by Ralph Peters
A band took up “Camptown Races,” competing with endless patriotic airs. The cheers were less explosive than they had been an hour before, when Hooker’s general order had been read to the troops by their officers, but they still confirmed that the army was in high spirits.
With one of his well-schooled smiles, Swinton extended a copy of Hooker’s evening proclamation:
It is with heartfelt satisfaction the commanding general announces to the army that the operations of the last three days have determined that our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him.
“Rather strong beer,” Swinton commented. He drew a notebook from his pocket. “Mightn’t one say? With the battle still to come?” The scribbler was some sort of bastardized Scotsman by way of Canada and reputed to be a Bohemian, but his paper had been a pillar of support. And Joe Hooker wanted no cracks in the pillar now.
“Don’t go flat-foot on me, Swinton. Your New-York Times is about to get the greatest goddamned story of the war. Greeley will be sick to death with envy.”
“I shall be glad of it.”
Hooker straightened his posture, reinforcing his authority. “The Rebel army is now the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: They may as well pack up their haversacks and make for Richmond. And I shall be after them, Lee hasn’t a chance.”
“My readers will be delighted.”
“All this army ever needed was a proper hand.” Hooker stopped himself. “Don’t quote that. No need to insult my failed predecessors.”
“Indeed.”
Hooker felt the newspaperman’s rather too piercing eyes upon him.
“Well, then,” Swinton resumed, “my congratulations, General. Oh, by the way: Not everyone seemed to be celebrating this evening. Meade seemed … shall I say ‘morose’?”
“Meade’s always that way. Constipated Philadelphia blueblood, you know the sort. Always contrary, always knows best.”
“I hear he wished to assume an advanced position. There was a tiff.”
Hooker bore down. “Listen, Swinton, the plan’s been a grand success. Just look around you. And I mean to stick to the plan. Between us, Meade knows Lee’s licked. He just wanted to grab the glory, claim he chased off the Johnnies by himself.” Hooker shook his head. “High ambition on every side, I deal with it every day. It’s a curse on this army.”
Swinton opened his mouth then closed it again. He slapped shut his notebook, making a small drama of it.
“I’d buy you a drink, General. But there’s an absence of desirable liquids.”
Hooker smiled. “No spirits on this campaign. Only esprit.”
“Then I shall take my leave. I need to get my dispatch back across the river and on to Falmouth—your telegraph seems a bit laggard.”
Hooker waved that away. “New machines, new system they’re trying out. Big improvement, Butterfield tells me. Just need to let the Signal boys do their work.” He instantly smothered a newborn concern: His plan depended heavily on the telegraph. “Everything will be in order tomorrow.”
“Indeed.”
* * *
Hooker lay awake on the borrowed bed, thanks to a damnable headache. Since he’d cut off his drinking four days before, he’d had a few punishing interludes. Of course, there were also times when he felt just splendid. All in the natural order of things, he supposed. He’d soon work through it. He’d always been robust in every respect—ask a hundred women. And he had a great deal to celebrate, had he not? Even pleasures could give a man a headache.…
They’d all been wrong, every one of them. All those who’d thought him destined to end as a failure. If he wasn’t already the most admired man in the entire Union, he would be in a matter of two or three days.
The best choice Lee could make would be to run. And running would not suffice.
Joseph Hooker’s shame would be behind him, every shred of it. The bankruptcy, the poverty, and the sweat that had never been enough to save him. In California, he’d left the Army, expecting to make his fortune, but the soil of Sonoma had proven worthless, the small cabin with its off-kilter door confining, and the saloons by the presidio too alluring.
He’d failed at farming, yes. And government posts had disappointed both him and his benefactors. Yet he’d been a white man, and he’d assumed the greasers, at least, would know the difference. In Mexico, after the war, they’d known their place.
He’d loved her, that was the thing. Isabella. That was the damnable, shameful thing: He’d loved her. And her family, the Alameda-Castillos, hadn’t had a proper pot to piss in, despite the airs they put on and the finery they dragged out for their church’s feast days, the silver buckles and embroidered costumes. Welcomed on their ranch as a guest, he’d believed himself admired and properly valued. Not least by Isabella, with whom—in that elusive Spanish way—he’d been denied a single moment alone. He’d even endured their sickening food to breathe the same air she did. And when he had at last asked for her hand in marriage—doing it formally, their way—the appalled look on her father’s face, the mortification evident on the features of a brown man who took better care of his beard than he did of his property, that look had stunned him. The old bugger hadn’t bothered to be polite, merely stuttering, “Pero … pero … no es imaginable, es imposible.…”
And then, when the war had come to his rescue and patriotic friends in San Francisco had taken up a collection to pay his passage back to volunteer, one had declared, all too publicly, “I’d pay the whole fare myself to see the last of Joe.”
Now here he was, commanding a vast army, an army that had cheered as he rode past, on the verge of a great victory. And Isabella, who’d soon been married off to a fellow greaser, could weep over her brown brats.
Midnight
Confederate Second Corps headquarters
Blessed he was in the women he had known, blessed in their flowering and grace. Only they could release him from his shyness, only they accepted him as he was. Men judged; women understood. Men mocked, but women soothed.
Perhaps, he thought, only women grasped the wonder of God’s Creation, the beauty and sorrow, the majesty and the immemorial loss.
The Lord had never asked more of him than upon his Ellie’s death, inflicting a loss he feared he was too weak to bear. Oh, the Lord had tested him then. He had not believed that a man could love more fully upon this earth than he had loved the wife of his first marriage. Only her sister, Margaret, had found the power to console him. They had grown to love one another, too, but their union was forbidden by the church, by God’s own covenant. Still, Maggie had calmed his soul in his time of need, even as her glance inflamed his heart. Now she was wed to another.
But the Lord had remained his guardian, rewarding his submission and obedience by lighting his way to North Carolina to fetch home an earthly angel to take to wife, his matchless esposa. Anna, in her quiet way, brought him joy beyond measure. With her, he could cast off the haunting fear, the lifelong dread of inadequacy, of blunders and humiliations. He spoke to her with a fluency he never had managed when confronted by men, with an ease he’d only found when addressing Negroes. As he shut the front door at day’s end, Anna’s love untied his tongue. The Lord was his shepherd and had sent him a lamb.
How short the time seemed now, how cruelly brief, those days of a new marriage in the last bright years of peace. Casting off frugality, he had bought Anna a piano, and after pulling down the shades and closing the drapes with care, he would push back the furniture and dance, alone, ecstatic and thumping, as she played. Then, heedless, he would sweep her up and hum as they danced together, whirling until she was breathless, escaped from all judgment, in flight from a frightful world. He suffered when she visited her family, even missed her when she rose from their bed to use the pot.
Then she gave him a daughter.
He did not believe he would g
o back to the Institute after the war. Instead, he would farm, somewhere in the Valley, perhaps there in Rockbridge County, rendering the earth fruitful, enjoying the fulsome beauty of God’s abundance, honoring Him through honest labor and prayer, and raising a family educated to reverence. If it were not blasphemous to say so, he and his wife and children would create an earthly paradise.
He rose from an hour of fitful sleep and reverie, kneeling first on the earth to offer prayers, thanking the Lord for His mercies and begging His aid in the undoing of His enemies.
Unwilling to wake his servant, Thomas Jonathan Jackson finished his toilet by candlelight and made ready to kill.
THREE
Eight thirty a.m., May 1, 1863
Tabernacle Church, four miles east of Chancellorsville
Laff McLaws peered westward into the fog.
“I don’t know,” he said. Picks and spades bit wet soil to deepen entrenchments. “Nobody tells a man anything much, expect you to figure it out.”
“Well, somebody’s out there,” Dick Anderson, his fellow division commander, mused, “and not just a scouting party. Or Lee wouldn’t have us digging, not here.”
“All my boys saw yesterday was cavalry. Nuisance, not much else.”
“We struck infantry. And cavalry. Not many, but there you are. Infantry don’t scout this far from home. And there was a fuss by Todd’s Tavern shy of midnight.”
“Stuart, most like. At long last. Could use us some horse-humpers. Sort things out.” McLaws cleared his nose on a red rag. “I just don’t like not knowing.”
Anderson chewed on his cheek, aching for coffee. Yankee coffee. Of which there was a distinct shortage in the Army of Northern Virginia. Next thing to an obsession, not just for him.
“Little Billy’s cranky,” Anderson said. “Won’t cool down. Yank cavalry scooped up some of his men again yesterday. Twelfth Virginia, hard-luck bunch. Took maybe thirty. Now Mahone thinks the whole Union army’s coming our way, and he’d like to take both fists to it.” Anderson resettled his still-damp tunic: Might turn into a fine, warm day, but the morning gripped raw. “I don’t see it, though. I just don’t see it. If the Federals were in force, they wouldn’t have stopped. Not in that godforsaken patch of no-place, not when they had free going.” He lifted his face to the heavy air. “Thinning a bit.”
“Not much.”
Anderson removed his hat and swept back his hair. “Never expected any of this. Did we? Back at the Academy?”
Big-bearded Laff McLaws said, “Couldn’t see one yard beyond graduation.”
“Now this.”
Both generals turned toward the west again, staring blindly along the hidden Turnpike. But the surprise came from the east, from behind their backs.
Hoofbeats. A dozen riders, at least. Both men about-faced. Staff officers tightened.
Jackson emerged from the mists, followed by a small retinue: a few aides and some couriers. No flags. Jackson had chosen his runt horse for the day.
Didn’t say good morning, just:
“Both here. Good. Saves time.”
McLaws and Anderson saluted. Jackson barely offered a return. Just looked down at them, hard as a Comanche, lips pursed. Pulled low, his cap’s visor obscured his eyes.
“Stop that digging. Form your men.” When neither division commander jumped, Jackson added, “Now.”
McLaws just never liked the man. And here he was, the feted Stonewall, not bothering with the protocol of presenting an order putting him in charge of divisions that weren’t his, that belonged to far-off James Longstreet. No, he just started in giving orders, a backwoods Napoléon.
McLaws did as told, though. Everyone did with Jackson. Since he had A. P. Hill arrested the year before. For doing his duty well but a tad too slowly.
With aides scurrying off to halt the work and assemble the men, Anderson said, not without evident trepidation, “Last orders we had from General Lee were to hold this position, sir. To defend right here.”
Shoulders thrown back, Jackson said:
“Best way to defend is to attack. Best way to hold this position is to make sure the enemy doesn’t come near it.”
The fog was, indeed, thinning. As if Jackson had given the mists their orders, too.
Before either division commander cobbled together a response, Jackson asked:
“Who knows this ground best? Which brigades?”
“Mahone’s Virginians, General. And Posey’s Mississippians next, I’d say,” Anderson told him. “Had their winter quarters hereabouts. Know it every inch, here to the river.”
“Chancellorsville?”
“Yes, sir. Mahone, he’d know it. And the Wilderness. Well as anybody can know it.”
Jackson nodded, almost imperceptibly. Couldn’t make out his eyes at all now, but a man knew they were fierce.
“Good,” Jackson decided. “Mahone leads the advance here, along the Turnpike. General McLaws, you follow with your division, commanding on this line. Posey will advance along the Plank Road. General Anderson, you’ll deploy an additional brigade behind him. Position the remainder of your division to reinforce General McLaws.” He paused, as if seeing all of this unfold, reading the future, then he turned that commanding nose toward McLaws. “Upon my order, you will locate and drive in the enemy’s skirmishers. Advance until you strike his main line. Draw him out. Then hold him.”
A horseman, half-uniformed, galloped up to Jackson, who did not look about but only said:
“Give them their maps, Hotchkiss.”
As one, McLaws and Anderson stepped forward with questions. Anderson spoke first. “Will your corps be coming up, sir? If we meet heavy—”
“Follow your orders, General,” Jackson said. “As I will follow mine.”
Trailed by his knights and squires, Jackson vanished.
When he had gone—when he was well away—the unsettled generals, new maps in hand, stared after him.
Dick Anderson said, in a muted voice, “Wish Dutch Longstreet was here.”
After a stretch of dead seconds, McLaws responded:
“Yankees don’t scare me, not inordinately. But, Lord knows, that man does.”
* * *
Jackson rode back to hasten on Rodes’ division, possessed by an exaltation unmatched since the fight for the causeways, manning his last gun, before Mexico City. It was a boy’s sensation, he knew, but the Lord had sent it, and Jackson did not resist. He could not wait to bring his divisions down upon the Federals—he literally could not wait and intended to attack before all of his men came up, to push Rodes forward and order a general advance along the Turnpike and Plank Road.
Strike first, strike hard. Never give the enemy the first grab at the stick.
He had a plan, although he had not shared it. McLaws and Anderson only needed to do their parts. As long as McLaws bit into whatever Union force appeared in front of him and held fast, the rest would go smartly. Jackson intended to flank the foe yet again, to destroy these trespassers. To slay them until there were none left to kill.
He had not wished to be rude. He never did. But words were costly to him, and fewer words meant clearer words. And he knew men such as Anderson and McLaws, had known them since West Point, even before. Things came easily to them. Until they didn’t come easily anymore. And then the men accustomed to ease and used to deference made mistakes. And battles were lost.
Nothing had ever come easily to Jackson. Western Virginia had been a bare-bones land, his family a failed endeavor, his father soon gone and his mother, well-intentioned but incapable, a susceptible woman, called to the Lord thereafter. His uncle, a man of great goodness, had taken him in at the mill, and he had known a few innocent years, a boy’s brief paradise, with only a sister left to him and her too soon removed (and now … now she was a traitor and a harlot—yes, such she was—giving herself to Yankee officers, her conduct unforgivable, his once beloved sister). Even his good uncle had failed in the end, his backcountry bamboozlements unsuited to civilizatio
n when it arrived.
He had known, beyond reason and words, that escape was necessary, and he had done all that godliness allowed to reach West Point, to gain an education beyond the near useless schoolroom where he had learned little and then taught others less. For all of his efforts, he had only gotten his place at the Academy because another boy had taken one look and turned tail the same day. Jackson had begged, that one time in his life. For the vacated appointment. And a congressman, amused, had pitied him.
At West Point, he had learned how little he knew, how unprepared he was, a clodhopper clutching his knife and fork in his fists, a beast of the woods who lagged in every faculty. There had been no one to teach him, no one to explain the simplest rules of society.
A target for endless gibes, he lived in dread of failure but would not quit, pulling himself up from the bottom of his class and gaining, through grit, a respectable ranking by his final years. The loneliness early on almost defeated him, but slowly other cadets accepted his presence, almost befriended him, overlooking his blunders and clumsy rudeness. He rarely could make words come right, could not retort smartly when Northern cadets argued or skin jokes like the Southrons. But if he could not debate, he could memorize; if he could not speak, he could act; and he was dutiful.
He had lived for letters from his then cherished sister.
And then he had marched proudly across the parade ground one last time.
The war against Mexico had drawn him in, with its swift campaigns against a foe sometimes brave but always inadequate. Unexpectedly, Mexico had enchanted him. Indifferent at French at West Point, he discovered a knack for Spanish and its flourishes. The strange words and sleek intonations unlocked his tongue: He could even flirt, if timidly, with the lace-covered señoritas of Ciudad de México.
He’d toyed with the notion of staying on, of resigning his commission and making a new life, perhaps wedding one of those lithe girls with olive skin and flawless manners. Even the glitter of the Catholic Church had its brief allure.
