Confederates (54 page)

Last night, around Big Spring, the North Carolina regiments, unlike regiments from any of the other states, held formal meetings, with their colonels actually present, to discuss the question whether a North Carolina boy had a right to invade Maryland. The 7th North Carolina had had a meeting, the 21st and 24th, the 28th and 33rd. Right on the question of whether their enlistment covered such a thing as crossing into Maryland.

‘The meetings were orderly,' Sandie went on reporting, ‘according to what I've been told. Most of them were hot in favour of crossing.…'

Jackson was shaking his head at the arrogance of such gatherings and of the 250 Tarheel deserters. Maybe it was the morning, but he began to make quite a speech by his standards. ‘This crazy argument about whether the South is fighting a war of defence or offence, Sandie! It's all words. It's debating society stuff. It doesn't have any meaning. If any of them are captured I want the Adjutant-General to treat them with full severity. I consider their actions worse than an act of cowardice; God forgives the coward, Sandie, on the perfectly good grounds that the coward cannot help himself. He does not forgive the proud. Satan did not fall through cowardice. He fell, Sandie, through a brand of Tarheel pride. Prepare a letter for my signature.'

‘I think,' Sandie said, swallowing to get the words out, ‘if any of them
were
sentenced to death, the Confederate Congress might overturn the decision. There aren't many votes in … in executions.'

But Jackson just put those scorching eyes on Sandie for a while and said no more, for he wouldn't be drawn into bad-mouthing Congress.

‘I want Ambrose Hill's division watched closest of all,' he muttered. ‘They're the worst stragglers.'

‘There's a cavalry guard marching behind them, stopping boys from dropping out.'

‘So be it.'

Well, even loyal Sandie Pendleton didn't know if it was the truth that Ambrose Hill's division were worse than anyone else. But he'd seen Stonewall and Ambrose have another falling out. It had been yesterday morning in the meadows round Big Spring. One of Hill's brigades was late starting out from those lovely fields full of late lupins. It had been allowed to wander off to a run of sweet water down amongst the quaking aspens and to fill its canteens. Stonewall had heard about this, who else from but Sandie and Kyd? So he'd decided to march beside Hill's lead brigade.

This brigade was commanded by a Brigadier Ed Thomas, who was soon to be the meat in the sandwich. Poor Thomas had Jackson on his shoulder, and 200 yards ahead Ambrose rode, leading his division as he should, pretending Jackson wasn't anywhere around. Then, at the end of the first hour's march, when there were standing orders for a ten-minute rest, Hill kept his boys striding right on. Jackson spurred the little way he had to catch up to Thomas and told him to halt. Then Ambrose galloped back and asked him: ‘Who told you to stop, Brigadier Thomas?'

All Ed Thomas could say was: ‘I halted because General Jackson ordered me to do so.'

Ambrose lost all his aristocratic coolness when he heard that. He stood up in his stirrups, dashed his horse towards Stonewall, pulled out his sword and offered it hilt first to this dullwit from the mountains. ‘If you take command of my troops in my presence, sir,' he said, ‘you might just as well take my sword too.'

Stonewall didn't let anyone get away with big gestures like that. ‘Put your sword away and consider yourself under arrest,' he told Ambrose.

So one of Ambrose's stragglers today would be Ambrose himself, for he would enter Maryland this morning in the traditional place of an officer under arrest, that is, right at the rear of his command.

Some of the local landowners and businessmen from Frederick rode out on good horses and found the General on that embankment. They said fulsome things like: ‘It is our pleasure, sir, to welcome the liberators of Maryland.'

But they told him that most of this part of Maryland was Union. Even this very county, Frederick County, was divided. The town of Frederick itself was by and large Confederate but there were lots of Germans round about who were hot for the Union, and some people that were just pro-Union out of the perversity of their politics. ‘I think I speak for most of my fellow townsmen,' one of them said, pretty grandly, ‘in telling you that the town of Frederick is all yours.'

Another said, ‘And I think we can get you, sir, a better mount than that-there artillery nag of yours.' And Jackson patted the big cream horse and laughed and said he wouldn't turn back any such offer.

Tom Jackson was still there on the north bank at noon. The army was passing him and spreading out into the fields of Frederick County. It was as fine a day in early September as you could wish for. The sun was high, the temperature – according to Hotchkiss, who kept thermometers with him – stood at 76° Fahrenheit. That was just when a crowd of waggons rolled down into the river. They were the light waggons and ambulances of the Stonewall division, followed by those of Dan Hill's division and of Ambrose's. There must have been 600 or more of them, creeping up through the town of White's Ford and edging down to the river. The trouble was they were so slow getting across. The mules got delighted this warm day to be in the cool water and halted with the ripples tickling their bellies. Some drivers steered their waggons past the first ones that halted, only to have their own mules stall before they were two parts across. It happened almost without anyone noticing, that the whole river was jammed with waggons, waggoners were yelling, the mules were drinking and grinning in a contemplative manner, and the waggons on the Virginia side were halted and had nowhere to go.

Old John Harman saw all this from the Maryland bank. ‘Goddamit!' he yelled. ‘They'll never move that mess. Half them waggoneers are goddam Dunkers.' The Dunkers were a peaceable German church strong in the Shenandoah Valley. They did not believe in warfare and so had been conscripted as waggoneers. More important to the matter at hand, they held against the uttering of oaths.

John Harman operated under no such religious handicap. He spurred his horse down into the water, not taking the road that was cut into the embankment, but riding the beast down the slope on its hindquarters. All that jolting only put the quartermaster into an even sharper frame of mind. He rode into the mass of waggons and kicked mules and yelped at them. He spoke at them in a great baritone voice that Kyd could hear above all the other voices of waggoneers, above both the voices of the gentle Dunker drivers and of the more profane.

‘Way-hay, you hinnies,' he screamed, ‘you comic beasts, you sons of whores and callithumpians, you no good eunuchs, you childless sons of bitches. Way-hay-hay! Goddam your granite brains, God blast your eyes, get out of that water there! Way-hay-hay! Is this a water resort and are you goddam Christians, you Monday morning whimsy of the Creator? Up, you goddam hinnies, up, you draft mules, go, you eunuchs, you goddam jests! Go on and way-hay and God blast your sterile flanks …' and so on.

Any mule Harman got close to began to haul again, and others, seeing that the train was starting to move, came to believe that the bathing was over and began to pull as well and to compete with others. Soon the waggons of Jackson's corps were grinding up the road to Frederick. Touching his hat coyly, expecting to be chastised for his cussing, Harman rode back to the General. ‘The ford's clear now, General,' he announced. ‘Lookee, there's only one language that will make mules understand on a hot day that they must get out of the water.'

Tom Jackson coughed. ‘Why, thank you, Major Harman,' he said. He didn't seem to be very interested any more in the train. He was pointing across the fields. ‘See that thirty acres or so of corn,' he said. ‘I'd be right obliged if you bought that from the farmer concerned.'

‘Easy done, sir.'

‘Corn to the men and the stalks to the horses. I want you to buy up fence rails too, so a day's ration can be cooked.'

Harman nodded, made a note in a notebook and tapped the saddlebag at his pommel that contained the promissory note forms he was authorised to issue when buying supplies. He thought it was crazy to buy fence rails and not just take them the way the Union did. To John Harman's mind, the Confederacy couldn't afford to spend money on a commodity that was just lying round the countryside fit for picking.

The place Tom Jackson camped was called Best's Grove, just south of the town, a sweet clearing amongst oaks and maples and sycamores, renowned round Frederick as a place for lovers and picnickers. At Best's Grove at mid-afternoon a crowd of the businessmen who had visited Jackson that morning brought a grey mare and made a present of it. Watching the handover, Kyd thought this horse looked even more like an artillery nag than the one it was replacing. There seemed to be something about Tom Jackson. Elegant horses evaded him.

‘Try him for size, General,' the businessmen were calling. They were plump and wore good cloth. The war hadn't touched them much or raised the price of Northern tailoring beyond the reach of ordinary men. Beside them, Stonewall looked dusty and his clothes awful shabby. Shabby as he was, he hauled himself up into the light saddle the great mare was bearing. ‘Take her for a canter, Stonewall, sir,' the businessmen called in their hail-fellow way.

Stonewall pressed her with his knees and she took two steps, but baulked dead. So he put a spur to her. At that she reared up, some few hundred-weight or more of grey mare, and fell backward, taking Stonewall with her and clamping his left leg under her ribs. The businessmen came fussing up to the fallen General and the mare on top of him. But it was Kyd and the others of the staff who got that gift horse up off Stonewall's leg.

The leg seemed whole, but Stonewall couldn't stand on it. He'd hit the back of his head as well and lay stunned right there in the middle of the grove for half an hour. Maguire tried to force brandy on him but he'd shake his head. He'd never touched liquor since a wild night he'd had as a cadet with other cadets in Washington years ago. They'd had a top floor room in Brown's Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, and at one o'clock in the breathless morning, under the spur of liquor, they'd locked their door, stripped off, climbed to the roof and began singing ‘Benny Havens'.

‘Come, fill your glasses, fellows, and stand up in a row,

To singing sentimentally, we're going for to go;

In the army there's sobriety, promotion's very slow,

So we'll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens Oh!

Oh! Benny Havens, Oh! Oh! Benny Havens, Oh!

So we'll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens, Oh!'

Those were days when nothing broke the night serenity of Washington after the hour of nine p.m. After old Mrs Brown threatened to call the police the cadets had climbed down and passed out on the floor of their room. Afterwards Stonewall always said he'd had to give up liquor for life because he'd liked the taste too much.

So now, though needing stimulants, he wouldn't touch Maguire's brandy. At last an ambulance came up and they lifted Tom Jackson on to it.

‘It'll have to be Daniel, Sandie,' he muttered through his pale lips. ‘Daniel will look after the corps.'

It would have had to be Ambrose, who was under arrest, except that Lee had happily assigned Stonewall's brother-in-law, Daniel Hill, to General Jackson's corps. Daniel was a North Carolina Hill. Tom Jackson liked him a sight better than he liked the Hills of Virginia. So Daniel Hill was named in command, and Maguire gave Tom Jackson laudanum for the pain in his leg.

18

So much for gifts from Frederick town.

But the people of Frederick offered services as well. Mrs Julia Fishburn and her niece Jess appeared by the paling fence of the field where the Shenandoah Volunteers had spread their blankets and cooked their corn and the last of their Manassas coffee. Mrs Fishburn was a dark little woman, well made, and Jess was a little lanky but with a sweet sort of cowlike face. Mrs Fishburn leaned on the fence, her head just showing above it. The first soldiers she saw on peeping over were handsome Ash Judd and Danny Blalock, who were lying flat out on the crabgrass with their belts undone.

‘Welcome to Frederick County, boys,' called Mrs Fishburn. But although her voice was rich and full, her words were sort of private. As soon as Ash heard them he knew what manner of woman she was.

‘Well,' he said, sitting up and grinning that slack grin. ‘Well, I always did hear how fine were the ladies of Maryland!'

‘Ain't these Southern gen'lmen jest gallant as hell, Jess?' Mrs Fishburn asked her niece.

Danny started laughing, a little nervous. He looked round to see where Lucius and Captain Hanks were.

‘My honey,' said Ash, coming up closer to the fence and not knowing quite which of the women he was talking to, since he had such a fancy for both of them, ‘I had exactly you in mind when I took it into my head to come visiting at the North.'

‘Do you think,' said Mrs Fishburn, darting her eyes about and winking towards Virginia, ‘that some of your friends would care to meet my niece Jessica and your humble servant?'

‘Praise the Lord, I know they jest would,' hooted Ash. ‘That's so, ain't it, Danny?'

‘Indeed,' said Danny, laying his eyes on the angular niece.

‘Of course,' said Mrs Fishburn, ‘my niece and I have had a hard time of it, being like trueborn Virginia ladies of proper-minded Southern sentiment and living as it were – in exile. Mind you, we seek Lincoln money, you must understand that, gen'lmen, since it is our fate to go on living under that tyrant.'

‘Why that ain't so, ma'am. You and your niece're now liberated. And liberated you'll stay …'

‘Still,' said Mrs Fishburn, ‘Jess and I feel we must insist on Lincoln dollars.'

‘It happens we have a little Union money,' said Danny. He couldn't stop himself lifting his hand to the fall of blond hair on Jessica's cheek.