The Bride of Texas

The Bride of Texas
is a romantic fictitious story, but it is set in a world that is as real as I know how to make it
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I chose General William Tecumseh Sherman to be the central character of this novel based on the American Civil War — indeed, I don’t hesitate to call him the hero — for obvious reasons. It was Sherman who commanded the huge army that marched through Georgia to the sea, and then up through the Carolinas to its final engagement, the Battle of Bentonville. And with him marched my Czechs
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Of the many other real-life commanders who appear in this book, I shall name here only those who took part in the Campaign of the Carolinas and the Bentonville battle, which greatly contributed to the final victory of the Union armies
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At the end of the war, Sherman’s forces consisted of three armies: the Army of the Tennessee, the Army of Georgia, and the Army of the Ohio
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The Army of the Tennessee’s commander was Major-General Oliver Otis Howard, a pious, one-armed officer who took part in many battles of the war, including Gettysburg and the bloody assault on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. Howard’s army was divided into three corps, one of which, the Fifteenth, under the command of Major-General John Alexander Logan, included Major-General William Babcock Hazen’s Second Division
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The Army of Georgia was commanded by Major-General Henry Warner Slocum and consisted of two corps: the Fourteenth, with
Major-General Jefferson Columbus Davis commanding, which included the division headed by Brigadier-General William Passmore Carlin and Brigadier-General James Dada Morgan; and the Twentieth, under Major-General Joseph Anthony Mower — Sherman’s favourite, whose rash action almost changed the course of the Bentonville battle. In Mower’s Third Division fought the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, with numerous Czech soldiers in its ranks
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The Army of the Ohio’s commanding General was Major-General John McAllister Schofield. It was composed of two army corps: the Tenth, under Major-General Alfred Howe Terry, and the Twenty-third, under Major-General Jacob Dolson Cox. Part of this army was the Cavalry Division of Major-General Judson Kilpatrick, a flamboyant and fearless womanizer
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Quite a few other union officers are mentioned in the novel, but since this note cannot be a Who’s Who of the Civil War I refer interested readers to the many non-fiction books on the subject, particularly the magisterial three-volume
The Civil War: A Narrative
by Shelby Foote
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Among the very few fictional Union officers in these pages are Captain Warren Baxter II, Colonel Browntow, Captain Bondy, Lieutenant Williams, Lieutenant Szymanowsky, and Lieutenant Bellman. The latter is important because he later wrote a fictitious book on the Bentonville battle, from which I quote freely
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On the Confederate side, the most prominent historical figure is one of the South’s best commanders, General Joseph Eggleston Johnston, who eventually withdrew from Bentonvillle not for lack of courage but for lack of soldiers. Also frequently mentioned are his three brilliant cavalry generals: Matthew Calbraith Butler, Wade Hampton, and Joseph Wheeler
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A note on the characters

Lorraine Henderson Tracy, the successful author of humorous novels for young women, is not entirely fictional. According to some sources (or perhaps rumours), the real-life General Ambrose Everett Burnside did have a fiancée who ran out on him when the couple were just about to take their vows. Lorraine’s literary career is my invention, although some problems of the craft she struggles with (and never really solves) are very real. Naturally, since she herself is not quite real, neither are her husband and her children. Most other characters around her, however, actually lived — from the peacemonger Clement Laird Vallandigham to Burnside’s subordinate, General Milo Smith Hascall; to the bloodthirsty Colonel Jennison, who had been with John Brown in “bleeding Kansas” and promised that Chicago streets would “be carpeted with Copperhead corpses”; and, finally, to the luckless Jeremy and Elihu Lecklider, and the murderer Thomas McGehan. On the other hand, the lovely Jasmine, her unworthy fiancée, Hasdrubal, and her mother-in-law, Gospel, never lived, although their problems are not fictional. Made up also is Vallandigham’s young colleague in the legal profession, Snopes, though I did not invent his name
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Real too are the Czech soldiers in the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, except for Jan Amos Shake, who anglicized his name from Schweik; he too is a good soldier — at least when he describes actions like the Perryville battle to his companions. Otherwise these men actually lived and fought: Jan Kapsa, Frantisek Stejskal, Vojtech Houska, Frantisek Fiser (Fisher), Adolph B. Chladek, Jan Dvorak, Vaclav Svejkar, Josef Paidr, Frantisek Javorsky, Frantisek Kouba, Ondrej Salek, Frantisek Zinkule, and numerous minor characters like the gunboat gunner Pechlat, who was determined to volunteer for submarine duty as soon as the Union had submarines. Very real also is the commander of the Lincoln Slavonic Rifles, Captain Geza Mihalotzy (in various sources the company is also called the Lincoln Slavonian Rifles or — as in Mihalotzy’s letter to Lincoln — the Lincoln Riflemen of Slavonic
Origin). Mihalotzy was probably Hungarian, or he may have been Slovak, and sometimes he even claimed Czech nationality — depending, allegedly, on who was paying for his drinks; he ended up as a colonel in the German Twenty-fourth Illinois Infantry. Though his ethnic background is unclear, he was a capable and valiant soldier; he was killed in action at Buzzard Roost, where a small fort commemorated his name
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The sources are similarly unclear as to which men actually went to the field with Mihalotzy, when the original number of pre-war volunteers dwindled after Fort Sumter. Apparently they numbered about ten, and the names most often mentioned are those which appear in the novel: Filip, Neuman, Kouba, Uher, Kukla, Dvoracek, Hudek, Smola, Kafka, and Jurka. (I added Shake and Salek.) They fought valiantly, and some were wounded
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Most Czech civilians who appear in these pages likewise lived. Charles Sealsfield, whose real name was Karel Anton Postl, was an adventurer who travelled in Texas and Lousiana probably as early as 1823, and later became a popular fiction writer under his Americanized name (though he wrote in German). Anthony M. Dignowity took part in the Polish uprising of 1830 and was forced to flee to America, where he became a jack-of-all-trades, his trades including that of medical doctor and writer (in English). At the beginning of the Civil War, Dignowity, an outspoken enemy of slavery, narrowly escaped public hanging in San Antonio, and he spent the rest of the war as an employee of the federal government in Washington D.C. His two sons had been conscripted into the Confederate army, but they both managed to escape, and joined the Union army. Another early Czech pioneer, Josef Lidumil Lesikar, came to Texas in 1851 and was also threatened with hanging, as the New Ulm, Texas, correspondent of an abolitionist Czech paper published in St. Louis. Lesikar survived the war. Ladimir Klacel, an ex-Augustinian monk (he once lived in the
same Moravian cloister as Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics), spent the second half of his life in America, where he edited Czech papers sympathetic to the free-thinkers movement
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