Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  He became superintendent of the Canal River Coal Company in Kanawha County, Virginia. Once he had the company running smoothly, he resigned to build a refinery in Cincinnati to turn the company’s coal into coal oil. But the refinery was an indifferent success, its product too cloudy to sell as lamp kerosene. In 1857, Rosecrans was working late in his laboratory on a process to remove the impurities when a retort exploded, spraying him with glass slivers and burning kerosene. He managed to beat out the flames on his body and then calmly extinguished the fire in the laboratory. He walked home, his clothes still smoking. His wife summoned a doctor to treat the terrible burns. When the bandages were removed months later, Rosecrans’s face bore livid scars across his forehead and one cheek, the latter giving his mouth a perpetual smirk. His voice, previously a clear tenor, rasped because of the scar tissue in the back of his throat.

  It took Rosecrans eighteen months to recover. In his absence, the refinery languished. He returned to the laboratory to work at a furious pace. He invented a new chlorine soap, patented two new lamp designs, and perfected his process for removing impurities from coal oil. Yet none of his work generated an income to satisfy both creditors and domestic wants, and William Starke Rosecrans—by character an optimist—was on the point of despair when war lifted him out of the mundane with a promise of the exaltation he had always expected from life.

  It is past two in the morning when Rosecrans returns to his headquarters. He has spoken to nineteen sentries, noted two dozen irregularities, rousted three more tents of cardplayers, and created the impression of ubiquity. A good night’s work.

  Garesché is still bent over his paperwork. Rosecrans sends him to bed and then makes himself comfortable in a chair before the fire with a tumbler of whiskey and a fresh cigar. Since boyhood he has needed but a few hours sleep a night, and he wants to relish his wakefulness this night of all nights. He has beaten them: Halleck and Stanton and the longshank Illinois lawyer who is president by an accident of history. They have cajoled, begged, pleaded, and threatened, but he has faced them down, forced them to acknowledge that they cannot do without him. Now, and in his own time, he has given the orders to advance.

  It has not been easy reaching this point. He started the war as George McClellan’s colonel of engineers in the Ohio militia. Within a month, they transferred to United States service, Mac as a major general and Rosecrans as a brigadier. Lincoln sent them across the Ohio into the unionist counties of western Virginia in June 1861. They fought the decisive battle of the campaign at Rich Mountain on July 11. Rosecrans devised the strategy and led the difficult enveloping movement over a narrow mountain track to hit the Confederate rear. But at the moment when McClellan should have attacked to annihilate the enemy, he delayed and most of the Rebels escaped. Disappointed, Rosecrans contented himself with the belief that he and McClellan were off on a successful partnership.

  With Rosecrans doing much of the work, they drove the remaining Rebels over the mountains and set about establishing a civilian assembly to debate statehood. But in his bombastic report on the campaign, McClellan gave Rosecrans scant credit. Rosecrans, with characteristic impolitesse, spoke openly of his chagrin to a reporter. Reading his deputy’s comments, McClellan was much displeased. When he was ordered east to take command of the Army of the Potomac after Bull Run, he left Rosecrans behind in western Virginia. Rosecrans imagined that McClellan would soon call on him to strike at the Rebel capital by way of the Shenandoah Valley in a repeat, on a vastly larger scale, of their tactics at Rich Mountain. Instead, McClellan stripped his army, leaving him with barely a brigade. That, too, was soon lost when Major General John C. Frémont was ordered to take command of the newly created Mountain Department.

  Rosecrans was ordered to Washington to await orders. He briefly considered resigning his commission but then had a cordial interview with Stanton. The new secretary of war sent him to find a division mysteriously gone astray on its way to Frémont. Rosecrans assumed far more authority than granted by his simple orders, attempting to coordinate several small armies operating in and around the Shenandoah Valley. Enraged, Stanton banished him to the West.

  Rosecrans joined Halleck in the ponderous advance on Corinth after Shiloh. When Halleck was ordered east, Rosecrans worked for Grant. At the battle of Iuka on September 19, 1862, he failed to close the trap Grant had laid for General Sterling Price. Grant was furious. When Rosecrans again talked too openly to the press, Grant resolved to get rid of him. But events intervened. Price and Major General Earl Van Dorn struck at Corinth. Rosecrans drew in his army, skillfully prepared his defenses, and defeated the Rebels in two days of vicious fighting on October 3–4. The battle demonstrated his considerable tactical skill and immense personal courage. Reporters noted that unlike most of the Union’s senior generals, Rosecrans had never suffered a defeat. Why wasn’t he commanding one of the major armies?

  Why, indeed? Lincoln read the reports of Perryville and Corinth and decided to replace Buell with Rosecrans. Stanton snapped “Rosecrans is a contumacious, obstreperous, unbiddable ass, Mr. President!”

  “But is he a witless ass, Mars? I think not. And if he has been an obdurate subordinate at times, perhaps that defect will become a virtue if he is made commander of our army in Kentucky and Tennessee. I would like to see General Bragg treated to some obduracy on the part of one of our generals.”

  “Mr. President—”

  “Tut, Mars. I think we shall go with Rosecrans.”

  And so it is that ten weeks later Rosecrans sits before the fire at his Nashville headquarters, enjoying the last of his strong, sweet cigar. The orders are given, the campaign begun. With dawn the army will move, rising like Medusa over Tennessee, its columns uncoiling, rippling down the roads, blue on red clay, blue steel against winter sky, brown fields, and the dark green of the cedar barrens between Nashville and Murfreesboro. Or so he imagines it.

  He tosses his cigar into the grate and settles himself to doze a while. Garesché will disapprove when he finds him sleeping in the chair, cluck at him about minding his health. But Rosecrans needs to sleep close to a fire, has needed to ever since the night when the retort exploded in his laboratory and he stood momentarily transfixed by the cloud of burning kerosene reaching out to embrace him. How beautiful it had been, and when he breathed it in, he became of the fire. The same.

  But that is a secret.

  Bierce is dreaming, limbs twitching like a hunting dog’s, as the nightmare takes him back into the rain and horror of that first night at Shiloh. In his waking hours, Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce is the most rational of young men. It is a cast of mind that makes him a superb topographical engineer. He records exactly what he sees, never letting imagination add anything to the preparation of his maps. That his maps are also the most detailed in the corps is due to Bierce’s stone courage. Time and again, he has scouted far forward to determine the lay of the ground between his brigade and the enemy. Under fire, he is able to make exact observations, complete lengthy calculations, and then sketch land and positions with a clear, steady hand. In a war where accurate field maps are at once essential and almost impossible to obtain, Bierce’s talents are quickly noted. And so, at twenty, the army makes him an officer.

  Bierce enjoys the rank and—in his waking hours—the war. Perhaps because it is so foreign to his character, Bierce is fascinated by irrationality; and war brings it out in men like no other cataclysm of spirit, body, or society. He puts it about that he wants to hear every unusual story, to see every bizarre case of injury and death. He records all in a weathered journal, as he might bearings, angles, and distances of topography.

  Perhaps because he is determined to banish emotion from his mapping of war’s realities, Bierce’s dreams have taken on an unremitting savagery. Night after night, he wakes sweating and shaken. It is in these moments that his courage fails him, that the horror becomes insupportable. Then even his famously steady hand falters as he records the dreams in his journal. But no one sees the trembling
in the darkness, and the writing restores his equilibrium— for dreams, even his own, are simply measurements.

  Dreaming now, he groans, flails an arm, and then rears up with a suddenness that almost stops his heart. Around him, rain beats, soaks, runs in streams down sodden canvas. The army is asleep in the rain. He sits shaking, the dream still more real than the waking. Since Shiloh, he has come to believe that dream is to the mind more camera obscura than camera lucida; that the light of images is sucked by dream through the pinhole of recollection to be blasted on the dark screen of the unconscious mind, colors intensified like blood intensifies red, yet the image all the clearer for that, its sharpness unsoftened by the sanity-preserving deception of memory. It is a realization that might have driven Poe mad. Perhaps did, though first he was driven to write, as now Bierce must.

  Bierce finds his journal and writes without seeing from long practice in the dark. There is nothing new in this repetition of the dream, and he writes mainly to calm himself. With daylight the army will march, and he is determined to rest while he can, though he hopes not to dream. A page filled, he lies back and closes his eyes, listening to the rain. Cannot sleep.

  The army wakes to mist, cooks and eats, then moves, 43,000 strong, as a harsh westerly wind brings a cold rain pelting on the red clay roads of Tennessee.

  CHAPTER 2

  Friday Morning

  December 26, 1862

  Murfreesboro, Tennessee

  General Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee is dispersed along a front from Franklin, thirty miles west of army headquarters at Murfreesboro, to Readyville, twelve miles to the east. When reports of the Federal advance first reach him, Bragg considers falling back to the Cumberland Plateau between Murfreesboro and Chattanooga. In many ways, this is the logical choice since Murfreesboro has little strategic importance. But retreat goes against Bragg’s every inclination. He is already blamed (unfairly) for losing Kentucky and much of Tennessee. The weather is terrible, and a retreat may weaken the army to the point it can’t fight at all. Here, at least, he can make a stand while his army is fed and rested. Above all, there is lure of the great victory that will so devastate Yankee morale that the people of the North will demand an end to this unjust persecution of their Southern cousins.

  THE CRAMP SEIZES his bowels, bending him double in the chair and turning his gray skin ashen. General Braxton Bragg jams both fists against his swollen abdomen, his face below the famous eyebrows contorted like a gut-shot corpse. He breaks wind tremendously, gasps with the effort, presses hard again, and lets loose a second thunderous delivery. He straightens slowly, forehead beaded with sweat, and glares at the bedraggled corporal of cavalry standing in the cluster of staff officers before his desk. “How many days’ rations?” he croaks.

  For a moment the corporal seems confused, his report forgotten in the wonder of Bragg’s stupendous flatulence. “Uh, we was only able to grab one Yank, Gen’rl. And he didn’t have no rucksack on him. Probably left it by the road when he went to answer a call of nature.” The corporal gulps, hurries on, omitting details of the Yank’s humiliation on being captured with trousers around his ankles. “But he said they’d been told to cook three days’ rations.”

  “Did he know the destination of the march?”

  “No, sir. He was just a private. Green as a persim’ and shakin’ and cryin’, all the time thinkin’ we was gonna cut his throat like Billy Wrench said we would if he made a peep. Anyhow, the lootenant couldn’t get much out of him. Me, I just don’t think he knew a lot.”

  Bragg glowers, waves a dismissive hand. A boyish lieutenant hustles the corporal from the room. Outside, he says in a low voice: “There’ll be something hot in the kitchen from breakfast. Get a plateful and then get on back to your troop.”

  “Lootenant, is the gen’rl all right? I mean, he sure made a powerful …”

  “Yes, yes. He’s fine. Just a small complaint of the digestion. Now go on back to the kitchen. Tell your lieutenant he did good work.”

  The corporal moves off, grateful at the prospect of hot food and early escape. The lieutenant gazes wistfully at the rain-chilled morning beyond the hall windows. He straightens his shoulders, reminds himself of honor and duty, and with a deep breath slips back into the vaporous closeness of Bragg’s office.

  When he has sent the last of his staff scurrying, Bragg leans back, welcoming the solitude. He checks his body’s various complaints and then concentrates on the map of middle Tennessee tacked to the opposite wall. Why is it so damnably difficult to get decent maps in this war? Had he known the lay of the land better in the fall, he would not have chosen his present base at Murfreesboro, which is easily flanked by roads north and south of the town. But in the making of maps, as in all things, he has been poorly served.

  Bragg grimaces, feels his stomach skirl at the recollection of his error in sending Forrest and Morgan raiding. John Pemberton, commanding at Vicksburg, had, as usual, been wailing for someone to do something to disrupt Grant’s advance. And, as usual, Bragg had been expected to make the sacrifice. To make matters even worse, President Davis had personally detached an entire 7,500-man division of infantry from the Army of Tennessee and sent it to Pemberton. Bragg would have called another man a damned fool for such folly, but Davis is a friend—more really, considering how much they owe each other for the events of that day in Mexico—and so he blames that loss, too, on Pemberton.

  He wonders sometimes at how little his life has changed since his boyhood in Warrenton, North Carolina. Even then he had enemies and humiliation in abundance. Rich boys (and poor boys, too, though they did not matter so much) mocked him with calls of “Jailbird” because of the absurd story that he had been born during his mother’s brief and unjust incarceration in the county lockup for the fully justifiable shooting to death of an impertinent nigger (free though that particular nigger had been).

  As a stripling, he grew tall and thought himself not unattractive. But the girls giggled at him, called him “Gloomy Brax,” when all he attempted was a small measure of dignity. He knew better than to seek parental sympathy— certainly not from his mother, whose outraged dignity was demonstrably murderous, nor from his father, a morose plodder who built the outbuildings and occasionally the homes of the well-to-do. At sixteen and already grim of spirit and mien, Braxton Bragg departed for West Point to learn the craft of war. Then, as now, he was secretive, implacable, raging.

  Bragg occasionally allows himself the bileful luxury of ruminating on his time at West Point. Many of his classmates were two, three, even four years older, and this made him a target for the hazing of not only upperclassmen but the boorish within his own class. He survived, became in his turn an upperclassman. The experience might have inclined another boy to go easy, to make friends and allies among the underclassmen. But he was harder on them than any of his classmates. He recalls with pleasure bracing a rumpled Henry Halleck. How Halleck’s eyes had popped that day, how desperately he’d tried to find enough chin to tuck into the requisite number of folds. Bragg had hissed in his ear: “If you showed up in my company looking so slovenly, I’d have you flogged, Plebe. And the second time, I’d have you shot!” Yes, a good memory among the many bad from those years.

  Now Halleck commands all the Federal armies and has sent Rosecrans south in force. But with what objective in mind? Until he knows, Bragg can’t bring in his scattered divisions. He has no huge reserve of food depoted in the rear for the army to live on while it waits. He must depend on Wheeler and his cavalry to scout out the Federal intentions first.

  Bragg has no doubt of the wisdom of young Wheeler’s appointment. Forrest is a bayou-bred killer: a vicious, wily ruffian without a trace of the gentleman about him. John Hunt Morgan is a gentleman but equally untrained and undisciplined: a dandy making a sport of war. But Joe Wheeler is a professional. Moreover—and unlike most of Bragg’s other generals— Wheeler is a man of honor and loyalty.

  With three or four exceptions, Bragg despises all his generals
. First among them in rank and mutual antipathy is Bishop Leonidas Polk, who resigned his West Point commission with its ink barely dry to study for the Episcopal clergy. Now, these three and a half decades later, he is a lieutenant general and commander of the right wing of the army. It is absurd: Polk knows little of war, less of obeying orders. Yet he is untouchable, twice consecrated by church and government.

  Lieutenant General William J. Hardee commands the army’s left wing. Former commandant and professor at West Point, Hardee is incapable of making a report without including a pedantry on the craft of maneuver and battle. The soldiers call Hardee “Old Reliable,” but the only utter reliability about Hardee is his penchant for sniping at his superiors. That and a thoroughly reliable lust. During the army’s foray into Kentucky, the widower Hardee insisted on kissing every comely farmwife and farmgirl he met. Then, if the response was sweet, he would detail a staff officer to arrange a more private encounter once the army camped for the night. Bragg, devoted both to his wife and to the concept of womanly virtue, is appalled and would have Hardee relieved for conduct unbecoming his rank and station. Yet, like Polk, Hardee is unassailable because of his connections among the powerful in Richmond.

  Among his division commanders, Bragg reserves a particular loathing for Major General John C. Breckinridge, former United States senator, vice president, and presidential candidate in the election of 1860. Stationed in Louisiana in the summer of 1862, Breckinridge wrote to Bragg, suggesting that the army march north to free Kentucky from Union occupation: Thousands of Kentuckians will enlist under your banner to drive the hated Yankees north of the Ohio. No result is more certain.

  Bragg planned accordingly. Breckinridge would lead the advance into Kentucky: the heroic native son returning home. Bragg would follow with the main army and a long train of wagons bearing thousands of muskets to equip the enlisting Kentuckians. They would install a civilian governor who would call a convention to vote a bill of secession. By the time Buell could bring his army north, Kentucky would be securely bound to the Confederacy.