Yankee in Atlanta

by Jocelyn Green

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Friday, September 2, 1864

  Morning dawned in a haze of smoke over a city panting between two flags. Abandoned by the Confederacy, not yet taken by the Union, Atlanta was without police protection, a municipal government, and practically without any law, for how long no one knew. As Noah Becker stepped outside in search of a doctor for Jack, he carried his revolver with him.

  This is my fault. If Noah hadn’t stopped Jack and talked to him, he wouldn’t have tossed his canteen onto the waiting shell. How cruel and pointless, that a man could survive three years of battles and be brought to death’s door by a wayward canteen. Noah pinched the bridge of his nose, the bump from its break pushing against his thumb. He would find a doctor before Caitlin awoke.

  Striding up to Dr. Calhoun’s residence, Noah knocked on the door and waited. A Negro man cracked it open a few inches, scanning Noah up and down. “Any Yankees out there?”

  “Not that I can see. Is the doctor in?”

  “Yessir, but he sick in bed. Tumor on one side of his face. You sick too? You sho nuff don’t look it.”

  “No. I have a friend, though, who needs a doctor’s care. Is there any other doctor in town?”

  The Negro shook his head of tightly coiled grey hair. “No how. Our doctor is the only one left, and that only because he can’t get up.”

  Noah tipped his hat. “Thank you kindly.”

  The door clicked shut.

  Moments later, tramping feet could be heard before their owners could be seen. From the porch of the doctor’s residence, Noah watched dusty blue columns march into town until the order to halt and rest scattered them like ants from an anthill just destroyed.

  There were surgeons among them.

  Noah was their enemy. But Jack is one of them. So was Caitlin.

  Slipping away between the houses and bombproofs, Noah quickly arrived back home.

  “Caitlin.” He shook her awake by her shoulder.

  She startled beneath his hand, then right away, checked for Jack’s pulse. The air in the room was fetid. Gangrene had a voracious appetite.

  “The Yankees are here.” He kept his voice low. “They have surgeons, medicine, everything Jack needs, and they are only blocks away. In fact, they will be coming through here any moment. All you need do is step outside and hail a congenial-looking fellow. Your accent will protect you as soon as you speak, I wager.” And who wouldn’t want to help a beauty like you?

  “They are here?” Her hand fluttered to her heart. “You’ll be their prisoner, you must go!”

  “Tell Ana I love her—”

  “Papa? You’re leaving again? But I need you here!”

  Noah’s heart buckled at the tremor in Ana’s voice. He flew to her side and wrapped her in his arms for but a moment. “The war cannot last much longer, now.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “Go!” Tears swam in Caitlin’s eyes.

  “I’ll come back.” Noah stood, though Ana’s wail nearly broke him in half. “Stay safe. We’ll be together again.”

  A hard knock sounded on the front door.

  “It’s for you,” he whispered to Caitlin, and stole out the back door before his lips could steal her kiss.

  Caitlin’s voice floated down the hall as Noah left, her Irish lilt thickening as she spoke. She was keeping the Yankees busy for a moment, giving him time to sneak away. It was time to rejoin Hood’s army, though wrenching himself from Caitlin and Ana took all the strength he had. Lord, bless them and keep them. Make Your face shine upon them and give them peace. Give us all peace, in Jesus’ name.

  “Halt!” The cocking of a hammer behind Noah stopped him cold. “Put your weapon down, slowly, and turn around.”

  “OH WHAT A NIGHT we had. They came burning the store house and about night it looked like the whole town was on fire. We all set up all night. If we had not set up our house would have ben burnt up for the fire was very near and the soldiers were going around setting houses on fire where they were not watched. They behaved very badly.”

  —CARRIE BERRY, 10-year-old resident of Atlanta

  New York City

  Saturday, September 3, 1864

  From inside the brownstone on Sixteenth Street, Edward and Ruby Goodrich could hear the guns saluting Sherman’s victory and the bands striking up “Hail, Columbia” in Union Square, where George and Vivian were sure to be. They could hear the crowds cheering as much for Lincoln as for Sherman, since Atlanta’s fall was a thunderbolt to any peace negotiations. “Let the war go on!” they could hear the people shout.

  “I imagine Reverend Lanser will be utterly rejoicing over this in church tomorrow,” Edward muttered over his newspaper.

  “And why not? Isn’t it a great victory for the Union?” Ruby sat on the floor, rolling a ball back and forth to Aiden.

  “Yes, of course. For the Union. But for humanity, I’d consider it a failure. Are you forgetting my cousin Caitlin was living in Atlanta? We still don’t know if she survived that senseless shelling. Aunt Viv is absolutely beside herself until she hears from her, or from Jack.”

  And that is the most you’ve said to me in a week, thought Ruby. After Edward had been withdrawn as a candidate for the pastorate, tension dripped between them. Hot words and cold silences pushed them to separate bedrooms. Refusing to hear her story, Edward drowned himself in his work and Ruby gave all her attention to Aiden. It was easy to do, especially since several of her sewing clients had withdrawn their business from her.

  “Aye, I remember Caitlin. I used to watch her and Jack when they were children in Seneca Village. I do pray they are both safe.”

  Edward grunted. “How holy of you.”

  Ruby whipped her head up, skin tingling. “You know darlin’, it was not so very long ago that you were nurturing my faith instead of mocking it.”

  “Ball! Ball!” Aiden protested her brief pause in the game. She rolled it back to him.

  “Ah yes,” Edward said behind his paper. “I’m the one who’s changed, then, am I?”

  “Aye.” She swallowed. “Yes. You have, and not for the better.”

  “Funny. In my estimation, it’s my circumstances that have changed, not me. You may say you are not different, but the information I have certainly is. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “You don’t have the whole story, Edward. I want to tell you, if you’ll promise not to interrupt, and not to hide behind that newspaper.” Even though you once told me you were not my confessor. That we were all sinners saved by grace.

  “Mama! Ball! Roll ball!”

  Edward folded his paper and dropped it to the floor. Quickly, Ruby rolled the ball back to Aiden.

  “I’ll start with the war. Matthew left, and I was on my own to make ends meet. His pay was delayed by months.” Aiden rolled the ball back, and she returned it to the boy. “I took in as much sewing as I could, but it wasn’t enough. I was evicted from my apartment and looked in Five Points for lodging. But I couldn’t bring myself to stay in the only flophouse I could afford.”

  She hazarded a glance to Edward and saw that his eyes had lost their hard edge. He appeared to be listening. Ruby caught the ball and rolled it back once more. “I tried applying to the Five Points House of Industry, but was denied for lack of references. Then I begged some Moral Reform Association ladies to give me a chance and place me as a domestic somewhere.” She rolled the ball to Aiden.

  “It was while I was there, that Phineas Hastings—”

  Crack! A wail erupted from Aiden, who held his head with both chubby hands. He had stumbled into the corner of a table while chasing the ball.

  “Oh, did you hurt your head? Let me see.” Ruby scooped him up and tried to console him, but the boy would have none of it. She bounced him on her hip and paced the parlor, murmuring in his ear.

  Edward just sat there, watching. “Story time is over, I see.” He stood.

  Ruby frowned over Aiden’s head at him. Unfair. “I can’t very well finish it while he’s upset
now, can I?”

  “Course not. Just drop everything and take care of his needs. Seems to be your specialty.”

  Tears bit Ruby’s eyes. The man was impossible.

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Monday, September 12, 1864

  “Caitlin.” Jack’s voice was edged with impatience. “It is the best way. It is the only way.”

  “I’m not leaving,” she said again. The Union doctor had successfully treated Jack’s leg with nitric acid before the gangrene had spread too far. His recovery, though incomplete as of yet, was enough for Caitlin to have no qualms about arguing with him now.

  “Then you are at odds with Uncle Billy, and I sincerely doubt you’ll win.”

  Uncle Billy. Such a congenial-sounding label for such a battle-hardened general. William Tecumseh Sherman may be a military genius, but his recent order for a forced evacuation of every civilian still in Atlanta marked the first of its kind since the forced removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. Certainly it was the first time such an order was imposed on white people, to Caitlin’s knowledge.

  “It’s for your own good. Don’t you see? Atlanta is a worn-out, used-up town. There’s not enough food to feed you, and the Union army can’t be handing out rations to all four thousand of you every day.” He flipped a piece of hardtack in the air and let it clatter on the table. “And think of the wood! Winter is coming, and where is the wood with which to keep you warm? Every stick of it is in the miles of abatis and fortifications left behind by your city’s fair defenders.”

  Caitlin struggled to maintain an even tone. “The city’s defenders bore their breasts to shot and shell for six grueling weeks of siege. Their courage outlasted their odds. And you forget, this city is not ‘mine’ by choice.”

  “Yes, it is. You are making the choice right now.”

  “It’s not that simple. I have a responsibility to Ana. And to Noah. He said he’d come back, and he deserves to find his daughter when he does.”

  “Noah, is it?” Jack raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes. The man who brought you to me. Remember him?”

  “I remember I told our mother I’d see you to safety. Her heart bleeds for you every day you’re gone. And now Sherman is offering free transportation to Nashville, and you thumb your nose at it, as though it were nothing. I won’t be here forever to watch out for you.”

  Did he not realize how much she had endured without him thus far? “What about Ana?”

  “Bring her with you. Mother would love her to pieces, you know she would.”

  “Jack.” She pinned him with her gaze. “I’m not leaving.”

  “Not for me? Not for Mother?”

  Caitlin pressed her lips resolutely.

  Sparks burned in Jack’s eyes. “Did you ever stop to consider how terribly selfish you are being? There are people who love you. And they aren’t here, they are home. That’s New York, in case you’ve forgotten. You have family, Caitlin. Me, Mother, Uncle George, and our cousin Edward. Go home.”

  “I’m glad Mother has been reunited with her long-lost brother and nephew, I truly am. If she’s well taken care of with her family, then she doesn’t need me, too.” Caitlin drew a breath. “This is my home now,” she whispered.

  Jack’s nostrils flared as he looked out the window. Brassy strains of “Yankee Doodle” floated on the breeze from the band playing at City Hall. He turned back, eyes flashing. “And what will happen to you after we leave Atlanta, and its former citizens return? How do you think they’ll treat you when they come back and see you’re a Unionist after all?”

  Caitlin swallowed. Licked her lips. “You may be right. But Noah—”

  “‘But Noah.’ Always Noah. He is a Rebel soldier, sister. Or did this somehow escape your notice? He is the enemy!”

  “He is not!” She dropped her eyelids. He is … a phantom. A hope. A dream. “He is not the enemy.”

  Caitlin met Jack’s gaze once more. He did not need to speak for her to read his thoughts.

  Traitor.

  During the next ten days, thirty-five hundred people departed Atlanta. Families with relatives in the Rebel army or farther South, were taken to Rough and Ready. Those with family in the North, or strong Union sentiments, were taken north. Naomi Ford was among them, on her way to her son in Gettysburg, and yet another hole was carved from Caitlin’s life, until her heart felt as riddled as Noah’s shell-blasted, wind-swept house.

  Still, she stayed. By virtue of Caitlin’s relation to Jack and Ana’s broken legs, they were among the fifty families allowed to remain, on one condition. They would not be a burden to the Union army.

  But the Union army was a burden to its host. Tens of thousands of Union troops built camp homes for themselves by pulling planks of wood off houses and harvesting bricks for their own stout chimneys. Pulled up fences provided wood for their floors. Villages of these little cabins now crowded together in front of City Hall and spread across open fields.

  Every other day, the army sent foraging wagons to scour the deserted countryside. The train always returned after three or four days replete with corn, sweet potatoes, flour, chicken, hogs, cows, and whatever else the quartermasters could find to confiscate.

  Caitlin asked for nothing—except for the soldiers to stop pulling Noah’s house apart for their cabins. While bands played and generals smoked cigars from the grand porches of her neighbors, Caitlin picked corn from ruts in the road like a dog lapping at crumbs from the table.

  Noah would come back. They would be there for his return.

  Rock Island Prison Camp, Illinois

  Thursday, October 13, 1864

  The rags draping Noah’s gaunt frame shivered against his skin while trees dripped with curls of sunshine and fire. Below autumn’s majestic canopy, he sat in the dirt, his back against the wooden planks of his barracks. In one hand, he held his day’s ration: a two-inch square of pungent salt pork and a one-third pound loaf of stone-hard bread. Man does not live on bread alone … But without enough bread, men died.

  Noah tossed the sick-smelling pork aside and slammed his loaf against the wall to break it into more manageable pieces. A gunshot cracked the air, spraying dirt all over Noah when the bullet hit the earth beside him.

  Noah dropped his bread and spread his hands to show the guards he was no threat. He should have remembered loud noises were grounds for being shot. In fact, since he had arrived at the camp, Noah had counted six prisoners who had been shot inside the fence, not trying to escape. At least one of them had been shot while he was inside his own barracks.

  Between six and eight thousand Southerners were imprisoned on this three-mile-long, half-mile-wide island in the Mississippi River between Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa. Surrounded by a twelve-foot-high fence and guarded by the 108th U.S. Colored Troops, Noah had never felt so far from home.

  What’s left of it. Was his house even still standing? Were Caitlin and Ana scratching out their survival from Atlanta’s ruins? When would a letter be able to get through the lines to them?

  Noah had nothing but the threads on his back. Everything he’d worked for since coming to America was gone. The Confederate currency and bonds were worthless now. How could he hope to provide for his family even after the war was over?

  Forgive me, he prayed silently. I am grateful for life itself. He would get home to Caitlin and Ana somehow. Someday.

  “Becker.”

  Noah squinted into the sun to find Col. Andrew J. Johnson, commanding officer of the prison camp, and quickly scrambled to his feet. “Sir?”

  “Hungry?”

  Noah returned his gaze, but said nothing. Of course he was hungry. He was wasting away.

  “You’re foreign-born, isn’t that right?”

  “Germany.” Would his immigrant status never fade?

  The colonel cocked an eyebrow. “Did you happen to have any connection to the 1848 revolution over there?”

  Wilhelm’s face surged in Noah’s mind. Yes he and his brother had fought
for the unification of Germany, and a democratic government and for the equal rights of all people. “Yes,” he conceded, cringing inwardly. The irony that he was now a prisoner for siding with secession and slavery was not lost on him.

  “Did you know Davenport is full of your old comrades?”

  Noah frowned. “Pardon me?”

  “The Forty-eighters. German revolutionaries, intellectual and political refugees. They came to America via New Orleans, then sailed up the Mississippi until landing in Davenport, just across the river from us now. One-third of the city is German, they still speak the language. You’d fit right in.”

  I doubt it. While a twinge of nostalgia washed over him, Noah had not come to the United States to be part of a German enclave. He had come to be an American. And now, neither North nor South would claim him. “Will that be all?”

  “No. It’s just the beginning. I suspect you fought to protect your state against invading troops more than for the principles of the Confederacy.”

  Noah waited.

  “How would you like full rations and a new set of clothes to keep you warm this winter? How would you like to get out of here, away from this constant armed surveillance? How would you like one hundred dollars bounty and a regular paycheck—in greenbacks?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Johnson cut his voice low. “I’m recruiting you into the Union army.”

  “To fight against the South?” Noah could never make war against his former comrades.

  “Never. You have my word.”

  Noah’s brow furrowed. “Then what?”

  “Our military presence in the West needs reinforcements. You’d have to swear allegiance to the United States of America, but then you’d trade your rags for a soldier’s uniform. In blue. We’d feed you well.”

  Noah pinched the bridge of his nose, the bump beneath his thumb a reminder of his previous transgressions. Temporary desertion was one matter, but literally turning coats another. No matter what he chose, he’d be hated by one government, and disposable to the other.