XVII

For his courageous actions as a messenger at the Battle of Shiloh, Branse Havelock was recommended by Fighting Joe Wheeler to the signals staff of General P.G.T. Beauregard, whom they called Little Napoleon. Pierre Gustave Toutont-Beauregard was a Louisiana Creole with grandiose tactical visions - a breathtaking prima donna. From this vantage Branse gained marvelous insight into the gods and generals that moved the destinies of nations. After General Beauregard withdrew the Confederate Army from Shiloh the Yankees had amassed a mighty host of over 120,000 men and followed him to lay siege to Corinth. Facing such a grandiose army, General Beauregard ordered an evacuation. He placed Branse in charge of a fantastic ruse to mask the withdrawal lest they invite an attack at a critical moment.

As the trains arrived to evacuate the countless wounded from the Battle of Shiloh, Branse had the 19th Alabama cheer around the railroad station to make it sound like they were welcoming reinforcements. Beyond the earthworks it gave the Yankees pause, who were now under the studious command of Henry Halleck, and who was nicknamed "Old Brains." Branse had so-called "Quaker Guns" made of logs installed around the perimeter to replace the real guns they evacuated by rail. Every night Branse had more campfires built to create the appearance of swelling numbers. Old Brains scratched his elbows and continued to hesitate, perhaps even expecting to be attacked by overwhelming numbers of rebels. Then one night they were all gone.

The Yankees mounted the earthworks kicking over Quaker guns and rummaging through empty tins looking for food. They had been bamboozled! The rebels slipped away! Indeed they had towards Tupelo, and for much of the summer of '62 the two great armies stood facing each other across the Mississippi hill country. At length, P.G.T. Beauregard was relieved after a scuffle with Mr. Davis in the press and was replaced by the General Braxton Bragg, who looked like a terrier. Branse was retained on Bragg's staff, but he found the general aloof and pugnacious. Still, the general planned a bold invasion of Kentucky for the autumn that raised the army's spirits after an inactive summer. The army was now called the Army of Tennessee and would remain so-named throughout the rest of the war. 

Branse helped organize the railway schedule to entrain 50,000 rebel soldiers from Tupelo to Mobile to Columbus to Chattanooga in a tortuous journey for the soldiers. The Army of Tennessee took this enormous geographical detour on account of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad being occupied by federals from Memphis to Huntsville, Ala. When they stepped off north into Kentucky they had high hopes of being welcomed as liberators, swelling their ranks with volunteers. Instead they were met with indifference, even derision.  They tarried for awhile until the grains were harvested and clashed in a sharp fight called the Battle of Perryville, in which the 19th Alabama didn't even participate. It was about that time that Branse Havelock received a letter from Virginia.  

It was marked with a return address to Richmond, but had no name for the sender. At his camp table in his field tent, he sliced open the envelope beneath the glow of a paraffin lantern. A ring had fallen out. He read the letter that was enclosed.

Dear Branse,

It is with great heartfelt condolence that I must convey to you the news that your father was killed in action at Sharpsburg on September 17th. He bravely withstood several Yankee charges made across the Antietam Creek bridge. His body was recovered and with General Lee's intervention was forwarded through to our lines. He is being advanced to Athens for burial.  Your father and I shared deep bonds of affection and politics. I have never had the pleasure of meeting my dear friend's son, but we must soon. Perhaps duty soon will bring us within reach, for I have much to tell you of your father's remarkable legacy. 

I Am Your Most Obedient Servant, Henry Lewis Benning, Brig. Gen., C.S.A.

His father was dead. They were at odds when they parted. Branse had voted against secession, one of the few Greeks to have done so.  His father, however, was a vehement secessionist - a real Fire Eater.  He had never been warm.  Indeed, he was harsh and domineering. He was too absorbed in the management of his plantation, Barbados, where he farmed a thousand acres with over a hundred slaves. He was gone often on business. As the country slid towards the secession crisis, he cursed the Yankee race and told Branse this war was for the salvation of the white race.  It will be like Haiti, where the n*****s killed ten thousand whites... women, children. They dashed babies against rocks and crucified white women after raping them. 

Whatever the truth may or may not be, these rants offended Branse's political sensibilities.  He believed slavery would eventually be extinguished of its own accord, but it must be within the Union and involve compensation to the owners for their pains.  Branse's father was appalled by his son's Whig-ish sentiments.  He called his own son a n****r lover, which wholly offended Branse. When they last saw one another, it was on the platform of the Huntsville Depot. They did not embrace. His father simply looked at him and said to 'look to your kind,' whatever that meant. Then he was off to Virginia to fight.

In spite of all this, Branse began to weep. His father was a very renowned and respectable aristocrat among the Greeks. They were all embarrassed when the elder Havelock enrolled to fight, though they fully expected it from the fanatical Fire Eater. They commented that they would remain behind to aide the war effort with their tills, never mind the slaves that actually worked them.  Cotton was still going to pay the bills for the war.  Now Branse inherited a towering legacy, for Barbados was an expansive estate, and there was the mansion on the Hill. Dr. Prentiss and the Greeks would be looking to him to fill in his father's shoes when it came to the elaborate system of patronage that kept the Democrats in power.  

As he dabbed his tears with his hankerchief he noticed the ring again.  It looked like a class ring, perhaps from the University of Georgia where his father had attended. He picked it up and rolled it with his thumb.  Inlaid into the bezel was a red jasper stone inscribed with white gold initials. They read - AK.  

The 19th Alabama at the Battle of Shiloh, April 1862

 

XVI

Burnside Lee, being a Democrat of the Whig tradition, voted against secession. His family were Burghers of Athens who made their fortune on hardware and believed in internal improvements and high tariffs. Still, he owned twelve slaves and 150 acres at his plantation Cerro Gordo, which he had specially constructed in the Spanish style of a hacienda and named after the battle in which he never ceased to recount. He was a proud veteran of the Mexican War where he fought under a bright constellation of heroes like Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and U.S. Grant. He had brought home a senorita, Romina Delgado, who was dusky and exotic and domineering. He called her his esposita.

After Fort Sumter, when Lincoln called up his 75,000 to suppress the rebellion, he threw in his towel with the secessionists like most other Southern Whigs. He personally financed a company of volunteers in Limestone County and called them the "Athenian Hoplites." He even designed a uniform (grey with bronze epaulets) and armed them with the excellent 1841 Mississippi rifle. Several scions of the Greeks joined up, including Bill Marmaduke and Branse Havelock. They were sworn into the Confederate Army in Huntsville, Ala. as Company A of the 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. "With the Old Guard." Their commanding officer was a dashing young Georgian named Joseph Wheeler. He placed the colors into the hands of Burnside Lee who would lead Company A in battle - a blue field with a white border and the image of an ancient Greek hoplite sown into the center.

They rode the cars to Mobile where they spent the next nine months drilling in the invariably stifling air of the Gulf. Their sergeant major was a profane martinet who whipped them into the most parade-sharp company in the regiment. In the winter of '62, Fort Donelson on the Tennessee-Kentucky border fell to Grant's army. Nashville was abandoned and the Confederate Army was falling back into the Deep South. If the Hoplites were eager for action, they were soon obliged. They were shipped north to join the mighty army of General Albert Sydney Johnston then concentrating at Corinth, Mississippi. It was time to strike back.

Their target was the army of Ulysses S. Grant, who had disembarked at a place called Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee River, near the Shiloh Church. He intended to collect more reinforcements before advancing with superior numbers on Corinth. General Johnston decided to strike first, and his army sallied forth to smash into Grant's exposed position. The great Battle of Shiloh opened with a surprise attack on the Yankees as they were cooking their breakfast. A crescendo of fire and thunder alerted Grant to the danger and the Yankees dug their heels in and made the rebels pay for every yard of ground.

A rider rushed forward and gave a crisp salute to Burnside Lee and passed him a slip. Sir, you are hereby ordered by Colonel Wheeler to advance your company up the Savannah Road and drive the enemy from his position. It sounded simple enough. Only the courage was lacking, so Burnside Lee withdrew a flask and emptied it down his gullet. Then he withdrew his sword, nodded to the drummer boy and they all stepped off to the cadence of The White Cockade. The entire 19th Alabama surged forward towards a peach orchard on the left side of the Savannah Road.

Nobody could see the enemy. Peach blossoms were raining down like confetti from an incessant rain of shots. They sounded like bees. As they reached the firing line men started dropping. The wounds were grievous. Burnside could see the flash of muskets from behind the curtain of smoke that blanketed everything. He halted the company. Make ready! They checked their primers. Take aim! They levelled their muskets with a clacking sound. Fire! The line erupted with a flash and long stabs of smoke. Load! It took a long thirty seconds to load a musket. They repeated this business for fifteen minutes during which men continued to fall with troubling regularity. Nobody could tell if they were hitting anybody.

Whatever the effect of their shooting, the firing receded. The Yankees were falling back. They then advanced up the right side of a road and found a grove where they rested for an hour. Rations were brought up, but there was no water. A nearby pond was greased with too much offal and blood to drink. Firing was heard everywhere around them as they ate. The boys were shocked to find their ranks missing so many friends they knew. Rumors started going around that General Johnston was dead. They could believe it. The fighting had been a maelstrom of bullets flying everywhere. No one was safe from that. PGT Beauregard was in command now.

They made the final push to drive Grant into the Tennessee River towards dusk. Company A was mustered into line and sent forward again. This time the Yankees weren't driven back. They had massed ranks of cannon and threw thick black shot you could see into the Hoplites' ranks. The men were simply blown back, or torn to pieces. Exhausted, they broke into camp for the night. Old Bernie walked around encouraging his boys then retired to his tent to weep. No one slept because Yankee gunboats on the Tennessee kept throwing shells into their camp.

The next morning it wasn't even contest. Grant had been reinforced by the army of Don Carlos Buell and had counterattacked with overwhelming numbers. It was the Hoplites' turn to feel the pressure, and they gave in. They had lost too much blood. General Beauregard called for a retreat. The Battle of Shiloh was over. They slogged back south to Corinth where the hospitals were swamped with casualties.

It was time to take to stock of their losses. In its first action, Company A lost over half of its ranks. They mustered 122 before battle. When they returned to Corinth only 55 remained fit for duty. Burnside Lee was crestfallen. He had lost so many of his boys. For the Athenian Hoplites, Shiloh was only the beginning of a war that would arc across three more Aprils.

Map of the Franklin Campaign: Sept. - Dec. 1864

 

XV

Jesus Christ forgives, but you never forget. That is a truth they never teach you in the Bible about your worst sins. Brother Pruitt never forgot that truth no matter how hard he drank. That was a sin too, he thought morosely. He thought about hanging himself every night, the feeling stronger on some days, less on others. By the grace of God. By the grace of God. One day at a time. God had called him to go forth into Nineveh. How could he look away from the countenance of the Lord and refuse? Besides, it kept him alive. It kept him ahead of his demons. God had a plan for him he repeated to himself.

When he was alone in his tent in the evenings, he would be visited by ghosts. All of them started in Missouri where the war had swept across the vast backcountry like a brushfire. A young St. Louis abolitionist full of piss and fire, he enrolled as a Jayhawk partisan. They fought Confederate Bushwhackers in a vicious and fluid guerilla war where the most savage depredations were perpetuated. Thousands of refugees were on the move in a countryside that was depopulated by terror. Farmsteads were torched, women were raped, boys of military-age were being shot.

 
A settlement of German immigrants was in distress. So the Jayhawks promised to defend it until they could move the corn harvest out to feed the federal army. They dug rifle pits and split log barricades and waited for the Bushwhackers to come. They came in through a steady rain. As Evander ducked low in his muddy pit he raised his rifle slowly and drew a bead on the shape of a horse and rider. The ambush was loosed. Firing exploded. He pulled the trigger and the man toppled, hit in the side. Fighting continued for two hours in a pitched firefight through driving rain where the smoke hung evenly, so they all moved in close with pistols and knives. It was bloody business.

 
When the firing petered out, Evander crept low through the brush, rifle ready looking for the first Bushwhacker he had winged. He found him behind a wild forsythia bright as the sun where the man had crawled into for cover. The rain had ceased and the rebel's wound was smirched with mud. A pool of blood collected on the earth. Along the rebel's shoulder belt hung a string of scalps. Evander saw red. Without a word he knelt down and pressed his knee into the rebel's neck. With one determined motion he had carved the man's scalp off with his Bowie knife. The man screamed and writhed. And when he had finished this, he silenced him by cutting open his throat. The earth around was soaked with blood and rain.

 
That ghost came often. Maw Possum called them boo hags. A lot of soldiers were visited by them. She prescribed all sorts of hudu remedies Evander thought pagan, but most veterans stayed with drinking. Its all they knew. Its all he knew. Beside Madame de Smet's cathouse in Strangetown grew a forsythia within sight of where he would preach, bright as the sun. And the Word of God would come to him, and he would be tortured by the uncertainty of its conscience or divine provenance.

 
"But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile, though shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die." - Leviticus 21:14

 
With all these ghosts - boo hags - he had nothing left but Jesus Christ. He surrendered his soul to Him. It was all he had left. Everything else was a phantasm of chaos denuded of any meaning, and that was worse than hell to Evander Pruitt. It was as though his soul needed some choice towards daily sanctification, or it would wither into the void and nothingness. If he were an Apostle, he'd be a Thomas.

As Evander Pruitt rested down into his cot in the tent he pitched in Strangetown's bottoms, he drank the numbing elixir. The boo hags came again. The man he scalped. He was wounded in the side like Christ, lanced by Evander's trigger. The blood from his scalp pooled. Christ's blood washes. This blood is befouling. While he felt saved today, he wondered if suddenly he were not tomorrow. He receded into a fitful sleep, and hoped he would never wake up again.

XIII

The sheriff was ushered into the study by a servant in white gloves where Burnside Lee was stooped over a large table by the light of a hundred candles. My eyes are going to s**t, he said without looking up. The table was crowded with hundreds of pewter toy soldiers and elaborately sculpted with plaster terrain. What battle is this, Bill asked? Rossbach. Frederick the Great's most magnificent victory! Bill had never heard of it, and worried Old Bernie would open into one of those ramblings-on about things that interested no one.

 
Instead, Burnside straightened up and took a puff of his cigar and studied Bill. You want something from me, he said. Forget it. You used to be one of us, Bill. A Republican? Your father would roll in his grave. You used to be a Democrat!

 
My father was a Whig. So were you before the war. You're not one of them, and they're not one of us. We served. We gave it all to the Cause, but whose Cause was it? It was theirs. It was Dr. Prentiss and the rest of those selfish philistines. The darkies are free, but the Greeks are all still grasping at reigns. Don't you see what's going on down there? He pointed in the direction of Strangetown. That's the new world down there.

 
Burnside looked off. Sighed. The world sure has changed, that's for sure. Now my coloreds are out there voting Republican. And here you are! Royal Bill! King of Strangetown!

 
He began to contemplate. We should have freed them long ago, he said distantly. It would have spared a good many of my boys.

 
Looking down at his toy soldiers he heard distant cannon fire from beyond time. It was the preliminary bombardment before Hood ordered them forward into the woods. It was a triumphant moment. He was colonel of the 19th Alabama leading his boys into the primeval dens of Chickamauga. They moved through the forest hallooing the old rebel yell as though flushing quail. Stabs of musketry and carnage. When it was over, they had broken through. The blue bellies were in flight.

 
When he had sobered up, his horse was dead, his leg was gone and his boys were shot to pieces. His war was over. The boys all still loved him though. Every veteran tipped their hat to Old Bernie. And he reveled in telling old war stories and boring tales of historical arcanum. Bill was right. The Greeks were not one of us.

Bill approached Bernie and looked very serious at him. I need you to keep me informed of what Prentiss and the Greeks are up to. I want you to be my spy on the inside. Can you do this?
Bernie looked mournful. A rivulet of tears ran down his cheek. He was weeping for them all. All of those beautiful boys lost. Bill was right about the Greeks and their "Cause." Bernie looked up as Bill stirred inside the leather pouch he had brought with him. He drew from it a shot-torn flag. It was blue rimmed with a white border. At its center was a seal sewn with the image of an ancient Greek hoplite. Inscribed upon it were the names of Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga and Franklin. A Company, 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. "With the Old Guard"

 
Bill pressed it into Bernie's hands, who was inconsolable. It was the colonel's first command. I kept it after the surrender, Bill said quietly. It's for you. The only cause now, old friend, is to get along with what's left. You'll do this for me, sir? For them? Burnside nodded yes.

With the Old Guard, Bill said.

Burnside Lee nodded again. With the Old Guard.

XII

William Stovall Marmaduke, Capt. CSA, bid farewell to friends, including Frank Gurley with whom he had grown close. He had ridden guerilla with him for over two years in the mountains of Jackson County, Ala. It was a difficult moment for Bill Marmaduke. He had fallen in love in these mountains, and had lost that love along the way in what seemed like another lifetime. He had to move on. Now great armies were on the move and mighty plans were afoot. The Confederate army of John Bell Hood set its sights on Nashville to cut off Sherman's army, which was then slashing and burning its way across Georgia towards the sea. So Bill joined back up with the old Army of Tennessee which was then marching its way west along the river near Gunter's Landing.

 
He was convinced to join by the appeals of a fellow Greek from Athens, Branse Havelock, who was then a Major on Hood's staff and with whom Bill had joined the Cause with. It was a warm reunion. Branse needed an old hand to take B Company of their old regiment, the 19th Alabama, so Bill obliged. His new company was a sorry sight but not because he doubted their courage. They seemed too young to shave, or make love, or to die. They looked like they were just pressed into the ranks straight from grammar school by the local home guard. So he drilled them for what he called "The Elephant," the din and terror of battle under which they must survive, and furthermore prevail. Bill discarded the manuals. Thrust your bayonet underhanded into the gut and tip your enemy over to the side, like bailing wet hay. Overhanded bayonet thrusts tended to strike and lodge in the ribs. There is no shame in laying down under fire, particularly from artillery. Shots float high when firing downhill, so aim at the enemy’s waist.

 
While the army was encamped at Tuscumbia, Bill was sent on a secret errand to occupied Limestone County by Branse to gather more recruits, and where General Hood believed enthusiasm for the Cause was still strong. He was wrong. Bill met clandestinely with Dr. Prentiss and the other Greeks. He found them nothing better than Yankee collaborators. Instead of growing corn to feed the starving countryside, they grew cotton and sold it North. He was disgusted. They didn't bother asking about the substitutes they had hired for themselves to avoid conscription. They would have learned they were all dead.

 
Bill felt stung by the indifference of his fellow Greeks. He had served. He had hired no substitute. His plantation was in disrepair and abandoned by its slaves. He was most probably in financial ruin, though he had no idea. He hadn't been home since he joined in the Cause, and didn't go back just then learning Yankees were quartered there. When he returned to B Company, he cursed the Greeks as selfish traitors. They had all voted for secession, but did nothing for the war effort except pay off a $300 substitute to catch a bullet in the chest for them. He had seen it all happen too. They were buried all over Tennessee and Georgia.

 
When the cold November rains came, Hood's army crossed the river at Muscle Shoals and invaded Tennessee. The boys of B Company, 19th Alabama began their long slog north looking for a fight. The Yankees, fearing defeat in piecemeal, abandoned their outposts in the Nickajack and concentrated north towards the Duck River, just south of Franklin. But now that the Yankees had abandoned Athens, Bill Marmaduke wondered whether Hood should not turn east and sack the Greeks on the Hill instead.

VII

Black vigilantes were not unknown in the South during Reconstruction. Somebody had to stand up for all the brothers and sisters. Guster Ledbetter learned long before that it ain’t gonna be a white man who does that for them. He’d been under their thumb all his life and he found them all untrustworthy and duplicitous. If human bondage hadn’t reinforced this impression enough, service in the Union Army had.

A fugitive of Cowford Plantation, he enlisted with the 55th Colored Infantry at the Strangetown contraband camp in the Spring of ’63. They shipped him out to Corinth where he and his brothers were trained by white drill sergeants who called them n*****s to their faces. Despite all this, they gave them guns anyway, which no brother could believe until it happened. White people giving us guns? This war must be some serious s**t. And so, it was. But whatever it meant to white people, it meant one thing for certain for the brothers… they weren’t going back to slavery now that they had guns in their hands.

He and the brothers of D Company, 55th Colored were shuttled up and down a series of camps along the Memphis and Charleston protecting the vital railroad. They engaged in tough guerilla fighting with an elusive rebel enemy, who came out at night to launch hit-and-run attacks on isolated outposts. They’d go out themselves to poke around a countryside devastated by war looking for Johnny Reb. Sometimes they’d find him, and a firefight would erupt and somebody would get hit and a brother would go down. And they’d grab him by the collar and drag him back behind cover as the bullets went whizzing all by. It seemed like none of the white officers knew what they were doing. When his unit got orders to ship to Memphis, they marched off the train to crowds of white people who threw bottles and spit at them and hurled slurs at them. It was hate that would make you cry.

When he returned to Limestone County he took to professional vigilantism. It was the only work he could do well. Besides, Royal Bill was one of those duplicitious Republicans who may have freed the slave, but forgot the negro. His greed and hunger for fame was too entangled in Strangetown to care for all the little freedman hamlets in the County. That’s where Guster Ledbetter made his legend.

He grew better with the pistol, but his preferred first shot came from afar using a Lorenz Model 1854 musket. He knew it best. Most anyone shot by Guster Ledbetter never knew what hit them. That made it easy if the job only called for one kill. But if more than one man needed killing, Guster could rely on his pistol and his knife. On occasion of having to use a pistol on a Klansman he had run down, he pointed his Colt Walker at the man’s face and asked “so what do you think about a n****r with a gun?” For a black man with a gun was the stuff of nightmares to white people back then. Just about everyone who heard this query quivered and wet themselves before they were shot… everyone but an Adelphon Kuklos.