Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

by Donald McCaig

  “We keep teaching them and they keep not learning.”

  “I always did think yankees slow-witted. Now what the devil happened to you? That scraggly beard you’ve grown—does it conceal a wound?”

  “Burn. Chancellorsville.”

  “Well, you used to be prettier, that’s the truth. Tell me, Wheelhorse, have you heard when we’ll be paid?”

  “Soon as they find paper to print the money. Say, I just came in from the countryside and possess a chicken which this afternoon was clucking in a farmyard, and I have cornbread too. Have you dined?”

  “Having lately feasted on hardtack and hardtack, I’d be honored to join you, sir.” Spaulding bowed deeply.

  Captain Spaulding’s haven was beneath the magnolia’s sheltering branches. His tent was torn, equipment helterskelter, and Duncan said, “It’s a good thing Jackson hasn’t got the inspection. Fifty, sixty demerits, sure.”

  “Oh hell, Wheelhorse,” Spaulding said. “You were always the one who cleaned up.” Under his blanket he located a frying pan, which he wiped with his sleeve. A small fire, salt pork for grease, and within half an hour, the two listened to chicken parts crackling while they whisked smoke away from their faces.

  “What brings you to headquarters, Wheelhorse?”

  Duncan told how Planter Pickering of Scottsville had a thousand bushels of corn he’d sell to the army, nay give to the army, “if’n he got a note from Marse Robert himself. It’s good feed and his corn cribs are only half an hour from the canal, and I don’t know how General Hill is doing, but some of General Mahone’s artillery horses are too poor to shift a gun.”

  “General Lee going to write the note?”

  “His aide, Colonel Venable, promises it in the morning. It’s personal with Planter Pickering. Old man says he won’t give ‘ary a ear of corn to Jeff Davis, but Marse Robert ken have what he wants.’”

  Spaulding lifted fork and knife in salute. “Isn’t that chicken about ready? It’s got me drooling.”

  The two didn’t have much in common except the Institute, but weaker ties have cemented lifetime friendships, and without talking much as they ate, they contrived to say a great deal. Spaulding was worried about A. P. Hill. “Cousin Hill’s been awfully sick. He’s just skin and bones. But he comes out of bed soon as the guns start rumbling.” Duncan’s old roommate repeated headquarters gossip. “General Lee says the Federals are digging underneath our lines, so our boys are digging to find them.” Spaulding shivered. “If I’m to die, let me die in the sunlight. All this digging and tunneling—there’s nothing gallant about it.”

  Duncan spoke of his dying sister, Leona, how she had lost all will to live. “Sometimes, when I’m in a grim humor, I know how she feels.”

  “Don’t be glum, Wheelhorse.” Spaulding tapped his pipe against his boot heel. “Die and you’ll miss all the fun.” He grinned, and after a pause, Duncan grinned too.

  Duncan told his old friend about Sallie, worrying her work at Winder Hospital was so important she’d not consent to be his wife.

  Spaulding said, “Wheelhorse, what would you think of a man who shirked duty for love of a girl?”

  “It’s different for a woman,” Duncan said.

  “You’re too acute a thinker for me, son.”

  Duncan stared into the fire. “And you? Anyone capture your fancy?”

  Captain Spaulding described a neighbor’s daughter, just sixteen when he went away. “And she said she’d wait for me,” he said. “For me! Can you believe that?”

  Duncan took Spaulding’s tobacco for his own pipe. “Frankly I cannot, unless she has confused conquering a Hill with surmounting a Spaulding.”

  Spaulding laughed. “Wheelhorse, our repast would be complete with a single cup of real coffee. How I miss it.”

  “Not two weeks ago,” Duncan said, “I was south of Bedford when an aristocrat of those parts invited me into his home, where a servant brought a cup of the finest coffee I have drunk since ’61. My host was one of these fellows untouched by the war. His plantation is prosperous and his servants haven’t run off. When I complimented him and asked wouldn’t he join me, he said he wasn’t drinking coffee until the supply was ‘more reliable.’ I didn’t ask when he thought that would be. I believe he expects to wake up one fine morning and find the Federal blockade dismantled and buyers for his tobacco again.”

  “We’ve not been bothered much at home,” Spaulding confessed. “A few bucks ran off when Federal cavalry came through the country, but they came back when they learned the Federals wouldn’t feed them.” Spaulding said that since they didn’t have coffee, Duncan’s excellent brandy would suffice, and when Duncan said he didn’t have any brandy, Spaulding said, “Ah well.” He also said that Lincoln couldn’t possibly win reelection, that the Federals were tired of fighting and would quit.

  “Brother Rat,” Duncan said solemnly, “no doubt you are right. As for me, I will not think about it.”

  The next morning they rose from their blankets and wished they hadn’t finished the chicken the night before. Spaulding ragged Duncan about his beard, which he said strongly resembled a turkey gobbler’s, while Duncan named the bearded Confederate generals and claimed, “Spaulding, your sweetheart will not think you a soldier without one.”

  “It is of no consequence,” Spaulding grumbled, “unless I find money for my leave.” He jerked around. “Here, what’s this!”

  The courier came off his horse without hitching and ignored the sentry’s salute. Officers were already assembling outside Lee’s tent when, napkin tucked at his neck, Lee ordered Colonel Venable: “Ride quickly to General Mahone and have him send two brigades to Blandford Cemetery. Those people have exploded a mine beneath our lines and are attacking in strength.”

  Duncan was already cinching his saddle. “I am Mahone’s officer, Colonel,” he cried. “I will accompany you.”

  They galloped across the Pocahontas Bridge, through neighborhoods which had been Petersburg’s finest until the Federal shelling. Roofless, punctured, abandoned mansions strewed bricks into the road. Some had been reduced to brick heaps with only an end wall or fractured chimney still standing.

  Their horses kicking up red dust, they hurtled down Jerusalem Road. Venable’s horse was a terrific galloper and Duncan rode hard just to keep up.

  By some fluke of terrain, neither the blast of the Federal mine nor the subsequent artillery barrage had been audible in Petersburg, but just beyond Blandford Cemetery the roar of guns sucked air from Duncan’s lungs. A particulate haze hung over the crater where the Confederate lines had been blown up, and the air stank of cold clay and peppery gunpowder.

  Around the next bend, the Federal cannonade was silenced as abruptly as if God had dropped a blanket over it.

  Just short of Lieutenant’s Creek, they left the plank road and splashed through shallows into the meadow where General Billy Mahone was waiting.

  Before Colonel Venable had finished delivering Lee’s orders Mahone was barking commands in his high, irritable voice. Mahone extracted Weisinger’s Virginians and Wright’s Georgians from the Confederate positions for a counterattack on the breached one.

  The brigades started along Lieutenant’s Creek, keeping below the sightline of the Federal signal towers. In an orchard filled with unripe peaches they were ordered to shed their knapsacks because they were going in for a fight. Men arranged their few personal belongings where they could recover them should they live.

  When Mahone and Duncan arrived at General Bushrod Johnson’s headquarters, only Confederate remnants—two hundred riflemen and a few guns—stood between the Federals and Petersburg. If the Federals took Petersburg and the railroads that supplied Lee’s army, the army was done for. “Only two hundred men,” Bushrod Johnson said, awestruck. “Damn them! Damn them and their cowardly mine!”

  “General,” Mahone spoke to the immobile Johnson with careful courtesy, “perhaps you’d escort me to a vantage point where I might inspect the enemy’s dispositions.�
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  “Captain Frazier will accompany you, General,” Bushrod Johnson dismissed that idea.

  Because Federal artillery was hitting Jerusalem Road, the three-man party dashed for the safety of a covered way. The noise was ferocious, tooth-rattling. Mahone yelled, “What do you make it, Major? A hundred guns? Two hundred?”

  Duncan shouted back, “More’n a hundred. About the same they had at Fredericksburg.”

  A thin stream of wounded soldiers hobbled down the covered way. “Hell is busted,” one whispered.

  One man had been buried alive, had lost his trousers, was smeared with earth, and dirt dribbled from his nostrils. Another had his hands clamped over his ears and was yelling loudly, “They’s niggers! Thousands of niggers! They’s revengin’ themselves for Fort Pillow! They’s givin’ no quarter!”

  The covered way ended in a shallow ravine angling toward the fighting. Bushrod Johnson’s aide pointed. “Up there. You can see the Federals from there.” The aide swallowed. “I’ll hold the horses.”

  When Duncan and the general topped the rise, they overlooked half a mile of Confederate lines.

  The Confederate trenches had been deep enough for a man to stand without being shot, narrow so an exploding shell wouldn’t do much damage. Circular earthen forts anchored the line, and rations and ammunition were brought forward through covered ways, protected from sharpshooters and artillery. The soldiers lived in bombproofs, some with brick chimneys.

  But after the Federal mine exploded, the only unwrecked trench was a shallow communications trench behind the crater. There the Confederate survivors had rallied.

  “God Christ Almighty!” Mahone said. “Jesus Christ Crucified! The bastards! The sons of bitches!”

  The crater was thirty feet deep, 150 feet across, and it steamed: raw earth, turned bottom to top—gray over red—splintered timber, wrecked gun carriages and limbers, a crumpled tin stove, an officer’s leather trunk half buried, a human torso—just the torso—its wounds cauterized by dirt, human limbs, some perhaps belonging to the dislimbed torso. So many bodies were dismembered that intact corpses were a relief to the eye.

  From one wall to the other, the crater swarmed with Federal attackers. Two hundred rifles pop-popped at them, but it was their own stunned horror, more than anything else, that kept the Federal soldiers in the hell they had created.

  Duncan was counting. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, a dozen, that’s two dozen, make that thirty, thirty-one, thirty-three regimental flags. General, if those boys get out of that pit the war’s over.”

  Mahone smiled a hard smile. “It will be our duty, Major, to ensure they do not get out of that pit. Kindly invite Colonel Saunders to bring up his brigade. Ask him to come at the double-quick.”

  Mahone’s brigades hurriedly formed in a swale below the crest. The Confederates were red-hot: life was hard enough in the Petersburg trenches without they burrowed underneath sleeping men and blew them to tarnation. Life was awful enough without they sent niggers at you.

  John Brown’s mad fantasy of blacks slaughtering whites filled these men’s minds. They told no nervous jokes and their officers made no speeches.

  When the Federals climbed out of the pit, they formed ranks two deep. At their back, in the crater, thousands more flourished like botflies in a dirty wound. Toward the pit more Federal regiments were advancing in columns, and the ridge behind was black smoke and thundering guns.

  The color bearer stepped before the Federal formation and unfurled the Stars and Stripes. When the Federal army took a resolute step forward, the thin line of Confederate survivors broke and fled.

  “Tell Weisinger to forward!” Mahone screeched. Screaming the rebel yell, his battle lines surged over the crest.

  Federal artillery turned its grim attention to new targets, and Confederates flew apart or were scythed like grass. “Close it up! Watch your dress!” officers cried, and men who wished to rush were restrained and men who might have fled went forward obediently. Hot metal clipped them and they leaned forward and lowered their heads like men walking into a storm but kept on coming, screaming their dire yell.

  As one, the Confederates halted, raised their rifles, and fired; a second volley from the second rank. Without delay, at the double-quick, bayonets extended, Mahone’s furious brigades charged. “No quarter!” the Federals had shouted. Well, they’d give them no quarter.

  The Federal front line tried to get behind the second line, but the second line was already breaking for the rear as the ice-cold bayonets of the Confederates dropped to the level of a man’s soft parts and slid forward smooth as closing a drawer. The meeting of steel and flesh was a thud, a grunt, the yammer of curses.

  Duncan took aim at a Federal captain, startled him with the first bullet, missed with the second, fired deliberately and the man dropped the flag he’d been carrying and Duncan’s fourth bullet smacked him and a Confederate sideswiped Duncan’s target with a rifle butt so he went down and two other Confederates invaded the man’s body with triangular steel, one charging so hard he overran and when he turned to extract his bayonet he was brained by a colored sergeant swinging his rifle like a ball bat. Bone flew with brains. Duncan fired twice, point-blank, and grabbed the sergeant around the waist and they wrestled on the flag the Federal captain had defended with his life. The sergeant bucked like a wild horse and someone jerked the flag, rolling them so the sergeant was on top, and his hands grabbed Duncan’s throat and he squeezed and Duncan banged at the man’s back with his empty revolver—and a BLAST and powder flecks burned Duncan’s cheek and the sergeant’s eyes popped out of his head like soft pebbles on cords and his fingers went slack and the dead man was so suddenly weighty Duncan couldn’t heave him but wiggled out from beneath. Duncan gasped thanks to the young Confederate who’d put his Enfield to the sergeant’s ear, and the boy giggled and bit a fresh cartridge.

  They were fighting in the shallow communications trench, jammed together so there was no room to move, no room to take a full swing or stab, and men wrestled and sometimes the bayonet that penetrated one man impaled another. Men fought with fingers and steel, knives and gun butts, and heads butted and teeth sank into the salty gristle of an Adam’s apple. They tramped blood from the wounded and dead until blood rose above their shoetops. Dead men roll when you stand on them, wounded men buck. Confederates killed men who fought bravely, brained them when they turned to flee, shot them at a distance.

  A colored soldier raised his hands to Duncan and said, in the softest voice, “Don’t kill me, Master,” and smiled a fine smile which collapsed when a Confederate officer’s sword cut through his neck and lodged in the spinal cord. The officer kicked the man’s head to free his sword.

  Duncan tucked his pistol under his stump to reload. His left arm ached from absent hand to absent elbow. His face was stiff and sticky with blood. He’d lost his hat and the sun was drying the blood in his hair.

  A Federal was using a regimental banner for a crutch and Duncan fired and the man vanished in his powder blast. A gunpowder-blackened Confederate ripped the flag from its staff, wrapped it around his chest, and high-stepped down the line crowing like a rooster.

  The Federals fled from traverse to traverse, flooding into the raw smoking earth of the crater. They dove for its safety like men diving into a pond and slid and rolled down the walls in avalanches of dirt and stones.

  Hammered by Federal artillery, the Confederates stalled, found cover, brought prisoners out of the trenches and started them toward the plank road. It was midmorning and desperately hot. Duncan took a canteen from a dead Federal and drank warm water that smelled of canvas and metal.

  One man on each handle, Confederates lugged eighty-pound coehorn mortars into the recaptured trenches. Mortarmen measured their lightest charges to drop mortar bombs into the pit fifty feet away. Some lost Federal troops appeared and gaped at the mortar crews before they were killed.

  Iron mortar bombs toppled into the pit like blackbirds and men shrieked
when they exploded.

  Federal guns killed the Confederates when they approached the crater rim, and Confederate bullets slathered the slope behind the crater when Federals tried to escape from it.

  The sun beat down. Men pressed against the cool earth, mouths open, gasping. Mahone hurled a fresh regiment against the Federal left, and when a thousand Federal rifles spat defiance Mahone’s regiment crumpled.

  Kicking steps for themselves, the boldest Federals climbed the crater wall, lined its rim, and fired point-blank. Corpses were passed up to be used as sandbags. Other corpses filled a gap a Confederate gun was hitting.

  In the Confederate trenches, officers sought their regiments, soldiers their friends, wounded helped wounded to the rear. The sun beat down.

  Before General Mahone committed his last reserves, the six hundred rifles of Saunders’s brigade, he asked Duncan, “How is it, Major? Are the bastards still coming?”

  “No, sir. But if they decide to, we’re not enough to stop them.”

  When Saunders’s brigade was in line of battle, Mahone cried in his squeaky voice, “Men, the Confederacy rests on your shoulders. They burrowed under our lines and our friends were buried alive in their sleep. They collected our runaway servants, armed them, and turned them on us. They fault us for Fort Pillow and cry, ‘No quarter!’ ” Mahone pointed forward. “God damn it to hell! I won’t tell you what to do!”

  “Then with your permission, General, I will,” Colonel Saunders said. “Alabamians! Forward!”

  The brigade rose up out of the swale like gray ghosts in gray smoke, and for a few seconds the Federals didn’t notice. When the Federal guns hit, the brigade’s yell of anguish and rage sent chills down Duncan’s spine. That yell broke the Federals’ nerve; their rifle fire became a harmless rattle and their bravest men dropped from the rim to the floor of the crater. Confederates grabbed abandoned rifles and launched them into the pit, bayonet downward. The coehorns’ bombs generated screams and explosions.