The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (George Washington Series)

by Newt Gingrich

  “You heard me.”

  “As your papers, sir?”

  He hesitated.

  “No, just general notes to be opened after I am gone.”

  Hay looked at him curiously, nodded, and said nothing. As the door closed he looked over at his assistant.

  “Find some place to put these,” he said.

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  SEPTEMBER 4, 1864

  DAWN

  It was as he had last seen it: raining, a mist rising off the river, the burial details finishing out the graves, a line of ambulances rumbling across the bridge.

  He had stumbled about the field for the last hour, ever since the first light of approaching dawn.

  James was beyond exhaustion. He had gone to check in at Willard’s after meeting with the President. He had taken the best room available, but he had skipped the bath and the buying of a change of clothes. Midnight was the deadline for this week’s delivery of sketches to his publisher, and he had gone over to their Washington office. He turned the usual sketches in, the life of soldiers in the trenches playing cards, a grand review behind the lines, bedraggled Rebel prisoners being led to the rear. He had included several sketches of the court of inquiry with the absolutely clear understanding they were not to be released until after the official record was published.

  He did share a couple of sketches of the digging of the mine, but his editor told him Frank Leslie had already beaten them to the punch on that, and Ward had turned in a magnificent drawing which had been featured as a two-page center spread the week before. It was old news now; too bad James didn’t have something fresh from Atlanta. His editor strongly hinted that he could make something up and turn it in tomorrow, the usual stuff of a city burning and wrecked trains. He did however pay James five dollars extra for the mine drawings, which could be published in the back pages after the court of inquiry was made official.

  They had gossiped a bit about the news. Burnside was indeed back in Rhode Island, supposedly on personal leave. All knew he would never return, Grant having already picked someone from outside the corps named Parker to command the Ninth. His editor said James stank like a dead hog, gave him a drink, and then actually offered him a good assignment, to go back to New York for a few weeks, get the war out of his system, perhaps turn in some drawings of political rallies. McClellan had already made it clear that he’d be delighted to sit for a portrait if Harper’s would put it on their front page.

  Reilly declined, took his pay in cash, drank five dollars of it back at Willard’s, and then just went out. He just went walking, finally crossing the iron bridge over the Potomac to come here.

  He had wandered in vain for the last hour; so much had changed since he was last here in June, just three short months ago. There were at least two thousand more graves, covering acres of ground. Where his brother had been buried, he could no longer tell. The rains of summer had collapsed some graves. Some of the wooden planks that marked each grave had fallen over; some good soul apparently had tried to replace them, but doubtless the next storm would knock them over again. In many places it was just the sunken, muddy ground that marked where a body, or bodies, had moldered during the summer of this third year of war.

  The gravediggers were more colored troops, men finishing their tasks and rising up out of the holes dug overnight, giving James a frightful chill as he remembered the bodies being hauled up out of the crater. Some were grumbling, and he wanted to go over and grab hold of them, scream that for heaven’s sake they should thank God this was all that this war demanded of them. But, like all fresh fish that had yet to see the elephant, they would not have listened.

  The ambulances drew closer, circled around, and stopped. The daily ritual was repeated. Bodies were pulled out, men who had died in the city hospitals during the night, now to be interred in a rain-soaked ceremony.

  He drew back and stood to one side, saying nothing, head lowered. The first of the wagons set off, then the next. He heard the distant words of a minister, a ragged volley, then the sound of men shoveling the earth back in.

  “Mr. Reilly?”

  Startled, he looked up. Standing before him was Garland White.

  Speechless, he could only stand there. Garland finally stepped forward and grasped his hand; a second later the two embraced and more than a few men, white and black, looked over at them with surprise, several muttering comments.

  “What are you doing here?” both exclaimed and there were shy laughs in reply.

  “You first, sir.”

  “Damn it, Garland, it is James. After all we been through together, it is James; it will be James forever with you.”

  “All right then, James. You first. Last I saw of you was the day after the crater,” he paused, his eyes glazing over with that strange long-distant look, “out there at night.”

  James nodded.

  “I went back to cover the court of inquiry.”

  Garland snorted with disdain but said nothing.

  “Yes, my feelings as well” was all James could say.

  “But here?”

  “Came up to turn in my drawings, and,” he hesitated, “to see an old friend and tell him about all that had happened.”

  Garland nodded sagely.

  “Did he believe you?”

  “Yes, he did. And I think it is all right to say he believed what you and your comrades did as well.”

  Garland looked at him quizzically but did not ask further.

  “Heard a couple of rumors about who your friend is.”

  “What?”

  Garland smiled.

  “After it was all over. One of my men was an orderly for an aide to General Burnside after the battle; overheard a conversation or two.”

  He chuckled.

  “Remember I once told you it is all rather amazing how often we, just standing in the corner, know far more than so many others realize.”

  James did not react, and Garland clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Thank you, my friend.”

  James, with so many years of practice, did not react, even now before his friend.

  “Why here, at this hour?” Garland pressed.

  James gestured back to the acres of graves.

  “I thought I might find my brother.”

  Garland sighed.

  “I am so sorry, James. We did not have time that day. Perhaps we can try and find him now and make arrangements.”

  James suddenly felt tears welling up and could only nod in reply.

  “Why are you here, though?”

  “Two things. I was given a furlough to accompany some of our wounded back to a hospital for colored soldiers established here in Washington. One of our boys died during the night, so of course I had to accompany him out here to see that all was fittingly done.”

  “So, at least we bury our dead side by side,” James whispered.

  “Yes, at least that is how it is done here.”

  “A good start.”

  “I think so.”

  “And what else?”

  Garland tried to smile but the gesture was awkward.

  “I was informed that I have to appear before a board. Apparently someone has decided to commission some colored officers.”

  “And you were nominated?” James asked, and now there was actually some delight in his voice.

  Garland nodded shyly.

  “Only as ministers for colored regiments; rank of major, but it is another step.”

  “I know you will make it, Garland. By God, if anyone can, it will be you.”

  “Thank you for that, James.”

  “I do have a few friends I could put a word in with…” James offered spontaneously.

  Garland smiled but shook his head.

  “Rather make it on my own merits, no matter who it is you know.”

  “You are naïve.”

  “Sometimes that’s a blessing.”

  Garland took James by the elbow. The burial detail was finishing up its duty, the
honor guard having already marched off through the mud.

  “Let’s see if we can find him.”

  The hour-long search proved to be a fruitless one. So much had changed in just a few months. Thousands of graves, the once immaculate lawn cut over, rutted, a sea of mud, fresher graves still mounded, older ones sunken in, the mud having run off in rivers from the driving summer rains.

  The dead had not been buried by regiments, only by date of death. Though they found some plaques from around the time that James’s brother had died, it was impossible to pinpoint, out of a dozen or so in one line, exactly which one was his, shared with another comrade.

  “I am so sorry, James,” Garland whispered. “It bothered me deeply after we left for the front. I promised myself that someday I would come back here with some of the boys and set it right for you.”

  James could only shake his head.

  “At least he’s here.”

  Garland looked over at him as James’s gaze swept across the lower field of Arlington.

  “This will always be sacred ground. He sleeps with comrades, whether he has his own marker stone or not. I don’t think it matters to him now. He is here, where he belongs, with comrades who understand what each other endured.”

  James did something that was now rare for him; he went down on his knees. He lowered his head, offered a Hail Mary for the repose of his brother, made the sign of the cross, and looked back up at Garland, who, with head bowed, had silently prayed alongside him and now helped him to stand back up.

  He reached into his haversack and took out one drawing that he had purposely saved, with the hope of one day seeing his friend again.

  “This is for you, Garland.”

  The sergeant major, soon to be a commissioned major, the first of eleven African American officers in the history of the United States Army, unfolded the sketch. It was of Garland, sitting by a campfire, comrades, many of them gone, perhaps some of them buried here, gathered around him.

  “Thank you, my friend,” Garland whispered. “My brother.”

  AFTERWORD

  The USCT, the United States Colored Troops, were nearly two hundred regiments strong by the end of the war in the spring of 1865.

  Troops of African descent had served in the Union cause as early as 1862, mobilizing in Louisiana, along the coast of South Carolina, and as far west as Kansas. The most famed of these early regiments, the 54th Massachusetts, immortalized in the movie Glory, saw combat service, but it was not until after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, that the federal government undertook an active role in recruiting men of color to serve in the Union cause.

  The effort could not have come a moment too soon. While, in the first eighteen months of the war, hundreds of thousands had flocked to volunteer, the relentlessly numbing casualty rolls appearing each day in newspapers across the North had stilled this early enthusiasm, and by late 1863, bounty payments of upward of a thousand dollars, the equal of nearly a hundred thousand dollars today, often failed to draw reliable recruits.

  Compounding this was the fact that nearly all the regiments which had volunteered with such enthusiasm in 1861 had signed on for only three years of service, and by the middle of the summer of 1864, as their terms of enlistment ended, it was becoming increasingly evident that the armies in the field might very well collapse for lack of troops.

  In addition, political will for this protracted and apparently endless war was waning in the North. If a modern Gallup Poll service had been around in that year, it might very well have found as few as one in three, or even one in four, in the North who still wished to see the fight pressed through to final and complete victory, thereby dooming the continent to more wars to come as both sides squabbled over what was to be done with territories to the west and even in other lands such as Mexico and Cuba.

  It was at this exact moment that African Americans were at last given the chance to flock to the colors and join the cause. Contrary to popular myth, the vast majority of these men, at least in the early regiments recruited in late 1863 through early 1864, were not runaway slaves or “contraband,” but instead were overwhelmingly freemen of color living in the North, many of them having lived there for generations, more than a few well educated. It is one of the few myths of the remarkable film Glory that nearly all the men of the 54th were “contraband,” runaway slaves. Many of that famed regiment could trace lineages back to ancestors who had fought in the war of 1812 and even the War of Independence.

  The story of Garland White is based on fact, and his story is intricately tied to the 28th USCT, recruited out of Indiana. He was indeed a slave of Senator Toombs of Georgia, who later briefly served as the Confederate Secretary of State and then as a general in the Confederate army. Doing what Frederick Douglass would have half jokingly described as “stealing himself,” White left the “employment” of Toombs in Washington, D.C., and fled to Canada. If you study the still existing letters of Garland White, you will observe a remarkable transition in a period of but a few years from a man who could barely print and articulate a clear sentence to one writing with the classical flourish of an educated Victorian gentleman, and who penned letters of great eloquence, exhorting the governors of various states to begin the mobilization of their black citizens, if they could be called such, for the war effort.

  Garland worked aggressively to recruit men for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts and was even offered the position of sergeant major with one of those regiments. He felt, however, a calling elsewhere, and focused his attention on the Midwest.

  On December 24, 1863, Garland White was present at a black church in Indianapolis to begin the enrollment of men for the 28th USCT. By his side was one Doctor Revel, whose brother after the war would be a congressman representing North Carolina.

  There is a terrible irony, worth considering even today, about the enlistment of this regiment. Every man who joined, and thereby helped Indiana to reach its quota of new recruits, was technically an illegal alien in that state. Although by the chartering of the Northwest Ordinance upon the creation of our Republic, this country forbade slavery in what would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and other states, nothing was said of the nature of full citizenship. Blacks were forbidden to settle there, own property, attend public schools, sit on juries, vote, or even hold a public library card. And yet, nevertheless, the black men rallied, Garland promising them that by so doing they would affirm their rights of citizenship and return to a state grateful for their service.

  When the regiment deployed out of Indianapolis, late in April 1864, Governor Morton formally reviewed the troops, his action seen by all as a significant symbolic gesture.

  As described, the 28th did serve as gravediggers at Arlington, and were finally incorporated into the Fourth Division of the Ninth Corps, sustaining fearful casualties at the Battle of the Crater.

  After the Crater, the division was held back from the front line for several months, though it did participate in limited actions along the western edge of the Petersburg front later that fall. When a corps made up solely of black troops was finally created, the two brigades of the Fourth Division were transferred to this new formation and positioned along the siege lines in front of Richmond.

  During the night of April 2–3, 1865, troops in the trenches before Richmond saw fires glowing in the city and were finally ordered to go forward. What ensued was a remarkable footrace, as dozens of regiments, black and white, dashed ahead to claim that they were the first to enter the Rebel capital, which was being abandoned when, after more than nine months of deadly siege after the Battle of the Crater, Grant finally broke Lee’s hold on Petersburg.

  Nearly every one of those regiments tried to lay some claim to being the “first into Richmond,” and perhaps history should award that title to all of them, for they were indeed there at the ending of the great siege.

  What unfolded next is truly the stuff of novels and not just dry history. Garland described the utter jubi
lation of thousands of liberated slaves, pouring out to greet men of the “sable arm,” pouring in disciplined ranks through the streets of the city. He wrote how, in all that confusion, he heard a familiar voice crying out his name and, turning, he saw his mother. His former master had brought her to Richmond as a house servant and, recognizing her beloved son in that surging column of troops, she pressed her way through the jubilant crowds to fling herself into his arms, a reunion after more than a decade of separation.

  But the war was not yet over for Garland and the 28th; the actions of an emperor in France now kept them in service.

  While our Civil War raged, Emperor Napoleon III launched a mad scheme to conquer Mexico as part of a French, Austrian, and Spanish alliance, and for a very brief time, with the connivance of England as well. Napoleon put an Austrian Hapsburg on the throne, the tragic Maximilian, who declared himself to be emperor of Mexico, backed up by the bayonets of the French Foreign Legion, Austrian, and even Belgian, troops.

  With our fratricidal conflict at an end, it was clearly evident that the Monroe Doctrine would be back in play, and President Johnson ordered the deployment of over fifty thousand federal troops to the Texas border with Mexico. Yet while nearly all the volunteer regiments of white troops had signed on for durations of three years or “until the suppression of the rebellion,” that was not so with the USCT. Consequently, the corps of over thirty thousand black troops, who had signed a slightly different contract, found that less than two months after the victory in Virginia they were on ships bound for Texas, led by General Phil Sheridan in a show of force, with the implied threat that unless the emperor of France backed off, our army, well seasoned in battle, would invade.

  What they endured was six months of hell. Fresh water was so scarce that watering ships had to sail clear to the mouth of the Mississippi, there to fill up with “fresh” water flowing past New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico, to be rationed out in the Texas heat at little more than a quart or two a day. Scurvy was rampant and more men of the 28th USCT would die of disease or be debilitated by scurvy than those who were felled by combat at the Crater.