Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  —If you don’t mind, Johnny, I’d like to call it James Drake Shawnessy. After my father.

  —All right. That’s a fine name. I like it.

  —James, she said thoughtfully. Jim. Yes, that’s what I want to call him. Jim. Little Jim.

  —Little Jim, Johnny said.

  He laughed. But Susanna didn’t laugh. Instead, she looked up at him with a curious smile. Then whispering to him as if they were conspirators, she said,

  —You’re absolutely sure? You can tell me now.

  —Sure about what?

  —That there wasn’t another.

  —Absolutely, Johnny said. Now, you go to sleep. You just need a good rest.

  He kissed her then, said good night, turned down the lamp, left the room. He went downstairs and, feeling unable to sleep, asked T. D., who was going back to the Home Place, to let him drive. Ellen intended to stay and help look after Susanna for a while.

  —I’ll walk back from the Home Place, Johnny said. I’m not a bit sleepy. I feel like walking.

  —Better get some rest, T. D. said. You got a new responsibility.

  But Johnny drove his father home. The earth was bright and cool in the early morning. It was April in Raintree County. Johnny Shawnessy felt strong and confident again as he strode out resolutely along the road from the Home Place back to Freehaven.

  Yes, all would somehow be well with him now. It was necessary to have courage and conviction and to find one’s people at the right time. All would yet be well, too, with the Republic. Even if it came to war, there were brave men in Raintree County and throughout the Nation, and they would fight to see the Union sustained in Liberty and Justice. It mattered after all whether one was right or wrong. It mattered about slavery. It mattered about the Union. This was the springtime of a solemn awakening of conscience.

  He looked about him at the earth of Raintree County, a dark earth on which the little flowers were putting into bloom. He saw the gentle hills and shallows lying away to north and south. He passed through the town of Danwebster, huddled in the crook of the river, he saw the river running clear and clean on its pebbly bed. He drank the young day scented with the flesh of flowers and colored with a mist of buds bursting on winterblackened trees and bushes. He loved this earth, which had been somehow sundered from him by the parting of the Nation.

  For Raintree County, he felt, lay far beyond the four borders which contained its span of dirt. It was also the Republic, a peerless dream. The war that had come was being fought for Raintree County and its way of life. It was for the soul of Johnny Shawnessy and his wife Susanna. It was for the future of his son.

  At about nine-thirty, he reached the office of the Enquirer. Niles Foster was out in front talking with several other men. Although it was Sunday, the Square was crowded.

  —Hi, Niles, Johnny said. I have an item I want you to print tomorrow.

  —Tomorrow be damned! Niles said. You can print it today if you want to.

  —I thought today was Sunday.

  —It is, Niles said. My boy, we’re putting out a special edition. Come on in and help.

  —You mean——

  —I mean we’ve struck the flag on Sumter. Pulled it down this morning, and surrendered with honor after a heroic defense. The Rebels shelled the place for two days steady. No telling how many brave men lost their lives. By the living God, the traitors will have to pay for it. Starting today we nail our colors to the masthead, ‘Down with Treason. The Union Forever.’

  —We’ll fight then?

  —Sure we’ll fight. This town’s crazy right now with war spirit. I never saw anything like it. They sure have pulled in their necks down at the Clarion. Every boy in Raintree County with red blood in his veins is itching to volunteer and get into the fight.

  —They’ll have to have it without me, Johnny said. I’ve just had a baby.

  —Congratulations! Niles said. Leave the facts inside, and I’ll write it up. Boy?

  —Yes, sir.

  —You’ll never get into it then, a man said. War’ll be over before that kid uncrosses his eyes.

  Johnny had a hard time getting through the Square. In front of the Clarion office he found Garwood Jones.

  —Hi, John, Garwood said. Hear you’ve gone and had that baby. You picked a bad time.

  —What’s the Democratic line on this Sumter matter? Johnny said. I suppose it’s all just a mirage in the minds of victory-drunk Republicans. Like Secession and all the rest.

  —I cannot pretend, Garwood said, clearing his throat and looking around to see how many people were listening, that I am not deeply moved by this insult to the Flag. We are men of generous breasts and slow to anger, we of the North, but——

  —Save it for the Clarion, Johnny said. So you’re doing a turntail?

  —Hell, no, Garwood said, talking low in his informal voice through the shattered horn of his cigar. After all, can you blame the Southerners? But if the people up here want war, war there will be.

  Later, Johnny ran into Zeke.

  —Well, John, Zeke said, you better take a last look at your favorite brother.

  —How’s that?

  —I’m volunteerin’, Zeke said.

  —Folks know?

  —Not yet. They been too busy gittin’ that brat of yours born.

  —How long do you think you’ll be gone?

  —Maybe a month, maybe two, Zeke said. Long enough to chase those skunks into the Gulf. Yippee!

  His big redbearded face was flushed, eager, happy. He laughed, rubbed his hands together, slapped his knee.

  —Who’s organizing the volunteers? Johnny asked.

  —Jake Jackson is takin’ a company over to Indianapolis next week. They say Lincoln will issue a call for volunteers any time now.

  A band went by playing ‘Yankee Doodle.’ A lot of hysterical citizens, men and women, were marching behind it.

  Down at the telegraph office, a talkative mob was taking the news apart as it came in.

  —Hell, a heavyset middleaged man said, if you boys have half the guts that we had back in ’46, you’ll have the damn traitors whipped by the Fourth of July. I wish I could git into it myself.

  The crowd was making fun of an old man, who was the town’s only veteran of the War of 1812.

  —How about it, Pap? Goin’ to git into it?

  —Demn right, the old man said. If they’ll let me.

  They thumped the old man on the back, his eyes watered, he laughed happily—an old man’s idiot, toothless laugh. All the young men were being slapped on the back too. Veterans of the Republic’s last war kept feeling the youngsters’ arms and giving them advice. The young men grinned goodnaturedly and looked vaguely shy and heroic. They were the chosen.

  Almost everyone seemed elated and confident about this war, which had begun with a defeat.

  Cash Carney had one thin, trimtailored leg on the top of a hitching stone and was evolving plans.

  —The key to the situation is railroads, he was saying. When you get right down to it, railroads will win the War. And we got more and better ones.

  —Think it’ll last long, Cash? Johnny said.

  —It can’t last long. Not the way people feel about it up here.

  Before he left the Square, Johnny picked up a copy of the Enquirer. The news from Sumter filled the important space. Down in the lower lefthand corner of the last page was an item under Personal News.

  NEW BABY

  (Epic Fragment from the Free Enquirer)

  The union of Mr. and Mrs. John Wickliff Shawnessy has been happily blessed with a male heir, who was ushered into this valley of tears, turmoil, and trouble at 4:00 this morning. The new cherub will carry the cognomen of James Drake Shawnessy, and a finer little fellow, it is reported, has never yet gladdened the eyes of doting parents. He weighed eight and a half pounds, and the mother is doing quite well, thank you. The father, a young man of prominence in the community, is resting easy and is expected to pull through. Interviewed just after th
e Happy Event, he stated that the arrival of the child would,

  AT LEAST FOR THE TIME BEING, MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE

  FOR HIM TO GO

  TO

  —WAR, said the Perfessor, is the most monstrous of all human illusions. All ideals worth anything are worth not fighting for.

  —War, gentlemen, the Senator said, is one of the world’s necessary evils. This nation grew strong through battle. The Civil War was the college in which the young men of this country learned how to do big things.

  —War is just plain killing, the Perfessor said. You understand, I’m not sentimental about it. God knows, unless we drew a little blood now and then, there wouldn’t be room on the globe for us all. What’s pitiful is how men murder each other and then glorify the crime in song and story. The real issues of the Civil War always seemed simple to me. The Civil War was fought quite simply because some men are darker than others. In a way both North and South were fighting the Negro—the South to keep him a slave and productive, the North to keep him from being too productive, which meant making him free.

  —There’s a lot of truth in that, the Senator said. No use pretending that either side fought the War on moral grounds. Two economic systems were pitted against each other—railroads against cotton. When I changed over and became a Republican, it was in recognition of that fact. Economically, the South was behind the times. This country was meant to be one Nation, one big industrial and political bloc. It was Fate, and the South had to give in to Fate—and the bigger battalions.

  —The Civil War, Mr. Shawnessy said, was fought because man will be free. Both sides fought it as a holy war.

  —But you see, John, the Perfessor said, you and I were part of the War, and we can’t get away from its fine old fervors. All that cant about Liberty and Union was part of our youth, and a man will cling to as much youth as he can. But was it so important after all that a certain hunk of the earth be called by one name instead of two? Which side fought for God and the Right? Well, I’ll tell you. God doesn’t care about these things. God was quite untroubled by the Great American Civil War. God, the God of Nature, is a great brute impulse. He laughs at our romantic ideals of love and war. I tell you, John, the farmboys went out and died merely because they had the goddam rotten luck to be born one side or other of a river. There’s no absoluteness in these things. War is neither moral nor immoral, just as life is neither moral nor immoral. War simply happens to men, they’re blind victims of it, it’s a clash of forces ruthless and natural, like the unconscious strife between the dinosaurs and the little early mammals who ate their eggs and destroyed them. Only our everlasting glorification of the individual makes us believe in the epic heroism of war. We get completely lost in a swirl of proper nouns. Sumter, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, Lincoln, Lee, Sherman, Grant, Washington, Richmond, the 134th Indiana Volunteers, the March to the Sea, Shiloh, Vicksburg—what are all these names? Words only, I assure you. All this is simply the romantic human being trying to deny that he’s an animal. It’s because we all try so hard to be immortal and distinguish ourselves from every other individual who ever lived that we have so much sorrow and so much poetry. We’d be happier if we practiced the same ethics toward ourselves that we do toward flies. What is the death of one hundred thousand flies? Just a natural phenomenon. A fly is not an individual. A fly is simply the representative of a species. No one but that sentimental sap, Uncle Toby, cares about what happens to a fly.

  —Perhaps the fly himself dimly resents it, Mr. Shawnessy put in.

  —But, the Perfessor continued, the death of a million men in a series of bloody explosions and stinking camps is called the Civil War and each man is lamented and remembered for a time, and people have banquets for fifty years, and Congress votes pensions, and schoolboys recite the Gettysburg Address. But sub specie aeternitatis, this is all nothing. Strictly speaking, there is no past. That which no longer is never was. Events, as you say, John, are something that never happened. The dead are simply nowhere. The new generations will look back on the Civil War with great calm. It’s hard to feel sorry for folks who died a hundred years ago.

  —The Civil War, Mr. Shawnessy said, drawing a deep breath and weighing his words, was fought for the Republic—or what Lincoln called the Union. The Republic transcends boundaries, triumphs over space. In America, a man not only possesses his home and his local gods, but he possesses the Republic, which is a denial of tribal boundaries and tribal prejudice. The Republic is the symbol of man’s victory over the formless earth. It may be an illusion, but to be human is to accept the human illusions, which were created by centuries of struggle. This Republic is, in Lincoln’s phrase, the last, best hope of earth. It affirms that a portion of America—this earth discovered, adorned, and named by human labor—shall not be the property of a single generation to wrest it away and shape it to new things at will. The North didn’t fight through a desire to acquire the South, to possess it, to invade it, to enslave it. They didn’t even fight to destroy slavery within it. They fought to preserve the Republic, a mystical concept that affirms the humanity of man. The Southerners threatened to destroy the Republic on a point of inhumanity—the perpetuation of slavery. Thus their moral position was hopelessly weak from the start. The ante-bellum South was a proud, feudal, voluptuous dream. In their blind way, the Southerners imagined that they too fought for freedom. But it was freedom to enslave other human beings. Their so-called right was not the world’s right nor humanity’s right. Thus a war came to be, in which the North was lucky to find great moral leadership in the person of Lincoln, while the South—significantly—found great military leadership in Robert E. Lee. As a series of physical facts, we know how terrible the War was. As a series of Moral Events, it was necessary and even sublime. It had to be fought and won for the future of humanity. If the Civil War had been lost by the North or had never been fought at all, Balkanization of the American Republic would have resulted, and the last, best hope of earth would have been lost for a time.

  —Will you philosophers pardon me while I do a little vulgar politicking, the Senator said, rising to greet an approaching delegation.

  —Well, said the Perfessor, this may all be true. But what of the martyrs who fought and died for this noble dream, the Union? Where are the young men who died in the first battles? Where are the heroes of First Bull Run? For them—and forever—

  1861—1863

  ‘ALL’S QUIET ALONG THE POTOMAC,’ THE NEWSPAPERS SAID.

  Awakening sometimes in the summer night, Johnny would have this phrase on his mind, and he would remember that the War had been a long time fighting. In these awakenings, he would come back from dreams of better days to the dark, highceilinged room, the pale square of the window that looked down on the town, the recumbent body of his wife Susanna, and the child sleeping in its crib.

  Then he would remember names of battles. They were old names already, belonging, as they did, to the first years of the War when it was believed that every battle might mean the end of hostilities. Sumter, First Bull Run, Shiloh, Corinth, Island Number Ten, Forts Henry and Donelson, The Seven Days’ Battle, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg. Each of these names had swum slowly into the columns of the papers, had lain there wallowing bloodily for days, had swum slowly out again.

  The Civilian’s War had long ago assumed a pattern of uniformity in chaos that made it tolerable to the general public, North and South. Its landscapes, costumes, trappings had achieved the familiarity and fixity of myth. It had its epic rhythms, epithets, heroes. It was a newspaper Iliad of seasons, maps, and proper nouns. Antietam, Fredericksburg, Bull Run, Shiloh, Second Bull Run.

  Summer (and this was the beginning of the third summer of the War) was the season of battles. It would be time, then, to have a map on the front pages of the more enterprising dailies. The map would be called the Theatre of Operations. On it, two mythical cities, Washington and Richmond, would confront each other across a tangle of rivers, roads, little towns. The roads wo
uld be firming now in the Theatre of Operations. The air would be warm and clear.

  It would be necessary, then, to have a battle in the newspapers. There would be a certain keenness of anticipation on the editorial pages. Armies were moving now in the Theatre of Operations, were reported here and there. But armies never moved as masses of soldiers. Only the heroes moved. McClellan, Burnside, Pope took up positions, advanced their flanks, forded rivers, fought sharp skirmishes. Lee, Jackson, Beauregard, Johnston, Stuart became alert, made cautious penetrations, conducted raids.

  Then there began to be reports of a battle. Towns and streams were tentatively named. In the space of a few days, there had been a battle, there had been no battle, there had been a success, there had been a minor rout, there had been a glorious victory, there had been a partial setback, there had been a sharp skirmish. Lee was beat. Lee was bested. Lee was battered. Lee was prostrate. It was all up with Lee. Lee was still fighting. Various Union Generals had accomplished the impossible. A name would begin to be mentioned more often than others as the location of a battle. There began to be eyewitness reports.

  Finally someone wrote confidently of the Battle of Such a Name fought on such a day. Thus long after the fighting, a battle had become the Battle. But the Battle was by no means over in the newspapers. Like a festering wound, it flowed on in crowded columns—with recriminations, conflicting claims, disappointed expectations, removals of leaders (who had accomplished the impossible), and finally the long, backwardwinding processions of wounded and dead.

  Then the next battle began to fester in the newspaper columns, and men realized that the last battle was a museum piece enclosed in a glass case called History. Shiloh, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Bull Run, Second Bull Run.

  But the battles were only the heavy stresses in the rhythm of the Great War. They were only crests of the waves. The troughs were the periods of waiting. All’s quiet along the Potomac, said the newspapers.

  All’s quiet along the Potomac. This phrase distilled the Civilian’s War, which was the atmosphere of Johnny Shawnessy’s life in the first years of the Civil War. Along a mythical Potomac, in the arena where the fate of the Republic was going to be resolved, in the eternal Theatre of Operations, usually all was quiet if not well. But this quiet was the time of gestation; this quiet was the womb from which vast, blooddrenched Events were born. This quiet was the unpictured swarm of life in camp and hospital, the letters home that said that everything was all right but I’m homesick, the plaintive songs around the campfires, the families waiting for news of sons, the long labor in the factories, the audible hopes and silent despair of millions. All’s quiet along the Potomac. This phrase would always recapture the hue and weathering of the years when the destinies of the Republic were being worked out in darkness. It would mean great dedications North and South; for the whole Republic, North and South, in its divided camps, shared a Potomac of human hopes and longings, courage and loyalty, a beloved earth threaded with rivers of Indian names.