Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Cleburne’s probe sets off a series of sharp skirmishes. Bishop Polk orders a test of the Yankee line. “Send a message to Cheatham and Withers to probe all points on the line to their front,” he tells his adjutant. “We shan’t let the Yankees have any rest this frosty morning, and our own men could use the warming.”

  Despite the long, cold night under the awning, the Bishop is positively bumptious this morning. He teases his staff, exchanges jibes with the men as they pass to the front. A blast of musket and cannon fire greets the skirmish line. The line wavers, men dropping by the dozen, finally falls back. The Bishop watches, humming a few bars of one of the Church’s livelier hymns.

  For the rest of the morning, artillery duels and infantry skirmishes ripple along the front. Finally convinced that Rosecrans has no intention of withdrawing before nightfall, Bragg allows Breckinridge to shift Colonel Joseph Palmer’s brigade to the other side of the river to counter Beatty’s threat to Wayne’s Hill. Bragg is distracted from further consideration of the situation by the arrival of an entirely undesired addition to the army: Brigadier General Gideon J. Pillow, fifty-six, grand sachem of Tennessee politics, former major general of volunteers in the Mexican War, and one-time law partner of the late President James K. Polk.

  Barging into the office without waiting to be announced, Pillow sticks a hand across Bragg’s desk. “How are you, Bragg?”

  Like every artilleryman of any meaningful length of service, Bragg is a little deaf. He has not heard Pillow’s entrance and is unaware of his presence until the thin grayish hand inserts itself between his gaze and the report he is carefully composing. He looks up, sees Pillow, and leans back from the hand in alarm.

  Colonel Brent, who has hastily followed Pillow into the room, sees Bragg’s eyebrows twitch furiously. At last Bragg manages, “General Pillow. I confess surprise.”

  Pillow drops his untaken hand without concern. “Hear you had a hell of a scrap yesterday. Didn’t quite whip ’em, eh?”

  For the first time in Brent’s recollection, Bragg looks to him in supplication. Brent bustles forward. “Coffee, generals? Or something stronger perhaps?”

  “Coffee,” Bragg croaks.

  “I’ll have the something stronger. With a dollop of water. Not much, mind you,” Pillow says. He plops himself comfortably in a chair. “So, tell me, Bragg. What happened here yesterday?”

  “Do you come from General Johnston? Or from the president?”

  “No, no, I’m not here as anyone’s spy. Regular transfer. I haven’t had much to do since that business at Donelson where Floyd made such a jackass of himself. Man would have done us all a favor if he’d surrendered along with Buckner and the boys. Me, I had to get out. I wasn’t going to let Floyd hand me a sack of dung and then scuttle off like the yellow dog he is. No, sir. I needed to get out and fight for the cause… . Thank you, Colonel. Most appreciated.” He takes a swallow of the whiskey and water, smacks his lips.

  Bragg accepts a cup from Brent with shaking fingers, coffee sloshing into the saucer. Brent is embarrassed. Why should Pillow so unnerve Bragg? Pillow is a buffoon, a coward, and quite possibly a lunatic. Everyone knows the story of how Grant had invested Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River the previous February. Fearing trial and execution, former Secretary of War Floyd handed over command to Pillow, who immediately passed it to Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner. So it fell to Buckner to ask his old friend Grant for terms while Floyd fled by steamboat and Pillow sneaked away in a leaking two-man scow.

  Bragg seems to remember his authority, asks in a cool tone, “What is it I can do for you, General?”

  Pillow looks surprised. “Well, as I said, I’m transferred here. I’m part of your command. At least for the present. I assume it may shortly be my command, once the president has gotten rid of Joe Johnston and called on you to take his place.”

  “The president is getting rid of General Johnston?”

  “Of course he is. Don’t be thick, Bragg. Jeff Davis hates Joe Johnston. Has ever since they fought over a girl when they were at the Academy together. Everybody knows that.”

  Or at least knows the story, Brent thinks.

  Pillow rises, handing his empty glass to Brent and then stepping to a mirror on the wall. He straightens his uniform blouse, smoothes his sideburns, runs fingers through his ample white goatee. “I was a major general in Mexico, you know. Rank everybody in this army now that old Twiggs is dead. Hell, most of you boys were only captains when I was already a general.” Satisfied with his appearance—and he is a handsome man—he accepts his refilled glass from Brent and sits again. “But I won’t argue seniority at the moment. I need to fight. So give me a corps or a division, and I’ll be happy until this scuffle is over.”

  “I don’t know that I can replace any of my current commanders in the middle of—”

  “Oh, poppycock, Bragg! You can replace anybody any goddamn time you please. You’re not putting me on your staff where I have to consort with a bunch of paper-soiling puppies. No offense, Colonel. I need the company of fighting men.”

  Bragg’s eyebrows resume their convulsive twitching. Send him somewhere he’ll be shot, Brent thinks. If any man in this army deserves shooting, it’s Pillow.

  “So what do you say, Bragg?” Pillow demands. “If you want me to suggest who you might replace, I—”

  “No. No, General. I believe I have the solution. Colonel Palmer was wounded yesterday afternoon. He’s been in command of one of General Breckinridge’s brigades. You can take it temporarily. Colonel Brent will draw the orders.”

  “So a brigade’s all you can spare, eh?” Pillow slaps his empty glass on Bragg’s desk. “Well, all right. I’ll do the best I can with it. But tell that whelp Breckinridge not to get in my way. Former vice president of the United States, indeed! Proof of just how far the Republic had fallen by the time the sisters of the South quit the damned Union. All right, Colonel, point the way. I don’t need to carry any goddamn written orders. Send ’em after me.”

  When Pillow has gone, Brent steps back into Bragg’s office. He is thinking of risking a joke, something along the lines of ordering Pillow shot before rather than after the next fight. To his surprise, he finds Bragg smiling grimly. “So, Colonel, do you think Generals Breckinridge and Pillow will get along?”

  “I rather doubt it, sir.”

  “So do I. So do I.”

  Hazen joins Bierce atop the hill in rear of the brigade’s line. “Let me see your map again, Lieutenant,” he says. Bierce unrolls the map he’s been constructing for the last three days. Hazen studies it and then gazes across McFadden’s Ford to the low ridge where Sam Beatty’s division has deployed. “That ridge is the prize we’ll fight for next. If we load it with artillery, we can blast Bragg’s flank and center. If he takes it back, he can do the same to us.”

  “Why aren’t we getting more guns on it now?”

  Hazen smoothes his imperial. “My guess is that General Rosecrans ordered the movement as a demonstration. But once he has the rest of the line consolidated, he’ll start reinforcing Beatty and developing the offensive possibilities. The advantage is coming our way.”

  Joe Wheeler has gone raiding again, but the pickings are much slimmer this time. Beyond Lavergne he encounters a southbound wagon train escorted by a full brigade of Yankee infantry. The strength of the escort can only mean a cargo of ammunition, but Wheeler’s men are too few and too exhausted to attack. He rides on, the afternoon turning blustery, the temperature dropping toward freezing again. Twice in four days he has ridden around the Yankee army, an act that when done once on the Peninsula made Jeb Stuart into the beau ideal of the Southern cavalier. But Joe Wheeler, small and bedraggled, looks more the sneak thief, the cutpurse, the low highwayman. ’Tis pity, but true.

  Rosecrans spends most of the day in the saddle, riding Boney and Tobey alternately. It seems that sending Sam Beatty’s division across the river to threaten Bragg’s right has produced the desired effect. The Rebels seem hes
itant, almost passive. Meanwhile, every hour makes his line stronger. By dusk, it may be unassailable.

  The skirmishing dies down in the early afternoon. The armies turn to necessary chores while watching each other warily. Litter-bearers remove the remaining wounded while surgeons, dizzy with exhaustion, continue their rough medicine. Burial parties dig long trenches, bury the fallen en masse. Along Overall Creek, Colonel Parkhurst’s provost guards flush hundreds of Union stragglers out of the thickets, herd them back to their regiments.

  Rosecrans’s headquarters staff tabulates the dead, wounded, and missing. When Rosecrans pauses in his peregrinations for a late lunch, Major Goddard hands him the estimate. Of just over 43,000 men, the Army of the Cumberland has suffered some 2,000 dead, 8,000 wounded, and 4,000 missing. Even given that the final figures will be the usual ten to twenty percent less than initial battlefield estimates, the army has taken a terrific pounding.

  Rosecrans studies the list of unit losses, his frown deepening. At last he sighs, looks at Goddard. “I think, Major, that we’d best keep this to ourselves for the time being. It is very serious, worse than I’d imagined.”

  “Yes, sir. There’s only the single copy I made. I’ll keep it safe.”

  “Good. So do you think we can fight another day?”

  Goddard is nonplussed. He has always thought of himself as a clerk, has not considered that Garesché’s death might elevate him to the position of advising the commanding general. He licks his lips. “General, if you fight, the men will fight with you.”

  Rosecrans nods, faintly amused by the young major’s obvious distress. “Yes, I believe they will. This is a fine army, Major. Fine men.”

  Lieutenant Colonel George Brent, who has undertaken the tabulation of the Southern dead, wounded, and missing, finds the Confederate commanders maddeningly casual in their reports. How is it, he muses, that we can keep track of four million coloreds and every boll of cotton and leaf of tobacco they produce for us, and not be able to count our own dead and wounded? It is a contrariety, one of many in the Southern character: a seeming refusal to do anything that might stink of clerkishness, of the tight-fisted avarice of the Yankee shopkeeper. Does this reluctance exacerbate the Confederacy’s difficulty with logistics? Explain why so many soldiers are poorly fed, shod, and clothed? Why Bragg, as skilled a quartermaster as any soldier in the South, is reviled for lacking imagination and dash? Brent, who would himself prefer to command a regiment to serving as chief of staff, rather supposes so.

  Despite the difficulties, Brent produces a surprisingly accurate estimate. Out of just under 38,000 men at the beginning of the battle, the Army of Tennessee has lost 1,300 dead, 7,900 wounded, and 1,000 missing. When he presents his report to Bragg in early afternoon, the general sets it aside until he finishes the letter he is composing to General Johnston regarding the unexpected and unwelcome arrival of Pillow. Only when he has read the letter over and signed it does he pick up Brent’s report. He studies the report without expression, his huge eyebrows drawn together behind his spectacles. He sets it down and gazes out the window at a snow flurry eddying in the cedars. At length, he looks at Brent. “Thank you, Colonel. These are heavy losses but not fearful ones. They fall within acceptable limits, and we have done great damage to our enemies. Tonight they will retreat. Tomorrow we will follow and finish the work.”

  Whatever his critics may think of him, Bragg is not without human feelings. When Brent has left the room, Bragg again reads the casualty figures, this time allowing himself a sad shake of the head. They could have been so much lower if men had just done what he’d told them to. The main fault lies with Breckinridge and Polk: Breckinridge for delaying in the face of a phantom advance until his brigades could no longer be sent to reinforce Hardee; Polk for squandering those same brigades in piecemeal attacks against the Round Forest.

  Despite the failure to take that miserable grove of trees, Bragg still views yesterday as a triumph. Hence his great surprise that Rosecrans has not retreated. He shares with most Old Army professionals the opinion that Rosecrans is brilliant but erratic, likely to come apart under pressure. Perhaps he has underestimated the man. Or perhaps Hardee is right in crediting George Thomas. Yet the more Bragg considers Rosecrans’s refusal to retreat, the more it seems a blunder. The Yankees have been marching and fighting for nearly a week. Wheeler has devastated their supply trains, and tonight they will again go cold, hungry, and shelterless. Meanwhile, Rosecrans the engineer will have them awake chopping and digging. By morning, they will be exhausted, even less capable of defending themselves than this morning. True, Bragg’s own men will also spend the night in the open, but they will at least have something in their bellies and as much sleep as they can manage.

  During the afternoon lull, Confederate details scavenge the field for abandoned Yankee weapons. They retrieve thousands of small arms, including a large number of new Springfield rifle-muskets. Even more satisfying is the tally of thirty-one cannons salvaged and presented to the army’s artillerymen. In several regiments, color guards set about adding crossed cannons to their battle flags. It is an award supposedly granted only by army headquarters, but generals have their priorities and timetables, enlisted men theirs.

  Oddly, the Rebel cannoneers are slow to integrate the Union guns into their batteries. Part of the problem is ammunition, another part their suspicion— not entirely unfounded—of the Parrott rifles, which have a reputation for exploding. A third part is their distrust of any gun that would allow itself to be captured. The Rebel cannoneers are an exceedingly superstitious lot, endowing their guns with names and suprarational personalities. To part with a trusted gun in favor of a treacherous Yankee piece—although it may fire a heavier load a longer distance—is more than they can be persuaded to do on short notice. So the majority of the captured guns go into the army’s reserve artillery of old, tired, obsolete cannons.

  Thousands of Confederate soldiers scour the battlefield on their own or in small groups, motivated by curiosity, the love of missing comrades, or simple greed. A squad of Cheatham’s men comes on the body of Colonel George Roberts. They bury him in the rocks, laboriously etching his name in the limestone. They know a hero when they see one, whatever his uniform.

  All but the most heartless men obey an unwritten set of rules when looting the dead. Clothing, shoes, coins and shinplasters (the fractional bills issued by both governments), pocketknives, sewing kits, and the innumerable small, useful items of the soldier’s life are considered expedient items of plunder. The scrupulous turn the watches and wedding rings of fallen comrades over to their officers. The same items taken from a foe become part of the barter currency within the armies.

  Earlier in the war, most soldiers considered it unseemly to read a dead man’s letters or diary. But by now curiosity, boredom, and a general want of reading material have made these almost as valuable as cash. Men pass them about, for the most part respectfully. There is, of course, something titillating in reading these letters. Photographs pass from hand to hand, the images becoming the object of late-night onanism by many men: a small and momentary pleasure that inevitably leads to sleepless ponderings on the possible faithlessness of wife or sweetheart, oaths of revenge, and— finally—small heartsick whimpering.

  Private Dickie Krall, Company A, 1st Louisiana Regular Infantry, finds a carefully folded and much-read letter in the inside blouse pocket of a redhaired Yankee private with a bullet hole through the forehead. He reads:

  Dear Husbend Charly,

  You no i said in my last leter that i culdnt go on bein fathful to you les you culd com hom and act lik a fathar to yur kids and a husbend to me. I aint got no mony atall and fathful dont pay for nothin. But you didnt com hom and you didnt send no mony so i tok up with homer pike from ovr in wadsworth. I am sory for this but i aint got no chois since you didnt com hom to be a good fathar and husbend and didnt send no mony. Homers a good man and had enuf mony to by hisself a substut and not go messin rond with a lot a things that
wernt non of his concrn and mite hav got him kiled anywy. But i hop tht aint hapened to you and tht yur wel. Gues this means you can go west lik you alwys sad you wnted to. Ifn it dont go rit with homer me and the kids i mite go long ifn youll hav us. Tho nowin you I dont supos youd hav us back even tho what i don wer only cuz you wodnt com hom and be a good husbend and fathar or send no mony.

  Yur wife Eleanor Bonnard

  Dickie Krall reads the letter a second time, feeling infinitely sad, before slipping it into a pocket. Later, when no one is looking, he’ll drop it in the fire. Why, he wonders, had the Yank kept such a hateful thing, folding it carefully after each reading? This seems to him entirely incomprehensible in the aftermath of his own shame. He thinks of Joe Zein dying of a dozen bayonet wounds, but whose face had still been beautiful in death, even sublime, as if waiting for whatever resurrection may yet come at the behest of a Mercy not only beyond knowing but inconceivable.

  With the afternoon fading, the scavengers and working parties abandon the field. Amid the cedars and the death, the dusk brings on atavistic fears even in the most rational. Colonel John Beatty, banker and writer, recalls the French phrase for twilight: Entre chien et loup—between the dog and the wolf—and shivers for no good reason.

  At sundown, a heavy exchange of fire blazes up at the center of the facing lines, but it withers quickly, curling away toward the flanks. Men settle down to making themselves as comfortable as possible. The Confederates receive their rations, but, forbidden fires, must eat their sowbelly raw. On the Union side of the line, the fare is much poorer. Even coffee, more treasured even than tobacco, is in short supply. John Beatty sups on a slice of raw pork and a few crackers, recording in his journal that no food ever tasted sweeter.