***
Trying to put out fires single-handedly creates a lonely life. There I was stuck in that small Virginia town while two fires burned and I felt helpless to put either one of them out. One fire consisted of my conviction to do all that I could to destroy slavery as an accepted American institution. The second fire was enveloped in the love that I was developing for Warren, a man with whom I felt unusually comfortable. A man who was a friend and a lover, but by political standards, should be deemed my enemy. Politics said that we should be enemies, while intuition and chemistry declared us lovers. I wanted to know him better, to see his playful side, his creative side, but I feared then that he was a man whom I could never truly know very well because of our unusual circumstances in that time, in that awful war.
I had to hold on. I could see a future for us. Someday with the war behind us we could have a house filled with children spinning through the seasons, watching each take their turn developing their talents and traits all their own. Then, after the War we would be able to live honest lives, without any lies or shadows between us.
Time could change everything. With Warren, I might even give up my interests in city life and follow the grooves in the earth heading west. With the passage of a brand new law, the Homestead Act, the wagon trails that offered new lands were the hope of prosperity; a trade-off for hard work. Our citizenship was all we would need for 160 acres, enough for a homestead. Well, that, and a win for the North. A strong win in this god forsaken war.
Most of the time, though, it seemed to me that there might never be a time after the War. The War Between the States would continue forever. Battle after battle after long and bloody battle, it would gnash onwards. After all, if the War lasted very long it would certainly spread to the entire western portion of the continent as one territory after another, slave or free added states, as stars, to the flag. The Homestead Act on the other hand was bound to create a new kind of war altogether, a war for land, changing the landscape and its peoples forever.
Thick with thoughts, I had unconsciously gone about my chores and once again found myself in the garden pulling up some beets and cutting lettuce and parsley. Despite the breeze, I was hot and flushed. It was nearing midday. Sensing the presence of another person behind me I turned and was startled to see a young soldier, a Confederate Private. He appeared to be unarmed so I thought he could be Warren’s messenger. Perhaps he had forgotten something and sent the young man in his stead. I waited for him to say something. But surely, this man standing before me couldn’t be very old. He barely had any beard or even the stubble that comes before a beard develops. With the sun in my eyes I pulled down the broad brim of my hat for some shade.
“Yes, Private, what is it?”
“It isn’t something I can tell you here. May I speak to you for a moment inside, Ma’am?” answered the young man who obviously hadn’t completed puberty yet. His voice didn’t have the resonance of a man, but more the lilt of a boy.
Hesitantly, I responded, “Certainly, this way.” I guided him into the house and to the living room where we sat in chairs opposite one another.
“Would you care for something to drink?”
“No, thank you ma’am, but maybe you could help me in another way?”
Confused and getting anxious, I asked the Private, “Were you sent by Captain Dodd?”
“No Ma’am,” and with that, he removed his hat only to reveal the longer hair and appearance of a young woman. “Not exactly, but now do you recognize me…” then in a whisper, “A fellow spy?”
My anxiety turned to joy as I saw the young woman in front of me and recognized her as a woman that I had met in Boston over a year before.
“Caroline Carter, is that you? My Lord you were so convincing, I didn’t even recognize you.” I lowered my voice as if someone else was in the house and could hear us, “Where have you been all these months? It’s been close to a year since I’ve seen you, hasn’t it?” My words continued to spill from my lips. “Let’s sit for awhile, and have some tea. You must give me all the details,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure how to approach you Annie, but I guess this worked!”
Getting up to go the kitchen, I hugged her and said, “You were brilliant. And it is so good to see a familiar face. But first, if anyone comes to the door let me show you where to hide. Here, bring your hat with you.” I led the way to the tall wardrobe that sat alongside the bed. Pulling up the cabinet’s floor with a thumb tab, I showed her where she could stand inside the wardrobe if needed. It would do as long as no one went searching. Returning to the living room, Caroline settled down in the cushiony chair while I went to the kitchen to find some food.
In minutes I was back with a tray of fruits and fresh bread with butter. Tall glasses of mint tea rounded out the meal.
“Your timing was excellent, Caroline,” I said. “Just a short while before you arrived a captain was visiting. A Confederate captain.”
“I know,” she responded. “Actually, I was already here and waiting for you to walk outside so in case we were seen, it would appear to be a more natural greeting,” Caroline responded. “As I approached your gate I saw a horse tethered to the hitching post and walked past the house and around for a block or two until he was gone.”
I was relieved that in her excitement to tell me about her activities that Caroline never asked me why a Confederate captain was visiting in the first place.
“Well Annie,” Caroline said, “I never thought I’d have as many adventures and near misses as I’ve had over the past year. Originally, I would have been happy serving the Union disguised as a guy and leave it at that. But, while I was on hospital duty, I must have been there for at least three months, my superior officer asked me to infiltrate a nearby Confederate camp as a cook and listen to conversations about plans they were making. I’d write down any pertinent information every few days and meet a scout at a designated point after the evening meal, as darkness set in. I did that for about six weeks until I realized someone had seen me depart and I felt that others were growing suspicious. That very night I left both my Union and Confederate posts and went west to a safe house, where I worked for a couple months to help some of the slaves who were heading up to Canada.” She continued.
“There were times when I’d leave the safe house to help out a party moving north or scout troop movements and report back. Working between the lines wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. Generally, there were forests between the two sides that I could slip into at night and over the lines, hiding by day in the brush if I had to. Unfortunately, my efforts to get back to a farmhouse, an old depot on the Underground, were blocked by intensive fighting, and that’s why I’m here. I must try to reenter the Union lines, but I can’t go as a Confederate Private or I’ll be shot,” she explained. “Please tell me you’ve got uniforms!”
“I’ve got one! “ I said. “Let’s see how it fits you.”
We went to the bedroom, this time to search my trunk to find the uniform buried at the bottom. I pulled out the costumes one by one, then stopped. Looking down at the trunk, I saw the clothes in somewhat of a jumble. They weren’t carefully folded as I knew I had left them.
Pulling the quilt from the trunk and holding it to my face, I commented, “That’s strange, it looks like someone has been in here.”
We looked at one another but Caroline shrugged her shoulders. Reaching down into the trunk herself, she pulled the remaining uniform from the depths. It was Union.
“I had several others, but they’ve been put to good use,” I said.
Caroline put on the blue jacket, but much to her disappointment, it was far too big. She assumed the pants would be the same way.
Seeing the disappointment in her face, I assured her. “I’m a tailor from way back. This job will just take a few hours. And, fortunately it is the jacket of a Private with no braid on it at all.”
Throwing the pants on the bed, I got on my knees to get to whatever was on the bottom
of the trunk. I pulled out a black oiled haversack and a squashed—looking blue cap of the Union army.
Turning to Caroline, I made her laugh. “Yes, only the best for you, Miss Caroline. Cowpie hat and all. Indeed, we offer you only the finest service at this elegant establishment. This pack can carry the uniform that you don’t need while you wear the other. Too bad I don’t have an Enfield to offer you. But try the pants on. I’ll need to take them up, no doubt, and in. You’ve lost weight, I’m sure. I’ll get you some food too. Then you can lie down and get some rest. You have a long trip ahead.”
Compared to Caroline and the other girls, I had far more comfort in my life. I had the luxury of paying rent and staying put and I didn’t have to sleep outside among poisonous creatures in all kinds of weather. As I finished the hems on Caroline’s pants, I thought back to earlier days and what led me to this life.
Sarah and I had reasons to do what we did. I thought back to our girlhood when our Negro neighbors, Mattie and Clem Smithton, had nearly been relocated to a plantation in South Carolina by a slave catcher. He accused the siblings of running away years before, swearing every way that they had been his bosses’ property. We all knew it couldn’t be true. Some of the town’s people remembered them as children, both born free, and remembered their parents, also born in the north, but I was unclear whether they were free or slaves to the wealthy households of merchants and sea captains. The myth was that slavery was a southern institution, but clearly, it existed in New England. The ties of north and south were evident. Cotton grown by slaves in the South and the heart of the economy for the southern states was woven into fabric and textiles in the North, the heart of the economy for the northern States. Captains and merchants north and south were involved in the trade of slaves, rum and sugar in the West Indies, so neither side was pure and without fault on this issue.
Had it not been for the citizens’ army that was instantly raised by friends and neighbors alike our community and its Negro citizens would have been bait for the slave catchers and Congress’ Fugitive Slave Law. The rally which arose on behalf of our friends had not been equaled since the minutemen of Concord. However, elsewhere throughout the north, a new frenzy of “witch hunts” were designed and carried out by the slave catchers. ‘Slave catchers’ as opportunists were looking for a fast buck and the chance to torture and humiliate innocents for the sake of their own greed and perceived power.
It seemed diabolical to Sarah and to me that under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the slave catcher’s word as to the identification of an accused runaway slave need not be proven, and the accused individual could offer no defense. There were stories told and reported, in fact, where men and women who were born free in the North were then taken away and sold in the South. It was the law, passed by the Congress of the United States. No trial by jury was obtained for the individual in question either. With such an impossible task, few accusations were proven false, and many free men and women were forced south into the hell-like conditions and the dank hovels of slavery.
In the case of the Smithton’s I recalled one woman, Hattie Linden, who made the difference. She had a huge laundry cauldron hauled to the town Commons and threatened the Smithton’s accuser herself with the promise of preheating the tar necessary to make her goose down feathers stick to his skin with ease. That tumult, together with the resistance that the Smithton’s put up on their own, was enough to finally drive off the slave trader and his menacing partner.
After that event, however, our convictions were ignited. Years later we didn’t need to be persuaded that the Union was indeed worth fighting for, but it was the social causes more than the political causes of the war that drove us to enter the spy network, a risky and uncertain affair. The events of the war were moving quickly and little by little I was finding out more about Warren and the world at war.
Only two weeks had passed since General Lee had been given command of the Army of Northern Virginia. President Davis, disgusted with the confusion between Generals Johnston and Longstreet had put Lee in the position of power rather than Johnston.
At the beginning of the war, President Lincoln had hoped that the former West Point superintendent, Robert E. Lee, would take the President’s offer to command the Union army. But instead, Lee returned to Virginia, his home, to fight for the Rebels. Hence, Lincoln didn’t have many commanders to choose from, and to his chagrin had chosen McClellan to march into Richmond. The problem for the North was exactly that: McClellan was expected to march on the Rebels and take their capital, but instead, he had chosen to sit within miles of Richmond, close enough for his front line of sixty-eight thousand troops to hear the clocks of Richmond chime throughout each long night.
Griped by an order of inertia, the frustrated Union men, tens of thousands of them, had been forced to dally for weeks and months throughout the heavy rains of spring, through flooded conditions, racked by the lung diseases and malaria that raged in the dank, muddied tents, week after week. Malarial fevers raged among the men. Clean water was impossible to find, so unless it was carefully boiled, water was as dangerous an enemy as gun fire. The only thing worse for the Union than disease or losses in a battle over Richmond, was being forced to leave the southern capital untouched and the war, instead of closing in, and ended, dragged on.
The conditions in June had turned to favor the Confederates. The rising Chickahominy River had divided the northern army separating three divisions to the north and two more to the south. However, the weather cycle was expected to dry and once that happened, it could favor the Union. Indeed, General Lee saw his opportunity to prevent an assault on Richmond and utilized JEB Stuart and the Cavalry to create a raid and reconnaissance mission around McClellan’s troops, thereby discovering any vulnerable areas. After raiding some of the staples of the north and a rail line, Stuart returned after four days and gave General Lee the information on Union troop positions. The waiting period had finally ended.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Each Other Page 17
