And There I’ll Be a Soldier

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Well,” Harry said, “what did he mean, saying that we’d never see those two gents?”

  “I warrant he means that they are all talk,” Gibb said.

  “Attention!” Sergeants and officers ran about the assembly, trying to get the soldiers back into formation.

  “Play!” Sergeant Rutherford ordered. “Play!”

  Ryan stared, then realized the sergeant was talking to him. He brought up the bow, settled the violin on his shoulder, and began “Dixie.”

  * * * * *

  Dismissed for breakfast, Ryan gathered with his friends on the sand behind the warehouse where they had made their fire pit. Other groups of men did the same, and soon the morning air was filled with the pleasant aromas of chicory, bacon, grits, even biscuits browning in Dutch ovens. Gibb fried salt pork, Matt made the coffee, and Harry Cravey passed out scones and sourdough bread his mother had made for him that morning.

  “Man,” Ryan said as he washed down a cherry scone with water from his canteen, “I hope we never leave Galveston Island. Not as long as Harry’s mom’s around.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Matt Bryson said, closing the lid on the coffee pot. “Nor do most of the boys. We want to see some real fighting.”

  “We will,” Little Sam said solemnly.

  “Here?” Harry’s voice trembled. “You think the Yankees will invade us here?”

  “No,” Little Sam said. “But from what Sergeant Jardine and Lieutenant Hawthorne say, we won’t stay in Texas.”

  “But …” Harry Cravey sank to his knees.

  Matt filled the first tin cup with coffee for himself. “How come you get to converse with sergeants and officers, Sam?”

  The young Houston grinned. “My name does have certain privileges.”

  “Where would we go?” Ryan couldn’t hide his own nerves. His mother had bawled after he came home that Saturday afternoon to tell his parents that he had joined the Bayland Guards, and that was even after he had to soothe her by saying they were just to guard the Texas coast. His father had snorted: “It’s not like he joined up with Hood’s brigade, Reine,” adding with contempt, “enlisted in a real outfit that will fight real battles and help win this war.”

  Little Sam shrugged. “Virginia? New Orleans? Mississippi? I don’t know. But somewhere.”

  “That’s great!” Matt set his cup down long enough to fill those of the others. “I didn’t join this army just to shoulder arms and say, yes, sir, no, sir, and march to Ryan’s fiddling. I want to fight some Yankees. See some real glory.”

  “Scones, coffee, and salt pork.”

  Ryan shot to attention, and fired off a salute. He didn’t know what else to do, but Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, shook his head, and said: “There is no need to salute me, young man. I am just an old, deposed … or should I rather say decapitated? … Texas statesman.” His eyes showed pain as he gripped the walking cane and forced himself to sit on the ground in front of the fire. “Might I trouble you men for some coffee and grub?”

  Ryan handed the hero of San Jacinto his own cup. Harry Cravey filled a plate with the last chunk of bread and two scones. Gibb Gideon speared the first piece of cooked salt pork and handed the meat, knife and all, to General Houston.

  For a few minutes, they ate in silence before Harry Cravey could no longer hold his tongue.

  “General … I mean, Governor … er, Senator, I mean, Mister President …”

  “The name, son”—Sam Houston’s blue eyes, so often cold, twinkled—“is Sam.”

  “Uh, yes. Mister Houston, why don’t you believe in the Confederacy?”

  The old man sipped his coffee, then passed the empty mug back to Ryan. “Thank you, son. Now you’d best fill your belly with some of that warmth.”

  Ryan couldn’t take his eyes off Sam Houston. He held out the empty mug in the direction of the fire, and moments later heard coffee filling the cup, feeling the warmth in his fingers.

  “I believe, young man, in Texas,” Sam Houston finally answered.

  “Yes, sir.” Harry didn’t seem to know anything else to say.

  “Boys, I made Texas.” Sam Houston nodded, his voice strong, his eyes, no longer twinkling, reinforcing that strength. “I don’t think it’s immodest of me to say that, do you?”

  “No, sir,” everyone sang out in reply, even Little Sam.

  “I think the citizens of Texas have prospered when they have listened to my counsel,” the statesman continued. “Would you not agree?”

  Heads bobbed all around to echoes of “Yes, sir,” and “Of course, sir.” For the first time, Ryan realized he wasn’t alone with his mess. Other soldiers from other messes, including Sergeant Jardine, Sergeant Rutherford, Lieutenant Hawthorne, even old Private Mills, and Captain Smith himself, stood in a semicircle.

  Sam Houston fingered a scone and pointed it at Matt Bryson. “You want to fight, isn’t that right?”

  Matt’s voice was barely audible. He dropped his eyes and muttered something that might have been affirmative.

  “Any particular reason?”

  “States rights!” Harry Cravey shouted, and a few heads in the ever-growing circle around them bobbed in agreement.

  “Yeah.” Matt had found his own voice. “Those Northerners can’t push us around. We’re tired of it.”

  Houston’s head shook. He looked at Gibb. “And you?”

  Gideon grinned. “The glory.”

  “Amen!” someone behind him shouted.

  “Glory.” Houston sighed. “You think war is glory?” He didn’t seem to be addressing Gibb Gideon, for his eyes stared at the tip of his cane, but Gibb answered.

  “You won more glory than just about anyone in Texas, General Houston.”

  “I have wounds that will never heal,” he said, still staring at the cane. “Some physical. My son here can attest to that. And others …” His massive head shook.

  The salt pork sizzled in the cast-iron skillet, but no one noticed. Silently Sam Houston finished his scone, and started to rise, straining against the pain, as he relied on the cane to push himself up and rise to his immense height.

  “And what of you?” Houston asked. “Why do you join this cause?”

  Those piercing eyes bored into Ryan, and Ryan felt the entire company of Bayland Guards staring at him.

  “It just …” He started, trying to find the right words. “It just seemed the right thing to do.”

  Immediately Ryan regretted that answer. He didn’t know what it meant, and wasn’t even sure that was why he had signed up with Doc Smith. Maybe he had joined to prove something to his father. Or to escape the teas and brunches of the Ladies Auxiliary Club of Harris County. Or perhaps it was just like Gibb Gideon had answered. For the glory. He remembered Scott’s Ivanhoe and Rob Roy. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. Mostly, right now, he recalled stories he had heard all his life about San Jacinto, the Runaway Scrape, and the Alamo. And Sam Houston.

  Glory.

  Houston’s response surprised him. “That is as honest an answer as I have yet heard.”

  The old man leaned on his cane, and his eyes swept across the gathering of the Bayland Guards. Smiling, he motioned at his oldest son and said: “Sam here came home one night up in Huntsville. Margaret nods to me, then points to this pretty little thing pinned on his lapel. So I ask … ‘Sam, by thunder what is that on your coat?’ And he answers, with pride … ‘Father, it is a Confederate rosette.’ And I tell him … ‘Son, you’re wearing that in the wrong place. You should wear that on the tail of your coat.’” Only Houston chuckled, and he shook his head, straightening. “Sam was angry, but I was only joshing him. You men are not cowards. You are Texians, and those of you who fight for what you believe in, I respect you. I don’t agree with you, nor do you agree with me, but we Texians are not easy
to change our minds when we know we are in the right. And when is a Texian ever wrong? Even when they don’t agree with each other?”

  The Bayland Guards chuckled. Even nigh seventy years, the old man hadn’t forgot how to stump.

  “But there is an hysteria enflaming these Southern states. An hysteria fueled by numskulls like Oldham and Wigfall and William Gilmore Simms who are more ignorant than that late, great, cantankerous old reprobate, John C. Calhoun. At least, I could respect Calhoun. But Oldham … Wigfall … Simms?”

  Simms. Ryan had heard of him. He enjoyed his books, The Partisan and The Life of Francis Marion, although he had not much liked The Sword and the Distaff, the novel his father claimed “would teach that Abolitionist harlot, Harriett Beecher Stowe, what slavery is really all about.”

  Sam Houston stood like a bronze statue. “But those of you who seek only glory, or who join a great Texian leader like Captain Ashbel Smith because of the rhetoric of idiots like Wigfall, I bid you warning. You will find no glory. None of you will, no matter your beliefs. Those stripes on the flag … the flag I support and love, the flag of the Stars and Stripes … they have been forged in fires hotter than the hinges of hell into the hardest steel, and will neither bend nor break.”

  Ryan expected hisses and boos, but no one spoke. They all listened as Sam Houston concluded his speech.

  “You think the Union is weak, but I know better, and I leave you with this warning … you are about to sink in fire and rivers of blood.”

  Chapter Five

  August 17, 1861

  Laclede, Missouri

  Colonel W. James Morgan paced back and forth, waiting for his new recruits to line up as the drummer—an immensely nettling private named Young—pounded out “Reveille.” A small sword in a nickel scabbard, suspended by thongs attached to a red sash, dragged across the dirt as the commanding officer of the Missouri Rangers walked, shredding a soggy cigar in his teeth.

  “Get a move on, boy!” Harold Masterson bellowed.

  Squatting by the smoky fire, Caleb Cole gave the former Pennville barber a quizzical look. “I haven’t finished my coffee yet.”

  Morgan wasn’t the only soldier with a sword. Harold Masterson drew his from a shining scabbard and, using the broad side, sent the tin cup spinning into the hot coals, which sizzled from the coffee that had not drenched Caleb’s left hand.

  The next thing Caleb knew, he was sitting on his bottom, hand almost numb. Seb Woolard, a farm boy from near Milan a few years older than Caleb, tossed his cup aside, and hurriedly helped pull Caleb to his feet.

  “Fall in!” Masterson roared. “Fall in! Fall in, you worthless petticoats! You’re in this man’s army now, girls. When that drum beats, you move!”

  Shaking the feeling back into his hand, Caleb followed Woolard as they hurried away from their tent, trying to find Captain Clark and the rest of Company E, Woolard cursing Harold Masterson, and Caleb agreeing with every word.

  “Give a barber three stripes to sew on his sleeve, and he thinks he’s George Washington.”

  “More like Napoleon,” Caleb grumbled.

  “Who?”

  They fell in line beside the Ehrenreich twins—Caleb still couldn’t tell Ewald and Rémy apart—and waited as other sergeants from other companies rushed their farmer’s and clerk’s and merchant’s and mason’s and carpenter’s and preacher’s sons into lines.

  Caleb wasn’t sure about this man’s army.

  He thought he had been joining his father’s friend, Captain Jacob L. Clark, who he had met on the Milan pike late on the morning that Caleb had left the farm. He remembered seeing the dust, and thought about hiding in the bar ditch, but something came over him. He had hidden from those Secesh brigands in a pigpen, and after such ignominy he wasn’t going to hide from any Rebel again. So he had dropped his sack at his feet and, fumbling with his Kentucky rifle, pushed the frissen forward, put powder in the flash pan, pulled the frissen back, and stood in the center of the road, brandishing that long, heavy weapon.

  Later, he had realized how foolish that had been, yet fortune had been with him. Riding a black horse, Captain Jacob L. Clark led his fifty-seven men up the road.

  “We are bound for Unionville,” Clark had told him, after introductions and explanations had been made. “Word reached us that treasonous fiends dared show their face there.”

  Caleb had filled in Clark and his men on all that had transpired, and when the volunteers marched back to Milan, Captain Clark had fifty-eight men.

  Fifty-eight men, Irish-born, English-born, Scottish-born, German-born, but most of them with roots from the Ohio Valley, and many of the youngest ones, including Caleb, Missourians by birth. They would join a new regiment of mounted infantry, the Missouri Rangers, commanded by one W. James Morgan.

  Morgan was about the same age as Clark, and, if Caleb could believe what he heard around camp, was a New Yorker who had settled and farmed in Chariton County before opening a grocery store in Brunswick. Before that, he had served in the militia in Ohio and Indiana. Harold Masterson, however, had whispered that Morgan had never even fired a shot or had ever been shot at, and, Harold Masterson believed, Captain Jacob Clark should be commanding the regiment.

  That, of course, was before Harold Masterson had been appointed sergeant, and those stripes had gone straight to his thick head.

  Others around camp said Captain Isaac Pratt should be commander.

  Pratt, a rich farmer from Linn County who hailed from Maryland or Massachusetts or Rhode Island or one of those Northern states, had also been forming his own Union regiment, but he and his men soon joined Morgan. Morgan’s Missouri Rangers came from Linn, Chariton, Sullivan, Grundy, Carroll, Livingston, and Putnam Counties, many of which Caleb had never even heard of, much less walked across. Now Caleb found himself in Laclede, way down in Linn County, more than fifty miles south of Unionville. The way Caleb’s feet ached, that distance might have been more like one hundred rocky miles.

  Sergeant Masterson huffed and coughed, wiping his sweaty brow with his left hand, as he herded the last of Clark’s Company E into line. He had sheathed his saber, and back-pedaled his way toward Captain Clark.

  “All present and accounted for, Captain,” Masterson said.

  “And hungry,” Seb Woolard whispered.

  Masterson and Clark snapped to attention, and sharply saluted Colonel Morgan, who did not bother to return the address, and instead turned to face the rows of rangers.

  “Attention, soldiers!” the colonel barked. Caleb and everyone from Company E knew that order, although Seb constantly complained that there was no reason to stand like that.

  “Look to the left and right, and dress!”

  Blinking back confusion, Caleb turned to Seb, whose face, likewise, went blank. He looked the other way, expecting to find Ewald or Rémy Ehrenreich, whichever one was closest, but the twins had broken out of the line and started footing it back toward their bedrolls.

  “My shoes!” Seb shouted, and followed the two Germans.

  Caleb had his boots on, and shirt, but knew he had left his hat and the flintlock back in the tent. When one of the Company E boys came running back with his shotgun, Caleb decided he had better get his, too. And his hat. That had to be what dress meant.

  He started forward, but Sergeant Masterson stopped him with the flat of his thick, right hand. “Stay! Stay!”

  Someone blew a whistle, and, above the commotion, Caleb heard Morgan shouting at his adjutant. Other sergeants, corporals, and lieutenants ran about trying to collect their men. Caleb fell back into line, saw Captain Clark smiling and shaking his head, heard curses and grunts. Seb Woolard came hobbling back, one brogan on, the other in his left hand. The Ehrenreich twins fell back into place, one of them holding a musket, the other lamenting that his remained by the elm tree. The drummer rapped out something. More curses. More shouts. That screeching
whistle kept blasting. Seb Woolard squatted, and managed to pull on his other brogan, which would certainly blister his feet since he hadn’t gotten on his socks. By the time Woolard was standing, the regiment had fallen, relatively, back into a line.

  “I am not commenting on your attire, boys,” Colonel Morgan explained. “What I meant, my fine comrades, is for you to line up in a straight row. We will work on military etiquette. Mister Godfrey.”

  Godfrey, the adjutant, shouted an order, and here came Sergeant Masterson, prodded along by that carpenter named Ault and some fellow from Pennville, both of whom had been elected lieutenants. Masterson’s huge hands straightened, twisted, and pulled Company E’s soldiers into proper position. Caleb leaned forward, saw how the men were standing, and tried to copy that stance. He must have succeeded because Masterson kept his paws off Caleb. Seb Woolard and one of the Ehrenreichs did not have that much luck.

  “Brave soldiers of Missouri,” the colonel eventually said, “thanks to Mister Pratt.” Here, Morgan nodded at the rich Linn County farmer who had merged his men into Morgan’s Rangers. “The department has awarded us with a new designation. Instead of being called the Missouri Rangers, we are now the Eighteenth Missouri Volunteer Infantry, and that is a name that will reap untold glory and help restore our precious and glorious Union.”

  As men up and down the line cheered, Sergeant Masterson glared, so Caleb kept his lips tight.

  When the din quieted, Morgan called the Reverend John Garner to lead the regiment in prayer, and that tall, rangy Tennessean strode to the center of the line, removing his wide-brimmed black hat. Caleb grinned. He had heard that Methodist circuit rider preach on occasion, and never minded going to meeting when he knew that the Carroll County sky pilot would be leading the congregation.

  “Boys,” he drawled, “about the only qualifications I have to lead you are ignorance, impudence, and a couple of strong lungs.”

  Caleb couldn’t stop from laughing at that one, and felt relief to see Sergeant Masterson chuckling, too.

  “Back in Tennessee, my kinfolk consider me the blackest-hearted gent to disgrace the Garner name. Why, they’d hang me if I were to return to the hills. They hate me, but I tell you what, I hate them more. I’m an Andy Jackson Democrat, and I’m not only right with God, but I stand in the right. Let us pray.”