The next morning, Draper, with me by his side, learned from Revere that it was a band of seventy-odd bushwhackers that was driven back. “Any casualties?” he asked.
“The tracks show there was likely some wounded.”
“No dead?”
Revere did not reply. His protracted stare was his answer.
The three of us stood just inside the doorway of the church. “Is there something more?” asked Draper.
“It’s said a detachment of the Gray Ghost’s men have come down from Virginia, along with what’s left of Clapson’s bushwhackers, and joined up with the raiders hereabouts, under Cy Grandy. They were the ones last night.”
“Not Elliott?”
Revere’s dead face was again his reply.
Elliott was Draper’s target, but for me, this news was a consolation, as it meant that Patrick would not have been among our attackers of the previous evening. Joseph Etheridge had said that he’d joined up with Elliott’s band.
“The Gray Ghost?” asked I, and Revere offered not even a flinch my way.
“John Mosby,” Draper explained, “a notorious guerrilla captain who has harassed our forces ceaselessly between Richmond and the capital.” He turned back to Revere. “Down here? Are your sources sure?”
“Nothing is sure,” said the other, adding, “but guerrillas are guerrillas. Does it make a difference?”
Draper dismissed Revere, who rejoined his detachment, awaiting a-mount on the edge of our camp. The colonel said to me, “Etheridge, take this down.” He paused until I’d loosed some paper from my haver. “‘To all citizens,’ new paragraph. ‘Anyone harboring or otherwise abetting in the least ways any guerrillas, either local or from abroad, shall not be spared,’ end paragraph. Signed, ‘Alonzo G. Draper, Colonel, Volunteers.’”
I finished my scribbling, thinking about that fool Revere and half mumbling to myself: “And so through the night goes this cry of alarm . . .” Revere would heartily approve of this public warning. He’d maybe even see it as license to unleash his swamp men to loot the hamlet and commit other such depredations.
“Pardon?” said Draper.
I didn’t realize I’d spoken loud enough to be heard. “Nothing, sir.”
“The poem?” His smile broke up the tangle of beard that had, since our departure from Freedom, spread over his mouth and cheeks.
I recited what I recalled of it:
“And so through the night goes this cry of alarm
A cry of defiance, to every village and farm . . .”
I had to think on it a moment.
“A knock in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a voice echoing . . . evermore!”
“Ha!” said Draper. “I suspected you for a literary man, but didn’t know you were a devotee of Longfellow.”
“Sir?”
“Longfellow,” said he as though I should recognize the name. When it was clear that I did not, he set in:
“Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.”
He went on at some length, much more than Revere had offered up, until he arrived at what must have been the very, very long poem’s end. It was an impressive display.
He looked sheepish then, as though embarrassed. “I have a gift for recall.”
A gift for recall? This was understatement. I remembered his unending recitation of the Lieber Code. He seemed to retain word for word whatever was put before him.
He removed his slouch hat and ran a hand through his topmost crop of hair, a deliberate gesture, to deflect the focus elseways than on himself. “And you,” he said, “how is it you’ve come to know and love books so well? I thought them off-limits to slaves.”
“I had a mistress who didn’t like to be told what to do.”
“Well, bully for her, then.”
Sure, why not? And likewise bully for me, for I had played along with Sarah’s safe rebellions. Sarah and Patrick and me—John B.’s ungovernable children.
I said, “The poem, though—it was Sergeant Revere I heard to recite it. Me, I don’t properly know it.”
“Sergeant Revere either, really, though what I heard was a close approximation.” He paused, pensive. “Revere, eh? . . .”
“Sir?”
“It’s called ‘Paul Revere’s Ride,’ by Henry Longfellow. I wonder if Revere is truly his name or one he chose once he joined our lines, in regard for the poem.”
The former Obediah Peters. And so through the night, indeed!
“Back to the task at hand,” Draper said, returning his hat to his head. “Find material with which to make broadsides.” He pointed toward the portraits on the walls, some of which had slipped slantwise. All were in one way or another spoiled. “The backs of those paintings, if you must. Then post a few about town. Keep the rest for farther along our route.”
He moved through the door.
“And leave off the literary flourishes,” he added, smiling. “Just the directive, as dictated.”
I enlisted Tynes and Sergeants Merritt Pool and Thomas Artis of G to join me. By halving the portraits with Artis’s penknife, we had sufficient stock to make some twenty-odd posters. Miles Hews took charge of seeing four of them put up around Shiloh. We kept the rest for other places upcoming.
Colonel Draper consulted his list of abettors of the irregulars, compiled from the captured enemy reports. He found two names that were cited as being from here. We located their residences. They stood side by side, as it turned out.
With our companies at attention afore them, Draper had me take a squad and evacuate the dwellings. “You, not Backuss,” said he. “I want the Rebels and anyone of sympathetic inclination toward the Rebel cause to see Negroes exacting the cost of disloyalty.”
Though he was no longer ranked, I ordered Fields with ten men into the house on the right, hoping the gesture might take him and me a first step toward reconciliation. His face didn’t register appreciation. It did not change one whit, remaining as blank as the canvas of a sail. But he hopped to and executed the assignment.
I led ten others into the house on the left. I knocked harshly, then burst through the door, hustling in and thereon hustling the inhabitants back out—a man my age or thereabouts, his wife and young son. Fields’s squad had found a larger group, with what appeared to be grandparents alongside a husband, wife, and three young tykes. The entire bunch was held at gunpoint in the lot beyond the houses.
After taking one last turn through the first domicile to make sure no one remained, I spread fuel from their lanterns overtop of whatever looked like it might readily catch—under the ticking of the sofa, on the window curtains, all such as this. I then scooped lit coals from the hearth into a long-handled pot and distributed it about. Flames jumped up quickly. I repeated the procedure next door. It was all efficiently done.
Draper announced loudly: “Citizens of Shiloh! The penalty for disloyalty shall be severe!”
Within minutes, smoke billowed from every opening left ajar. Glass panes burst out on account of the crackling heat. The men of the two families screamed protest, and one rushed toward the flames to attempt to snuff them out. Fields and Hews forced him to the ground and used their knees to keep him there.
No townsmen turned out of their houses, though the curtains of the neighboring windows shifted to allow for viewing.
When the flames had grown to where no amount of water might douse them, Draper turned toward the battalion. “We move out, men! Forward, march!”
He led us out of the town.
“Damn you!” cried the man whom Fields and Hews had restrained. “May God damn you all to Hell!”
I heard Fields’s retort, though the man himself could not: “I am already there.”
The bushwhackers took to potshooting our march up the Indiantown road. But their here-and-again sniping didn’t accomplish much beyond displacing our pickets, who would rush toward the position only to find it abandoned, not a soul in sight. After the first few times, the battalion hardly even slowed with each crack of rifle fire.
“They’re probing our line,” said Colonel Draper, “feeling us out for exposure.”
We made periodic stops along our route. At each house from the colonel’s list, fire was applied as rough medicine for poor association. Draper varied the sergeants to lead the procedure. “To assure that morale is kept up equally across the companies,” he whispered down to me from his saddle.
He was generally such a reserved and composed man. It was odd to see him derive such pleasure from these doings.
His tactic worked, though. As we paraded up the road, our men boomed “Go Down Moses,” a song most-all knew from bondage times. Our voices echoed into the trees, all the way to the pocosin beyond.
At the third stop, a stately manor not a mile south of Indiantown proper, we found eight bondmen but no masters. A blanketing drizzle had settled in. The slaves, who were mostly very old women and men, confirmed to Draper that the house’s owner was in league with the bushwhacker gangs hereabouts.
“More than just this,” said one old pappy. “Mass Sanderlin be currently raising his own outfit of Partisan Rangers.”
Draper assigned Thomas Artis, G’s sergeant, to take charge of the torching.
The battalion had been collecting contrabands as we’d progressed—maybe thirty, including these new arrivals. Most were aged like these ones, or terribly crippled. All would have difficulty traveling. General Wild had believed the country to be mostly empty of colored, given all the canvassing in the neighborhood during our occupation of Elizabeth City. He was wrong, though, and this was proving a problem. Where Wild’s large column was meant to be a sword thrusting toward Currituck Courthouse, our smaller one was to be its cutting edge, striking at the irregulars who peopled the region. The new arrivals threatened to compromise our mission by hindering our mobility.
I ordered Hews to confiscate what carts and draught animals he could find hereabouts and join them to our ambulance wagons, which were already full of previously chanced-upon colored. I found the colonel and let him know what I’d done.
He nodded but seemed distracted, looking off toward the Sanderlin house.
He then made a gesture toward the unceasing drizzle. “Be sure to keep your sword dry of the lingering moisture,” he said. “Otherwise, it’ll rust.”
This was an obvious thing to a colored man raised to domestic duty, what I myself might tell a tyke, to begin teaching him the oversight of things.
“Done, sir,” said I, though it was at times like this that the obligatory “sir” felt bitterly akin to saying “Mass” to me.
He remained preoccupied, notably so. Further, his horse had taken to whinnying and pawing at the ground with a foreleg, its ears flicking back and forth. I’d seen Syntax behave such as this back home, when anxious.
We were being watched, and by unfriendly eyes. The horse clearly sensed it.
Our battalion had tarried here too long. We were disorganized and now vulnerable. Captain Smith and the bulk of Company I were spread out among the chattel houses. Likewise G, in the neighboring domiciles.
“Colonel, sir—” said I, aiming to forewarn him of my apprehension. But he stared fixedly at the manor house yon.
He dropped then from the saddle, grave of countenance, and strode toward its front doors.
“Sergeant Tynes!” I called, and he came forward. “Take your squad and form a battle line along that fence.”
It faced the pocosin, two hundred yards distant.
“Yes, sir,” said he.
I chased after Draper. Passing into the house, I found him in the great room, his pistol drawn, staring at the entrance to another space. He waved curtly to bid me to be quiet. I made my way to him. In the room beyond, a dining hall, were Sergeant Artis and three of his privates—Shadrach Keyes and two men I didn’t recognize—stuffing silverware and varied ornaments into pockets and havers and knapsacks, whatever would accommodate their treasure. One half-wit was trying to wrestle a candelabra into the sleeve of his greatcoat.
This was what had caused Draper’s unease, passed along to his horse, not bushwhackers in the tree line. He took two strides forward and fired his pistol—at the half-wit’s arse-end, I thought, but in fact just near enough so that the man felt a proper warmth there.
Startled, Artis and the rest stopped their doings and looked up.
“Sergeant, what’s going on here?” said Draper.
No one spoke. All looked pained.
Me, too. I was outraged at them fool Negroes, looting such as they were.
I also felt a tinge of guilt for finding myself on the side of the white man in this incident. It somehow recalled the night of the discipling of Fields.
“Sergeant!” said Draper, echoing his earlier inquisition, only more sternly now.
Artis said, “It would all be spoiled in the fire, Colonel, sir. So what difference that we take us some?”
“What difference?” Draper looked genuinely flummoxed, if not by the question itself then by Artis’s audacity in asking it. “We will abide by military order and discipline, this is the difference. You, of all men, should know this, Sergeant.”
Lieutenant Backuss and Captain Smith burst into the room, other troopers following.
Glaring yet at the guilty men, Draper said, “Were we encamping here, I’d have the lot of you traced up by the thumbs on the village square.” He turned then toward the officers. “Place these thieves under arrest. Manacle them and strip them of their uniforms. If they have on undergarments, bully for them. If not, they shall march without. But they are not fit to wear the Union blue.” Draper added, again facing the guilty ones: “Keep them on the column’s flank for all the others to see, until we can transfer them to General Wild’s column and they join the other miscreants and prisoners.”
My heart was gladdened that he’d saddled the officers with this dour chore and not laid it on me.
As to Backuss and Smith, neither appeared in the least bothered by the order. Smith asked, “Their brogans, too? We’ve a ways to go, sir, and their marching barefoot over frozen ground may slow the battalion’s advance.”
Draper turned toward Artis and the other three. “Let them keep their shoes.”
I sought Artis’s eyes, to ask of them with an earnest look: Why, Thomas? Why would you do this? . . .
He faced the floor and would not look up.
Backuss waved over some nearby troopers. They took the guilty ones roughly by the collar and shoved them out of the room. Backuss seemed to derive pleasure from it.
When it was just the colonel and me, I said, “Is it wise, sir?”
“Pardon?” He again wore an expression of bafflement, like the one at Artis’s earlier attempt at justification.
I let it all out in one long breath to preclude him from interjecting or otherwise interrupting: “The punishment, sir, this shaming punishment. They’ve been treated—we all have been treated—as less than men our whole lives. As beasts of burden, no better than the ones we were made to drive out in the fields. Humiliation was our daily course. Artis and them, they know they’ve done wrong, they were caught red-handed at it. Punish them with extra duty or reduction in rank—or imprison them if you must. But don’t publicly shame them like you might an over-eager dog that has wet the front-room carpet. Do not rub their noses in it. Leave them their dignity, Colonel. Especially out here in the country we all heretofore come from, in front of kinfolk as well as former owners.”
It occurred to me to, but I chose not to mention Revere’s swamp men and their suspectly-got new costumery.
I merely added: “It’ll go a long way with the men, sir, to know you’re capable of understanding our previous experience, of seeing things as we do, from our view.”
He didn’t on the spot respond, and I didn’t give him much chance to. I saluted and left, as that was all of this conversation I cared to partake in. What I’d said had needed saying, and if there were consequences for me, then so be it. Draper had taught me things on leading. This time, it was him that needed teaching.
The battalion passed through the center of Indiantown, a hamlet not so unlike Shiloh, in size and also in the shuttered-up disposition of its domiciles. Artis, Keyes, Green Whitfield, and Washington Darby (as I learned the other two thieves were called) were confined to the wagon train at the rear—bound at the wrists but fully clothed—not off to the side of our column as some spectacle to behold.
I will confess to appreciating this—the colonel’s effort at understanding. He’d heard what I’d said.
The neighborhood was hardly empty of slaves, as Wild and Draper had anticipated it would be, and bondmen continued to attach themselves to our column. Ten more came away with us at Indiantown, one, a ma’am with her four tykes. For the transportation of themselves and their things, they chose the ornamented buggy of their erstwhile owner, not for its practical purpose—the five of them barely fit along the single bench seat—but for its style. They sang ditties, and the children attempted at dancing in the tight space of the buggy, wearing what had clearly been the Sunday clothes of their masters.
Not far along the road to Sandy Hook, our next destination, Draper hailed me forward. He didn’t give me an order to relay as I’d expected. Instead, he dismounted and, leading his horse by the reins, ambled forward. He seemed to want me to join him.
“You know, Etheridge,” said he, thoughtful, facing the ground rather than the route afore us, “I’d never met a Negro before my enlistment in the service.”
“Aren’t there any up in Massachusetts?” said I, though I knew full well that there were.
“Some, sure, but not many.” He glanced toward me but beyond, at the North River pocosin in the distance, on our flank. “Not enough to note in Lynn, anyway, where I’m from.”
I let the silence ride, as I didn’t know what he intended with this.
“I’m an Abolitionist,” he said, quickly, “have been my whole life.”
“I do not doubt it, sir,” said I. And I didn’t.
“I’ve always seen my mission as to the downtrodden. Back home, before enlisting, I led the journeymen shoemakers—cordwainers, cobblers, and the like—on a workmen’s strike, to earn their fair due. Did you know that?”
How would I? I didn’t even know that he’d been a shoemaker. I had heard that he was read in the law.
“The rights of the common man must pertain as much as those of the gentry,” he continued, speechifying now, as for effect, “for how do we, by spurious notions of natural right, deny fellow men a decent wage with which to feed their wives and children? I launched a well-read broadside to achieve this end and canvassed most of New England and New York, drumming up support. Even those opposed to my positions praised me, in speeches and print alike, as someone who always ‘invariably counseled moderation’ and ‘deprecated, at all times, any resort to violence.’ These were their very words, Etheridge.”
I found myself unsurprised by the things he was telling me. Sure, he tended to keep a certain distance from us others, as a commander should. But unlike so many officers, it didn’t seem from scorn or mistrust.
He looked me dead on then, confiding again as he had at the Pool house back in Elizabeth, and it felt equally odd now. “Making hostages of women? Burning and razing property? Me, the ‘man of moderation,’ undertaking these sorts of behaviors?”
I, too, had been surprised by the Brigade’s descent into the terrible. Still, I felt a need to defend the general.
“When bushwhackers lurk about in every direction,” I said, “and are irreconciled with the message that we carry, maybe moderation isn’t what is called for.”
This didn’t appear to ease his mind. Nor did it mine, really. For I was also finding the general’s actions increasingly difficult to stomach, as with the boy Daniel Bright.
“Maybe comes a time when we are all new people,” I went on, trying for better, “unfamiliar even to our own selves. When seraphim become fiendish and lambs lupine, we do what needs doing because the times dictate it.”
He smiled. “I suppose so, Etheridge.”
I’d meant my words as a period and not a comma, and thought our powwow done. But he didn’t remount his bay, continuing to amble along. So I didn’t quit his side.
Finally, he said, “There was another thing I wanted to talk with you about.”
“Sir?”
He looked to be searching for how to say it. When he found it, I wasn’t sure he hadn’t misaimed.
“It seems to me that what makes you and your lot good soldiers has to do with what was beaten into you to make you learn to submit. Soldiers and slaves, their daily surrender to authority is similar. The thievery earlier, well—soldiers will be tempted to take spoils, regardless their race. I encountered it in my previous unit and punished the guilty in the manner I was prepared to employ with those men today, had it not been for your intervention. You were right to call my attention to the difference. But there are other things . . .”
His meaning remained woolly, so I couldn’t interject to help get him there.
“Some of what I encounter with the men . . .” he said. “It surprises.”
“Sir?”
“More than that, it discomfits.”
I was at a complete loss now, and he must have recognized it, for he finally arrived at his point head-on. “Privates Prentiss and Dozier in your company, others in the Brigade. They insist on calling me ‘master,’ and it causes me great embarrassment.”
This made me smile. I felt a kind of relief, too, that this was his reaction to it.
I explained, “It’s the older men, most often as not. I’ve reiterated to Prentiss the proper way of addressing you, as ‘sir’ or ‘colonel.’ Prentiss, Dozier, the others, they know better. But maybe ‘sir’ and ‘master’ is all of a thing to them—as you said, soldiers and slaves sharing a similar training and all.”
He took this in without response, and I took his silence as inducement to say more.
“And maybe what causes you discomfort is a comfort to them, sir. You see, Prentiss has been a slave his whole life. Now you say he is a man but call him a private and have him do slavely chores, cleaning latrines and digging entrenchments and the other things we been doing back at the fort. Because, truth be told, this raid excepted, our soldierly lives have much resembled the previous ones.”
“Me, my interest has only been in the instruction of you men at becoming a good fighting troop,” said he, defensive, “never in the upkeep, much less the betterment, of the base. Those directives come from above.”
“I know it, we all do. But yours is the face relaying the message.”
He took this in, again in silence.
I said, “Being driven to do things we might not choose to otherwise, were the choice truly ours—well, sir, maybe in those circumstances, ‘master’ might to some men seem as appropriate a term of address as ‘colonel.’ You might not deserve it, but neither did we deserve the lot we were born to.”
He again smiled. “To each his cross to bear, I suppose.”
He began to remount but stopped and turned back to me. “If I’m the slave master in the framework as you lay it out, then what does that make you and the other sergeants?”
“Drivers,” said I. “Drivers and overseers. My cross to bear.”
And I smiled—though rather than jestful, it felt like an observation true.
He climbed atop his big bay. “Well, anyway, Etheridge, all this is to say, thank you for your intervention on behalf of Sergeant Artis and his men. Your advice was sound—no, it was wise and just.”
A commotion caught our attention just then, fevered hoofbeats approaching. Revere rounded the bend ahead, riding with some dispatch. Draper rushed forward. Me, I called over toward the battalion, “Relief, halt!” and heard the order repeated down the length of the line. I watched Draper and Revere conferring, their horses wheeling about one another, still riled.
When Draper returned, his countenance was stern and grave. “Double-time the men forward,” said he. Then he turned his horse and galloped up around the bend.
I bellowed, “Forward! At the double-time!” and the column jumped to.
With F at the top of the battalion and me at the top of F, I arrived before the rest, and what I met with stopped me dead. Men pushed up behind me, my company and then the others, bending a bunched semi-circle around the patch of field where Draper and Revere and the swamp men sat atop their horses, staring upwards. All were silent but for two of the swamp men, one sobbing audible, slumped in the saddle, his shoulders jerking, the other field-hollering over the wails of the first:
“I stood at the River of Jor-dan
To see that ship sailing o-over”
Three lengths of planking had been twined together to make one stout crossbeam, and it had been posed between the upper reaches of two thick-trunked oaks. From there hung four bodies, two men and a woman—their tongues grossly bulging the o’s of their lips, their necks hideously kinked—and a baby, him by his right foot. He was naked and upside down, the free leg dangling loose and misbent at the hip. It was clear that this had been recently done, as their clothes were rumpled but not overly thus and there was no evidence of scavengers about—little pecks of blood and their eyes gouged out.
“I stood at the River of Jor-dan
To see that ship sailing o-over”
A placard was strung over the head of one of the men. It read: THESE NIGGERS HANGED BY ORDER OF CAPTAIN CYRUS W. GRANDY.
A rejoinder to what Wild had posted on the boy Bright, back at River Bridge.
Colonel Draper commanded, “Cut them down, cut them down from there,” and Revere and Golar set to it, and praise Jesus for this. For the idea of being tasked with this, of ordering my men to do it, repulsed me to the core.
“Oh Mama, don’t ya weep
When you see that ship sail over
Shout, Glory, hallelu-jah!
When you see the ship sail by.”