A Stillness at Appomattox (4 page)

A fizzle, in other words, worth no more than a passing glance—except that the war had changed, and something hard and cruel and vicious was coming to the surface, and this raid was a dark ominous symbol of it, with bitterness and hatred visible behind it and growing out of it.

The men who killed Colonel Dahlgren (he himself had thought there was no better place to give up the ghost) had not been kind to his body. Someone cut off a finger to get at a ring he was wearing. Another took his artificial leg as a souvenir. Others got his watch, additional valuables, and his clothing. His body itself was carted off to Richmond in a pine box without a lid, and it went on display in a railroad station there, a show for the curious. And someone also took from his pockets the papers on which he had written down the objects of the expedition, and these papers seem to have been tampered with, so that they finally appeared to prove that his principal aim had been to burn and sack the city of Richmond and to murder Jefferson Davis and all his Cabinet; and these papers were openly published, to put a ramrod in the spine of Secession.

Braxton Bragg, chief military adviser to President Davis, forwarded them with an endorsement denouncing "the fiendish and atrocious conduct of our enemies," and Secretary of War Seddon sent them on to Lee, suggesting that since arson and assassination had been on the agenda the Yankees taken prisoner from Dahlgren's command ought to be hanged. Lee himself, who had sanity enough for three or four cabinet officers, agreed the papers were atrocious, but he doubted that executing the prisoners would help much. After all, he remarked, the projected murder and rapine had not actually taken place, the
validity
of the papers was in some question, and anyway the Federals held certain Confederate raiders who had looted a train along the upper Potomac and were considering accusing these men of plain highway robbery--and altogether if the business of hanging prisoners were started no one could be sure just how it would end. Lee sent the papers on to Meade under a flag of truce, with a note asking, in effect: Is this the kind of war you are going to be fighting from now on, and if so how about it?
¹⁹

A sensation, indubitably: possibly offsetting the effect of Mr. Lincoln's offer of amnesty and brotherhood. Kilpatrick reported bitterly that the Confederates had used bloodhounds to hunt down fugitives from Dahlgren's scattered command, Northern publicists fumed and foamed over the mutilation of Dahlgren's corpse, and the old admiral wrote to General Butler to say that he would appreciate it if, by any flag of toice negotiations, the body could be recovered and brought north for decent burial. Meade wrote to Lee that neither President Lincoln, he himself, nor General Kilpatrick had ordered any cities burned or civilians killed, and a Richmond newspaper acidly commented that the chief casualty of the expedition had actually been
^‘
a boy named Martin, the property of Mr. David Meems, of Goochland"—he whom Dahlgren had incontinently ha
nged for leading him to a ford t
hat was not a ford.

The newspapers had a field day. The Richmond
Examiner
urged its readers to realize
that "we are barbarians in the e
yes of our enemies," and called for reprisals, saying that the war now was "a war of extermination, of indiscriminate slaughter and plunder on the part of our enemies." The editor dilated on the wick
edness of the Yankee design of ‘
turning loose some thousands of ruffian prisoners, brutalized to the deepest degree by acquaintance with every horror of war, who have been confined on an island for a year, far from all means of indulging their strong sensual appetites-inviting this pandemonium to work their will on the unarmed citizens, on the women, gentle and simple, of Richmond, and on all their property." The New York
Times,
in its turn, exulted that the expedition had at least destroyed millions of dollars in Rebel property, and spoke zestfully of what the raiders had seen in war-racked Virginia—"the large number of dilapidated and deserted dwellings, the ruined churches with windows out and doors ajar, the abandoned fields and work shops, the neglected plantations." It mentioned Martin, the luckless colored guide, as a man who "dared to trifle with the welfare of his country" and it approved his hanging as "a fate he so richly deserved."
²⁰

So in both North and South there was fury, and the propagandists righteously sowed the wind, and the war between the sections, which once seemed almost like a kind of tournament, had at last hardened into the pattern of total war.

Kilpatrick's cavalry got back to the Army of the Potomac, after a time, taking ship from Fortress Monroe and debarking at Alexandria. The men were supposed to have a few days of relaxation at the Alexandria rest camp, but there was an unfortunate incident. Alexandria was policed by colored troops just then, and the cavalry of this army had no use for Negroes in uniform, and one of the colored guards halted a Michigan trooper to enforce the rule that none but couriers, orderlies, and other persons on duty were permitted to ride through the town's streets. The Michigan soldier drew his saber and killed the man, on the spot, and punishment followed quickly: the whole command had to march back to its camp on the Rapidan at once, without a chance to rest or to draw new clothing.
²¹

2
Turkey at a Shooting Match

The army had always been impatient of restraint, and even an its early days a provost guard which tried to arrest dashing cavalrymen had to make a certain allowance for breakage. Yet provost guards had not hitherto been cut down with sabers; nor had they ever before been men with black skins, recently elevated from property to manhood, wearing the national uniform and empowered to enforce the national will. The army was dubious about it. (A colored sergeant, about this time, given an argument by an unruly private, leaned forward and tapped the chevrons on his sleeve. "You know what dat mean?" he demanded sternly. "Dat mean
guv-men
t!")
¹

The colored man had been part of the war from the beginning, to be sure, but in the old days nobody had to spend much time thinking about him. He was just Uncle Tom, or a blackface minstrel with a talent for slow humor, or a docile contraband who could be made to do chores for soldiers. If he was none of these things he was a mystery, and figuring him out might bring a headache.

A New York cavalryman remembered that back in 1862 he and a comrade made friends with a free colored man, an aged Negro called Uncle Jake, who had a log cabin not far from their Virginia camp, and one day the old man asked the two soldiers to come to dinner. They went, and found themselves in a neat little room with a dirt floor, dinner cooking at the fireplace, table set for two. They had never imagined a dinner at which host and hostess stood by and ate nothing while the guests sat and ate, so they insisted that Uncle Jake and his wife draw up chairs and dine with them. Uncle Jake flatly refused, and he appears to have been slightly scandalized. Never in his eighty years, he said, had he heard of a Negro sitting at table with a white man, and all of their entreaties would not move him. So the soldiers ate the dinner—a good dinner, the cavalryman recalled, with roast possum as the main course—and went away, puzzled and ill at ease about that queer line drawn between host and guest.
²

But that had been in the early days. Nothing in all the world was the same now as it used to be—not the war, nor the army, nor for that matter the colored man himself. He was coming out of the shadows and a new part was being prepared for him, and although the army did not like the transformation it was nevertheless the army which had brought it to pass. For the army had created a myth and the myth held a kernel of truth, and no cruel misuse of sword or noose would quite kill it.

The myth rode with Custer's men, as they came sloping back from their stab at Charlottesville—rain frozen on weapons and uniforms, saddles creaking with ice, trees along the way all silver with frozen sleet, tinkling when the branches moved. They found themselves at the head of a strange procession*

As they went along the Virginia roads their bugles sounded down the wind like the trumpets of jubilee, and the slaves laid down their burdens and came out by the scores to follow. Before long the cavalrymen were leading an outlandish tatterdemalion parade of refugees, men and women and helpless children, people jubilant and bewildered and wholly defenseless, their eyes on the north star.

Some of these had carts and wagons, some of them rode on mules or oxen, and some stumped along on foot, carrying their few possessions. They took their place just ahead of the rear guard, and in the struggle to keep up they endured great hardships. When the Confederates assailed the retreating Yankees, Custer's officers would ride through, shouting and pleading and threatening, and there was general bedlam— bullets in the air, crying children, livestock grown either panicky or balky, creating fearful knots and tangles in the traffic, troopers swearing and women screaming, weaklings here and there falling out by the roadside and watching in despair as the column moved on without them. When they were not storming with rage the troopers were braying with laughter. It struck them as very funny to see a desperately frightened Negro riding a runaway mule, holding onto one of its ears with one hand and its tail with the other. Despite all difficulties most of the refugees kept going, and as they plodded along in the cold rain and mud one of the soldiers felt that the Union Army was "the representative to them of the great idea of freedom."
⁸

For that was the myth that this army had created, and it had vitality, and it went like a bent flame down plantation roads and country lanes. When Kilpatrick's division crossed from Richmond to Butler's lines the colored folk greeted it with ecstasy, and the raid that accomplished so little was a light across the sky to many hundreds of people. As the division passed one big plantation house, forty or fifty slaves crowded down to the road to watch. A young woman suddenly sprang up on the fence, waving her sunbonnet and crying: "Glory! Glory hallelujah!
I’
se
gwine wid you! I'se gwine to be free!"

The whole crowd came surging out in a moment, and Old Marster was running down from his veranda shouting fruitless threats, a helpless Canute berating an unheeding tide.
⁴
The scene was repeated, with variations, over and over, until presently the cavalrymen were surrounded and followed by thousands of slaves whom no one any longer owned and for whom no one in particular was likely to be responsible: a devoted shuffling multitude, men and women carrying bundles, tiny children trudging along big-eyed, gray-haired old folk leaning on canes, scores and hundreds of people coming out of the past into the unknown.

All of this was stimulating to tired soldiers, for it was pleasant to be hosannahed and wept over as bringers of freedom. But finally the men got to New Kent Court House, and there for the first time the cavalry saw colored soldiers—some of Ben Butler's men, trim and neatly uniformed, lining the roadside to greet the cavalry, cheering wildly as the head of the column came up, white eyes a chalkline in a long row of black faces. Cavalry returned the cheers, and one trooper wrote that "a mountain of prejudice was removed in an instant." Yet somehow there was a catch in it, and prejudice had not been removed so far that it could not quickly return. Late that night it began to rain again, and Kilpatrick's men were making a sodden bivouac without shelter, and they suddenly realized that these colored soldiers occupied a warm dry camp with wall tents standing. So along toward midnight tie cavalry attacked the camp, driving the colored soldiers out into the cold with blows and angry words and taking the tents for themselves, and there was no further exchange of cheers.
⁵

The soldiers were not the same men they had been three years ago, and they dimly realized the fact. An Ohio soldier looked back wistfully to the time when they had all been recruits, with knowledge ahead of them—to "those happy, golden days of camp life," when each regiment eagerly awaited its marching orders and the only worry was the haunting fear that the war might end before a man got his fair chance to fight.
⁶
In those days there was a great difference between regiment and regiment, and between man and man. Western regiments derisively yelled, "Paper collars!" at Eastern regiments, which they considered dressed up and dudish, and the Easterners retorted that the Westerners were uncouth backwoodsmen. The city man looked and acted unlike the man from the country, and even a casual glance would show the difference between Hoosier and Ohioan, between Pennsylvanian and down-East Yankee. Now the distinctions were gone, and all of the volunteers looked very much alike. An officer in a Maine regiment mused that the army was a great leveler, and he wrote how "rich men and poor, Christians from pious back-country homes and heathen bounty-jumpers from the slums of New York . . . would bathe in and drink from the same stream, whether prior or subsequent to the watering of the brigade mules."
⁷

The army had put its stamp on all of its infinitely various members. It had produced a type, at last, and the volunteer had become the old-timer—rusty in a worn uniform, wearing his forage cap with its broken visor tugged down over his eyes, tolerant of high authority but not especially respectful toward it (one fussy brigadier was greeted on all sides as "Old Bowels"), taking eventual triumph for granted, but fully aware that he himself was the man who was going to pay for it.