Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories

by Shelby Foote

  They followed no trail, for there was no trail to follow. There was only Isaac, who rode a claybank mare as far out front as visibility allowed, sometimes half a mile, sometimes ten feet, and even in the latter case they sometimes followed not the sight of him but the sound of snapping limbs and Isaac’s cursing. Often they had to dismount with axes and chop through. Just before noon of the eighth day, Sunday again, they struck the southern end of a lake, veered right, then left, and continued northward along its eastern shore. Two hours later Isaac reined in the mare, and when the wagon drew abreast he signaled for a halt. A wind had risen, ruffling the lake; through the screen of cypresses the waves were bright like little hatchets in the sunlight. “All right,” he said. “You can get the gear unloaded. We are home.”

  That was the beginning. During the next ten years he was joined by others drawn from the south and east to new land available at ninety cents an acre with few questions asked. The eighteen hundred acres of Isaac’s original claim were increased to thirty-two hundred in 1826 when his neighbors north and south went broke in the crash. Two years later, though he had named his ten-square-mile plantation Solitaire in confirmation of his bachelor intentions, he got married. It happened almost accidentally. She was the youngest of four daughters; the other three were already married, and she herself was more or less engaged at the time to the blacksmith’s assistant, two doors down the street. Her father kept a tavern, and from time to time she took her turn at the tap. Isaac found her tending bar one warm spring evening when he rode down for a drink. He had seen her before, of course, though he had not really noticed. Now he did. He particularly admired her arms, which were bared to the elbows, and her thick yellow hair, worn shoulder length. That night he had trouble getting to sleep. At last he dropped off, however. He did not dream, but when he woke he thought immediately of her. Whats this? he asked himself. He returned to the Inn that evening, and the next. By then he had decided. He spoke to the father first. “I’m willing if Katy is,” the innkeeper said.

  The wedding was held at the Tavern and the blacksmith’s young assistant was there, bulging his biceps, drunk for the first time in his life. He got into three fights that day, though not with Isaac.

  2

  That ended the first phase of his life, the fifty years spent running hard after trouble in any form, first among men—river bullies at Natchez-under-the-Hill, painted Creeks at Burnt Corn, British regulars at New Orleans; he had tried them all—and then against the cat- and snake-infested jungles of the South. Isaac, however, was not aware that it had ended until two years later, after Dancing Rabbit opened the remaining northern section of the state to settlers, when his neighbors, small farmers and planters alike, were selling their claims for whatever they could get, packing their carts and Conestogas, and heading north into the rich new land that lay between the lake and the Tennessee line. It was then, after they had gone and he had stayed, that Isaac knew his wilderness thirst had been slaked.

  What bound him finally and forever to this earth, however—and he knew it—was the birth of his son in August, 1833, the year the stars fell. Mrs Jameson named him Clive, not for any particular reason; she just liked the name. In the ten following years she bore six more children. They were all girls and were all either born dead or died within a week. They lay in a cedar grove, beneath a row of crosses. She had become a pleasant-faced, bustling woman, rather full-bodied, expending her energy on a determination. to keep the Jameson house the finest on the lake.

  This took some doing: for, though nowhere near the extent it would reach ten years later in the expansive early ’50s, there was already plenty of competition. Cotton was coming into its own, and the lake country was a district of big plantations, thousand- and two- and three-thousand-acre places which the owners ruled like barons. When the small farmers, settlers who had followed Isaac into the region after the Doaks Stand treaty opened the land, moved away to the north after Dancing Rabbit—usually with no more than they had had when they arrived, a wagon and a team of mules or oxen, a rifle and a couple of sticks of furniture, a hound or two and a crate of chickens or shoats, a wife and a stair-stepped parcel of children in linsey-woolsey, and perhaps a widowed mother or mother-in-law—their claims were gobbled up by those who stayed, as well as by others who moved in on their heels. These last, the second wave of comers, were essentially businessmen. They had no gift (or, for that matter, desire) for ringing trees and rooting stumps; their gift was rather for organization. They could juggle figures and balance books and put the profits where they earned more profits. Eli Whitney made them rich and now they began to build fine houses to show it, calling them Westoak Hall and Waverly and Briartree, proud-sounding names in imitation of those in the tide-water counties of Virginia, though in fact the Virginians were few among them. They were mostly Kentuckians and North Carolinians, arrived by way of East Mississippi or the river, and for the most part they were not younger sons of established families, sent forth with the parental blessing and gold in their saddlebags. Many of them did not know their grandparents’ names, and some of them had never known their fathers.

  Isaac’s original L-shaped structure, which he and the ten slaves had put up in 1820 soon after their arrival, had grown now to a two-story mansion with a brick portico and concrete pillars; the roof had been raised so that now all the bedrooms were upstairs. It was still called Solitaire though the name no longer fit. Isaac himself had grown handsomer with age. He was still a big man, six feet four, but he looked slimmer and, somehow, even fitter and more hale. Gray hair became him. Dressed habitually in broadcloth and starched linen, he had a stiffness, a formality that resembled an outward show of self-satisfaction and pride. In 1848, when he was seventy, people seeing him on the street in Ithaca, with his straight-backed manner of walking and his careful way of planting his feet, would point him out to visitors. “That’s Ike Jameson,” they would say. “He was the first man into these parts. Fine-looking, aint he. How old would you take him to be?” The visitor would guess at fifty, fifty-five, and his host would laugh. “Seventy. Seventy, by God. Youd never think it, would you? to look at him.”

  In September of that year he sent his son, who had reached fifteen the month before, to the Virginia Military Institute. This was at the boy’s insistence, and Isaac was willing: not because he wanted him to become a soldier (he wanted no such thing; he had known too many soldiers in his time) but because in preparation for the life of a planter it did not much matter what form the schooling took. In fact a military school was probably best, since the boy would be less likely to become seriously involved with books. A young man’s true education began when he was through with school and had come back home to learn the running of the plantation, the particular temper and whims of cotton as well as the temper and whims of the people who worked it, meaning Negroes. Besides, the Mexican War was recently over. Young men throughout the South were admiring General Winfield Scott and old Rough-and-Ready Taylor, Captain Bragg the artilleryman who “gave them a little more grape,” and Colonel Davis from down near Natchez who formed his regiment, the Mississippi Rifles, in a V at Buena Vista and won the battle with a single charge.

  Early in June, nine months later, when Isaac went to Bristol to meet him at the station, Clive was in uniform, the buttons bright against black facings on the slate-gray cloth. All down the platform, people were looking at him. Isaac was impressed.

  “I declare, boy, you look almost grown to me.”

  “Hello, papa,” he said, and extended his hand. Always before that they had kissed.

  Three Juries later, when he came home from graduation, tall, slim, handsome, blond, nineteen, he was the catch of the lake. It was not only his looks; he could be amusing, too, as for instance when he gave an imitation of his mathematics instructor, T. J. Jackson, who wound up every lecture covered with chalkdust and perspiration and who sometimes became so interested in solving algebra and trigonometry problems that he forgot the students were present and just stood there r
easoning with himself and Euclid. Clive had much success with this; “Give us Professor Jackson,” they would beg him in houses along the lake. Soon, however, his social horizon widened. He was one of the real catches of the delta. Isaac and Mrs Jameson were impressed, and so were the various girls; but the ones who were most impressed were the girls’ mothers. They preened their daughters, set their caps, and laid their snares. At dances and outings he moved among them, attentive, grave, pleasant, quite conscious of the advantages of his position.

  Isaac was amused, but he was also rather awed. His own youth had been so different. Past seventy, nearing eighty, he could look back on a life divided neatly into two unequal compartments, the first containing fifty years of wildness and the second containing twenty-odd—nearly thirty—years of domesticity, with marriage like an airtight door between them. Now, though he did not know it and could have done nothing about it anyhow, he was moving toward another door which led to a third compartment, less roomy than either of the other two, with a closer atmosphere, even stifling in the end, and more different from both of the previous two than those two had been different from each other. In a sense beyond longevity he led three lives in one.

  Since 1850, the year of the Compromise, planters in the lake region had been talking disunion. As a topic for discussion it had crowded out the weather and even the cotton market. Seated on their verandas or in their parlors, clutching juleps in their fists, they blustered. They had built their fine big neo-Tidewater houses, displaying them to their neighbors and whoever passed along the lakeside road, each as a sort of patent of nobility, a claim to traditions and ancestry which they for the most part lacked. Insecurity had bred a semblance of security, until now no one questioned their right to anything at all. When Lincoln was nominated in 1860 they took it as a pointed insult. Not that they believed he would be elected; no; “Never in all this world,” they said. “Those abolitionist scoundrels just want to flaunt this ape in our faces for the purpose of watching our reaction. Yes. Well, we’ll show them something in the havent bargained for, if they dont watch out. Let them be warned,” they added solemnly.

  They admired the spirit and emulated the manner of the Texas senator, an ex-South Carolinian with a reputation as a duelist, who said to his Northern fellow-senators, smiling as he said it though not in friendliness at all: “The difficulty between you and us, gentlemen, is that you will not send the right sort of people here. Why will you not send either Christians or gentlemen?”

  “Wigfall knows how to treat them,” the planters said. “A few more like him and Preston Brooks and we’d have this hooraw hushed.”

  But Isaac, who had fought under Andrew Jackson at New Orleans and followed his politics ever since, believed in the Union in much the same way as Jackson had believed in it. He thought sectional differences could be solved better within the Union than outside it. At first he would say so, with the others watching him hot-eyed over the frosted rim of goblets. Later he saw that it was no use. Like much of the rest of the nation, they were determined to have violence as the answer to some deep-seated need, as actual as thirst.

  Clive took little or no part in these discussions which went on all around him. He had come home from the Institute with a soldier’s training, but now he was busy learning the life of a planter; the slate-gray uniforms and the tactics texts had been folded away in a trunk with the unblooded sword. He was closer to his mother than he was to Isaac. He was quiet, indeed somewhat vague in his manner, with gentle eyes; his way now was very little different, in fact, from the way in which he had moved among the Bristol matrons and fanned their hopes with his almost casual attentiveness. He loved horses and spent much of his time in the stables. Behind the softness of his eyes and voice there was something wild that matched the wildness of horses, and this was where he most resembled his father.

  Then Lincoln was elected—the planters had said it would never happen; “Never in all this world,” they said—and South Carolina seceded, followed within two weeks by Mississippi and then the others among the Deep South fire-eater states. That was in January. Moderation was gone now, what little had remained. Clive even heard from the Institute that the chalkdusty Professor Jackson, a Mexican War veteran himself, had stood up in chapel and made a speech; “Draw the sword and throw away the scabbard!” he had cried. It did not sound at all like him, but anything was believable in these times. Two months later, a month before Sumter, Clive rode off as captain of a cavalry troop formed by the lake planters and their sons. With their wagons, their spare mounts and body servants, they made a long column; their ornaments flashed in the sunlight.

  Nearly all of them returned within four months, not as a unit but in straggling twos and threes. It was the common end of such ‘elite’ organizations; they had not expected war to be like that. The excitement lasted not even as long as the glitter of their collar ornaments. Once it was gone they thought they might as well come home. They had seen no fighting anyhow. It was mostly drill and guard mount, patrolling encampments while the infantry slept, moving from place to place, then back again. The glory had departed, and so did they.

  When Clive came home, his uniform and saber sash a bit faded from the weather, Isaac came out to meet him in the yard, looking somehow more military in broadcloth than his son looked in uniform. They stood looking at each other. “How did it go?” Isaac asked him.

  “It went all right, considering. There just wasnt anything to do.”

  “You wanted it another way. Was that it?”

  “I didnt want it the way it was. We disbanded piecemeal, man by man. They would come and say they were leaving. Then theyd leave. Finally there were less than a dozen of us; so we left too. We made it official.”

  They stood facing each other in the hot summer sunlight; First Manassas had been fought two weeks ago. Clive was smiling. Isaac did not smile. “And what are you going to do now?” he asked. “Stay here and farm the place?”

  “I might.”

  “So?”

  “I might.…”

  “So?”

  “No, papa. I’ll go back. But different.”

  “So,” Isaac said.

  He stayed ten days, and then he left again. This time he went alone. Within two years Clive Jameson was one of the sainted names of the Confederacy. It began when he came out of Donelson with Forrest, escaping through icy backwater saddle-skirt deep. Then he distinguished himself at Shiloh, leading a cavalry charge against the Peach Orchard and another at Fallen Timbers after the battle; Beauregard cited him as one of the heroes of that field. By the time of Vicksburg, in the summer of ’63, newspapers were beginning to print the story of his life. Southern accounts always mentioned his having been born the year the stars fell; Starborn, one called him, and the others took it up. Poetesses laureate in a hundred backwoods counties submitted verse in which they told how he had streamed down to earth like a meteor to save the South; they made much of the flaming wake. Northern accounts, on the other hand, made much of the fact that his mother had tended bar in her father’s taproom.

  He never wrote. They did not see him again until late in ’63 when he was wounded at Chickamauga, his fifth but his first really serious wound, and was brought home in an ambulance to recover. He was still a young man, just past his thirtieth birthday, but he looked older than his years. It was as if the furnace of war had baked the flesh of his hard, handsome face, which by now was tacked in replica on cabin walls, badly reproduced pen-and-ink sketches clipped from newspapers, and mooned over by girls in attic bedrooms. The softness had gone from his eyes and voice. He did not resemble himself; he resembled his pictures. Having him at Solitaire was like having a segment of some actual blasted battlefield at hand. His mother, after an hour with him, came away shaking her head. “What have they done to my boy?” she asked.

  “He’s a hero,” Isaac said. He had seen and known heroes before. “What did you expect?”

  Clive mended fast, however, and soon after the first of the year he rode awa
y. They heard of his raid into Kentucky that spring—‘brilliant’ was the word that appeared most frequently in the newspaper accounts; the columns bristled with it, alongside ‘gallant’—and in June he led his brigade in the attack that crumpled Grierson’s flank at Brice’s Crossroads and sent the invaders stumbling back to Memphis. The papers were full of it, prose and verse.

  Mrs Jameson sealed off the upper story of her house. She and Isaac lived downstairs. She was fifty-six, an active, bustling woman who got things done. She still had the yellow hair and even the beautifully rounded arms, but she was subject to dizzy spells, which she called the Vapors, and during such an attack her mind would wander. She would imagine the war was over and her son was dead. A moment later, though, she would sigh and say, “I’m glad he’s doing well, but I wish they would let him come home for a while. I really do.”

  She never thought of him the way he had been when he was there with his Chickamauga wound. In her mind she saw him as he had been when he rode away that first time, in the spring of ’61, with the soft voice and gentle eyes, or as he was in the daguerreotype which she kept on the night table beside her bed. It had been taken when he was a child; he wore button shoes and ribbed stockings and a jacket of watered silk, and there was a small-boy sweetness in his face. Sometimes in the night Isaac would wake to find the candle burning at the bedside and Mrs Jameson sitting bolt upright, propped on three pillows, with the picture in her hands. There would be tears in her eyes, and if he spoke to her at such a time she would turn and look at him with the face of a stranger.