Karl Bacon (21 page)

I stopped reading because the man had died, his gaze still fixed upon the distant range, his lips still set in their joyful mien, the very likeness of tranquility now that his life was spent. He had been a feared enemy, fighting for a cause that I could neither understand nor find sympathy for, and I had been just in killing him. I was the instrument of God’s justice upon this man and his sin.

I turned to the front of the Bible and read the inscription, written not in a softly feminine script like Jessie Anne’s, but with a bolder, coarser hand:

May 17, 1861–

To my dearest husband, may the Lord bless you and keep you.

May His Word always be bread for your heart and soul.

Your loving and affectionate wife,

Then at the bottom of the page, in another hand, presumably the man’s own:

Augustus J. Wyatt
Jeff Davis Mountaineers
26
^th
No. Carolina Troops

I turned to the next page and a small, well-worn, hand-painted image fell to the man’s still chest. I picked it up and looked into the faces of what must surely have been the Wyatt family: Constance seated in the middle surrounded by a young girl and two small boys—Rebecca, William, and Alfred, according to the baptismal records in the Bible.

I returned to the psalm and finished as I had begun, reading aloud as if the dead man could still hear:

My voice and my hands trembled as I read these words, for I could hear the voice of the dead Wyatt speaking them. The dead man before me was a fellow believer, trusting the justness of his cause and fighting for it as completely as I did mine. And yet I had killed this man—but even more, I had despised him and I had cursed him in my heart without knowing him. Here was a simple man of the South, seeking his Father’s will to do it until death, but I had judged him to be a demon from hell, the source of all my despair and misery. I had been his enemy and I had hated him
with cruel hatred.

“It’s all over, Corporal Palmer.” I sat motionless, knowing the voice of Captain Carpenter before I looked up at him. “Dry your tears, man. A great victory was won here today, Palmer, a great victory in the greatest battle ever fought on this continent. They’ll not be back for more,” he said as he watched the last few straggling Rebels melt away into the western afternoon sun. “You’re a sight, Palmer. I hardly recognized you with your face all bloody like that. You should have it tended to.”

“I will, sir.”

Captain Carpenter waved at Mr. Wyatt’s lifeless form. “Did you know this man? Was he a friend of yours, Palmer?”

“No, sir,” I said, fighting against the quaver in my voice, “not a friend, sir, … a brother. He was my brother.”

Captain Carpenter shook his head slowly, then walked away. The dead lay in a thick carpet before the wall of stone and the silent guns; the wounded swelled a frightful chorus of moans and wails most pitiful. How many of these myriad dead had
also named the name of Christ? Surely many—and I had hated them all.

The heart that had at once been hot with fury and cold in the killing both cooled and thawed. I sat next to Mr. Wyatt in that blood-soaked field for some time without moving, playing the dreadful scenes of the just-finished fight over and over in my mind, fixing them forever in my memory. Then I prayed. For the first time in many weeks—was it really since John had died?—I truly prayed, not for Mr. Wyatt, nor for comfort for his bereaved family, nor for my family far away, nor for my daily bread, nor for a hastened end to this terrible war, but for myself. In the dust and ashes before that stone wall this God-forsaking soldier had also been among the fallen. How great and numerous were my sins. Could His grace and His mercy possibly cover them all?

I finally stood up and walked slowly back to the stone wall, where I stacked my weapon. I had no wish to visit the hospital, for my wound seemed minor and I knew the scene at the hospital would be too distressingly gory. Jim Adams helped me clean and bandage my wound. Then I went back out on the field, along with hundreds of others, to help the wounded, both friend and foe, and to remove the dead for burial.

At twilight I returned to the wall. I gathered up some of the half-charred and splintered pieces of the blasted Rhode Island battery’s limber chest and started a small fire for coffee. Nighttime showers washed away the grime and sweat and muted the cries of those wounded that remained unaided. For the first time in many weeks I slept peacefully; the cauldron boiled and spewed no more; my bedfellows had departed for parts unknown.

If a wise man contendeth with a foolish man, whether he rage or laugh, there is no rest.
PROVERBS 29:9

Sunday, July 22, 1863

Beloved Husband Michael,

The newspapers have been full of reports of the magnificent victory of our army at Gettysburg, Penna. Details of the exploits of the 14
^th
Regiment have been particularly moving and distressing and I cannot but shudder when I think of your involvement. One account told of how the 14
^th
made a “glorious charge” across the open field in the face of the enemy, how you quickly put them to flight with force of arms, and wrested a farm from their control. Another told of “tremendous cannonading” you were forced to endure. A third article reported how the men of the 14
^th
“stood unwavering and unyielding against the onslaught of the finest soldiery of the Confederacy” during their terrible charge and how you turned them back. The writer exhausted many words in detailing the dreadful, bloody cost in dead and wounded in the 14
^th
.

I can only thank God above that you were spared, as the receipt of your letter of July 8
^th
at last confirmed. However, my
dearest Michael, I am somewhat perplexed that you made little of the fighting, preferring rather to dwell upon a temporary lack of rations and your weariness of marching southward once again. If your desire is to spare me concern and anxiety over your well-being – and were I in your place, perhaps I would do the same – please know that I need you to tell me all, the best and the worst of it, that we might bear one another’s burdens. Allow me,
please,
this privilege of being your wife.

Sarah, Edward and I walked over to the Robinson’s house yesterday. Our dear sister Abby continues to comport herself bravely when in public, but her private sorrows are profound. While the children played outside, she ushered me into her bedroom. An empty chair now sits beside the hearth, a chair she says no one will ever sit in again. John’s dress coat is draped upon the back of the chair, his forage cap and a pair of worn leather gloves are laid in careful array upon the seat, along with John’s Bible and the letter from Captain Carpenter. The chair seems to me a constant reminder of their loving, joyful life, of John’s faithful presence and the sweetness of family communion that is forever past, all the more poignant and bittersweet now that it is lacking.

Dear, dear Abby – I have no more words for her and wish only to allow her some respite from grief. But what am I to do? In all my dealings with her my constant guide is the knowledge that I could easily be in her place, and then what care might I wish from her? Perhaps, if in the coming weeks or months she seems amenable to more social engagement, I might invite Abby and her girls to dinner along with the widower George Allerton and his boys. Perhaps.

Beloved Michael, I am ever mindful of your perils and pray for you often each day. In some ways I miss you just as keenly as Abby does John, but I have a confident hope that Our Heavenly Father
will yet be gracious and allow you to return to me in safety.
Even so, Lord, may Your will be done.

I am, as always, your loving
and devoted wife and friend,

The three warring days at Gettysburg had taken a severe toll on our army. Of the seven corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac, General Reynolds of the First Corps was dead, our beloved General Hancock had fallen with a bloody wound to his upper leg, and General Warren was given temporary command of the Second Corps. General Sickles of the Third Corps had also been grievously wounded in the lower leg. General Gibbon, commander of the Second Division of the Second Corps, had been wounded as had Colonel Smyth, our brigade commander.

Regarding the Fourteenth, Major Ellis had fallen ill and Captain Davis once more assumed temporary command of the regiment. A sorry lot we were too. The pitying eye with which we had regarded our brothers in the lowly Twenty-seventh Connecticut was now cast in our direction. The Fourteenth had marched into Gettysburg on July 2
^nd
with one hundred sixty-six men of all ranks; it marched out just three days later with fewer than eighty men fit for duty. Fourteen, nearly one in ten, were killed or mortally wounded, dozens more had been seriously wounded, and several had been captured by the enemy. Of those fit for duty, many bore evidence of minor wounds from the fight. We proudly wore our blood-blackened wrappings as sure evidence that we had remained steadfast and done our duty. As for the bloody stripe on my own face, it was healing well with no sign of festering, but it would leave an ugly purple scar.

Seven thousand men lost their lives at Gettysburg; an
additional 33,000 were wounded, many of them grievously. Thousands more were captured by the enemy and condemned to the starvation and pestilence of the prison stockade. Through this contest of arms of three days’ duration, the course of the war was decided, and the future of the nation was established for generations yet unborn.

During the previous twelve months, the Army of the Potomac had passed through many a fiery trial. The soft of body and the soft of heart had been purged, either by death or sickness or desertion or through the expiration of short-term enlistments. The army had been reduced in number to about 80,000 men, but all had been weighed in the balance of war and had not been found lacking. Trials of every sort had brought out the best men and the best in them.

Now, as the victorious army of veteran warriors marched southward away from Gettysburg, all this was about to change.

Conscription was now the law of the land. As the war became longer and bloodier, it became apparent that the army could no longer maintain its strength solely through volunteer enlistments. Of those who were of a mind to volunteer, most had already done so during 1861 or 1862, so that during 1863, when the army sought to replenish its ranks once again, the well of volunteers had dried up, or nearly so. All men between twenty and forty-five years of age were liable for service in the army. If a certain fellow’s name was chosen, he might try to escape the draft by claiming one of the hundreds of medical or other exemptions for himself, but if he failed in this, he might pay three hundred dollars to another man, either known or unknown to him, to serve as a substitute. The opportunities for fraud, favoritism, and other mischief abounded with this system in which little or no accountability existed.

From the beginning, the rich man could always afford the substitute and almost always chose to pay rather than serve. The
working-class man could often conjure up an exemption because he was an only son, or because his occupation was vitally important to the war effort, or he could be exempted by a sympathetic physician. Thus the army supplemented its ranks from two distinct and divergent classes of men, the indigent poor man, who had no benefactor to spare him from his fate, and the paid substitute, who was often recruited not from the bustling establishment of commerce, nor from the pastoral dairy farm, nor from the hallowed college hall, but from the filthy streets of the city, where all manner of evil flourished unchecked. During the late summer of 1863, the first of this new breed of “soldier” began to appear in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac.

The two armies sidled slowly and deliberately southward, much as they had the previous autumn. On Wednesday, July 15
^th
, the Second Corps came upon the Hagerstown Pike and turned toward Sharpsburg and the Antietam battlefield. A sudden hush fell over the men at the northern end of the Miller cornfield. Not a man spoke as the column marched on; not a man averted his gaze from the scenes that were burned in his memory. Gone was the dreadful carpet of the dead; a new crop of lush green corn was reaching heavenward. The trees of the East and West Woods still bore their scars and ever would until they were felled by time and nature or by the woodsman’s axe. To the right of the road, the simple whitewashed walls of the Dunker Chapel were now adorned with crude patches, silent testimonies to the ball and shot that had profaned this sanctuary of a peace-loving people. A little farther on, the land to the left dipped down into a swale and the sunken lane came into view. I hesitated to look at first, with the fleeting thought that the lane would still be filled with ghastly skeletal corpses, but it was not. The bodies were gone; the fences were mended; the crops were growing. It
seemed that life along Antietam Creek had returned to its antebellum serenity.

The Second Corps passed by Harper’s Ferry and crossed into Virginia. Thankfully, there would be no repetition of the sojourn at Bolivar. Once again we marched down the beautiful Loudon Valley while Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched through the Shenandoah Valley to the west. At length, the byways of the Virginia hill country brought the Fourteenth Connecticut, along with the Twelfth New Jersey, eastward to a place called Cedar Run, a secluded, secure, and most pleasant place to rebuild and refit a pair of ailing infantry regiments. After a few peaceful weeks, the regiment moved to a new camp near the Orange and Alexandria Railroad at Bristow.

Wednesday, September 2, 1863
Camp of the 14
^th
Conn. Rgt. Vol. Inf.
Near Bristow, Virginia

Dearest Jessie Anne,

Please accept my deepest apology for not writing to you for almost a month – your letter of July 22 found its way to me August 19. Three weeks ago Captain Carpenter summoned me to his tent and promoted me to the rank of sergeant. Sergeant Morrison was promoted to second lieutenant and transferred to Company I to replace Lieutenant Seymour. Captain Carpenter said I’m the oldest man in the company, the fact of which I knew already, and therefore, at least to his thinking, the most mature and best suited to the job. The captain also told me he will be transferred to the Invalid Corps. He has not been well of late and in much pain, doubtless resulting from his wounding at Fredericksburg. Our new captain is likely to be Lieutenant Simpson from Company D.

Since my promotion I’ve been busily employed training about two dozen new recruits. These men know nothing, and we old soldiers know nothing of them until they prove their worth. We must always be on watch to prevent desertion. Hardly any of the new men hail from Connecticut; some are draftees, others substitutes. I can count a dozen nationalities in the regiment – Irish, French, Italian, German and such – and some speak hardly a word of English. These conscripts seem as chaff ready to be blown away by the ill winds of opportunism, self-preservation, and cowardice.

But there is one exception to this rule – a paid substitute named Otto Wehlmann, a lad of nineteen years. Otto is a giant next to me, a muscular and handsome fellow with straight blond hair and a closely clipped beard the color of fine straw. His voice is a soft tenor, colored with a slight German inflection. His first words to me were, “I hate the mules. Don’t put me with the mules.” Otto worked as a “hoggee,” the mule driver for his father’s passenger barge on the Erie Canal. Otto was forever following the hindquarters of the mule team, shouting endless curses at the beasts and flicking the whip without mercy in what seemed a fruitless effort to keep the mules pulling straight, and not veering off to the left or right in search of fresh clover.

This past June a pretty young lass aboard his father’s boat caught Otto’s eye, but a sense of his own lowliness and lack of prospects overwhelmed him. All during the seven days’ journey to Albany, Otto could never summon the courage to speak with her and had, instead, stared with loathing at the hind ends of the mules as he drove them along in disgust.

Otto knew he could not make one more trip along that canal with the mules. With less than twenty dollars to his name, he left the family boat in Albany and boarded a river steamer bound for New York. Still without prospects, with no trade or skill that would be useful to an employer in the city, Otto entered a tavern
on the waterfront, spent his last twenty cents on a flagon of ale, and sat down to glean whatever news he could of which merchant vessels might be taking on hands for an upcoming voyage.

A man sat down at the table with Otto and struck up a conversation. The man was an agent for some of Connecticut’s wealthier citizens commissioned to search out substitutes for drafted relatives and friends. For Otto, who had never considered volunteering in the army and who had never heard of such a thing as conscription, the promise of three hundred dollars, regular food rations, and a monthly stipend more than outweighed any concerns he might have had for his personal safety, and he happily accompanied the man to the depot to board the next train bound for New Haven.

From the moment I met this young man, I liked him. Humble beginnings have produced a truly humble man of even temperament, trusting of others and trustworthy himself, genuine to the degree that I can name nothing false in him.

I cannot say the same of a draftee named Caesar Ferretti. He’s an Italian bricklayer about thirty years of age from Bridgeport. He’s short of stature and thickly built. He has a dark complexion with dark brown, almost black, wiry hair, a full, equally dark moustache, deep brown eyes, and a scruffy unkempt beard. His name came up in the draft, and he had neither the political contacts, nor the money, nor even the desire to avoid the army. Instead, he resignedly accepts his fate with a shrug of his shoulders. Although he speaks little English, Caesar made it clear he thought the army would be more enjoyable than masonry, but that was before he had been many days with us.