House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  He pushed through Martinsburg and on along the Valley pike. The road, a crushed limestone macadam, had once been hard and smooth; but for two years the tides of war had scoured it, the wheels of cannons and caissons and supply trains and the hoofs of horses and the feet of traveling men had beaten it and broken it. The damage they did, frost and snow and rain extended; so now it was in many places impassable for vehicles. At such spots the breaks had been by-passed, wagons and guns turning off into the fields; and when the ruts they cut became too deep, they took new ways. Every fence rail for miles had been burned for camp fires, and the highway, bordered by the scallops of the many turnouts like so much rude embroidery, was marked by the skeletons of wagons wrecked and abandoned, by the decayed carcasses of horses or of mules.

  Longstreet continued on this highway till, a few miles beyond Martinsburg, he found Lee’s bivouac where a singing creek flowed into a great bend of the Potomac. Its music was sweet in the hush of the evening, and the hamlet, not surprisingly, was called Falling Waters. Longstreet spoke to the commanding general. Had the warm day helped those persistent rheumatic twinges? Yes, they were better, Lee assured him. Yes, all went well.

  Next morning they woke to a drenching rain. The day began in sobering fashion. With a hard task ahead, the men must be kept strictly in hand, and though General Lee usually dealt lightly with offenders, this was not a time for mercy. So at dawn there was one execution in Pickett’s division, and there were four in that of General Rodes. Longstreet from his tent heard the spatter of those fusillades. The sound was muffled. Probably the poor devils had been marched down to some glade among the willows by the river, where the steep banks would stop any bullets that went astray; and Longstreet imagined the squads with levelled muskets, the men about to die, the condemned and their executioners alike drenched by the steady rain and the drip from sodden trees.

  When they had breakfasted they mounted, and at eleven o’clock they reached the ford at Williamsport. The Potomac, though it was here a wide and shallow stream, had long ago cut for itself a steep-sloped valley; and the road descended sharply to the narrow bottoms choked with willows, and crossed them to the waterside. Pickett’s division was in the lead, and although the hard rain had already soaked them through and through, nevertheless the men, preparing to wade across, stripped off their trousers. As he approached the other bank Longstreet saw a group of ladies, looking under their umbrellas like an overnight growth of strangely tinted mushrooms, waiting to welcome General Lee into Maryland. Then one of the trouserless soldiers called in shrill warning:

  “Shet yore eyes, ladies! Here we come!”

  Pickett turned to hush the man with a stern word; then, splashing back to his place at Longstreet’s side, he said with a chuckle: “That’s Red Wheatley of the First Virginia. He’s the regimental clown, keeps the men in good humor on the hardest march.”

  Longstreet had looked around to identify the jester, a brick-faced stalwart whose hat was all brim and no crown, his flaming hair plastered down by the steady rain. “He needs a new hat,” he commented, in mild amusement.

  “He claims he likes that one,” Pickett explained. “Says he’s afraid that red hair of his will catch fire if he keeps it dry!”

  When they rode up from the ford, General Lee spoke to the waiting ladies with a gentle courtesy. Longstreet thought one of them, so small she seemed like a child, was no bigger than Louisa. Last night a courier had brought Lee dispatches from Richmond; but there was nothing from Mrs. Longstreet, and Longstreet wished he had some word. This was her fifth month; and during her pregnancies her worst times came with an inexorable regularity. She would be feeling badly through the days just ahead.

  Pickett’s men took the road that followed the valley of Conococheague Creek toward Greencastle, but Longstreet rode with General Lee to a roadside grove beyond the last houses of Williamsport. While they were at mess, a youngster brought a basket of raspberries as a present for General Lee. The boy was the age Gus would have been if he were still alive, and Longstreet made friends with him, at ease as he had always been with children. He called Trav to discuss in serious tones whether they could not use this young man on the staff, and the boy grinned and squirmed delightedly.

  Next morning General Lee rode on through Hagerstown toward Chambersburg, but Longstreet stayed to bring up the rear. When at last he turned his back on the Potomac he was conscious of a quickening of all his faculties, an intensified perceptiveness. He felt too a profound uneasiness. They were surrounded by a wall of hostile silence behind which any disaster might be preparing. Hooker was presumably almost directly south of them, for they had moved northwest into the Valley, then northeast to the Potomac. Washington itself was off to the southeast, so they were deep in enemy territory, and Longstreet felt like a blindfolded man, or like one who tries to cross a strange room in darkness, expecting at any moment to stumble over the furniture.

  No doubt their own cavalry now guarded their flank and rear, and General Lee must know from Stuart’s reports where Hooker’s army was; yet Longstreet could not be sure. This morning when they parted, Lee had certainly been in an angry humor, jerking his head in that nervous, sidewise fashion which always meant that his temper was under hard control. Longstreet had suggested that they detach men to establish signalling stations along the mountain on their flank. “They could give us early intelligence of any enemy approach,” he pointed out. But General Lee shook his head.

  “No, no. Stuart will let us know. He’s watching them. I think Hooker has gone to sleep.” And he repeated: “If those people had moved, Stuart would let me know.” Longstreet thought that repetition sounded as though Lee wished to reassure himself.

  This was another weary day of mud and rain, so that even when they rode out of low rolling hills into a wide and fruitful valley, they could see only near-by farms and fields. South Mountain to the east, though its ramparts could not be far away, was screened by the steady downpour. Longstreet, remembering that day last fall when McClellan had come over the mountains to threaten flank and rear, wished to be ready for any such move by Hooker now, so he stayed near the rear; and long before dark began to fall, a few miles short of Greencastle, he ordered the headquarters tents pitched and halted for the night.

  Rain, two days of rain, with its threat of rising water in the river behind them, gave him troubled dreams; but when he woke it was no longer raining, and the tone of the wind and the feel of the air gave cheering promise of better weather. He was at breakfast when Moxley Sorrel brought a stranger to meet him. “Lieutenant Colonel Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards,” Sorrel explained. “He has letters of introduction from Secretary Seddon.” Sorrel added smilingly: “He’s been trying to catch us up for days.”

  Longstreet, eager in this clearing weather to push on, gave the Englishman only an inattentive welcome; and when breakfast was done he took the saddle. Greencastle seemed to be a modestly comfortable town, with pleasant brick houses and an air of thrifty well-being. Certainly it was set in fine farming country, through which it was contenting now to ride. He and the staff were somewhat ahead of the column of the First Corps when they came into Chambersburg. The few citizens on the streets watched them with masked eyes; the solid and substantial houses and business buildings, closed and shuttered, seemed to wear sullen and forbidding aspect.

  The road by which they entered the town descended to a public square that was not a square at all but a diamond, with uneven sides. There Longstreet pulled up his horse, and Moxley Sorrel brought one of the civilians who had watched their arrival to answer the General’s questions.

  The man was willing enough to talk. Longstreet inquired about roads. This pike by which they had come, the man said, led on to Harrisburg. The highway that crossed the square was the turnpike from Pittsburgh to Baltimore. If they turned east toward Baltimore, six miles would bring them to Fayetteville and then to a little village named Greenwood two miles farther on, and then over the mountains to Cashtown sixteen miles away.
Gettysburg was twenty-four miles eastward along the pike; and another fifty miles or so beyond Gettysburg lay Baltimore. Longstreet asked the man his name and his business.

  “Jacob Hoke,” he said. “Merchant.”

  “Have you seen General Lee?”

  “Yes sir. He and General Hill got here yesterday afternoon. They had a council of war right here in the Diamond. Then he rode out the Baltimore pike, so I guess that’s where you’re bound.”

  “The less guessing you do, Mr. Hoke, and the less talking, the safer you will be. Where is General Lee now?”

  “He camped out in Messersmith’s Woods. Shetter’s Woods, they used to call it, till George Messersmith bought it. It’s a picnic grove.’

  Sorrel approached to say General Lee had left an aide here with orders. Longstreet’s corps was to proceed without a halt out the Harrisburg Turnpike and camp well beyond the town. “We turn off the pike after we pass a Mennonite church,” Sorrel explained. “There’s good water in a creek, and good camping ground.”

  General Pickett was already leading his division into the square. “You had better leave guides for General McLaws and General Hood,” Longstreet directed. “Tell them General Lee wants no halt in the town.” He called Major Moses, and as the officer approached Longstreet spoke again to the civilian who had answered his questions. “Mr. Hoke, this is Major Moses, in charge of our commissary. I trust you will help him meet some of our needs.”

  Mr. Hoke promised to do so, and Longstreet nodded in dismissal and turned his horse to join General Pickett and rode on through the town. Beyond the Diamond and the tight-shuttered stores they came into a neighborhood of comfortable homes. A few women watched them pass, and Longstreet saw one buxom matron with a Union flag, pinned by the upper corners, spread across her ample bosom. He was not surprised when from the ranks behind him a jocose soldier shouted:

  “Look out thar, ma‘am! Show us Virginny men breastworks with a Yankee flag on ’em and we’ll storm ’em every time!”

  A shout of laughter from the ranks applauded the jest, and the woman fled indoors. Longstreet said to Pickett in a mild amusement: “General, that sounds like your red-headed man again.”

  “That’s Wheatley, yes,” General Pickett agreed. “But you can’t blame the men for answering sauce with sauce.”

  Longstreet smiled in his beard. “Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, eh?”

  A little beyond, as the street ascended at an easy grade toward the outskirts of town, a pretty girl standing under a cherry tree beside the fence that enclosed a well-tended lawn called: “Won’t you shoot off the bands a little, please, sirs?” General Pickett doffed his hat and bowed low and passed an order along to the first band in the column. The band began to play and Pickett reined his horse toward where the girl stood and pulled down a branch of the cherry tree and plucked a handful of the ripe fruit and sat a moment in laughing talk with her, eating the cherries, before he put his horse to a canter to overtake them.

  The road that led them out of town had climbed so gradually that Longstreet was surprised, when the last houses had been left behind, to find himself upon a crest with a wide outlook. To the east, beyond rich rolling farmlands, rose South Mountain like a wall; to the northwest at some distance he saw another conspicuous height of land. When the road dipped abruptly into a valley he pulled up his horse. The creek which had carved that valley meandered toward him from the east, its course easily traced by the willows and the thickets along its banks, and crossed the road ahead and then swung southward; the hill on that side dropped off more sharply.

  While the General’s eye swept this suddenly unfolded panorama, Pickett’s men filed off the road to bivouac along the creek. Longstreet chose a pleasant clump of trees where his own headquarters tents would be pitched. Then he asked Major Currain to find someone to show them the way to General Lee’s headquarters; and Trav brought the farmer on whose land Pickett’s division was making camp.

  “This is Mr. Long, General,” he explained. “He’s concerned about the damage we may do to his standing crops.”

  The farmer seemed resigned to loss. “Guess’t can’t be helped,” he said. “If you’ll keep your men away from my barns and my family, I won’t complain.” He went with them to point out a byway that would take them across to the Baltimore pike. “You hit the pike and turn back towards town and you’ll see General Lee’s tents.”

  The ride proved longer than Longstreet had expected, a fair three miles. When they arrived, General Lee was dictating an order; and Longstreet waited till he was done, then made his report.

  “Pickett’s division is going into camp, General. I left guides to lead McLaws and Hood to the bivouac, and ordered no halt in the town.”

  Lee nodded approval. “Keep your men in their camps, General. No one is to go into Chambersburg except on business. We must give the citizens no cause to complain of us. See to it that your men behave themselves as soldiers should. We will stay here till tomorrow, possibly longer.”

  Longstreet wished to ask whether there was news from Stuart; but Lee seemed abstracted, so he refrained. He rode back to his own headquarters, scanning this Pennsylvania countryside. The small farms appeared to be fruitful and prosperous, but there were none of those handsome houses and vast estates which were a part of the Southern scene. He reflected that where everyone shared a general prosperity, classes must tend to disappear; but would not that put an end to aspiration, to ambition? Was not a caste system the mark of a healthy society? Certainly every Southerner believed so.

  Or at least every Southern planter believed so, every Southerner of family and cultivation. It was possible that the poor man or the yeoman farmer or the mechanic might disagree. Longstreet shook his head. No matter. His business was not to reform society. His business was war.

  At headquarters Major Moses was waiting Longstreet’s return. “Well, General,” the Major reported, “your Mr. Hoke is a spendthrift with words. He could talk the legs off a stove!”

  Longstreet smiled. “You met your match?” The Commissary had a lively tongue.

  “In more ways than one, yes sir. To hear Mr. Hoke, there’s hardly a dry crust of bread left in Chambersburg.” And the Major explained: “The local people began to move off toward Harrisburg a week ago Monday; took their wagons, horses, cattle, carriages, everything they could carry or transport. Some of Milroy’s fugitives from Winchester came through that day, and our cavalry got here the day after.”

  “Had we any trouble with the civilians?”

  “No sir.” Moses laughed. “One of our troopers fell off his horse and the jar set off his carbine. He thought the shot had come from a house, and went raging up to bang on the door. The man who lived there, a man named Brand, put on his wife’s clothes and ran off and hid to save his neck. After that, General Jenkins required all arms to be surrendered.”

  “When did General Ewell get here?”

  “Tuesday. But by that time the Chambersburg people had cleaned out the freight warehouse full of government stores; bacon, bread, beans, flour, everything. Damn their eyes! We could have used those stores. Rodes’s division came in Wednesday morning. Mr. Hoke says over ten thousand men passed through here that day.”

  “I suppose Mr. Hoke sent the news to Harrisburg.”

  “He denies it, but of course someone did.” And Moses added: “General Ewell was travelling in his carriage. He put up at the Franklin Hotel, raised a flag over the court house, seized all the liquor in town, and requisitioned clothing and saddles and bridles and feed, and as much bread and molasses and salt and flour as they could supply. He paid for everything, of course, though the people here didn’t think much of our money. But some good trader bought up all he could get at five cents on the dollar and then sold it for twenty-five cents to the local tanner; and the tanner used it to buy the hides of the beef cattle that Ewell’s corps slaughtered.”

  Longstreet smiled. “You’ll get no change out of these Dutchmen, Major. They’re pretty sha
rp.” He asked: “When did General Ewell leave?”

  “Yesterday. He went toward Harrisburg, but General Early took the Baltimore pike.”

  “No resistance?”

  “Nothing but casual skirmishing. Mr. Hoke compliments us on the good behavior of our men. He says a man named Strite was killed by some stragglers a few miles south of town; but that was the only real violence.”

  Longstreet nodded. “Be sure you give no unnecessary offense in your work.”

  Colonel Fremantle joined them at mess that day, and Longstreet drew the Englishman into conversation. Fremantle said he had entered the Confederacy through Mexico and Texas some three months before. “I travelled from Brownsville to San Antonio in a wagon driven by a jolly gentleman named Sargent——”

  “Sargent?” Longstreet echoed in surprise. “A fat fellow with a gift for mule talk?”

  “Yes. Though he was outshone in the latter respect by his companion, Judge Hyde. You know Mr. Sargent?”

  “Hyde too, eh? Yes, I know them both. I served for several years in that country.” Longstreet smiled. “I expect your English judges are a little more careful of their dignity, Colonel.”

  “Yes, perhaps they are,” the other agreed. “I understand that Judge Hyde is a member of your Texas parliament; but he seemed to make our mules his particular charge.”

  “I’ll wager you heard some language from those two.”

  “From Mr. Sargent, at least. If he thought a mule needed discipline, he called on the Judge to administer the cudgelling; but he himself produced the language without any assistance!”

  “You must have heard some words new to you?”

  “Yes sir, I did.” Fremantle added: “Yet I have observed that most of your cultivated gentlemen speak very much as Englishmen do.”