by Tom Blair
Before returning to Virginia, in that summer of 1864, agonizing while hearing news of North Anna and Cold Harbor, I received one bleak official assignment. While we couldn’t feed ourselves, one commodity we had in abundance was Yankee prisoners—trophies of our first three glorious years, but now just a drain on our pitifully thin supplies. Some we “galvanized”—recruited into our army—and some of those were to prove pretty darn good, others, of course, going over the hill at first opportunity. But most just sat there eating our scanty food, drawing down our declining number to guard them. They piled up in their starving, unsanitary crowded camps—well, they had surrendered, not us, and our children were getting no better than they, and they were dying even faster. You knew this intellectually, but you thought of it as like battlefield deaths, each side taking its chances. Six thousand died in one North Carolina pen. But as God is my witness, we weren’t killing them. We couldn’t get the food for them, we didn’t have the timber to build them shelters. All very grimly logical. But I still didn’t know how that passed from facts on paper to cold, slow horror in life.
After we could no longer hold captives securely in Richmond, and regular prisoner exchanges with the Yankees had broken down, we moved an army-sized mass of bluecoats—at least that’s what they had been wearing when they were captured—to an insignificant place in Georgia called Andersonville, where there weren’t even enough civilians to supplement the guards to working efficiency. And to make things finally worse, since any man of competence and character was needed at the front, they’d put in charge a Swiss soldier of fortune called Wirz, a man I wouldn’t have assigned to shovel horse droppings. And as the saying goes, no money, no Swiss.
I was tasked there from the Ride to see if a thousand prisoners could be assembled for a trade, a swap with the North for some of our captured men, so desperate were we for any man or boy to take up arms. I made a week’s trek before riding through the gates of Andersonville on my sad spotted nag, to the indifferent courtesies of a demoralized guard, into the silent stench of living death.
Almost silent. A few voices were yelling with a mechanical brutality. Captain Wirz could not feed his prisoners or keep them clean, but he could set up deadlines and punishment schedules. He presided over a host of skeletons, too wasted to support the weight of their shirts, too parched to lift a cupped palm. He was the only man the Union formally put to death when all was over, when, in fairness to the Yankees, many howled that we should all be hanged as traitors. And the ravages I saw in Wirz’s Andersonville haunted my dreams to my dying day.
You ask why? Did I give a care for Yankees? Would I have passed up a chance to shell them down “like demolishing a wall,” as Mr. Ruskin said to the Woolwich Military College cadets, panting for glory in some future war? No indeed. But there is something deep within us that we ourselves do not know, cannot know, cannot grasp in others, but whose existence presses upon us, if only to tell us that the world is not empty—that life lives. Andersonville trampled men into life’s deepest nightmare, impossible to awaken from. And it trampled me, because this was the South; but not the South of my mind.
No trades of men with Yankees; we had nothing to barter.
So there I was again in Virginia in the fall of ’64 with my regiment—an ever fewer and more tattered regiment, but you should have seen their spirit—hammering at the Army of the Potomac as it pushed us slowly back around Richmond. As always, at Darbytown Road, and at Strawberry Plains, we killed more of them than they of us, but they always had still more, many more in reserve—and they had more munitions, horses, and—ever more important—more food. A regimental commander, which I was by now—because Haskell and Whitrow had been given brigades, and we had left Kaine in a wood at North Anna and Drew in the mud at Yellow Tavern—spent far more time thinking about corn, no matter how dried up in the fields (and, the next year, no matter how green) than about Sheridan’s cavalry.
On the afternoon of April 9, 1865—a date seared on my very soul—I was sleeping, if you can call it that, where I stood, leaning against a white oak, where I had slumped, wearing grays more brown from months of mud, blood, and other intimacies of our gruesome war. We were just west of Farmville, where we’d engaged the Yankees in yet another holding action just two days before. Awakened by a soldier with a message. It was over, the war was over. By dusk a written communication from above: General Lee, our savior, surrendered at a place called Appomattox, until that moment nothing more to me than a crossroads on my field map, on our projected route to relative safety in Lynchburg. Just as sudden as a shot to the head, it was over. We were told to take our horses home, use them to plow—at the moment an empty gesture, but spring plantings saved a few good babies. Justice where justice is due.
What of the Ride? Was it as so many others, brick chimneys rising from a mountain of ash; a mountain of ash attesting to the black souls of that army of Northern invaders. I dreaded what I might find, but Hosey and I rode hard, only stopping to keep our horses from dropping. Still it was close to a full week’s journey from the tree where I learned the vile truth, to riding into view of Clayton’s Ride. Only despair greeted me. No assets, only liabilities, liabilities with deep-set eyes of hunger. Something else, a letter—not a letter, but an envelope, from Mrs. Sargent. Months before I had written Rebecca’s parents, choosing each phrase, each word with the utmost care, trying somehow to make sense of it all, of Rebecca’s passing. With my letter to them I’d enclosed a letter to Oliver; I asked that they forward it to him or if, perhaps, he might be at home, they pass it to him.
In the envelope I found only the letter I had posted to Oliver, across it written in large letters “deceased,” and then a single sentence scrawled in the script of a woman, a plea to God: “Your South has killed our daughter and our son, God damn you and your South.” A plea to God not necessary, her wish already fulfilled.
It was a ruined land, but they had dealt fairly lightly with the Ride—they were in a great hurry to push north toward Johnston’s army—we had nevertheless been cleaned out of provisions from cellar to attic, and our cotton gins were smashed, and all the footloose people had gone off with the Yankee column; and I must say that I was so exhausted that I was almost relieved that such possible trouble had walked off.
With Hosey at my side, we took stock of what was left. There would be precious little crop come the fall, even if we had someone to sell it to; most of our sheds and barns and stables were wrecked or burned, some out of malice, more from tired, frightened men drinking and smoking and knowing they’d be moving on to risk getting killed tomorrow—I’d seen enough of that on our side. We had some timber, but the choice had to be made between firewood now or some pathetic bit of money to help rebuild.
I went into what we still called the ballroom, and they were waiting for me. Even Hosey drew in his breath behind me.
They were gaunt—gaunt like an army of bitter cadavers come out of the grave, and ragged, more ragged than the poorest pickaninny’s doll; and sores and scabs showed through the tatters. They were gazing at me with eyes that I had never seen, and with more than hunger in their eyes. But not, I think, with hatred. Reproach, yes. Impatience, in some eyes. And it almost seemed that they were looking at me from an equal height. Some were even sitting on the great staircase, and not even Brick or Hosey could find it in himself to shoo them away.
I had not expected this meeting, but the facts were the same to whomever I should tell. I told them that, for those who wished to leave, I would give them my heartfelt wishes for good fortune wherever they might choose to go. Frankly, I would have been glad to see as many depart as possible. A cold prospect chilled the chilly room. Famine might yet grip the Ride, I thought. I told them I would set out a table of rations with Brick. Then a moment of strangeness. I thanked them for their diligent labor; startled myself that I had done so. Perhaps from the habit of thanking my soldiers, merely a mistake of habit.
And so I was not just a temporary insolvent, but a ruined man. More
particularly, what ten years before would have been the Ride’s most substantial assets, the people of any plantation, had been sieved down to grievous liabilities. We had fought to keep them; now the ones who had not put themselves on the road, the least valuable by commercial reckoning—though I must say I loved many of the rascals—were hangers-on of a broken enterprise. To keep going would be deeper ruin yet. But I thought of Rebecca, and I thought of my life. Born into comfort. Born to be a gentleman. But nothing now. Father gone, sweet Rebecca no longer, no children, no brothers; Clayton not a legacy of name, but perhaps a legacy of action to come. Rebecca’s deathbed request I did not grant, “Let them go.” Now I would struggle my best for them. I would not cast those whom we had made helplessly dependent into a harsh world of independency. To drive them out would be murder.
That first evening at the Ride, Hosey came to me, came out to the far fields where I was watching hard-shelled beetles dine on my meager future, wondering if perhaps they were Northern bugs seeking retribution; of course they were, everyone would soon be clawing for their share of the little meat still embedded in the crevices and shards of our broken Southern bones. Cast down with a weight of some unknown sorrow, Hosey’s eyes did not meet mine. No tears, within him a barrier rigid against his bare emotion. Gasping for air, he told me that Reverend Rolt was on my verandah, that I was to see him quick; then with his voice breaking as the last breath of a dying man, Hosey said that the Reverend demanded to tell me of some grand event. For whatever reason, perhaps because of the hurt that was certainly twisting within him, I didn’t question what news could be of boiling import. So I walked the half-mile—I hobbled the half-mile—back to the Ride wondering what occurrence would be of consequence to the wasteland of rubble that was now our Southern states.
With a grin and a pace more of a run Rolt closed the last fifty yards when he saw me approach. Lincoln was dead. Shot by a Southern hero, shot to claim the South’s rightful revenge. Those were the Godly Reverend Rolt’s declarations, not mine.
Yes, Lincoln was misguided, certainly to my mind when I hotly and publicly debated Sargent and his band of Harvard intellects dripping with obnoxious rightness and obstinate hypocrisy. And, yes, I would have sighed a smile of relief if Lincoln had been mortally wounded by one of General Early’s eagle-eyed sharpshooters when he came under fire inspecting Union troops at Fort Stevens. But now, mercifully, the long struggle was over; a war of four years and half a million troops killed. Not troops, let us not soften the carnage, over half a million sons with mothers, and husbands with wives; across the Confederate and Union landscape millions of pillows wet with tears of heartbreak.
No, no soldier who had trudged and crawled on battlefields damp with blood, battlefields with a bountiful crop of ripped fragments of God’s greatest gift, no soldier who had witnessed such a scene, no soldier who still clung to the belief, the hope, that men who had been dragged through the furnace of hell could still possess a soul, no such soldier could take felicity in any man’s death once the truce had been made. I was such a soldier.
The question was not whether the Ride could somehow prosper with the coming years, but whether it would become some sort of morgue within the coming weeks. I put as good a face on it as I could, if only to keep up credit with the tradesmen from whom we had to buy the tools necessary just to start recovery. But that would not be enough, and though the Freedmen’s Bureau imposed by the conquering government actually showed some energy and enterprise, higher wisdom had placed its nearest office a very great distance away, and anyway it was stretched to the utmost.
But then there befell a piece of luck of a kind that I could not have thought to imagine, from a direction entirely outside my thinking.
One day, a captain of the occupying army appeared to present himself with a card from the local commander, a remarkable man, I admit it, called Galusha Pennypacker. He had been a major general of volunteers before he was old enough to vote. After a long convalescence from a wound in early ’65, he had transferred to the regular army to oppress us. Well, that may be ungracious to a well-meaning man, and if the Ride had a roof on it, it was his doing.
Pennypacker had a reputation for courtesy and as much fair dealing as you would expect from a Quaker, or actually rather more; though the youngest general in America he was a devout birthright Friend. He had commanded the force we had been attacking along Darbytown Road, was writing an account of his division’s actions before memory faded, spoke very warmly of my men’s courage and resolution, and asked if he might come over to pay his respects “to a distinguished fellow citizen, no longer an enemy.” Well, it would have been ungentlemanly to brush off an admittedly brave and able brother officer; and so I wrote that he might come.
He galloped up without an escort, only an orderly, quite the man of breeding paying a private call. We spoke first in the colonnade; but in due course I needed to consult some papers, and despite his protestations, limped inside, him following. No sooner than we were out of the sun, he stopped.
“But your portraits!” he said.
Well, yes—Grandfather, Great-grandfather, even Great-great-grandfather had set great store by the fine points of such things; for me the old faces were just part of the family, impossible not to imagine on the walls, but not a matter for connoisseur-like discussion. He could see that I was somewhat annoyed—going to patronize our beds next, I supposed—and went along to my study to talk about mighty Stonewall. But somehow things came out, talking to him—he was a man of magical sympathy—and so I told him, through my teeth, of our descent to destruction.
Now, if finding that out was difficult, how was it that with perfect tact he put it to me that there were people in the North who would pay excellent money for my faded ancestors’ smoke-marked features—“Copleys, were they? The Sullys I surely know, for I can remember Mr. Sully coming up from Charleston to paint us boys when we were small, and he’d done Father and Mother already.
“The merest letter to a friend …” said Pennypacker. And he wrote it, and this fellow came down from New York, and what he offered quite took my breath away. Some fetched more than they likely cost to be painted. It was like driving children into the snow, seeing those protecting house-gods of the family being boxed up for sharepushers and worse out of the Manhattan thoroughfares, but needs must. If what I heard was true, that they were passed off as blood ancestors by the Astors and Drews and Vanderbilts, then I sold my own flesh for dirt. But at least the dirt was put for the crops again.
But more to the point, this Yankee from Pennsylvania saw our silver, and it was like Pizarro seeing the Inca treasure—and that’s what got us over the hump. We had to eat with horn spoons for five years, but all those crooked war profiteers paid excellently for two hundred years of our plate. And again it was Hosey, it was his warning, his insistence—if a slave can insist—that two years before the Ride’s silver was laid in a great oak chest of grandmother’s and buried under the chicken coop … lest our silver trays and goblets fill the saddlebags of Union troops.
Everyone has a use in this world, my godmother used to tell me. Pennypacker’s enterprising eye saw us through the storms of peace in which so many foundered. We hacked away at the ruined fields, found brokers for our cotton—though not on such good terms as before the war, because the Yankee blockade got people growing cotton in Egypt and India—and did much patching and repairing. We had epidemics, of course, and many died, the young and old, because there was no medicine; at least Rebecca didn’t see that. But not one of our people died of want or cold, and, rather to the horror of several neighbors I need not name, I started a school for the blacks.
I can hear my Harvard classmates hooting, but really it didn’t take much to teach what children need to know back then: basic figuring, the Bible, signing their names. People like old Zackary Graystone, our long retired rector, were appalled, however hard he had worked for these people as Christian souls: the sons of Ham were to be our bondservants and need not learn such things abov
e their station for that. Had not God seen to it that they were delivered here? I told him that between ’61 and ’65 I’d seen enough of God’s judgment to know that it pointed both ways, like a rifle. So what we saved in the ’68 crop was devoted to books and school. In time, all could read and write and perform simple sums.
Three hard years, but each year better … less harsh … than the last. We, all the growers, got less for cotton; beaten down, we couldn’t bluff when setting price. From our meager income, wages were paid; food and ten cents a day. Each year the good workers stole away, those with muscle and wit. Figured they could do better, having been told wondrous stories of Washington and Baltimore. I knew they were fanciful stories, but paid little mind. They had a chance, and with them they at least took some ability to read and write.
A few months after the first crop that was really up to the standards of those dreamlike years before the war was brought in and sold for profit, a profit tall enough to cast a shadow, Hosey came to me and told me, to my entire bewilderment, that he was taking his family to settle some new village of blacks on the far sod-house frontier. He reckoned that he’d done his part in getting the Ride going again, and he wanted his children to have more of a future than they could have inside these gates. Reconstruction was about over and the South was governing itself again, but not even an old soldier of Lee’s—perhaps especially an old soldier of Lee’s—could dislike all that had taken place.
I argued with him, bitterly, but I couldn’t shake him, nor could I any more hold him, and I despised those who would have been glad to help me keep him. And in the end, it came to a heartrending whipsaw: during four years of hard-fought struggles to save my South, new bonds had formed between us, more vital and humanly natural than the ugly bonds of slavery; and grieved as I was, powerless and old as I felt, I suppose I knew that this departure was inevitable if Hosey was indeed to be a truly free man. So I swallowed, tried vainly to stem the welling in my eyes and faltering words; strange, only once before did my eyes draw tears and my voice break as I wished another man a farewell: when in ’61 I bid a long good-bye to my brothers standing proudly resplendent in their fresh Confederate grays of a lifetime ago … tears only for brothers? I wished Hosey well, and to my amazement, he held out his hand.