Liberty Bazaar

Chapter 2

2

RECOLLECTIONS OF A CONFEDERATE GENERAL BY JUBAL DE BROOKE

Chickamauga Creek, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina, September, 1863.

The Union infantry was waiting behind its entrenchments across a picket-fenced meadow where corn once grew. “General de Brooke, sir!”

Glancing across my shoulder, I saw Lieutenant Fickling, one of my commanding officer’s aides, rein in his frantic horse dangerously close to our front line.

I called out to him. “It would please me greatly, Mr Fickling, if you would come down from your saddle. You will present less of a target and I shouldn’t want you shot before you relay your message.” A poor joke, but it would help to calm the lieutenant whose agitated state was having an unsettling effect on my boys.

Hurriedly dismounting, and leading his horse away from the forward position, Fickling made an extravagant salute. “General Longstreet’s compliments, sir, and he would be greatly obliged if you would attack immediately.”

“Thank you, Mr Fickling,” I said. “Please return my compliments and inform General Longstreet that I will advance at once.”

Fickling made another windmill-like salute and remounted his horse.

My brigade of nearly three thousand men was drawn up directly before the Federal entrenchments. If we had attacked early that morning, as planned, the enemy would not have had so much time to arrange its defences. But the sloppy issuing of orders delayed the attack until midday.

We went forward with fixed bayonets across open ground towards the Federal breastworks, perhaps two hundred yards distant.

Initially, we moved slowly, at common time – seventy yards per minute. The Federals opened fire almost immediately, but, at this range, the accuracy of their shooting was poor and we pressed on, accelerating our advance to quick time. Another ripple of enfilade fire depleted our line, then another. Men were skittled and scattered and smashed, some crying out, others strangely silent – perhaps not believing that after beating the odds so many times, fortune had deserted them.

At less than one hundred yards, I ordered double quick time. A further volley thinned our line, yet didn’t break it.

Half a dozen paces to my left, Sergeant Major Laws took a bullet in the throat and keeled sideways, taking our battle flag with him. Another member of the colour guard picked it up, became an instant target, and was struck down within seconds. A third man – Sergeant Papajohn – snatched up the flag, this time prevailing, at least while a cloud of scorched gunpowder obscured him from enemy rifles.

Our respite was brief. The next volley raked our entire line.

The attack stalled.

Men looked groggily to their sergeants; and they to their officers. But so many had fallen that leaderless gaggles loitered like confused children amid the field of human wreckage.

Our colours remained clearly visible in Papajohn’s hands. But, for the first time since I had known them, these veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia needed more than a flag.

I was not given to showmanship, yet I had to concede there were times when it was effective. So I stuck my hat on the tip of my sword and held it high to show them their general was still there – that we would go on together.

“Virginians! To me!” My voice sounded curiously dislocated, as if projected from some other’s throat.

There was a long pause. Men wavered, looking about themselves.

“You heard the general, boys!” Papajohn waved our flag, oblivious to the hail of minié balls that reduced it to a rag. “Surely, you ain’t gonna keep him waiting?”

A ripple of shouts, even the odd cheer, transmitted along the ranks. Slowly at first, the brigade resumed its advance, gathering pace on the hard dirt furrows.

At last, we charged full tilt and I felt the familiar embrace of wild yet remote madness.

The Federals were hastily reloading their Springfields, knowing they had time only for one more volley.

Nearer we came, nearer still, until we could see their teeth flashing white as they bit off the ends of their paper-wrapped cartridges, then poured the powder into their muzzles.

My hat had slid down my sword half way to the hilt, yet it could still be seen; and although I could hardly be heard, I shouted again in that other voice: “Over we go, boys!

For Virginia!”

The Yankees fired at point blank range. More of us fell, torn and split. Yet we were upon them now, streaming over their breastworks. They fought bravely, but were overwhelmed in the close-quarter fighting. These were the moments that haunted me most: looking into the enemy’s eyes; smelling his breath; feeling his blood warm and thick between my fingers – fearing it might not be his but mine. The only mercy of these encounters was their brevity. They were simply too frenzied to last. The Yankees not directly engaged began to throw down their weapons. Others withdrew towards Missionary Ridge and Snodgrass Hill.

As the shooting began to stop, a faint draft licked my cheek – a minié ball fizzing by, not two inches from my face. Sergeant Papajohn was less fortunate. He was hit above the elbow. Mashed bone gleamed white in ripped flesh.

“Damn.” He spoke softly, as if inconvenienced by a trifling mishap.

I turned to the soldier next to him. “Get a tourniquet on that arm right away, then take the sergeant directly to the surgeon.”

Papajohn looked at me and we exchanged grim nods as a jean-cloth strip was lashed in place and tightened to stop the bleeding. We both knew he would lose the arm.

*

The Confederacy won the battle of Chickamauga. But our losses – eighteen thousand casualties – prevented the capture of our main objective, the city of Chattanooga, eight miles to the north.

Nowhere was the human cost more evident than in the field hospitals where my duties oftener involved attending dying men than recovering souls. In all honesty, I didn’t know how many more times I could look another hopeless man in his eyes. It would have been easier – and perhaps kinder – to stay away. Yet these were my people. I had brought them to this. How could I leave them now?

Sergeant Papajohn had lost his arm as we had feared. Yet there was worse. Infection claimed more lives than bullets and my friend was not expected to survive the day. The surgeon, Major Crisp, met me at the entrance to one of the hospital tents. He wore a crimson-streaked apron and a weary mien.

“Sergeant Papajohn is waiting for you, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr Crisp.” I paused, about to exchange pleasantries, but his look forestalled me.

“I advise haste, General.”

Inside the tent, the unmoving air held an ill-suited weave of odours: damp canvas; human waste; suppurating wounds; chlorine. Flies circled and weaved over the maggots being used to cleanse open wounds.

Papajohn was lying alone in a corner, his complexion waxen but his expression unconcerned. I had seen this aspect of resignation before, but it only became harder with each passing life.

“Doc’s give up on me, ain’t he, sir?”

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing to be done.”

“How long?”

“Not long.”

Not a trace of doubt or fear. How I envied his peace.

Placing his hand over his face, he smoothed his eyes closed with his fingers, then stretched himself straight, crossing his arm over his chest.

“I’d be obliged if you’d fix me, sir.”

I completed the procedure by using a brass safety pin to fasten the toes of his stockings together. Boys often arranged themselves for burial in this way before letting go, content that they were in good order for the grave as they had been for the line of battle.

Papajohn died a few minutes later and part of me died with him. I’d lost more people than I cared to recall, but none had given as much of himself as this man. He never quit, never shirked the smallest duty, and never complained. He’d been at my side at Mechanicsville and Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and a string of smaller engagements; some nameless, all b****y. I didn’t know if I could go on without him. I said a prayer and walked out into the thickening dusk.

*

Some time later, in my bivouac, I removed my coat and took a glass of whiskey into which I poured a few drops of laudanum tincture. These substances were no cure, but they did help me to sleep that little bit deeper, blinded me to those visions of exaggerated reality that could not have been real at all. If my mind played tricks, the tincture helped still them.

Sitting back in my canvas chair, I took from my breast pocket the small leather-bound bible handed down to me by my grandfather. When he gave it to me some thirty years ago I believed I had received a token of my birthright. Inside the fly-cover, there was an inscription in pale ink: “To Robert de Brooke, from his good and loyal friend Lazarus Hotchkiss”. My Grandfather Robert had never mentioned Lazarus Hotchkiss, although he died when I was still a child so that wasn’t so surprising. All the same, I was always impressed by this simple affirmation of one man’s loyalty to another in those equally b****y days when my grandfather cut his ties with Britain and enlisted in Washington’s army.

Sipping more of the whiskey and tincture mix, I glanced at the small portrait of my grandfather that I kept in my mess chest. He would have been about my age – thirty-eight – when it had been painted, and there was a marked resemblance in the sharp cheekbones either side of a narrow nose, the broad mouth and large deep blue eyes. A clear difference was evident, though, in his almost bald head which contrasted sharply with my dense, dark hair perhaps inherited from my grandmother’s side of the family.

Absently, I pondered where he would have been in all this … Like me, he’d taken up arms against central authority, but not without deep contemplation. The truth was that I’d never know whether he’d have fought for the Confederacy or the Union.

I must have fallen asleep, for I was roused by attacking Yankee cavalry.

I heard the beat of hooves, a screeching bugle, ragged gunfire. Seizing my sword, I ran from the bivouac and saw the Federal horsemen with impossible clarity: faces masked by wide-brimmed slouch hats; scarlet guidons vivid against dusty tunics; sabres glinting; carbines raised.

They were almost upon Lieutenant Fickling. Incredibly, he wasn’t aware of them.

“Fickling! Get out of the way!”

Scurrying forwards, I knocked over a pail of milk and barged though a line of laundry before hurling myself at the lieutenant. We tumbled to the ground together and I rolled sideways, ready to parry a sabre thrust.

But the Yankee riders had vanished; and Fickling, his head wrapped in a turban of undergarments from the toppled laundry line, was not looking at me with the expression of a man whose life I had just saved. His expression was more like pity.

*

“Join me for a little refreshment, de Brooke.”

My commanding officer, General James Longstreet, indicated a chair by his desk. His headquarters was located in a semi-derelict farmhouse, two miles behind the front lines.

Longstreet ladled some brandy peaches into two bowls, then handed one to me.

“Nice manufacture,” he said, between mouthfuls, examining the back of his fork. “Sheffield, England. You have family over there, don’t you?”

“There has been no correspondence since the Revolution, sir.”

Longstreet feigned surprise. He was an imposing man with square features and a full bush beard. Dark hair was swept back from a wide brow and his eyes were shrewdly expressive. “I was given to understand your grandfather was an English nobleman and your ancestors fought in their civil war.”

“That is true, sir. But as far as I’m aware, there has never been any attempt to resume relations with our English cousins.”

Through the window, I could see a column of field artillery labouring along the hard clay road that ran north to Chatanooga. Above the clatter of hooves and grind of wheels, heavy guns squealed and groaned in wooden limbers hauled by teams of six horses. Men cursed and whips snapped in the hot, dusty air.

“All the same, General, I guess you’d like to visit England, given your professional background and all.” He was studying me with a peculiar curiosity that I found mildly irritating.

“I don’t follow you, sir.” It seemed unpleasantly warm in this upstairs room and I set about unfastening the uppermost buttons on my double-breasted tunic. One became entangled in some loose thread in the buttonhole. I tugged, frustrated, but couldn’t pull it free.

After carefully dissecting a peach with his little fork, Longstreet eventually glanced up at me. “You were a newspaper editor before the war, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was, but my paper reported news in southern Pennsylvania, sir. Its circulation area, although growing, didn’t quite extend to the other side of the Atlantic.”

Longstreet indulged my mild sarcasm with a good-humoured chuckle and downed his last portion of brandy peach.

Unable to contain my impatience any longer, I decided to press him. “Sir, this conversation about my family is very pleasant, but I’m anxious to know why you wanted to see me. Are we to move on Chatanooga?”

Longstreet gave me a long, studied look. “How is your health?”

“Good, thank you, sir. Holding up …” Again I started to fiddle with my loose tunic button, but I tugged too hard: the thread snapped. The gilded metal button slipped between my fingers and went skittering noisily across the wooden floorboards.

Longstreet searched a stack of documents on his desk and retrieved a copy of the Richmond Examiner. “I’ve been reading your letter to the editor.” His expression became lugubrious. “It isn’t every day that a Confederate general argues that slaves should be freed in return for fighting for the South. What sort of reaction did you think you would provoke?”

“My comments were entirely reasonable,” I said, perhaps too quickly. “You once said yourself that we should have abolished s*****y and then fired on Fort Sumter.”

“That was a speculative remark made in private – not in one of the most influential newspapers in the South. You have provoked uproar among some extremely powerful people.” He was clearly annoyed.

“Where is this leading, sir?”

Longstreet started to smile, but seemed to think better of it. “England. You will take ship to Liverpool where you are to revive your family connections to bolster support for the Confederacy. We have many wealthy and influential friends among the British ruling classes and their support could be critical to our success in this war.”

I felt as though I’d taken a minié ball in the chest that had driven the air from my lungs. Earlier that week I’d seen Papajohn buried, along with hundreds of others. Now it seemed the rest of my boys were being taken from me. I was going to lose everything I lived for ... “But I belong here, sir, with my brigade.”

Longstreet’s voice acquired a compassionate softness. “You no longer have a brigade. You lost half your strength at Chickamauga Creek.”

The memory of the s*******r was hard to bear, and I struggled to respond.

“But we won that day, sir. I implore you to reconsider.”

“It’s out of my hands, now.” Longstreet picked up an official-looking letter. “This arrived this morning, direct from Richmond. The War Department has decided that you will go to England as our envoy.”

“But my boys – ”

Longstreet held up a flat hand to halt my protest. “You can still help your boys, Jubal. Liverpool is to hold a Grand Liberty Bazaar in aid of the families of Confederate prisoners held in the North. The organisers are confident they can raise as much as twenty thousand pounds – that’s more than one hundred thousand dollars. Imagine what that amount of money could do to relieve the destitution among the wives and children of our boys penned up in those prison camps.”

“General Longstreet, sir, I am a soldier not a diplomat – ”

“Please, Jubal. Sit down.”

I hadn’t realised that I had come to my feet, and returned to my seat, muttering an apology.

“As a friend, I hope you won’t mind me saying you haven’t been yourself of late. It’s come to my attention that there have been a number of … episodes.” He raised one eyebrow. “Only this morning you bowled over Lieutenant Fickling for your whole camp to see, hollering about an ambush by Yankee cavalry.”

With great force of will, I kept my hands away from those damned buttons and looked at him directly. “Are you telling me I am unfit for command, sir?”

Longstreet made a fatigued sigh. “I am telling you that you are one of the finest brigadiers in the Confederacy; that you have been identified by the War Department as being uniquely capable of carrying out an important diplomatic mission in Great Britain. But more than any of these, I am telling you that you have pushed yourself too far, too hard, for too long and must take this opportunity to recuperate.”

“I see.” The grim set of my commanding officer’s face told me that it would be futile to object. Suddenly, I felt too tired to argue further ...

Reaching forward across the desk, Longstreet picked up an envelope, sealed in red wax with the stamp of the War Department, and handed it to me. “These are your orders. There is a ship waiting for you at Charleston.”

*

The waterfront at Charleston, where the Ashley and Cooper rivers emptied into the Atlantic, was the most lucrative location in the South for profiteers and shysters, shady dealers and reckless captains with fast ships.

So I decided to stay clear of the thronging jetties and quaysides until my ship was ready to sail on the next tide. She was a blockade runner called the Owl, a powerful paddle steamer that could outrun any Yankee warship and she was bound for Liverpool in England.

Away from the waterfront, Charleston presented a pleasantly distracting maze of thin streets crowded by antique buildings.

I visited a bookshop where I bought some reading matter for the sea passage – The Southern Literary Messenger and some novels by British authors – William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair which I hadn’t read since I was up at Harvard Yard, together with Dickens’ recently published Great Expectations, in three volumes. In addition, I obtained a copy of Redburn by Herman Melville, in which the city of Liverpool figured prominently.

Because of the shortages, there was little fare of any worth to be had in the restaurants of Charleston, so I made my way back to the quayside and was drawn to a small workshop where an elderly potter sat at his wheel, fashioning shapeless fists of clay into the most astonishing artefacts. In that moment, I felt deeply envious of this modest craftsman and his ability to create form and grace, for it seemed my talents lay only in violence and destruction.

I chose two dishes and a small vase for my mess chest, which came to just fifteen cents. I handed him a Confederate five dollar bill, but he shook his head with a look of embarrassed apology.

“Mighty sorry, sir, but I don’t have that much cash in the shop.”

“Please, General de Brooke, let me help.” A lissom young woman stepped from behind me, opening her purse as she came.

“You have me at a disadvantage, ma’am.”

“Sarah McConville.” She extended a hand. “You and I are to sail aboard the same ship – the Owl. I know we haven’t been properly introduced, but that would have happened very shortly in any event.” She spoke with an English accent, but the vowel sounds were elongated and there was a brusqueness to the cadence of her words that I’d heard before the war when I met a fellow editor from Manchester, in the north of England.

“Miss McConville, I must thank you for your kindness but politely decline. I can’t accept charity from a lady on the foundation of an acquaintance made but moments ago.”

“Nonsense. You may call it a short-term loan, General.” She gave me a penetrating look and I noticed that, although attractive, her face had a harsh aspect – slightly rough-edged, like the accent.

She handed the potter a Bank of South Carolina one dollar bill which he cut in two with scissors, handing one half back and making up the rest of the change in silver.

The walk back to the ship was a short one and as we prepared to part company on the quarterdeck, a generous smile dispelled the aspect of frostiness that seemed to linger on her countenance. “I shall look forward to seeing you again at dinner, General. And, of course, discussing business with you.”

“Which business would that be, Miss McConville?”

“The Grand Liberty Bazaar, of course, General. I understand you are to play a substantial part in recruiting support for the event, while I am a member of the organising committee.” The smile had briefly vanished, but now it returned and I sensed a note of mischief in her tone. “And of course I shall pursue you relentlessly with regard to the repayment of your debt.”

I went to my cramped cabin and set about finding places to stow the items I – or rather, Sarah McConville – had bought. Something about this young woman perturbed me and I was not altogether happy to be in her debt.

A place for everything, and everything in its place. That, I had been led to believe, was a maxim much vaunted in Britain. Yet I was no longer certain where my place was. Instead of charging Federal entrenchments, I was to support what the Confederate government considered to be a strategically important biscuit party directed by the British well-to-do.