At the commencement of the war General Wild was practicing medicine in Brookline, Massachusetts. That he understands the guerrilla pathology, and can give a prescription that will cure every time, I think the Pasquotank bushwhackers will acknowledge.
From Our Own Correspondent, New York Times
The rain drummed down the next morning. The African Brigade marched up North Road Street out of Elizabeth City, company after company, to the beat and fifing of “John Brown’s Body.” Behind the main column, the wagon train wherein Fanny rode; behind them, Company K, our rear guard. A large group of citizens followed despite the cold and wet, curious about the notices we’d posted announcing the day’s courts-martial, or maybe just eager to assure that we were truly leaving.
Our great assemblage didn’t travel far—maybe a mile—before stopping at River Bridge, the hamlet where, upon our arrival the week before, we’d razed the house and barn of the bushwhacker Billy Drinkwater to rebuild the crossing that he had destroyed. Intelligence gathered from contrabands who’d come into headquarters confirmed that many dwellings hereabouts were peopled by irregulars or by folks who supported them, and so the general’s choice of location was plainly deliberate. Orders came down to form up on a makeshift parade ground afore an unfinished post office on a knoll. At the front, a scaffold had been raised with wood from the construction site.
The Brigade, more than a thousand strong, filled the rain-slicked field. I called F to order. My corporals—Fields, of course, no longer one of them—relayed the command to the various squads. Most officers pushed toward the fore, but Colonel Draper made his way back toward us. He took a place aside me, with Tynes on the other side. The musicians had quit playing and rejoined their companies, all but the drummer boys, who formed up in two parallel lines afore the scaffold. Under guard aside it were the twenty-odd prisoners who had been taken during our forays into the surrounding countryside. All were shackled, save the two women.
General Wild and his brother climbed the scaffold. The general addressed the congregation afore him, soldiers, citizens, contrabands, and prisoners alike.
“We convene this drumhead court-martial today to review the cases of the men and women arrested since our arrival on the eleventh ultimo.” His voice was clear and strong, even to us standing several rows back. “If these accused can prove their legal status as regular soldiers of the armies of the Confederate States, then we will attend to their various offenses committed while in that service.”
Two cider barrels had been established up there, a plank in between to form a sort of table, and the general and his brother took seats behind the makeshift judicial bench. Case after case was heard. Captain Wild sounded officious in his reading of the charges. Nearly half the captives managed to produce papers that the general judged sufficient to warrant immediate release. Most of the rest—men wearing random pieces of butternut duds or forage caps or both—had documents to attest to their enlistment in the Confederate service or orders proving they were on furlough from it. Wild declared these ones prisoners of war and announced that they would accompany our return to Fortress Freedom, where they would be jailed.
Next came Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks. They offered up no defense, neither speaking a single word. Each stood stiff and tall, with a wool shawl over her shoulders and a bonnet atop her head, hands manacled in front. Wild concluded that, being women, they were obviously not members of the Confederate Army. Yet, on account of their associations, they would remain detained.
He had decided against execution. For the time being, at least.
The sun was full out now, having burned off the clouds, the sky sheening blue. General Wild had kept for last the case against Daniel Bright, the boy whom the dinner guest Creecy had advocated for, and it quickly became apparent why. Wild proclaimed: “Lieber, in his study of the matter, clearly and succinctly distinguished a combatant from a common bushwhacker . . .”
“General Orders Number One Hundred,” whispered Colonel Draper, leaning into me, explaining, “what’s called the ‘Lieber Code’—the regulations meant to guide proceedings such as this one. Section Four, Article Eighty-Two is the one concerning the irregulars. ‘Men, or squads of men, who commit hostilities, whether by fighting, or inroads for destruction or plunder, or by raids of any kind, without commission, without being part and portion of the organized hostile army, and without sharing continuously in the war, but who do so with intermitting returns to their homes and avocations—”
I nodded thanks and cut him off—“I did not know it”—upon which he quit his schoolmasterly recitation.
What a queer bird, thought I, wondering how long he would have gone on, or been capable of going on, had I not stopped him.
Up on the scaffold, Wild turned from the documents laid out afore him toward the boy. “You say that you belonged to the Sixty-Second Georgia, yet you wear no uniform, nor was any found at your domicile.”
Bright was stringy, in a long wool coat and what looked like farmer coveralls beneath it, and he had crab-apple cheeks that stood out against his bleached face, even from my vantage point, a bit of distance away. Though barely younger than many of us in the Brigade—and likely older, in fact, than ones like Miles Hews—Bright did indeed look only a kid. He hung his head at Wild’s words and didn’t respond.
“If you were a deserter as you’ve claimed,” said the general, “there should be some evidence somewhere of your enlistment. We’ve held you in custody for going on a week and where is it? Where are the papers or orders, or even a tintype of you in uniform?”
The boy looked puzzled, bewildered.
Wild went on. “Quite the contrary. Since your arrest, your cohort has kidnapped one of my men as a retaliation”—Moses Cornick—“further evidence of your being in league with these armed prowlers, with the vile bushwhackers.”
Bright hung his head anew as General Wild rose from his chair.
“I shall not be held hostage to the lex talionis!”
I turned toward Draper for translation, but none was forthcoming. He just watched now, no longer in a teacherly mode, most-all transfixed.
“The crimes and enormities to which we’ve been subject since our arrival have included the destruction of property, pillage and bridge-burning, and provisioning the larger guerrilla force. The punishment for any one of these activities is summary execution. Absent a single shred of evidence to the contrary, you, Daniel Bright, are found to be guilty of Articles Eighty-Two through Eighty-Five of Section Four of the Lieber Code, and are hereby sentenced to death.”
The boy dropped to his knees at this and commenced what sounded like prayer, a Sunday camp-meeting invocation. “O merciful Father! O merciful Father!”
Major Wright led a handful of troopers in stripping the unfinished post office of still more wood. With this lumber, they set to fashioning a gallows. The banging of hammers overlaid the “O merciful Father!” but could not drown it out. The rest of the field was quiet—soldiers, citizens, contrabands, prisoners.
“Shurtleff!” cried Wild, and the captain of H emerged from the parade assembly. He was long like the boy and strode to the fore and climbed onto the scaffold. He leaned over Bright, his shoulders hunched forward in what looked like a gesture of easement.
It did not calm the boy one whit. “O merciful Father! O merciful Father!” He repeated it a hundred times if he uttered it once.
“He was a seminarian before the war,” Draper said, indicating Shurtleff with a glance.
I already knew this, as Shurtleff regularly held Sunday morning services, though none of us colored were ever welcomed to join in.
“The general wanted that it should be me,” confided Draper, “but I’m not suited to it.” He looked genuinely unsettled. “Ministering to souls? No, no.”
The hammering ceased. The judge’s bench had been disassembled and one of the cider barrels rolled beneath the gallows—a standing post with a crosstie up top, which called to mind the spar of a schooner. Captain Wild handed Major Wright a halyard, and the latter tied a hangman’s knot, then secured it to the joist overhead. Captain Wild placed a wooden wedge under one side of the barrel, such that it tilted forward.
“O merciful Father, look down on me!”
Shurtleff grabbed the boy by the lapels and gave a sudden shake. “Stop it, son. Stop it now!”
Bright did. They faced one another, the condemned and his make-do spiritual counsel.
Shurtleff helped him to his feet and up onto the chair that abutted the cider barrel, and from there, up onto the barrel itself. The captain held him steady by the elbow, as the wedge made the barrel wobbly. Major Wright climbed onto an adjoining chair to put the noose into place. General Wild leaned in and spoke something at Bright, discreetly, and Wright looked at a loss an instant, overhearing. Wright then unwrapped the red scarf from his neck and secured it about the boy’s head. It left more of his face uncovered than not.
Wright quit the chair and then the scaffold. Only Wild and the make-do chaplain and the boy remained. The boy’s mouth moved over and over in a rhythmic way. O merciful Father, O merciful Father was what I supposed it said, but he spoke it too low now and I was too far to hear. Shurtleff bowed his head and looked to be praying. I strained for his words but only caught the final “Amen,” which was on the spot accompanied by the general raising his leg and landing a hard kick at the wooden wedge below the barrel, triggering the gallows.
The barrel crashed over with a thunk and rolled off the side of the scaffold, and Bright’s long body dropped a few feet and snapped to a stop. His legs scissored back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, setting his body to slow spinning like a pocket watch at the end of a fob.
It took a while. His neck would not break. The red scarf sagged on one side, no longer blinding him, and he reached his foot out for a toehold against the nearest upright post. His boot-tip attaining, he pulled his body as best he could toward it, to relieve the pressure of the rope, and he found a pinch of air. His foot slipped off then and thus recommenced the slow spinning. He once again gained purchase. Five seconds. Ten.
Finally, he tired of the effort and let go. His legs jerked up and back, but not fighting now, his body stretching. I wanted that they had thought to use a hood rather than Wright’s insufficient scarf, as the boy’s whole head was revealed and going the color of his cheeks, and his tongue poked from between bulging lips, and it was impossible not to look.
“That nigger Wild,” I heard behind me, only with what sounded like dismay. I thought it Hews’s voice but did not look to see.
Tynes said, close to my ear to keep his words from reaching the colonel, “Them buckra soldiers back at Freedom, the night before we left. They called the general a lunatic, and it ain’t so clear that they might not be a little bit right.”
“Killing boys not yet fuzzed of cheek and chin?” It was Gil Mezzell, the sergeant of B, not at all tempering his loudness of voice. “Is this now our mission?”
Colonel Draper glanced over, but his look did not reproach or admonish us to be silent. It confessed that he likewise was unsure of the answer.
I’d seen death and knew that, unless my own precluded it, I would see plenty more. But as it did the others, the boy Bright’s slow spin sickened me.
I scanned the crowd of townspeople, off to the rear, searched and searched for that man Creecy. I didn’t find him. I would have liked to, and liked for him to see me seeing him, for him to know that I would not shrink from what had to be done, no matter how raw. None of us would.
I turned toward the wagon train then, to the section where were posted the hired-on helper women, and sought out Fanny among the faces there. I wanted her to know, too—that this was what we were into, that this was what we were in for. The cost of freedom. I found her and saw that she was looking back at me. I saw that she knew it. How had I imagined that she wouldn’t?
General Wild spoke at his brother, and the captain leaned over a piece of flatwood the length and width of a guidon. He used his kerchief as a makeshift brush and, with ink from his well, made a placard that he then affixed around Bright’s neck with a length of twine. I read it as F marched past the scaffold, shortly after:
THIS GUERRILLA HANGED BY ORDER OF BRIGADIER GENERAL WILD.
DANIEL BRIGHT, OF PASQUOTANK COUNTY.
It might as well have been Cornick’s body up there slow-turning in the wind.
The African Brigade made its way up the road with the boy left hanging there. The message was plain. The ante had just been upped.