They walked down King Street, shouldering through the crowds. All of Charleston was in the streets, and Samuel caught snatches of conversation as he passed, men bragging on what they would do in the upcoming fight, women adding to their bravado, or speaking in fearful tones, or gushing about the strength of Southern arms. He heard the word “honor” punctuating conversations like an exclamation point, and “Yankee” and “Black Republican”; it all swirled together in a patriotic gumbo.
They came at last to the Bowater house, three stories of brick walls and white-painted window frames and green ivy, standing shoulder to shoulder with the other fine homes on Tradd Street. A sign over a side door proclaimed, “William Bowater, Esq., Attorney at Law.”
It was the only home that Samuel had ever known, the only place he had ever lived besides the dormitories of the Naval School and the wardrooms of various ships. It was the place where Samuel had grown to manhood under his father’s seemingly omniscient eye, his unwavering rule.
It was where Samuel had learned to be a gentleman, and, more to the point, a Southern gentleman. Courteous to the last. Studied, urbane. Personally disciplined-a gentleman, he was taught, did not show womanly weakness of any sort. Passionately loyal to his country and his state. Unwilling to suffer even the hint of insult. Tolerant of the lower classes, appreciative, even, of their labor, but always aware of their place, and his. Kind to slaves. These were the things that made the Southern man, and the instruction was so thorough that those traits became a part of Samuel Bowater as much as his height and the color of his eyes.
They climbed the stairs, brother and sister, and crossed the porch, and Samuel pushed open the big front door. It opened onto an expansive foyer, at the far end of which was the wide staircase to the second floor. The floor was tiled, white-and-black checkerboard. A deep brown, ornately carved Venezuelan ironwood table sat to the right of the door. Samuel had brought it back from Caracas following a cruise in South America.
Samuel had not yet closed the door when Isaac appeared, his dark face-nearly the color of the ironwood table-showing no hint of interest in the commotion going on in the streets.
“Here, Isaac.” Samuel handed the black man his haversack and easel and paint kit.
“How da paintin’ go today, Misser Samuel?” Isaac asked. Samuel held up the canvas for the servant to inspect.
“Ain’t dat somethin’?” Isaac said. It was what he always said. Samuel considered it one of the more insightful comments he received.
“Samuel?” His mother’s voice came from the sitting room off to the right, a lovely, strong voice with just a hint of her native Ireland. There was a rustle of crinoline and silk, the tap of shoes on the marble floor, and the heavier footfalls of his father.
“Samuel!” His mother, Rachel, raced out into the foyer, his father right behind. “Oh, Samuel, have you been down to the harbor?”
His mother, at fifty-four, was still a beauty, with her once black hair now showing signs of gray, her strong features emboldened with tiny lines around her eyes and mouth. She came up to him, put her hands on his arms. “You are all right?”
“It was a near thing, Mother. I almost stabbed myself in the eye with my paintbrush. But my dear sister was there to see I came to no grief.”
“Our Michelangelo was well out of the way of the flying metal, Mother.”
Over his mother’s shoulder Samuel met his father’s eyes. He wore a vest and bow tie, as he did every day of his life, as far as Samuel could recall, and his white hair and beard were as perfectly groomed as Samuel’s dark brown hair and goatee. “What news, son?”
“Stevens’s Iron Battery at Morris Island opened up just at dawn, and the rest right after that. The firing has been continuous since. There was a relief squadron in the offing. Pawnee and Harriet Lane, looked like, but they’ll never dare come in now.”
“Sumter still stands?”
“For the time being. Not for much longer.”
William Bowater nodded.
“You are the only people in all Charleston not in the streets, I reckon,” Samuel observed. He knew that his father, like himself, thought the gawking crowd unseemly.
“Let us retire from here,” William suggested, and the party moved en masse from the foyer to the big, open drawing room. Through the tall windows they could see throngs in the streets. The jubilation seemed to reach through the glass, to sweep the elegant room and its occupants along with it. The excitement was like the odor of spent gunpowder that drifted over the city, ubiquitous, invading every space, wrapping itself around every person.
“Isaac, coffee,” William called as he sat in the big wing chair, the patriarch chair, and turned to Samuel. “I would say this is war, son. What will you do now?”
Samuel let out a breath. He had no notion of what his father, a staunch secessionist, thought of his long resistance to joining the Confederate forces. His father was a lawyer-his feelings were not easily read-and he was a gentleman, so he did not impose those feelings on others. He and Samuel talked at length about politics. They did not talk about emotions.
“I had hoped it would not come to this, I won’t pretend differently,” Samuel said. “I swore an oath to the United States, once. But it is war, as you say, and now my duty is clear.”
Isaac came in with the silver tray. He poured the coffee, added sugar and cream to each individual preference, and handed out the bone china cups.
William Bowater balanced his cup and saucer on his knee. “You are resolved, then, to fight for the Confederacy?”
“It is my duty. Honor demands it. But it was not an easy thing, Father, not at all.”
It was not an easy thing.
Samuel Bowater viewed South Carolina as the hub of all that was civilized and proper in America. When he thought of the Yankees coming, of the low, dirty mechanics and foreign-born plug-uglies, the dried-up abolitionists in their black clothing, the fast-talking, haughty New Yorkers running unchecked through his beloved Charleston, lording over his fellow Southrons, it made him angry in a way that surprised him.
They were the unwashed, battering down the gate to his shining city, the Persians coming to topple his perfect Athens. It was silly, of course. He knew plenty of Yankees, had been shipmates with them, and they were fine men. But somehow those men with whom he had sailed were not the same as the infidels who were coming to destroy his cherished South Carolina.
“No,” William Bowater said, “I should think it is not an easy thing at all. For thoughtful men it cannot be an easy decision,” and for the first time Samuel believed he heard a note of approval in his father’s voice. “Will you apply to the navy?”
“The navy is all I know. But there are plenty of naval officers who have not been sitting on the fence, and I fear the available berths have gone to them. There can’t be but a dozen or so ships in the whole Confederate Navy.”
Samuel was being generous, and he knew it, referring to the ragtag collection of tugs and paddle wheelers and sundry craft as “ships.” If there was no navy, he did not know what he would do. Join the army, perhaps, but what good could he be to an army?
“Perhaps it is too late, perhaps not,” William Bowater said. “I think your action in the Mexican War has not been forgotten.”
Samuel tried to wave the comment away. A stupid, rash move, a burst of youthful enthusiasm, more than a dozen years ago. By some miracle he managed to rescue a few dozen sailors when by all rights they should have been dead, along with himself and his crew. It had been a foolish act, but since he lived it was viewed as heroism.
“What is more,” William added, “Stephen Mallory and I are acquaintances, I might venture to say friends.”
“I had no idea,” said Samuel. Stephen Mallory was a former senator from Florida, former chairman of the United States Senate’s Committee on Naval Affairs, and, as of February, Secretary of the Navy of the Confederate States.
“We had occasion to work together on a matter concerning a merchantman belonging to
a client of mine wrecked on Key West,” William said. “We only met twice, but have kept up our correspondence, even to this day. If you like I will write you a letter of introduction.”
“Yes, if you think it proper.”
“I will do no more than attest to your character. The rest is between you and Mallory.”
“I would expect no more.” Samuel felt his mood buoyed by the promise of action. Not combat-he was a long way from that-but something, anything beyond the purgatory of indecision to which he had condemned himself.
After more than a decade in the United States Navy, where action and promotion were equally unlikely, where discipline and protocol were maintained out of habit and not out of any pressing need, the idea of an upstart navy was refreshing. Better to play at David, with blood pumping in his veins, than be a sleepwalking Goliath. He was eager to be at it.
“I will leave tomorrow for Montgomery,” Samuel announced, even as he reached the decision himself. “Isaac, fetch Jacob.”
Jacob stepped into the room. He was the son of Isaac and Isabella, the Bowaters’ cook, had been Samuel’s servant for the past seventeen years, since Samuel had turned sixteen. Aboard the Pensacola he had acted as Samuel’s cabin steward, and had handled rammer and swab on the starboard midships thirty-two-pounder while at quarters.
“Jacob, I’ll be off to Montgomery in the morning. Pray pack my bag. I imagine I shall be away a week or so.”
“Yes, Misser Samuel. I’s goin’ with you?”
“No, I think not.”
“Yessuh,” he said and was gone.
“Dear Lord, but I am famished!” Samuel announced. “Is dinner not yet served?” He had not felt so sharp an appetite for months.
3
I shall never forget that beautiful day, and how elated I was, marching down the street while the band played “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Dixie.” Thousands were on the sidewalks, cheering and waving handkerchiefs. Some were crying, and of course it never occurred to me that many of us would never see those dear friends and neighbors again.
– Private George Gibbs, 18th Mississippi Infantry
The late-afternoon light was muted and soft and the breeze had died away and the warm ground gave off its smell of early spring. The Yazoo River moved slowly down to its rendezvous with the Mississippi, where together they would flow to the sea. But all of the earth’s somnambulant pace could not smother the excitement that rang through the halls and fields of Paine Plantation.
Robley Paine, owner of the plantation, patriarch of the family, stood on the wide porch, under the roof painted light blue on the underside to mimic the summer sky. One hand on the brilliant white porch rail, he stared out at the vast green lawn which rolled down to the Yazoo River, the grass as smooth and flat as the water, with only the one old oak to break the straight run from porch to river.
Paine Plantation, all nine hundred acres of it, was just south of Drumgould’s Bluff, on one of the rare straight stretches of the twisty Yazoo. From northeast to southwest the river ran like a great corridor though the green, fertile country of western Mississippi, past countless fields of cotton, cotton, cotton, the currency of the South.
Cotton was to the Southern man what the buffalo was to the Plains Indian, and Robley figured that if cotton could migrate, then the Southerners would pick up and follow after it.
A shout from inside the house, and Robley was pulled from his thoughts by the commanding voice of his oldest boy, Robley Paine, Jr., ordering, “You give me back that gun, now!”
Robley Junior was a venerable twenty-two and took his leadership and manhood seriously.
“Yassa, General, suh!” the higher-pitched voice of Jonathan Paine, third and youngest son, eighteen years old. Paine smiled and shook his head. How ever would those three boys manage under the real discipline of army life? They had lived their wild, rambunctious, and carefree youths there on that plantation, on the banks of that river. They had grown to manhood under Robley’s eye, Robley’s none-to-firm hand.
He would not crush the joy from them, as his father had done to him, just for the sake of making them strong. Robley was strong, and he reckoned he would have been strong even without the sermons, the beatings. Stronger, most likely. He probably would not have the brittle feeling inside him, as if his soul was a skim of ice on a water trough in early winter.
Robley Paine had let his boys run their heedless way, let them suck the joy out of every moment of their youth. Despite the disapproval of his fellow planters, all the head-shaking and tongue-clicking over the subject of his easy parenting, he gave them little by way of discipline. Just his quiet instruction and his love, and that he gave unstintingly.
And for all the predictions of worthlessness and profligacy, his boys, Robley, Nathaniel, and Jonathan, had grown to fine and honorable young men.
Robley Paine, Jr., was talking again, in his officer’s voice. “Git your goddamn gear on, and be quick about it!”
He was now, informally, Lieutenant Robley Paine, Mississippi Infantry. The young men of Mississippi were responding to their state’s call to arms. From Ocean Springs and Amite and Covington and Pike, from Marshall County and Carrol County and Clark County and from Yazoo, from every town and county in the state, young men were becoming young soldiers.
In Yazoo they were signing on under the captaincy of Clarence F. Hamer, who, until just weeks before, had been a lawyer in Yazoo City. Though there was nothing yet official, Robley had been appointed to the rank of lieutenant. That rank was the result not of family influence or money, but rather of the acclamation of his fellow soldiers.
Unfortunately for him, his younger brothers did not appreciate, as he did, his importance and position.
“Y’all wanna miss the whole damned war?”
Robley Senior frowned and shook his head. Such language. The boy thought it made him sound more like a soldier and a man.
Under the oak tree the two dozen other young men assembled there looked up at the sound of Robley Junior’s voice. Like the three Paine boys, they were the sons of the planters that lived pressed against the Yazoo River. Like all the sons of the wealthy plantation owners, who had grown up to understand that they must serve honor as faithfully as they would serve God, they had flocked to join the new-formed Confederate Army of Mississippi.
Like his boys, Robley reckoned, they all had fathers both proud and sick with fear.
The boys had been gathering all day under the big oak at the Paine plantation. Now they were all there, twenty-four young men, and soon Lieutenant Paine would lead them up to Yazoo City, where they would join the rest of their regiment. From Yazoo City they would travel by steamer to Vicksburg, then by train to Jackson, where they would begin to learn the art of soldiering.
Robley smiled. To listen to them and their pontificating you might think they were already veterans of years of bloody fighting. They discussed war the way they discussed the young ladies: high talk and great bravado based on an absolute dearth of practical experience.
He heard shoes in the hallway and turned, and the door opened and his boys joined him on the porch. His heart lifted to see them; tall and strong, handsome, smiling boys. Jonathan and Nathaniel wore identical gray shell jackets, Robley Junior a gray frock coat with a single second lieutenant’s stripe on the collar. They wore gray trousers and kepis tilted back at a jaunty angle-save for Lieutenant Paine, who wore his perfectly horizontal.
Each jacket sported a single row of brass buttons with a star in the middle and the word “Mississippi” surrounding it. The buttons ran down the front of their jackets and held them snug against their strong, lean forms. They had slung over their shoulders cartridge boxes and canteens and haversacks, and they carried knapsacks on their backs. They clutched their shiny new.58-caliber Mississippi rifles. They smiled as if setting off for a great camping trip.
Robley Paine ran his eyes over each grinning boy and he smiled as well. They looked like window displays for a shop selling soldiering gear. “I�
�m proud of you boys,” he said.
“Thank you, Father, thank you,” they mumbled, embarrassed, trying to be weighty and sincere. They were too young to understand the depths of a father’s love, so he let it go at that.
Robley Paine, Sr., was a passionate secessionist, what the papers liked to call a fire-eater. As a senator in Jackson he had been calling for Southern independence since long before it became the fashion to do so.
Paine loved his nation, his new nation, the Confederate States of America. There was nothing, save for his boys, that he loved more. And now the one love was demanding the sacrifice of the other. It was Abraham and Isaac, to the third power.
“Y’all write your mother, you hear?”
“Yes, Father…” The boys were glancing over at their comrades, who were standing and adjusting themselves for the march. The Paine boys were eager to be at it. They were afraid their father would do something embarrassing, such as hug them. Robley understood that, and desperate as he was to embrace each of his boys, to never let go of them, instead he thrust out his hand and gave each a manly shake.
“Very well, then. Off with you,” he said and managed something of a smile.
Robley Junior, Nathaniel, and Jonathan clumped down the stairs to the lawn and over to where their fellows were clustered in the shade under the big oak. It was a massive tree, hundreds of years old and easily seven feet wide at the base. Twelve feet up the trunk, two huge limbs thrust out at right angles. From the river, looking back at the house, the tree seemed to be welcoming with arms spread, ready to embrace anyone tramping up the lawn toward the Paine home. Robley loved the tree and its insinuation of hospitality.
“All right, y’all, form up, now,” Lieutenant Paine was saying, and Robley was happy to see that the boys were obeying, after a fashion. His son had a lot to learn about command, but Paine did not want to see the boy’s authority questioned now, at the very outset of his military career.
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