The Battle of the Crater: A Novel

by Gingrich, Newt

  Garland settled down on a low camp stool, leaning forward slightly, hands clasped between his knees, staring into the fire as James had asked.

  James picked up his stick of charcoal, sharpened it with his razor pocketknife, and resumed his work.

  “Garland, I know so little about you,” James said. “Just that before the 28th formed up you worked as a recruiter for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts and turned down noncommissioned rank with both. Mind telling me a bit more about yourself?”

  “Sir?”

  “I’m not an officer, James will do.”

  Garland looked up at him for a moment and there was a flicker of a smile.

  “Not many white men make that offer.”

  “You might be surprised once all this is over. Besides, I’m Irish, been through some hard knocks myself.”

  “I’ve found that some of the Irish hate us even more than white folks born here.”

  James did not reply to that.

  “Just James. Remember, I asked that before, all right?”

  Garland nodded.

  “Where are you from originally?”

  “Georgia.”

  “Strange, you don’t have much Georgia in your voice.”

  Garland laughed.

  “Most white folks say it’s hard to tell us colored apart and we all sound alike.”

  “Well, the same is true for us. Cork and Galway are as different as night and day to someone born there.”

  Garland nodded.

  “So you were born in Georgia. When?”

  “Not sure really. I guess around 1830 or so.”

  “Family?”

  He shook his head.

  “Never seemed to have time or be what the Lord wanted of me. Last I heard my mother was still alive though.”

  “And how long ago was that?”

  Garland looked off.

  “More than ten years since I last saw her.”

  James felt a kinship with that. His own mother was dead, buried at sea. His father, last he had heard, had died a drunk, killed while working on the Illinois Central, and he had felt precious little emotion over that loss. His brother … well, Garland knew that story.

  “In 1853 my master was selected for the Senate by the state legislators and he took me with him to Washington to be one of his house servants.”

  “Your master was a United States senator?” James asked with surprise.

  “Yes, sir,” he paused, forcing a bit of a nervous smile. “Yes, James, Senator Robert Toombs.”

  James could detect just a trace of pride in his voice, the way a man might speak of a regimental commander whom he respected as a leader.

  “The same Toombs who was secretary of state for the Confederate government and then a general?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Well, there were times I damned him,” Garland said, and now he did smile. “He presented a strange argument. Said he was for keeping the Union together at all cost and against secession, but at the same time said slavery should be allowed to spread clear to California.”

  Garland chuckled.

  “Funny how masters at times never quite figure out that servants and slaves have mighty big ears while standing there silent in a corner of the room, all dressed up in finery, and ready to step forward and quietly refill a glass of brandy for a gentleman or punch for the ladies gathered in the next room.

  “For over five years I can’t say I sat in, but I most certainly stood in, on nearly every debate held in that house of his, only three blocks from the Capitol. On many a day, I accompanied him to the Capitol itself carrying his umbrella, taking his coat, and then waiting, but while waiting always listening to the debates from the other side of the door. I can’t say I met, but I most certainly served a drink, opened the door for, and at times spoke to nearly every famous man of that time in the Senate, Congress, and even from the White House. Jefferson Davis himself was there more than once, and even northern men like Sumner, before he got caned so wickedly, and the man who is now secretary of state.”

  “You mean Seward?” James asked, now truly taken aback.

  Garland smiled.

  “Even carried on a correspondence with him after the war started, urging him to mobilize black troops.”

  “You knew Seward, so you could write to him?”

  Garland grinned.

  “You act like you never met someone famous or high up before. And you the famous artist for Harper’s?”

  James just smiled in return and figured it was best to let that line of the discussion drop.

  “When the Senate wasn’t in session, and the Senator went back home to Georgia, I stayed on to oversee the house and maintain it. That’s when I learned to read and write though I already had the basics of it from Bible lessons while still in Georgia. Some fine Quaker ladies in Washington had set up a school for colored folks to learn, and I spent many an evening there studying, God bless them.”

  “So how did you get free?”

  “Easy enough,” and Garland pointed to his feet. “One morning I just packed a bag. I am a tad ashamed to admit it, but I felt after all those years of service I was owed at least a few dollars, so I withdrew from the petty cash box, that was kept to pay delivery boys and such, just over thirteen dollars. Actually all that was in there. That purchased me a train ticket as far as Buffalo.

  “So it was easy enough. I went to a colored printer’s assistant down on K Street, he made up a fancy-looking document saying I was a free man with papers of manumission, and signed it for me with a real fancy signature. I packed my bag, walked out the door and down to the Baltimore and Ohio station.

  “I had a lot to think about on that walk. I posted a letter for my mother to a white preacher near the plantation, who I knew would read it to her. I doubt if I will ever see her again in this world.”

  He paused and for a moment it seemed as if emotions would take hold.

  “Do you have any idea how many men of this regiment cannot tell you tonight where a parent, a wife, or a child is?”

  James did not reply.

  Garland sighed and stared back into the fire.

  “I have no idea if she is alive or dead. And she has no idea of my fate other than that I was most likely cursed as a runaway.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it anymore,” James offered.

  “No, I like to finish what I start.”

  He shook his head.

  “I knew I’d be branded a thief for taking the thirteen dollars. Toombs was a good man in many ways to his slaves, or servants as he called us, in the house in Washington. He even talked about granting me freedom after he died.

  “That did bother me, though. You see when I learned to read I started to read things Frederick Douglass was already writing. I read the Declaration of Independence and how it said all men were created equal. This was just after the Dred Scott decision, which Toombs applauded, but which said I was not even, in the capital named after Washington, considered to be the equal of a mule or a horse.

  “There was a lot to think about as I took that walk to the station. That train took me to Buffalo and from there I walked to Toronto on the other side of the river where I knew I would be safe from slave catchers. I lived there and I waited.”

  “What were you waiting for?”

  “This is my country, too,” Garland said fiercely. “How could I enjoy my freedom, with the knowledge of so many of my race, or to those of but half race, quarter race, or one-eighth race, still in bondage in a nation that says it was founded on certain self-evident principles derived from God.”

  James said nothing.

  Garland took a deep breath and exhaled noisily.

  “I hear a lot of the men calling you preacher or reverend rather than sergeant,” James urged, and as he did so, he worked quickly to try and catch the serious, almost tragic look in Garland’s eyes. He noticed the way Garland�
��s comrades, sitting in the shadows of the campfire, sat in respectful silence, listening to his story, more than one nodding as if they were hearing their own story as well.

  “The preacher in me? Well there are precious few schools in this land where a black man can actually be ordained and given a certificate of some kind. I was a runaway from a rather famous man, who had posted a notice that I had stolen money and silverware from him as I left his employment.”

  He actually chuckled and shook his head.

  “Now that did bother me a bit. I figured he owned me near on to thirty years, so taking fifty cents a year or so wasn’t a sin, but the silverware as well? That was just plain wrong to claim that against me.”

  He laughed softly and more than a few commented that he should have taken every silver knife, fork, and spoon in the house.

  Garland looked back at them smiling and then just shook his head.

  “The thirteen dollars was enough to get me to freedom.

  “So there I was, in a strange city, in another country no less.

  “I felt it best not to draw attention to myself, but I had always felt the calling to preach the word of God since I was a boy. That white preacher I mentioned would read Bible stories to us slaves, and I was able to remember them by heart. Once I did learn to read the Bible became my guide. I read it and reread it. It taught me much. Not just about God and salvation, but about how this language can be shaped to form men’s hearts and men’s ideals.”

  “You do a good job of it,” James responded and there was evident respect in his voice. “I heard the way you talked to the men tonight. You know when to be a sergeant major, and you know when to be a darn good preacher.”

  “Thank you,” and again he hesitated, “James.”

  “And the rest of it?” James continued to work on his sketch, now using a fine pencil to hatch out the remaining lines of the drawing.

  “Then the war came. I returned to New York first. I wrote to everyone I knew in Washington … Seward, Welles, Sumner, even the President himself.”

  “What did you write?”

  “That, but give the word, and two hundred thousand black men would spring to the call. This war was not just about the Union, but about freedom long denied as well. I do wonder if the President ever read my letter.”

  James made no comment, but felt he most likely had. Unless the letters were from outright cranks, potential threats, or scallywags looking for some government job, Lincoln tried to read or at least scan all his mail every day. John Hays most certainly would have singled out a letter from a former slave for notice.

  “I think he would have,” James finally ventured.

  Garland smiled at that, deep lines streaking his face as he did so, and James wondered if he should somehow change the face in his drawing from somber and reflective to more cheerful, but he had already decided that he would title this one, A Colored Sergeant on the Eve of Battle, and would send it in to Harper’s. Smiling could too easily be turned into a caricature by an engraver back at the publisher. Publishers, even Harper’s, were notorious for changing around what an artist or writer did.

  “When I heard that Governor Andrews of Massachusetts decided to jump the gun, and actually mobilize two colored regiments even before the Emancipation Proclamation was made official, I sat outside his office door for two days before getting an audience and offering my services as a recruiter.

  “Not many people knew this, most never will, that in reality there are precious few colored folks in old Massachusetts. I wandered as far afield as Ohio and Indiana, recruiting men, getting them vouchers for train tickets, and sending them back to that old Bay State. I bet there are more men in those two regiments who claim Ohio as their home than Boston.”

  He chuckled at the thought of it.

  “And that gave me the idea.”

  “Which was?”

  “Well it was evident, wasn’t it? I think I can honestly claim I personally recruited over two hundred men to the Cause. And yes, Colonel Shaw, God rest him, hearing of my work and after meeting with me, offered me the post of sergeant major in the regiment. It was then that I met Frederick Douglass and he urged me to take it as well. But I refused.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I saw a higher goal. Just say the good Lord pointed me a certain way that led to here.”

  Garland paused for a moment and raised his head.

  “Did you hear that?”

  James had not really noticed it until Garland stopped and called his attention to it.

  The camp was beginning to settle down for the night. Rather than be up till dawn drilling, they were at last to go back to a regular soldier’s schedule, already filled with the dire certainty that after this day off, on the following morning it was back to regular inspections, clean uniforms, polished brass, and drills.

  A rhythmic clapping had started. During the time they had been talking there had been the usual background chatter of a regimental camp, more enthusiastic and animated than usual this evening because of the news given this day. And though James had to admit it did seem somewhat alien to him, there was something even more different, that the way men talked, joked, bantered, and now sang was born out of a different culture.

  He had no words to define it. It was not like some stout and taciturn regiment from New England deciding to sing “Rock of Ages,” or some other hymn. It was not a group of Ohio boys laughing to some raucous and perhaps bawdy riverboat man’s song accompanied by a fiddler, or an Irish regiment singing a lament of a lost homeland across the sea, or a German regiment lustily cheering a good drinking song or a favorite hymn.

  This was unique.

  It was a rhythmic clapping; others were joining in. Snatches of words could be heard to the beat, sometimes picked up by others; sometimes, after a few repeats, the refrain would stop. A few lines of a more familiar song would be voiced, a few more voices joining in, then that would drift away as well.

  Someone was speaking a line when Garland, as if listening all along, had hushed him to silence.

  “We look like men a-marchin’ on…”

  The line was repeated and repeated. Other voices joined in. What had been spoken words began to pick up a cadence, a marching cadence, but also inflections, notes rising and settling, the first one to call it out a baritone, then a tenor joining in, then a bass, counterpointing, the words echoing.

  Garland, as if lost in the rhythm, was nodding his head, beginning to clap his hands.

  And then it happened.

  A second voice made a counter reply.

  “We look like men of war.”

  It was repeated instantly, as if fearful that the words might be lost. Some broke into approving applause at this new refrain, others increased the tempo. A drummer boy picked it up, beating to each step; a fifer struggled to add notes, following the rise and fall of the two-line chant.

  We look like men a-marchin’ on …

  We look like men o’ war.

  Garland turned to look back at James, and he could see that the man’s eyes were bright, struggling to hold back tears.

  “This is what I was called to do,” Garland said quickly, as if afraid he too might lose the words he had to speak.

  “I could have gone off with the 54th, maybe died in that charge down in front of Charleston, and I would have been content, but I had learned something while recruiting in Ohio and Indiana.”

  “And that is?”

  “Politics.”

  “God save you,” James said, trying to smile but with one ear still cocked to the chant.

  “Don’t you see?” Garland said excitedly. “Politics. In the early days of the war, there were volunteers aplenty for the government ranks. A call would go out for more men, a quota would be assigned to each congressional district, and it was up to the governor of each state, by any means possible, to meet that quota.

  “Well, by the spring of 1863, with newspapers filled page after page with the casualty lists of Chancell
orsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and by that autumn Chickamauga and Chattanooga, unless you bribed a man a thousand dollars or more in bounty, which each state had to raise again and again, no one was volunteering. All the good men, well the white men with a stomach for the fight and a belief in the Cause, be it for Union, against slavery, or both, were at the front lines. We all know what a disaster the draft has proven to be. And yet there were hundreds of thousands of men eager to answer the call, if only the governors would listen.

  “In a way I was ‘poaching’ on recruits in the Midwest. Every man, every black man out of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois I recruited for Massachusetts was one less man for the governor of the state I took him from. So I started writing letters to the governors. I’d tell them how many men I had loaded aboard trains leaving from Columbus, Indianapolis, Springfield, to fill the quotas of Massachusetts and ask if it wasn’t time they counted those men as their own instead.”

  James could not help but chuckle. The chanting was dying down; in a few more minutes tattoo would sound, and then, fifteen minutes after that, the new call the army had adopted for lights out, which had been written by Dan Butterfield the year before.

  He pulled out two cigars, and held one up to Garland, who hesitated and then nodded a thanks, reaching over to take it. Both bit the ends off; Garland put a stick into the fire to light the end, held it over to James as he puffed his cigar to life, and then lit his own.

  “Good Cuban, thank you, sir.”

  “James, please.”

  “Well, it isn’t every day a man gets a good Cuban. How much do those folks at Harper’s pay you?”

  “Not enough,” James chuckled. “Publishers never do, and believe me, they smoke far better cigars than I do while I’m up here with you men getting shot at.”

  “Well, thank them for me.”

  “The rest of your story, Sergeant Major. We have only a few minutes.”

  “Oh, yes,” and he puffed on the cigar for a moment, holding it out to look at it, the way any aficionado would when enjoying a good smoke.

  “I finally got a rise out of Governor Morton of Indiana. I must say he wasn’t too pleased to hear that at least a hundred or more men had been snatched off by me and by a less than scrupulous rival working for the state of Rhode Island where, believe me, you can count the colored on one hand.”