25
Jamie took his Marauders into the mountainous section of East Georgia and there holed up until Sparks and the others could return from New York City. Jamie began sending out men dressed in civilian clothing and riding the poorest of stock to act as spies, to learn the whereabouts of Layfield and his Revengers. For when the time came, Jamie was going to hit Layfield so hard the man would think a mountain fell on him.
Layfield, meanwhile, was busy looking for Jamie, but he was over in Central Tennessee and North Alabama, several hundred miles away from Jamie’s position.
For a time, the war seemed far away to Jamie and his men. They hunted and fished and picked berries and mended clothing and did all the other things that soldiers do when not fighting—including waiting.
It was late spring before Sparks and the men returned, laden with gold and Federal paper money.
“That New York City is some place, Colonel,” Sparks said. “I sure hadn’t ever seen anything like it. And I’m not sure I ever want to see it again. Too damn many people to suit this country boy.”
The men were also very relieved to be rid of all that money.
Jamie had heard no real news of the war, and Sparks brought him up to date. “Forrest really got the Yankees all riled up against us after that raid on Fort Pillow.”
“What raid?”
“Happened a few weeks ago just north of Memphis. Forrest and his boys stormed the place and took it, but the Yankees is sayin’ it was a slaughter. The newspapers back east is sayin’ that Forrest’s boys bayonetted and clubbed to death most of the colored soldiers ’cause they was fightin’ for the Blue. The Yankees lost more than three hundred men, most of them blacks . . . accordin’ to the newspapers, that is.”
“It might have happened that way, too,” Jamie said. “Nathan’s got some ol’ boys fighting with him that hate colored people. Some of them were with us originally, if you’ll recall.”
“That’s not to say they weren’t good men in their own way, Colonel.”
“Oh, no. I’ve fought shoulder to shoulder with men who felt the only good Indian was a dead one. I disagree, but I still called them friend and comrade.”
At this time, Jamie was well aware that his friend, General Joe Johnston, was over in Dalton, Georgia, with his army, preparing to face off with Grant. Jamie didn’t care. Suddenly, that war was far away. He was ready to face his own war, as, he felt sure, was Layfield. Up close and personal. Very personal.
“Sherman is sending troops out to forage, Colonel,” Sparks added. “And sometimes they’re right cruel with the civilians in doing it.”
“Are they paying for what they take?”
“Sometimes, but not often. In something called script.” He looked around. “Where is the Top Soldier?”
“Out headhunting,” Jamie replied.
With Joe Johnston was John Bell Hood, in his early thirties, one of the youngest generals in the Confederate army. John had lost a leg at Chickamauga and had an arm shattered at Gettysburg, but he was still able to sit a horse (he had to be strapped in the saddle) and was a respected leader of men. The men liked Hood, but they idolized Joe Johnston.
Sherman was asked what he intended to do with Colonel Aaron Layfield’s brigade.
“Keep him just as far away from me as is humanly possible,” Sherman replied.
Layfield had made the mistake of attempting to preach to Sherman one day. Very poor judgment on Layfield’s part.
* * *
Jamie very carefully laid out his plans to the men driving the supply wagons, and they rumbled out. Each Marauder carried five days’ meager rations in his saddle box, to be used only in an emergency. Jamie had given each man money enough to buy food along the way if they had to. Mainly they would depend on hunting and fishing to sustain themselves.
During the first week in May, 1864, Sherman launched his Georgia campaign, and Grant crossed the Rapidan, signaling the beginning of the campaign against Lee in Virginia. Jamie and the Marauders rode off to tangle with Layfield and his Revengers.
When Sherman learned that Layfield was going to wage a personal war against Jamie MacCallister, he smiled. “Maybe that pompous bag of wind can keep MacCallister occupied enough so he’ll not have time to harass us.” Then he chuckled and called for an aide. “Take this down as a direct order, Captain. It’s to Colonel Aaron Layfield and his Revengers.”
He then made it official: Layfield was to keep Jamie MacCallister and his Marauders away from Sherman’s army. Try to contain the Marauders up in Northeast Georgia if at all possible.
“And make sure that blowhard has sufficient supplies,” Sherman added, then leaned back in his chair and lit up a cigar, smiling around the thick swirl of smoke.
War certainly made for strange allies, he thought.
* * *
Jamie certainly had ample supplies. He had his men cache supplies and ammunition all over Northeast Georgia: from Blue Ridge up near the Tennessee line, down to Gainesville, then over to the South Carolina line and up to the North Carolina line, following the river. The white citizens of Georgia knew what he was doing and helped Jamie whenever possible. To a person they despised Layfield and his men . . . and their opinion of Sherman and his army wasn’t much better, for the man had started his campaign of burning everything that stood in his way.
“In some small way, the Yankees will pay for this,” Jamie promised a group of citizens one summer’s afternoon. “I promise you that.”
They certainly would. There was one small town in Pennsylvania where the citizens would never forget or forgive Jamie and his Marauders.
The mountains of East Georgia were pimples compared to the Rockies, but they were mountains, and Jamie was at home in the mountains.
“We won’t be doing many mounted charges,” he told his men. “But we’re going to teach Layfield and his men some very hard lessons.”
On the same day that Sherman and his Union troops attacked the Confederate stronghold of Rocky Face, Jamie and his men were getting into position in a tiny town in East Georgia. Layfield had been trailed by some of Jamie’s scouts, and they had learned that the Southern-hater was planning to loot and burn the village.
Jamie ordered the civilians—mostly older men and women and children—out of town and into ravines about a mile from the settlement. He had some of his own men—the smaller men—dress up in dresses and bonnets and sashshay up and down the streets so Layfield’s vanguard would see them and not suspect anything.
“You shore look precious, there, Luke,” Sergeant Major Huske told a Marauder, all dolled up in dress and bonnet and parasol.
Luke told the Top Soldier where he could stick his comments... sideways.
Layfield had halted his men about a mile from town, where Aaron was busy praying to the Lord to give his men the strength to wipe this wretched town from the face of the earth, and to teach these Southern whores a lesson in humility. Layfield did not think of rape as wrong—as long as the rape was being committed against Southern women. Layfield considered them to all be whores and trollops anyway. Why shouldn’t his men relieve their tensions? Weren’t they doing God’s work here on earth?
Not this day. On this day, Layfield was about to step up and shake hands with the man he considered to be the spawn of the devil: Jamie Ian MacCallister.
Layfield rode up to within a few hundred yards of the sleepy little town. One of the “ladies” parading up and down the boardwalks flipped “her” dress up and made a hunching motion toward Layfield.
“Whoor!” Layfield yelled. “Filthy Southern whoor!”
Yet another “lady” made a very obscene hand gesture toward Layfield.
Layfield waved his saber and shouted, “Charge, men! Remember, we are doing God’s work!”
God must have surely winked at that, for He certainly wasn’t looking with favor on Layfield that day. Layfield’s men came galloping into town, screaming and yelling. Jamie’s Marauders cleared a hundred saddles during the first volley. The roaring of gunfire was enormous. Horses reared and screamed in fright and dumped their riders to the dirt. The dust and gunsmoke limited vision to only a few yards, and that helped to save Layfield’s life. When the man finally realized he had been suckered into an ambush, he shouted for his bugler to sound recall and then wheeled his horse and got the hell gone from the dusty, bloody streets of the small town. Layfield retained vivid memories of the last time he’d tangled with the Marauders and tried to keep his butt planted firmly in the saddle.
There was just something very unseemly about getting shot in the ass.
Jamie had forewarned his men that there would be no pursuit after the ambush, for Layfield’s force was much larger than Jamie’s four companies of Marauders, and out in the open the Marauders stood a good chance of getting badly mauled.
On this warm early summer’s day in East Georgia, Jamie’s men had killed just over fifty Union Revengers and wounded another fifty or so. Jamie ordered all the guns, ammunition, supplies, and horses to be taken. Any money found on the men was to be given to the townspeople. The badly wounded and the dead were loaded into wagons and taken several miles out of town, while the lesser wounded were told to get the hell gone and tell Layfield to come get his wounded and see to them.
Jamie added this: “You tell that hypocritical psalm-singing son of a bitch who ramrods your outfit that his war is with me, not against civilian men and women and kids. If he retaliates against this town for what happened today, you have my personal word that I will hunt down every man jack of you and stake you out over an anthill and pour honey over your eyes and let the ants have you. And don’t you doubt for one second that I won’t do it. You be damn sure he gets the message.”
The slightly wounded and badly frightened Revenger believed every word Jamie said as the man towered over him, his pale blue eyes burning with the heat of emotion.
Jamie threw the man onto a horse and slapped the crow-bait on the rump, sending him galloping out of town.
Moments later, Jamie and his Marauders were gone, vanishing into the mountains like ghosts.
Layfield and men returned to pick up their dead and wounded and then retired some miles away, to lick their wounds and let their hate fester.
Jamie had not lost a single man, to death or wound.
* * *
All through the months of May and June, 1864, the Marauders and the Revengers fought each other in small battles all over the northeastern corner of Georgia. To the west and south, the Union army was slowly clawing their bloody way toward Atlanta. On June the first, the Yankees were on the north side of the Chattahoochee River, only a few miles north of the city. But it would take the Union forces almost seven more brutal and bloody weeks to reach the city. They would measure their daily advance in yards and sometimes feet. Atlanta was being evacuated.
Jamie and his Marauders and Layfield and his Revengers had been all but forgotten by Richmond and Washington. For them, the war was each other. But it was about to turn decidedly in Jamie’s favor.
The Henry rifle had just been introduced, and a train load of them, along with other supplies, was on its way to Sherman’s troops, now almost within spitting distance of Atlanta.
The train never made it. Jamie and his men blocked the rails and seized tons of supplies and all the Henry rifles and .44 ammunition for them. The Henry lever action rifle was a marvel, holding fifteen rounds in a tube under the barrel. Each Marauder carried two in saddle boots and a third in hand, across the horn. It gave them awesome fighting power, for counting the rounds in the pistols they carried, each man could now fire over eighty rounds before having to reload—unheard of in those days. And Aaron Layfield and his Revengers would soon experience the killing effectiveness of those new Henry Rifles.
Jamie and the Marauders set fire to the freight cars, and then blew up the locomotive, blocking the Western and Atlantic tracks for several days. Then they rode off with their wagons of booty, Gibson tooting on his bugle.
The loss of a small train and locomotive did not disturb Sherman nearly as much as the loss of those rifles; he had been counting heavily on them. For a brief time he considered sending a brigade of men after Jamie and his Marauders. A dozen commanders immediately volunteered.
But Sherman had been studying maps of East Georgia, and the terrain was not to his liking. Moreover, he knew that MacCallister was right at home in the mountains and was a master at setting up ambushes.
“No,” Sherman finally decided. “We’d lose too many men in rooting him out, and besides, we might not succeed.”
“But if he should come in behind our lines . . . ?”
Sherman waved that off. “MacCallister has four companies of cavalry, with no artillery to back him up. He could pester us, but not to any large extent. His war is with this Layfield person and I want it to remain so. Send someone to tell Layfield to force the issue with MacCallister or I will replace him with someone who can do the job.”
The message stung Layfield, and he immediately went to his tent after telling his officers he must be left alone in order to seek Heavenly guidance on how best to deal with Jamie MacCallister and his band of Southern trash.
Actually, what he was doing was drafting a letter to Jubal Olmstead in Washington, outlining the problem and asking if he could do something to aid the Vermont Revengers.
While he was composing the letter, a plan came to mind, and Layfield thought hard for a moment. He smiled, a cruel curving of the lips, and wadded up the paper, discarding it. Layfield knew that Southern men held their women in high regard, placing them on almost a spiritual plane. Layfield found that amusing, if not downright sacrilegious, for to his way of thinking, Southern women were nothing but trash and whores.
Layfield chuckled. Oh, yes, indeed. He knew a way to lure MacCallister and his band of thugs into a trap. And he was sure it would work. He called for a meeting of his officers, and they immediately began making plans to rid the world of Jamie MacCallister, once and for all.
Layfield did not take into consideration that Jamie just might have a thing or two to say about that.
* * *
On September the first, Rebel commanders finally realized the futility of any further holding on, and Atlanta fell. During the night, Confederate troops began slowly retreating. The next day, the mayor of Atlanta officially surrendered the city to the Union forces.
From the very outset, from the moment Sherman had marched out of Tennessee, it had taken a hundred and thirty days of combat, much of it with knife and bayonet, to finally reach and conquer Atlanta. No one could ever offer any disparaging remarks about the bravery of the men of the Blue and the Gray. The casualties were staggeringly, unbelievably high. Both sides combined suffered over seventy-five thousand men dead, wounded, captured, or missing. It was an incredibly bloody price to pay.
But on both sides, the survivors could boast that their fallen comrades had, “Died for the Cause.”