The foray to Clapson’s farm turned out to be prelude to a grander pageant. In the days after, I overheard Cornelius Crowley and Henry Adkins, the first sergeants of Companies K and E, discussing an even larger-scale sortie devised by General Wild. It was confirmed when there arrived at our parade ground crate upon crate of Harper’s Ferry muskets, this time sufficient for the entire Brigade. The troopers substituted these for the pretend rifles they had fashioned for training in the absence of proper weapons, and each company drilled all day and into the evening.
Thereon, General Wild summoned the great lot of us and apprised us of his intention for the immediate use of our new arms. “They fear you,” he bellowed, standing atop a scaffold, a silhouette in the dusking light, straight and tall and rigid of posture. “They fear that, with weapons in hand, you will pillage and savage like the old preacher Turner did. Well, let them fear it!”
His one absent arm and the distressed other forestalled much possibility of gesticulation, but his voice—ho-ho! It was strong and cadenced, burning.
“It’s their territory out there. General George Pickett in Raleigh has left the northeast of North Carolina to the Home Guard to defend, and it is where those guerrillas have taken root. But not for long. They think themselves safe in the forests and swamps, and from there they terrorize the loyal citizenry, they harass our outposts and expeditions. The African Brigade shall raise a voice that proclaims, ‘No more!’”
His words carried us, each and every one, like camp-meeting Sunday. But none knew whether it was proper military decorum to shout back as we otherwise might have, and so no one did. Especially not with buckra troopers looking on. A spattering of white soldiers gathered along the wooden railing at the entrance to our parade ground, sharply silent, where they typically mocked our drilling and marching and whatnot.
“On four occasions previous,” said the general, “Union forces have attempted forays such as this one, to bring the disloyal portion of the population to the side of allegiance. Ours will prevail, however, because unlike the predecessors, we will be terrible.”
Just then, in the row afore me, Revere began waving his sergeant’s sword back and forth above his head, the spirit in him.
“Sometimes, in order to be right, one must be infernal, and this we will be!”
Revere’s platoon followed with huzzahs and foot-stomping, and I unsheathed my sword and took to waving it, too. Fields’s back-and-forth brisked the company standard, and my men set in, stomping feet and whooping—Josh Land and Jerry Banks and Donald Newby, many more.
“Successful raids are characterized by surprise and speed,” the general roared over our noise, “but this will not be a raid. We will march on their territory at our leisure and evacuate their hamlets that harbor the land pirates. Our bayonets, not stealth, will assure our safe return.”
More huzzahs and stomps.
“For many of you, this will be a return home,” said Wild, and the men of the Brigade fell still. “We shall not waste it. The Confiscation Act is our friend. It ordains us with the power to liberate the families you have left behind, to free your friends. This, too, will be our mission. We will endeavor to emancipate every bondman in the region.”
Those words struck the right chord, for even if some buckra volunteers like these onlookers at the wooden railing questioned what they were fighting for, nan one of us did, ever!
“Some label you ‘contrabands of war,’ mere property that the Secessionists have forfeited by their treasonous rebellion. I look at you, and I say, Bunk!”
Even old John Brown could not have spoken it more true. And all us colored were anew fevered then, stamping and hooting, clanging bayonet blades against canteens.
“Bunk, say I! You are men!”
As American as any and more man than most!
“This will be the largest military operation conducted exclusively by Negro troops,” said the general. “You have shown to me that you are ready. Now, let us endeavor to show the doubting Thomases that you are, down where we’re going, but up north, too.”
We stomped and cheered in defiance of the doubting Thomases right there nearby us, on and on, for what felt like ten minutes or even more.
The white soldiers did not disperse as we broke ranks. They stared while we sergeants ushered our men past and back to the barracks. “Giving buck slaves guns?” I overheard one say to his friends, with voice deliberately raised, making it clear that he wanted it heard. “Why, that man is sure as hell a black Republican.”
“The blackest they is,” said another. “Blacker than old boy Abe hisself.”
“That nigger Republican general is a lunatic,” insisted the first.
“Lunatic and wild!” said one who had until then been silent.
A grizzled older soldier spoke up, making no pretense of talking at his comrades, but rather, directing his poison words at me. “I have come up agin them boys, them Partisan Rangers down in Carolina. They are awful to meet on the field, and devout. You monkeys will be shown your proper place.”
I paid him back in kind, bad eye for bad eye.
Fields came over then, and we hup-twoed our troopers along with a barking style and a mite of dash, much as General Wild himself would have done. For we were the African Brigade! We were men!
December 5, 1863, ten days after Clapson’s farm, just three weeks until Christmas. We counted a full regiment this time out, twelve companies, some one thousand men of the African Brigade, as we set off from Fortress Freedom at first light. Ours was the first column of two, led by the general himself. Colonel Draper had to stay behind to testify at Edgar Clapson’s impending trial.
We sergeants were informed that our route south would follow the Great Dismal Swamp canal from Virginia into North Carolina. Orders came down that our column should look smart, at the ready, as we could not know when the Rebels would learn of our movements, if they had not already, and mount an opposition. And the men of Company F did. My troopers looked smart and snappy, marching to a silent cadence.
Maybe a touch too much so. More than a few looked downright jumpy, glancing about at the least sound. And why wouldn’t they? This wasn’t drills on the parade ground armed of carpenter’s wood and suchlike planking, but marching off to war with muskets on their shoulders and bayonets on their belts, and none of the men had ever experienced it, not even us of F, who’d been on the Clapson mission. Not on this scale. Who knew what to expect or when to expect it, especially against bushwhackers? For it would likely be Home Guard like Clapson commanded that we encountered, the so-called Partisan Rangers. No stacked battle lines facing off across a broad field, as we’d trained for at Freedom, their formations mirroring our formations, tactics countering tactics—none of that. I imagined it would be ambuscades on our flanks and being sharpshot at from afar-off tree lines.
Marching through coastal pine toward a yet unannounced enemy, my men looked to be imagining it much as I was, as though some unrevealed specter was out there, for certain coming. So, I deemed it wise to forestall such inner workings and divert their attention elseways.
“Get it on step!” I shouted. “Hup, one, two! March, one, two!”
Fields recognized my intention. “Sing it out, Paps!” cried he.
Not missing a beat, Paps Prentiss, one of my privates, launched in: “Sitting by the roadside of a summer’s day . . .”
My squad called back: “Sitting by the roadside of a summer’s day!”
Paps sang: “Chatting with my mess-mates, passing time away . . .”
“Chatting with my mess-mates, passing time away!”
“Lying in the shadows underneath the trees . . .”
“Lying in the shadows underneath the trees!”
“Lawdy, how delicious, eating goober peas . . .”
“Lawdy, how delicious, eating goober peas!”
The chant became general up and down the column. And thusly the African Brigade made its way south, advancing through Virginia.
“Allow me a few lines to remark upon the bearing and style of General Wild,” the newspaperman Tewksbury read aloud from his notepad by the light of a bonfire, our first night out. “His manner of dress is quite undistinguished from that of any other officer of the front line—a double-breasted blue frock of the old infantry style, with simple epaulets displaying his brevet rank and cinched at the waist by a leather belt holding his field officer’s sword. But for the eyes! His ardent gaze unveils his chivalric creed. He is the ideal of gallant soldiery, no less so for his empty left sleeve.”
The African Brigade was camped at Deep Creek, just outside the Great Dismal. We’d made only eight, maybe nine miles over the sloughy road. Pup tents were pitched according to company and rank, and most men not on sentry duty had turned in, as those first miles had been arduous and long in a drizzling rain. I was one of a few—officers, mostly—who had gathered around the New York Times paperman whom the general had recruited to accompany the expedition.
Tewksbury read on. “Much has been written of Colonel Shaw and his regiment of free Northern Negroes, particularly after their failure at Fort Wagner this summer past. However, General Wild has embarked on an altogether more demanding test—making men of slaves!”
“Will they fight?” he declaimed, thrusting a finger into the air. “Or, as so many believe, turn tail and run?”
I found myself cleaning at my fingernails with the tip of my eating knife, ceasing to listen. Tewksbury had a way with words and a certain style, and I’d sidled up hoping to hear luxuriant particulars on New York or on the North, and maybe for the chance to talk with him, a proper author. But he was a mite tough to tolerate for more than a few minutes going, what with his tragedian’s manner and joyous self-regard and tittering at his own sad jokes.
I quit the gathering and made my way through the rows of pup tents back toward my own. We had not tents enough for all, and so some troopers slept under wagons with boards set up at one end to shield against the wind. Many just closed tight their greatcoats and rolled themselves up in gum blankets on the damp ground. Passing from pup to pup, from one bundled-up man to the next, I recognized myself not yet ready for sleep—for the nightly nostalgia about home, for the nightly pining for my girl there.
My mind was on the African Brigade and on our mission. Will they fight? Tewksbury dared to query, and in this moment of pause, I, too, found myself wondering, would we? . . .
Mister, we would! It was my duty as sergeant to ensure that General Wild’s words of the previous evening were readily recalled and promptly executed by each man of my company, on each day of our sortie. And this, by God, I would do.
A campfire near the edge of the field drew me. As I neared, I saw that it was commandeered by other non-comms such as me, chatterboxing back and forth.
“Did you know that man a doctor?” said Moses Cornick, a corporal from Company K.
“A doctor of what?” asked his sergeant, Orange Redmon, a jolly, rolly man who’d run off from somewhere nearby the Secesh capital.
“Of healing!” said the first. “He gave it up for fighting.”
“Guess his Abolition impulse was stronger than the curing one,” someone said, to which Jake Whitfield replied, “Oh, he be curing, all right. The Rebby-boys just won’t like the taste of his medicine.”
We all laughed.
Rumors about the general were common currency throughout the Brigade, had been since I’d mustered in under his standard three months before. It was nice to get to share in them among men of my own rank, as I could enjoy the tall tales without having to rebuff troopers for talking out of turn about their commanding officer. Pushing in nearer to the fire, I loosened the buttons of my greatcoat, let the crisp heat cook at my shell jacket and pants.
“He took the Minié ball that took his arm at Antietam,” Moses Cornick said, though I knew it to have occured at South Mountain. “We licked old Bobby Lee good up there at Antietam.”
“I heard he amputated the arm hisself,” was said by some voice at my back.
This was met by a chorus of naws and ain’t no ways.
“Not the actual cutting,” insisted the same voice, which I could not locate in the shadows afar-side the fire. “But they say he oversaw the doctor that was charged with it.”
This seemed plausible to me, given the general’s fire and grit.
“Our man is wild,” someone said, echoing what, since Clapson’s farm, had become a typical refrain throughout the Brigade. “That nigger be just plain wild!”
And the word nigger was not common parlance among us. Non-comms, in particular, were loath to use it, even when disciplining green troopers who needed to be taken down a peg. Yet it carried special meaning when used to refer to the general.
A sergeant from Company A, whose face I knew but name I did not, piped up. “I heard he has a record of arrest and has been court-martialed.”
More naws and suchlike.
I saw Fields across the fire, standing between two corporals of Company G. I worked my way through the men to join him, as a skeptical Moses Cornick said, “How he come to be a general, then, if he has got jailed up?”
“Look who he a general of!” the sergeant from A shot back.
I squeezed in aside Fields, and he whispered the answer to the man’s rhetorical query: “Of colored troops, of course.” His face contorted into a look I’d known since boyhood, the one your ma’am shoots at your misbehaving antics or that colored folk sneak in disapproval of some foolish direction from their master—resignation born from enduring patience.
“Old Whitey think commanding us is a punishment,” said the sergeant from A. “Their loss be our gain.”
This was met by affirming grunts and Yes sirs. For Wild was our man, former convict or not, crippled or whole.
The campfire zizzed and popped. Abe Armstead of H, standing right alongside it, said, “This here war is not Wild’s first. I once heard him telling the colonel how he had fought in an overseas place for a man name of Garibaldi.”
“Baldhead Gary who?” someone said, and we all laughed.
“No lie,” said Armstead, “Garibaldi. Some Italian that has fought wars like this war, but over in Italia, across the seas.”
“A war agin slavery?”
“Naw,” said Armstead, “one for union.”
I knew Garibaldi to be a hero to folk over there. I’d read on him.
Moses Cornick said, “I heard the general telling this, too. He likes to tell such things to Colonel Draper.” A smile inched up one side of his face. “Wild told him he had offered the voyage to his new bride—as a wedding gift. This was they honeymoon!”
We all harharred anew.
“Some gift.”
“And what breed of bride did the man choose who would accept one such as this!”
“And youall think it ain’t so?” was said sharply, and this calmed our raucous laughter.
It was Revere. How someone of his formidable bearing moved about unseen was a wonder, as I had not, before hearing his words, noted him among our group.
He said, “You fools think that man does what he does from some contrarian whim or for spiteful reprisal, on account of his wounds. I’m telling you otherwise. He is a zealot.”
Since Clapson’s farm, who could doubt this assessment of the general for its raw truth? Yet it seemed to forebode some other, darker implication coming from Revere’s bone box.
To a man, we just stared over at him, and he stared right back at whatever of us would dare to hold his eyes. They burned brighter than the light of the bonfire.
“You, Etheridge,” said he. “Is your heart in this?”
I hadn’t expected to find my grit challenged and so, taken off guard, I just stood there mute—though I did not much care for the public chiding.
“And you, Cornick,” he continued, “or you, Whitfield, with your doltish tales and joking comments?”
“Calm yourself, man!” said Henry Adkins, the first sergeant of E, aiming to forestall this before hotter heads prevailed and true confrontation resulted.
Revere went on as though Adkins had not even spoken, saying, but in a reciteful way, “For through the night I ride, and so through the night goes my cry of alarm . . .” And just then I realized he was indeed reciting at us, a poem or some such:
“A cry of defiance, to every village and farm,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo
Evermore!”
It wasn’t the worst poem I’d heard, but if it was him who’d penned it, I knew myself to have a thing or two to learn him on metered lines and better rhyming.
“General Wild said that we were to be Gog and Magog,” continued Revere. “Split-tail or hung, Secesh is Secesh. We should see them all dead, for they would thus see us.”
With this, he spun on his heel and, pushing men aside, cut a path into the night—a final flourish to his theatrical apparition and just as sudden leave-taking.
A sight too stagy to my mind, but it had had its effect. A heavy silence reigned now, and more than one man stared into the fire or down at his brogans.
“Who that nigger calling Gog-Magog?” said Cornick to guffaws and bellowing. Even Adkins, who didn’t abide the use of the word, turned his face so we would not see his smile.
As the chuckles gave way to quiet, Hilliard Johnson said, “They say his come hard-earned.” He indicated with his chin the darkness into which Revere had passed.
“Whose ain’t?” was a general reply.
“Naw, Revere had a special cruel Mass,” Johnson insisted. “Meaner than most.”
“He sneaked himself letters is what I heard,” said a sergeant I did not know.
“I heard the same,” said Adkins. “Took stripes regular for pilfering his master’s books but kept on at it, yet and still.”
Yet and still. It was amusing to hear when Adkins took to talking like the others of us did. He’d been born free in New York, a gardener by training, and his usual speech was more proper than ours. The African Brigade didn’t yet have a regimental sergeant major, the chief non-comm above all others, but Adkins seemed a top contender for the position.
“Revere?” Livian Adams said. “Tst! I knowed that fool since he was foaled. His Mass’s name was Peters, a hemp and hog farmer up by Isle of Wight. Called the boy Obediah, and he answered to it.”
Obediah Peters, thought I. Ain’t that something?
Livian Adams’s revelation had seemed aimed for comical effect, but none of us laughed. The camp beyond had stilled and the night cold fiercened, and our meet-up was thus done.
Fields and I headed back toward our company. He said, “If that man weren’t wearing blue, I might fear him.”
He meant Revere.
“Maybe even in blue,” said I, searching the dark into which Revere had disappeared, “a dose of precaution is warranted.”