Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

  The Federals had been driven out of the mule shoe, but from the far side of the breastworks they poured galling fire into the Confederates. Federal artillerymen wheeled two small brass cannons into position and discharged a blast of canister that ripped the charging Confederate brigade. Holding his pistol in both hands, Catesby strode toward the guns, stopping, firing deliberately. A Federal officer was passing canister to his gunners and Catesby fired twice before the man dropped to his knees.

  So much Confederate fire concentrated on those brass cannons that no man could stand near and live. Their artillery horses were killed a dozen times over.

  More Confederate brigades poured into the field even as Federal reinforcements arrived on the far side of the breastworks.

  Catesby fought in a three-sided fort, men firing to the front and over the south traverse. The trench was knee-deep in pink-tinted water, and men stood on their comrades’ bodies to get a better shot. Men fired through the logs and over them and sometimes a Federal soldier would leap to the top of the breastwork, fire down into the upturned faces, and be shot away himself. As soon as the front rank fired, hands passed their rifles to the rear for reloading. Catesby bit open a cartridge, rammed it home, set a cap in place, and handed the rifle forward. Another gun came to him. Another.

  For a moment the rain lifted and cold wind blew across the drenched bloody men. A Federal regiment rushed the breastworks and toppled onto the Confederate side. Their first volley felled fifty Confederates. In the act of handing Catesby a rifle a man was shot in the back and stumbled forward, clasping Catesby in a bloody, wearisome embrace.

  Over the dying man’s shoulder, Catesby watched helplessly as a Federal drew a bead, but that man was felled by a volley from South Carolina reserves coming at a run. The Carolinians swept through entangled, brawling troops and mounted the breastworks the Federals had latterly held. The Carolinians’ colonel toppled, hit time and again. With his staff, the Carolinians’ color bearer swept Federals into the teeming brawl at his feet until a minié ball knocked him into death.

  On either side of the breastworks, Federals and Confederates fired as fast as they could reload, and bullets peeled the bark off trees.

  When the Confederate dead grew too numerous, a line formed to pass bodies to a heap in the rear.

  Noon came. Afternoon.

  Hit by fire from two angles, the trunk of a good-sized oak tree was disintegrating. Wounded men plundered the dead for ammunition. On the breastworks, when a dead man’s hand was convenient to hold cartridges, that’s where cartridges were placed.

  General Lee was building a new line behind them. They must hold here until the new line was done.

  When men died in front of him, Catesby come forward until he was the one taking aim and squeezing the trigger and passing the empty rifle back and snatching a new one. A bayonet flicked between a gap in the logs and stuck the next man in the eye. The man grunted and blood shot forth and he fell back off the bayonet, which stabbed again and again, like a snake seeking prey. Catesby fired through the slot and the snake was stilled. The blinded man rolled back and forth across the logs, blood gushing from his socket. Someone grabbed his feet and dragged him into the trench.

  It got dark. Some hours went by and more hours went by.

  On the far side men stopped shooting, and an unarmed Federal officer leapt onto the breastworks.

  A Confederate major cried, “What do you wish, sir?”

  “Why, sir, I am awaiting your surrender. My men report you have raised a white flag.”

  “We are Carolinians, sir. We do not surrender.”

  “Why have you raised a white flag?”

  “If any man has, it is without my permission.”

  “Well then, a mistake has been made.” The officer considered the heap of dead and wounded, the group of Confederate survivors. “It is no better on your side than ours,” he said before he was shot dead.

  Bold Federal soldiers climbed the breastworks and fired into the massed Confederates, and they were shot down. About eleven o’clock, the oak tree was cut through by bullets and toppled onto the traverse. A branch knocked Catesby to his knees.

  While Georgians kept up a determined fire, Catesby and a dozen others dragged the tree back, beside the pile of dead men. Again, Catesby loaded rifles, passed them forward, loaded, passed them forward. When men died, Catesby moved forward. One young soldier who had been firing all day and night was struck in the head and fell wordless into the mud.

  Their original trench was filled to ground level with bodies. A Federal muzzle poked over the top, and Catesby directed it harmlessly aside before it fired. He pushed his rifle over the top and fired. Another. Another. His face was crusty with black powder, his hair thick with dried blood. A sudden jerk dragged him half over the breastworks and a voice hissed in his ear, “You’re my prisoner, Johnny,” and someone had his legs and someone else was pulling his arms until a shot blasted beside his ear and killed the Federal trying to take him prisoner and Catesby slid down his own side, over the slickness of living and dead Confederates into the ditch. When someone stepped on the small of his back, Catesby was pressed into the spongy mass of dead men. He bucked and twisted so he could breathe and another dead man fell on top of him and another, and Catesby crawled away from their embrace.

  It rained. The night was lit with muzzle flashes. Men who climbed the breastworks were silhouetted by war’s glare.

  Catesby thought to pray but couldn’t think how. He sat on a dead man who was beginning to bloat. The hand he put out to steady himself brushed a dead man who might have been Federal or Confederate, but was surely pinned to the logs by an iron bayonet. Catesby wiped his hand on the man’s tunic. Someone fell at Catesby’s feet and looked into Catesby’s eyes and said, “Help me,” in the politest way. Catesby wished he had strength but hadn’t, so the wounded man slid into the ditch of the dead.

  It rained. The Federals lobbed mortar shells. These exploded. The Federals kept up such rifle fire no man dared lift his head above the breastworks. Now and again snake bayonets probed.

  Catesby thought that if Christ had come to this place tonight, he’d have been killed like everyone else. Death is what men truly love. All the talk of kindness and honor and decency is only talk. Children and old men are alike in death. General Lee knew why they had come here, what men are for.

  At three-thirty in the morning, messengers slipped along the lines whispering they could retire, that the new line was ready, that Longstreet’s fresh troops were manning it. Survivors paired up to help a wounded man to the rear. Catesby Byrd laid down the rifle he was loading and walked through the mud alone.

  “DON’T WE LOOK LIKE

  MEN O’ WAR?”

  CATHARPIN ROAD NEAR ALRICH, VIRGINIA

  MAY 15, 1864

  “Is not a negro as good as a white man to stop a bullet?”

  “Yes,” General Sherman replied, “and a sandbag is better.”

  “BEST THING ABOUT this mud,” Surgeon Potts joked, “covered with mud you can’t tell one of them from one of us.”

  “Why did you cut off his head?” Colonel Campbell asked.

  “He didn’t object,” Potts said solemnly. “Never said a word.”

  The rain pattered on the headquarters tent, and the smell of wet wool uniforms and unwashed men thickened the air. Since the brigade commander had criticized officers who failed to uncover in their superior’s tent, the ridgepole lantern cast light on bare heads. Canvas walls were gray with the light of an overcast morning.

  First Sergeant Tubman stood just outside, hands tucked behind his back, at parade rest, eyes straight ahead. No sir, he wasn’t hearing a word. Second Sergeant Jesse Burns sat inside at a field desk writing things down properly.

  “Potts, are you drunk?”

  “Oh hell, no more’n usual. Colonel, I do my duty. I am the best sawbones in this damn division, and once we get into a scrap I’ll be glad to prove it.” He scoffed, “Cholera! Pneumonia! The flux! I sw
ear these boys are the unhealthiest soldiers I ever saw. That’s what I was trying to figure out. Man like Private Bolden: big strong buck, fine figure of a man, and yesterday morning he falls in for muster and drops in the mud dead as J.E.B. Stuart. And nary a mark on him. His messmates say Bolden felt fine that morning, no complaints, no soldier’s disease, not a solitary damn thing wrong.”

  Colonel Campbell, who’d been a Presbyterian elder, said, “I’d appreciate decorum in your language, sir. Although this tent is regimental headquarters, it is also my home.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir. Scientific curiosity made me autopsy the man. There he was, a buck in the prime of life, and he drops dead. Now, what do you think would happen if we was making a charge and a couple hundred niggers was to drop dead on us?” The surgeon winked. “See what I mean?”

  Lieutenant Seibel, the colonel’s aide, asked, “Sir, are we to understand your motives were scientific?”

  Seibel, Jesse, the colonel, three senior captains, and Surgeon Potts were crowded into a tent meant to hold half their number. The air was heavy and damp and the tent’s canvas walls were spattered with mud.

  Potts sighed, heavily. “Finally, I got one officer to understand. Yes, I went into that boy to learn why he died. Scientific inquiry.”

  “I am told,” Captain Fessenden said, “that having examined the man’s liver, heart, and entrails, you piled them on the dispensary table.”

  “I had to put them someplace, didn’t I?”

  “And then you cut off his head.”

  “Captain, all the time I was sawin’ on him I didn’t hear one word of complaint. No sir, he just lay there, ‘ready for inspection’ so to speak.”

  “And then you replaced the head with a bottle wrapped in a blanket and removed the head to your own tent, where later that night you scalped it preliminary to extracting the man’s brains.”

  “I got the idea to measure ’em,” Potts said. “Might have weighed ’em too. Shadrach Bolden. You ever hear a white man named Shadrach? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were in the Bible.”

  “They were thrown into the fiery furnace,” Jesse said quietly.

  “And they came out alive,” Potts crowed. “You see, niggers are different. You ever watch them pour sugar into their coffee? A white man’d choke on so much sugar. White men don’t fall over dead for no good reason at muster, but niggers do. I admit it, Colonel, maybe I took too many spirits that afternoon, but I meant no wrong. I wanted to find out what makes niggers different from white men.”

  “Captain Fessenden, you and Lieutenant Seibel will escort Surgeon Potts to corps headquarters. Dismissed.”

  “Colonel, I . . .” With a helpless shrug and a jerky salute, Potts and the other officers left. In terse sentences, Colonel Campbell dictated charges, had Jesse make a fair copy for the order book, and gave the original to Potts’s escort.

  The colonel held the tent fly open. It had stopped raining. “The men are much distressed,” Colonel Campbell said.

  Jesse sat at attention, his eyes straight ahead. “Yes, Colonel.”

  “How distressed? You may speak freely, Sergeant. What talk have you heard among them?”

  “They come to fight, sir. We guarded railroads at Manassas Junction, march thirty miles in one day, which is as good as Lee’s men ever did, and when we reach Germanna Ford they set us to guarding it. Rest of Burnside’s men fight in the Wilderness, but not the colored troops. When the army race for Spotsylvania, it’s whites doing the racing. It’s white soldiers kill J.E.B. Stuart, and white soldiers braggin’ about it. We coloreds guard supply trains and the beef herd. We didn’t join up to guard cows. And now this business. Surgeon Potts cut Private Bolden up and piled his guts into a box and left him where anybody could take a look if they had a mind to.”

  “I’ll see Potts out of the army for it,” Colonel Campbell said quietly. “I can do no more.”

  “It’d help if you found a coffin for Private Bolden and put every part of him in it and buried him with everybody looking on and you said a prayer, maybe.”

  “Done.”

  “It’d help if you got us into the fightin’ part of this war.”

  The colonel said, “I’ve tried. General Ferrero’s tried. Burnside, he’s been trying. So long as General Grant’s got veteran white regiments left, he’ll use them up first. Tell the men I’ll do the best I can.”

  They were bivouacked in a meadow above the Orange Plank Road, which had seen hard fighting last year, and skulls gleamed beneath bushes and pale bones lay where the foxes had abandoned them, cleaned. Jesse passed a half-buried skull whose eye sockets were packed black with mud. Bones; just bones.

  The sky was overcast, but it was a high overcast. Maybe it wouldn’t rain anymore. Jesse stopped at a cookfire under a sheltering chestnut. Only good thing about guarding trains was how well they ate. For breakfast, Jesse had fresh beef, fresh crackers, and the dried vegetables they were starting to feed the army. He took a cup of coffee and stirred sugar into it. “You ever think why we always put sugar in our coffee?” Jesse asked.

  Private Clement Smallwood sat on a cracker box. “Tastes better.”

  “I mean why is it we use sugar in our coffee and the white men don’t.”

  “Captain Stiles, he use sugar in his coffee,” someone piped up.

  “Yeah. But the colonel don’t. Nor Captain Fessenden. How about Lieutenant Seibel?”

  Nobody knew Lieutenant Seibel’s preferences. “Jesse, we gonna get our money back?” Clement Smallwood asked.

  “I told you not to give it to Potts,” Jesse said.

  “I know you did. I know you did. But what a man gonna do when Massa says hand it over.”

  “Depends whether you’re a servant or a soldier,” Jesse said.

  “You gonna stay in the army when this war over?” Private Smallwood turned the socks he’d been drying before the fire.

  “Depends if we win,” Jesse said.

  Smallwood was shocked. “Oh, we gonna win all right,” he said. “Father Abraham leadin’ the way.”

  The commotion on the Orange Plank Road was General Ferrero himself, his staff, colors, and twenty-man cavalry escort. “Colonel Campbell!” Ferrero cried. The general was a dapper man with a fine black mustache. “Is your regiment ready for a fight?”

  Jesse was running for his rifle before Campbell’s reply and was fastening his bullet pouch to his belt as the drums started their roaring. “Fall in! Fall in!”

  The men raced into ranks as if Gabriel had sounded his trump, and moments later were marching, tense, thrilled, every eye gleaning the countryside ahead. Ten minutes down the road, they heard musketry like big drops of rain spattering the leaves. Pap, pap, pap. The sky was dark overhead and lowering. The regimental drummers hammered the cadence while officers checked their revolvers. Nobody sang. Nobody called out a chant. The determined grim footfalls on the plank road were the only music they required. The color bearer unfurled their regimental flag. First Sergeant Tubman marched backward, eyeing the ranks for alignment and purpose. “Guide right, B Company!”

  Colonel Campbell rode beside General Ferrero. Several of Ferrero’s staff officers drew their swords.

  The damp held the burned-powder stink close to the earth, and Jesse’s nostrils filled with the peppery smell.

  The 2nd Ohio Cavalry were holding the crossroads at Catharpin Road. Their colors waved on a ditchbank behind the road while dismounted troopers kept up a fire on the woods, perhaps 350 yards west. The woods blossomed with white smoke and red reports and ghostlike gray figures inside the trees. The regiment marched sharp, arms swinging in unison, feet smiting the road, and Ferrero pointed toward the woods and Colonel Campbell shouted, “Form into line of battle.”

  Jesse pivoted onto Catharpin Road and marked time as A Company, and each subsequent company swung from column of march into two ranks of men across the field, as if someone had laid a ruler on them. The color party joined Colonel Campbell and officers took their
places. Ferrero and his flamboyant escort galloped to the rear.

  Colonel Campbell lifted his sword and the drummer struck his drumhead, boom, boom, boom, and the 23rd USCT marched straight at those woods. Confederate fire got hotter and a few men fell and others stepped over or around them.

  The colonel called, “Halt!” and one, two, everybody halted. The colonel called for a volley, and the front rank fired, then the second rank, and the regiment was enveloped by its own smoke. The rain came then, a torrent, as the men recharged their rifles at the count of nine and set their hammers on half cock, and the colonel ordered them forward. The firing seemed less, but more men fell, and at the treeline the 23rd poured in a volley, though with the rain dripping off his cap Jesse couldn’t see a soul in there. With a hoarse cheer the regiment rushed into the woods in an extremely gratifying fashion. Colored troops stood where Confederates had been scant moments ago—they could smell them—and they dragged two wounded men out of the bushes, two gray-clad soldiers covered with twigs and dust and blood, one’s left leg stuck out at a funny angle, the other shot in the thigh.

  “What’re you gonna do?” one of the Confederates said. He was just a boy.

  “Remember Fort Pillow?” Private Clement Smallwood said.

  “Why,” Second Sergeant Jesse Burns said, “I guess you boys are our prisoners.”

  “Ha, ha, ha. Don’t we look like men o’ WAR!”

  LETTER FROM MAJOR DUNCAN

  GATEWOOD TO LEONA BYRD

  SPOTSYLVANIA COURTHOUSE, VIRGINIA

  MAY 16, 1864

  MY DEAREST SISTER,

  I take pen in hand to report grievous news. Your husband, Captain Catesby Byrd, has given his life for his country. Since Catesby’s oft-repeated wish was to return to his beloved mountains, I have had his mortal remains embalmed and shipped on the Virginia Central Railway. Their agent at Louisa promises that the melancholy consignment will arrive in Millboro Springs Tuesday if Federal marauders haven’t torn up the tracks again.