Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  Oates waited.

  “William … you know that you can count me among your admirers…”

  “Ain’t looking for a dance partner. What’s that sumbitch done? Or got done? Just tell me.”

  Perry tensed. Preparing himself. As if Oates might strike out at him.

  “He’s coming back with a commission confirmed by the full Confederate Congress. As a colonel. Backdated more than a year.”

  “Earlier date than mine?”

  Briefly, Perry looked away. Then he steeled himself to his task again. “Yes. You could say that. And he’s also going to have a patent to assume command of the Fifteenth Alabama.”

  Oates had to relearn the English language, one word at a time, to understand. The blow hit harder than that plank his father had laid flat across his shoulders. So long ago.

  “That can’t be. That … can’t … be.”

  Perry could not meet Oates’ stare. “It’s true. I’m telling you because I don’t want you surprised. No more than you are right now, anyway. You daren’t raise a hand against him.”

  “I’ll kill him.”

  “And you’d be shot. Or hanged, to save the bullets. Listen to me. I haven’t told you all. He’s also got a commission for Feagin. As the regiment’s lieutenant colonel.” Perry hesitated, then dove on in. “And one for you. As a major. As this regiment’s major.”

  “I’m already a goddamned colonel.”

  “No. You’re not. The Congress . . at someone’s behest … has decided that Law’s promotion of you last year was illegal. It was never confirmed in Richmond.”

  Oates swung. He punched the tree so hard it shivered. It hurt his hand and skinned it. He didn’t care.

  “This can’t be. This damned well can’t be.” Oates grew frantic, fearful that it might all be true, learning fear for the first time in his life as a grown man. “I’ve led this regiment since before Gettysburg. Through all”—he swept his bleeding hand toward the battlefield—“all this.”

  “And you led it well,” Perry told him. “Magnificently. Now listen here.”

  “There’s more? You got more? What the Hell more could there be? You’re taking my regiment. My men…”

  “I’m not taking anything. The Congress of the Confederate States of America took it. And God have mercy on their souls for doing it.” Perry risked stepping closer. “William, do you have any friends in politics? Friends in the legislature? Anybody?”

  Oates shook his head. “Some Alabama boys. One or two.”

  Perry appeared to have expected that. It wasn’t enough.

  “I won’t serve as major under that cowardly bastard,” Oates said.

  “I reckoned on that, too. You just march this regiment today. Keep on leading it, for now. I’ll try to learn when Lowther’s about to grace us with his presence again. When that time comes, General Field’s going to write you a pass. You’re going to leave camp before Lowther shows his face. I will have no confrontation, no violence, hear? You’ll go when I say go, and that’s an order.”

  “Go where?”

  “The pass is for Richmond, to plead your case. I’ll try to arrange a meeting with General Lee before you go, get his advice, his recommendation. But”—he reached out as if to take Oates’ arm, then stopped himself—“don’t expect a miracle. Lee will support you to a degree, but won’t contest a decision of the Congress. You’re going to need to work the political side.”

  “I hate politics.”

  “Well, Lowther doesn’t. And he’s going to command this regiment. That’s how things are.”

  “No!” Oates shouted, losing control. Burned deep. Raging. Fists clenched to strangle the world. “This is my regiment. I’ve earned this command. My brother died in this regiment.” He gasped for breath, realizing, to his shame, that tears crowded his eyes. “I’ll kill the man who tries to take it from me. These are my boys.”

  “No,” Perry said. “You won’t. And they’re not.”

  June 14, noon

  Douthart’s plantation, north bank of the James

  Meade felt rich with pride. The engineers, his engineers, had nearly completed the great pontoon bridge over the James River. And his troops were already crossing by boat from wharf to wharf for miles upstream and down, a great army breaching the obstacle of a wide river with ease. The view from the mansion’s lawn on the high spit of land was spectacular, with the troop-bearing vessels steaming below, the engineers quick at their labors, and the roads full of regiments glad to be out where the air was fresh and smelled of water, not death. After the wastes of Cold Harbor, the river seemed as beautiful as he imagined the Nile or the Euphrates.

  Grant had given the order, but Meade and Humphreys had moved the army, and Humph had been a genius, a veritable Alexander of logistics. For his part, Meade felt in command again. He still chafed at Grant’s presence, but bore it stoically. The past six weeks had been a trial by fire, but their relationship seemed to have settled itself at last.

  Now they had to beat Robert E. Lee to Petersburg.

  He had mourned the many lost below the Rapidan, and he mourned them still. He doubted he would ever fully forgive Grant those frontal attacks, the slaughter of the army he had nurtured. Nor would he quickly forgive himself his desultory behavior at Cold Harbor. But this day made it hard not to be elated. The army’s accomplishment in reaching and crossing the river unmolested was a maneuver to go down in the annals of war.

  Even the breeze that rose from the river seemed a glorious thing.

  He only wished that he’d been allowed full command, that Grant had remained in Washington, the correct location for a general in chief. He would have done many things differently.

  Yet, here they were, crossing one of the South’s great rivers, with not one lone Confederate to be seen. The campaign bore a mark of triumph, after all. They had not been dissuaded from their purpose. Discouraged, now and then, it was true. But never deterred.

  Biddle, one of his favored aides, approached with a plate covered over with a napkin. Meade smelled bacon.

  “Well, Biddle? What do you think of that?” He gestured down toward the busy river.

  “We’ve come a long way, sir.”

  “And a hard way.”

  “The boys found quite a larder in the house. It may be late for breakfast, but I thought you’d enjoy a picnic.”

  “Splendid. What do we have?”

  “Bacon thick as a beefsteak. Fresh butter for the biscuits. Eggs.”

  “Have the men eaten?”

  “They’re gorging themselves.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll have a plate when I go back in. Not Philadelphia’s grandest petit déjeuner, but one begins to believe Virginia may not be without virtues.”

  The breeze lifted the napkin. The fragrance of the food seemed overpowering.

  Meade held out his hand for the plate. “My wife and I like picnics, you know. I miss her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, go and feed yourself, Biddle.”

  Careful not to tip the plate, Meade lowered himself to the ground and sat on the grass like a child. Out in the river, a steamer blew its horn, a sound so deep it reminded Meade of foghorns and his lighthouses.

  The biscuits were fine, but the bacon was truly memorable.

  Sitting in the kindly warmth and stroked by the river breeze, with a strip of bacon halfway to his mouth, Meade had a revelation. The obviousness, the simplicity, of it stunned him.

  Looking down at the busy array on the river, at the thousands of men ferried to the southern shore, he saw it all:

  Grant had no idea how to beat Lee on a battlefield. But Ulysses S. Grant knew how to win the war.

  Author’s Note

  Why waste time on historical fiction? Why not just read history?

  Given the inaccuracies, anachronisms, and careless writing that too often infect historical novels, those are legitimate questions. Most readers would answer that they read novels with historical settings
simply because they enjoy them, and, in the end, there’s no better response. But there is another, compelling answer, as well: If historical fiction is properly done, it can bring history to life. It should be a matter not of either/or, but of complementary roles for historical nonfiction and fiction (and one might argue that today’s revisionist historians write more fiction than the sounder historical novelists). Historians provide the indispensable skeleton of facts. Dutiful historical novelists supply warm flesh to give those facts humanity. A historian may tell us that soldiers in wool uniforms marched twenty-two miles in ninety-four-degree heat and many fell out by the roadside. Well-executed historical fiction helps us understand what it felt like to make that march.

  History tells us what happened. Fiction makes us ask, “What happens next?” History provides the identities. Historical fiction investigates the souls. One descends from Thucydides, the other from Homer.

  Of course, historical fiction, poorly done, can become hysterical fiction (in two senses). Among the routine sins are both dressing up modern, politically correct spirits in antique costumes and simply playing fast and loose with the facts to smooth out the story line. But done well, historical novels can be sublime. Limiting the discussion to our own country, the much-abused genre is redeemed by those rare, magnificent works that resurrect an era with tactile richness—books such as the late Thomas Flanagan’s incomparable The Year of the French, which made me see the Irish rising of 1798; or Joseph Stanley Pennell’s haunting The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters, an epic that chronicles our Midwest from the Civil War into the twentieth century; or, not least, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. These books are so splendid, they frustrate readers conditioned to lesser historical fiction in which every Confederate officer was young, dashing, and raised with a free-black best friend on a progressive plantation, or that features a feisty, clandestinely educated, proto-liberated woman rebelling valiantly against the constricting patriarchal societies of bygone centuries (all the while wearing enthralling dresses). The first sort of novel romanticizes the past, the second euthanizes it.

  The past was a different place in ways both practical and psychological, even as deep human qualities endure—and it’s folly to imagine that those who went before us were somehow nobler creatures en masse. Battlefield leaders and soldiers in our Civil War did not all speak in the sanitized cadences of Victorian-era parsons any more than did Reformation-era Landsknechte or the soldiers who marched with Alexander, and the history of the female half of humanity was not populated exclusively by seductive witches concocting medieval granola, secret voracious readers destined for wealthy, enlightened marriages by a novel’s end, or Mary Queen of Scots. Most of our ancestors, male or female, would have been happy to keep a few teeth past age thirty.

  Getting both the differences and similarities is essential. So is accuracy in each detail. Some years ago, a lazy British novelist caught out with an impossible plot and dubious character constructions responded that he was interested not in historical truth, but simply in the truth of good storytelling. It mattered not to him that his romantic, free-spirited hero had, in fact, been a nasty Nazi agent. I find such liberties with historical facts repugnant. Serious historical fiction doesn’t muddle the past for the author’s convenience, but makes a sincere effort to understand, then to communicate that understanding. If a writer seeks to bring the past to life, he should begin by digging up the right corpse.

  Straightforward history and serious historical fiction need never stand in conflict, but should function as a team to help us grip our past … for if we do not understand who we were, we will never fully understand who we are. And if we do not understand who we are, the lies of demagogues may all too easily determine what we become.

  If nothing else, historical fiction has enticed millions of readers to read straight history. At a time when our education system has abandoned serious history instruction, historical novelists and historians need to embrace each other as allies.

  I have tried to make this novel as accurate as possible, down to the local weather at a given time of day. Whenever possible, characters speak the lines they are recorded as having spoken (although one suspects that memoirists did a great deal of sanitizing). But those characters also believe what they believed, not what we wish they would have felt. Just as some were self-sacrificing abolitionists, others reasoned in favor of slavery. Some struggled to lead virtuous lives, while others were merry hellions. In short, they were human.

  To us, the answers to yesteryear’s doubts seem obvious. But those questions—above all, regarding slavery—were once so fraught that at least 624,000 and perhaps as many as 750,000 Americans died in four years of war to settle them (to the extent that, even now, we may regard them as fully resolved). Whatever an author’s personal beliefs, he or she must give a fair hearing to all of the revived characters, to try to understand why they believed as they did and how their beliefs shaped their daily lives as well as the fate of our country. And characters must wield the language of their times, even when it offends us.

  There are, however, two instances in which I changed historical details, and the reader must be told of them. First, there is no evidence that Robert E. Lee visited the summit of Clark’s Mountain on May 4, 1864. He had ridden up to the signal station in the preceding days, but his midday whereabouts on May 4 are unclear. I placed him atop that mountain for two reasons: First, it made military sense for him to go to the one nearby spot from which he could see the progress of the Army of the Potomac for himself, and second, it was a perfect opportunity to give the reader a panoramic view of the situation through Lee’s eyes, to introduce the man through the situation.

  The second alteration I made to history was to darken William C. Oates’ hair to deepest black to match his presence and personality. It just felt right.

  Other factual errors the reader may discover are plain mistakes, not intentional manipulations of history.

  One difference between the novel you have in hand and its predecessor, Cain at Gettysburg, is that, in Cain, every action of the 26th North Carolina or the 26th Wisconsin was accurately portrayed, but the enlisted men from those regiments were fictional characters. In Hell or Richmond, the enlisted soldiers of the 50th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry Regiment are historical figures. A treasury of their letters home has survived, and those written by Charles E. Brown, the highly literate John Doudle, Samuel K. Schwenk, and others provided me with a firm foundation for elaborating their personalities. As for Henry Hill, he is mentioned in the letters of other soldiers, but his own letters have not survived. I built his character on my firsthand knowledge of the Hill family, formerly of Schuylkill Haven, my hometown, and my relations through a remarkable aunt’s marriage. Each of the Hill males I’ve known through the generations has been taciturn and stubborn. That stubbornness won Henry Hill a Medal of Honor for his action in the Wilderness, although administrative ineptitude delayed the award until the 1890s. Charles E. Brown, who would end the war as a captain commanding Company C, won the Medal of Honor himself for capturing the flag of the 47th Virginia in the action along the Weldon Railroad, near Petersburg. The personalities attributed to the Eckerts are invented, since I found no evidence of their individual characters beyond names on the regimental roster. Clearly, though, the Eckerts were a patriotic lot, contributing at least half a dozen soldiers to Company C.

  And there really were pirates on the Schuylkill Canal.

  Napoleon wanted “lucky generals.” Good luck matters in publishing, too, and I feel honored and very fortunate that the masterful George Skoch agreed to do the maps for this novel. In the past, George has contributed maps to the finest contemporary Civil War histories, so it was a risk for him to descend to fiction. Making maps for such a book is a significant challenge, since they not only must be accurate, but are limited in number and still must portray, at a glance, the essentials of complex situations. If a map is too detailed, it disrupts the narrative. If crucial details
are lacking, the reader’s confused. I feel that George got it as right as possible. I hope readers agree.

  I also must thank a few of the many individuals who have both supported me and kept me firmly grounded during the maddening process of writing this book. First, my wife, Katherine, a career journalist and executive editor, brings the mercy of Clara Barton to our personal lives, but wields the savagery of Francis Channing Barlow as an editor, her red pen whacking a faltering scribbler with all the force of the flat of Barlow’s saber. This is her book, too.

  My “real” editor, Bob Gleason, made consistently wise suggestions during the long months of writing, but, more important still, asked penetrating questions that I did my best to answer on the page. A remarkable man whose career began at the door of Henry Miller’s almost foreclosed house, Bob knows both the beauty and the business of books as do few others. His alert aide-de-camp, Whitney Ross, also gets a battle star for dealing with my desire to micromanage every step of a book’s production.

  Regarding production, my thanks to the design and production team at Forge for the splendid work on the jacket design and typeface selections for this book and Cain at Gettysburg. People do judge books by their covers, and I’m thrilled with the quality of the work the Forge team produces.

  Belated thanks go to Scott Miller and Robert Gottlieb, of Trident Media, who have represented me over the decades. Any writer who doesn’t think agents are worth their keep is as big a fool as those nineteenth-century officers who insisted that repeating rifles would only waste ammunition. These two men changed my life.

  Brigadier General (Retired) Jack Mountcastle, former chief of military history for the U.S. Army, gets a grateful nod, as well, for his selfless assistance over the years and for insisting that John B. Gordon had to be a key figure in this novel. I also am indebted to Andy Waskie for sharing his seemingly endless knowledge of George Gordon Meade. An old redleg vet, Colonel (Retired) Jerry Morelock, of Armchair General magazine, has been not only a good friend, but a “fire support provider” over the years; when he is asked for assistance, his prompt reply is always, “On the way!” Eric Weider, scholar, publisher, and friend, has been ineffably generous in support of the work I try to do. Eric’s a doggone good man.