Chapter 3 - Isaiah Fitzhenry
quote:
Sinkler's Ridge, Tennessee.
December 23, 1864.
Early morning.
We know General Forrest and his cavalry are out there. But will he come? Will he ever come? And if he does, shall we be ready?
When we went into camp two days ago, Major Charles Shaw held the command of our detachment. Major Shaw died last night, struck down not by Rebel fire, but by fever. I, Lieutenant Isaiah Fitzhenry, command the detachment now. The mission is in my hands.
"Lieutenant!"
Sergeant Raines burst through the door and strode toward me, boots crashing across the wood floor. His bootfalls sounded like the echo of artillery and I jumped to my feet with reflex action. I pray that I, too, am not succumbing to fever.
"Have we received an answer?" I asked quickly.
I'd sent him to telegraph for new orders. Marching orders, I hoped. We had to move east, rejoin the regiment, get the sick men to safety.
"No, sir," Raines replied.
His anxious gaze shifted to the floor, then out the window, then back to the floor. His clenched jaw looked tight enough to break a tooth.
"What then?"
Raines's boots appeared at once wet and stiff. They were covered in mud, and frozen, no doubt.
I glanced through the window of the tumbledown house we'd taken as headquarters. A vile mixture of rain and snow was falling outside.
I wiggled my own toes. Only the faintest sensation. And I know I am better off than most of the men.
Raines raised his piercing blue eyes.
"It's the telegraph line, sir," he said. "It's been cut."
I felt blood drain from my face.
We were cut off.
Raines shifted his weight.
"It's General Forrest's Confederate cavalry, Lieutenant. One of Forrest's men cut the line."
"How do you know?" I shot back. I prayed Raines was mistaken. "Can you be sure?"
"Our boys on picket duty caught the Reb that done it, and brought him into camp."
I looked back out the window. The mighty blue mist-shrouded mountains loomed like a silent approaching enemy. Sniffing us out, roping us in, preparing to strike. So Forrest was near!
"Is the prisoner outside?"
"At the hospital tent, sir. He tried to escape and took a shot in the arm."
Sinkler's Ridge is a single street of drab clapboard and log buildings. A worth-nothing town that we never would have seen. If it weren't for the junction.
Two minor rail lines pass through here. Minor only in size, for they carry goods to General Sherman's army. Vital supplies like hardtack, coffee, coats, tents, rifles, shoes, socks, artillery, and ammunition.
Everything necessary to sustain the campaign.
If we lose the junction, the Rebels could destroy Sherman's army. Union victories at Vicksburg and Atlanta won't mean a thing.
"Keep the Sinkler's Ridge rail junction in Union hands."
Oh, how simple those orders sounded two days ago when the men stood tall and sixty strong. One's circumstance can change so quickly.
My men are dropping like flies, the fever is spreading, and it is cold.
So cold.
Of the many things we need, I would settle for blankets.
"How many men are ready for service?" I asked.
"Fewer than twenty-five, Lieutenant. If Forrest comes this way with even a small force, we ain't going to be able to hold them and that's a fact."
Today is my twentieth birthday. Two years in the army now and by all accounts a man, yet I do not look it. Though tall, I'm thin. Though an officer, my hair falls across my forehead like a baby's curls and no amount of combing keeps it back.
The men must see me as more boy than man.
Respect is earned. I know such regard takes time.
But I feel I can prove my strength, show that my heart is free of fear and weakness, that I am built to serve the Union and prevail.
"If we can't telegraph for new orders, we must obey the orders we have."
"Lieutenant?" I could hear the shock in Raines's voice.
"Prepare to defend our position. If the Rebels want this junction, they have to fight for it and fight darn hard. Am I right, Raines?"
Raines was a good man, resilient and hard. I'd never seen defeat in his face and I didn't see it now.
"Yes, sir!"
"Assemble the men and reassign duties. But first, alert the hospital tent that I'll be by directly. I will see the prisoner."
"Yes, sir," Raines repeated, saluting as he turned on his noisy heels.
A tin whistle's jaunty tune filtered through the window. It was the town boy I'd seen before, and his friend with a drum. They marched back and forth on the main street, backs straight, heads high. Playing and drumming.
"When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah! Hurrah! ..."
They'd been practicing.
They were ready.
When we see action, I might have to call on them.
So this takes place during the US Civil War, and if anyone has any questions about it, let me know. There's a little inaccuracy here. Fitzhenry and his troops are here, in December 1864, to defend Sherman''s supply lines. The problem is, after Sherman took Atlanta in November, he abandoned his supply lines to march to the sea, with his troops living off the land. Right now, he's just about to take Savannah, Georgia (which he will in the next day ot two, then send a message to the President telling him that he's given him Savannah as a Christmas gift/)
However, in general, it gets the mood right, especially the very important role that railroads played in shipping supplies during the Civil War. If Fitzhenry's troops lose control of the railroads,, they lose control of the supply route. It also gets the dread of General Forrest right. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate cavalry general, and a thoroughly unpleasant person and racist (although a lot of the Confederate leaders were racist. He had been a slave trader before the war and afterwards was the head of the Ku Klux Klan. (it's possible near the end of his life he eased up a little on the racism, giving a fairly conciliatory speech to a black audience, but he could also have done that for business and political reasons). Regardless of his personalities, he was a very skilled cavalry commander, and a terror to US troops. In fact, on December 15th and 16th, just a week before this, his actions at the Battle of Nashville guaranteed the escape of General Hood's very defeated army, that would have been destroyed or surrendered without him.
Chapter 4
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The biting wind cuffed my ears as I walked toward the tents.
We'd set up at the end of the main street, just across the tracks from the depot. One large tent served as the hospital. A dozen dirty-white wedge tents formed two rows of flapping canvas shells. If the fever continues to spread, we won't need half the tents we've got.
I tucked my journal into my right pocket and crossed the tracks.
Ma sent the journal in her last package, in a box meant for Thanksgiving, but not received until just days ago. The chocolate and potatoes were still good, but the turkey was rotten and the cake had turned hard as mortar. I wish I had it now to add to munitions.
Other men kept journals, but never me. Why remember all the things I wanted to forget? In her letter, Ma told me why.
"You'll be an old man someday, Isaiah. You'll think back on this war - on the boys you knew and the towns you saw - and you'll need to remember."
"Lieutenant!"
Sergeant Raines appeared from behind the hospital tent, his face contorted in alarm and confusion.
"There's some men coming into camp, sir." The intensity of his voice stopped my heart. Forrest?
"Who?" I yelled, falling into a run. "What approach?"
"Not sure, sir."
"For God's sake, Raines! Speak up."
"I guess they must be runaway slaves been hiding back up in the hills."
I started to breathe again, annoyed with Raines for getting so excited. For getting me so excited. We had no time for distractions. This would be a trivial matter, a corporal's job.
"What do they want?" I said shortly. "Food?"
"No, sir," Raines said weightily. "They say they've come to fight."
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. A nervous mix of surprise and annoyance at a preposterous idea.
I rounded the back corner of the hospital tent and froze in my tracks.
Three dozen men, perhaps more, stood before me in an uneven line. Tall, short, wide, slight. Mismatched shirts and pants unified by a state of profound wear, as though each man had been born into the world with just one suit of clothes and was wearing it still.
Such blistering sores on feet I've never seen even on my own ill-provisioned men. Mere suggestions of boots. Near them on the dirt rested raggedy knapsacks tied to rickety sticks.
I looked at the faces last, at features as diverse as those in our detachment, at dark skin of varied hues.
"What'll we do?" Raines demanded, breaking the silence of my observation. "Use them as contrabands?"
Contraband was what we called these people early in the war, back before the Emancipation Proclamation. Back when the Union first realized that it could employ former slaves. Not as soldiers, but as laborers.
I didn't answer Raines, for there were more than thirty faces fixed on me, each wanting an answer.
Whom to address? Which face to look at? I met one tall man's eyes, but his gaze dropped instantly to the dirt.
So I moved toward the tattered wall of men and said, somewhat shakily, "I am Lieutenant Fitzhenry. I see you're here to help the Union cause. I am glad of that, for we need your help. A Rebel attack is imminent."
At this, a wave of whispers rustled through the men.
"We must prepare defenses. That is my sole concern," I continued. "There's no time to construct gabions or chevaux-de-frise. We need earthworks, simple and straightforward. And we need them dug fast."
A smallish man with a wide-brimmed hat stepped out of the line.
"We're here to fight, sir."
I ran my eyes up and down the line of men, pondering how to phrase my rejection in clearer terms."
Do you understand that soldiering takes many forms? That fatigue work is as much a part of victory as ..."
"We'll dig your defenses, Lieutenant. But when the attack comes, we want to fight."
"What's your name?" I said.
"It's Jacob."
"You will refer to me by my rank," I said sharply.
"Yes, Lieutenant."
"Surely you know you cannot fight," I said with rising frustration. "Surely you know it's impossible."
"We're free men, Lieutenant. Everyone in this line would rather die than lose that freedom." Again, whispers ruffled the line, obvious support for Jacob's words.
"And I know your men are sick with fever," Jacob continued. "You need men, Lieutenant. Here we are."
"Fighting is out of the question!" I shot back, glancing at Raines. The presumption in Jacob's candor and logic disturbed me. "We can provide you with minimal provisions - boots, stockings, a bit of food - in exchange for labor. We need entrenchments dug! Raines will distribute shovels and
pickaxes and whatever else he can find. Fatigue work is all I can offer you," I shouted, exasperated. "It's all I can offer!"
They couldn't fight. It was impossible. My own men would not stand for it. The townspeople, now only weakly pro-Unionist, would rebel. An armed force must be unified, not divided!
And the men were untrained. They could not shoot muskets if they had them.
Yet we were in desperate need of men. With just twenty-five, we were a handful against a multitude. What did Forrest's force number? Hundreds?
More?
"Follow me, all of you!" Raines yelled, marching off toward the supply shed.
Raines's order was premature.
Jacob hadn't accepted.
He stood still, staring at me with eyes dark as night.
"We'll do a job to make Lincoln proud", he said finally, smiling faintly. Reluctantly, he marched away after Raines. The other men fell in after him.
I feared I hadn't won the argument. Indeed, I felt it had only just begun.
When the armies went south, they encountered escaped slaves seeking freedom, and when they were down in the deep south, they encountered more.
While black soldiers had fought for the US in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, by the time the Civil War started, that was no longer allowed. As the war started, blacks served in labor roles, like Fitzhenry said.....clearing brush, setting up camps, working on fortifications, etc., but in general, they weren't allowed to actually fight as soldiers. On July 17, 1862, Congress passed a laws allowing black soldiers to actually fight, and black soldiers did. About 186,000 soldiers fought in the US army during the war, for the most part, under conditions a lot worse than white soldiers.
Even though it was legal, though, there were a lot of white officers and soldiers who (largely due to racism) resisted it, and the reasons they gave were the reasons Fitzhenry gave.....people wouldn't like seeing black soldiers, black people weren't competent to fight, it would destroy army morale, and so on.
