by Bruce Graham
A man I had not seen before had me turn about, while he pawed my coat. “You won’t need this when you get to Dixie. It’s always hot down there.”
“They didn’t fit you very well, boy,” said Charles Pollard, a farmer out the road toward La Grange. “Look at those baggy britches. My cousin Willy was pretty well turned out when he went to Mexico.”
“Your cousin Willy paid to have his uniform fitted down in the Falls,” said a much older, portly man through his smoldering corncob pipe.
A middle aged man studied my feet. “Do your shoes fit? And won’t you need boots when you’re fighting in the fields and woods?” He fumbled with his pant legs to show battered, high boots.
“This is what we’re given.” I looked toward the closed front door. Several boys and girls were huddled against the storm outside. “I see you folks are still rude to the little ones.”
“After this fighting is over, you’ll be one of us once in a while,” muttered Charles Pollard. “You’ll be boring us to death with your war stories. So fight well and carefully so we can learn about the Army when you’re back.”
A murmur of chuckles and coughs went through the group. Then they moved on to gossip about the man at the grist mill who had fallen down on his way home a night earlier in the week and the poor greenbacks that the government was intent on issuing. I stood silent for a couple of minutes before I took my father’s things and left for home.
I spent the weekend clearing snow and ice from the roof of our house and breaking a path through the snow to the reserve pile of firewood and filling the wood box. We went to church on Sunday morning and I was called on along with three others in uniform to stand and be recognized for our service, while the congregation sang “John Brown’s Body.” We left quickly after the service so that I could leave on the noon train. We trudged to the depot along the Chester Road in silence, and I felt that Dad was apprehensive about whether he would see me again. We stood for several minutes waiting for the train.
As the train rolled into the depot my father took me by the arms. “Be brave, follow orders, but don’t take chances or try to be a hero. You’ll have plenty of other men to help.” For the first time in my life I saw tears in my father’s eyes.
I climbed aboard and was on my way, waving to Dad with tears in my own eyes.
At camp we found our supplies waiting for us as the sergeant had predicted. We assembled in the fading light and were reviewed by a group of new sergeants and officers. Our commanding officer introduced himself as Colonel George Roberts, and majors as battalion commanders, and our company captain and lieutenants whose names escape me. Our new sergeant was named Oldfield, a tall, gangly man.
At dawn we marched to the depot where trains were waiting. We crowded into the cars and endured the long, bumpy and cold ride to somewhere in New York City. We marched in companies to a wharf, where we climbed aboard a sailing ship resembling what I had seen pictured in my history book in high school as a clipper or brig, which mounted swivel guns. We were surprised to be moved by sea.
Only when we were on the open water was the word passed around that we were headed for the Gulf Coast, to engage in the campaign involving New Orleans against Confederates up the Mississippi. By the time we heard that news many of us were less than concerned about where we were going, only that we should arrive quickly, because sea sickness was taking a severe toll, aggravated by the bitter cold wind. While I was not affected by the ailment, I remained most of the time in the moderate comfort below decks.
The next two years blur in my memory for the simple reason that the Regiment spent a lot of time not accomplishing much, although moved back and forth between camps, posts and preparation for combat, but little battle action for my company. Three companies of the Regiment were dispatched to capture a Confederate fort, but the Rebs were gone and the only job was repair work. We went to Baton Rouge and moved toward the Confederate forts at Vicksburg. Within a few weeks of desultory movement and maneuvers, the attack was abandoned and we returned to Baton Rouge, and most of us were down with various illnesses. I was diagnosed with malaria and returned to camp for recovery.
Because I was in the Regiment’s camp, I wasn’t on hand for the humiliation of the battle of Baton Rouge, where the Vermont 7th earned the ire of the notorious General Benjamin Butler, by being one of the Union units that exchanged fire---I believe it’s called “friendly fire”---with other Federal troops. It was a double disaster, even though the Confederate attack was repulsed, because both General Williams and our commander, Colonel Roberts were slain, Baton Rouge was lost and General Butler laid the blame on our unit.
Our officers and sergeants spread the word that the 7th was blamed for the outcome because General Butler had aspirations for national office and that tiny Vermont was the least influential state within his command and putting the onus on the 7th would avoid offending units from the larger states. I heard about this when the Regiment moved out of the combat area.
This was in the autumn of 1862, and the nation’s attention had been focused on the campaign in Virginia and Maryland, after the killing field of Shiloh, in Tennessee, in April had shocked both sides. Mid-September brought the Battle of Antietem, where the loss of Union life startled the North, and led to the Emancipation Proclamation. So the effort at the Mississippi delta was not high in civilian attention. Talk at camp centered on the poor devils up north who were being slaughtered without accomplishing much, except a political edict from Washington. But the real attention of the boys of the Regiment was whether they would be thrown into the maw of battle, and how soon.
I recovered my strength slowly, and was ready for action, when in November we boarded ship again and landed in western Florida, for what was listed as garrison duty. We shielded runaway slaves and whites who preferred the Union to the fading Confederacy, perhaps for the steady pay rather than for greate5 loyalty. There was one disturbing incident when the Rebs overwhelmed three companies of the 7th and took almost a hundred prisoners, and a standoff at Gonzales Station. We received new recruits and were signed up for a further three years or the duration of the War. In August of 1864 the Regiment was returned to Vermont for a furlough.
The six former boys from the vicinity of Rockingham arrived in Bartonsville and were greeted by quite a crowd at the depot. My father and Judith were there. There were songs, the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ ‘Hail, Columbia’ and a few others, including hymns. Abner Gates, one of the selectmen, made a glowing speech about the “patriotic boys who’ve given so much for the Union and freedom.” He sort of got carried away when he promised that our names would be on a monument that the town planned for the center of Bellows Falls. I, and I’m sure the other young men had undergone major changes since we had departed our home village two and a half years earlier. I had filled out from the spare eighteen year old, as had the others of about my same age. Although I, and I am sure most of the others, had complied with the moral and health admonitions provided before we left camp in Rutland thirty months before, we had sampled John Barleycorn and seen parts of the country far different from forested Vermont. We had learned to deal with fellow soldiers whose habits and feelings were different from ours. In short, we had matured and grown up, more than in simply a physical way. While the gathering greeting us, they may have looked on us in much the same way as when we left, we viewed ourselves in a much different light.
When the gathering broke up with each of us going away with our families I noticed that John Bates didn’t seem to have any family with him, that he was looking a little lonely on the platform.
I asked Dad if he could at least walk with us back to the village.
My father whispered, “He probably wants a place to stay. His father died a year ago and his mother remarried and her new husband doesn’t have any interest in John, he has other children.”
“That’s awful. What’s he going to do?”
My father shrugged. “He could come home with us, he could share your room.”
I went to John. “Do you have a place to stay?”
“No. I’ll camp at the hotel.”
“You can’t do that, it’ll take all of your pay, and more.”
John shrugged. “I’ll go back to camp early.”
“No, John, you come with us. We have room.”
I could tell that he was glad for the offer. He brightened up. “Are you sure.”
“Come on, Dad said it’s okay.”
So John stayed with us. He helped with the firewood stacking and even hired out for a couple of the farms to do painting and carpentry. He joined us going to church, although I had never seen him go when his father was alive.
My father spoke of the stronger business climate in Bartonsville. He had become full time at the former grist mill that Albert Moore had purchased and was turning into a paper mill, he had been the owner of a paper mill in Bellows Falls. “The pay is good, and I can still work for others part time. With you gone and only Judith at home, I have more free time.”
I was able to move around our little village with much more poise and confidence than during my most recent visit. I made no effort to visit the store, as in my mind, I did not need to prove my maturity by currying favor with the old geezers who still hung around the potbellied stove for no purpose. One day I was pulling a cart with my father toward the depot where he expected a cargo to be waiting, when a middle-aged man on the porch of the store called out my name. The man waved a hand. “Come in, we want to hear about the Regiment, what it’s doing.”
“I can’t tell you much,” I called.
“Come in anyway.”
I paused while the man stood looking.
My father whispered: “Nate, they’re inviting you to join the club. Don’t snub them. Respect them.”
“Why should I? They treated me like a child.”
“You were a child, now you’re grown up. ‘When I was a child, I reasoned like a child, spoke like a child. But now that I am a man I have put away childish things:’ Paul’s Epistle to somebody. A grown up forgives, forgets and respects. Besides, you’ll make me look small if you don’t.”
So I did go into the store and shook hands with the old timers, and some not so old timers. I answered a few questions honestly and defended the Regiment against some of the rumors the men spoke about. After a few minutes I even was offered a chair around the cold stove. A couple of the men moved on to local gossip, about the poor railroad service, the odd man who was the new principal at the high school in Bellows Falls.
One of the men asked: “How’s your father doing with the mill? I hear that Albert Moore is not easy to work with.”
“I can’t say, he doesn’t talk about it. But if I knew I probably wouldn’t say anything.”
The man nodded. “Yes, I shouldn’t have asked that.”
I suddenly realized that I really had arrived: one of the geezers had apologized to me. “Well, I have to go, my father may want my help.” With that I sprang up and wished the group good day and strode from the store.
But I felt something not quite right within me. Bartonsville was little changed from when I left for the War. The struggle to survive was still the same, the labor with firewood, the snow and ice, the narrow margin between poverty and the little extra that could provide some comfort, the ledges and boulders, the scarcity of potable water at the same time as floods and washouts, the ragged clothes, the constant labor at the farm and tenuous hold on today, let alone tomorrow, seemed as if they could never change. New York City, even the southern Gulf Coast gave promise that well-being might better be found than in hardscrabble, rocky New England. The soldiers from other states seemed so much more optimistic and energetic than my fellow Vermonters, apprehensive and doubtful. I wondered if the War was to end soon, would I want to return to Vermont and the almost dismal conditions.
Even in the seemingly prosperous and bustling village of Bartonsville, the prospects seemed dim for improving my condition, compared to the bustling outlook for the rest of the growing country. Everywhere I went I heard the line “Go West and grow up with the Country.”
CHAPTER SIX
When we climbed on the train to return to camp John Bates had more money than when he arrived. He was almost crying when he thanked Dad and Judith for putting up with him and promised that he’d be a good buddy for me, although he’d never been that close before we joined the Regiment. In fact, before the War, I hadn’t really liked John much, him being too rough cut for my liking, using coarse language and bragging about how smart he was and how he was going to be rich some day because his father had lots of land. But I figured that his father’s death had knocked some of the stuffing out of him, so to speak, and had brought him down to our level, especially since with a stepfather he might not get as much inheritance as he expected before.
The Regiment again journeyed by train to New York, then by ship to New Orleans, that was now a Union center for not only military, but commercial activity, the citizens anxious to return to some sort of normality. We formed a part of the force that moved east toward Mobile, Alabama. I was involved in only one action, in which I fired my gun twice from a distance at a ragged band of Rebs. When rumors spread that the Confederates defending Mobile were seemingly ready to surrender, we felt that we could relax.
John Bates and I, meanwhile, had become not only physically close, but emotionally and mentally close. We shared a tent and took grub together more that would be usual for men in the same outfit. The weather was chilly, and rumor had it that the Confederacy was on the verge of collapse.
We closed in on Mobile in late March of 1865, and pinned the ragged Rebs in Fort Blakely. Our forces were concentrated against it, and the 7th formed up for action. We, of course, had no way of knowing that General Lee was preparing to surrender in Virginia, but the word around the Regiment was that the War was just about over. And each of us felt that, on reflection, we wanted not to be the last man killed before the conflict ended.
“Why don’t they just give up?” asked John on an evening when we were rousted out for sentinel duty. “They don’t have shoes, or clothes, or bullets. Their money can’t be any good. I heard it from Ted Ramsey in B Company, he studied business at a university before joining up. He says that when a country is collapsing the money becomes worthless, and the Confederates have nothing to back it up, only cotton, and that’s mostly either rotted or held by us. What they have can’t be sold overseas. I saw some of their money when we were at that plantation down the road. It says it’s backed by cotton and would be redeemed in gold after a peace treaty with the Union. Some chance of that.”
“Thanks for the lecture on finance. Now we have to get to picket duty. I’ll take the right. What’s the password?”
“’Harvard’. The countersign is ‘pigsty’. And their answer is ‘Mongolia’.”
We hoisted our haversacks with hardtack, our canteens and our muskets, bayonets fixed. I walked to the right, toward a thicket along the bank of a small rivulet, on the other side of which was another thicket. John worked his way slowly to the left and vanished into a small copse. I took up a spot at a pair of trees, I believe they were fir trees, between which I could look at a break in a thicket on the opposite side of the rill. The moon was coming off new, and vision was very bad. I waited in silence, in the chill, shifting my weight from one foot to the other.
Occasional sounds, as of brush moving and rubbing on the ground. Possums or coons, I thought.
Footfalls came from the opposite side of the waterway, together with grunts and an occasional oath. When the sounds seemed to reach the opposite bank I called out: “Who goes there?”
“Harvard. Harvard.”
“Pigsty.”
“Mongolia, wherever and whatever that is.”
“Advance, comrades.”
Two dark figures in disheveled blue uniforms floundered from the thicket and across the brook. “We’re Company D, the 7th, where are we?”
“Company J, the 7th. What were you
doing over there?”
The figures moved to beside me, blue all over, no rifles, pistols at the hips. “We were scouting, it looks as if the Rebs are taking a powder. We’re going on to the bivouac.” They moved past me out of the thicket and toward the camp.
I resumed my stance, wishing the moon was brighter. The wait seemed interminable. I shifted my gun from one arm to the other.
“Nate, you okay?” It was John, his voice a little nervous.
“I’m fine.”
“My feet are cold, and wet.”
“You got the wrong spot, it’s dry here. Do you hear something?”
Silence for several seconds. Then: “Yes, somebody tiptoeing around out there.”
“Could be a possum or coon.”
“It’s getting closer,” John said, in a hoarse whisper. “Still a ways off.”
“Not if they’re sneaking up on us. Who goes there?”
There was no answer. The footfalls stopped.
“Who goes there?” I called. I raised my gun, butt to shoulder. “Answer or I shoot.”
Muffled voices came from the opposite side of the brook. Then, more sounds of feet through the undergrowth. A voice whispered: “Where’s the line?”
I didn’t dare shoot, because I couldn’t see a target; if I fired and missed I’d have only my bayonet. I waited while the soft shuffling of feet continued, slightly closer. It sounded like two or three, close together. “Who goes there? Give the password.”
The footfalls seemed to move apart until they seemed separated. The sounds stopped.
I still couldn’t see a figure across the tiny glimmer from the rivulet. There was only fifteen or twenty feet between my spot and the thicket on the opposite side.
