The Bloody Ground

A messenger was spurring toward the brigade. A horse-drawn ambulance had just splashed into the ford accompanied by a cheer from the closest troops. Robert Lee was inside the vehicle, put there by injuries to his hands when he tried to quiet his frightened horse. A wounded commander, Swynyard thought, was not a good omen, but he put that pagan thought behind him as the messenger rode to Maitland under the assumption that the elegant lieutenant-colonel was the brigade commander. “He’s the fellow you want,” Maitland said, indicating Swynyard.

The messenger brought orders for Swynyard’s brigade to cross the river and Swynyard, in turn, gave the Legion the honor of leading the brigade onto Northern soil. The colonel walked down the Legion’s column of companies. “Remember boys,” he shouted again and again, “no looting! No roguery! Pay in scrip for whatever you want! Show them we’re a Christian country! Go now!”

Truslow’s A Company waited until a battery of South Carolinian guns had splashed into the ford, then followed onto the road and down the muddy ramp into the water. The color party followed with the Legion’s single flag held aloft by young Lieutenant Coffman, who found it a struggle to hold the big battle flag high against the wind while his slight body was buffeted by the Potomac’s swirling current, which rose above his waist. He pushed on gamely, almost as though the whole war’s outcome depended on him keeping the fringed silk out of the water. Many of the men were limping, not through wounds but because their ill-booted feet were blistered and to those men the river’s cool water was like the balm of Gilead. Some men, though, refused to cross. Swynyard paused to talk with half a dozen such men who were led by a gaunt young corporal from D Company. The corporal’s name was Burridge and he was a good soldier and a regular worshipper at the colonel’s prayer meetings, but now, as respectful and stubborn as ever, Burridge insisted he must disobey Swynyard’s orders. “Ain’t our task to go north, Colonel,” he said firmly.

“It’s your task to obey a lawful order, Burridge.”

“Not if it’s against a man’s conscience, colonel, and you know it. And it is lawful for us to defend our homes, but not to attack other folks’ homes. If a Yankee comes south then I’ll kill him for you, but I won’t go north to do my slaughtering,” Burridge declared and his companions nodded their support.

Swynyard ordered the men back to where the provosts were collecting other soldiers whose consciences could not abide carrying the war off their home soil. It grieved Swynyard to lose the six men, for they were among the best in the brigade, but it had been a confrontation he could never win and so he bid them farewell then followed the Legion into the river. Some of the men ducked their heads into the water to give their hair a brief washing, but most just pressed on toward the Northern bank, climbed onto Maryland soil, then crossed the bridge over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that lay just beyond the river. And thus they entered the enemy country.

It was a fine place of comfortable farms, good wooded land, and gentle hills; no different from the landscape they had left, only these hills and farms and woods were ruled by an enemy government. Here a different flag flew and that gave a piquancy to the otherwise unremarkable countryside. Not that most of the men in the five regiments in Swynyard’s Brigade considered Maryland an enemy; rather they believed it was a slave state that had been forced to stay with the Union because of geography, and there were high hopes that this incursion of a Confederate army would draw a flock of recruits to the rebel’s slashed cross flags. But however sympathetic Marylanders might be to the rebellion, it was still an enemy state and here and there some farms yet flew a defiant stars and stripes to show that this was Yankee territory.

But such stars and stripes were far outnumbered by rebel flags, most of them homemade things with faint colors and uncertain design, but they were hung to welcome Lee’s army and when, at midafternoon, Swynyard’s men marched through Buckeystown they were greeted by a small crowd that was hoarse from cheering the arrival of the rebels. Buckets of water or lemonade were placed beside the road and women carried trays of cookies along the weary columns. One or two of Buckeystown’s houses, it was true, were shuttered closed, but most of the village welcomed the invasion. A Texan band played the inevitable “My Maryland” as the column passed, the tune becoming ever more ragged and the harmony more cacophonous as the bandsmen were supplied with cider, beer, and whiskey by the villagers.

The brigade trudged on, their broken boots kicking up a plume of white dust that drifted westward on the breeze. Once, a mile beyond Buckeystown, a sudden crackle of firing sounded far away to the east and some of the men touched the stocks of their worn rifles as if preparing for battle, but no more shots sounded. The countryside stretched warm away, bounteous and calm under the summer sun. God was in His heaven, all seemed well in the world, and Lee’s rebel army was loose in the North.

Starbuck walked into Richmond where he left Lucifer, his small luggage, and the letter for Belvedere Delaney at Sally’s house, then he led Martha Potter on a tour of Richmond’s drinking dens. Alcohol was officially banned from the city, but the government might as well have tried to outlaw breathing for all the difference their high-mindedness had made.

Starbuck began with the more respectable houses close to the Byrd Street depot of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, where Martha had last seen her husband. Starbuck spared her the brothels, reckoning that no whore would have endured a drunk for three days. Instead they would have picked Matthew Potter clean on the first night and then pitched him into the street to be swept up by the provosts. Once sober the lieutenant would have been sent to Camp Lee and his failure to arrive suggested that he had discovered some liquor-sodden haven, or worse.

Starbuck worked his way down the hierarchy of liquor shops. The first places he searched had some pretensions to gentility, maybe a gilded mirror or a stretch of tobacco-soaked carpet, but gradually the furnishings, like the liquor, worsened. He knocked on a half dozen doors in Locust Alley, but found no sign of the missing lieutenant. He tried Martin Street, where the whores hung out of the upper windows and made Martha blush. “He didn’t have the money to drink all these days, sir,” she told Starbuck.

“He might have,” Starbuck insisted.

“There weren’t more than three dollars in my purse.”

“Three dollars will take you a long way in this town, ma’am,” Starbuck said, “and I daresay he had a coat? He had a pair of boots? A revolver?”

“All those, yes.”

“Then he could sell those and be drunk for three months. Hell,” he said, then apologized. “Forgive my language, ma’am, but that’s where he is. The Hells. I think, ma’am, I’d better take you back to Miss Sally’s.”

“I’m coming with you,” Martha insisted. For all her timidity she was a dogged girl and no amount of Starbuck’s persuasion could convince her to abandon the search.

“Ma’am, it ain’t safe in the Hells.”

“But he might be injured.”

He might be dead, Starbuck thought. “I must insist, ma’am.”

“You can insist all you want, sir,” Martha said stubbornly, “but I’m still coming. I’ll just follow you if you won’t escort me.”

Starbuck took out his revolver and checked that all five cones were primed with percussion caps. “Ma’am,” he said, “where I’m going ain’t called the Hells for nothing. It’s in Screamersville, down by Penitentiary Bottom. Ugly names, ma’am, ugly place. Even the provosts don’t go there under company strength.”

Martha frowned. “They outlaws there?” she asked.

“In a manner, ma’am. Some deserters, a lot of thieves, and a lot of slaves. Only these slaves aren’t under orders, ma’am, they’re out of the Tredegar Iron Works and they’re tougher than the stuff they roll in the mills.”