m. the fog lifted and the Union assault began. All day long, at every point along the battle line, waves of Union soldiers tried to advance the heights, and they died. Again and again they came, long lines of them bravely marching into the face of artillery and thousands of muskets. They fought as they had been commanded: to walk toward the enemy, and when within range, to fire their rifles, then reload and march forward again. Thousands of them never got within firing range. More thousands of them never got the chance to reload.
Far to the right it seemed as if at last Union forces had found a weak spot, a heavily wooded shallow valley, part of Stonewall Jackson’s line. The atmosphere on Lee’s Hill was tense, as they all strained to see any indication of the men in blue streaming back away from Jackson’s line. But no such welcome sight met their eyes. They couldn’t hear because of the throaty continuous roar of the cannon.
But then, distinguished only as a soprano note to the artillery’s bass, they heard the high, quavering Rebel yell. One Union chaplain reported that it was an “unearthly, fiendish yell, such as no other troops or civilized beings ever uttered.” Even as their hearts rose at the eerie cries that were so welcome to them, they saw Union troops running out of the woods, throwing down their rifles, and staring behind them in terror. Then behind them ran ragged men in gray, screaming their banshee song, insanely joyous in pursuit.
Morgan felt a thrill of triumph as he watched. He had not fought in a battle. He had never even fired his rifle. But at this moment, for the first time, he understood men of war.
General Lee turned to General Longstreet and said, his dark eyes flashing, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it!”
On and on they came, dashing themselves to pieces against the entrenched might of the Army of Northern Virginia. They fought until a dense gray twilight fell. It was bitterly cold, and the Northern Lights, which were rarely seen this far south, colored the air with a surreal display. Over nine thousand men had been wounded on this day. Many of them died of their wounds, lying on that bloody field, and many of them froze to death.
General Lee fully expected Burnside to renew his attack in the morning, but it did not come. In the morning, sharpshooters picked off some men on the field below and scattered Yankees who were collecting their dead and wounded close to their lines. Those were the only shots fired that day.
On the next, Burnside asked for a truce for the burial of the dead and the relief of the wounded. Lee agreed. All day long, surgeons, ambulances, and burial details were busy on the body-littered fields. There was no blue or gray now. Surgeons attended wounded men, no matter their uniform, and burial details interred Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs side by side. No shots by the men of war were fired on this day.
On the next morning, December 16th, Burnside was nowhere to be seen. The Army of the Potomac had melted away in the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO
Jolie, Ketura, Evetta, Rosh, Santo, and Amon waited as long as they could. As the days turned into weeks, and still no tidings, no newspapers, no mail, and above all no sound of distant battle came to Rapidan Run, Jolie finally said to Amon, “I cannot stand this one more day. We must have some news! What has happened? Did we dream it? Did they decide not to fight, and everyone just packed up and went somewhere else?”
“That ain’t it,” Evetta assured her. “Them armies is still there, all right. I guess they’s just making scary faces to each other ’crost the river. But she’s right, Amon. We got to know something. I know Mr. Tremayne didn’t want you to get caught in the battle, but maybe if you could get some idea of when that might be, we’d know to stay away.”
“I’ve had it up to here, too, sitting around and waiting,” Amon admitted. “I’ll go as close as I can, but not till tonight.”
“Then you gotta take me, Daddy,” Rosh said. “I know exactly where Mr. Tremayne is, just in case it seems like we can go on in.”
So Amon and Rosh set out for the battlefield at twilight. As far as they knew, all the Yankees were on the other side of the Rappa-hannock, but they were still cautious. They decided not to take the River Road. Rosh knew the way across country that would take them to the southernmost point of the line of hills above Fredericksburg. “Can you find your way at night?” Amon asked hesitantly.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Tremayne taught me,” Rosh answered confidently. “He could find his way around this country blindfolded. One of those nights we were out camping he showed me this way.”
But they didn’t need to know the way. When they had traveled about a mile south of Rapidan Run, they began to understand the glow in the sky they were seeing ahead. Fredericksburg was on fire. Sadly, they returned to the farm.
Everyone, even the Bledsoes, were waiting in the house for Amon and Rosh. When they finally returned, Jolie could tell from their demeanors that the news was not good.
“I’m sorry, folks, but it looks like there’s a real big fire in the town,” Amon told them quietly.
“What? What’s on fire?” Leona demanded.
With compassion, Amon repeated, “It’s a real big fire, ma’am.”
“You mean you don’t know? Are you telling me that you didn’t go into town and see what was burning? And try to help?” Mrs. Bledsoe cried in outrage.
“Ma’am, when we left, they wasn’t anybody left in that town,” Amon explained patiently. “And that means that there’s prob’ly just Yankees there now. I don’t hardly think I’m gonna go help ’em put out the fires they started anyways.”
“How dare you speak to me like that!” Mrs. Bledsoe shouted, her voice shrill with hysteria.
Jolie wanted to rail at the woman, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Regardless of how Mrs. Bledsoe was acting and how outrageous her behavior was, she was Jolie’s elder, and Jolie wasn’t about to show her any disrespect.
But she wasn’t Maisie Patrick’s elder, and Maisie’s view at that moment was that Mrs. Bledsoe didn’t deserve an iota of respect. She stepped in front of Mrs. Bledsoe defiantly and said, “Eileen, everyone here is sick to death of your shrieking and wailing and the way you’re treating all of us respectable people. Cal
m down. If you can’t calm down and act like a civilized person, then go to your room. Benjamin, I’m surprised at you. How can you let her embarrass herself in this way?”
He looked disconcerted. He had lost his bluster, which was practically the only way he knew to deal with people. In the last two weeks, he had become a parody of himself, a mumbling, indecisive, fumbling old man.
Leona, her head held high, stepped up and took her mother’s arm. “You have no right to speak to my mother that way, Maisie. Just leave us alone.”
“I’ll be glad to,” Maisie retorted, “if you’ll go away.”
Leona whirled around and, practically dragging her protesting mother, flew up the stairs. Benjamin, after one shamefaced look at the others, hurried after them.
Maisie turned to them and said defiantly, “There are probably a hundred thousand men out there who are going to try their best to kill each other in the next day or so. Half of them are our families, our sons, our husbands, our brothers. For anyone to be hysterical over their parlor or their china or their Grandma’s portrait right now is just shameful. I don’t regret what I said one little bit.”
It wasn’t the next day. On that day, eighty thousand Union soldiers crossed the Rappahannock, while the ones already landed destroyed Fredericksburg.
Everyone at Rapidan Run was so anxious with anticipation and dread that each avoided in-depth conversations with any other. Evetta burned a pudding and volubly called her own self a variety of colorful names.
So it was a kind of release when the sound of artillery came to them late the next morning. All day long they heard it, like a constant rolling roar of far-off thunder. After dinner they all gave up any pretense at working. Wherever they were in the house, or out on the grounds, they constantly searched toward the south. Of course they couldn’t see Fredericksburg, ten miles away. But they could see the death-gray smudge rising and growing in the southern sky. It was smoke from Confederate cannons and a hundred thousand muskets. The distant din didn’t stop until nightfall, and then the sky was lit with the strange aurora.
Jolie stood for hours out on the tiny front porch, staring up, wondering if it was an evil omen. If that’s what it was, she was sure Morgan must be dead.
The next day and the next were eerily quiet. Again they were utterly mystified. Amon didn’t wait for Evetta to prod him this time. On December 17th, he said, “I’m going. It’s so quiet I’m wonderin’ if they ain’t every last one of ’em dead. That’s how crazy I’m a-gittin’.”
“It ain’t just you, Amon,” Evetta said. “Not knowin’ will make a body a lot crazier than knowin’.”
Amon and Rosh again set out early that evening. It was two o’clock in the morning before they returned. Again, all of them were sitting up waiting. Mrs. Bledsoe was truly ill now. She had been shocked out of her hysteria by Maisie’s sharp words and had finally mentally rejoined the real world—the one where her only son was fighting in a war. She had been suffering heart palpitations and near-fainting spells, and Jolie had finally given her a bottle of brandy. She suspected that Benjamin Bledsoe and Leona had partaken, too, from the high, hectic color on Leona’s sharp cheekbones to Mr. Bledsoe’s bleary eyes. She didn’t care. She didn’t even care who had won the battle. All she could think about was Morgan Tremayne.
When Amon and Rosh came in, she didn’t have to ask or say a word. She could tell from their faces that Morgan Tremayne must be alive and well. Before they had even said a word, Jolie sat back in the straight chair, put her head back, closed her eyes, and took a deep, trembling breath.
The others crowded around them, firing questions at Amon and Rosh both. Finally Maisie raised her voice above the insistent cries of the women and the hoarse, rapid-fire interrogation by the men. “I’m telling my own self to shut up now,” she said loudly. “And I suggest you all do the same. Let the men tell us what they know, and maybe then they can answer our questions.” Finally it was quiet.
“Mr. Tremayne’s alive and fine, jist fine,” Amon said with a broad smile. “He says to tell you all that he’s so glad you’re all here together, with me and my family and Jolie. Friends need to stick together real close in these dark ol’ days.” The smile faded, and the big man looked distressed. “We won, all right. Yes, sir, we did. I couldn’t see those lowlands ’tween Marye’s Heights and town, but Mr. Tremayne says there must be a thousand men buried down there, most all of ’em Yankees. He says it looked like ten thousand of ’em got wounded. And now they’re gone. Not a Yank in sight on either side of the river from Falmouth down to Massaponax.”
“Have they sent out the lists of wounded and killed yet?” Ellie Cage asked with anguish.
“No, ma’am. Mr. Tremayne says that’s gonna take some days, always does.”
“What about Gibbs? My son, Gibbs Bledsoe?” Mrs. Bledsoe asked in a weak, fearful voice. “Morgan is friends with him. Surely he knows whether—surely Morgan knows how he is.”
“Mr. Tremayne sends his ’pologies to you, ma’am, ’cause he knows you must be worried to death about your son. But Mr. Tremayne says he only knows that General Stuart was far, far down the river, guarding the army’s right flank. He said he’d seen General Stuart at headquarters, but he didn’t know about any of his men.”
“Did he send me a message?” Leona demanded, her eyes brilliant and her mouth tense.
“Uh—not personal, no, ma’am. He just ask who all was here, and like I said, to tell everyone how welcome they was, from him. He didn’t hardly have time to send word to everyone,” Amon said in a very gentle voice. “The battle might be over, but they was still all scurryin’ around, busy as beetles. And Mr. Tremayne hurried us off, like he wanted us to get word back to everyone.”
Leona seemed mollified with Amon’s diplomacy and tact and said nothing more.
Connie Archer said softly, “And so the Yankees are gone. Does that mean that we can go home now?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Amon answered. “Mr. Tremayne said that he don’t know much about the town, ’cause he ain’t been down there yet. All he knows is that there’s no Yankees there. So whoever wants to go home, me and Rosh and Amon will be glad to take you.”
On Christmas morning of 1862, Mary Custis Lee sat in her rolling chair at the front windows and watched the snow fall. It was a pretty sight, but as soon as the feather-flakes hit the earth, the scene became grimy and dreary. East Franklin Street in Richmond was always busy, as were all the streets in the heart of the capital city. The humble rented house had a generous covered front porch, but no garden or yard, so it loomed right up over the street.
Soldiers dashed up and down, some on foot, some on horseback, always hurrying. Even in the dry heat of summer, the street was always a mire of mud and horse droppings.
Still, in good weather, Mary sat on the porch hour after hour, day after day, knitting socks of Confederate gray. But in the cruel winters, she was in so much pain she could barely sit up at all, and when she did, she huddled close to a hot fire.
Today, however, she had decided to brave the icy drafts around the window to watch the charming snowfall as she opened her special Christmas presents. They were Robert’s letters.
Mary Custis Lee was not a sentimental woman. She was intelligent, clever, forceful, plain-spoken, and pragmatic. She had saved Robert’s letters through the years, because they documented so well the times and events in his life, but she rarely visited them. It had only been in April of 1861, when her husband had become General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate States of America, that she began to treasure them. Last Christmas she had started her tradition of giving herself the best Christmas present: rereading Robert’s letters.
Opening one letter that crackled with age, she began to read and was transported back to those heady days of their youth, when he was a lonely second lieutenant at Fort Monroe and she had wintered at Arlington. She saw again the wonderful years there when Robert was working in Washington. She relived the terrible two years of the Mexican War and the joy of his
homecoming. Then there were the blessed peaceful years, at Baltimore and West Point. The death of her father was still sorrowful to her, though it was muted now, and she remembered how her grief had been mixed with joy that Robert had been at Arlington with her for two years. Then he had gone back to Texas, but only for a short time. The events after March 1, 1861, when Robert had returned to Arlington, seemed fast and frantic.
Grimacing with pain both physical and in her soul, she opened Robert’s letter of October 20, 1862, only three months ago:
I cannot express the anguish I feel at the death of my sweet Annie. To know that I shall never see her again on earth, that her place in our circle, which I always hoped one day to enjoy, is forever vacant, is agonizing in the extreme. But God in this, as in all things, has mingled mercy with the blow, in selecting that one best prepared to leave us. May you be able to join me in saying, “His will be done.”
Mary looked up, now sightless with hot tears stinging her eyes. No, she had not been able to join Robert in his acceptance of God’s will. She did not think it was merciful that Annie, their sweet Little Raspberry, had died. She was angry, and she was bitter. Hers and Robert’s only grandchildren were dead. Robert E. Lee III, Rooney and Charlotte’s son, had died the previous June. He was only two years old. Charlotte had given birth to a little girl in November, and the child had died on December 2nd, only twenty-three days previously.
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