In spirit, the Fourth of July 1862 found us far from the battlefields of the War. Yet, those wasted fields and farms of stained soil were never more than ten to fifteen miles away, give or take a river. Our respite was a welcomed relief from the daily routines and pressures of our lives and it gave us a chance to spend uninterrupted time together.
Being in supplies it was not uncommon for Warren to be called to a train or farm to replenish what he could. Supplies were scarce and getting more scarce. Knowing that Warren would have to return early on the sixth, and also for our own safety, we had no need to venture out though we’d heard in town when we arrived about small get-togethers around the community to recognize the holiday.
It was a fine summer day, though hot, and since it was a holiday it was an excuse for us to become more celebratory and for a few hours, drop back from the pressures forced by the war. Besides, we had all the entertainment we needed, just there, between the two of us.
July the Fourth 1862 was an odd holiday for the Confederacy, a nation separate and distinct in itself, but still celebrating holidays of its previous incarnation as part of the United States. Indeed, celebrating independence from Britain may have potentially alienated a tenuous business partner. Cotton was scarce on the continent while Britain and France appeared to favor the South in order to keep their commodities crossing the sea, but neither country had fully backed the efforts of the Confederacy. Therefore the day came and went with many mixed emotions and in the camps, gunpowder became the soldiers’ fireworks.
Weeks later the news of that historic Fourth of July reached Warren who relayed it to me. Apparently, in the aftermath of the Seven Days’ campaign, a week of endless marching and bloody battles, the need for celebration of any kind was evident in both the Union and Rebel encampments
As both sides moved into camp, recognizing the fourth as a familiar holiday, a truce was declared. Gray and blue soldiers emerged from their lines of war and joined one another out in the sultry glades where they traded tobacco, coffee, and newspapers as if they were neighbors living next door, passing news of the day over a garden fence.
The fields were thick with ripening berries and the men, craving any fresh food, and particularly juicy, sweet blackberries, picked the bushes clean. Blue side by side with Gray, they sat in the fields, gathering and eating berries while talking in the sun like cousins on a beach picnic. Their lips and fingertips dripped purple with berry juice. It marked their unshaven faces and dotted their filthy uniforms. Later in the laziness of the afternoon, both Rebel and Union soldiers lay down in the fields, covered as they were with the stain of berries, and napped, quite sated in the stillness. Cicadas buzzed about high in the canopy of trees at the edge of the fields and the ethereal hours of July Fourth passed far too quickly as the enemies rested together side by side in the heat of the day.
Slowly as the afternoon cooled, the men left the common field and moved to their respective hillocks or troughs to clean their guns and reload. Tobacco and coffee still on their breaths, they found cover and shifted under the weight of their weapons. The holiday was over. Soon blackberry stains would mingle with open bloody wounds as the fighting resumed. In the many months that had passed and like so many nights to follow, brothers and uncles, fathers and sons would lay down in the fields, not marked by the juice of summer berries, but by their own blood and by the blood and dirt of one another, never to awaken.
We couldn’t know then that the costliest battles, measured in human life, were still yet to come.