Confederates

  Tom Jackson wasn’t amazed or trembling. All statistics came from the hand of a hard but fatherly God. He told his staff to watch for stragglers. At ten o’clock near the place where the Smoketown road met the pike he himself found a straggler with a light face wound carrying a pig in his arms and therefore sent him back.

  Surgeon Maguire had come to talk to Tom Jackson around 9.45. At that stage Stonewall was standing by an artillery battery near the Dunker church. The noise was beyond all telling. Maguire gave Tom Jackson some peaches he’d picked from a tree in passing on his way across from Shepherdstown. While Hunter talked in his ear, Stonewall split the peaches in long fingers and ate them hungrily, getting the nectar in his whiskers. All through the woods on the left of the church there was this crackling and hissing, and Maguire could see Yankees through the Miller cornfield and the woods beyond.

  ‘Over there,’ yelled Maguire, pointing to the masses of Union soldiers. ‘They look like hordes.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Tom Jackson evenly, mashing the peach flesh.

  Maguire said, ‘I admit I’m disturbed by what I’ve heard, sir. The Shepherdstown Road is crammed with stragglers. Some of them officers. They all say the business is going bad, sir.’

  Tom Jackson didn’t like his surgeon being hysterical like this. ‘Stragglers will always tell you the business is going bad, Doctor Maguire.’

  ‘I’m wondering if the wounded as a group shouldn’t be evacuated south from Shepherdstown straight away.’

  ‘Down the Valley?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Stonewall, still ripping into the peaches, and as if it didn’t have anything to do with him.

  Hunter Maguire decided to make a speech. ‘Look, General, we have six churches in Shepherdstown – the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic and the rest. Already they’re all full. There are men laid out on the steps of the altar. I saw an armless boy propped in the pulpit of the Lutheran church.’ Maguire could feel the edge of panic that was in his own voice now. He expunged it. He could tell how little Stonewall appreciated edges of panic.

  ‘You should take over the schoolhouses,’ Tom Jackson muttered, looking all the while up the pike and at the cornfield.

  ‘We have,’ Maguire said, more deliberate now and calmer. ‘The Oddfellows’ Hall as well. The Freemasons’. Surgeons are working in the Town Council room. We’re also using farmhouses, barns, corn cribs …’

  ‘Corn cribs,’ said Stonewall dreamily, as if he was reminded of boyhood.

  ‘Livery stables too,’ said Maguire.

  ‘Well, Doctor Maguire, you must relieve the pressure as you see fit.’ Tom Jackson worked with his tongue at the peach skin lodged between his lower front teeth. ‘I’d dislike it an amount though if you let all this influence your thoughts.’ He gestured towards the northeast, towards the cornfield again, towards the sunken laneway over there where Daniel Hill was so short of fire that he was shooting a private’s musket himself. ‘They,’ he said, ‘they have just about done their worst.’

  God knows how he believed that. But at about 10.30 that day the Yankee infantry dragged back into the woods, far up the pike, that they’d started from that morning. When that happened, Jackson and young Junkin and Hotchkiss and Sandie rode up the pike themselves a little way. The cannon on both sides of the road were still blazing, and all the fences were hung with scarecrow corpses and, against the embankments, young boys lay with their heads back and their lips parted.

  After some quarter of a mile, Tom Jackson’s party came to what at first seemed a thick line of dead against the bank at the side of the pike. It proved to be instead a Tarheel brigade sheltering there. Their reason for sheltering was clear enough. There seemed to be a Yankee battery sighted on them – its guns stood in place way over beyond a farmhouse. Tom Jackson had got glimpses of that farmhouse in its stony yard all morning. It was about as far as anyone in his army had got. He could see through his glasses that there were corpses on its roof. It was from beyond that roof that the Yankee battery was firing now. Fragments of shell clattered down on the pike. Sandie and Hotchkiss and young Junkin sat their horses and waited to be killed by such fragments; but they were not touched. Once they had dismounted, they felt less naked.

  A colonel rushed up to them as they stood under the embankment bowing their heads a little before the rain of metal. This colonel said his name was Matt Ransome. These boys here were his regiment. The 33rd North Carolina. They’d tried to get to the farmhouse and the battery on the rise beyond it, but they suspected there was still an immense force over there.

  That was a question Tom Jackson was interested in. Hotchkiss knew what the General was thinking and couldn’t help being a little shocked by it. Tom Jackson, after fighting off three attacks at a price the Confederacy could bare afford, was thinking now of counter-attack. Of rolling up McClellan’s right flank in the Stonewall manner. If he tried that, few of these Tarheels of Colonel Ransome’s would be complete men by noon.

  Up on the embankment stood a big hickory. It seemed to Stonewall that a man ought to be able to see beyond the farm and even beyond the hill and the Yankee battery from the branches of that hickory. A man should be able to see what McClellan had in reserve over there.

  He called for a volunteer to climb the hickory. ‘Everyone knows from when they were young,’ he said for those that could hear, ‘the hickory’s one of the best climbing trees you can find.’

  A dozen boys started forward. They all wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren, thought Hotchkiss, that once they climbed a tree for Stonewall. The first who got to him was a lanky boy without any shoes. He said his name was Private William Hood. He had that easy rustic way and the sort of slack rustic grin you’d expect. He was up in the high branches inside half a minute.

  ‘Can you see any troops beyond?’ Jackson called up at him. Jackson himself had climbed the bank and was leaning his hip against one of the long lower branches.

  ‘Whoo-ee,’ said the Tarheel. ‘There be oceans of ’em, General.’

  ‘Count the flags you see,’ Jackson said, not really happy with such an inexact report.

  Private Hook started counting. ‘They be 1, 2, 3 …’

  Just as well he can count, thought Hotchkiss. Bullets began to travel towards the hickory now, making a sharp rustle as they passed through the foliage. There were some sharpshooters firing at William Hood. Chunk! went a ball into the ancient wood of the hickory. Jackson didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘… 7, 8, 9 …’

  Hotchkiss saw that a dead boy hanging on the fence beyond the hickory and in a rough line with Jackson jerked as a bullet hit the unfeeling flesh. But Jackson had this Presbyterian belief that God would take him when the time was fit. Until then sharpshooters could just about go on wasting their ammunition.

  ‘… 19, 20, 21.’

  About the time Hood got to 30, a shell exploded above the apex of the tree. It did not stop Hood counting or Jackson listening. When Hood got to 39, the General held his hand up.

  ‘That will do. Come down, sir.’

  Hook got down even quicker than he’d got up. Well, he has his historical anecdote, Hotchkiss thought.

  A sort of whimsical light came into Jackson’s eye. He turned to talk to Colonel Ransome. ‘Why ever did you try to take a battery that’s supported by 39 regiments?’ he asked.

  The figure filled him with a divine contempt for McClellan. 39 flags! And he let them stand by. That’s how (under God) we’ll win it. By a whisker. By moving regiments around to whatever stretch of fence or pike or lane they’re needed at. While McClellan permitted himself – and the Lord permitted McClellan to permit himself – to leave whole corps, perfectly good ones, standing around in the fitful sunlight of mid-morning.

  There was a sunken laneway running near Mumma’s burned-out farmhouse. It was beyond Miller’s cornfield and ran sort of north-south, leading towards the township of Sharpsburg itself. Dan Hill had charge of its defence, but u
nder Tom Jackson’s orders. Jackson rushed some of the units, who’d got intact through the fight at the church and in the cornfield, across to the laneway to help Dan Hill’s division. They found that thoroughfare filled to its lips with the dead and the wailing; yet it was held.

  At the same time the Yankees moved against the laneway, a Union general called Burnside was meant to cross the Antietam by a stone bridge at the south of the hamlet and take the Rebels from that end. He did not get around to trying it till mid-afternoon, and then again the Confederacy – in the shape of its northern Virginia forces – survived by a hair, namely because Ambrose Hill’s boys arrived back from Harpers Ferry at the exact right hour, about 4.30.

  Weeks later, Searcy would read accounts of the fight in both Northern and Southern newspapers he managed to obtain. Already the North were into the habit of calling the day Antietam, for they had been engaged so much with that obscure country stream, with crossing it, pivoting on its banks. The South had begun to call the event Sharpsburg, for their line, their argument, their future had been anchored on the little town.

  These accounts and any others he would ever read would always sicken Searcy. Why, knowing everything, hadn’t McClellan managed to trap the beast, the Secession itself, the Serpent of Slavery between Antietam Creek and the big river that morning and so ended it all? It was a question he would bore people with for some years to come. It was the old question of how such incompetence could go hand in hand with a good cause.

  Usaph had already left Sharpsburg. By noon he was on the Shepherdstown road and spent the afternoon and the whimpering night in a stables on the edge of that town.

  Some orderlies moved through the stables with pails of water and dippers, and when Usaph had drunk deeply he slept. It was almost like he was devouring wedges of sleep; but like sour plums in a cake there was always a dream at the core of the sleep and it would wake him. Yet the day lurched on into the night, and he huddled in a corner behind an old harrow in the hope of not being bothered by surgeons.

  In the morning he crossed the river at a place called Boteler’s Ford, the water pulling at his knees and wearying him. There were many others crossing too, soldier-farmers who’d done what they could and now were going home. On the Virginia bank, an elderly provost officer with gentle eyes was trying to halt this drift. As Usaph came out of the river he heard him say to an infantryman: ‘Where’s your furlough, son?’

  ‘This is my goddam furlough,’ said the boy softly and raised his rifle and pointed it at the officer’s chest. The officer could see the boy meant to shoot if he were stopped and so let him go through. That old officer knew the price wasn’t worth it.

  Usaph’s sleeveless arm, tightly dressed in the Quaker dressing, was now his furlough. The bandages were hard brown like bark from all the stiffened blood and to anyone who saw it, it looked a frightful wound. So he was let through.

  The wound was not just his furlough, it was his ticket, too. For Lee and the army left Maryland not fifteen hours after Usaph, and as the ambulance and ordnance waggons of the withdrawing force caught him up, he would be given rides, and when not in army waggons, farmers and people in carriages would often ask him to ride with them. And so he made his way down the Valley. And people fed him on account of that mess on his upper arm.

  Whereas mere stagglers stole or starved.

  9

  It was murky in Orange that last evening. Rain had settled in again at the hour when Mrs Whipple got her last caller of the day. Young Surgeon Curtis, the head surgeon in the Orange Girls’ Seminary, stood in the doorway. He was carrying a basket covered with a cloth.

  ‘Dear Mrs Whipple,’ he said, ‘I’ve brought you your dinner.’

  She liked the look of Dr Curtis tonight. He had none of that solemnity most of her visitors had, the solemnity of people visiting the already dead. Perhaps it was his experiences in the military hospital that gave him such an easy manner at the door of death cells. The depression that had come on her after Searcy’s visit was lifted, and she smiled at the young surgeon.

  ‘You are very welcome, sir. Do you think you can persuade the turnkey to let you in?’

  The turnkey obeyed her wish without being asked. Once in the cell Dr Curtis bowed to her. ‘I have wine, ma’am, light, dry, white. It is North Carolina wine, but good enough to eat fried chicken with.’

  The bottle sat in a bucket of ice which filled one corner of the basket. In the other corners were flourbread rolls, fried chicken and gravy, roast potatoes and green peas. By the standards of the Confederacy it was an expensive meal, and the surgeon must have commanded most of the resources of the Lewis House to get a meal like it together.

  Chatting, they unpacked, then they sat and began to eat, not before having an argument about who would use the one chair.

  While they ate, she asked questions concerning patients she knew. Some had died. Well, it isn’t such a big issue to die. Others had got better and been put into detachments moving northwards. They would likely come back more grievously wounded or ill than they had been in the first place. That was the irony of the conflict.

  Then she said: ‘I don’t want to talk at length about this. But have you seen a hanging?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘What is your frank … frank, mind you … opinion of the sufferings of the hanged person?’

  He looked at her direct, as if he could tell it was no use being coy. ‘I’ve spoken to this hangman,’ he said. ‘And I think I can assure you, ma’am, as a surgeon, that you will suffer nothing. The world, ma’am, is amazed at your courage, if not your politics. I can assure you, you won’t be made to suffer.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ she said simply. ‘I will see Yates Whipple again.’

  ‘Mr Searcy,’ he said and coughed, ‘sends his warmest affection and hopes you would reconsider his offer … there is still time to contact Richmond by telegraph.’

  She lifted her hand. ‘Don’t say it!’ She thought a while. ‘Tell him I am as you see me. That I am settled in my mind, in other words.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ he said. Then his face lit up. ‘Did you hear what the Marylanders did to Canty? They locked him in the privy at the Lewis House. Bound his hands, gagged him. There was a line of people, ma’am, if you don’t mind my being indelicate, hammering at the door, and Canty not even able to answer them except for a grunt.’

  Mrs Whipple clapped her hands and laughed. ‘He must have sounded like some case of dysentery.’

  ‘He is some case of dysentery, ma’am. Never mind, his brain will soon burst with all that booze.’

  ‘You are a good man, Surgeon Curtis,’ she said.

  He closed his eyes and lowered his head, taking the compliment. ‘And you among the best of women, ma’am.’ Then he spoiled it a little by saying what they all did. ‘I don’t know who is right, ma’am. But whoever is right, whoever prevails you will always be remembered. And if we are defeated …’ He shook his head, ‘our name will be dirt for having done this to you.’

  ‘Not your name, sir,’ she said. ‘Your name won’t be dirt.’

  ‘My name,’ he nodded; ‘my name with all the others.’

  The chicken was eaten and only half a glass of wine was left when the turnkey brought them coffee. Mrs Whipple, already euphoric, found that an immense sleepiness overtook her as she drank the coffee.

  ‘I’m not accustomed to wine, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps you should lie down, ma’am.’

  ‘In the presence of a gentleman?’

  ‘Far from a gentleman, ma’am, a surgeon.’ He grinned. He helped her to her cot. She fell heavily down on it and went almost immediately into a profound sleep. Strange she didn’t suspect, Curtis thought. She should have suspected, given her familiarity with hospitals. He felt her brow and her pulse. Then he called to the outer office and they let in a nurse to sit by Mrs Whipple all night.

  ‘She’ll not be very aware in the morning,’ Surgeon Curtis told the nurse. ‘In fact she should not eve
n be properly conscious. It will take you and one of the guards to get her to the scaffold. Hold her firmly all the way.’

  The nurse said she would.

  ‘When she’s cut down, be sure her body is as thoroughly cleaned and arranged as she has a right to expect.’

  Mrs Whipple was snoring. The surgeon shook his head and gathered up the feast to take the basket and dishes, the glasses and the bottles back to the Lewis House. After he had delivered them to the kitchen there, he went into the lounge, where he found Searcy sitting in a corner, a hand over his mouth, his eyes lowered.

  ‘Sir, there were two grains of morphia in her coffee,’ the surgeon told Searcy. ‘She will not suffer, no matter if the hangman makes mistakes.’

  Searcy began to sob, so loudly that people in the lobby began looking in at him through the doors. ‘I think of what the rope will do to her sweet little body,’ he said.

  Curtis murmured: ‘Sir, there’s no profit in that.’ He glared at the spectators in the lobby and frightened them off. ‘Be as brave as Mrs Whipple is,’ he muttered. ‘I think we should have some brandy, sir.’

  10

  The idea that the Army of Northern Virginia should leave Maryland came up clear on the afternoon of the day following the fight. Stonewall and James Longstreet and Lee kept getting reports of latecomers reaching Sharpsburg, a dribble of slow and lame who were at last arriving. Stonewall rode up the pike again with one of the artillery chiefs and they considered the question whether they could with their fifty guns break up that northern end of McClellan’s army. Even Jackson decided it couldn’t be done, not with what was left and with a few thousand foot-blistered and weary stragglers. Across the creek of Antietam, two new Union divisions arrived that day and took up their positions on the low hills. Others still would be coming up from Washington. Whereas Lee could expect nothing, nothing ever until today’s fourteen-year-olds in Virginia and Alabama and the Carolinas grew up.