Across Five Aprils (21 page)

The letter he finally wrote to Jenny with Ross Milton’s book close at hand as an aid to spelling was a simple one. He had no fine phrases to help him convey his feelings; but Jenny found it a good letter, and she kept it all the years of her life.

Nancy
had heard from John in June; it was a long time before she heard from him again—early December of 1863. He wrote a long letter then; he had a long story to tell. He began:

During the dreary days in which she had heard nothing from her husband, the name Chickamauga had held desolation and despair for Nancy. She had studied the newspaper map with Jethro, the map of Chattanooga down on the Tennessee River, with Lookout Mountain to the south-west, Missionary Ridge facing on the east, and beyond the Ridge, the line of water labelled “Chickamauga Creek.” The newspaper accounts were hard for both her and Jethro to understand; they were stories of chaotic confusion, of bitter fighting and terrible disaster. In September of 1863, the Army of the Cumberland had finally encountered General Bragg, who was soon reinforced by General Longstreet. The Confederates thus outnumbered Rosecrans’ army by as many as twenty thousand, and they handed a terrible defeat to the army that had so cheerfully set out upon its march in June. A terrible defeat, but not quite a complete one, for the left wing of the Army of the Cumberland had held firm under the command of a general named George Thomas.

There were many names in the papers those days—names of men and places that for a time were on everybody’s tongue and then quite often were almost forgotten, while other names gained prominence in the news. The name George Thomas had been a great one at Logan’s Crossroads, when the big Virginian who had decided to remain loyal to the Union had given the Federals their first taste of victory in the West. But that had been before Donelson, and for Jethro, the meaning of the war began with Donelson. Thus he had failed to identify the name of Thomas at first, but after September of 1863 it would never again be either ignored or forgotten by Jethro or by anyone of his time for whom the news of the war mattered. “The Rock of Chickamauga,” the papers called him, after the soldiers under his command had held out against twice their number with a stubbornness that finally forced Bragg to give up, thus leaving Thomas and his men free to go back to Chattanooga.

Other names prominent in that battle were, true to the temper of the times, disgraced and dragged through the mud. Those who fought battles comfortably within their homes or newspaper offices had more than enough mud to spare. Rosecrans, McCook, and Crittenden, who in the bewildering mountain terrain had completely lost control of the men they were supposed to command, were now accused of everything from downright stupidity to traitorous complicity with the enemy.

After the hope and jubilation that Vicksburg and Gettysburg had inspired in July, Chickamauga was a dreadful reversal for the North to suffer; for Nancy it was a name threatening her with “hard news” until the day John’s letter came.

After that, John’s letter was a long narrative of what had happened in the mountains around Chattanooga during that cold November of ’63. Jethro had read accounts of it in the papers, but John’s story was closer, more immediate. It was a vivid picture, and as Jethro read, he felt as if he were an actual witness to the unbelievable thing that had happened.

John wrote of how near the army had been to starvation after Chickamauga; how the snipers located all along the slopes of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge made it impossible for a wagonload of food or provender to get through to either men or animals.

Then he told of the reinforcements that arrived: Joseph Hooker with detachments from the Army of the Potomac; William Tecumseh Sherman with most of the Army of the Tennessee. And Grant came down in person, Grant with his new promotion that placed him over Hooker, Sherman, Rosecrans, Thomas, and the others in the West.

The next paragraphs explained Grant’s strategy of the battle: Hooker would strike at one end of the Confederate line on Lookout Mountain; Sherman would hit the other end on Missionary Ridge. The Army of the Cumberland would attack the center—an easier job, John said, because they were only expected to worry Bragg enough to keep him from sending men from his center to reinforce his ends.

John went on to say that things weren’t going so well with Sherman’s men, and the Cumberland boys waited with excitement mounting by the minute. Then finally the command came for them to take the frontline trenches at the base of Missionary Ridge, which towered like a steep wall opposite Lookout. That was when pandemonium broke out!

Jethro rewrote John’s letter carefully and sent his copy to Shadrach and Jenny in Washington. He made mountains of chips and stones out in the wood lot and showed John’s little boys how their father, along with the boys in the Army of the Cumberland, had scaled Missionary Ridge and had so broken the center of the Confederate line that General Bragg had had to order his divided army to retreat and to leave Chattanooga in the hands of the Federals.

Nancy wrote to John of Jethro’s interest in his description of the battle, and weeks later John spoke of it in his reply:

In November of that year the President made a speech at Gettysburg; papers all over the country printed it, but they were not agreed upon its quality. One of the papers Jethro read claimed that “the cheek of every American must tingle with shame at the silly, flat, dish-watery utterances.” Another said that the President’s speech would live among the annals of man. Jethro didn’t know. He loved Mr. Lincoln and felt deeply drawn to him; it angered him to read the mouthings of hate directed toward the President, but as to whether the address at Gettysburg was a great one or just another speech, an eleven-year-old farm boy did not know. He read it aloud to his mother.

“It has the ring of the Scriptures about it, Jeth,” she said.

He nodded. It had, somewhat, he thought.

That winter many people were talking of peace. The end could not be rushed; there would be fighting to the last ditch, but the end was inevitable. A people pushed to the extremities that existed in the South could not possibly hold on, the papers claimed. But they did hold on, and as the war trailed drearily on, vindictiveness toward the stubborn stand of the seceding states grew steadily more bitter in the North. This vindictiveness was urged on by men in high places who resented the President’s spirit of clemency as violently as they resented the tenacity of the South.

In December Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the Constitution and the Union of the states, to abide by the government’s pronouncements against slavery. He promised, too, that a Confederate state could return to the Union whenever ten percent of its voters should reestablish a loyal Union government within that state.

“Never hev I loved him so much,” Matt exclaimed tearfully. And Jethro remembered words in the President’s letter: “There will be much criticism, but if I err it will be on the side of mercy.”

The criticism of his act came with quick violence from all sections of the country. In the South the Confederate Congress cried out that if the Washington government called for restoration of the Union it was merely setting a cruel trap for the deluded; that it would be only a relationship between the conqueror and the conquered; that it would mean personal and public degradation and ruin. And in the North the chant of hate against Lincoln became stronger than ever. His proclamation of amnesty was little better than treason, the President’s detractors shouted, and many people began to consider it high patriotism to talk of the coming wholesale execution of rebels.

The third winter of the war went by with the echoing story of suffering and death. In the early part of the war’s fourth year, General Grant was placed in command of all the armies of the United States. With this promotion another general fell to a lower place—General Halleck, who had never quite risen to his position, was finally relegated to the list of those whose names had soared for a while and then fallen into near-obscurity. Jethro could remember the early days of the war when he had felt resentful upon learning that Halleck was Grant’s superior officer. In March of 1864 he felt a glow of personal triumph that his resentment had perhaps been justified.

In Washington, Shadrach Yale was slowly struggling back to health in the safety of his aunt’s home. Now that Jenny was with him, Shad’s letters were addressed to Jethro. They were like gifts to the lonely boy; he read them over again and again, and then placed them carefully in the big envelope containing the President’s letter.

Shadrach wrote that he and Jenny had seen the President and General Grant as they drove through the Washington streets together.

Early in 1864 talk of the presidential election was in the air. Jethro had been barely conscious of the excitement, anger, and vicious invective that had accompanied the election of 1860; now he was fully conscious of emotions of even deeper violence in the talk of men in the community and in the papers that he read.

There was hatred for Mr. Lincoln within his own party as well as in the Democratic party. Thad Stevens, the aging floor leader in the House of Representatives, pushed his program of “no mercy to the South” and let his contempt for the President spill out in every speech he made. Midwestern newspapers reprinted the blasts of Wendell Phillips in the East, and of Editor Horace Greeley, who asked rhetorically if this man Lincoln was the sole hope of the Republican Party. The answer, he thundered, was in the negative: did not such men as General Frémont, General Wade Butler, General Ulysses S. Grant, rank high above Abraham Lincoln?