Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Thomas guessed, of course, what Rosecrans meant, but evaded anyway. “What story is that?”

  “About Nat Turner, Pap.”

  “That was almost ten years ago. Why should you want to know about a dead darky?”

  “Because you’ll be gone next month, and no one will ever know the truth about you and him.”

  “Rumors are always more exciting than facts. Enjoy them.”

  “Come on, Pap. You’ve got to tell sometime.”

  He did not have to tell, cared not at all what stories were told about him. He remembered too well Nat Turner’s rebellion, sometimes woke sweating with the memories. Yet Rosecrans was not easy to refuse. Thomas hesitated, then closed the text and gestured for the boys to find places. Rosecrans perched on a corner of the desk. Harvey Hill, dark, brilliant, impatient, took the foot of the cot. Earl Van Dorn, cocksure, romantic, leaned elaborately against the doorjamb. But try as he might, Thomas cannot, twenty years later, summon the face of the fourth boy, who slipped into the corner farthest from the light. Yet Thomas has the disturbing sense that it was Grant—quiet, watchful, gauging.

  Thomas told the story methodically, without emotion or circumlocution. He was fourteen when Turner’s men came over the hill drunk, wild, waving muskets, machetes, and a flag hacked from the bloody dress of a white woman. The house slaves, Miriam and Tobias, rushed Thomas, his mother, and sisters out the back of the big house and across the fields to the woods. From there they watched as Turner’s hellions surrounded the house, smashing the windows, taunting, cursing, yelling for the white folk to come out to meet Judgment. “Miz Thomas, we’s got to go,” Tobias pleaded. “Ain’t no good stayin’.”

  Thomas’s mother said nothing, her face set with the quiet fierceness Thomas had seen as a little boy when she’d set off for the barn, fowling piece in the crook of her arm, to chase off a peddler who had abused one of the slave girls. He feared that she might decide to confront Nat Turner, demand that he and his riffraff drop their weapons and sit quietly by the well to wait for the sheriff. “All right,” she said. “Miriam, you take one of the girls, I’ll take the other. Tobias, you lead the way. George, go warn as many of the neighbors as you can. We’ll be all right.”

  On the backtrack of Turner’s march, Thomas found terrible things: people disemboweled, decapitated, hacked limb from limb. A young matron he had seen at church with her husband and infant daughter lay naked in a furrowed field, her torso ripped from pubic bone to throat, her guts spilling on the ground—the first naked woman he had ever seen. He went to investigate the house, heart hammering, bowels loose so that he had to stop to empty them before climbing the porch.

  It was still inside, save for the lazy buzzing of flies and the rustle of a breeze in the curtains of the smashed parlor windows. A long gash of blood ran down the hall to the back porch where the headless body of the young husband lay jackknifed over the steps. Thomas searched for the baby, moving deliberately from room to room, though his fear screamed at him to run, to hide. Upstairs, he looked in closets, chests, and under the beds. No baby, and the rest of his life he will periodically dream of making the search, of pursuing down long corridors of nightmare the cries of an abandoned, invisible child.

  Night found him hunkered in a swamp. He had warned a dozen farms and plantations by that time and had been lent a horse—a spavined, disconsolate creature that stood, head drooping, hooves slowly sinking into the muck, as if it would accept with equanimity being swallowed entirely. Thomas squatted, clutching the blacksmith’s hammer he had carried since leaving the plantation where the baby is forever missing. The sky of Southampton County glowed orange with the flames of burning houses and barns. About him, insects of all the innumerable species of the South buzzed, sang, chirruped, chittered, rasped, and bit. He listened for snakes feeding on the insects and frogs, knowing that they were there and that they were likewise aware of him, of the man-heat, of the squatting mammalian reality of him. Thomas pondered his fear, pondered the ways of serpents and insects, men and societies.

  He continued his circuit of the neighborhood through the next day. By then, most of the holdings were abandoned or strongly defended. He refused offers of shelter and kept moving. In midafternoon, he found his mother and sisters safe at a cousin’s plantation. That night, he camped with a party of enraged town and country men hunting Turner’s gang. To his surprise, he found himself a hero: the stalwart youngster who, refusing all offers of safe haven, had spread the alarm through a countryside crawling with murderous niggers. Thomas tried to tell them that the few slaves he had come across all begged him to say that they were good and true niggers who knew nothing of Nat’s craziness. But this was interpreted as modesty, only further increasing his reputation for courage beyond his years.

  He took no part in the hunting of the rebels over the next few days, nor the eventual capture of Nat Turner six weeks later. He did not attend the trial, nor did he go to the execution of Turner and his principal lieutenant. Instead, he returned to his studies and his responsibilities about the plantation. The story that Andrew Jackson personally presented him with an appointment to West Point is utter nonsense.

  Rosecrans looked crestfallen. “I thought you just held onto it until you were older.”

  Thomas shook his head. “No, I received my appointment from my congressman, same as most.”

  Rosecrans mused on this disappointment. “But you did know old Nat Turner?”

  “Yes, everyone in the neighborhood did. He wasn’t very old, only about thirty.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “He delivered things, he preached to the darkies, he was a fine carpenter. His owner used to rent him out to build things. He was about as free as a darky could be who didn’t have his papers.”

  “Did you ever speak to him?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did he say?”

  Thomas shrugged. “He said ‘good morning’ when I said ‘good morning.’ Or ‘good afternoon’ when I said ‘good afternoon.’ He was always friendly, polite.”

  “Well, what made him do it then?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Perhaps he was crazy, though he never seemed so to me. Hill probably has a better explanation.”

  Harvey Hill sucked at his unlit pipe. “I imagine he felt wronged. He had some education I understand, could read and write. A slave with those talents is likely to feel himself wronged.”

  There was a silence, for they all knew that they were treading close to a subject taboo at West Point. Thomas considered telling them what he learned that night in the swamp with the insects, snakes, and the old disconsolate horse: that constancy must come before courage. Must, indeed, come before all virtues. For without it, all men, all systems, all nations fall into chaos. He has seen the sky turned red with fire, and he dreads revolt, rebellion, revolution. That is why he holds to constancy before all else, knows that it will carry him through, will carry his nation through if people choose aright.

  But he did not tell them for fear that he would not find the words, that he would make constancy sound as ponderous as he sometimes felt among those as quick and facile as Rosecrans, Hill, and Van Dorn.

  He graduated that spring, twelfth in his class, and took his constancy and his gravitas to the artillery. He fought Seminoles in Florida and Mexicans at Monterey and Buena Vista, where he served under Braxton Bragg. Except for a pleasant tour as an instructor of artillery at West Point, where Sheridan, McCook, and Stanley were among his students, he spent the next decade in a succession of dismal posts in Florida and on the frontier. He alleviated the boredom by becoming a skilled botanist and geologist, frequently sending samples to the Smithsonian. For the last few years before the war, he was a major with the 2nd Cavalry, where he became close friends with Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. They fought Comanches. In one skirmish, Thomas was struck in the face by an arrow. To cover the disfiguring scar, he grew a beard, which came in peppered with iron.

  In 1861, though his family p
leaded, threatened, and eventually declared him pariah, Major George Henry Thomas remained faithful to the Union. His sisters turned his portrait to the wall, vowing that they would never speak of him again. They will keep the promise the rest of their long lives.

  Many West Pointers chose to go South: Bragg, both Johnstons, Lee, Beauregard, both Hills, Hardee, Longstreet, and so many more. Thomas claimed no moral superiority, felt only the great tragedy of inconstancy.

  He won one of the first battles of the war at Mill Springs, turning back a Rebel attempt to invade Kentucky, fought in the second day at Shiloh and during the siege of Corinth. Before Perryville, he was offered command of the Army of the Ohio by an administration tired of Buell’s delays. He refused, unwilling to disgrace a general he respected on the eve of battle. But at Perryville, Thomas had an unaccustomed lapse, misreading the situation and failing to urge Buell into the timely attack that might have destroyed Bragg’s army. When Bragg escaped across the Cumberlands, Buell was relieved by the administration, Rosecrans appointed in his place instead of Thomas. Briefly, Thomas considered resigning, but Rosecrans was quick to placate him, consulting him on all important decisions. Altogether, Thomas wishes Rosecrans talked less and listened more. Yet Rosecrans is a good man. Should he falter, Thomas will brace him. Should he tumble, Thomas will lift him up. Thomas will be constant. And if, in the end, this means he must always follow behind other men, so be it. He will do his part in the march.

  At Nolensville on this Sunday at the butt end of 1862, Thomas eats his breakfast alone before the parlor fire in the house commandeered for his headquarters. Two of the stray dogs he has rescued lie at his feet, wondering at the warmth of the fire. Thomas’s menagerie includes several dogs, half a dozen cats, a donkey, a trio of motley ducks, and a large, illtempered goose.

  Finished with his meal, Thomas smokes half a cigar and then goes out to check the weather. The goose greets him at the door, honking at the dogs, who make a quick detour around it. Thomas produces a dozen kernels of corn from a pocket and scatters them for the goose, who efficiently scoops them up before waddling after Thomas.

  A pair of orderlies watch the goose with open malevolence. They were among the half dozen soldiers who originally liberated the goose from a farm a week after Perryville. They carried it by the feet to camp where one of them made the mistake of setting the goose upright. With two snakequick strikes of its bill, it was free, flapping away on clipped wings and churning feet. In moments the camp was a furor as a hundred men took up the chase, all intent on a goose dinner. Thomas was in his tent, writing a report on the recent battle—a task that had already put him in a savage mood—when the uproar disturbed him. He threw down his pen and stormed out of the door. He was greeted by a white bombshell of feathers and beating wings coming straight for his chest. But a man who withstood Mexican cavalry charges on the windy desert plateau of Buena Vista meets such challenges with stern courage. Thomas braced himself and received the flapping bird with both arms. The goose dealt Thomas two or three stout blows with its wings then, sensing a friend, settled into his arms and honked at its pursuers. Thomas glowered at the circle of soldiers struck motionless, clubs and frying pans brandished. He has never been a man of facility with words, can produce no ready witticism that might make the moment into a folk story forever endearing to soldiers, press, and civilians. “You heard the beast. Dismissed!” he thundered, turned on his heel, and marched back into his tent, new pet in his arms.

  So, these two months later, the orderlies can only watch, mourning the feast never enjoyed, as goose and general stand together, inspecting the weather.

  Captain Horace Fisher of McCook’s staff steadies his horse and surveys the row of downcast farmers. They are mostly old men and adolescent boys, though two seem of an age and fitness to be soldiers. Fisher suspects that these two are deserters, perhaps even spies. He points them out to his burly first sergeant, who pulls them out of line and hustles them away to be questioned— beaten if necessary—for whatever they know of the Rebs.

  Fisher clears his throat, introduces himself. He keeps his voice civilized, unbullying. “You men have been brought here to serve as guides for the advance of this brigade. Two of you will go with the cavalry escort, the rest will march in the front rank. If any of you attempts to flee, he will be shot and his farm burned. If any of you fails to warn a Federal officer of trouble ahead, he and another man will be shot and their farms burned. If any of you directs this command down a wrong road or in any other way gives false information, he and another man will be shot and their farms burned. If this command suffers casualties that in my judgment could have been averted by any of you, I will have you all shot and your bodies left by the road for your families to collect. And, of course, I will also order all your farms burned.”

  He swings his horse away, trots to where Brigadier General August Willich has his brigade drawn up. Willich regards him with disgust. “Vell, have you frightened the bejabbers out of those men?”

  Fisher salutes casually. “Yes, General. In this part of Tennessee, the natives aren’t likely to be well disposed toward us.”

  Willich snorts. “They are poor farmers. And like poor farmers everywhere, they are most disposed to stay out of the way of all armies. Come. We must be about General McCook’s orders.”

  The brigade moves out, the cavalry pushing ahead through the corridor of dripping cedars. The infantry follows, cursing the mud and the easy-living troopers. Fisher rides near Willich, studying the old man who was a Prussian officer before Fisher was born. Willich’s appearance belies his legendary reputation in the Army of the Cumberland. He might, Fisher thinks, be a grocer or a butcher except for the eyes. The eyes are dark, piercing, the eyes of a dangerous man, a true believer.

  August von Willich was born a Junker. A lieutenant at eighteen, a captain at twenty-one, he seemed destined to wear a general’s epaulets. But at thirty, Willich quit the army, dropped the “von” from his name, and became a communist. The rebellions of 1848 gave Willich a sudden, heady vision of the future. But the uprisings were mere street bombs, scattering a few cobbles and killing a few passers-by while hardly shivering the foundations of the old order. The armies dispersed the rebels, posted the guards, and drew up the firing squads.

  Willich fled Germany for the New World, settling in the German enclave in Cincinnati, where he opened a German-language paper for the workers. For Willich and the other Forty-Eighters, the South’s secession was simply another attempt by a ruling class to maintain its power. They enlisted in droves. Willich trained a regiment that fought with ferocious discipline at Shiloh and Perryville. The regiment’s performance won its commander a star and command of First Brigade, Second Division, McCook’s corps. Yet to Fisher, Willich looks old and gray riding in the cold winter rain. Soon, Fisher thinks, these old men must give way to younger men—men of Fisher’s age. Such is history. And what communist can argue with history?

  Through the morning, the infantry plods along in the mud. The cavalry sends back a trickle of Rebel stragglers. Fisher questions them, alert that some may be spies. Those he particularly suspects he dispatches with Sergeant Wilson for further, less polite interrogation. Meanwhile, he inspects captured haversacks for evidence of the number of days’ rations carried by Hardee’s men, quizzes the cavalry on the condition of the roads ahead, and presses the close-lipped farmers for more information on the country. By noon, he is satisfied: Hardee has turned east on the Salem Turnpike for Murfreesboro. He communicates this to Willich, who nods and gives the order for the brigade to halt. He will let the soldiers boil coffee to go with their noon rations and then move on to Eagleville.

  Fisher glances at the bedraggled farmers, who have slumped in a knot by the road. “What do you plan to do with our guides?” he asks Willich.

  “Your hostages, you mean,” Willich replies.

  Fisher shrugs. “They’re yours now, General. I’m off to report to General McCook. Wilson! Mount up.”

  Willich watche
s Fisher ride off, shakes his head. He knows the type. Prussian, Hanoverian, Austrian, Italian, French, American, it makes no difference. The educated thug. He turns to an aide. “Find those men some rations and something hot to drink. There is no sense in making them our enemies forever.” He rides over, dismounts, goes among them, shaking hands, inquiring of their health. They are unwilling to talk at first, but because Willich is emphatically who he is and nothing else, they inevitably warm to him, answer his questions, even smile.

  Hardee is livid when he storms into Polk’s headquarters. He slams a copy of Bragg’s order of battle on the table, making plates and silverware jump and nearly overturning the Bishop’s glass of wine. But Polk, with the grace not unusual in fat men comfortable with their bulk, sweeps the glass up a heartbeat before Hardee’s fist lands to rattle the rest of the Bishop’s Sunday dinner.

  “Have you seen this—this abortion of a plan?” Hardee snarls. “He is going to split the army in two at the river! Hasn’t the man read a single text? Rosecrans will gobble us down in pieces. It will be Cannae. Jena. Austerlitz! Bragg is a fool, an absolute goddamned fool!”

  The Bishop shakes a finger, eyes smiling over the rim of his wine glass. “Now, Bill, remember your language and my position. Take a chair. Calm yourself. Have some wine.”

  “I beg your pardon, Bishop. I forget myself. But have you seen this… .” He snatches up the order of battle, shakes it, words failing.

  “Of course I’ve seen it. And though I have never written a book on tactics, I have read a few. Even yours. I recognize the errors.”

  “But what are we going to do?”

  “Do? What can we do but fight according to the order of battle? He is the commanding general.”

  Hardee slumps in his chair. “Better that you were.”