Bull Run (4 page)

I borrowed a fife, found a man to teach me, and commenced practicing from first light to night. For days I trudged up and down scales. Then through hymns. Then a songbook. After a week I told Grandpap good-bye, walked three days, practicing all the way, and joined the regiment's band. We played at a big review that first day. The tails of the coat they gave me scraped the dirt. I hadn't seen the music we'd be playing, but promised the bandleader I'd get through it. I did, not finishing much behind the others on most of the pieces and well out in the lead on “Dixie.” The crowd cheered. I could scarcely believe I was part of the army at last.

I begged God not to let me miss the fighting. It was said we'd be marching North any day and would give our next concert in Washington. Five weeks later we were still in Georgia. We played at the dress parades every evening and when important sorts came to visit. We practiced some, but mostly the men spent their time gambling and brawling. Whiskey wasn't allowed in camp, but a woman used to come by, selling it from her special-made tin bustle. The cornet player poured liquor into a hollowed-out watermelon, buried it, and drank some each night through a length of straw. There was stealing and swearing and poker playing with cards that had Jefferson Davis and the rest of the Confederate big bugs on 'em. I feared for my life when the men got drunk. It was not the Christian life I'd known, and I began to wish I'd never left home. I recollected Grandpap saying that if I ever saw the Devil to cut him in half and walk on between the pieces. But if I'd done that, there'd have been hardly a man left alive in the band.

How I longed to render my drawings in color! To show the red blouses of the Garibaldi Guards, the emerald flags of the Irish Brigade, the tricolored standard of New York's French regiment, not to mention the companies of immigrant Germans and Scots and Poles, each with their own vivid uniforms. And then there were the astounding Zouaves, who truly put my pencils to shame. Baggy red pantaloons flapping like sails, leather leggings, red-braided blue jackets, and atop every head a red fez cap from which hung a long black tassel. They were New York rowdies dressed in the style of the Zouaves, the fearless soldiers of Morocco. Walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, I stopped and gawked at the sight of them, and watched one push his companion through a barber's plate-glass window for sport. I'd heard tell of their penchant for mayhem. But the following day I saw Colonel Ellsworth lead them through the most difficult of drills, perfectly synchronized, faultlessly executed, their rifles spinning at times like wheel spokes. It was a stunning display. I made several sketches and left sure that no army could best the Union. Walking toward another camp, I skirted some woods, heard a voice, then had my faith severely shaken. I'd come upon an officer, no doubt one of the many inexperienced civilians elected to his post. He was poring over a book, and was practicing shouting orders
to the trees
. The scene filled me with foreboding. I declined to present it to the readers of the
New York Illustrated News
.

Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth. The world knows his name. Songs and poems were written about him. Babies were named for him, and streets, and whole towns. His ugly face was even printed on envelopes. But what of James Jackson?

I grew up in Alexandria and was there the day the Union troops first dared to invade Virginia's soil. They skulked across the Potomac before dawn, riding on steamboats. We'd heard they might. I was eighteen years old and had stayed up all night waiting and watching from the attic window. They marched up from the river at dawn. When I spied the Zouaves, dressed up like peacocks, I thought I'd fallen asleep and was dreaming. Ellsworth sent a band of them to capture the telegraph office. Then he peered at the Confederate flag flying from the roof of the Marshall House Hotel. I saw him stride off in that direction and dashed down out of my house to follow. By the time I got there, he'd gone up the stairs, climbed out on the roof, cut loose the flag, and was heading back down the stairs with it. “I have the first prize,” he shouted out. Mr. Jackson, the hotel's owner, met the intruder on the second-floor landing. “And I the second,” he said, and killed Ellsworth with a shotgun blast. Straightaway, a Union soldier shot Mr. Jackson square in the face, then bayoneted him over and over in the chest, for the crime of defending his property. His blood was every bit as red as Ellsworth's, but who remembers his name?

Until that day I'd had doubts about secession. That evening I rode a horse to Centreville and joined the Confederates as a courier.

I felt myself to be a horse who's ordered to gallop while still hitched to a post. As commander of the Army of the Potomac, I was expected to crush the Confederacy's army and, if need be, take Richmond, its capital. The public, the press, the politicians, the President—all demanded it. And since many of my soldiers were ninety-day men, whose enlistments would expire in July, I was expected to accomplish this with all speed. Despite the fact that my troops were as green as June apples, spoke a Babel of tongues, and were led by officers who knew nothing of battle. Despite lacking sufficient weapons, ammunition, mules, food, and equipment of every sort. Despite the fact that my success depended on keeping the Confederate army in the west from leaving Harpers Ferry and joining Beauregard, a duty given to General Patterson, who was too old and too timid for this or any task. Despite my not having a single reliable map of Virginia, which I was to invade. And despite the most worrisome problem of all, one I dared not complain of in public: I, who'd just a few weeks before been made a brigadier general in command of an army of thirty thousand, had seldom led more than a hundred men.

In spite of all this, I drew up a plan of attack. It was approved by the President. We'd begin our march south in the second week of July. I dreaded the coming of that day.

My daughters departed soon after their husbands. The house held but me and the servants once more. After all the bustling, I found idleness irksome and organized a Soldiers' Friend League. We sewed shirts by the score. We cut and rolled bandages. We searched our ragbags for scraps of linen and scraped them with knives to procure lint for wounds. While working we exchanged the latest news. General Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, had come to Virginia and made his headquarters a few miles off in Manassas Junction. We felt as if the Lord had sent one of His angels to protect us from the Yankees. Mrs. Granger had actually spoken to him and reported him most charming. He was from French Louisiana and at once showed himself a gentleman by kindly advising all the civilians in Washington to leave, as he would shortly occupy the city. We prayed that he would do so quickly, for the newspapers said that the Union was sending thousands of armed Negroes and Indians to pillage the South and free the slaves. Weeks passed. Our troops made no advance. We fretted and furiously debated but could not understand the delay. Then Miss Pruitt read from a Richmond paper a report stating that Lincoln so feared an attack that he slept with a guard of fifty men and had lately been drunk for days at a spell. Upon hearing this, we concluded that General Beauregard had been halted by his honor, which would not permit him to strike an opponent who was already all but prostrate.

To be a Negro living in the midst of whites, unknown to them, is to be a ghost spying on the living. Oftentimes I felt I must have joined the Southern army by mistake. The soldiers mercilessly abused a stuttering black cook in our company and tormented the collie dog he'd brought with him. Most of them said they were fighting against secession, not against slavery. Some declared they'd rather shoot Negroes than the Rebels. My ears burned at such words.

In May we traveled to Washington. A march on Richmond was constantly talked of, but instead we merely crossed the Potomac and drilled on the south bank instead of the north. Unlike many of the men, I could write, and was often asked to take down their letters. I recorded their complainings about the heat, the drilling, the food, the lice. Many vowed to rush back to Ohio the moment our ninety-day term had expired, no matter if the Rebels were marching on Washington. I nearly strangled my pen at such times. Then one day I found myself putting in ink a loutish private's opinion that the blood of black people was thinner and inferior to that of whites, which explained the Negroes' lack of intelligence. How I hungered to yank off my cap and show him which of us knew the alphabet and which was the inferior, ignorant fool! I almost did so, and halted my pen. Then I mastered myself and finished the letter, but closed it with “Your wood-headed jackass” instead of the farewell he dictated. He grinned, uncomprehending, at the words, then below them scrawled, with some effort, his “X.”