Every white person being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize, or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the Confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprise, attack, or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death.
In his autobiography, written over half a century after the event, Henry James recounted a memorable visit he made that spring to Camp Meigs, the regiment’s training grounds at Readville, outside of Boston. There the author, who had always felt himself constitutionally excluded from such blatantly butch realms of endeavor—he confessed that he couldn’t “do things”—was struck by the romance of his little brother’s “quick spring out of mere juvenility and into such brightly-bristling ranks,” marveling that “this soft companion of my childhood” should have mastered “such mysteries, such engines, such arts.” (All of which mysteries, engines, and arts would serve the future Frank James splendidly in his felonious postbellum endeavors.) At Readville, Henry found his brother surrounded by a cadre of “laughing, welcoming, sunburnt young men who seemed mainly to bristle…with Boston genealogies.” Foremost among these was the regiment’s strikingly handsome and patrician commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, eulogized decades later by William James as “the blue-eyed child of fortune.” Shaw chose Wilky to be his adjutant.
The Massachusetts 54th Infantry shipped out of Boston for South Carolina on May 28, 1863. Among the throng lining the route of their valedictory march through the city to the harbor that day were Frederick Douglass, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry James, Sr. Though he confessed to being “helplessly absent” due to illness on that historic occasion, Henry James, Jr., nonetheless described the stirring scene of the regiment parading through Boston on its way to war, led on horseback by “its fairest of young commanders,” the tawny-bearded Colonel Shaw, his upraised sword gleaming in the sun, to “great reverberations of music, of fluttering banners, launched benedictions and every public sound.”
Around the time of this inspiring spectacle, Robertson James, at the illegally tender age of only sixteen, signed on with the all-white Massachusetts 45th Regiment, from which he, too, soon transferred to a black outfit, the newly mustered Massachusetts 55th. According to R. W. B. Lewis, the youngest James brother had never found “any moral or psychological sustenance in the slavery issue,” but in deference to Elena’s Yankee roots and ardent emancipatory proclivities, he played up his adolescent abolitionist sympathies to the hilt, saying that he’d enlisted with “a heart willing to temper every uttermost anguish of the slave in every form” (a phrase she later learned he had pilfered from Wilky’s description of Robert Gould Shaw). His actual motives were doubtless less monolithically exalted. Indeed, in light of his father’s remark about military service “lifting young men from indolence and vanity,” we might surmise that he was more or less booted out of the house. Thus Rob may well have identified psychologically, if not politically, with the persecuted Negro race, having often felt himself to be in some sense the “nigger” of his family, even to the extent of fantasizing that he might not be a James at all. In later life, he wrote:
I never remember being told anything extraordinary about my babyhood but I often like to contemplate myself as a baby and wonder if I was really as little appreciated as I fully remember feeling at the time. I never see infants now without discerning in their usually solemn countenance a conviction that they are on guard and in more or less hostile surroundings. However that may be, in my own case, at a very early age the problems of life began to press upon me in such an unnatural way and I developed such an ability for feeling hurt and wounded that I became quite convinced by the time I was twelve years old that I was a foundling.
Though he may have felt that by enlisting he was extricating himself from an increasingly untenable family situation, “l’ingénieux petit” Robertson James, as one of his French governesses once called him, could have had only scant suspicion of what he was getting himself into. In woeful contrast to the rousing public displays of patriotism and the spit-and-polish discipline of the training camps, the Civil War was in many respects a proverbial Chinese fire drill. General Helmuth Karl von Moltke, the great Prussian military historian who observed the fratricidal conflict at first hand, declared it to be little more than “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned.”
A tragic instance of this endemic ineptitude—and one that nearly cost Wilky his young life—was the disastrous storming of Fort Wagner in July 1863, a battle described by the younger James brothers’ biographer Jane Maher as “one of the worst debacles of the Civil War…poorly planned and even more poorly executed.” The edifice in question was the principal Confederate installation defending Charleston Harbor and “the strongest single earthwork known in the history of warfare,” according to the 54th Regiment’s historian, Luis F. Emilio. On the day before the doomed assault, the unit had acquitted itself admirably in an engagement with a squadron of Confederate cavalry that had pinned down the Connecticut 10th Infantry on nearby James Island, an action for which the 54th was widely credited with saving the lives of many of their fellow New Englanders. It was the black regiment’s first taste of heavy combat, and Wilky never forgot the sight and stench of mutilated bodies on the beach. On closer inspection, the mutilation turned out to be the work not of enemy soldiers but of ravenous fiddler crabs; yet these horrors were only a grim prelude to what was to follow: After two days without rations or sleep, the men of the 54th were chosen to spearhead the assault on the massive battery itself, a battle in which it became rapidly apparent that the black soldiers were woefully outnumbered and outgunned. Almost half of the regiment’s enlisted men and nearly two thirds of its officers were shot down or bayoneted in front of the fortress or within its walls. Colonel Shaw, leading the charge, was felled by a bullet through the heart and unceremoniously interred in a ditch with about fifty of his Negro troops. Wilky took a rifle slug in the side and a cannister ball an inch and a half in diameter in the ankle—grave wounds from which he doubtless would have died had he not been miraculously discovered in a field hospital by the father of his fallen comrade Cabot Russell and delivered, unconscious, back home to Newport for a “long and tedious” recuperation.
Even as the 54th was being decimated at Fort Wagner, Rob was shipping out for South Carolina with the 55th. His destination was Charleston Harbor, where his regiment’s major mission was to pile up timber and sandbags on the marsh between James and Morris islands to form the foundation for an immense Parrott cannon nicknamed “The Swamp Angel.” Constructing the emplacement for this formidable piece of artillery—together with its carriage, it weighed over 24,000 pounds—was grueling, backbreaking labor, made all the more onerous by a scorching Southern sun, swarms of malaria-bearing mosquitos, and sporadic enemy shelling that often sent the soldiers scuttling for the trenches “like so many land-crabs in distress.” As Rob later recalled the hellish scene, “the flies of a whole continent had congregated there to harass the emaciated creatures who were dying by scores in the field hospitals.” The stinking water in the shallow wells swarmed with rats, and “with the advent of vermin,” the men felt they were “reverting to the animal state.” Rob contracted a severe case of dysentery, and in addition to his unrelenting physical miseries, he was suffering deep distress over the plight of the wounded Wilky, the brother with whom he would be “paired in all the major activities of their lives.”
It wasn’t long before the young officer—still just barely seventeen—had become desperately demoralized and homesick. In keeping with the James family’s propensity for misplacing or destroying unbecoming documents, all but one of Rob’s letters from the front have been lost, but apparently, the impetuous adolescent had begun flirting—much to his father’s
alarm—with the idea of quitting the army, just as he had cut and run from the Sanborn Academy.
“It is a temptation which your manhood is called upon to resist,” Henry Sr. wrote back to his youngest son. “I know perfectly well that if you should yield to the weakness it prompts, you would regret all your days having done so, provided of course your aspiration towards a manly character be genuine.” The letter concluded: “Cheer up then my dear boy, and be a man, where you stand…this is all you want to evince you an infinitely better manhood…. Resist it like a man, and it will flee from you.”
Manliness, evidently, was something of an obsession with Henry Sr., and doubtless a bit of a sore point as well, in light of the fact that the figure he himself cut in society was by no means a conventionally masculine one. He had lost his right leg in a childhood accident and was condemned to hobble about on a prosthetic cork limb for the rest of his life. Furthermore, he had never engaged in any recognizable business or profession, much to the embarrassment of his growing sons. (When, as a child, Henry Jr. once asked his father how to describe his occupation to his schoolmates, Henry Sr. had replied, “Say I’m a philosopher, say I’m a seeker of truth, say I’m a lover of my kind, say I’m an author of books if you like; or best of all, just say I’m a student.”) But this superannuated scholar had no academic affiliation and earned virtually no money from his writings, living off an inheritance from his father. Even in his own home, it was his wife, Mary, who wore the financial pants, overseeing the household budget and making most of the practical decisions while mothering her husband “as she mothered her offspring.” On top of everything else, “this childlike father,” in the characterization of Jean Strouse, had suffered, at the age of thirty-three, a kind of nervous breakdown. One evening, while sitting alone at the table after a comfortable dinner, he had been overcome by a “perfectly insane and abject terror,” for which he could account only by the imagined presence of “some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds,” he later wrote, “before I felt myself a wreck; that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy.” Following the formulation of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, Henry Sr. came to refer to this frightening collapse as his “vastation”—one of the steps in the regeneration of the soul, according to the Scandinavian seer—thus managing to force a positive spin onto what otherwise might have been more naturally experienced as a devastation. Nevertheless, the episode had left him psychologically shaky, kept spiritually afloat only by the idiosyncratic interpretation of Swedenborgian mysticism to which he clung thereafter. Yet this damaged and pampered trust-fund dilettante, who seldom in his adult life had been obliged to do anything he didn’t care to, pressed on in his correspondence with his errant son. In a letter dated August 31, 1864, he wrote to Rob: “I conjure you to be a man and force yourself like a man to do your whole duty,” concluding with yet another entreaty to the demoralized adolescent to remain “manfully at your tracks.”
All these blustering paternal exhortations served to foment in the nascent bandit a seething rage at his progenitor, next to which his animosity toward the Confederate foe paled to insignificance. Faced with the harsh realities and mortifying cruelties of war, Lieutenant Robertson James came to feel that he’d been had. What he suspected was nothing less than the awful proposition that his dad wanted him dead. As the future outlaw came to interpret it, the old man’s message, stripped of all its patriotic posturing and chivalric rhetoric, was simply that his two younger sons were little more than cannon fodder whose heroic demise in battle might glorify the James family name while sparing his more intellectually promising progeny for the chance to achieve higher—and less fatal—forms of greatness. (Jesse’s sense of being used for his father’s purposes must have resonated powerfully with Elena Hite, who had long suspected her own father of employing her beauty and talents to advance his standing in Hartford society.)
By the end of the summer of 1864, the elder Henry had become so exercised over the young officer’s threatened desertion that he implored Wilky, who had recently rejoined his regiment in South Carolina, to pay a visit to his brother and talk him out of his “passing effeminacy.” Wilky dutifully embarked on his father’s mission, but the G. W. James who returned to the front would have been nearly unrecognizable to the rash young sergeant who had rhapsodized with glee over bullets whizzing about his head. During his long convalescence at Newport, Wilky had come to question the benevolent God of Henry Sr.’s Swedenborgian visions, and had begun to think of himself as “a mite sacrificed on the altar of our father’s wartime pieties.” In a letter home written shortly after his return to South Carolina, he described his physical appearance—though he might as well have been reporting on his state of mind—as “no longer the stout party on crutches of six months ago, but a meager, sallow, highly moustached cavalier with more mud on his clothes than on his boots.”
This soiled cavalier was appalled to discover that his younger brother was in even worse shape than he had been led to believe. On the heels of a bout of sunstroke, the shining-eyed Rob was hollow-cheeked, gaunt, and addle-brained from fever. He was also drinking heavily. But something in his determination to desert fanned the flames of Wilky’s own smoldering resentments, among them the brothers’ shared grudge against the administration in Washington for first offering the black enlisted men in their regiments lower federal pay than their white counterparts, then not paying them at all—a congressional scam that planted the seeds of rebellion in the future desperadoes. “Bob was disgusted by the government’s behavior,” wrote Jane Maher, “and for the rest of his life he remained suspicious of and often hostile to most forms of bureaucracy, particularly the federal government.” Wilky, too, could never shake the gnawing suspicion that the gallant 54th had been granted the dubious “honor” of leading the doomed assault on Fort Wagner not in recognition of the regiment’s valor or effectiveness but simply because its colored troops had been deemed the most readily expendable of the Union forces on hand.
Given these grievances, Wilky’s fraternal loyalty came to trump his dedication to the army: He wanted to get his anguished little brother the hell out of there, and rather than convincing Rob to stay the military course, he found himself persuaded to join his brother in abandoning it. One night, as Jesse recounted it to Elena, the disgruntled pair “just upped and lit out.”
In thus taking “French leave,” the younger James boys were far from unique. The desertion rate for Union troops during the Civil War was scandalously high, among officers as well as enlisted men. Over the course of the conflict, by conservative estimate, more than two hundred thousand federal soldiers bolted from their units. Many of these absconders headed home, but Rob and Wilky—being subject to what Jean Strouse described as “the Jamesian system of moral absolutes,” according to which “anyone who was not all good was all bad”—felt that they were effectively severing ties not only with the army but with the James family itself.
Likewise, in heading off to Harvard, William and Henry had managed to extricate themselves from both the clutches of the military and the bosom of the family. The bosom, however, had not been long in coming after them. During the spring of 1864, Henry Sr. once again decided to absquatulate, this time transporting his household from Newport to Ashburton Place in Boston. The new seat of the James clan was a three-story redbrick house, “as substantial as Boston itself,” in the description of Leon Edel. It was within the walls of this imposing edifice that the reunited family waited apprehensively all September for word of Rob and Wilky. But the army, as Jane Maher noted, “had no efficient system of notifying families of their sons’, fathers’ or husbands’ injuries or death.” Even allowing for the distressingly spotty wartime mail service, after several weeks of ominous epistolary silence from the front, the Jameses could no longer help but suspect that no news was bad news.
Haunted by the Confederate decree of death for officers commanding black troops, and by grim visions of the boys’ bodies lying in the sand, the family anxiously scoured the newspapers and hung by the mailbox until hope gave way to resignation and, finally, to despair.
“In the mystical creation,” Henry Sr. had written to Robert Gould Shaw’s parents after their son’s death at Fort Wagner, “we are told that ‘the evening and the morning were the first day,’ and so on. This is because in Divine order all progress is from dark to bright, from evil to good, from low to high, and never contrariwise. And this is the reason why, though I feel for you the tenderest sympathy, I cannot help but rejoicing for him even now with unspeakable joy, that the night is past, and the everlasting morning fairly begun.”
It is unlikely that Henry Sr. greeted the apparent demise of his own offspring with such unspeakable joy. Indeed, as Henry Jr. wrote around this time, the James household had become “about as lively as an inner sepulchre.”
Back down in South Carolina, having made their fateful break from the army, the renegade James brothers, still very much alive, found themselves in a quandary. Being absent without leave from their units, they dared not head north back into Yankee country; nor could they push any farther south, a direction that would take them even more deeply into enemy territory. Since they were already on the shores of the Atlantic, there was no farther east they could venture without shipping off for Europe. So, setting their sights on California as their ultimate destination, the apostate pair headed west across South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, traveling mostly on foot and by night, as furtively as any runaway slaves following the drinking gourd to freedom.
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