The Damned of Petersburg

by Ralph Peters

  “Sì,” Barlow said.

  The artist reached for the third painting.

  Barlow shook his head. “Don’t be greedy, old fellow. Two and done.”

  He paid the man, who tried not to show his delight at putting one over on the wealthy American. Barlow quite liked him.

  The artist rolled the two watercolors together and bound them with string. Then, uninvited, he sat down on an adjacent block of stone.

  Gesturing at the ruins, the fellow said, “Bella Roma, yes?”

  But it wasn’t beautiful. The ruins were interesting, fascinating. But hardly beautiful. Nellie Shaw, on the other hand …

  And then there had been the countess, rather a warning about remaining free.

  Arriving in Rome after New Year’s to recuperate, he’d been welcomed by the American community, whose members feigned restraint and craved sensation. He’d been repelled by his lionization by those who’d gone abroad to avoid the war, feeble young men with wealth and faithless wives. Not least, he’d been put off by the female sculptors, whose oddity surpassed The Marble Faun. He suspected at least one, who smoked cheroots, of unnatural habits.

  The English, too, had taken him up, fussing over his military record despite their open sympathy for the Confederates. He’d liked them at first, for their sardonic humor and public rigor, but he soon found them petty, vain, and too fond of boys. And the women were awful.

  He’d done best with the Italians, for a time. The English and the Americans thought them impossible, but Barlow found them splendidly entertaining. Their balls were smelly and glittering, their palazzi in decay and full of life. The women flirted openly, not behind Chinese screens in shabby ateliers, and he’d enjoyed the jealous company of two generals, both of them Piedmontese, whose gala uniforms were laden with more medals and orders than any real soldier could gather in a lifetime. Their operatic manners, Louis-Napoléon beards, and gay accounts of Magenta and Solferino rendered his wartime experience indescribable, a horror that occurred in another universe. He listened with his old smirk, letting them brag.

  And the countess … he’d never seen a woman so wickedly beautiful, as if the word exotic had been coined for her. He’d been startled at her interest, suspecting that she found him a mere curiosity, but she favored him at her salons and invited him to her private rooms for tea, where he’d found her alone. She took him to sit for a photograph, which she claimed would be her treasure, and she called him “caro Francesco” twice in front of her guests. He’d never found himself carried toward an intrigue before and went about it more cautiously than the countess, which turned out to be wise. On the brink, he learned that the woman was notorious for passing on a loathsome disease to a prince.

  It was enough, all of it. More than enough. He didn’t fit in with any of them, the war had left him as foreign to their worlds as a Chinaman. They didn’t know what men were capable of, didn’t understand loss, had no sense of the things that truly mattered, things indescribable in polite society, nameless things.…

  He despised them more than he despised himself.

  Newly arrived, he’d immersed himself in the antiquities, in the ruins, paintings, and architecture. But soon he’d grown avid for the accounts of the war in the London papers, a mere four days late when they reached the English bookseller. Battery Wagner and Wilmington had fallen. Sherman was moving northward from Savannah. And Lee was still penned at Petersburg.

  Seen from a distance, things became utterly clear. The crucial point was that the war would be fought to its end in the spring. He had to be there, had to be in on the kill.

  He didn’t belong in Rome or London. Or in Paris, which he had learned to detest in four days. He belonged back in the lines in front of Petersburg.

  It was time to return to his war.

  The sun passed its meridian. The artist didn’t move, but seemed to luxuriate on his slab, as if Barlow had changed his fortunes forever. A band of children erupted from the ruins and scurried past them, shrieking and coming quite close, their bare feet raising dust. The artist clutched the unsold watercolor but smiled in the wake of the boys.

  He shrugged and said, “Ragazzi.”

  Barlow realized that his backside ached. But this pain came from sitting too long on stone, not from ill-health. In fact, he felt magnificent, with his strength returned and redoubled. Even his feet had stopped plaguing him.

  He stood up and took the watercolors he’d bought.

  The Italian rose, too. He pointed at the book Barlow had forgotten. “Il libro, signore.”

  “I’m done with it,” Barlow told him.

  Author’s Note

  All novels should challenge their authors—if the authors respect their readers—but this book fought me doggedly. The Battle of the Crater has been written about repeatedly, but not always honestly. Too often, the temptation to leap past the racial viciousness won out, with the result that we think we know how bad it was but really don’t. How could I make this account true and bring it to life? What perspectives would best capture this oft told tale with integrity, sparing no party to the carnage and portraying the moral and ethical breakdowns frankly?

  The Crater fighting included some of the worst racial butchery in our history, worse than the Ft. Pillow massacre in that some white Union soldiers turned on their black comrades, an act of treachery the passage of time cannot soften. Yet it was the United States Colored Troops (USCT) who first charged into the trenches and traverses, shouting, “No quarter! No prisoners!”

  For the Confederates, the commitment of black soldiers in force was a shock that erased inhibitions. Then Brigadier General William Mahone was not an enthusiastic slave-owner. He and his wife shared seven slaves, including three children, and seem to have found them more of a burden than a benefit. After the war, “Little Billy” would ally with black politicians, bringing down the wrath of whites upon him. Yet something in Mahone snapped that morning when he heard that the Colored Troops were committing atrocities. I suspect that his childhood memory of his family’s dash to escape Nat Turner’s slave uprising—his father’s haste and worry, his mother’s dread, the crying children, the inevitable rumors of women “shamed” before death—all of that flooded back. And Little Billy gave his own “No quarter!” order.

  In that three-sided massacre, we Americans showed ourselves at our worst.

  By the summer of 1864, black troops in Union blue were appearing upon battlefields in large numbers—gaining critical mass, in modern parlance—hardening Southern defiance, while exciting a range of reactions from uniformed Northerners, not all approving. As the months passed, the Colored Troops were accepted, grudgingly, as a battlefield presence and contributed notably to the Union victory: The first Federal infantry to enter Richmond’s ruins belonged to black regiments (they behaved with more discipline than their paler comrades).

  But acceptance lay in the future on that summer day before Petersburg as men struggled to the death in a slaughter pit. This novel attempts to capture the emotions, logic, hopes, and fears of all parties engaged on July 30, 1864, and to do so as fairly as possible. Above all, I sought to avoid that great sin of historical novelists: judging the past by present values, inserting our own sensibilities, and yanking their words from the mouths of the dead to insert our sanitized and approved vocabulary. Our history deserves honesty and our citizens need it. Without understanding who we really were, we’ll never quite grasp who we have become, leaving us prey to demagogues and despicable entertainments.

  Once this novel fights its way past the Crater, it returns to my standing commitment to highlight forgotten battles and remarkable men who have blurred into history’s shadows. Second Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern, Reams Station, Peebles’ Farm, Burgess Mill … initially indecisive, those contests of arms and souls set the conditions for an ultimate Union victory by eroding Lee’s position and depleting Confederate manpower and resources. For most of us, the Petersburg fighting pauses between the Crater and the chase to Appomattox eight mo
nths later, but the evolving siege produced a succession of grinding encounters—even more than this book portrays—with the intervals between major bloodlettings filled with cavalry actions, local raids, picket-line forays, and endless, deadly sharpshooting. Once again, I’ve done my best to help fill in popular history’s blanks, adding my bit to the splendid work of historians, National Park Service Rangers, and my friends, the battlefield guides.

  The legacy of the Crater haunts us still.

  * * *

  As always, the solitary work of writing has been eased by others. As I struggled to revivify our past, my wife, Katherine McIntire Peters, brought her quarter century of journalistic experience covering government and the military to our battlefield excursions and to her work as my “tactical” editor. Katherine has an unerring eye for the overwrought line or excess word and has done her best to save me from myself (and my passion for Faulkner).

  Bob Gleason, my “strategic” editor, has been supportive beyond the call of his formal duties. Bob not only caught the vision for these books, which evolved from a trio to a quintet, but—as one example of his commitment—he personally tracked down the painting I wanted to use on this book’s jacket after others had given up hope of acquiring the rights. I had remembered the image from a LIFE publication issued during the Civil War’s centennial. My father had bought the booklet for me fifty-four years ago and the Crater painting had such an impact on a nine-year-old boy that I never forgot it. I had to have Tom Lovell’s work on this book. Bob made it happen.

  Sona Vogel, an extraordinary copy editor, once again refereed my tug-of-war with the English language. As ever, she has been splendid.

  Brigadier General John W. Mountcastle, U.S. Army (Ret.), our Army’s former chief of military history and a front-rank Civil War scholar, generously agreed to proofread my draft (and promptly informed me that I had Billy Mahone’s date of rank off by two weeks). Over the years, Jack has always been generous with his time, advice, and encouragement, for which I am deeply grateful.

  George Skoch created the maps for this novel, as he has for the past two, but this time around the work proved especially onerous for George as I slowly figured out what I really wanted. Of course, he came through: Whatever the reader may think of my words, I trust that he or she will agree that the maps are superb. George’s work is essential to these novels.

  To Colonel Tom Doherty, Captains Elayne Becker, Emily Mullen, and Whitney Ross, and the rest of the 1st Forge Regiment of Volunteers, thanks for making this book a fine production.

  Not least, thanks to the inimitable and irreplaceable Ed Bearss for talking “horse sense” to me.

  Following my standard practice, I want to acknowledge some of the key works that I used for reference. This listing is not comprehensive. It’s meant as an informal guide to further reading for those who want to explore the men, battles, and issues in greater depth. Some fine books will be overlooked, for which the authors have my apology. Also, given the wealth of works on the subjects engaged, I have excluded any books that I acknowledged in previous novels in this series … so Barlow’s letters and Lyman’s diaries, biographies of Oates, Hancock, and Grant, and many another key work won’t be listed in the following paragraphs.

  There is no substitute for the words of the men who fought—even when those words weren’t strictly honest. Whenever possible, I immerse myself in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion and, especially, in letters and diaries, reading them over and over until I internalize the voices. For this book, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, volumes 11 and 12, were especially valuable (I’d bought Grant’s collected papers when I was an Army captain, a purchase that strained an already tight budget).

  First-person accounts of particular interest for this novel included Our Noble Blood: The Civil War Letters of Major-General Régis de Trobriand, translated by Nathalie Chartrain and edited by William B. Styple; Lee’s Adjutant: The Wartime Letters of Colonel Walter Herron Taylor, 1862–1865, edited by R. Lockwood Tower; Four Years with General Lee, by Walter H. Taylor; A Pair of Blankets, by William H. Stewart; The Veteran Volunteers of Herkimer and Otsego Counties in the War of the Rebellion; Being a History of the 152nd N. Y. V., by Henry Roback; and Seventy-five Years in Old Virginia, by John Herbert Claiborne.

  As for modern biographies, there are two fine studies of Wade Hampton, the man who came closest of any senior Confederate to embodying the ideal of the “Southern cavalier.” Gentleman and Soldier, by Edward G. Longacre, is a fine, highly readable work that concentrates on Hampton as a soldier. The richly detailed Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior and Southern Redeemer, by Rod Andrew Jr., is a “full” biography of Hampton, with the latter half of the book devoted to his controversial political life after the guns went silent.

  Worthy biographies not mentioned in my previous author’s notes include the revelatory “Happiness Is Not My Companion”: The Life of General G. K. Warren, by David M. Jordan; From Blue to Gray: The Life of Confederate General Cadmus M. Wilcox, by Gerard A. Patterson; and A Hero to His Fighting Men, an excellent life of Nelson A. Miles by Peter R. DeMontravel (although it concentrates more heavily on Miles’ Frontier service and later Army duties than on his Civil War experiences).

  As for “Little Billy” Mahone, he deserves a modern biography. The Army of Northern Virginia had no shortage of colorful, gifted characters among its generals, but Mahone stands out among the most compelling.

  Additional regimental histories consulted for this novel include John Horn’s forthcoming The Petersburg Regiment, 12th Virginia Infantry, a work of great value. Mr. Horn generously shared his manuscript with me as I completed this novel, and it deeply influenced my account of the fighting around Burgess Mill. Benjamin H. Trask’s volume on the 61st Virginia also proved helpful, as did a reprint of The 48th in the War, by Oliver Christian Bosbyshell, and The 48th Pennsylvania in the Battle of the Crater, by Jim Corrigan. Some of my own early memories of Civil War matters involved tales told of the 48th and the Crater back in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, always with a defensive note that “our” miners got their part of the business right. On the other hand, Company C of the 50th Pennsylvania was recruited in my hometown, but that regiment rarely got a mention in kitchen-table discussions—all I knew was that Henry Hill, a relative through an aunt’s marriage, had been awarded the Medal of Honor (long after the war—red tape is not a recent innovation).

  Fortunately for me—and for all interested readers—there are a number of terrific histories available on the offensives and battles featured in this novel. The masterwork is the two-volume study by Edwin C. Bearss (with Bryce A. Suderow, another gifted historian), The Petersburg Campaign: The Eastern Front Battles, June–August 1864 and The Western Front Battles, September 1864–April 1865. This was breakthrough work, and no individual has done more of the exhausting, exhaustive, get-out-and-get-dirty research and writing than Ed. He’s the daddy of us all (although I fear he may view some of us as illegitimate).

  Noah Andre Trudeau’s single volume on the same period, The Last Citadel, is a great introduction to this long, grim struggle. Well organized and always clear, the book underscores why Trudeau remains so popular with Civil War enthusiasts.

  In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat, by Earl J. Hess, is yet another first-rank study by a Civil War scholar whose works I’ve often consulted. This is the sort of book that requires a near lifetime of effort to produce. On the Crater specifically, Hess scored again with his Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg. I found it to be the best single volume on the Crater and used it heavily. A solid runner-up was The Horrid Pit, by Alan Axelrod, which made excellent use of the records of the postdebacle court of inquiry.

  In the course of writing my Civil War novels, there’s always a book that proves especially resonant for a given subject. This time, John Horn’s The Siege of Petersburg: The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864, drew me back again and again. It was a true labor of love
for Mr. Horn to write about three battles in which the rest of us, wrongly, have shown but little interest: Second Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern, and (Second) Reams Station. His recently revised and expanded edition is, as my old drill sergeant used to say, “mighty fine, mighty fine.…”

  So many combat encounters occurred before Richmond and Petersburg during the months covered in this novel that I could not portray them all. For those who would like to learn more, I recommend Richard J. Sommers’ magisterial Richmond Redeemed, which examines the battles of Chaffin’s Bluff and Poplar Spring Church in such detail that I’m confident his account will never be bettered. A shorter study (though well worthwhile) is Fort Harrison and the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm, by Douglas Crenshaw. And for a solid work by a promising young historian, seek out The Battle of New Market Heights, by James S. Price, a revealing account of the heroism and accomplishment of the U.S. Colored Troops fighting north of the James in the early autumn of 1864. The USCT did their part, but the generals didn’t.

  Next to last, I have to acknowledge a splendid oddity—the sort of book only a truly dedicated historian would produce—Robert K. Krick’s Civil War Weather in Virginia. No historian embarks on such a project expecting whopping sales, but if such works of scholarship don’t top the bestseller lists, they’re a godsend to journeymen historians and writers. Weather is a critical part of this novel (as it is of every war). While eyewitnesses often commented on how hot or wet a day was, it’s a fine thing to be able to turn to the meteorologic statistics. “Bob” Krick has many grateful admirers. I’m one of them.

  And one final book: Guide to the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, edited by Charles R. Bowery Jr. and Ethan S. Rafuse. A volume in the U.S. Army War College’s series of guidebooks to Civil War battlefields, this disciplined, detailed text is a great aid to anyone trying to sort out battlefields brutalized a second time by strip malls and fast-food joints, pierced by superhighways, and ravaged by housing developments (nothing the Yankees did to Petersburg was as destructive as what the city did to itself in the post–World War II decades).