Six days after the Battle of Front Royal, on May 29, McClellan sent General Heintzelman’s corps, which included Emma’s regiment, across the Chickahominy River to join the other troops on the outskirts of Richmond. Emma dared to hope that the Confederate capital would fall imminently, but the following evening a violent thunderstorm swept the Peninsula. For hours the rain fell, heaved in all directions by great gusts of wind, accompanied by thunder one rebel soldier described as “hell’s artillery.” Lightning bleached the sky, one strike instantly killing four men of the 4th Alabama. “Had it not been for McClellan’s faith in the Bible and in God’s covenant with Noah,” Emma wrote, “he would no doubt have seriously contemplated building an ark in order to save himself and his army from destruction. The Rebels seemed to think this flood was sent as a judgment from the Almighty upon their hated enemies.”
Confederate general Joe Johnston did view the storm as a godsend. The Army of the Potomac was now divided by the Chickahominy, and the rising floodwaters would make it nearly impossible for McClellan to reinforce his troops across the river during battle. Two days later, around noon, Johnston ordered his men to attack, hoping to surprise the most advanced Union regiments and drive them back toward the river. The general then moved his headquarters to a small house nearby and waited for the sounds of battle. The fighting raged around him—cannon thundering, shells shrieking, rifle balls stuttering t-h-t! t-h-t—but he heard none of it. The newspapers called such strange mirages of noise “silent battles.” The sounds were most often absorbed by woods and hills or deflected by wind currents, bounced away to a distant location, even hundreds of miles away. Johnston had no idea his men were fighting until several hours later.
Emma, dressed in Frank Thompson’s full uniform and mounted on “Reb,” the horse she’d acquired during her last undercover assignment, acted as orderly for General Philip Kearny. The general had lost his left arm in the Mexican War and compensated by gripping his reins in his teeth and brandishing a sword in his right hand. She rode alongside him on the battlefield, delivering messages and dodging shots and shells, watching her comrades march across the one remaining rickety bridge, held together by a single stringer. She was about to ride off with another message when a ball struck and shattered the arm of General Oliver Howard, standing nearby. She hitched Reb and rushed to the general, pouring water on the wound and down his mouth. His arm was limp, sandbag-heavy and awash in blood. As she rummaged for bandages in her saddlebag Reb sank his teeth into her arm, stripping flesh from her bone, then turned and kicked her in the gut with his hind feet, hurling her through the air.
All of the breath rushed out of her and she felt turned inside out, whipped like laundry on the line. She gasped violently, greedily gobbling at the air, ordering herself to her knees, to her feet, wobbling back over to General Howard. Her own arm was so swollen she couldn’t lift it above her head, but she wrapped the general’s wound and reported to an old sawmill that had been converted to a field hospital. It was crowded with injured men who had crawled in from the battlefield, dragging themselves forward inch by inch using nothing but elbows and chins.
At the moment she was the only nurse there. She bound her arm into a sling and went to work removing the soldiers’ clothing. She had neither scissors nor a knife and so bit through the soaked, stiffened garments, blood seeping into her mouth and staining her teeth. When she ran out of bandages she started off in the direction of two houses, about a mile away. She hoped the rebel folk inside would notice her condition and show some mercy.
The occupants of the first house refused to let her in, and she limped along to the next. A man came to the door, holding it open just a crack, and told her he had nothing she could use for bandages. Emma snapped, her patience and strength both exhausted. She drew two pistols from her belt and aimed them at the man, the hand of her injured arm shaking under the weight of the metal.
The man looked into the guns’ shiny gaze and that was all the convincing he needed. He called to his wife, who brought an old sheet, a pair of pillowcases, and three yards of cotton cloth, for which she demanded five dollars. Emma gave her three.
On the way back to the sawmill she felt a strange whirling in her head. She removed her sling and saw that she’d grazed her arm with her pistol, reopening the wound, fresh blood blooming across her skin. Her breath thinned, and she stopped to rest by the side of the road.
An hour passed, and she heard the distant sound of hooves drawing closer. She looked up to see a Union chaplain. His eyes flickered down, taking her in, but he continued without offering her a ride. She assumed he was hurrying to help the wounded at the sawmill, but after she staggered back she found him wrapped in a blanket, sleeping on a pile of hay.
She considered asking the chaplain if he would be so kind as to bring her horse—just for the sake of having the vicious “Reb” give him “a little shaking up”—but instead she stood over him in quiet disgust. She muttered that he was “not the possessor of one grain of manhood,” hoping he was awake enough to hear the words. Slumping down beside him, she began to cry, for once not caring if she looked like a girl.
The night brought respite, Yankees and rebels lying on their arms within speaking distance of each other. Fighting resumed at seven thirty in the morning. Emma spotted McClellan riding along the battlefront, the men cheering as he passed, all of them comforted by the sight of their commander. The rebel army was falling back toward Richmond and dealing with an unexpected emergency: General Joe Johnston had been struck in the chest by a heavy fragment of shell, knocked off his horse, and carried off the field on a stretcher. President Davis asked General Robert E. Lee, his chief military adviser, to assume command of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s main fighting force in the eastern theater of the war. Recognizing the precarious state of his troops, Lee continued the withdrawal toward Richmond.
By noon the Battle of Fair Oaks (known as Seven Pines to the South) was over, a Union victory at immense cost: 790 killed, 3,594 wounded, and 647 missing; the Confederate casualties numbered 1,000 more. It was the worst battle yet in the eastern theater, and Emma, standing by the surgeon’s tree, could do little more than survey the horrific scene. “The ground around that tree for several acres in extent was literally drenched with human blood,” she observed, “and the men were laid so close together that there was no such thing as passing between them.” For the next two days she helped load the wounded onto railroad cars bound for White House Landing, where they were transferred to hospital ships for the trip north. Men died along the way, their bodies crammed in close boxcars along with the living, maggots burrowing into their wounds.
Publicly McClellan swaggered, boasting about the “great victory” and issuing an optimistic address to his troops: “Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac! I have fulfilled at least a part of my promise to you. You are now face to face with the rebels, who are held at bay in front of their Capital. The final and decisive battle is at hand. . . . The enemy has staked his all on the issue of the coming battle. Let us meet him, crush him here, in the very center of the rebellion.” But in letters to his wife the general confessed a distaste for the realities of warfare. “I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield,” he wrote, “with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded! Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost.” In perfect position to advance on the Confederate capital and possibly end the rebellion, McClellan instead blamed the poor weather for his inaction and badgered Lincoln for more men.
While the general waited for his bridges to be rebuilt and for reinforcements to arrive, an odd lull ensued. Union and Confederate pickets lined the swampy lowlands on the south side of the Chickahominy River, in some spots separated by a mere hundred yards, trading newspapers and telling stories and hoping the enemy would honor the informal agreement not to shoot. Emma temporarily resumed her duties as postmaster and mail carrier, riding Frank from the front lines to Fort Monroe and back again, a nearly sixty-mile route that took her through areas heavily populated with rebel sympathizers; she had heard reports of another mail carrier being robbed and murdered by bushwhackers on the very same path. It was always late when she passed over that “most lonely spot” of the road, so dark she knew it only by the rustle of paper under her horse’s feet, and she prayed that God would keep her safe until that dreadful noise was gone.