With Every Drop of Blood
A Novel of the Civil War
James Lincoln Collier
and Christopher Collier
I hurried outside. Ma had got the mules out of harness and into the stalls. She was up in the haymow pitching down some hay for them.
“I’ll do that, Ma. You go on in and tend to Pa.”
She put the pitchfork down and clambered down the haymow ladder. “What did he want to tell you?”
“He made me promise not to run off to fight. He made me promise to stay here and help with things.”
“I figured that was it,” she said. “Did you promise?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad,” she said. She put her arms on my shoulders and looked me square in the face, for we were about the same height. “It’d kill me to lose another one, Johnny.”
James Lincoln Collier is the coauthor, with his brother, Christopher, of My Brother Sam Is Dead, a Newbery Honor Book. They have also written Jump Ship to Freedom, War Comes to Willy Freeman, Who Is Carrie?, and The Clock.
James Collier lives in New York City. Christopher Collier lives in Orange, Connecticut.
Copyright 1992 by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, an unpublished draft entitled Blue and Grey, Black and White. Copyrighted © 1994 by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, published version entitled With Every Drop of Blood.
Maps by Jackie Aher.
First ebook edition copyright 2012 by AudioGO.
Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-202-3
Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9098-3
Cover photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HAER CAL, 14-DVNM, 4–5.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
For Ida and Bonnie
CONTENTS
About the Use of the Word
“Nigger” in This Book
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
How Much of This Book is True?
About How People Speak in This Book
The Gettysburg Address
About the Authors
Also Available
ABOUT THE USE OF THE
WORD “NIGGER”
IN THIS BOOK
Over the long history of black people in America, a number of terms have been used for them. Until fairly recently the most acceptable word was Negro. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, blacks decided that they preferred to be called black, and the term supplanted Negro. Another change came in the 1970s and 1980s, when Afro-American, and then African American, came to be preferred by some. These terms, however, have not entirely replaced black, which continues to be widely used.
Regrettably, the most common term for blacks has been, for well over two hundred years, nigger, a corruption of the word Negro. Until recent decades most whites in the North and virtually all in the South regularly employed this term, although in the North at least they might avoid using it in front of black people. Indeed, many blacks also use the term routinely among themselves, usually, but not always, in a half-joking or ironic way.
It is therefore impossible to completely avoid the term in a book of this kind, if we are to be historically accurate; many of the kinds of people portrayed here would have used that term, and no other. We hope readers will understand that we do not approve of the word, but have used it in order to present an accurate picture of black-white relations during the Civil War period.
With Every Drop of Blood
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray,
that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth
piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years
of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until
every drop of blood
drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago,
so still it must be said,
“The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Abraham Lincoln Second Inaugural Address March 4. 1865
Chapter One
When they brought Pa home from the war all shot up, he said he might die, and he did, too. But before he did we had a lot of time to talk about why he had to get himself shot—what the war was about and why so many people had to get killed in it. Hundreds of thousands of them dead, Pa said. He wasn’t exactly sure how many, for it had been some time since he’d read about it in the newspapers, but it was way up there.
Pa got shot at a place called Cedar Creek, which wasn’t more than forty miles from our house halfway up the side of High Top Mountain. If he had to get shot, it was good it happened nearby, for he didn’t have far to travel to get home. He said it helped to stiffen his spine for the fighting to be near home, for he knew he was defending his own people—his own family, when you got down to it.
Oh, we needed defending, all right. The Shenandoah Valley was about as hard hit as any place during the war. The soil in the valley was rich and the crops always good—the barns busting out with corn, wheat, and hay, the cattle and hogs sleek and fat. The Southern army needed an awful lot of food every day and counted on the Shenandoah Valley to produce a good deal of it. Naturally, that brought on the Yankees. For months General Sheridan’s bluecoats had been ranging up and down the valley, taking what they could carry off and destroying the rest—slaughtering our cattle and sheep, burning down our mills and whole barns full of corn and hay. It was awful. A crow would have to carry his own dinner if he was to fly across the Shenandoah Valley then.
We never thought they’d come up onto our mountain, for our soil was thin and our crops not near as rich as down in the valley. One of the Reamer boys from down at Conrad’s Store raced up to warn us that the Yankees were on their way. I hitched up the mules to the wagon. While I was harnessing them, Ma and the little ones, Sarah and Sam, threw everything they could lay their hands on into the wagon, and about five minutes later I was heading up High Top, across Hawksbill Creek, and into the woods above. And not a minute too soon, neither, for I wasn’t more than a quarter mile into the woods when I heard the Yankee horses clattering over the stones on the wagon trail, and the sounds of somebody shouting orders. I fell down on my knees and prayed to the Lord they wouldn’t think to look in the woods for me. They must have known, from seeing the hay and feed in our barn, that we had mules. But they didn’t think of it, and by and by I heard them clatter on back down the wagon road. I waited another hour, just to be safe. Then I grabbed the lead mule, Bridget, by the halter and took them back down to the barn. We’d saved the mules, the wagon, and the stuff Ma and the little ones had thrown in the wagon—some tools, the plow, some bags of corn. But the Yankees had got our milch cow, which meant that nobody was going to get a cup of milk around there for a long time to come—not till the war was over, I reckoned.
Oh, I was mad as could be when I found out. What had we ever done to the Yankees to bring them down on us like that? I stood in the kitchen cussing them until Ma told me to stop it, I wasn’t to take the Lord’s name i
n vain no matter what the Yankees did. So I quit cussing, but I vowed that the next time I wasn’t going to hide, but would fight them.
“With what?” Ma said, her lips tight.
“Great-grampa’s sword,” I said. Ma’s grampa had fought in the Revolution. He’d been at the Battle of Yorktown, where the British surrendered, and got a sword from a British officer.
Ma gave a hard laugh. “One boy with a sword against a troop of bluecoats with repeating rifles.”
“I’m not a boy. I’m fourteen.”
“Johnny, you got to learn to rein yourself in. It says in Proverbs, ‘He that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.’ You let your feelings run away with you too easy. You let go like that on a bunch of Yankees and you’ll get yourself killed for it.”
I knew Ma was right. So many had got killed in the war already one more didn’t matter very much. The bluecoats wouldn’t think twice about running me through with a bayonet if I started fussing with them. Still, it was hard to hold back your feelings while they rampaged around your place stealing things and smashing what they couldn’t steal. All we could hope for was that General Early could push the Yankees out of the Shenandoah before we were stripped of everything. Of course, right then we didn’t know that Pa was fighting along with General Early that very minute.
Up there on our mountainside life hadn’t ever been easy. Pa’d always said that when Sam and Sarah got bigger and could do real farm work, he’d clear some more land and put in a cash crop. If we were lucky, we’d be able to put by a little money and buy a piece of land in the valley. But right now Sam and Sarah were too little to be much help, beyond taking care of the chickens and weeding the vegetable garden. With Pa gone, all the hard work fell on me and Ma. We plowed with the mules, planted, hoed, cut hay, and dug potatoes. The hogs weren’t much of a bother most of the time, for we just turned them loose in the woodlot to feed off nuts and whatever else they could find. But still, you had to fatten them up in the fall, butcher them, salt the meat down, and cart what we didn’t need for ourselves over to Stanardsville to sell.
Betweentimes I earned a little money with our mules and wagon, by hiring out as a teamster. I could handle those mules as well as a man. I was only ten when Pa left and didn’t know much about it, but I’d seen him do it often enough, and had some idea of it. A lot of folks liked horses better than a mule team, but mules ate less and had more staying power than horses. And they were lighter and had smaller hooves, so they were much steadier on the mountains. I wouldn’t have swapped ’em for anything. There were three of them—the lead mule was Bridget; then there was Regis, and Molly. They knew me and they’d do things for me they wouldn’t do for anyone else. Oh, they could be stubborn, all right—stop dead on you the very time you were in a desperate hurry to get someplace. Bridget in particular had a mind of her own, and she’d stall for no reason I could see and wouldn’t budge until I gave her a good talking to and cracked the whip at her in the bargain. When I did that, she’d turn and give me the most pitiful look you ever saw—why was she always getting blamed for everything? And if I was hungry and wanted to get home to supper, and wasn’t in no mood for her shenanigans, I’d lose my temper and give her a good smack. I knew I should hold on to my feelings better, but sometimes I couldn’t. I could manage the mules, but there’s no easy way with them. Still, we were lucky to have them, and I took every teamstering job I could get, for we were short of money all the time. It was mighty hard doing without Pa.
He’d been fighting since the beginning. The moment the Virginia government voted to join with the other states that had seceded from the Union, he went out and signed up. He didn’t think twice about it, for nobody figured the war would last more than a few months, and maybe not more than a few weeks. We could get along without him that long, he figured. But the war just went on and on. Pa was fighting at Manassas under General Stonewall Jackson, where we’d run the Yankees clear back to Washington, nearly. After that he’d been at Gettysburg and climbed up a hill in an attack with the bluecoats firing down on him with everything they had. They almost drove the Yankees off that hill, Pa said, but the way the Yankees had got themselves dug in up there the Devil himself couldn’t have driven them out. The bodies in the fields and orchards below were so thick you couldn’t hardly put your foot down without tromping on one.
From time to time Pa managed to get home for a week or so. He’d rest up a bit, and then get to work on the farm straightening out things we hadn’t been able to get to. Then he’d go, and we might not see him again for months. It went on like that for more’n three years.
Then, in the fall of 1864, there was terrible fighting up the valley to the north. We knew Pa was up there somewhere. Mr. Reamer came up to tell us about it. Sheridan had beat General Early good and the Yanks were all over the place down there now. But no word of Pa, and we were mighty worried. Then the wagon came up the trail, going in and out of the shadows made by the trees in the afternoon sun. At first we didn’t think anything of it—there were always wagons going up and down by the house, for the best way east from that part of the Shenandoah was through Swift Run Gap up the mountain behind us. But of course Sam and Sarah were curious as usual. They ran down the wagon road to see who it was, and in a minute they were running back up to the house shouting, “It’s Pa, it’s Pa.”
Well, we ran out, and sure enough it was him. He didn’t look any too good. He was wrapped up in a blanket and hadn’t shaved for some time, neither. His face was white and looked whiter because his black hair hadn’t been cut for a while, and hung down by his cheeks.
The wagon stopped in front of our little stone house. Pa sat there looking at it, a smile on his face. “There were a lot of times I reckoned I’d never see the old place again.”
Ma ran over to the wagon, put her arms around him, and hugged him. He winced. “Oof,” he said.
Ma let him go. “You’re hurt,” she said.
“Pretty much so,” he said. “I took a minié ball in my side. My luck ran out. I can’t kick. I was lucky for three years. Some fellas didn’t last three minutes.” He looked at the house once more. “But now I’m back.”
I liked our stone house, even if it was little—two rooms upstairs and two down, with the barn out back, the woodshed, root cellar, and all. The barn and the woodshed were made of planks, but the house was stone. On hot days it was cool and dark inside. I loved being inside there on days like that, when I got a chance, just sitting on Ma’s footstool, listening to the clock tick, looking out the window where the sun poured down on the hayfìeld, hearing the bees buzzing in Ma’s flower garden, feeling the cool and dark.
Even though it was warm for October and he was wrapped in a blanket, Pa shivered. “Johnny, help me down out of here.” He nodded at the wagon driver. “And give this fella a cup of cider.”
“There isn’t any cider, Pa. The Yankees got it.”
“The Yankees? They came up here?”
“Johnny took the mules and the wagon into the woods,” Ma told him. “So we saved them. But they took the cow, the barrel of cider, a sack of corn we didn’t get hid in time.”
Pa shook his head. “I never thought they’d come up here.” He swung his legs over the side of the wagon, wincing. “Give me your hand, Johnny. Let me down easy. “
“Where does it hurt, Pa?”
He pointed to his left side, just below his ribs. “I got it right there.”
I put my arm around him from the right side and eased him down out of the wagon. He stood there for a minute, holding on to the wagon to steady himself. “Thanks,” he said to the driver. “I don’t reckon I’d have made it up the mountain by myself.”
“We owe you fellas that much,” he said.
Pa let go of the wagon. The driver snapped his whip, and the horses began to tug the wagon on up the mountain past the house toward Swift Run Gap and the lowlands on the other side. Pa put his arm around my shoulder, and I helped him into the house. He eased himself into the old rocking chair
by the stove in the kitchen. I wrestled up some wood to boost up the fire, and Ma fixed him some dinner. It wasn’t much—boiled turnips and a piece of beef Ma’d managed to hide from the Yankees. “Don’t worry,” Pa said. “It beats hardtack and molasses. The Yankees pretty much cleaned out the valley—burned the mills and the barns full of wheat, stole the livestock. There’s not much left for anybody down there now, us or them.”
Then he told us how he got hit. “We were up the valley a ways, up past Massanutten Mountain. There’s a little river up there they call Cedar Creek. The Yanks were camped to the north of it.” He laid his knife on the table to stand for Cedar Creek. “We slipped across the creek before sunrise right here.” He walked his fingers across the knife. “It was foggy and dark. They had no idea we were out there. We jumped on them and they broke and ran and we chased them out.” He slid his fingers along the table top. “Finally we dug in at a place they call Belle Grove. But in the afternoon their cavalry came charging back at us.” He galloped his fingers along the table. “We didn’t have a chance. They rode right into us and we got up and ran back across Cedar Creek. It was an awful mess, our men trying to get through the creek with horsemen all around us, slashing with their sabers, and their infantry coming along behind, firing, and the wounded falling facedown in the creek and drowning.” His fingers scrambled back and forth across the knife.
“Were you scairt, Pa?” Sam said.
“You bet I was. There wasn’t never a man in battle who wasn’t scared. Sometimes when the fighting’s hot and you and them are right on top of each other shooting it out, you get so busy you forget to be scared. You don’t forget when you’re running for your life with the cavalry all around you slashing and shooting. All you can do is duck and dodge and pray to the good Lord to get you out in one piece. I ducked and dodged my way across the creek. I was just coming up the other bank when I felt the ball go into me.” He stopped and looked out the window at the stubble in the hayfield, remembering. “It’s funny,” he said slowly. “All those years I saw men hit and a whole lot of them killed, too—hundreds of ‘em, thousands, maybe—I don’t know.” He went on looking out the window, and I knew he was thinking about all those men who had died. “They call it ‘seeing the elephant’—that means going into a fight. You march along strung out in a line, supposed to be thirteen inches apart, though I can tell you, once it gets hot you’re not thinking about staying thirteen inches from the next man, or even worrying about where the next man is. You’re thinking about those bluecoats up there behind a stone wall or over a creek and the balls flying all around you. Oh, you’re scared, all right. But you wouldn’t turn tail and run, for you’ve been with all those fellas around you for weeks and months, and you couldn’t face them afterward if you did. So you keep on marching toward the guns, and here a man goes down and there another man goes down, but on you go until you’re a couple of hundred yards from them. Then you begin to run and yell, and the men around you keep on falling, but you don’t pay any attention, you just keep on running toward those guns up ahead, all the while loading and firing as best you can on the run. And either they give up and run on out of there, or it gets so hot you can’t go any farther and you give up and crawl on back to where you started from.”
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