- Gnoman
- Feb 12, 2014
-
Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme
|
Chapter VI: Part I - Robert E Lee
quote:
General Lee sat easily on Traveller, watching his soldiers splash up out of the Rapidan at Raccoon Ford. Once on the north side of the river, the men paused to put their trousers back on before they formed ranks again. Many of them had no drawers. That bothered Lee more than it seemed to bother them. They grinned and cheered and waved their hats as they marched past.
Lee waved back every so often, letting the men know he saw them and was pleased with them. He turned to Walter Taylor. “Tell me the truth, Major: did you ever expect to see us moving to the attack again?”
“Of course I did, sir,” his aide answered stoutly. Startlement filled his eyes as the possible import of the question sank in. “Didn’t you?”
“I always had the hope of it,” Lee said, and let it go at that. A new regiment was fording the river, its battle flag fluttering proudly as the color-bearer carried it in front of the troops. Lee had trouble reading a printed page without his spectacles, but he easily made out the unit name on the flag forty feet away. He called, “You fought splendidly in the Wilderness, 47th North Carolina.”
The soldiers he’d praised cheered wildly. “You’ve made them proud, sir,” Walter Taylor said
“They make me proud; any officer would reckon his career made to command such men;” Lee said. “How can I help but admire their steadfastness, their constancy and devotion? I stand in awe of them.”
I don't know if this is a direct quote from the historical Lee, but there are many examples of similar statements. Pulling from known historical dialog is a way to make the characters more authentic, but sometimes Turtledove takes it too far - the dialogue feels stilted and the characters feel less "real". In this case, it works well enough because this is something of a speech situation.
Lee is making plans to go forward. Longstreet's understrength corps will be left to hold the line against Grant, while the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia goes North. What Lee has seen of Grant's generalship has impressed him.
quote:
“No, but now we shall have to go through him, and that after he has made the acquaintance of our repeaters. Any man may be taken by surprise once, but only a fool will be surprised twice, and General Grant, I fear, is not a fool.”
“What then, sir? Shall we try to outmarch him and approach Washington from the north and west, as we did last year?”
“I have been considering precisely that.” Lee said no more. His mind was not fully made up, and might change again. But if he moved straight up the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad toward Washington, Grant would have to try to block his path. Without the new repeaters, assaulting a bigger army that stood on the defensive would have been suicidally foolhardy. Lee had made it work even so, against Hooker at Chancellorsville. But the Wilderness had shown him Grant was no Hooker. Grant could be beaten; he could not be made to paralyze himself.
Lee made his decision. He pulled out pen and pad, wrote rapidly, then turned to a courier. “Take this to General Stuart at once, if you please.” The young man set spurs to his horse, rode off at a trot that he upped to a gallop as soon as he could. Lee felt Walter Taylor’s eyes on him. He said, “I have ordered General Stuart to use his cavalry to secure the Rappahannock crossing at Rappahannock Station and to hold that crossing until our infantry joins them.”
“Have you?” One of Taylor’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “You’ll go straight for Grant, then?”
“Straight for Washington City, at least for the time being,” Lee corrected. “I expect General Grant will interpose himself between his capital and me. When he does, I shall strike him the hardest blow I can, and see what comes of it.”
“Yes, sir.” By Taylor’s tone, he pad no doubt what would come of it. Lee wished he had no doubts himself. His aide asked, “How soon do you think we could reach Washington City?”
“We could reach it in four or five days,” Lee said. Taylor stared at him. Deadpan, he went on, “Of course, that is only if General Grant becomes a party to the agreement. Without his cooperation, we shall probably require rather more time.”
Taylor laughed. Lee allowed himself a smile. He had slept perhaps four hours a night since the campaign started, rising at three every morning to go see how his men fared. He felt fine. His chest had pained him a couple of times, but one or two of the tablets the Rivington men had given him never failed to bring relief. He was not used to medicines that never failed.
Note the subtle reminder of how dependent the Confederacy is on the AWB. Lee's heart medication is a small thing, perhaps, but the lifeline they represent is never far from his thoughts.
Lee has decided that everything must be done hastily. This victory is only the latest in a string of Confederate victories, and none of the previous ones lasted. He still has the AK-47 to even the odds, but he no longer has the near-perfect intelligence that the Rivington men provided, and Grant is not an easy foe. The clock is ticking.
quote:
As for Grant, he’d handled his army about as well as could be expected, given the trouble in which he’d found himself. In a defensive fight, with his powerful artillery to back up his numbers, he might yet be very rough indeed.
And, Lee wondered, how long before some clever Northern gunsmith works out a way to make his own AK-47? Colonel Gorgas had been unsure it was possible. Gorgas was gifted, but for every man like him in the Confederacy, the North had three or five or ten, and the factories to assemble what those gifted men devised. If the Federals suddenly blossomed forth with repeaters of their own, the situation would return to what it had been before the men from out of time arrived.
“Not only must I suppress those people, I must do it quickly,” Lee said. Every minute’s delay hurt him and helped Grant. He brought Traveller up to a trot. The exact moment he got to Rappahannock Station almost certainly would not matter, but all at once any delay seemed intolerable.
In the middle of the afternoon, a courier on a blowing horse rode up to him, held out a folded sheet of paper. “From General Stuart, sir.”
“Thank you.” Lee unfolded the paper, read: “We hold Rappahannock Station. Federal pickets withdrew northeast past Bealeton. We pursued, and discovered more Federals approaching the town from the southeast, their cavalry leading. We shall endeavor to hold the place unless your orders are to the contrary. Your most ob’t. servant, J. E. B. Stuart, Commanding, Cavalry.”
The tiny town of Bealeton, Virginia saw no major action during the war historically, though it was an important supply corridor for the Union once the Confederacy was pushed back into Central Virginia and there were many skirmishes in the region. In this history, it will have far greater importance.
Stuart is ordered to hold the town at all costs while infantry is rushed to reinforce. This is an interesting mirror of Gettysburg, where Union cavalry held important ground against Confederate assault until Union Infantry could reinforce and hold. Stuart's men normally would have no chance of holding long enough, but Lee hopes the AK-47 will give them just enough edge to do the job.
quote:
As the aide rode off, A. P. Hill rode up. Always gaunt and hollow-eyed, he no longer seemed on the edge of breaking down, as he had before the campaign began. Victory, Lee thought, agrees with him. As he had with Ewell, he told Hill of the new situation.
Hill’s jaws worked as he listened. Finally he said, “I don’t care for the prospect of fighting with the river close in our rear. We almost paid for that at Sharpsburg.”
“I remember,” Lee said.
“Grant isn’t such a slowcoach as McClellan was, either,” Hill persisted. “He wasn’t what you’d call smooth in the Wilderness, but he got more of the Army of the Potomac into the fight than we’ve seen before.”
“I want him to put his men into the fight, if that means they are advancing straight into the fire of our new rifles,” Lee said. “Not even the resources of the North will stand such bloodlettings indefinitely repeated...which reminds me, have we enough ammunition for another large fight?”
“Two trains full of cartridges came into Orange Court House from Rivington this morning,” Walter Taylor said.
“That should be all right, then,” Lee said, relieved. Thanks to the Rivington men, his soldiers had won a smashing victory in the Wilderness. Thanks to them, the Army of Northern Virginia would have the wherewithal to pursue another one. But without a continued flow of munitions from the Rivington men, his army would soon be, if it was not already, unable to fight at all. Lee reminded himself to write once more to Colonel Rains in Augusta to see if he had succeeded in producing loads suitable for the AK-47.
In 1862, Lee launched an invasion of the North, prompted by a shortage of food in the war-torn border regions of the Confederacy and the belief that following their many defensive victories with an offensive one was critical for victory. As part of this advance, Lee issued Special Order 191, dividing his forces and hit several key positions by surprise. In one of the most famous coincidences in history, a pair of Union enlisted men managed to find a copy of this order wrapped around three cigars. This order made it to the hands of General George McClellan, prompting the infamously risk-averse general into launching a counter-attack. While McClellan was still slow enough (not least because he was trying to get Lincoln to send the troops covering Washington City under General Pope as reinforcements) that the Army of Northern Virginia was mostly able to reconstitute, the fact that McClellan attacked at all was game-changing. The Confederates named the resulting battle Sharpsburg, after the town near the battle site. The Union preferred to name battles after bodies of water, and called it Antietam. 87,000 US troops met 38,000 Confederates in the largest single-day battle of the war. Lee was forced to retire in good order after suffering 10,000 casualties (1567 of them fatal), while McClellan allowed the 12,000 casualties he suffered (2,108 KIA) to prevent him from a vigorous pursuit that could well have destroyed Lee's army entirely. Tactically a draw, the battle nonetheless put an end to Lee's hopes of an offensive victory until his second invasion in 1864, and finally gave Lincoln an ironclad excuse to fire the well-connected George McClellan. Of equal importance, it was enough of a Union victory for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slavery abolished in the rebel states.
Had Grant been in charge at that time, it is very likely that the Confederates would have been destroyed. It is a stretch to say that the entire war could have been won then and there, but an entire army could have been taken off the board, and Lee's officer corps had to know that. This makes their apprehension here quite reasonable.
And, of course, we have another, more explicit reminder of how dependent the Confederacy is on the AK, and how Lee is trying to wriggle out of that.
Battle lines are drawn, and the orders are given.
Chapter VI: Part II - Nate Caudell
quote:
Dempsey Eure let out a loud, unmusical bray. “If I was a mule, they’d shoot me after a march like this, on account of I wouldn’t be of no more use nohow.”
“You’re a drat jackass, Dempsey, and you’re marchin’ to give some Yankee the chance to shoot you,” Allison High answered. A few men who heard the exchange had the breath left to chuckle. Most simply plodded on, too busy putting one foot in front of the other to have room for anything else.
Mulus Marianus, Nate Caudell thought in the small pan of his mind not emptied by fatigue. He wished Captain Lewis were close by; of all the Castalia Invincibles, Lewis was the only other man who had any Latin and might have appreciated the allusion. But the captain’s bad foot was giving him trouble on the march, and he’d fallen back to the rear of the company.
Caudell coughed. The 47th North Carolina was not in the lead today. The men tramped through a gray-brown cloud of dust that left their hides and uniforms the same color. Every time Caudell blinked, the grit under his eyelids stung. When he spat, his saliva came forth as brown as if he were chewing tobacco.
He’d already forded both the Rapidan and the Rappahannock, but the memory of splashing through cool water was only that, a memory. Reality was muggy heat and sweat and dust and tired feet and the distant thunder of gunfire to the east. The Federals were not going to leave Virginia without more fighting, and were not of the mind to let the Army of Northern Virginia get free of its home state again, either.
Then shots came from the right front, not heavy rolling volleys mixed with artillery where General Ewell’s men were already hotly engaged with the Federals, but a spattering of skirmisher fire. “Grant’s looking to flank us,” Allison High guessed. “He’s got men and to spare to try it.”
“If he didn’t lose three for our one in the Wilderness, I’ll eat my shoes,” Caudell said.
“And if he did, he still has more men than we do,” High answered, which was so manifestly true that Caudell could only click tongue between teeth by way of response. He tasted wet dust when he did.
This, of course, encapsulates the problems of the historical Confederacy. No victory they won could materialy reduce the odds against them.
The battle begins much as the one the previous day did. With one major exception.
quote:
Lieutenant Dunn carried a pair of field glasses on a leather strap around his neck. He lifted them to his face for a better look at the foe ahead. When he let go with a cry of outrage, Caudell and all the Confederates in earshot stared at him. The field glasses had already fallen to his chest again. Pointing ahead, he shouted, “You know what those are up ahead, boys? Those are n****r troops!”
A couple of rebels started shooting the second they heard that. At a range still close to half a mile, they did no harm Caudell could see. Whatever color they were, the Federal skirmishers had the discipline to hold their fire. Caudell’s jaw tightened. Escaped slaves and free Negroes--they would have no reason to love Southern men any better than he and his comrades loved them.
The bayonets on AK-47s were permanently secured under the barrel by a bolt. Caudell hadn’t brought his forward at any time during the Wilderness fighting. Neither had any other Confederates he remembered seeing. Now several men paused to deploy them. With black men ahead, bullets were not enough for them. Seeing black men in uniform made it literally war to the knife.
As far as Caudell was concerned, any man with a rifle musket in his hands, be he white, black, or green, was a deadly enemy so long as he wore a blue coat. Still as if on parade, half the Yankee skirmishers--now they were close enough for Caudell to tell they were Negroes with his unaided eye--brought their Springfields to their shoulders in smooth unison and fired a volley at Caudell and his comrades.
The range was still long; had Caudell been leading that Federal skirmish line, he would not have had his men shoot so soon. Even so, a couple of men from the skirmish line fell, groaning and cursing at the same time. The Negroes who had fired began to reload; those who had not raised their weapons to volley again.
“Give it to ‘em!” Caudell shouted. All the other company skirmish leaders yelled orders that meant the same thing.
Caudell raised his own rifle and started firing while he advanced on the Negro skirmishers. They began to drop as the Confederates’ repeaters filled the air in their neighborhood with bullets. The blacks still on their feet, though, kept loading and firing as coolly as any veterans. A couple of white men with swords--officers, Caudell supposed--shouted commands to them. Those officers soon fell. They would have been natural targets on any skirmish line and were all the more so here because of whom they led. But even after they went down, their black soldiers continued to fight steadily.
“Jesus God almighty!” shouted a private named Ransom Bailey, a few feet away from Caudell. He pointed toward the oncoming line of battle behind the colored skirmishers. “They’s all n*****s! Looks like a division of ‘em!”
“Worry about them later,” Caudell told him. “These ones up front are enough trouble for now.”
Skirmish lines seldom came to grips with each other. One would usually retreat because of the other’s superior firepower. The Confederates badly outgunned the black Union troops, but the Negroes would not retreat. They made charge after charge against the Southerners’ merciless rifles. Only when just a handful of them were still on their feet did they stubbornly withdraw.
By then, they did not have far to go; the regiments of which they were a part had almost caught up with them. The black troops’ line was wide and deep. Because their regiments were new and untried, they had far more men in them than units which had already seen hard fighting. They deployed with the same almost fussy neatness the skirmishers had shown.
The United States Colored Troops were first raised in 1862 after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Initially small units, their numbers swelled rapidly - by 1865, they constituted nearly 10% of the Union Army - roughly 180,000 black men would serve. 36,000 would perish in that service (although only 2200 or so of those were from battle), a proportion far higher than that suffered by white troops. These units were noted for superb discipline and almost fanatical courage - Turtledove's portrayal here is entirely in line with the historical performance. Of the 1523 Medals of Honor awarded durning the Civil War, sixteen were awarded to USCT men - an astonishing percerntage given the limited combat service the units were allowed to participate in, the relative numbers, and the racism of the officers who would award medals.
The US troops fire two volleys - all but ingnoring the steady AK fire tearing into their lines, and advance into a charge.
quote:
Between shells and rifle fire, the battle din was deafening. A near miss from a shell knocked the man beside Caudell into him. He fell over. Somehow he hung on to his repeater. Two men stepped on him before he managed to get to his feet. He looked down at himself, hardly daring to believe he was still intact. Muttering a prayer of thanks, he started shooting again.
The black soldiers were frighteningly close. They’d taken dreadful casualties, but still they came on. Even as he did his best to kill them, Caudell admired the courage they showed. It occurred to him that George Ballentine might have fought well, if anyone had given him the chance--and if Benny Lang hadn’t made him want to run away instead.
Because their regiments started so large, the colored troops greatly outnumbered the rebels at the start of the engagement. That meant they still had men left when their battered line and that of the Confederates crashed together. They threw themselves on the Southerners with bayonets and clubbed muskets.
The Confederates wavered. Their AK-47s were not made to double as spears. But they could still shoot. Black men fell, clutching at chest or belly or legs. Screams and curses almost overwhelmed the thunder of gunfire.
Right beside Caudell, a colored soldier drove a bayonet into a Southerner’s belly. The Confederate shrieked. Blood dribbled from his mouth. He crumpled to the ground as the Negro ripped out the bayonet. Caudell fired at the black man. His rifle clicked harmlessly. He’d fired the last round in his clip without noticing. Grin flashing whitely in the middle of a black face made blacker by gunpowder stains from Minié ball cartridges, the Negro spun toward Caudell, ready to spit him, too.
Before he could thrust with the bayonet, a rebel landed on his back. The two men went down in a thrashing heap. The Confederate tore the Springfield from the colored man’s hands. He heaved himself up onto his knees, rammed home the length of edged steel that tipped the musket. The Negro screamed like a lost soul. The Southerner stabbed him again and again and again, a dozen times, a score, long after he was dead. Then, grinning like a devil that seizes lost souls, he got to his feet.
“Thanks, Billy;” Caudell gasped. “That was bravely done.”
“Shitfire, Caudell, you don’t got to thank me none for killin’ n*****s,” Billy Beddingfield said. “I do that for my own self.”
Hand-to-hand fighting seldom lasted long. One side or the other soon found the punishment too much to bear. So it was with the black Federal troops now. They broke away from their foes and retreated to the north. The Confederates raked them with heavy fire from their repeaters. That was finally enough to make the Negroes run, though even then some turned back to shoot at the Southerners.
A fresh magazine in his AK-47, Caudell took his own pot shots at the colored soldiers. Rescuing him like that was the sort of thing that could earn Billy Beddingfield his corporal’s chevrons again. As long as the regiment was in active combat, he was as good a soldier as any officer could want. Trouble wits, he’d already shown he couldn’t hold his temper in camp.
Kirkland’s brigade--Heth’s whole division--pushed ahead, trampling down early wheat and corn as they advanced. The very precision of the blacks who opposed them cost those Negroes dearly. Their officers still handled them as if they were in a review rather than a battle, and used extra time to make every maneuver perfect. Meanwhile, the ragged Confederates took a heavy toll with their repeaters.
A few Negroes tried to surrender when the rebels overran them. Caudell brusquely jerked the muzzle of his AK-47 southward; two frightened blacks babbled thanks as they shambled away. A few seconds later, a rifle barked behind him. He whirled. The colored men lay twisted on the ground. Their blood spilled over cornstalks and soaked into the dirt. Billy Beddingfield stood above them, that devilish grin on his face once more.
“They’d given up,” Caudell said angrily.
“A n****r with a rifle in his hands cain‘t give up,” Beddingfield retorted.
Such was the fate of many USCT men. Many such soldiers that found themselves in Confederate hands were summarily butchered, with at least three full-blown massacres. Those who survived this saw incredibly poor treatment even by the atrocious standards shown by the Confederacy in general. Caudell's subdued admiration, however, is also a historically attested reaction. The efforts of Fredrick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and later activists to highlight the performance of USCT was a major part of the early Civil Rights movement, and had a strong impact on public opinion.
With this charge broken, even if it came far closer to stopping the Confederates than anything thus far, Caudell and his men are pulled out to try outflanking the US artillery that has been pounding the regiment to bits.
quote: Up ahead, the artillerymen were still at their trade. One soldier Set ball and powder inside a Napoleon’s muzzle. Another rammed them down to the bottom of the barrel. A third jabbed a wire pick through the vent to pierce the bag that contained the powder. Still another attached primer and lanyard. That same man yanked on the lanyard and fired the piece. The fellow with the rammer swabbed it down. Back at the limber that held the ammunition chest, two more soldiers handed another bag of powder and a ball to a third, who carried them at a run to the man who loaded them into the smoothbore. The process began again.
Caudell and his comrades began to interrupt them and the other five gun crews that made up the battery. “Take your best shots,” he told the skirmishers. He and they stood behind stout tree trunks, not so much for protection as to give themselves cover. “We aren’t going to hit all the time, but we’ll do them some harm.”
A gunner went down, then another. Caudell kept firing steadily. Still another man reeled away from his cannon. A few seconds later, a rammer was hit as he ran up to the muzzle of his piece with a soaked sponge. Replacements took over for men wounded or killed. They began to fall, too.
Although the Confederates were shooting from cover, the muzzle flashes of their rifles quickly gave them away. Someone pointed toward the plums. Artillerymen leaped to a Napoleon’s handspike, began swinging the twelve-pounder toward the stand of trees. Even from half a mile, the gun’s bore, though only a bit more than four and a half inches wide, seemed a huge and deadly cavern to Caudell.
“Take out that crew!” he shouted--needlessly, for the skirmishers had already started shooting at the gunners. The corporal or sergeant who stood behind the Napoleon to gauge the range clapped a hand to his face and toppled. A rammer fell, grabbing at his leg. Another man snatched up the swab-ended. pole and carried on.
The brass cannon belched flame and a great cloud of thick white smoke. A round shot smashed a tree not twenty feet from Caudell with a noise like a giant clapping hands. The artillerymen began their drill once more. Two more of them went down before they could fire again. This time they chose a bursting shell. “My arm!” a skirmisher wailed. The Federal artillerymen stolidly resumed their appointed tasks. When yet another man was hurt, one of the drivers from the limber crew replaced him.
Another shell exploded in the grove. Fragments thumped against the trunk which sheltered Caudell. He fed bullets into a banana clip and hoped the next shell would be a dud. Federal gunners, unfortunately, used better fuses than their Southern counterparts.
But the next shell did not come. The depleted gun crews fired a last couple of shots, then rushed to attach their cannons to the limbers. Some of them snatched out pistols and began to fire them. The drivers urged teams into motion.
Four of the guns in the battery made good their escape. Caudell shouted with delight as rebels advancing from the southeast swarmed over the other two. One of those was the Napoleon that had been trying to blast his comrades and him out of the grove. “We did something worthwhile, boys!” he yelled to the other skirmishers. “We kept ‘em too busy to run till it was too late for ‘em anyhow.”
The Yankee infantry was pulling back too, north and east along the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The black foot soldiers did not run like a frightened mob, but they did not show the same extraordinary stubbornness they had displayed earlier in the day, either; against the Confederates’ repeaters, that had only gotten more of them killed.
The battle comes to an end, and they set down to rest. This includes taking advantage of the battlefield loot - not only were the USCT units far closer to full-strength than normal, they were extordinarily well supplied. Most of the men are not happy with the nature of the enemy this day.
quote:
Caudell wanted to argue more. Despite questions about Georgie Ballentine, he’d always thought pretty much as Winstead did. So did most people in the South; so, for that matter, did most people in the North. But as a teacher, he’d urged his students--especially the bright ones--to test what people said about the world against the world itself. Here, what they said and what he’d seen didn’t add up the same way. The Negroes had fought as well as anyone could expect.
One of the other things he’d seen in the world, though, was that most people didn’t really want to look at it straight on. Going with what they said--whoever they were--was easier and more comfortable than trying to figure out how things truly worked.
So instead of directly challenging Winstead, Caudell shifted the argument: “I saw Billy Beddingfield kill a couple of n*****s who’d surrendered. I didn’t reckon that was right--I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to kill us if we had to give up to them.”
“Any n****r comes at me with a gun, that’s a dead n****r,” Winstead said. “An’ I wouldn’t surrender to ‘em anyways, no matter what, on account of what they’d do to me if I done it.”
“Some truth in that,” Caudell had to admit. “But if they can learn to fight like soldiers, they might be able to learn to act like soldiers other ways.”
“They better,” Dempsey Eure added. “Otherwise this here war’s gonna turn even uglier’n it is already.”
“You’ve got that right, Dempsey,” Caudell said. This time, nobody disagreed. Who could deny that black men and what to do about them lay at the heart of the war between the states? The North was convinced it had the right to dictate to the South how to treat them; the South was equally convinced it already knew. Caudell wanted no part of having someone hundreds of miles away telling him what he could or couldn’t do. On the other hand, if Negroes really could fight like white men, the South’s answers didn’t look so good, either.
Caudell reflected that America would have been a much simpler place were the black man not around to vex it. Unfortunately, however, the black man was here. One way or another, North and South would have to come to terms with that.
Chapter VI: Part III - Robert E. Lee
quote:
“Major Marshall, I should like you to draft a general order to the Army of Northern Virginia, to be published as soon as it is completed,” Lee said.
“Yes, sir.” Charles Marshall took out notepad and pen. “The subject of the order?”
“As you must be aware, Major, the enemy has begun to employ against us large numbers of colored soldiers. I aim to order our men that, if these colored troops be captured, their treatment at our hands is to differ in no particular from that accorded to any other soldiers we take prisoner.”
“Yes, sir.” Behind Marshall’s spectacles, his eyes were expressionless. He bent his head and began to write.
“You do not approve, Major?” Lee said.
The younger man looked up from the folding table on which he was working. “Since you ask, sir, in no way do I approve of arming Negroes. The very concept is repugnant to me.”
Lee wondered what his aide would have thought of General Cleburne’s proposal that the Confederacy recruit and use Negro troops in pursuit of its independence. But President Davis had ordered him to keep silent about that. Instead, he said, “Major, not least of my concerns in issuing this order is fear for the safety of the thousands of our own captives in Northern hands. Last summer Lincoln issued an order promising to kill a Confederate soldier for each Union man slain in violation of the articles of war, and to put at hard labor one man for every black captive returned to slavery. By all means make that point explicit in the language of the order, to help the men understand its promulgation is, among other things, a matter of practical necessity.”
“You’ve thought a step farther ahead than I did,” Marshall admitted. “Put that way, I see the need for what you have asked of me.” He bent to his task again, this time with a better will. A few minutes later, he offered Lee the draft.
I can find no evidence that the historical Lee ever issued such an order. It is certain that he resisted the notion of including captured USCT men in the hitherto regular prisoner exchanges, which largely ended the practice until late in the war. I do not know if Turtledove found something that I have missed, or if this is intended to be Lee already changing due to his interactions with the AWB men.
quote:
“Good. Now on to other business.” Lee unfolded several newspapers. “These have been sent on to me by those behind Federal lines who are in sympathy with our cause. Not only does the government in Washington City often inadvertently reveal its intentions in the press, but through it we can gauge Northern sentiment toward the war.”
“And?” Marshall asked eagerly. “What is the Northern sentiment toward the war, now that we have beaten back yet another ‘Forward to Richmond!’ drive?”
“I shall be delighted to provide you with a representative sampling, Major.” Lee held a newspaper close to his face; even with his spectacles, the small, cramped letters were hard to read. “This is the New York Times: ‘Disaster! Grant’s army overthrown in the Wilderness. Forced to retreat above the Rappahannock, and there defeated once more.’ Below these headlines, the story continues as follows: ‘Unhappily, like many of our engagements, the late fighting, though serving to illustrate the splendid valor of our troops, has failed to accomplish the object sought. The result thus far leaves us with a loss of upwards of 40,000 men in the two battles’--useful information there--’and absolutely nothing gained. ‘Not only did the rebels hold their lines, but they are advancing behind the impetus of their new breech-loading repeaters, against which the vaunted Springfield is of scarcely greater effect than the red man’s bows and arrows.’”
This reaction from the newspapers is far, far milder than you would expect after such an event. 40,000 casualties - even assuming that this includes wounded in the normal proportion - is a disaster of incredible proportion. The historical Union Army suffered casualties in the range of 800,000 men (this figure includes disease, as far as I can determine), so 40,000 would equal 5 percent of the losses for the entire war.
The Confederate newspapers are much happier with the outcome, and there is news of other fronts.
quote:
Venable handed them to him. As he read the first, he felt a great load of worry lift from his shoulders. “General Johnston has held General Sherman at Rocky Face Ridge, with heavy losses on the Federal side, and then again at Resaca and Snake Creek Gap, when he tried to use his superior numbers to outflank us. Sherman’s forces are now halted; prisoners report he dares not seek to outflank us again for fear of the casualties he would sustain from our rifles.”
“Business and pleasure together,” Venable exclaimed.
“True enough, Major.” Lee had feared that only his own army would derive full benefit from the repeaters the Rivington men had provided. He’d never been so glad to be proved wrong. True, Johnston had given up a little ground to the enemy instead of advancing as the Army of Northern Virginia was doing, but the enemy in Georgia had more room to maneuver than was true here. And Johnston was a counterpuncher in any case, a master of the defensive. Lee would not have wanted to be a Federal general assaulting a position he chose to hold, the more so when his men were armed with AK-47s.
“What is the other dispatch, sir?”
“We shall know in a moment.” Lee opened the envelope. He read the paper inside, refolded it, and put it back in its place before he lifted his head to face his aides, both of whom were fidgeting in an effort to contain their curiosity. Lee said, “In southwestern Virginia, General Jenkins with twenty-four hundred men was engaged by Federal General George Crook with between six and seven thousand on the ninth of this month just south of Cloyd’s Mountain.”
“Yes, sir,” the two men said together. They both sounded anxious; close to three-to-one was long odds against any army.
Lee lifted their suspense: “Our troops succeeded in holding their position; the Federals withdrew to the north and west up the Dublin-Pearisburg Turnpike. Among their dead were General Crook and Colonel Rutherford Hayes, who commanded a brigade of Ohioans. I regret to have to add that General Jenkins was also wounded in the action and had his right arm amputated. But as General McCausland--who replaced him--adds, the victory has preserved our control of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, without which rail connection between the two states would have been broken.”
“That’s excellent news, sir!” Charles Marshall said. “Perhaps the tide has turned at last.”
Lee is fearful of simply driving the Union forces into fortifications, and begins to sketch out a plan that is, for the moment, left unsaid.
quote:
Andries Rhoodie’s horse came trotting up to Lee as he rode alongside the head of a long column of gray-clad troops. The Rivington man politely stayed a few feet outside the group of generals and officers with Lee and waited to be recognized. “Good morning, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee said. He studied the way Rhoodie handled his bay gelding. “Your horsemanship has improved, sir, since I first had the pleasure of your acquaintance.”
“I’ve had a good deal of practice since then, General Lee,” Rhoodie answered. “Before I came to join your army, I’d spent little time on horseback.”
The officers with Lee concealed scornful expressions, some well, some not so well, A man who habitually rode in a buggy was hardly a man at all--and what other reason could there be for eschewing horses? Lee thought he knew the answer to that question, which to the others must have been purely rhetorical: by the distant year 2014, men must have discovered better means of transport than either horses or buggies. Lee wondered whether railroads ran down the center of every street in every city in the almost unimaginable time from which the Rivington man had sprung.
One day, he might ask Rhoodie about such things. The priceless knowledge that man had to hold in his head! No time now, though; no time, all too likely, until the war was done. No time for anything save the immediate till the war was done. To the immediate, then: “How may I help you today, Mr. Rhoodie?”
“I’d like to speak with you in private, General Lee, if I could,” Rhoodie said.
Rhoodie is absolutely furious about Lee's order to treat all soldiers as prisoners, and orders him to rescind it immediately.
quote: “You go about giving the friend of the family equality in anyone way, General Lee, and you set foot on the path to making him equal in all ways.” Rhoodie sounded less peremptory than he had a moment before, but no less serious. “That is not what America Will Break stands for, General. If you don’t care to bear that in mind, we don’t care to keep providing you with ammunition.”
Lee swung his head around to stare at the Rivington man. Rhoodie’s smile was less than pleasant. Lee nodded slowly. Having wondered if this moment would ever come, he was the more ready for it now that it was here. He said, “If President Davis ordered me to do such a thing, sir, I should present him with my resignation on the spot. To you, I shall merely repeat what I said a moment before: no.” He urged Traveller up to a trot to leave Rhoodie behind.
Rhoodie stayed with him; he was a better rider than he had been. He said, “Think carefully about your decision, General. Remember what will happen to the Confederacy without our repeaters.”
Lee fails to rise to the threat, much to Rhoodie's confusion.
quote:
Now it was Rhoodie’s turn to stare at Lee. “You would sacrifice your precious Virginia for the sake of kaffirs who were doing their best to kill your own men?”
“As General Forrest has said upon occasion, war means fighting, and fighting means killing. But there is a distinction to be drawn between killing on the battlefield, where foes face one another man against man and army against army, and killing helpless prisoners after the fighting is done. It is the distinction between man and beast, sir, and if it is a distinction you find yourself incapable of drawing, I shall pray to God for the salvation of your soul,”
“I believe in my heart, General Lee, that God has established that white men are to rule over blacks,” Rhoodie said, and Lee, no mean judge of character, discerned nothing but sincerity in his voice. The Rivington man went on,” As for General Forrest, his men didn’t take any high moral tone when they captured Fort Pillow last month. They found kaffirs in arms there, and they disposed of them.”
Lee’s mouth twisted in a grimace of distaste; the report of the Fort Pillow massacre had come to his notice. For a moment, he wondered how Rhoodie had heard of it. Then he shook his head, annoyed at himself. In one sense, Rhoodie had known about Fort Pillow for a century and a half. Lee said, “General Forrest is not under my command. I would never deny his abilities as a soldier. Of his other qualities, I am less well qualified to speak.”
In point of fact, most of what he’d heard about Nathan Bedford Forrest was unsavory. Much of the fortune the man had amassed before the war came from slave trading. Less than a year ago, he’d been shot by a disgruntled subordinate, whom he’d proceeded to stab to death with a penknife. He would never have fit in among the Virginia aristocrats from whose numbers Lee sprang, But only Jeb Stuart deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as a Confederate cavalry commander.
The historical Forrest was, in fact, held in disdain by Southern society for his slave trading, despite the fact that said society quite happily and proudly built their wealth on the backs of said slaves. This is one of the most blatant hypocracies of the slaver class and the society they built. The Fort Pillow Massacre, unfortunately, is quite real. A force of around 1500 Confederate cavalry captured Fort Pillow, which was defended by roughly 600 Union troops - half of which were USCT men. When a large portion of this force attempted to surrender, the Confederates merely slaughtered them with bayonet and musket fire. There has been great debate to the degree to which Forrest himself was responsible for this - some sources claim he personally ordered no quarter, others claim that the massacre was spontaneous and that Forrest put a stop to it as rapidly as possible. There is also no certain consensus as to how many prisoners were murdered, and if any civilians were among them.
Rhoodie promises to cut off Lee's supply of ammunition for the AK if the order is not removed. Lee is unmoved, and refuses. Though Rhoodie leaves in retreat, Lee is not immune to fear of the consequences of what he has done.
quote: What if no more cartridges were forthcoming? Lee thought about that. He did not care for any of the conclusions he reached. Reequipping his army with repeaters had taken a couple of months. If he required that much time to go back to rifle muskets, the Army of Northern Virginia was done for. The Army of the Potomac would never leave it alone long enough to make the changeover, not in spring.
He reproached himself for not having had his men pick up the precious brass cartridges they’d expended in the fighting thus far. Even if Colonel Gorgas and Colonel Rains had to load them with ordinary black powder and unjacketed lead bullets, they’d keep the AK-47s in action a while longer. He thought about sending men back to Bealeton to glean such cartridges as they could--in the miserable tangles of the Wilderness, the brass was likely gone forever.
He decided to hold off. He had succeeded in imposing his will upon Federal generals throughout the war; even the capable, aggressive, and determined Grant now moved to his tune--thanks in no small measure to Andries Rhoodie’s repeaters. Now to learn whether he could outlast Rhoodie, a man nominally an ally, in strength of purpose.
The army continued past the dormered cottages of Middleburg, on toward Leesburg and Waterford. Stuart’s cavalry slashed up to seize a stretch of the Alexandria, Loudon and Hampshire Railroad and keep Grant’s men from using the train to get to Leesburg first. Lee ordered the troopers to hold the Federal infantry as long as they could. He would never have given such a command to soldiers with single-shot rifles. But one man with an AK-47 was worth a fair number with Springfields...and by now, the Federals knew that as well as Lee did.
The lead elements of the Army of Northern Virginia went through Leesburg the next day, tramping past the elms and oaks that shaded the white-pillared buildings of the courthouse square. Lee rode back to check on the ammunition supply and learned a new wagon train had just come in, up from the end of the Warrenton railroad spur.
“Excellent,” he said softly. “Excellent.” A few minutes later, he saw Andries Rhoodie riding along beside the long gray files of Confederates. He gave no sign he’d noticed the Rivington man, but affectionately patted the side of Traveller’s neck with a gloved hand. He’d called Rhoodie’s bluff, and got away with it. Rhoodie needed him as much as he needed Rhoodie.
Chapter VI: Part IV - Nate Caudell
quote:
Rain in his face, rain turning the roadway to muddy soup. Nate Caudell slogged on. When the weather was fine, he’d wished for rain to cut the dust. Now that he had it, he wished for dust again. Mud was worse.
The road, already chewed up by countless feet, disappeared into water ahead. White’s Ford had steep banks; two years earlier, Stonewall Jackson had had to dig them down before wagons and artillery could cross. Caudell held his repeater and haversack over his head as he splashed into the Potomac. The river was waist-high. He did not mind. He was already soaked. He knew only relief that the rain hadn’t made the water at the ford rise any higher.
Regimental bands played on the northern--here, actually the eastern--bank of the Potomac. The downpour did nothing to improve their musicianship, but Caudell recognized “Maryland, My Maryland.” As it had the previous two summers, the Army of Northern Virginia stood once more on Northern soil.
Thanks to the rain, that soil clung to Caudell in abundance. Similarly bedraggled, Dempsey Eure observed, “If this really was my Maryland, I’m damned if I’d go boasting about it.”
“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Caudell agreed. The wet weather kept him from seeing a great deal in any case; even the long, low bulk of South Mountain to the west lay shrouded in mist and rain. But he remembered Maryland as distinctly poorer country than the fat farms and houses farther north in Pennsylvania.
This is a short interlude to end the chapter, showing Nate's unit crossing into Maryland. Nate and the rest dream of taking Washington City and ending the war, fight a few brisk actions with Union cavalry, and keep advancing.
quote:
“Maybe.” Caudell looked southeast. Nothing lay between Lee’s soldiers and Washington City but its ring of forts. It was a big but. He suspected Marse Robert would keep the army too busy for it to do much wrecking for wrecking’s sake.
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Jan 19, 2022 21:50
