‘Sir, my heart cries out for the boys in Chimborazo. And in this town, sir. But I know that the fact that my heart cries out is in no way evidence.’
At some stage they made her stand, her counsel standing beside her. Poor Major Pember had gone pale, and the president of the court and the other two judges sat there looking like victims.
‘This court,’ said the president, in a voice you had to lean forward a little to hear, ‘finds you guilty of high treason against the Confederate States. The statutory penalty for a civilian is death by hanging. This court therefore has no choice but to allocate a date, namely next Tuesday September 18 at nine o’clock in the morning, as the date of your execution. We do, however – in view of your sex – recommend you to the mercy of the President of these States. I just don’t know, ma’am, what hope you should put in our recommendation. The court admires your demeanour, ma’am, but notes you have condemned yourself with very little help from the prosecution. May God have mercy on you, ma’am.’
Dora Whipple simply sat. There was nothing more that they could do to her, there was no leverage they could use on her. She had even taken the solemnity out of the judges and the starch out of the prosecutor. A terrible fierce calm grew within her. So they’ll hang me? Well, that means I shall be with Yates Whipple soon.
She found though that, when her counsel helped her up towards the door of the school where her guard stood, her legs would not take her weight. Major Pember whispered in her ear: ‘They’ve made it Tuesday so the President will have time to act. I am sure, ma’am, he’ll decide for mercy. Please don’t distress yourself, dear lady.…’
It was just what he had been saying all along.
‘Let go of me,’ she said. He looked confused. ‘Let go of me!’
He took his arm from beneath her elbow and she stood alone, persuading her legs to hold firm. At last she took a tentative step and found she did not fall. So she proceeded down the steps of the schoolhouse. Well, they’ll hang me.
Already the outside world looked to her like someone else’s county which you visit for just a few days.
17
It was some crossing! It was the sort of thing that caught you up the way that banquet in Manassas had, that banquet Bolly died of. You got the feeling that it was no use having personal opinions about going into Maryland, there was a sort of great opinion working in that mass of men. It pushed along some North Carolina boys, who didn’t think it quite right to cross into the North, just as sure as it pushed someone like Usaph, who approved of it all anyhow. And Cate it pushed too – Cate in a daze – pushed him along as sure as it pushed Wheat.
It was a Biblical morning, and Maryland shone beyond the water like the bountiful country it was. On the Maryland bank of the river stood a little village. Oaks grew out over the water on both sides and wore in their branches the flowers of the trumpet vine. The white flowers and crimson berries of trailing arbutus shone on the far bank, the army’s path was over and amongst the wildflowers which grew everywhere – lobelia, tobacco plant and goldenrod and lupin and May apple – all scarlet and blue on both the banks. And partridge and ruffed grouse rose up protesting out of the crabgrass.
Cavalry came down there to White’s Ford at dawn and squinted awhile at the far bank, which was high, before crossing. When they did cross, the first thing they found, beyond that high bank and across the fields, was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Half a dozen barge men and farmers had tied up their barges there for the night. Three of these barges had melons on them, and the horsemen bought melons from a farmer-bargee who took their Confederate dollars deferentially, even though he felt a little cheated and would rather have got his melons down to the markets of Washington without hindrance. Whatever he felt, this was the first time ever that Confederate money had spoken in the North. The farmer was ignorant of that historic fact.
After the cavalry a band came through White’s Ford, playing ‘Dixie’ in the mild mountain air, and behind them a boy carrying the flag of Virginia, the great blue flag with the maiden slap bang in the centre trampling on the tyrant. And then the first infantry regiment went down into the river. The 10th Virginia. At the bank, its soldiers broke their ranks and stripped their britches off amongst the wildflowers or rolled the legs high, and they took off their shoes and strung them round their necks and bundled up their powder in their blankets, and carried all they owned on their heads like so many negro washerwomen, and waded in. The water was so good they would have stayed and swum if it had been any other river. The band waded too, holding their instruments high, drummers toting the drums on their heads. But as soon as they’d battled up the high slope on the far side, then they formed up again and took a stance in the meadow there and began in on ‘Maryland, My Maryland’.
‘The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland, my Maryland!
This torch is at they temple door,
Maryland, my Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!’
Tom Jackson came on right behind the 10th Virginia. He was riding a big cream-coloured horse, for Sorrel had bolted off in the Leesburg area, lured away by the bluegrass pastures. Jim Lewis the slave had stayed back there to find him. With Jackson rode his usual retinue, including foul-mouthed old John Harman, the quartermaster.
The 10th Virginia ahead and everyone behind were singing and hollering when they saw Stonewall. And Stonewall did a pretty grandiose thing for once. He splashed two-thirds of the way across, and then parked his big cream horse and his staff right there in the water, and he dragged his dirty old forage cap off and sat bareheaded under the genial sun.
Now there were more bands and regiments crossing, and the tune of ‘Maryland’ fought the tune of ‘Dixie’, and ‘Dixie’ fought the ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’. And everything fought the Rebel yell, that resonant howl which was like the baying of some mean animal that meant to eat flesh.
While all this noise went on, the staff thought their thoughts. Kyd felt all the flush of a boy coming home. He’d been born in Shepherdstown on the south bank of the river, but grew up on Ferry Hill over the river. When the army was properly across he’d ride upriver to see his mother and father and sister; he would liberate them and taste their admiration. Because he’d been a student and a militia private when he last saw home and now he was coming back as Stonewall’s adjutant and friend. If that wouldn’t make a man’s parents sit up and glow a little, he wondered what would.
The sight of the Potomac’s steep and tangled banks worked powerfully on Kyd today. The last time he’d been in this area was a clear night last year when he’d led a little patrol down to the river. With field-glasses he got a view of his father’s house on Ferry Hill burning. The flames broke from the windows of the gallery where his father and mother would sit at evening drinking a cocktail and looking south over the hills of Virginia.
Later Kyd’s younger brother crept over the Potomac to join the Confederacy, and from him Kyd learned that the burning of the gallery had happened at the end of a party held by some Yankee subalterns there. It was the result of stupidity not malice. The barn had burned later for the same cause. Most of the house could still be occupied. His father and mother and sister were prisoners in the house though – Yankee privates were allowed to go into the rooms of the womenfolk and root through bureaux looking for jewellery; for some brutal reason a Yankee sergeant had attacked petite Miss Douglas’s feather bed with a bayonet and torn it apart. AH the fences right up to the door of the Ferry Hill mansion had been torn down for campfires, the wheatfields had been turned into artillery parks, the lawn was decorated with rifled Parrotts, and rifle pits stood in front of the Greek revival doors. All the corn and fodder and hay on the property had been forfeit to the United States.
Sitting mounted with Tom Jackson in midstream, Kyd relished the quiet ferocity that rose in him now.
/> Bulky and profane Major Harman felt satisfied because the bottom of this ford was pebbles, and firm. It would take waggons.
Surgeon Maguire amused himself identifying the plants that grew all over the embankments of the river. He was pleased to see the lobelia tobacco plant with its chunky red flower growing in wild numbers. A tincture could be made up from that plant which Maguire considered the best expectorant and tonic for sufferers from chest disorders and pneumonia. And if the campaigning in the North that was beginning today should drag on until late autumn, there’d be lots of chest disorders. One of the things Maguire liked about the lobelia tincture was that it had that smell about it, like real tobacco, and that made it easier to get down soldiers’ throats. It tasted good and, unlike real tobacco juice, didn’t burn going down.
The Shenandoah Volunteers crossed before nine o’clock; Cate in a daze, most others singing and making noises. And in Usaph, such a certainty that this was the act that would end it all, this barefoot crossing which all the millions and the malice of the North had not in the end prevented!
By then Stonewall had got out of the river and you could see him and the staff atop the far embankment, their position marked by a large Confederate flag just about as big as a country ballroom. Sandie was talking low there in his general’s ear.
‘Lawton says no more than 250,’ Sandie was saying.
‘Folly,’ said Tom Jackson. ‘Folly.’
‘Lawton says there’s no use punishing them. You’d never get a court-martial to sentence men like that.’
‘Surely justice can be universal,’ said Tom Jackson. ‘Surely they are deserters in the truest sense.’
‘I suppose it’s that we can’t spare the men to go after them.’
Some hundreds of North Carolina boys had deserted in the night and Tom Jackson would certainly punish them if he could reach them. North Carolina people often played this game of being the sanest and most regretful of Rebels and therefore the most morally impeccable. The governor of that state, Zebulon Vance, struck these moral airs whenever he made a speech, and regularly attacked Jefferson Davis for trying to control the troops of North Carolina and employ them this way or that without taking account of their fine spiritual fibre or of the opinions of the said Mr Vance.
Last night, around Big Spring, the North Carolina regiments, unlike regiments from any of the other states, held formal meetings, with their colonels actually present, to discuss the question whether a North Carolina boy had a right to invade Maryland. The 7th North Carolina had had a meeting, the 21st and 24th, the 28th and 33rd. Right on the question of whether their enlistment covered such a thing as crossing into Maryland.
‘The meetings were orderly,’ Sandie went on reporting, ‘according to what I’ve been told. Most of them were hot in favour of crossing.…’
Jackson was shaking his head at the arrogance of such gatherings and of the 250 Tarheel deserters. Maybe it was the morning, but he began to make quite a speech by his standards. ‘This crazy argument about whether the South is fighting a war of defence or offence, Sandie! It’s all words. It’s debating society stuff. It doesn’t have any meaning. If any of them are captured I want the Adjutant-General to treat them with full severity. I consider their actions worse than an act of cowardice; God forgives the coward, Sandie, on the perfectly good grounds that the coward cannot help himself. He does not forgive the proud. Satan did not fall through cowardice. He fell, Sandie, through a brand of Tarheel pride. Prepare a letter for my signature.’
‘I think,’ Sandie said, swallowing to get the words out, ‘if any of them were sentenced to death, the Confederate Congress might overturn the decision. There aren’t many votes in … in executions.’
But Jackson just put those scorching eyes on Sandie for a while and said no more, for he wouldn’t be drawn into bad-mouthing Congress.
‘I want Ambrose Hill’s division watched closest of all,’ he muttered. ‘They’re the worst stragglers.’
‘There’s a cavalry guard marching behind them, stopping boys from dropping out.’
‘So be it.’
Well, even loyal Sandie Pendleton didn’t know if it was the truth that Ambrose Hill’s division were worse than anyone else. But he’d seen Stonewall and Ambrose have another falling out. It had been yesterday morning in the meadows round Big Spring. One of Hill’s brigades was late starting out from those lovely fields full of late lupins. It had been allowed to wander off to a run of sweet water down amongst the quaking aspens and to fill its canteens. Stonewall had heard about this, who else from but Sandie and Kyd? So he’d decided to march beside Hill’s lead brigade.
This brigade was commanded by a Brigadier Ed Thomas, who was soon to be the meat in the sandwich. Poor Thomas had Jackson on his shoulder, and 200 yards ahead Ambrose rode, leading his division as he should, pretending Jackson wasn’t anywhere around. Then, at the end of the first hour’s march, when there were standing orders for a ten-minute rest, Hill kept his boys striding right on. Jackson spurred the little way he had to catch up to Thomas and told him to halt. Then Ambrose galloped back and asked him: ‘Who told you to stop, Brigadier Thomas?’
All Ed Thomas could say was: ‘I halted because General Jackson ordered me to do so.’
Ambrose lost all his aristocratic coolness when he heard that. He stood up in his stirrups, dashed his horse towards Stonewall, pulled out his sword and offered it hilt first to this dullwit from the mountains. ‘If you take command of my troops in my presence, sir,’ he said, ‘you might just as well take my sword too.’
Stonewall didn’t let anyone get away with big gestures like that. ‘Put your sword away and consider yourself under arrest,’ he told Ambrose.
So one of Ambrose’s stragglers today would be Ambrose himself, for he would enter Maryland this morning in the traditional place of an officer under arrest, that is, right at the rear of his command.
Some of the local landowners and businessmen from Frederick rode out on good horses and found the General on that embankment. They said fulsome things like: ‘It is our pleasure, sir, to welcome the liberators of Maryland.’
But they told him that most of this part of Maryland was Union. Even this very county, Frederick County, was divided. The town of Frederick itself was by and large Confederate but there were lots of Germans round about who were hot for the Union, and some people that were just pro-Union out of the perversity of their politics. ‘I think I speak for most of my fellow townsmen,’ one of them said, pretty grandly, ‘in telling you that the town of Frederick is all yours.’
Another said, ‘And I think we can get you, sir, a better mount than that-there artillery nag of yours.’ And Jackson patted the big cream horse and laughed and said he wouldn’t turn back any such offer.
Tom Jackson was still there on the north bank at noon. The army was passing him and spreading out into the fields of Frederick County. It was as fine a day in early September as you could wish for. The sun was high, the temperature – according to Hotchkiss, who kept thermometers with him – stood at 76° Fahrenheit. That was just when a crowd of waggons rolled down into the river. They were the light waggons and ambulances of the Stonewall division, followed by those of Dan Hill’s division and of Ambrose’s. There must have been 600 or more of them, creeping up through the town of White’s Ford and edging down to the river. The trouble was they were so slow getting across. The mules got delighted this warm day to be in the cool water and halted with the ripples tickling their bellies. Some drivers steered their waggons past the first ones that halted, only to have their own mules stall before they were two parts across. It happened almost without anyone noticing, that the whole river was jammed with waggons, waggoners were yelling, the mules were drinking and grinning in a contemplative manner, and the waggons on the Virginia side were halted and had nowhere to go.
Old John Harman saw all this from the Maryland bank. ‘Goddamit!’ he yelled. ‘They’ll never move that mess. Half them waggoneers are goddam Dunkers.’ The Dunker
s were a peaceable German church strong in the Shenandoah Valley. They did not believe in warfare and so had been conscripted as waggoneers. More important to the matter at hand, they held against the uttering of oaths.
John Harman operated under no such religious handicap. He spurred his horse down into the water, not taking the road that was cut into the embankment, but riding the beast down the slope on its hindquarters. All that jolting only put the quartermaster into an even sharper frame of mind. He rode into the mass of waggons and kicked mules and yelped at them. He spoke at them in a great baritone voice that Kyd could hear above all the other voices of waggoneers, above both the voices of the gentle Dunker drivers and of the more profane.
‘Way-hay, you hinnies,’ he screamed, ‘you comic beasts, you sons of whores and callithumpians, you no good eunuchs, you childless sons of bitches. Way-hay-hay! Goddam your granite brains, God blast your eyes, get out of that water there! Way-hay-hay! Is this a water resort and are you goddam Christians, you Monday morning whimsy of the Creator? Up, you goddam hinnies, up, you draft mules, go, you eunuchs, you goddam jests! Go on and way-hay and God blast your sterile flanks …’ and so on.
Any mule Harman got close to began to haul again, and others, seeing that the train was starting to move, came to believe that the bathing was over and began to pull as well and to compete with others. Soon the waggons of Jackson’s corps were grinding up the road to Frederick. Touching his hat coyly, expecting to be chastised for his cussing, Harman rode back to the General. ‘The ford’s clear now, General,’ he announced. ‘Lookee, there’s only one language that will make mules understand on a hot day that they must get out of the water.’
Tom Jackson coughed. ‘Why, thank you, Major Harman,’ he said. He didn’t seem to be very interested any more in the train. He was pointing across the fields. ‘See that thirty acres or so of corn,’ he said. ‘I’d be right obliged if you bought that from the farmer concerned.’