Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

“Or you. We are agreed on that, but his excellency President Davis is not.”

  “This time we may not get away. Rosecrans is smarter and more dangerous than Buell. And he has Thomas commanding the center. Old Slow Trot won’t allow another Perryville.”

  “Oh, I don’t worry about Thomas. Thomas is a plodder.”

  “Can we wire the president? Tell him that the army faces annihilation because of this insane plan?”

  Polk purses his lips. “The president is a dear friend of mine. And I know he has warm feelings for you. But General Bragg is no stranger to the president’s affections, either.”

  “But this plan—”

  “Bill, I think you are making too much of the splitting of the army. The river is not deep. We will be able to support each other.”

  “It’s a terrible plan. It violates all the rules.”

  “I agree, Bill, I agree. Yet armies have survived worse. Usually, though, generals do not.”

  Hardee frowns. “Are you suggesting that Bragg will not?”

  Polk shrugs. “Well, as you said, it is a mad plan. And since General Bragg seems to have the constitution of a horse for all his complaints, I think that evidence of madness may be what we need if you or I—and God forbid the latter—are ever to command this army.”

  Hardee studies Polk. “I am always amazed, Bishop, at exactly how devious you are.”

  Polk lifts his palms in mock modesty. “You are too kind, Bill. It is, of course, a pity that the army may suffer from General Bragg’s disadvantageous positioning of its elements, but what can we do? We are soldiers involved in two battles, and we must take opportunities as they come.”

  “Still, if the president saw the order of battle—”

  “He would do nothing.”

  Hardee sighs. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I am, Bill. I fear that I am. Now let us do our duty by following the commanding general’s orders insofar as we are able. We’ll leave the rest to God and then draw off the army when the battle’s over.”

  “Yes, we retreat exceedingly well.”

  “Do we? I always thought we did it rather ill-temperedly. But be patient, Bill. Our day will come. Trust in God. Now have some refreshment.”

  Hardee looks at the laden table. “Well, if there is enough for two.”

  “If there isn’t, we shall send for more.”

  Hardee would go on talking of Bragg, but Polk—always mindful of his digestion—insists on talking of other generals. Fortunately, Hardee is a wonderful gossip and, once distracted from his beloved tactics, can produce almost endless anecdotes, rumors, and slanders.

  The afternoon is well advanced when Hardee, complexion reddened by a bottle of burgundy and three glasses of port, goes to check on his corps. Polk calls for brandy and coffee, settles back to contemplate. Trust in God, he thinks. Well, he supposes he believes in God occasionally, though the question has not troubled him much in many years. He is, after all, a bishop, and princes of the Church must serve the Church first, God as an afterthought. Hardee says he is devious. But is not God devious? Witness the death and destruction of war. Are the faithful to believe that it is part of the Divine Plan that young men should die in the most ugly, fantastic, painful ways: disemboweled, castrated, decapitated, impaled, blown to bits? Yes, for God is most devious. And so must his ministers be.

  Along Stewart’s Creek, Union and Confederate skirmishers exchange occasional shots in the last of the afternoon’s light. The firing is mostly out of boredom, and when the sun goes down, they cease by common consent and begin calling back and forth. A Union officer records one exchange:

  Rebel: “What command does you-ens belong to?”

  Federal: “Fifteenth Indiana.”

  Rebel: “Who commands yer brigade?”

  Federal: “Colonel Wagner. What is your command?”

  Rebel: “We ar Wheeler’s; an’ I believe you-ens are the fellers we fit at Dobbins’ Ferry.”

  Federal: “You bet we are! What did you think of us?”

  Rebel: “Darned good marksmen; but whar yer fellers tryin’ to go ter?”

  Federal: “To Murfreesboro.”

  Rebel: “Well, you-ens ’ll find that ar a mighty bloody job, sho.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Monday

  December 29, 1862

  Stewart’s Creek, Tennessee

  Bragg has decided to fight close to Murfreesboro, deploying his army on either side of a bend in Stones River. But Rosecrans worries that the Rebel army may be lying under the cover of the woods below Stewart’s Creek. He orders a crossing in heavy force by Crittenden’s three divisions and Negley’s division of Thomas’s corps. Thomas’s other division, under Major General Lovell Rousseau, is designated as the army reserve.

  MAJOR GENERAL THOMAS LEONIDAS CRITTENDEN has his corps awake at two in the morning and under arms by four, in lines by division: Palmer, Wood, and Van Cleve. In all, nearly thirteen thousand men stand poised along the west side of Stewart’s Creek for an assault at first light. But as every common soldier in every century knows, hasty mustering is almost always followed by interminable waiting.

  The day dawns clear and cold. The fields on the far side of the creek lie white with hoarfrost and empty of Reb skirmishers. Crittenden feels his gut tighten as he imagines the thousands of butternut infantry hidden in the woods. He gulps coffee laced with whiskey. It does no good, and despite his fear that Rosecrans will arrive any minute demanding to know why the assault is not underway, Crittenden loses his nerve. He orders a battery brought forward to shell the woods while the shivering infantrymen wait, stomachs growling.

  The order to the battery is fumbled and, when finally received, executed with dismaying clumsiness. The guns finally open at nine-thirty with a mix of solid shot and shrapnel. Everyone along the Union line waits for counter-battery fire. Finally, a puff of smoke plumes from the woods. Three more Rebel guns fire in ragged succession along the tree line. Their shots are well short. Three of the cannonballs bounce a time or two before burying themselves in the wet field. The fourth hits a rock, rebounding absurdly high—an iron-black point traveling a steep parabola against the blue— before becoming suddenly large in its plunge earthward. It hits the creek, throwing up a freezing geyser that douses two dozen men and sets off a wave of jeers and laughter from the rest of the front rank.

  Generals Palmer and Wood ignore the scene, concentrate instead on the line of woods. Wood snorts. “That’s just horse artillery. There’s hardly anything there except some cavalry.”

  John Palmer, big, gray-bearded, a Kentucky politician turned solid soldier, growls, “Then, for God’s sake, let’s get across before they change their minds and bring up infantry.”

  Wood hurries to Crittenden and advises him to order an immediate advance. But Crittenden hesitates, torn between his fear of Rosecrans and his dread of the gray multitude he still imagines in the woods. “A few more minutes, General Wood. Just to be sure.”

  “I’ll tell General Palmer he’s to advance in ten minutes.”

  Crittenden gulps coffee and whiskey. “Yes, ten minutes.”

  Palmer’s men plunge into the freezing, testicle-clenching cold of the creek, wade across, Springfields and cartridge boxes held high, and scramble up the far bank. The line rolls across the fields toward the woods. Fighting Joe Wheeler stands, arms folded, watching them come. He has promised Bragg that he will delay the Yankee descent on Murfreesboro, but there is no way he can stop this blue wave. Not when Bragg won’t give him infantry to back up his troopers. Not when his artillery is a pathetic collection of ancient smoothbores that the Yankees can pulverize with their rifled Parrott guns. Not when his own goddamn men keep falling asleep and letting the Yankees steal the march. Those bridges! Both of them should have been fired. Simplest thing in the world, and it would have taken the Yankees the better part of a day to rebuild them for their wagons and guns. Goddamn it, anyway!

  “General, they’re pretty close to killin’ range. Want that we g
ive ’em a little bit of a welcome?”

  Wheeler ignores the bearded major by his side. Waits. Thirty more yards. Make it count. “All right, Major. One volley, and then pull back to the position I showed you this morning.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wheeler takes his own carbine, rests it in the fork of a small tree, and picks out a color bearer at the center of the leftmost brigade. The sound of his shot is lost amid the volley as the major screams: “Fire.” The color bearer lurches forward, but the flag hardly falters as another member of the color guard grabs the staff. One less of the bastards, Wheeler thinks. He has killed many, doesn’t bother to count.

  A volley from a Yankee brigade rips into the woods, but already Wheeler’s troopers are scuttling back through the underbrush toward their mounts. Wheeler follows, the anger making him stiff-legged so that he appears more the banty cock than ever.

  Crittenden watches his lines sweep into the trees, blue uniforms blending into the shadows so that definition is lost and the forward ranks fuse into a blue-black undulation against the dark green of the cedars. And still there is no blast of hidden cannons, no sudden sparkle of ten thousand rifle-muskets speaking at once to break the beautiful wave. He sweeps his hat in the air, shouts “Hurrah!” His staff is caught off guard, looks at him curiously. A few attempt to cheer but the sound is self-conscious. Crittenden hastily claps hat to head and spurs across the bridge onto the field.

  After the long delay, Crittenden’s corps advances rapidly, crossing a second creek in early afternoon. General Palmer gestures to a young staff lieutenant. “Take a dispatch for the general commanding: ‘We are across… .’”

  Palmer pauses, waits impatiently while the young man fumbles a dispatch book open and scribbles: To the Commanding General. We are across… . Up ahead, a Rebel cannon fires from a copse of trees, the shell flying long so that it lands harmlessly between the last rank of Palmer’s division and the first rank of Wood’s. But the lieutenant has never been under fire before this morning, and when the shell explodes with a whump a hundred feet behind him, the pencil point snaps in his shaking fingers.

  Palmer doesn’t notice, continues dictating: “… Overall Creek in good order, the Rebel cavalry retreating before us.” (The lieutenant concentrates, swearing that he will remember every word.) “We have the river on our left and will push ahead within sight of the town if possible. Palmer. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. And, son, be ready next time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Palmer rides ahead. The lieutenant finds another pencil in his dispatch pouch, writes quickly: The creek in good order. We are within sight of the town and pushing ahead. He hesitates. There seemed to be more, but he cannot quite remember what. Oh, yes. He adds: The enemy is retreating. There, that was the gist of it at least. He signs Palmer’s name and then digs out his watch. He labels the message precisely 3:00 P.M. and then sets off for General Rosecrans’s headquarters. En route, he passes General Crittenden and his staff and wonders why Palmer has not sent the message to the general commanding the corps instead of the commanding general, which would seem to be, in the lieutenant’s very limited experience in the intricacies of the chain of command, the proper manner of doing things. But the lieutenant is but a month away from his father’s law office in Indianapolis, and he is not about to second-guess a general.

  Rosecrans has established temporary headquarters at the hamlet of Stewartsboro. Sunshine has made the afternoon pleasant and he sits in a rocker on the porch, watching Rousseau’s division of Thomas’s corps marching down the Old Liberty Road. He reads Palmer’s puzzling message a second time. “Let’s see the map.”

  A pair of aides unroll a large field map and stand holding its edges as the general and the chief of staff study it. “What time did you say Crittenden got off?” Rosecrans asks Garesché.

  “Not until about ten-thirty, General. He decided to prepare his advance with artillery fire. He sent an apologetic note for the late start.”

  Rosecrans snorts. “Well, I will have to address General Crittenden’s tardiness at a later date. But Palmer says he already has the town in sight. That’s a long way to advance in four and a half hours. They must not be meeting any resistance.”

  “So it would appear.”

  “And he says ‘The enemy is retreating.’ Does he really mean that Bragg is abandoning Murfreesboro?”

  “I can imagine no other interpretation, General.”

  “Where’s the man who brought the dispatch?”

  They look about. A staff captain clears his throat. “He rode off the way he came, sir. Must not have known to stay until released.”

  Rosecrans shakes his head. For a moment he ponders, chewing on his cigar. “All right, then. Tell Crittenden to push a division into town. Then send word to Stanley that his cavalry is going to have fat pickings south of Murfreesboro. For once we’ll have a chance to tear up the Reb trains instead of defending our own.”

  “Yes, General,” Garesché says. He glances at Major Goddard, who is already scribbling notes.

  Rosecrans cups a lucifer, gets the cigar going again. “I really thought old Bragg would fight. Why else would he bring Hardee in from Triune? Well, we’ll follow along and see what he’s got in mind.” He rises, working the fingers of his fire-scarred hands to stretch the skin; a habit Garesché has observed often when Rosecrans is deep in thought. “All right, Julius, I’ll give you an hour to badger me with paperwork. Then I’ll ride to the front to see how Crittenden is getting on.”

  Major General Alexander McDowell McCook is feeling poorly. Not physically, of course, since he is and always has been healthy as a horse. Rather, his confidence is out of fettle. Try as he might, he cannot stop brooding over the accidental casualties in the fog north of Triune. All his life, his ambitions have fallen victim to his impetuosity, his thoughtlessness, his downright stupidity. He can still hear his father raging over the broken windows, overturned buckets, bumped and bleeding brothers and cousins. “By Old Thunder, Alex, can you never learn? All the gods of the Pantheon must be struck dumb by the incessant obtuseness of my son!” Here he rapped Alex on the forehead. “There must be some semblance of a brain here, since you manage to move, breathe, consume nourishment, belch, and defecate. But I will be goddamned if I can detect thought of more than bestial complexity. Go cut a switch, boy. Cut two. It seems we have work to do in the woodshed.”

  Alex never resented the switchings, knowing how certainly they were deserved. Besides, Old Dan McCook never laid on heavily, for he was more bluster than bully. Alex vowed each time that he would learn judgment. But then at fifteen he killed Hannah, Old Dan’s favorite horse.

  He’d led her down the lane at dawn past the sleeping edge of the village and then, as the sun crested the green Ohio hills, mounted and run her across fields shining with dew and the webs of night-spinning spiders until the breaths of horse and boy streamed back in clouds of jubilation. And though he knew Hannah was a wonderful horse, knew that she was proud and loyal, he also knew that she was no great jumper, never had been, and was even less so in these years on the far side of her prime. Knew all this, but launched her anyway at the ditch. Ever so politely she shied, tried to tell him that it was too wide, but he kept her head straight, dug his heels into her flanks, bent low over her neck, told her that they could make it for they were in this hour unconquerable. And they leaped, horse and boy, soaring against dawn sky and summer hillside.

  He heard no snap when they landed. He stood in the stirrups, pumped his fist in the air, and shouted his triumph. And he thought that Hannah tossed her head in like victory over fear, age, and the simple width of a ditch. Then she was stumbling, barely able to keep her legs. He dismounted, felt along her right foreleg, up the cannon to the knee. He could not feel the break but his fingers sensed something askew beneath the quivering muscles. Perhaps she has only twisted the joint, he thought. But even at fifteen some deep discouragement with his luck overcame Alex McCo
ok in this moment, told him that her injury must inevitably be serious. He led her home over the green hills to the farm to tell his father.

  Old Dan McCook, the patriarch who would go to war fifteen years later as a paymaster colonel while his son Alexander commanded a corps, came from his breakfast in shirtsleeves. He knelt in the road and grimly examined the mare’s foreleg. In a moment, he stood, spoke quietly. “Get my pistol, Alex.”

  “Papa, it can’t be so bad. We should send for Doc Evans. Ask—”

  “Alex, get my pistol. Do it now.”

  By the time he came back, the family had assembled on the porch. The McCooks, male and female, were rarely a silent lot, for they brimmed, each and all, with a eupeptic confidence in the good fortune each day must bring the clan. But they were silent now. Alex tried again. “Papa, can’t we—”

  “Shoot her, Alex. Get it over with and then we’ll talk.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then I shall. But if you are ever to be a man worthy of the name McCook, you must do it.”

  So Alex McCook placed the barrel of the pistol beneath Hannah’s ear and, sobbing his apologies, shot her through the brain. Afterward, Old Dan locked himself in his study for the rest of the morning. He came out in early afternoon to eat his lunch and to hand Alex the letter he had composed to the district congressman, requesting an appointment to West Point for his son.

  Because of the McCooks’ formidable political power, there was never a doubt that Alex would receive the appointment. His going was not a punishment, but an admission by Old Dan that he could not teach this son the judgment the others had demonstrated almost from the cradle. No, in Alex’s case, it would take the discipline of the military life. It took Alex McCook five years and the considerable forbearance of his instructors to graduate from West Point. But once commissioned he proved a reliable enough officer. He was popular with his enlisted men, even more popular with his cadets when he returned to West Point as a tactics instructor. He winked at their petty violations of the rules of conduct, never managed to catch anyone sneaking off for a drink at Benny Haven’s tavern. War came, and he was quickly a brigade colonel, which was fine, a post he felt well suited to fill. But then, because Old Dan is who Old Dan is, Alex McCook was made a general. And he wishes he wasn’t. It terrifies him to command so many men, their lives like water cupped in his shaking hands. But he is a McCook and must not falter.