Bernie MacKinnon's Blog - Posts Tagged "civil-war"

In my last post I was talking about the Battle of Franklin and its depiction in Howard Bahr's dark gem of a novel, The Black Flower. I can't think about that battle without recalling its most distinguished casualty, Confederate General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne. Among the 6200 Southern casualties were six dead generals plus seven wounded and one captured. None, however, represented as big a loss to the South as Cleburne, who was called "The Stonewall Of The West." Tough, smart, resourceful and loved by his men, Cleburne had been born in County Cork, Ireland and emigrated to the United States at the age of 21, settling in Helena, Arkansas. There he worked as a pharmacist and later as a newspaper publisher. When the war threatened, his personal qualities and military experience (three years in the British army) made him a natural choice as captain of a militia company, which he led in January 1861 to capture the Union arsenal at Little Rock.

Three tumultuous years later, Cleburne figured in a quiet but very telling episode of the war. Recognizing the South's great manpower disadvantage and the urgent need to address it, Cleburne proposed to General Joseph Johnston and the rest of the Army of Tennessee's leadership that the South begin freeing slaves in return for their enlistment in the Confederate forces. A crucial passage of his address reveals both his knowledge of history and his blindness to what he was up against:

Satisfy the negro that if he faithfully adheres to our standard during the war he shall receive his freedom and that of his race ... and we change the race from a dreaded weakness to a position of strength.

Will the slaves fight? The helots of Sparta stood their masters good stead in battle. In the great sea fight of Lepanto where the Christians checked forever the spread of Mohammedanism over Europe, the galley slaves of portions of the fleet were promised freedom, and called on to fight at a critical moment of the battle. They fought well, and civilization owes much to those brave galley slaves ... the experience of this war has been so far that half-trained negroes have fought as bravely as many other half-trained Yankees.

It is said that slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.

Born and raised in another country and not arriving in the South till early manhood, Cleburne had never grasped how fundamental slavery actually was to the war and to his adopted region, even though it was the threat to slavery's spread that had triggered secession in the first place. (In the research for my novel Lucifer's Drum, one thing was clear: slavery imbued the pre-war years like no other issue. Nothing else came close.) The other generals listened quietly and respectfully, but Johnston was reportedly shocked. And—no surprise—Cleburne's proposal was not discussed, let alone acted upon. The basic idea persisted, however, as Confederate desperation intensified. And in early 1865—truly the 11th hour, long past the point where it could have had any effect—the Confederate Congress authorized the first feeble steps for slave recruitment. Within a few weeks, the Union had triumphed.

At Franklin on November 30, 1864, Cleburne correctly judged General John B. Hood's assault plan as foolhardy but followed orders, exposing himself to maximum danger as the charge proceeded. His troops momentarily breached the Union line but were thrown back. Cleburne died while charging on foot after his horse was shot out from under him. His body was found plundered, without boots, watch or sword. He deserved far better. Then again, there were so many others of whom you could say that—on any side, in any war.



Portrait of General Cleburne. (Courtesy:
Library of Congress)

In the opening chapter of my novel Lucifer's Drum (which I hope to post here presently), the hack newspaper publisher Gideon Van Gilder meets an especially unpleasant end. Van Gilder is a Copperhead, or "Peace Democrat"—one of that loud Northern political faction opposed to Lincoln, the Draft and Emancipation. Most Copperheads favored preservation of the Union but proclaimed the right of the Southern and border states to maintain slavery. And they opposed black advancement on principle, whether free or slave, portraying the white majority as besieged by evil forces. They identified as Democrats and strongly influenced the direction of that party, whose 1864 presidential platform was wholly Copperhead. Still, it has to be stated that many thousands of non-Copperhead Democrats ("War Democrats") fought in the federal ranks.

The name came about as an epithet, when Republicans and Union loyalists in general compared these dissenters to venomous snakes. As with many such movements, supporters reacted by taking the name as a badge of honor—quite literally, in this case, cutting the Liberty symbol from copper pennies and proudly wearing them. They were strongest in areas just north of the Ohio River and in urban ethnic neighborhoods. Anyone who thinks that today's level of political vituperation is unmatched should check out the editorial commentary (and the cartoons) from Copperhead newspapers, especially during the '64 election season. The editor of Wisconsin's LaCrosse Democrat, Marcus "Brick" Pomeroy, branded Lincoln "fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism . . . a worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher than has existed since the days of Nero." Pomeroy declared that anyone who voted for the President was "a traitor and murderer," and that "if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good." (As is often the case in times of civil tumult, men like Pomeroy defined treason and fanaticism as anything short of their own views—practically a textbook definition of true fanaticism.)


Anti-Copperhead cartoon, February 1863. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

In New York, the official Catholic paper The Metropolitan Record championed draft resistance and helped ignite the July 1863 riots, still the bloodiest such event in U.S. history. Largely Irish immigrant mobs lynched a number of black men in the street and burned black-owned businesses. They also burned and looted the Colored Orphan's Asylum, whose terrified residents (233 children plus staff) had to be shepherded to safety by police. Many of the troops called in to quell the riots had fought at Gettysburg just two weeks earlier, arriving exhausted and no doubt disoriented by the scorched urban setting. (Gideon Van Gilder is depicted as having played a similar role in inciting this mass violence.) The editor of The Record, John Mullaly, was arrested a year later for his anti-draft activities. For the most part, however, Union authorities had to put up with high-profile Copperheads like New York's mayor and later congressman Fernando Wood, who once proposed that the city secede and thereby maintain its lucrative cotton trade with the South. (Generally speaking, it has always seemed to me that where money goes, heartfelt conviction follows.)

The core of the Copperhead movement grew from The Knights Of The Golden Circle, a pro-slavery and pro-expansionist secret society formed in the 1850's. During the war it changed its name to The Order Of American Knights and then The Order Of The Sons of Liberty, headed by the Copperheads' most prominent spokesman Clement L. Vallandigham. Given the thrill of secrecy and the sense of their own historic role, the Knights and their successors tended toward the grandiose, calling their branches "castles" and sometimes using secret handshakes. (The Ku Klux Klan would later take this sort of stuff to unexplored heights.)


Fernando Wood, Mayor of New York City (1855-58,
1860-62), pro-Confederate and post-war U.S. Congressman.
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)

The Copperheads' fortunes ebbed and flowed along with that of the Union military cause, but reached their high-water mark in '64. What effectiveness they had evaporated on Sept. 2, when the fall of Atlanta made eventual Union victory look certain. Shortly before this, the Democrats had nominated George B. McClellan for president; however much McClellan despised Lincoln, who had sacked him as commanding general in the East, he did not embrace the Copperheads—contradicting the platform on which he supposedly ran and leaving his candidacy hamstrung. Among the Copperheads, only a minority were radical and nervy enough to actually participate in anti-Union schemes, such as encouraging soldiers to desert. And it is probably true that the Republicans exaggerated the Copperhead threat for political gain. Yet movement leaders like Harrison H. Dodd did in fact advocate the violent overthrow of certain state governments. Dodd and others were implicated in a plot to help Confederate prisoners escape from a POW camp in Indiana—and when federal authorities foiled it and made arrests, the evidence was compelling. Several Copperheads were sentenced to hang, but the Supreme Court eventually freed them after deciding that they should have had a civil and not a military trial.

I can't end this without a quick focus on Clement Vallandigham. He was a two-term Ohio congressman who blamed the war on the Abolition movement and railed against Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus. By the time he was voted out of office, he was the acknowledged leader of the Copperheads. Back in Ohio, he confronted General Ambrose E. Burnside's ham-fisted General Order No. 38, which mandated arrest for anyone expressing Confederate sympathies. (Burnside had acted on this when he shut down the pro-Copperhead Chicago Times, only to have Lincoln reverse the ban as soon as he heard of it.) Vallandigham was arrested under this order in May 1863 and sentenced to prison for the duration of the war. Facing loud protests from Democrats, however, Lincoln altered the sentence to banishment behind Confederate lines.


Clement Vallandigham (seated center) with other prominent
Copperheads, circa 1865. Several years later, he would accidentally
shoot himself. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

In time, Vallandigham left the South by blockade runner and ended up in Windsor, Ontario, from which he ran in absentia for the Ohio governorship. His campaign was strong but unsuccessful. Meanwhile, in the same trial that convicted Harrison Dodd and other Copperheads, testimony implicated Vallandigham in a plan for armed revolt—the so-called Northwest Conspiracy. He had allegedly sought funds from a Confederate agent for this purpose, but the charge was never pressed. By now he had slipped back into the United States and was being monitored by Union authorities; Lincoln with his usual shrewdness declined to have Vallandigham arrested again and made a martyr. Vallandigham even attended the Democatic convention as a delegate in Chicago. Despite strong disagreements with McClellan, he would have been named Secretary of War had Little Mac not been crushed at the polls that autumn.

After the war, Vallandigham ran losing campaigns for senator and congressman before resuming his law practice. He opposed black suffrage and anything hinting at racial equality but then endorsed the Democrats' "New Departure" policy, which basically discouraged all public mention of the war. In Lebanon, Ohio in June, 1871, he took up the case of Thomas McGehan, who was charged with shooting another man in a barroom brawl. At the Golden Lamb Inn, Vallandigham sought to demonstrate for fellow defense lawyers how the victim might have accidentally shot himself during the melee. Picking up a pistol he thought to be unloaded—but was not—Vallandigham pocketed the weapon but snagged it on his clothes, shooting himself in the stomach. He died the next day, aged 50, expressing faith in the Presbyterian concept of predestination. Needless to say, Thomas McGehan got off—only to be shot dead in another brawl four years later. Say what you want about Vallandigham's political beliefs—has any attorney ever gone quite so above and beyond for his client? And at least his death wasn't as bad as Van Gilder's.

When a novel is already fat, its author would do well *not* to include a prologue, those leisurely opening pages that give readers a bird's-eye view of time and place. Some works of fiction benefit from a prologue—a short one, preferably—but most do fine without one. I confess that when I open a book and see one, my heart sinks a little, since it means a delay of action. Still, my novel Lucifer's Drum once had a prologue. The story did seem to call for it at the time—a panoramic update, a hold-onto-your-hat overture as the Civil War lurched into its last and most horrific year.

But as I wrestled with a big story that threatened to become too big, those pages proved highly expendable. I put a lot into them, though, and am therefore posting them today, the 150th anniversary of Richmond's capture. The Confederate capital's fall was the culmination of events that started eleven months earlier, when Grant and Lee began their death struggle and the blood tide crested. All of which I tried to evoke here:

PROLOGUE: SPRING, 1864

Deep into the war, survivors found themselves looking back to the beginning. Each had a sudden, private urge to reclaim that moment, now so distant, before it too was lost. Few spoke of it, so memories groped in silence. And the more they remembered, the stranger they felt, realizing that madness and innocence are sometimes impossible to tell apart.

It had begun in fever and delirium, in shrill song and deafening cheer. With an eruption of bands and banners, with ornate cavalry and shiny black cannon rattling down the avenues. With brave, endless volunteer columns trying to look smart and march straight for the weeping girls. And with speeches: On to Richmond, God points the Way, Victory before Christmas, let him whose heart is faint turn back. A Union forever. Now, with the roar of Gettysburg not a year past, a generation of ghosts thronged the woods, hills and fields from Pennsylvania to the Trans-Mississippi.

People had at first been the manifest agents of conflict, actively willing events toward a vast and inescapable collision. Responding to the scope of the hour, they appeared somehow magnified to themselves and one another, their deeds and assertions grand as never before. Noble resolve covered everything in hues of gold, even the first homeward coffins and the humble tents dotting the hillsides. Minds, bodies, convictions—these, overnight, were galvanized for a single severe purpose, pushing and not driven, sweeping and not swept to the forward lines.



Yet at some otherworldly juncture, as the cemeteries grew and then spilled over, that purpose left the realm of human design—gone into the earth, into the smoky sky, somewhere else. A war launched in righteous certitude, by humans, had become a colossal organism that thundered of its own power. It was a creature undreamed of. Deaf to protest and opinion, it dwarfed the legions and drowned out the bands, banishing the golden light forever. Amid its heaving, unstoppable shocks, men cowered and scrambled. Armies were its beasts of burden, battalions food for its maw, each soldier a windblown seed. People had in fact never looked so small.

Deep inside the din, speeches could still be heard—Abolitionists, Constitutionalists, War Democrats, centrist Republicans and Copperheads were no less strident. But invocations of the Deity were more frequent, as if the speakers knew instinctively that mortal arguments alone would rally no one, would sound shriveled and obscene to ears grown hard. Street conversations were more clipped, more distracted, and one might note a cast of shadow in another's eye. Yesterday's expressions and sentiments remained like stumps in a hurricane and people clung to them, grasping at the same time for new certitudes. They tried to predict. They tried to envision the end. But in the fury of this storm, no eye could penetrate. And at solitary moments, all but the most flinty and partisan of souls wondered what it was they had done, what had been done, what they would do now. In the Executive Mansion, a gaunt President wondered this continually.

The opposing forces had hibernated through the winter. Greatcoated sentries leaned on their rifles and gazed across the river. For its part, the population marked time and kept busy. Women rolled bandages when they weren't cooking or mending. Children played, did chores or school work and said their prayers. But at night, clocks struck louder upon the ear. Lying awake in barracks, or in feather beds, people listened to the wind moan prophecies they could not decipher.

By daylight, many spoken prophecies centered on Ulysses S. Grant. The general's air of scruffy competence heartened Northerners, who had seen their boast trampled on too many fields. Betrayed by their own optimism, gorged sick on debate and mistrustful of appearances, they welcomed a man who was plain in speech, manner and appearance but a virtuoso in warfare. Grant came east with his record of western victories and did not boast. He went to work planning his spring campaign and assembling one of the largest forces in world history. In early May, chewing his cigar, he watched his great army cross the Rapidan into the Wilderness, into the scrub oak and blooming dogwood. Into Confederate hellfire. On the second night, with flames racing through dry undergrowth, the woods torn by the screams of wounded unable to crawl fast enough, Grant excused himself from his staff, entered his tent and wept.

What followed was armed combat as the world had never seen it. Grant did not withdraw but sent his blue leviathan hulking southeastward. Robert E. Lee's gray one followed, and the antagonists remained in daily, bludgeoning contact as the month wore on. Along with the dead and wounded, men returned wide-eyed and gibbering from the front, struck with a madness yet unnamed. Crows and wild pigs fed upon the dead before they could be carted off, and as accounts of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor bled into newsprint, the casualty rosters unfurled. Memorial portraits decorated parlors draped in black. Embalmers put up their signs. Diarists sat with nibs poised above blank pages. In school and church, children's attention strayed as they tried to picture that paradise to which their martyred fathers had gone.



June's arrival found towns and cities in a growing state of shock. Draftees fled or scraped up the $300 substitute fee. "Bounty-jumpers" prospered by enlisting for cash bonuses, deserting, then repeating the process. Urging calm, local pro-Union leaders gave pallid homilies about honoring the dead through renewed commitment.

Washington, D.C., had more experience than most in the practice of calm. While the rest of the North sank from frenzied hope to bitter dismay, Washington sought to emulate its own statues and not flinch. It took reassurance from its grand, unfinished government buildings and its unrivaled ring of forts. It kept about its business despite daily boatloads of wounded at the Sixth Street wharf. Wounded languished in hospitals, converted churches and private homes; in hotels, warehouses and fraternal lodges. But the summer heat swelled, dulling alarm and bringing out something of the city's languid Southern character. Much less of that character survived these days. For Washington, the firing on Fort Sumter had signaled not just war, not just the swarming encampments, but also an influx of merchants and poor folk. War meant business for shops, markets, taverns, theaters, hotels, brothels and livery stables, and these had multiplied while troops paraded and battles quaked upriver or to the south. Confederate spies moved within the burgeoning population, drawing support from the city's strong pro-Southern element, passing information despite the War Department's draconian measures. Ridiculously young for its size, ridiculously divided and unready for its role as the Union's martial crux, Washington strained to meet the challenge of its transfiguration. But while it aped the smugness of older, greater cities, foreign diplomats eyed its imperial pillars and snickered. Away from the fashionable districts, shanties huddled along brawling, mud-holed streets where police chased thieves and battled ruffian gangs.

Still, as the murderous tumult continued elsewhere, the capital's summer heat slowed everything. It conjured flies from the fetid marsh and aqueduct and from the government slaughter pens. To many, a worse stench emanated from the Capitol Building, where Copperhead congressmen declared Grant a mass murderer and cried for peace while Republicans cried for censure. All looked forward to the summer recess, though it would not be much of one. A presidential election loomed with the promise of more dirt, more acrimony than the campaigns of 1860, and the parties had to marshal their forces. It was widely expected that the Lincoln administration would fall. Of the last eight Presidents, none had seen a second term, claimed either by death or factional strife.

Increasingly, dark-skinned refugees turned up—bedgraggled men, women and children liberated in Grant's wake and drawn by the capital's safety. "Contrabands," the authorities called them, ranking them with captured livestock and cotton bales. Up from the Virginia fields they came, stunned and hopeful, to scrounge some kind of living, to gaze at the monuments and at the white citizenry who glanced and kept walking. Some were taken in by the Freedman's Aid Society or the quietly industrious community of free blacks. Others slept on the street or in woodlots, or settled in shack towns along the city's northern fringe. Many of the men soon left to join their lettered, Northern-raised brethren in Negro regiments. To any white who cared to ask or listen, the ex-slaves would evince no doubt of the war's mystical dimension. They might show a ragged scar or two, indicating time spent under the devil's will and a sure preference for God's, however terrible.



But everyone knew that the story was being blasted and re-written even as they breathed. The imponderable creature roared louder than ever, taking all in its reach. On clear days near the capital's outskirts, one could catch the far-off rumble of shelling. And certain people sensed that motives had sunk beneath the level of language, beneath the phrases about God, Honor, Freedom and Country, to the darkest region of the heart.

(Photos Courtesy: Library of Congress)

I can't spend the 150th anniversary of Appomattox without posting something. This time it concerns a historical figure who plays a minor but colorful role in my novel Lucifer's Drum, Henry Kyd Douglas. Douglas served as a trusted aide to Stonewall Jackson and later to Jubal Early. At Appomattox, where he was a brigade commander, his troops fired the last shots and were last to surrender.

Douglas hailed from Shepherdstown, Virginia (later West Virginia), though his family's home Ferry Hill stood across the Potomac, on the Maryland side. Enlisting as a Confederate private at the war's outbreak, the 22-year-old fledgling lawyer rose rapidly through the ranks and by mid-1862 was on Jackson's staff, participating in the Valley Campaign, Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas and Antietam. He filled the extra role of guide at Antietam, given his first-hand knowledge of the area. At Gettysburg he was captured and sent to the officers' prison camp at Johnson's Island, Ohio, but was freed by exchange in March, 1864. Lucifer's Drum depicts him as smart, daring and high-spirited, almost a surrogate son to his superior Jubal Early, whose mid-summer thrust down the Shenandoah brought them to the doorstep of Washington, D.C.

Many of the incidents and conversations in the novel are of course imaginary, informed by history but no more than that. One particular moment, however, is taken directly from the historical record. As Early gives orders for the Confederate host to withdraw from Washington's outskirts, following the Union counterattack, he stops to boast that they have "scared Abe Lincoln like hell." To which Douglas, then a major, responds, "Yes, General, but this afternoon when that Yankee line moved out against us, I think some other people were scared blue as hell's brimstone!" Reacting to his young aide's brash modesty, Early reportedly declared, "That's true, but it won't appear in history!" Early was no prophet.



Henry Kyd Douglas, last to surrender
at Appomattox. (Courtesy: Library
of Congress)

Novels are by definition works of invention—but for historical ones, true events and true moments provide a mother lode of drama. Lucifer's Drum uses plenty of them: the solemn parade of Rebel troops past Stonewall Jackson's grave; the 4th of July picnic for the free black community of Washington, on the grounds of the President's House; Lincoln under fire on the parapet at Fort Stevens. Often, when you have researched these incidents, you are left feeling that only real life could have scripted them. Fiction pales.

Douglas saw action in nearly every Eastern campaign and survived six woundings. Varina Davis, wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, called Douglas, "with one exception, the handsomest man I ever met." After the war, he published his memoir I Rode With Stonewall, often cited as one of the most engaging and best-written of its kind, though not necessarily the most reliable. (You wouldn't think Douglas would have had to embellish, but it's a good bet that he did. Well, he definitely wasn't alone in that.)

Never marrying, he ended up a respected attorney in Hagerstown, Maryland, the very Unionist town that his Confederate brethren had shaken down for a "levy" during Early's Raid. Maybe its citizenry were more forgiving because of the mistake the Rebel cavalry had made on that occasion, misunderstanding Early's demand for $200,000 and snagging only $20,000 instead. History is plenty tragic, but once in a while it's funny.

Lucifer's Drum starts its journey in the wee hours of June 6, 1864, on a lonely road in northern Virginia. So I am marking this particular June 6 by posting the novel's first chapter. Here the Copperhead (pro-Confederate) newspaper publisher Gideon Van Gilder is fleeing through the night, pursued by something terrible.


CHAPTER ONE
NORTHERN SHENANDOAH VALLEY
JUNE 6, 1864

Gideon Van Gilder had left his dignity far behind, like an expensive topcoat forgotten in haste. He did not mourn its loss—had not mourned it even at the last roadside inn, when he started awake and spied his stricken face in a shaving mirror. Now, huddled again inside the rocking coach, he could think only of escape. Escape—southward, southward by moon and carriage light, along this road so rough that it threatened to break the axles. Up the hill-haunted Shenandoah lay sanctuary, some haven behind the booming, gargantuan battle lines. Only there could he know rest once more. Rest, and perhaps the luxury of pride.

The lump of the derringer beneath his vest was small comfort–he had never fired a pistol in his life. At times in the jouncing blur of his journey, he had found himself gripping his cane between his knees like a talisman of dubious power. More frequently than ever he yelled at his hunchbacked coachman, calling him a sausage-eating monkey or a deformed German half-wit. The coachman said little.

Awaking from a fitful doze, Van Gilder realized that the coach’s rocking had ceased. He shuddered as he blinked out of the window into a mass of tall black shapes that hid the moon. He heard a ragged breathing sound. After a disoriented moment, he identified the sound as that of the horses and the obstruction as a stand of pine. He shifted to the other side and elbowed the door open. In the carriage lamp’s glow he discerned the misshapen form of the coachman. He was carrying two pails down an embankment, headed for the ripple of an unseen creek.



Van Gilder drew a breath to holler, but in the dark his voice came as a hushed rasp. “Kirschenbaum!”

Maintaining his balance on the slope, the coachman made an awkward turn. “Horses are tired, you makes them run all night. Tired like me, sir. I get vater.”

“Do it, then, imbecile! But no more stops!”

The hunched form started to turn away, then hesitated. “Herr Van Gilder?”

“Get the damned water!”

“We gets closer to the secesh.”

“Yes!” Van Gilder hissed “Yes—and I’ve paid you! Get the water!”

“I did not know I must take you five days and now all night. And we gets closer to the secesh.”

Though still hushed, Van Gilder’s voice began its climb toward full fury. “Fool! I know where we’re going! I’ve paid you!”

“You pay me more, I think.”

In the rippling stillness, one of the animals snorted. Van Gilder sputtered a curse. “Three dollars more, when we reach the place!”

“Ten.”

From the creek, a bullfrog let out a deep “bong” sound. Van Gilder thought of the derringer—wishing, thwarted. This time he spoke in just a murmur. “Ten, when we get there.”

“I thank you,” said the hunchback, who resumed his descent.

Dense with cricket noise, the warm, still air pressed in on Van Gilder, worsening his agitation. He took up his map, rattled it open and lit a match. In the match’s flutter he followed the black line of his route to the town of Strasburg, marked by a tight circle. Twenty-five miles to go, more or less. He blew out the match, folded the map and again peered outside.

“Kirschenbaum!” he called in a hoarse whisper.

From the embankment, the hunchback’s laboring form reappeared with the pails, slopping water. Kirschenbaum began watering the first pair of horses. When they got to Strasburg, Van Gilder thought, he would stick his derringer in the face of this insolent moron. Then he would drop a single coin at his feet and tell him to get out of his sight forever.

“Van Gilder!” came a deep-throated call.

Van Gilder jerked upright. For a crazed moment, he could neither move nor think nor breathe. Then, blindly, he began fumbling for his derringer.

“Don’t fret,” came the voice. “I am here to see that you pass safely through our lines.”

Van Gilder stopped pawing at his vest. Shaking, he leaned slowly out the side. He saw Kirschenbaum standing motionless, staring past the back of the coach. From that direction he heard a crunch of pebbles, very close. How—how could anyone have come upon them with such stealth? Leaning out farther, he forced his head to turn. Out of the gloom, the shape of a horse and rider emerged. The man wore a military cap, cape and double-breasted tunic, its brass buttons winking like sparks. With the oil running low, the lamps cast a meager halo about the coach—and as the stranger entered it, his uniform proved to be Union blue. He held a revolver and the reins in one hand, an extinguished lantern in the other.

Van Gilder gazed, open-mouthed as the intruder guided his mount forward and then halted–a bearded, powerful-looking officer, the right side of his face hidden by bandages. In an attitude of dutiful ease, he slouched in the saddle, his revolver held loosely away. His one visible eye peered down at Kirschenbaum, though it was Van Gilder whom he addressed:

“Major Henry Spruce, Army of the Potomac, currently on detached service. I am your official escort—to ensure that you make your rendezvous in Strasburg. That you do so without being fired upon by federal pickets, who perhaps know a traitor when they see one.”

There was something odd about the major’s low-in-the-throat intonation. Still gaping, Van Gilder fidgeted with the buttons of his coat. “How did you know . . . ?”

“For reasons that are plain enough, our government has observed you closely for some time. We welcome your decision and wish to aid you in carrying it out. The Union is well rid of you, don’t you think?”

Van Gilder’s ire stirred, eating through his fear. “And I, sir . . . I am well rid of the Union!”

The major passed the lantern down to Kirschenbaum, who distractedly placed it in the coach’s boot, along with the empty pails. Holstering his weapon, Spruce dismounted with a grace unusual for a man his size, let alone an injured one. His whiskers were cinnamon brown and the bandages new, with no trace of dirt or blood. The horse complemented him entirely–a sleek black stallion whose forehead bore a patch of white, like a chipped diamond.

Spruce held his palm out to Van Gilder. “I’ll take your piece, for now.”

Van Gilder hesitated, teetering between caution and resentment. Then, with a quivering hand, he reached under his vest, withdrew the pistol and gave it up.

The major stuck the weapon in his saddlebag, from which he then took a bundled hitching strap. Unfurling it, he fastened one end to his horse’s bridle ring and the other to the coach’s roof railing.

“What are you doing?” Van Gilder demanded.

Spruce took out a little sack, then placed his booted foot on the coach’s step plate. “My mount can trot along behind. It’ll be daylight soon, and I don’t mean to be picked off when your secesh friends see us coming.” He signaled for Van Gilder to move his legs. “You’re stuck with me for the last few miles, good sir.”

Van Gilder budged over.

The major glanced over at Kirschenbaum. “Drive on.”

“Ja, sir.”

The hunchback hoisted himself up to the driver’s box as Spruce climbed in.

At the sound of the lash, the vehicle lurched, rocked and continued along the rutted road. Van Gilder’s heart still thudded. Longing for daylight, he averted his gaze from the major who sat opposite, one hand playing with the cord of the window blind.

“A Concord Coach,” said Spruce. “You do travel in style, don’t you?”

Van Gilder granted himself a look, taking in the holstered revolver, the bayonet in its leather scabbard, the broad shoulders with epaulettes. Spruce had not seen fit to remove his hat, under which tufts of cinnamon hair protruded. However noxious, his military aspect made him a known quantity, nudging Van Gilder toward sullen acquiescence. Still it unsettled him to sit facing a man with half a face. Then Van Gilder noticed the one pale eye looking straight at him.

“You will pardon my appearance,” said Spruce. “This little addition to my features was made a few weeks ago at Spotsylvania, courtesy of one of your fine compatriots.”

Van Gilder cleared his throat. “A misfortune I would have wished to prevent. As with this war.”

Arms crossed, the major gave a shrug, barely detectable amid the jarring of the dim coach.

Van Gilder felt satisfied with his own response. Beneath the lingering shock, he was settling down. He reached for his cane. Holding it firmly, he raised his double chin and tried to meet Spruce’s eye. Instantly his stomach tightened again. Even in this gloom, the look on the rugged, half-concealed face seemed too knowing.

Van Gilder struggled for an airy tone. “Through your lines, eh? I didn’t think there were lines to speak of in this region.”

“Your information is faulty, sir. Like your politics.”

Van Gilder managed an authentic glare.

“The Valley’s in federal hands,” said the major. “General Hunter’s on the march.” With a hint of smile, he reached under his cape and withdrew a flask, which he uncorked. “It helps the pain as well as anything,” he said, and took a quick swallow.

Van Gilder’s tension eased a bit. The coach bumped along beneath him, headed toward safety. He would make Strasburg, albeit with an unwelcome companion. “So you’re all they sent,” he observed.

Spruce chortled. “Ho-ho! First you’re indignant that we knew your movements—and now you complain of insufficient escort? Thanks in no small part to you and your kind, our forces are fully engaged throughout Virginia. We can scarcely spare men for duties so . . . minor.” He took another swallow, then wiped his lips on his cuff. “My regrets, sir, but one loyal convalescent is all we can afford you.”

Looking out at the bumpy darkness, Van Gilder sneered. “In truth, Major, you’re more than enough.”

Spruce let out a comfortable sigh. “I reckon I’ll suffice.”

Van Gilder sat back. He didn’t need to look at Spruce again. For him, in these cramped shadows, the scales had balanced. Patience had never been his strong card, but he could stand the presence of a tippling bluebelly for a while. So long as it meant asylum in the great gray bosom of Dixie.

“But come, Van Gilder—credit me with restraint. I’ve been told of your career and yet refrained from calling you any number of names. Treasonous dog, reptilian Judas, Copperhead scum . . . "

Van Gilder straightened in his seat. His face grew warm as he forced a glare into Spruce’s lone eye, and for a moment he became the self that he fancied best: champion of states’ rights, arch-foe of miscegenation, battler of the tyrannical federal serpent. “Then credit me, sir! Credit me with the ardor of my convictions! The prospect of despotism and half-nigger infants may not worry you. The plague of freed black bucks robbing honest white men of their livelihoods may not concern you. But for my part I’ve endured intrigue, vilification and all manner of devilry for merely wishing peace. Peace, Major! An end to the wounds and killing! Your face, sir, would be whole now if my words and those of my fellow believers had been heeded!”

Holding a hand up, the big officer looked into his lap and slowly shook his head. “And you have many words, I’m sure. I cannot hope to match their eloquence, certainly not at this late hour.” The hand fell. “In fact and at heart, I’m a humble soldier. Besides, I’ve heard the Copperhead gospel so many times it makes my senses fog. So let’s simply enjoy the ride, eh?”

Van Gilder looked down at the major’s boots and smirked. Spruce’s voice was as odd as the man himself, sounding as if he had a pebble in his throat or needed to burp. Now it throbbed with false conciliation, its owner taking refuge from Van Gilder’s impassioned tongue. Whiskey was rapidly dulling this warrior’s spirit. The man had just pleaded for mercy, after a fashion, and Van Gilder supposed he might soon be hearing maudlin tales of a wife and children left behind. This was by no means the sort of exit he had planned, but at least he would depart Northern soil on a note of moral victory. Miraculously he was no longer afraid.

“You do well enough, Major,” he said, “—for a humble soldier. Though you rely on snideness overmuch.”

“War hardens us overmuch, Van Gilder.” Spruce took another nip and then reached into his little sack, from which he produced a silver folding cup. “I propose that this trip be made not in the spirit of rancor, but in recognition of opposing ends achieved at a single stroke.” He raised the cup, its rim glistening. “For you the South opens its grateful arms, while the North may now turn its intrigue and vilification upon other worthy targets. This journey, sir, is celebratory.”

Van Gilder leaned forward on his cane. He sniggered. “You propose that I drink with you, Major Spruce?”

Looking thoughtful, Spruce lowered the cup, then used it to push back the brim of his hat. “I . . . I propose that we honor the one objective, the one prayer we find mutually agreeable. To this sorrowful conflict’s end.”

Van Gilder arched an eyebrow.

Spruce raised the flask and the cup, poured two fingers’ worth and offered it to Van Gilder. Sneering at the cup, Van Gilder let Spruce’s hand hold it there for a moment, vibrating with the road. Then he took it. He could humor a jabbering Unionist fool. Perhaps he could even squeeze the man for an answer or two—answers that he could impart to Richmond officials, when he told them how outrageously sloppy their agents were.

“Not that it matters now,” Van Gilder said, “—but how were my movements made known to you?”

Now it was Spruce who smirked. He drew his hat down till it hid his eye. “Let it just be said that the government has its ways. More than either of us can know.”

Van Gilder shifted position, frowning at his drink. After all the tense planning for this contingency, his Southern friends—maybe even Cathcart, his most trusted—stood guilty of some idiotic lapse, the exact nature of which he would probably never know. The thought made him sullen once more.

Spruce held the flask up. “To war’s end!”

Van Gilder squinted at the hat’s brim, hoping the major could feel the heat of his contempt. “To peace!” he declared, and downed the liquor.

Smacking his lips, he gazed out at the night again. In the deep black of the east he sensed the Blue Ridge Mountains, soon to be fringed red with dawn. Sooner than that, this road would join the Valley Pike, taking him through Winchester and on to Strasburg. Surely he was in Virginia by now.

The coach slowed as it started on an uphill grade. Through the door seam came a breeze, clammy on Van Gilder’s face. He was perspiring. He realized that he had dropped both the cup and the cane and that his fingers had gone limp. As he turned his head, the fear began—a quiet explosion of cold, all over.

On the seat beside his companion he saw the corked flask. Next to that lay the major’s hat, upside down, the cinnamon wig like some dead creature in its hollow. And he saw the man watching him—fingertips together, elbows out, cape spread. A man of shadows—half-faced, dark-maned, somehow larger than before. Van Gilder knew the patient mannerism of the fingertips. He knew the lone steady eye, the barely visible scar along the scalp. And when the voice came, the true voice, he knew that too—smooth and distant yet horribly intimate, as in his nightmares.

“How do you feel, Gideon?”

Van Gilder understood at last that fear had been a presence throughout his life. Fear of many things, played out in bluster and vitriol. But the terror that struck him now dwarfed the sum of every fear he had known, quaking him in a tide of nausea. His eyelids fluttered, but if he blacked out it was only for a few seconds. In his swimming vision he beheld the half-faced specter, waiting there. Van Gilder could not move. His lips emitted a low whine.

“Nothing fatal,” said the voice. “The cup was coated with a substance derived from the glands of a large Caribbean toad. Hard to obtain, but within our means. It will simply . . . hold you in place.”

Wide-eyed, his insides bucking, Van Gilder strained against the near-complete paralysis.

“It was easy, mind you. I just had to wait, watch, trail you for a bit.”

Van Gilder stared, choked.

The fingertips parted, then came to rest on his knees. “And if you could speak, Gideon, what would the words be? A plea, I suppose. But you recall our last session and what passed between us then. A whole year ago—could that be?” Reaching out with his index, he flicked Van Gilder’s hair beside his right ear. “A covenant broken is a kind of death.” His caped bulk leaned forward, looming. “It is death. Death, precisely. With death as its only atonement.”

The coach started down a grade, speeding up with a clacking of wheels. Blood thumping in his ears, Van Gilder fought to breathe. For an instant, horror transported him back to the night that he had entered into the contract and doomed himself—a howl within his memory, unfathomable. Then he returned, though the howl could not break free. His eyes bulged at the one pale eye and he knew that he was in hell—a cramped, dim, rocking hell prepared for him alone, with the darkest of angels presiding. The specter looked down, contemplative. Next to his upended hat sat a jar full of clear fluid labeled “Formaldehyde.” Then, with that casual elegance, he drew his bayonet. If Van Gilder’s soul had harbored any small hope of reprieve, it died now. There would be no reprieve, no mercy.

The dark angel sighed. “Gideon—your atonement begins.”

In Manfred Kirschenbaum, my novel's main hero Major Nathan Truly has a hugely valuable asset. Kirschenbaum is a hunchbacked German immigrant, a veteran of the 1848 revolutionary movement that rocked the German states, along with much of Europe. He is working as a hack driver in New York City when he and Truly first meet, in the aftermath of that city's July 1863 Draft Riots (still the most deadly and costly such event in U.S. history.) Kirschenbaum's physical limitation prevents him from joining the Union cause as a soldier—but not as an intelligence operative. In that capacity, under Truly's direction, he shines, displaying wily resourcefulness and an observant eye. Working as coachman for Gideon Van Gilder, a venomous Copperhead newspaper publisher, he gathers information on anti-Union activities in NYC, which was then a hotbed of pro-Southern sentiment. And when Van Gilder mysteriously flees the city in terror, it is Kirschenbaum who drives his horse-drawn coach through the night, toward a fateful rendezvous in the Shenandoah Valley. With that rendezvous, the increasingly dire events of Lucifer's Drum are set in motion.

German Americans remain the largest distinct ethnic group in the U.S.—and in the Civil War, were the largest such group represented in Union military ranks. German-speaking people were settling in British North America from the earliest colonial times, the very first being Dr. Johannes Fleischer at the 1607 founding of Jamestown, Virginia. In the North, they played a conspicuous role in the settling of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Missouri; in the South, many set roots in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, French Louisiana and eventually Texas (where, in a fine example of cultural cross-fertilization, they introduced Mexican residents to the accordion.) They were drawn by the classic immigrant visions—rich land for farmers and a burgeoning economy for shopkeepers and artisans, as well as freedom from religious and political oppression.

Germany would not exist as a coherent nation until the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71, when Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck engineered a stunning victory over France. Simultaneously, the loosely run German Confederation—founded by the 1815 Congress of Vienna, comprising thirty-nine principalities—was galvanized into the German Empire. But before von Bismarck's triumph, these German states chafed under the autocratic domination of Austria; they were therefore fertile ground for liberal political agitation. In early 1848, an anti-monarchist revolution broke out in Paris and ignited several concurrent uprisings throughout the Confederation, throwing many crowned heads into panic. Working and middle class Germans held massive street demonstrations, demanding better living and working conditions, as well as universal male suffrage, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and a united Germany. In many instances, royalist troops fired on unarmed demonstrators, who reacted by arming themselves and taking the crisis to a new and bloodier level.

Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I, Prussian King Fredrick William IV and the many German princes made nervous concessions. A National Assembly was called in the free city of Frankfurt am Main—in the novel, Kirschenbaum's home city—and drew up a constitution enshrining the principle of equal rights. Its primary goal was to unite the states as a constitutional monarchy—but as the revolution's working and middle class factions gradually split, and as advocates of Austrian vs. Prussian hegemony failed to agree, royalty and aristocracy realized that the liberal peril was receding. The Assembly at Frankfurt was dissolved in May 1849. Full-fledged war broke out between the revolutionaries and the Kingdom of Prussia, and the revolutionaries lost big.



Street-fighting scene from the Revolutionary Year
of 1848, Adolphe Hervier (1821-1879).
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)

In a dispiriting anticlimax, concessions were cancelled, rights abolished and protests violently suppressed. Arrests, executions and imprisonments followed. One consequence of this was a great wave of German immigration—disappointed exiles known as "The Forty-Eights," seeking the political freedom they had failed to achieve in their homeland. For the United States, this brought an infusion of people who, however hardscrabble their lives, were beneficiaries of the German primary school system—at that time, probably the best and most inclusive in the world. Overall highly literate and well-read, they took a robust interest in current events—and when the Civil War commenced, they overwhelmingly supported Lincoln and then Emancipation.

Several all-German units did fight for the South, though none reached regimental strength. In Texas, the community of Forty-Eighters steadfastly opposed both slavery and secession. Threatened with the draft in August of 1862, one armed group of them attempted an escape to Mexico but were caught and crushed by a Confederate force on the Nueces River. The North, by contrast, raised many all-German regiments—five from Pennsylvania, six from Ohio and eleven from New York, as well as others from Indiana and Wisconsin. More than 200,000 Union soldiers were German-born. In war-riven Missouri, the pro-Union German community was a crucial factor in preventing secession. (It was a largely German unit under Captain Nathaniel Lyon, in May 1861, that kept Confederates from capturing the federal arsenal at St. Louis.)

Prominent among German Americans was Carl Schurz, a Forty-Eighter who threw his legal and journalistic skills behind the early Republican Party, and whose wife Margarethe was a pioneer in the field of early childhood education. Appointed ambassador to Spain by Lincoln, Schurz tactfully influenced that country against supporting the Confederacy. Later, he served as Brigadier-General and earned a reputation for bravery, serving at the Union defeats of Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville and then the victories of Gettysburg and Chattanooga. After the war, he edited newspapers at Detroit and St. Louis. In 1868 he was elected Senator for Missouri, becoming the U.S. Senate's first German American. He later served as Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes.

Just as prominent was Schurz's friend and fellow Forty-Eighter Major-General Franz Sigel. Sigel's mention in Lucifer's Drum is not complimentary, referring to the whipping he took at the Battle of New Market (May 15, 1864) in the Shenandoah. But Sigel was a man of proven valor, whose reputation helped attract German recruits throughout the war—"I fights mit Sigel!" was their proud declaration. Early on, he was instrumental in keeping the Union's grip on Missouri. And on March 8, 1862, Sigel's counterattack at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, sealed an important Union victory.



Major-General Franz Sigel, victorious at Pea Ridge
but crushed at New Market; throughout the war, a
powerful symbol of pro-Union German Americans.
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)

Max Weber, who had served under Sigel in the '48 revolutionary forces, raised a German American unit called the Turner Rifles and became a Brigadier-General of Volunteers. At Antietam, assaulting John Brown Gordon's position along the Sunken Road, Weber was grievously wounded. He too gets brief mention in Lucifer's Drum, for his hasty evacuation of Harper's Ferry during Early's Raid. (True to the time and place, Sigel and Weber are referred to in the book as "Dutchmen," a common corruption of "Deutsch.")

Lawyer, revolutionary and politician Friedrich Heckler escaped royalist authorities in Europe and settled in Illinois, where he had a major role in founding the Republican Party and focusing its abolitionist principles. He became a regimental colonel of largely German immigrant troops and was badly wounded at Chancellorsville, though he recovered to participate in the victory of Missionary Ridge and the capture of Knoxville.

Seventeen German immigrants serving under the Union banner received the Medal of Honor.

Rich and poor, male and female, Catholic and Protestant and Jewish, these German Americans represented a vast and obvious benefit for the United States, given their literacy, industriousness and idealism. Poignantly, they were just the sort of German that Germany itself, some seventy years after the U.S. Civil War, could have used to combat Hitler's rise. And when the U.S. army landed in occupied Europe, its ranks again featured German names from top to bottom—from future novelist Private Kurt Vonnegut to Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower. Thus, often, is one nation's catastrophe another nation's gain.

Confederate Lnt.-Gen. Jubal Early, pre-war moderate/post-war zealot. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

On the military side of my novel Lucifer's Drum, Lnt.-Gen. Jubal Anderson Early (1816-1894) stands center stage. His thrust against Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1864 gave the North a bad scare, and so gives the novel much of its tension. Before and during the war, Early typified an outlook that the war ended up burying—one that prized loyalty to state over national loyalty. It was a feeling and a concept steeped in the past—several steps beyond tribes, a step or two beyond city-states, but well short of full-blown nationalism. Early's chauvinistic love for his home state of Virginia led him to join the Confederate forces. He never missed a chance to extoll Virginia, sometimes at the expense of other states under the Confederate banner—and to the exasperation of fellow officers from those states. Still, for professional military men, birthplace did not necessarily determine which side they chose.

Following the War of 1812, continued reliance on state militias seemed a lousy idea, given that war's many battlefield humiliations for the U.S. Resources were committed to upgrading the Military Academy at West Point and to building a truly national army. This enabled a devastating U.S. victory in the 1846-47 war with Mexico. On the eve of the Civil War, however, the standing army numbered only 16,000—but within its ranks, an identification with country over state or region was inevitably fostered. It may not have prevented Early, Robert E. Lee and 60% of their fellow Virginians from going South, but there was still that 40% who went the other way. Prominent among them was Union General George "Pap" Thomas, one of the ablest leaders of the conflict, who saved the Union position at Chickamauga and shattered John Bell Hood's Confederate force at Nashville. In November, 1863, following the Northern victory at Chattanooga, Thomas ordered a new cemetery laid out for his dead. Asked whether he wanted them buried according to state, the general famously replied, "No—mix 'em up. I'm sick of states' rights." Thomas stood for this dawning nationalist perspective, just as Early stood for his obsolete state-centered one. The two men were fellow Virginians and contemporaries but really signified different eras, an outgoing and an incoming. Ken Burns, in his monumental The Civil War series, observed how the war transformed the country in people's minds from a plural to a singular—from "the United States are" to "the United States is." In that linguistic shift, you hear a new worldview swallowing an old one—something that happens all the time in history, though seldom so suddenly or violently.

In the pre-war years, Jubal Early was no fanatic. As Franklin County prosecutor, he was named delegate to the state convention that had been called to decide on secession, which he opposed until very late in the crisis. He showed little patience for the rabid pro-slavery element. As an attorney ten years earlier, in 1851, he had successfully represented an ex-slave woman named Indiana Choice. (Choice had been freed by her widowed mistress, whose second husband later tried to negate the manumission.) But the war left Early bitter and recalcitrant. Following exile in Canada, he returned to Virginia and resumed his law practice. The mid-1870’s found him virulently white-supremacist, refusing to participate in any commemorative ceremony that included black veterans. In word and in writing, he also did much to promote the cult of Robert E. Lee, which raised that great, now-deceased general to godlike status (much as the cult of Lincoln did for that greatest, most mysterious of Presidents.) Early never married, though he sired four children by Julia McNealey of Rocky Mount, VA. Disdaining the loyalty oath, he died “unreconstructed” in 1894, aged 77.

{A postscript on "Pap" Thomas: During Reconstruction, he commanded occupying troops in the South, often deploying them to defend black communities against the Klan. He also set up military commissions to enforce labor contracts with black citizens, circumventing the bigoted local courts. When he died of a stroke in 1870, aged 53, his Virginia relatives all boycotted the funeral. For his allegiance to the Union and his effectiveness against Southern arms, he had long been dead to them.}


Union Maj.-Gen. George "Pap" Thomas, an American
first and a Virginian second. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

**************************************************************************

And friends—at this time, like none other, taking on the subject of Jubal Early is like drinking from a firehose. Because wartime Early leads to post-war Early, which leads to white supremacy and Jim Crow. Which leads to desegregation and the Confederate Battle Flag. Which leads to now. How many times has it been said that the Civil War is still being fought, 150 years on? And how much more pertinent could that thought be, with the AME Church in Charleston, SC now hallowed by the blood of the Nine, killed by one who sported the Confederate flag as a purely white-supremacist symbol? And with growing calls for South Carolina—the first state of the Confederacy, the war's Ground Zero—to take down said flag at its State House? And for other Southern states to do likewise? And with debate intensifying over any number of Confederate memorials? For obvious historical reasons, Lucifer's Drum bears on its cover the flag in question. It fits there. But should it be endorsed and flown by any state government? The answer cuts right to the heart of this war that—in spirit, and therefore in fact—we are still fighting.



It is hard to think of another instance where a war's losing side has been given such latitude in the writing (and re-writing) of that war's history. In the years after Appomattox and the aborted Reconstruction, the North had a considerable interest in mollifying its former enemy, recognizing that to further fuel the South's hatred would cause no end of trouble—spasmodic violence, bitter obstruction, further exhaustion. Sentimentality was invoked to cover the nation's raw scars, as in memorial pictures that showed Union and Confederate veterans shaking hands. Slavery's collapse and the emancipation of four million people—the war's biggest consequence, the sorest point for the South—was systematically de-emphasized in favor of Reconciliation, a simple Union vs. Disunion theme. But the violence, the obstruction and the exhaustion came anyway.

Attacks on black voting rights went largely unanswered. Jim Crow laws took root and would get no serious challenge for eighty years. Lynchings spiked and spiked again. Confederate monuments were erected throughout the South, not just to honor brave men but, even more, to frame the Southern cause as a straight-up defense of home and freedom. (In the lovely Oxford, MS town square stands one with the inscription, "To Those Who Died In A Just And Holy Cause.") In 1915, D.W. Griffith's masterful pro-Klan/pro-Confederate fantasy The Birth Of A Nation was honored with a screening at the White House. The film, with the apparent endorsement of Southern-born-and-raised President Woodrow Wilson, stirred anti-black violence across the country and caused a surge in Klan recruitment. (Around this same time, Wilson was busy re-segregating federal buildings and the federal civil service, which had been integrated since the 1880's. He remains to me the template for the Cerebral Racist, a variety that has arguably done more harm than any number of burning crosses—the kind that smiles down benevolently at an oppressed ethnic group and says, in effect, "Let me tell you all about yourself.")

Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, a mountain of scholarship has placed slavery—and the contributions of black Union soldiers—back at the center of Civil War history, while at the same time cultivating a nuanced, non-glorifying view of the North. The heirs to states'-rights doctrine have not taken this lying down. On the contrary, they have made a concerted effort to obfuscate slavery as the central cause and to sanitize the past. School textbooks have long been a vital part of this battlefield. In Virginia in 2010, a newly published fourth-grade history textbook described massive black enlistment in the Confederate forces, including two battalions that supposedly fought under Stonewall Jackson. But all this happened only in the fevered imaginations of neo-Confederates. Trained historians—of whom the author of this book was not one—fortunately decried the fabrication and had the passage struck. That same year, the conservative-dominated and nationally influential Texas Board of Education endorsed the idea that states' rights, not slavery, should be taught as the war's primary issue. In April of that year, at the request of the Sons Of Confederate Veterans, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell resurrected Confederate History Month by proclamation, omitting any mention of slavery as a root cause for the war. A national protest caused the governor to back down on this point and make a statement condemning the Peculiar Institution. At that same time, however, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour declared Confederate Heritage Month ("Heritage"—such a comfy term compared to "History," which so often proves dark, slippery and nervous-making.) Barbour defended McDonnell and stood by his own silence on slavery as a root cause: We all know it was bad, so why bring it up?


Sgt. Samuel Smith of the 119th USCT (United States Colored Troops) and family.
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)

Of those white Southerners who deny or downplay the connection between slavery and the Civil War, I think a majority do so mainly out of an understandable defensiveness. Defensiveness not just against hard-to-swallow historical fact, but against Northern snobbery on the subject. And as a Northern transplant, I can confirm that this snobbery persists—flattering those who indulge in it, while projecting responsibility for American racial ills ever southward. Vanity and easy judgment always seem to go together. Up North, Southern transplants routinely squeeze the Dixie accent out of themselves, just to deflect the pompous, soul-killing assumptions of Northern strangers. And I recall one particular Yankee megabrain bragging to me about snubbing an airplane seat-mate because she was from North Carolina. There were many terms to describe this action of hers, none of them nice, and maybe I should have offered her a few of them. But I swear, I was just too gob-smacked to speak.

Going farther: the most vicious, unabashed racial invective I have ever heard from whites I heard up North. It's instructive to recall that the most intense hatred that Martin Luther King said he ever encountered was not in Alabama or Mississippi but in Chicago, when he marched for housing rights; also, that slaves had a major role in building that great Northern economic engine, New York City; also, that at the Ku Klux Klan's peak in the 1920's, it boasted claverns from Maine to Washington State (where a highway was named for Jefferson Davis) and was most powerful of all in Indiana, where maybe 30% of white male residents wore the hood. Nearly 40,000 Klansmen lived in Detroit alone.

That said, the portrayal of "states' rights" as the war's main point has always left a gaping question: What state right are we talking about? Which one was perceived as being under threat? The right of who to do what—and to whom? Another question pretty much flushes it out: What was it about Abraham Lincoln that triggered secession? The well-documented answer: not that he proposed to abolish slavery, but that he opposed its expansion. That and not any plausible threat of Emancipation was enough to make eleven states secede and launch four years of slaughter. True it might be that most Confederate soldiers owned no slaves (about one in ten—they were young, after all, and didn't own much of anything; for white Southern households, though, the figure was nearly one in three) and fought primarily "because ya'll are down here." But little guys only fight wars, they don't start them. For starting them, credit nearly always goes to wealthy non-combatants—those who effectively dress up their material interests as "custom" or "tradition," as chivalric honor or regional pride.

Some demonstrably noble men fought for the Confederacy. On the subject of race, a few of them were even several clicks ahead of the average Caucasian, North or South. One of them was surely Major-General William Mahone, whose counter-attacks at the Battle of the Crater inflicted a heavy federal defeat and killed a lot of Union boys, many of them black. In the early 1880's, however, he formed the Readjuster Party in Virginia, a bi-racial coalition of liberal Republicans and Democrats, meant to reduce the state's crushing debt but also to oppose the white planter elite. It advocated public funding for both black and white schools and an end to the poll tax. Though he was elected Senator, Mahone's party enjoyed only a few years' success before the forces of white supremacy crushed it. And there was Major-General Pat Cleburne, "The Stonewall Of The West," about whom I have written previously: (https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...). Observing the South's dire manpower shortage and admiring the performance of black Union troops, Cleburne proposed that male slaves be freed in exchange for their enlistment in the Confederate cause. Irish-born and a relative outsider, Cleburne had never realized how intertwined that cause was with slavery and with white-supremacist doctrine—which is why his proposal met with awkward silence and complete inaction. No argument and no arithmetic concerning manpower could overcome the narcotic of racial hegemony.


Maj.-Gen. Pat Cleburne, out of step with
his fellow Confederates on the subject of
slavery. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

Recently I was perusing a friend's book of family history and came upon this entry: "Captain Thomas Ebenezer Cummings was killed on Sept. 11, 1864 in the battle of Jonesboro near Atlanta, Georgia, after fighting three years for states' rights, not for slavery." It made me recall a bumper-sticker I saw a decade ago, bearing the image of the battle flag: "Sons of Confederate Veterans Against Racism." There is real poignance to this belief, no doubt utterly sincere—that a man's motivating fire can be kept separate from the general conflagration, and that his descendants can point to it as if this were all that mattered. Still, if the South's cause was based just on lofty notions of self-rule, it must be asked . . .

Why did South Carolina's statement of secession—the very first—complain that the North had "denounced as sinful the institution of slavery" and "encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes?" Why did it blast Lincoln as someone "whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery?" And why did Mississippi's statement of secession declare, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world?" And why did Texas's statement of secession target the very notion of racial equality, blowing hard about the North's "unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law?"

Why in his infamous "Cornerstone Speech" did Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens feel it necessary to affirm "the great truth that the negro is not the equal of the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition"—and to declare his government "the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth?" And why, in the post-war years, were prominent ex-Confederates like Jubal Early so bent on imposing Jim Crow laws, meant to approximate black slavery as closely as possible? Thus there should be no wonder at all why the Confederate Battle Flag enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1950's-early 60's, when resistance to the Civil Rights Movement had it flying all across the South, including the grounds and domes of state houses—or that before hometown crowds, segregationist politicians liked nothing more than to invoke their Rebel forebears.

Nothing is more subjective than a cultural symbol, flags in particular. That is why we'd never expect a Nicaraguan to feel the same swell of emotion that an American does before the Stars 'n' Stripes, or a Pakistani to feel as an Englishman does before the Union Jack. Emotions are fully real to whoever is feeling them; they are not subject to rational justification. But when you choose to fly a flag—or build a monument, or name a park, or name a school, or design a license plate—you are publicly honoring whatever it represents. You are implying that the whole community should do likewise, if only by acquiescence. And that is when something more than sentiment is required. That is when you need a factual basis that justifies the honor.


Children in the ruins of Charleston, SC, 1865. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

For many white Southerners, the Confederate flag conjures proud defiance and the image of a magnificent gray army. Well, that's factual enough—the South was proudly defiant, its army one of the greatest in world history. Over the decades, along with dyed-in-the-wool racists, plenty of people have displayed the emblem without nasty intent—for nothing more specific than that prideful jolt, or a poke in the North's judging eye (think Lynyrd Skynyrd). It's when we go deeper and wider that the trouble starts. There are tons more quotes like the ones I gave above, each of them reinforcing a bedrock truth: slavery and white supremacy were central to the Confederacy's aims, the main reasons for its birth. Its banners were soaked in a poison wellspring. The battle flag did not "come to stand for racism" in recent times, as some in the media have suggested, but stood for it from the get-go—whatever benign meanings were projected onto it later. Long-term unawareness of this requires a truly impressive degree of denial and avoidance.

The Klan and the neo-Nazis require no such denial and avoidance. They embrace the flag's historically based meaning and wave it all the time—it represents their whole program, after all. They are tapped into its dark essence, as is the Charleston shooter, as are the toxic websites that inspired him. In the wake of the massacre, defenders of the flag complained that the murderer had "misused" or "hijacked" it. Far more accurate it would be to say he blew the cover on it, tore wide open a sentimental falsehood. Whenever the flag is hoisted over some state house—that is when it's being misused.

"Political correctness" has long been the right's go-to explanation for anything it doesn't like, a rubber stamp for easy dismissal. In lefty enclaves, PC culture does exist with its simplistic assumptions, its censoring reflex and attendant smugness. (I think every college freshman orientation should include discourse on the First Amendment and its historical relevance.) But the right has its own, better-funded and more conspicuous brand of PC—whole sets of received wisdom, zealously guarded—of which spotless Southern triumphalism is just one aspect. When a government endorses a flag with this kind of documented historical baggage, it promotes that baggage, whether or not it denies the existence of same. How welcome and respected is a black resident supposed to feel, with his/her home state's government so visibly celebrating an epic pro-slavery enterprise? "It's complicated," you often hear—and if they're talking about the whole tragic saga with its social mosaic, political cross-currents and personalities, it sure is. The South itself is complicated—downright byzantine, in ways that are both endearing and exasperating. But there's nothing complicated about what should be done here. That part is pretty straightforward.

As for private citizens who keep flying the battle flag—yes, that's free speech, no way around it. But it's telling that it has become less and less common, no longer mainstream. To be born white in the modern South is, for a great many, to be born up to your eyeballs in black culture, with black friends and acquaintances never far. Some awareness of their feelings and perspectives is bound to seep through eventually, and often has. And sometimes that awareness reaches a tipping point, as I believe it did in 2001, when Georgia voters erased the Confederate emblem from their state flag. Or just two weeks ago, when the State of Alabama quietly ran it down the pole and stashed it away.

Whatever the case, 2015 finds us way past the point where the flag can be plausibly defended. Anyone who chooses to display it should not be (or act) surprised—and above all, should not act somehow persecuted—when fellow Americans of all races react against it, white Southerners included. They will do so from solid historical fact, something that no amount of fabrication and propaganda can ever bury. Apart from the memory of the Charleston Nine and apart from the Declaration of Independence, if there is just one thing we can focus on to guide us, I would suggest that Alexander Stephens quote about the Confederacy's founding truths, so self-evident to him: "the negro is not the equal of the white man; slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition." Let that one echo, and the whole flag issue will be an easy call.

Public monuments, at their best, call us to certain ideals that have been exemplified in the past and remain vital in the present. The individuals that they commemorate do matter, but matter less than the transcendent purpose for which they stand. There are thousands of monuments from America's Civil War, ranging from the generic to the stirring to the highly problematic, but each one stands for things that Americans value in their heroes and heroines, as well as in themselves.

If I had twenty grand or so lying around, I would commission a statue of John H. Crowder, and lobby for its placement in or near Port Hudson, Louisiana. It would fulfill that transcendent purpose. But I do not have twenty grand lying around, so Crowder will likely remain unheralded, while existing monuments continue to extoll the era's prominent generals and politicians.



Union battery at Port Hudson, Louisiana, 1863. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

My first exposure to the subject of black troops in the Civil War occurred in the fifth grade, when at the Eleanor B. Kennelly School library (Hartford, CT) I discovered Worth Fighting For: A History Of The Negro In The United States During The Civil War And Reconstruction, by Agnes McCarthy and Lawrence Reddick. (Decades later, in my novel Lucifer's Drum, I gave the name Reddick to an African American platoon sergeant.) Central to the book was the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863, by the Massachusetts 54th—an event later immortalized in the 1989 film Glory.

The Fort Wagner battle has been referred to as "obscure" but was actually well reported at the time, especially in newspapers with Abolitionist leanings. It had the dramatic essentials—a doomed yet valiant charge by disciplined black troops and, moreover, a dashing white commander killed in action. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw's last hour was surely his finest—smoking a cigar just before the charge, talking with calm affection to his men, personally leading the regiment as it headed through sheets of cannon fire toward the parapet, his death pretty much certain. If there is such a thing as a good death—and I suspect there is—no one ever died better. But Fort Wagner was not the first major use of black Union troops in battle, nor was the valor displayed there unequalled. Several weeks before, the Battle of Port Hudson—Lieutenant John Crowder's first and last action—had showcased the potential of African American soldiery. The one missing element, in terms of lasting public awareness, was a picturesque white martyr.

In the spring of 1863, only two Confederate strongholds remained on the Mississippi—Vicksburg and Port Hudson. While Grant besieged the former, Major-General Nathaniel P. Banks had the task of taking the latter. The previous December, Banks had replaced Major-General Benjamin F. Butler as head of the Army of the Gulf at New Orleans. Banks was a former governor of Massachusetts and a military mediocrity, having had his clock cleaned by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. One of his failures there had been inadequate reconnaissance. At Port Hudson, he would repeat this lapse and many Union boys would pay for it.

The byzantine culture of New Orleans—a major center of the slave trade—featured a racial caste system based on skin tone as well as blood percentage. There was a large community of free blacks, some slave holders themselves, and a mixed-race elite. At the war's outset, some 1,100 free African Americans formed the Louisiana Native Guard to help defend New Orleans and demonstrate their worth as citizens. The Louisiana legislature, nervous at the spectacle of armed black men—with black officers, even—passed a law that disbanded the regiment. But then the governor, nervous before the Union military threat, defied the legislature and called the Guard back to duty. None of it mattered—New Orleans fell anyway in late April, 1862, when Union Admiral David Farragut's fleet came thundering in, and the Guard was again disbanded.

Yet in September, Butler organized a black Union regiment and gave it the same name. Some ten per cent of the men who had joined the Guard's Confederate incarnation now signed up for this Yankee one, their pride as Southerners eclipsed by an eagerness to combat white supremacy. Some of them took up their previous ranks as line officers, commanding recruits who were for the most part newly escaped slaves. In these pre-Emancipation days, Union policy discouraged such enlistment; yet it gave way to the press of numbers, great enough so that the 2nd, 3rd and eventually the 4th Louisiana Native Guard had to be formed in addition. (In June of '63, with the siege of Port Hudson in progress, they would be absorbed into a more recently formed black outfit called the the Corps d'Afrique—why does just about anything sound better in French?—which would later be absorbed into the United States Colored Troops, or USCT.)



Union Major-General Benjamin F. Butler. Clever
and far-sighted, greedy and unscrupulous.
(Courtesy: Library of Congress)

And please pardon the following tangent.

It was an acerbic God indeed that arranged for Nathaniel Banks to replace Benjamin Butler. Butler, a Democrat and an appeaser of the pro-slavery forces, had narrowly lost to Banks in the race for governor of Massachusetts. In the war, however, he did far more than Banks—an avowed Abolitionist—to help escaped slaves. Commanding at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in the war's first year, he cleverly declared such people "contrabands" as a legal way to deprive the Confederacy of labor. As military governor of New Orleans, Butler proved strict and effective, providing relief for the poor and taking strong measures to quash the annual yellow fever epidemic. But he became one of the most reviled men in the South following his infamous Order No. 28, which prescribed that any woman who insulted a federal soldier would be treated like a prostitute ("a woman of the town, plying her avocation.") "Beast Butler," they called him, using his likeness to decorate the bottom of chamber pots—"Spoons Butler," too, after he seized silverware from a lady trying to cross Union lines and arrested her as a smuggler. On top of this there were his shady financial dealings in partnership with his brother Andrew. The pair enriched themselves by buying confiscated cotton for cheap at rigged auctions, then selling it at a giant markup.

Thus, amid the rumble of controversy, Butler was recalled from New Orleans. Yet his feisty performance had made him a favorite among Radical Republicans—so President Lincoln found it politic to give him a new appointment in late '63, this time as commander for the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, based at Norfolk. There, his corruption really hit its stride. His deep involvement in the black market trade—across enemy lines, no less—was discovered near the war's end, and would have meant prison and disgrace for a less well-connected man. It was not malfeasance that caused his removal, however, but military ineptitude—he was no better on the battlefield than his rival Banks. In the blood-soaked spring of '64, his half-hearted offensive on the James River ended with his army stymied by a much smaller Confederate force. And in January, 1865, after his failure to capture Fort Fisher near Wilmington, North Carolina—the last major Atlantic port in the South's possession—overall commander General Ulysses S. Grant had him sacked.


"Sic Semper Tyrannis." The 22nd Regiment
USCT, featured in Lucifer's Drum, had a pretty
no-nonsense battle flag. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

Butler went on to serve five terms as a Republican congressman and one, finally, as governor of Massachusetts (reverting to the Democrats—the man was nothing if not flexible.) Rising to prominence in the House, he skillfully managed the impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson, which famously fell short by one vote. He was an able administrator, a brilliant attorney, a successful industrialist (cartridge manufacturer) and died very rich. He embodied much of what we decry and lampoon in politicians. Still, he was something more than a venal scoundrel and lowdown profiteer, and that's what makes him interesting. In cases that didn't trigger his avarice, he showed nerve and far-sightedness.

Having shed his early role as a slavery accommodationist, and having pioneered black recruitment at New Orleans, he became a sincere believer in African American fighting mettle. He later commanded units of the United States Colored Troops in Virginia, where several (including the 22nd USCT, which has a part in Lucifer's Drum) proved instrumental in the victory at Chaffin's Farm or New Market Heights, Sept. 29-30, 1864, charging through intense fire to turn the Confederate left. Twenty-three USCT troops were awarded the Medal of Honor as a result, and Butler had another medal struck—the so-called Butler Medal—for an additional 200 men. In Congress, he was a key promotor of the Civil Rights Bills of 1871 and 1875, the first one authorizing strong measures against the Ku Klux Klan and the second forbidding racial discrimination in public accommodations (later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and not redeemed until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) He supported greenback currency, an eight-hour work day and women's suffrage. As Massachusetts governor, he appointed the nation's first African American judge as well as its first Irish Catholic judge. He named the great Clara Barton to head the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, the state's first-ever instance of a female in an executive position. On the Greenback/Anti-Monopoly ticket, Butler ran for President in 1884 but didn't get a single electoral vote.



Magazine illustration of Native Guardsman on
picket duty. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

But back to the Native Guard . . . As soon as Nathaniel Banks took command in New Orleans, he set out to purge the Guard regiments of its black line officers and replace them with white ones. Abolitionist or no, he made the typical race-based assumption that these men were sub-standard. But while the 2nd and 3rd Regiments were brought fully under white command, the 1st resisted the order and retained its black officers. These included two who were, each in his own way, extraordinary: Captain Andre Cailloux and 2nd Lieutenant John H. Crowder.

Born a slave of mixed race, Cailloux had petitioned for his freedom at age 21 and been granted it. He founded a successful cigar-making business and married a woman of similar background named Felicie Coulon. They had four children, three of whom lived. On the side, Cailloux was also a feared amateur boxer. Literate in French as well as English, he helped support the Institute Catholique, which had a leading role in educating the city's free and orphaned black children. At the war's outbreak he was 36 and a respected leader in the large African-French (Creole) community. He was among those who first signed up for the Native Guard's Confederate version, proud to defend the city he loved, but put on the blue uniform when his chance came. His Company E was notably well drilled.



Not even a staff this big could save Union Major-General Nathaniel P. Banks (seated
center) from mediocrity. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

John Crowder had been born to a free black couple in Louisville, Kentucky. He was still an infant when his father left as an army hireling for the Mexican American War and did not return. His mother took John with her to New Orleans, where she had friends and found work as a seamstress. She also married a steamboat steward who proved a worthless drunk and eventually abandoned her and his stepson. From the age of eight, John worked—as a cabin boy, as a steamboat steward, as a jeweler's porter—always forwarding his pay to his mother, Martha Ann. A prominent black minister took an interest in him and saw to his education.

We can only infer how impressive Crowder was by the fact that he became an officer while managing to conceal his age—which was 16. A handful of his letters exist in the special collections library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, most of them written to his mother. In one he remarked to her, "If Abraham Lincoln knew that a colored Lad of my age could command a company, what would he say?" Crowder's youth brought consternation within the ranks, however, especially since he outshone other officers in leadership qualities. So besides regular insults from white citizenry, he had to contend with them from fellow officers. One in particular, a jealous captain later prosecuted for cowardice, started spreading false rumors about Crowder's personal conduct. When one of this captain's men committed a lewd act in front of an older woman—a friend of Crowder's who had nursed him through a fever—the young lieutenant reported it, his nemesis having failed to do so. "I remember your first lesson," he wrote his mother, "that was to respect all females." After this, the slander campaign against him intensified. But he was resolved not to be driven from the Native Guard—"to stay in the service, as long as there is a straw to hold to."

The Guard had been used only for fatigue duty—chopping wood, digging earthworks, guarding rail lines. Then, in May 1863, the greater part of it was sent to lay bridges around the Confederate bastion at Port Hudson. Having encircled the town, General Banks launched an attack from the east on the morning of the 27th, probing for weak spots in the enemy defenses. When it stalled, the 1st and 3rd Native Guard were sent in from the north, crossing a pontoon bridge over Foster's Creek and heading down Telegraph Road toward Port Hudson. Incredibly, no one from Banks on down had ordered the terrain scouted. Had they done so, they would have found that the enemy had made maximum use of it, placing riflemen atop a bluff on the left, alongside the road. Underbrush, felled trees and a man-made backwater (channeled from the Mississippi) made the position practically impregnable. On the right, the flooded Mississippi formed a large natural backwater full of trees, while down the road stood another bluff holding the main Confederate works.

There were only two Union cannon, and these were quickly disabled by Confederate artillery. The Guard shifted to the left and formed two lines, the 1st Regiment and then the 3rd, moving out of the woods and into a relatively open area. They never had a prayer. Still they charged, taking enfilading fire from the roadside bluff and raked by canister in front. Torn up, the 1st stalled within two hundred yards of the enemy position, whereupon the 3rd barreled past them and were in turn torn up. Twice they fell back and re-formed and twice again they charged. Some troops tried to get at the enemy by wading through the riverside backwater or climbing the roadside bluff, but it was in vain. The Guard withdrew, having lost about 200 out of 1,000. The Confederates recorded not one casualty.



Bottom magazine illustration shows the Native Guard assault at Port Hudson
(May 27, 1863). The dim figure on the far right with sword raised is supposedly Captain
Andre Cailloux. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

Fatally wounded, John Crowder had been taken to the rear, where he died that afternoon. Andre Cailloux survived nearly to the battle's end, leading his company and bawling orders in both French and English, though a rifle ball had shattered his forearm. Finally a shell killed him. In subsequent days, Rebel sharpshooters prevented the collection of the dead, so Cailloux's noble corpse moldered on the field. When it was at last recovered, he received a hero's funeral attended by thousands in New Orleans. Crowder's mother had to bury her son in a pauper's grave. At Port Hudson, meanwhile, Banks launched a second infantry assault on June 14. It was a costly, ill-coordinated failure, made worse by fog. From there it settled into a siege with frequent bombardments, while Confederate Major-General Franklin Gardner conducted a stubborn and intelligent defense. Disease, desertion, starvation and an ammunition shortage finally led the Southern garrison to surrender on July 9, though only after news came of Vicksburg's fall five days earlier.

The Guard's performance changed a lot of minds concerning black troops. Union Captain Robert F. Wilkinson wrote, " . . . the black troops at P. Hudson fought & acted superbly. The theory of negro inefficiency is . . . at last exploded by the facts." General Banks stated, "The severe test to which they were subjected, and the determined manner in which they encountered the enemy, leaves upon my mind no doubt of their ultimate success." Banks' shortcomings had of course made that test more severe than it need have been. In any case, the protracted misery of Port Hudson left him in a poor light and permanently damaged his larger aspirations. We would never have a President Banks. (Like his adversary Butler and so many other forgotten politicians, he did indulge that fantasy for a spell.)

In faraway New York, the Times editorialized: "Those black soldiers had never before been in any severe engagement. They were comparatively raw troops, and yet were subjected to the most awful ordeal than even veterans ever have to experience—the charging upon fortifications through the crash of belching batteries. The men, white or black, who will not flinch from that will flinch from nothing. It is no longer possible to doubt the bravery and steadiness of the colored race, when rightly led."

"When rightly led." The knife-twisting irony here was, of course, that they acted courageously despite very poor leadership from the top. Even so, African American troops would have to prove themselves over and over—at Milliken's Bend, at Fort Wagner, at Ocean Pond, at Jenkins' Ferry, at Wilson's Wharf, at Brice's Crossroads, at Baylor's Farm and at Chaffin's Farm. Given the majority's tendency toward selective amnesia, they would in fact have to prove themselves in each war thereafter, well into the 20th Century. Race-based ideology has its self-protective reflexes, like any organism. When punched in the face, it takes a fallback position from which it can still resist full equality—a position like "When rightly led." Thus, in every similar instance, this qualifier would come droning up like a persistent wasp, with its own implicit qualifier: "by white officers." Only after President Truman's desegregation of the armed forces in 1948 would that wasp be finally swatted to a paste.



Regimental flag for the 24th USCT: Let soldiers in war,
be citizens in peace. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)

Which brings me once and for all back to John Crowder—his mother's shining hope, dead at 17, buried anonymously. Andre Cailloux got to marry a woman he loved and have children, attain worthy goals and demonstrate character, gain standing in his community and accolades in death. In his last moments—surrounded by friends, I can only wish—John Crowder must have known what millions of dying boys in hundreds of wars have known: that despite all his yearning, he would never have these things. He exhibited just about every quality that makes youth beautiful in our sight—the supple mind, the ardent will, the high hopes, the unbounded bravery, the vivid personality, the generous humor, the aching promise. And the idealism—an idealism that would have been sorely tested, had he lived to a natural old age. Because he would have lived to see the rise of the Klan and the entrenchment of Jim Crow, the Nadir of the 1890's and the plague of lynchings, the use of sharecropping and the penal system to erect a de facto new slavery, the theft or destruction of hard-won property, the denial of education and the trampling of aspirations, the despoiling of those principles that America supposedly holds dear.

Whatever he would have done or said or become in response, we will never know. And I guess that is the precise reason we should treasure him—a youth forever suspended in hope, aching with promise. I swear there are nights when I can feel his ghost moving among us, watching it all. That's why any monument to John Crowder would be to the person he was, the man he would have become and the ideals he signed up for, but also to grief and loss. The worst kind of grief and loss imaginable.

Final tidbits: Future politician, publisher and civil rights pioneer Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchbeck, a free black man, was a company commander with the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard but resigned his commission after twice being passed over for promotion and repeatedly insulted by white officers. During Reconstruction, he was elected lieutenant-governor of Louisiana and served as governor for 15 days after the sitting governor stepped aside to face impeachment charges. Pinchbeck was later elected to the U.S. Congress and then the Senate, though he was blocked from taking his seat. Each of these attainments was a first for a black politician.

Also: Jamaican-born and of mixed race, Morris W. Morris served in the Confederate version of the Native Guard and briefly in the Union one, as a 19-year-old lieutenant. He was the only black Jewish man to serve on either side. Re-naming himself Lewis Morrison, he went on to become a famous actor. He was the grandfather of Hollywood's Bennett sisters—Constance, Barbara and Joan—and the great-grandfather of TV shock-show host Morton Downey, Jr.

Here is a video link: U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey reading her magnificent poem "Elegy For The Native Guards" on Ship Island, MS, where the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard did garrison duty: http://southernspaces.org/2005/elegy-...

{Note: Much of my information here came from Joseph T. Glatthaar's cornerstone work Forged In Battle: The Civil War Alliance Of Black Soldiers And White Officers, which also informed the historical background for Lucifer's Drum.}