Replacing her hat with a scarf pulled down over her head to her chin, she hurried downstairs and left the hotel, glanced up and down the street, and saw Cecil’s back in the distance. She hurried after him, as much as possible keeping close to the shadows of the buildings.
He walked some distance, reached the river, then turned and made his way along the waterfront. There were few people about and Veronica was nervous that he would turn back. But she kept on.
After about ten minutes, Cecil stopped. A man wearing a thick overcoat and broad hat approached him. Veronica crept closer then stopped, hiding behind a brick warehouse, and peered around the edge of the wall. They talked for a few minutes, then Cecil handed the man a packet. They shook hands. The man turned, walked toward the river, got into a small boat, and began rowing across.
Realizing they were through with their business, Veronica turned, ran along the side of the building, and tried to regain her bearings. She hurried back to the hotel, just barely reaching it in time to remove the scarf and sit down and try to relax and seem bored. Two minutes later Cecil’s knock came on the door.
“Where did you go?” she asked, doing her best to hide the fact that she was still out of breath herself.
“Oh, just downstairs to the lobby,” he replied. “I had to see someone.”
“I thought you were going into the city somewhere.”
“No, just downstairs. But now you and I can go out. Do you feel like some dinner?”
“It’s not… dangerous, is it? I mean—are there any Union soldiers about? Do you think there could be any fighting?”
“No, nothing to worry about!” laughed Cecil. “Where is the brave spirit of the Beaumonts?”
“I thought the Union army was nearby.”
“I think there might be a regiment across the river somewhere, but I assure you it’s nothing to worry about. This is a strategic city and there is little doubt the Union will make an attempt on it eventually. But it won’t be in the next few days. Most of the action is south of here at Chickamauga where the armies have been facing off for months. But that’s eight or ten miles away.”
“Ten miles! There’s fighting that close?”
“They’re not fighting, my dear,” laughed Cecil. “At least not yet. That’s just where they are.”
“That sounds close!”
“Not to worry, I tell you. What’s come over you, Veronica? You’re more jittery than I’ve ever seen you.”
“Oh, nothing… it’s just… different here.” Veronica forced a laugh. “Maybe I am a little nervous,” she added.
The next two days were not what Veronica had expected. There was little to do and she kept mostly to the hotel. Cecil met a few people, introduced her to some of them but spoke in low cryptic tones to others, making it clear he did not want her to hear the gist of the conversation.
As they were returning one evening to the hotel, Cecil glanced back over his shoulder.
“What is it?” asked Veronica. “You’ve been acting funny all day. Now it’s you who are nervous.”
Cecil laughed. “Nothing to worry about, I’ve just had the feeling someone is watching us and I don’t like it.”
“You’ve been meeting strange people ever since we arrived,” laughed Veronica. “It’s probably one of your mystery people who wants to talk to you!”
Cecil looked at her with an odd expression.
“What do you mean… my mystery people?”
“You know—you’re always talking with people like everything’s so secretive.”
Cecil nodded but said nothing more. He did not seem pleased by her comment.
They left Chattanooga the following morning, taking the train to Nashville, then Louisville, and north to Indianapolis, and finally Chicago.
The moment they were out of the South, everything changed. In the cities of the North life seemed normal again. Within no time Veronica forgot her fears and hesitations in the glamour of the great Midwestern city. Every day they went shopping and sightseeing. Every night they went to the finest restaurants. Cecil was in rare form as a host and man about town. They went dancing, he bought her gifts. Was he, thought Veronica, made of money?
How would she explain to Richard all these new dresses and hats, gloves and shoes?
Even in Europe, Richard had never shown Veronica such a time as she had in Chicago with Cecil Hirsch. By the time they returned to Washington, she was more under his spell than she would have thought possible.
Sixteen
It was with great relief in their hearts that the family of Aaron Steddings crossed the border from Maryland into Penn’s Woods. Tears rose in Zaphorah’s eyes to know they were out of the South and the Confederacy. They were tears that spoke many things, and they rode for some way in thoughtful silence.
With the help of many new Quaker friends, they arrived in Philadelphia a week after leaving Greenwood. There they caught a train to Burlington, where they rented a buggy for the final several miles of the journey.
Their keen sense of anticipation rose with every mile of the way that led them along Rancocas Creek, past the original homestead of John Woolman and his father William, from whom by now more than a thousand Woolman descendents had sprung. Just beyond it, they turned into the long road leading to the several homes that had been built through the years on the original Borton land, one of which was now occupied by Aaron’s former employer John Borton and his brother Pemberton.
They heard the clank, clank, clank of hammer on anvil as they rode toward the house.
John Borton himself, gray and showing the signs of his sixty-eight years, was out in the blacksmith’s shop that had been Aaron’s domain twelve years before. Hearing the sound of an approaching buggy, the pounding stopped and Borton walked out, hammer in hand. A buggy was just reining in.
He squinted in the sunlight. A man and a woman were getting down, both black. Three black children were with them.
He walked slowly away from the shop… the fellow was running toward him… what was that great smile on the man’s—
Suddenly Borton’s face went pale. The hammer fell from his hands and landed with a thud on the ground.
He stood in disbelief, tears streaming down his face as he beheld the friend approaching whom he had never expected to see again.
“Aaron Steddings!” he breathed in a voice not much more than a whisper as the two shook hands. “My dear friend! How… but… the Lord be praised! Thee has come home!”
Aaron stood before him beaming, his own face also wet in unashamed joy.
“And thy beautiful wife!” Borton went on, seeing Zaphorah walking up behind Aaron, “…and thy young ones, now all grown into fine young men and women! Will thee not all come in… we shall have something cold to drink. I… I am simply overwhelmed… I do not know what to say. I am eager to hear everything!”
“And thy wife?” asked Zaphorah. “She is well?”
Borton drew in a deep sigh.
“I am sorry to have to tell thee,” he replied. “But I lost my dear Martha only a year or two after thy disappearance.”
“Oh, the dear lady!” said Zaphorah. “I am so sorry for thy loss.”
Seventeen
Both the Union and the Confederacy were about to face their greatest challenge of the war. In a single week of July, two massive battles, one in the East, one in the West, changed everything.
In the summer of 1863, the Confederacy again attempted an invasion of the North under General Lee. This time Lee’s army crossed the Pennsylvania border, and moved into Union territory. It finally seemed that no one was capable of stopping Robert E. Lee.
Only when its own soil was threatened, as at Antietam, did Union forces rise to the occasion. Now came another such encounter. The Confederate army was met in late June by a huge federal force under the command of General George Meade at the small town of Gettysburg. The very name would forever after be linked with the most terrible battle ever fought on American soil. Once again the Union army s
tiffened and rose to repulse an invasion. When it was over, after three days of fighting, over 50,000 young American men were dead or wounded. The wagons full of the casualties of the defeated rebel army stretched seventeen miles as they made their way back south.
But Gettysburg was not the Union’s only victory that week. The war turned on two fronts simultaneously.
In the West, on July 4th, the day after the final shots had been heard at Gettysburg, after a forty-eight day siege, Confederate Commander John Pemberton, a Pennsylvanian, at last surrendered 30,000 Confederate troops to Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg.
The Union now controlled the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans and the Gulf.
In one week, the entire course of the war had shifted. Lincoln wrote to a friend, “Victory does not appear so distant as it did.”
Yet again, in spite of the victory at Gettysburg, Lincoln’s eastern generals disappointed him. As before, a decisive opportunity to crush Lee’s retreating army and possibly end the war was lost by a tentative Meade. The fighting as a result would drag on for another two years.
After his defeat at Gettysburg, Lee wrote to Jefferson Davis offering to resign. “I generally feel a begrowing failure of my bodily strength,” he said. “I anxiously urge the matter upon Your Excellency from my belief that a younger and abler man than myself can readily be obtained.”
But to find a better commander than Robert Lee, Davis said in reply, was “an impossibility.” Lee’s offer was not accepted.
With their guns silent and their cannons stilled, the armies moved on from the catastrophic scene of battle, leaving just over two thousand residents of Gettysburg to care for and bury the 25,000 that were left with them. A woman wrote, “Wounded men were brought into our houses and laid side-by-side in our halls and first-story rooms. Carpets were so saturated with blood as to be unfit for further use. Walls were bloodstained, as well as books that were used as pillows.” And on the hills and in the fields surrounding the town, dead lay everywhere by the thousands, corpses putrefying under the summer sun.
In the West, meanwhile, now that Grant had secured the Mississippi, the Union looked toward the strategic city of Chattanooga, on a bend of the Tennessee River where two important railroad lines joined, guarding the routes to the eastern Confederacy and Georgia, as its next objective.
But standing in the way were the Confederate forces at Chickamauga Creek just across the border in Georgia.
The battle at Chickamauga in the third week of September in defense of Chattanooga brought one of the rare instances in the war when Confederate troops outnumbered those from the Union. A six-month standoff between the two armies at last erupted when Confederate forces pummeled the Union.
The fighting raged furiously for two days.
Thomas Davidson was now fighting with Captain Young’s regiment under the command of the general most of his troops considered a tyrant, General Braxton Bragg. Cameron Beaumont had been promoted to sergeant and was now also assigned to Captain Young’s command. But though they all hated him, Bragg’s Confederate troops had the better of it.
Thomas’s regiment found itself in the thick of the afternoon’s charge. The air was thick with the gray smoke of cannon explosions. All about was yelling and shouting and running as the commanders shouted orders in a chaos of confused smoke and mud and blood.
By late afternoon the badly routed Union army was fleeing in full retreat, staggering back toward the city.
But, their victory assured, Bragg called off the charge. He was reluctant to pursue Rosecrans across the creek. Young and the other officers were furious. Had Bragg ordered a full assault on Chattanooga, they might crush the entire Union army in Tennessee!
It was a massive defeat for the Union, and included the death of Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law. Yet even in defeat, Union troops occupied Chattanooga, and Bragg’s hesitancy made it not so severe a defeat as it might have been. And federal reinforcements were on the way to attempt to turn the defeat into a victory.
They were led by Ulysses S. Grant.
That night as he lay on his bedroll, Thomas Davidson lay awake unable to sleep.
The day had been a savage one. Even in what everyone was calling a victory, dead had fallen all around him. He was hungry and tired and homesick. Even going into battle, their rations of meat were too skimpy to keep a rat alive. Sometimes Thomas wondered if that’s what they were eating!
One by one incidents from the day replayed themselves in his brain… the shrieking… the smell of gunpowder… bodies lying everywhere… wounded crying for help… running… stumbling sometimes over but half a broken body.
Late in the day, before Bragg had called them off, his regiment had been in pursuit of a dozen or more Union soldiers who had dropped their guns and were fleeing for their lives.
“Don’t let a single mother’s son of them escape!” shouted Young. “After them, men… the cowards are on the run!”
Shots sounded on all sides. One by one, fifty yards ahead, the young men in blue continued to fall. Unable to keep up, Thomas saw one gradually slow.
Beside him an explosion sounded from Travis Durkin’s gun. Thomas saw a splotch of red explode over the blue uniform, and the man toppled to the ground.
Durkin ran up and looked down, and shot him again, this time in the head. He turned to where Thomas watched in shock. A look of disdain spread over Durkin’s face.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “Why didn’t you shoot him? You were closer than I was.”
But the others were continuing in pursuit and Thomas ran on to join them.
Max Cardiff had just emptied his gun and stopped to reload. “Travis, get that guy on the right,” he cried. “Look, he’s still got his gun—get him before he fires!”
Durkin slowed, raised his rifle, and fired.
“I missed!” he yelled, swearing loudly. “Get him, Davidson—that’s an order. Shoot him!”
Thomas hesitated.
“Come on, you sissy, fire!” shouted Durkin again. “I’ll have you up on charges if you don’t empty that gun of yours!”
Gunfire was exploding all around him. Thomas raised his gun and aimed high, then pulled the trigger. The next instant he saw the blue form stumble and fall forty yards ahead.
A silent pang of horror overwhelmed him. Thomas shut his eyes and tried to shake the image from his mind. But he could not keep away the tears of agony and grief. Had he actually killed a man today? The thought was too horrible to dwell on.
Shots had been coming from everywhere, he tried to tell himself.
“Oh, God!” he thought. “Let it have been somebody else!”
Why did he join this army? he agonized with himself for the hundredth time. He didn’t believe in this war. He didn’t believe in slavery! He thought of the Shaw boys. They had been his and Seth’s best friends.
As much as he had tried to tell himself that his father was crazy for what he had done, he realized now that his father had been right—slavery was wrong, this war was wrong, killing was wrong!
“I’m sorry, God… Help me get out of this awful war! Help me, God… please help me!”
Thomas turned over, buried his face in his dirty blanket, until, mercifully, sleep finally overtook him.
They recovered from the battle, buried their dead, and got their wounded into field hospitals and nearby homes.
Reports confirmed that Grant was on his way north, some said with as many as 17,000 reinforcements.
Scouting details were sent out in several directions from the Confederate camp across Chickamauga Creek. Thomas went out with a half dozen men eastward into Georgia, just south of the Tennessee border.
As they were riding on their third day out on patrol, suddenly they heard a whoop from Travis Durkin. They looked and saw him spurring his horse ahead. The rest of their small detail hurried after him. They saw that he had spotted a small group of slave girls picking berries.
“Hey look, boys,” yelled Durkin behind him, “we f
ound us some nigger girls!”
“Yeah, but ugly as sin,” said Cardiff riding up to join him. “I can tell even from this far.”
“They’s girls, Max,” added Durkin with an evil grin. “They got all the equipment I need. Let’s go!”
The four girls saw the soldiers almost the same moment. Immediately they realized they had wandered too far from the farmhouse. They dropped their buckets as the riders galloped toward them and ran for their lives.
Like dogs enlivened by the chase, the riders whooped and shouted and spurred their horses on. Though the terrain was uneven and uncultivated, with scattered trees and one stream to negotiate, and with a denser wood five or six hundred yards beyond, the pursuers quickly closed the distance, excited to yet greater heights by the shrieks reaching their ears.
Lagging behind his companions, Thomas feared what might be the outcome if they overtook the terrified girls. He had seen enough during the past two years to know what was on the minds of Travis Durkin and Max Cardiff. Like many rowdy youths unpossessed of the backbone of character, once out from under parental authority, they gave full vent to their untamed nature. To such half-men, casting off the restraints of conscience validated what they perceived as their dawning manhood. They were in fact but boys now occupying the bodies of men who had never learned that the first sign of maturity is the capacity to discipline oneself, and to curb the lusts of the flesh.
Though the perceived constraints of his own parental covering had grown oppressive, out on his own in a world where sin ruled, the younger son of Richmond and Carolyn Davidson was slowly recognizing that he was not like other young men, and that their ways disgusted him. He was more the son of his father than he yet realized. He did not exactly define the struggle taking place within him as resulting from his being a Christian. Had he paused to reflect upon it, he might have confessed uncertainty about his beliefs. A time would come for him to wrestle through matters of faith, but that time was not yet. He only knew that in matters of behavior he was set apart from most of those around them. He could not drink like them, swear like them, kill like them… and did not view women like they did—as objects of pleasure. Till now he had been a silent, unwilling, uncomfortable, and sometimes conscience-burdened observer. But a crossroads of courage for Thomas Davidson was nearly at hand.
American Dreams Trilogy Page 127