by Tonya Bolden
“Yes, of course. I’ll do that.”
“Can’t say what I’ll do if I cross paths with General Reb.”
“I understand.”
Captain Galloway also vowed to write General Grant, President Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and every newspaperman he knew to tell them about General Reb’s infamous order.
Colored lives don’t matter.
It was dusk and there Caleb sat, hollowed out and alone in his tent, when he remembered Mariah uttering those words. A tear made tracks down his cheek. And steady on was the downpour. As Caleb listened to the rain, he longed to hear her voice once more. But then he saw her. Saw her emerge from the root cellar, saw her leading Dulcina over to the scrub oak, saw her jubilant over those lace-up boots, saw her hands swimming in his buckskin gloves, saw the love in her eyes right before they kissed. His everything was gone.
Caleb did something he had not done since Lily, then his mother, died.
He wept, knowing the rainfall would drown out his sobs.
When spent, Caleb wiped his eyes, took a sip of that cold coffee, and picked up his pencil again, willing himself to write about Ebenezer Creek, telling himself that he had to get it all down while it was still fresh in his mind. But, in the end, all he could manage was a few words.
“Camped on the Eden Road.”
EPILOGUE
Many hundred gone? Many thousand?
Not a soul would ever know nor untangle tales about what Rebel horsemen did to those who did not plunge into Ebenezer Creek.
Rife were the rumors of folks hacked to death.
Shot.
Bludgeoned.
Rampant were reports of Rebels hauling scores back into slavery.
And onward went the march.
Two more days, three, four—twelve days after Ebenezer Creek, Uncle Billy’s boys took the city by the sea. And owing to the march, more than twenty thousand of Georgia’s colored men and women, girls and boys, who trooped with Sherman’s four corps made their great escape.
When, a few weeks later, Sherman’s army quit Savannah to plunder the Carolinas, steady on a multitude marched. A host of those folks attached themselves to Captain Abel Galloway, stuck with him through the end of the war that had split America asunder, an end that came four months after Ebenezer Creek. An end with true freedom—and great hope—in its wake.
Some of those hopeful souls even followed Captain Galloway to Washington, DC, and became a part of his new mission field: a school named after a founding father and Galloway friend, General Oliver Otis Howard, “Old Prayer Book.” Among the Galloway loyalists were some survivors of Ebenezer Creek.
And Jonah.
Other survivors put down roots in Savannah and surroundings, made their livings as barbers, bakers, cooks, coopers, farmers, fishermen, milliners, masons. They celebrated freedom with fish fries, barbecues, picnics. They laughed, loved, married, had children.
Caleb dropped his dream of being a newspaperman, never wrote that book, never married. He built a smithy and a home some miles shy of Savannah. Though he could have afforded one, his wasn’t a large spread. Just one acre. On the Eden Road. And he called his homestead Mariah.
Year after year, on December 9, even in the pouring rain, Caleb rode out to Ebenezer Creek and tossed flowers upon the waters. Standing there alone, he saw Mariah’s profile in a cloud, heard her laughter in the wind. On bright days her smile was in the sun. And year after year he recounted what happened at Ebenezer Creek to whoever would listen, whoever he thought, hoped, prayed would remember to pass the story on.
And that’s how it came to be said that in a southeast Georgia swamp, when a driving rain drenches an early December day, bald cypresses seem to screech, tupelos to shriek, Ebenezer Creek to moan.
Down through the years, when science minds tried to explain it away with talk of air flow, wind waves, and such, others shook their heads. Not so. They said it was the ghosts of Ebenezer Creek rising, reeling, wrestling with the wind. Remembering.
Remembering desperate pleas, heartrending screams.
Remembering hope after hope, dream after dream, and body after body flowing downstream.
Mariah, who had dreamed of a long life with Caleb and at least one acre, she first remembers that twelve days before she reached Ebenezer Creek, a hungry hush sent a shiver down her spine.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Years ago I was invited to do a presentation in Pocantico Hills, New York. Before it, I and other authors were treated to a lovely dinner. Most of the conversation was about history. At one point, my book on Martin Luther King Jr. came up.
One host, Robert Balog, asked if King’s ancestral church in Atlanta, Georgia, and other black churches carried in their name “Ebenezer” because of what happened at Ebenezer Creek.
“What happened at Ebenezer Creek?” I asked this Civil War history buff.
I knew about Sherman’s March to the Sea. I knew about his vow to “make Georgia howl,” and that he made good on that vow to the tune of a hundred million dollars’ worth of damage.
But I had never heard about the tragedy, the betrayal at Ebenezer Creek.
During the rest of dinner, after the program, and days later I couldn’t shake the story. I wondered about the lives of those who perished in Ebenezer Creek and about the lives of those who didn’t plunge in. Who did the world lose? What did the world lose?
I did a little digging. One of my first finds was an article, Edward M. Churchill’s “Betrayal at Ebenezer Creek.” Then in late 2010, I discovered that in the spring of that year, the Georgia Historical Society placed a marker about a mile south of Ebenezer Creek, at the end of Effingham County’s Ebenezer Road. It reads:
March to the Sea: Ebenezer Creek
One mile north, on December 9, 1864, during the American Civil War, U.S. Gen. Jeff. C. Davis crossed Ebenezer Creek with his 14th Army Corps as it advanced toward Savannah during Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Davis hastily removed the pontoon bridges over the creek, and hundreds of freed slaves following his army drowned trying to swim the swollen waters to escape the pursuing Confederates. Following a public outcry, Sec. of War Edwin Stanton met with Sherman and local black leaders in Savannah on January 12, 1865. Four days later, President Lincoln approved Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, confiscating over 400,000 acres of coastal property and redistributing it to former slaves in 40-acre tracts.
A marker can only say so much. There was no room to note that it was from Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15 that the myth arose that all black people—or all once-enslaved people—in the United States had been promised forty acres and a mule.
There was also no room to note another betrayal: in the fall of 1865, President Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, revoked that special order. Almost all those four hundred thousand acres on which thousands of black people had begun to build new tomorrows in self-governing communities went back into the hands of ex-Confederates.
As for Secretary of War Stanton’s visit to Savannah in January 1865, before he met with General Sherman and those black leaders—Garrison Frazier among them—he had a talk with Sherman about Ebenezer Creek.
Stated Sherman in his memoirs: “He talked to me a great deal about the negroes, the former slaves, and I told him of many interesting incidents, illustrating their simple character and faith in our arms and progress.”
When the conversation turned to his general Jefferson Davis, Sherman assured Stanton that he was a fine soldier and that he put no credence in talk that he hated black people.
Stanton didn’t let it go. He showed Sherman a newspaper article about the incident at Ebenezer Creek. Sherman admitted only to having heard rumors about Davis taking up a bridge and leaving some black people behind. He then suggested that Stanton speak with Davis himself. When Stanton did, General Davis explained that the closer they got to Savannah the more creek-ridden the terrain, thus requiring constant use of the pontoon bridges—and Rebel cavalrymen were in hot pursuit.
Yes, Davis told Stanton, at Ebenezer Creek, the bridge was taken up before all the black people crossed. But they were ones who had fallen asleep, he claimed.
And yes, said Davis, some were picked up by Confederate cavalrymen. As for Confederates killing blacks in cold blood, like Sherman, Davis dismissed that as claptrap. In a later defense of Davis, Sherman told someone that his general “took up his pontoon bridge, not because he wanted to leave them [the colored people], but because he wanted his bridge.”
Jefferson Davis in Union blue survived the brief investigation into the incident at Ebenezer Creek, survived the march through the Carolinas, survived the war. He died in Chicago on November 30, 1879, at the age of fifty-one. The New York Times reported that he breathed his last “after being confined to his bed for five days with pneumonia.” The article was titled “Gen. Jefferson C. Davis Dead. The Honorable Career of a Soldier Who Began in the Ranks—Incidents of His Life.”
Jefferson C. Davis came to me out of history, as did the black people in Savannah Caleb tells Mariah about. Mariah, Caleb, Zeke, Dulcina, the Doubles, Mordecai, Jonah, and the rest, they feel to me like messengers from history. They are fictional but based on real people I have read about in books and heard of as a child during firefly nights on Southern porches and around cozy Northern kitchen tables when family lore was being served up and consumed. My characters are also based on what history tells me was possible.
Of course the journey was real.
So it is my hope that through these characters, through this book future generations will not lose sight of what happened at Ebenezer Creek, that they will remember.
And pass the story on.
RESEARCH AND SOURCES
Many sources played a key role in helping me write about the people and the places in Crossing Ebenezer Creek: books, diaries, and articles, which allowed me to put myself—and thus my characters—on Sherman’s march and enabled me to visit the lives of black Georgians during the Civil War as well as those of Union soldiers and white Georgians. The following are chief among the sources on which I relied.
“Betrayal at Ebenezer Creek” by Edward M. Churchill (accessed from www.historynet.com).
Black Savannah, 1788–1864 by Whittington B. Johnson (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).
“The Civil War Diary of James Laughlin Orr” (accessed from http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jonnic/People/zUnknownConnections/Churchyard/civwdiar.html).
Cornelius C. Platter Civil War Diary, 1864–1865 (accessed from the Digital Library of Georgia, http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/hargrett/platter/001.php).
History of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment of Indiana Volunteer Infantry based on the manuscript of Chaplain John J. Hight, compiled by Gilbert R. Storming (Princeton, IN: Press of the Clarion, 1895).
“An Indiana Doctor Marches with Sherman: The Diary of James Comfort Patten,” by Robert G. Athearn, Indiana Magazine of History (December 1953): 405–422.
Jefferson Davis in Blue: The Life of Sherman’s Relentless Warrior by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Gordon D. Whitney (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002).
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1866).
Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War by Jacqueline Jones (New York: Vintage, 2009).
Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown edited by Louis Alexis Chamerovzow (London: n.p., 1855).
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938, sponsored and assembled by the Library of Congress (Washington: n.p., 1941; accessed from Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org).
Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea by Noah Andre Trudeau (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
The Story of the Great March: From the Diary of a Staff Officer by Brevet Major George Ward Nichols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1865).
Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland: The Letters and Diary of Major James A. Connolly edited by Paul M. Angle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
“ ‘We have Surely done a Big Work’: The Diary of a Hoosier Soldier on Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’ ” by Jeffrey L. Patrick and Robert Willey, Indiana Magazine of History (September 1998): 214–239.
I also drew upon knowledge acquired in writing two of my nonfiction books: Cause: Reconstruction America, 1863–1877 (New York: Knopf, 2005) and Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty (New York: Abrams, 2013).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ever grateful to my first editor, Michelle Nagler, for believing that this was a story that needed to be told. And oh so grateful to my second editor, Mary Kate Castellani, who thoroughly and utterly embraced the project. Mary Kate’s enthusiasm along with her wise and wondrous direction opened me up to discover things in my mind and on my heart that I didn’t know were there. Thanks is also due to others in the Bloomsbury “crew”: Jill Amack, Colleen Andrews, Diane Aronson, Erica Barmash, Beth Eller, Courtney Griffin, Melissa Kavonic, Linette Kim, Donna Mark, Lizzy Mason, Shaelyn McDaniel, Patricia McHugh, Emily Ritter, and Claire Stetzer. I thank you all for all your fine and so excellent work. You did so much for the book and thus did so much for me. As does my agent, Jennifer Lyons.
And, bless you, my fellow writers Joyce Hansen and Sharon Flake. I can’t thank you enough for giving the manuscript a close read and for giving me such useful feedback.
Thank you, Joseph McGill, Civil War reenactor and founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, for your read and feedback too!
Thank you, Jim Prichard, professional researcher, for reading a chunk of an early draft and for telling me about the killing stone.
Thank you, Robert Balog, for telling me about what happened at Ebenezer Creek.
Copyright © 2017 by Tonya Bolden
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in the United States of America in May 2017 by Bloomsbury Children’s Books
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bolden, Tonya, author.
Title: Crossing Ebenezer Creek / by Tonya Bolden.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2017.
Summary: Freed from slavery, Mariah and her young brother, Zeke, join Sherman’s march through Georgia, where Mariah meets a free black named Caleb and dares to imagine the possibility of true love, but hope can come at a cost.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016037742 (print) | LCCN 2016050232 (e-book)
ISBN 978-1-59990-319-4 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-61963-055-0 (e-pub)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: African Americans—Fiction. | Freedmen—Fiction. | Sherman’s March to the Sea—Fiction. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Historical / United States / Civil War Period (1850–1877). | JUVENILE FICTION / People & Places / United States / African American. | JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Sib
lings.
Classification: LCC PZ7.B635855 Cr 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.B635855 (e-book) |
DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037742