Shattered Nation

by Jeffrey Brooks

  SHATTERED

  NATION

  An Alternate History Novel of the American Civil War

  By Jeffrey Evan Brooks

  This is a work of fiction.

  Copyright ©2013 by Jeffrey Evan Brooks

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0615802052

  ISBN-13: 978-0615802053

  Published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

  Map by Steven Stanley

  Cover art by Meredith Scott

  Dedicated to my parents, Lonnie and Barbara Brooks,

  Who taught me to be a good man and to love learning. All that I have done or will do with my life is built on the foundation they gave me.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  The Civil War Trust

  About the Author

  All great things hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.

  - Napoleon Bonaparte

  Chapter One

  June 27, Morning

  In a long trench carved into the slope of Kennesaw Mountain, surrounded by the endless pine forests and red clay hills of northern Georgia, the men of the 7th Texas Infantry Regiment waited in silence.

  Birds drifted in the light breeze above them, oblivious to the turmoil that had engulfed the land. Although the sun had peeked over the horizon only an hour or so before, the air was already becoming stifled with the humid heat that had plagued the regiment since the campaign had begun. If the past few days were any indication, it would be over a hundred degrees by mid-afternoon.

  The soldiers themselves remained still, clutching their Enfield rifles as they stared intently down at the enemy lines at the base of the mountain. When the regiment had marched out from Texas nearly three years before, it had numbered over a thousand men. Now, barely one hundred hungry survivors remained.

  Among the hardened veterans was Sergeant James McFadden. Slightly smaller than his fellow soldiers, his face was covered with a thin mustache and goatee very different from the bushy beards sported by most of his comrades. His skin was deeply tanned, giving him a vaguely Latin appearance that belied his Scottish blood. His cool gray eyes reflected a sharp intelligence, but where there should have been emotion there was only emptiness.

  “The Yankees are coming up the mountain,” Private Billy Pearson said. He quickly glanced about to see if anyone would respond.

  McFadden said nothing in reply, hoping that his silence would deter Pearson from speaking further. Sometimes the trick worked, but on this morning it did not.

  “Do you think the Yankees are coming up the mountain, Sergeant?”

  “No,” McFadden said simply.

  “I think they are,” Pearson replied. “It’s just too damn quiet. Usually we can hear the Yankees talking, chopping wood, all that kind of thing. Can’t hear a damn thing this morning, though. They’re getting ready to come up this mountain, sure as hell.”

  “Doubt it,” McFadden replied resignedly. “Attacking us straight on isn’t Sherman’s style. He’ll try to get around our flank again, just like he’s done, over and over.”

  “Two dollars says they attack before the morning’s over.”

  “Go to hell.” McFadden knew that Pearson didn’t have a dollar to his name anyway, having lost all his money to Private Balch in a series of disastrous card games.

  “You think I’d win, don’t you?” Pearson said with a grin. “I think that’s why you never take my bets. You think I’ll win. Ha! I expect I’ll have taken a hundred dollars off the rest of you fellows by the time we get back to Texas.”

  McFadden wanted to remind Pearson that the odds of any of them making it back to Texas were not particularly good, but decided that it was best to try silence again. The soldiers on either side of them followed McFadden’s lead. Pearson continued his chattering until the authoritative voice of Captain James Collett, commander of the regiment, came down on him like a thunderbolt.

  “Billy, shut your damn mouth and keep your eyes peeled!”

  “Yes, sir,” Pearson meekly replied.

  “Sergeant McFadden, please keep the men of your company quiet.”

  “I will, sir. Sorry, sir.

  Collett nodded and moved on to the next company. McFadden glared menacingly down the line of the twenty or so men who made up Company F, nicknamed the Lone Star Rifles, which was under his command. Ordinarily the command of a company should have been held by a lieutenant. But with so many officers having been killed, each company in the 7th Texas had become the responsibility of a sergeant.

  Silence again descended upon the line and McFadden gripped his rifle more tightly. As the long minutes passed, he found his mind drifting, which was not unusual. He wondered if the seemingly endless trench warfare was beginning to wear on the minds of the men. Since the great Yankee offensive against Atlanta had commenced two months earlier, the regiment had been involved in one vicious fight after another, interspersed with endless marches or the labor of constructing fortifications. There had scarcely been a single day of rest. Such a constant strain was bound to erode even the toughest of men. His own spirit was undeterred, however, and would remain so as long as he had the opportunity to kill Yankees.

  From somewhere off to the north, there was a noticeable increase in the soft booming of artillery. The thunder of distant cannon had been a constant companion since the onset of the campaign, but changes in its tempo were always worthy of attention. The men lifted their heads and strained to hear. The artillery fire continued for several minutes, then reached a crescendo. A sudden silence was followed, a few minutes later, by a far-off crackling sound that the men recognized as sustained musket fire.

  “The Yankees are attacking up north,” Private Tom Harrison said. “We may get a battle today after all.”

  McFadden nodded. Harrison was one of the few men in the regiment that he genuinely liked. “Sounds like the fighting is where Polk’s corps is,” McFadden observed.

  “Not Polk’s any more. Poor fellow got himself killed by Yankee artillery a couple weeks ago. Not sure who’s in command of it now.”

  “Who cares? Think they can hold?”

  “If they’re dug in as good as we are, should be no problem.”

  “Isn’t that what we said at Missionary Ridge?”

  The mention of that horrible day brought a slight but noticeable shudder among the Texans. For just a moment, McFadden bitterly recalled how their division had held its portion of the line at Missionary Ridge, only to have the rest of the army give way in the face of the Yankee attack. The result had been a shameful rout of the entire army, which the 7th Texas had barely been able to escape.

  The crackling sound to the north went on. Veterans like the men of the 7th Texas had long since learned to read the sounds of distant battle. Had the sounds of musket fire suddenly ceased, it would probably have meant that the Yankees had breached the line and that hand-t
o-hand fighting was taking place. If the sound gradually faded, it would have meant that the attack had been repulsed. The fact that it continued unabated indicated that the Yankees were still pressing on with their attack, the outcome yet uncertain.

  “Stay alert, men!” Captain Collett shouted. “The attack to the north could be a diversion. They could be planning to mount their main attack along our lines.”

  McFadden couldn’t fault the captain’s logic, but the idea that the Yankees would launch a frontal assault on such a strong position seemed ludicrous. The men of the 7th Texas had had days in which to transform the slopes of the little mountain into a veritable fortress. The very hour they had arrived, they had begun digging a regular trench and thrown up a parapet in front of it with the excess dirt. A head-log had been mounted on top of the parapet, the foot-high gap between the log and the parapet allowing them to shoot down at their foes with little risk of being hit by return fire.

  Their fixed defenses were not the only obstacle to any attacker. They had cleared the slope in front of them of any trees that might provide cover to Union soldiers, while laying out barriers of chopped branches to make the ascent as difficult as possible. Closer to the line, barriers known as chevaux-de-frise had been erected, consisting of thick logs with sharpened stakes sticking out of them from four angles.

  After nearly three years of war, the men of the 7th Texas had mastered the art of preparing defensive positions. McFadden was sure that they could hold their line against anything short of an attack by the Devil himself.

  Still, he hoped that the Yankees would attack. It would give him the opportunity to kill more of the enemy, exacting slivers of vengeance with each shot at the people whom he held responsible for the death of his family out on the plains of central Texas. More importantly, somewhere out there was the Yankee captain with the scar across his left cheek, from whom he had sworn to extract a more direct form of revenge. Would today be the day he finally had the man in the sights of his Enfield? He prayed that it would be so, even if he was no longer certain of the existence of God.

  After about an hour, the sound of musketry from up north began to fade. The Union attack had clearly been beaten off. But relief was quickly transformed to alarm when a series of loud, dull thudding sounds suddenly emanated from the Union lines directly across from them.

  “Get down!” Captain Collett shouted.

  “Down!” McFadden repeated to the men of his company.

  The men needed no encouragement, instantly diving to the bottom of the trench. A second later, explosions rocked their position as artillery shells slammed into the mountainside. The shells that exploded as they hit the parapet or the ground in front of it threw up great chunks of earth, tossing dirt every which way. More dangerous were the projectiles that exploded in the air, showering the men of the 7th Texas with shrapnel.

  McFadden hugged the earth as tightly as he could. The noise of the explosions pounded his eardrums and the impact vibrations shook his body. He knew a shrapnel fragment might take his head off at any instant, but he felt no fear. In his first battle, fought more than two years before at Val Verde in distant New Mexico, he had been absolutely terror-stricken, shaking so much that he had nearly dropped his musket. But the many battles he had gone through since then had cured him of that ailment. If it was his destiny to die on this particular day, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Besides, he was one of the lucky ones who did not particularly care whether he lived or died.

  “Told you!” he could hear Pearson shouting over the sound of the bombardment. “I told you they were going to attack! You owe me two dollars!” He had never taken the bet and considered shouting this fact back to Pearson, but decided that to do so would be a waste of breath.

  McFadden hoped the bombardment wouldn’t last long, as the noise was extremely annoying. It was common for the Yankees to try to soften them up with artillery fire before launching an infantry attack. It usually did little good, as the fortifications were strong enough to survive the shelling virtually intact. In fact, by giving away the intentions of the enemy, the artillery fire probably helped the Confederates more than it hurt them. But that didn’t make the noise any less annoying.

  Over the sound of the shell explosions, McFadden heard a man scream somewhere off to his right. Glancing over, he saw Lieutenant Martin Featherston grasping at his leg, which was suddenly half the length it should have been. What had been his foot a moment before was now nothing but a bloody stump. The stretcher bearer team immediately dashed forward to rescue him. Such wounds all too often became infected and led to an agonizing death.

  Some of the men were shouting. “Cleburne! General Cleburne’s here!”

  McFadden looked back to where they were pointing, and there he was. General Patrick Cleburne, mounted on a reddish-brown mare, was riding behind the lines as if on a regular inspection tour, seemingly unconcerned about the explosions shattering the earth all around him. Two staff officers followed him at a respectful distance, along with a color-bearer who was carrying the distinctive flag of the division, a blue field with a white ellipse in the center. Cleburne’s division was the only one in the Confederate Army permitted to carry a non-regulation battle flag, a fact that filled the men with pride.

  McFadden thought that Cleburne’s uniform looked more like that of a private than a general. Their division commander, perhaps just shy of forty, was not a physically imposing man. He was slightly taller and rather more thin than most men, with a well-formed if undistinguished face covered with a thin red beard. Though his appearance might not have attracted attention, the look on his face was fierce. His eyes seemed to blow out fire.

  The men cheered as Cleburne rode past and he responded by taking his hat off and waving it. “Stand firm, 7th Texas!” he shouted. “Treat them the same way you treated them at Pickett’s Mill!”

  McFadden remembered that fight, exactly a month before. His mind involuntarily recalled the horrific sight, after the battle was over, of hundreds of Union soldiers lying dead or mangled in front of the Confederate lines. They had been mowed down like so many blades of grass. McFadden had been convinced he could have walked forward several hundred yards without his feet ever touching the ground. The sight had pleased him enormously.

  Cleburne rode on, and the bombardment continued. It went on for what seemed like an hour, but was probably only five or six minutes. Then, quite abruptly, the firing ceased. From long experience, every soldier in the regiment knew what that meant.

  “Stand up!” Captain Collett yelled.

  “Up!” McFadden repeated.

  As one, the men of the 7th Texas rose from the ground and took their places on the fire-step. Looking through the gap between the top of the parapet and the head-log, McFadden could see clusters of blue-coated Union soldiers emerging from the trees at the base of the hill, forming their lines for an attack.

  “Don’t bother with bayonets, men!” Collett shouted. “They’ll just get in the way of reloading. This here’s going to be a rifle battle from start to finish!”

  McFadden took a large swig of water from his canteen, thinking it might be the last he would taste for awhile. He went through the automatic task of loading his rifle: bite off the top of a cartridge, pour the gunpowder down the barrel, insert the musket ball, use the ramrod to shove the ball and powder down the barrel, lift the weapon to firing position, pull back the cock, and place the firing cap on the cock. It had been somewhat complicated the first time he had done it. He now did it automatically, without thinking.

  Many of the Enfield rifles which with the men of the 7th Texas were armed had only recently been acquired. At the beginning of the campaign, the regiment had been equipped with a jumbled assortment of weapons, not only Enfields but also Springfield rifles captured from the Yankees and Lorenz rifles imported from the Austrian Empire and run through the blockade. The Texans considered the latter two models inferior to the Enfield. Fortunately, after their victory at Pickett’s Mill, however, t
he men had taken a sufficient number of Enfield rifles off the corpses of dead Yankees to reequip the entire regiment. They now went into battle as one of the best-armed regiments in the Confederate Army.

  Turning his eyes back to the base of the mountain, McFadden was astonished to see that the numbers of Union soldiers had massively increased in the minute or so since his previous glance. Packed into dense columns, they were moving steadily up the hill like some giant snake, their obvious intention being to overwhelm the Confederates by sheer force of numbers. To the men of the 7th Texas, however, such a tightly-packed formation simply made for an easy target. The barrels of a hundred rifles poked out from beneath the head-log, aimed directly at the oncoming mass of men.

  “Hold your fire until the command!” Captain Collett shouted. McFadden could hear other officers shout commands to the men of neighboring regiments on either side of them. He gripped his Enfield tightly. He felt no fear, but rather a sense of anticipation not unlike that he had often experienced just before a visit to one of the camp prostitutes. The few remaining minutes seemed to last forever.

  When the Northern soldiers were about a hundred yards away, the Yankee officers gave the order to charge. The Union men rushed forward, letting forth a tremendous deep-throated battle cry, their bayonets glinting in the morning sun. They could be on top of the parapet within less than a minute.

  “Fire!” Captain Collett yelled. Instantly, the Confederate line erupted in a tremendous crash as every soldier pulled his trigger at the same moment. The troops of the regiments on either side of the 7th Texas opened fire at almost the same moment. To the attacking Federals, it must have seemed as though a volcano had exploded in their faces. Blue-coated men immediately began to fall in droves and the sound of bullets whistled through the air.

  It was not just musket fire that sliced down the Yankees. Positioned on the left of the 7th Texas was a concealed artillery battery of four cannon that opened up with canister shot. These deadly munitions spewed out containers packed with small lead balls, effectively transforming the cannon into gigantic sawed-off shotguns. McFadden could see great gaps being torn in the Union ranks, but the Northern men stoically continued up the slope.