LITMIR.BIZ

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was the commander. At Chickamauga, the most violent two days of the entire war, he would have to make up for not being the commander by saving the army that Rosecrans, by his strategy of attrition, had left completely exposed in the northern Georgia thickets.

      From January to September, we sat in camp or moved a few miles, inching our way toward the railroad center of Chattanooga. We guessed that General Bragg, commanding the Rebel forces, would make his stand at that city, with his troops and guns perched on the mountains surrounding Chattanooga, to rake us as we approached. Believing that may have made us more hesitant to proceed: when we all got there, Bragg would have the advantage.

      I think the hesitancy that we all felt was what brought me into Thomas’ confidence.

      ◊◊◊

      One night, after a few miles of marching in a steady rain, the boys go into camp hungry, wet, and tired, but soon enough have a hundred fires kindled and are eating their supper. Some fervent spirit, determined that the weather is not going to get him down, strikes up the national anthem:

      O! say, can you see by the dawn’s early light,

      What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.

      A hundred voices join in, and the distant mountains seem to resound with their own song:

      Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.

      A band far off to the right is mingling its music with the voices, along with the occasional whinny of horses and squawk of mules in camp. I have ridden to Thomas’ tent to deliver a routine report on the position of my troops for the night, and to get from him the orders for the morning.

      I must have jumped back when I saw his eyes glistening, out of sight of the singing soldiers a few yards away. He said nothing as long as they continued through song after song, some patriotic, some romantic, some downright rude.

      Without saying anything, he motioned for me to close the flap of the tent and sit down on the cot opposite him.

      When the sounds diminished, he turned to me and began talking urgently in his Virginia drawl, “We’ve had time on our hands, William. I need to tell you that I have overheard some of our soldiers questioning why I am fighting for the North. As much as I understand their confusion, their words still sting. But when I am with you I feel a kinship, so I suspect I can talk to you, and I need to speak with someone. Can I trust you with my thoughts, Colonel Swain? I cannot trust anyone above me in command, and I would not share my feelings with any of my generals. We all need to appear strong, all of the time.”

      “General Thomas, I am honored that you would consider me a trustworthy person, and I can assure you that anything you tell me will remain confidential.”

      “Thank you, William…. You know, in the South the army determines public opinion and is unaffected by it. Everyone hopes for their victories and hangs on the latest news. I am a Southerner. I know. But in the North the army has no effect on public sentiment, yet we are slaves to it nevertheless. Our people clamor for action—and force us to move too soon, as at Fredericksburg and Bull Run. They have to be patient; we have to push deliberately, but patiently. We should consolidate regiments, and send home thousands of politically appointed officers who take their pay and give us nothing in return. More will die if we just keep fighting one inconclusive battle after another with no plan on either side.

      “General Lee pleaded with me to join him and fight for Virginia before I made my decision.” The General paused. “I had fought with him in Texas, and we were the best of friends then and still were in eighteen sixty-one. He told me that no one in Washington had a right to tell us in Virginia how to live our lives; if we wanted to have slaves, that was our business. We contributed to the economy of the nation. We were not forcing slaves on anyone else. We were the ones who set the highest tone for public service in this country. The great politicians in our history had come from Virginia, not Boston and New York, and many of them, like Jefferson, had slaves. It did not keep them from thinking great thoughts and inspiring the North as well as the South.”

      The songs outside had started up again, in the distance. He continued, deliberately and intently, looking right at me.

      “But I was not swayed by Lee’s argument—amazingly, I was not. I could not have admired or liked a man more than I admired and liked Robert E. Lee. I think he expected that I would be moved by what he had said. Not only was I not affected by what he said, I came away from his speech believing less in the cause of the South than ever before. I simply said to him, ‘Robert, this is going to be a horrible war. It will not just divide and destroy families. It will threaten the existence of the country itself, not only the government in Washington. When that break up starts it will never stop. The South will not hold together. It will begin to shatter into smaller and smaller units—states, counties, municipalities, towns. All that holds the South together is its rural life and slavery, two things that you cannot build a lasting culture on. Take away the North and you do not even have the cotton mills that process the raw material that slaves pick.

      “I told him I had to fight for the North because I could not conceive of what America would look like otherwise. I am not an abolitionist, William, but when I was young I chose to teach slaves on our plantation to read; even if they were not citizens and might never be, I believed they still deserved to read and write. My father, a gracious and dignified man, disagreed but did not interfere with my belief in their right to literacy. He set me on this road of independent thinking.

      “I told Robert E. Lee that I would fight for the Union because there was no hope for any country within our borders—nothing that could be called America—if I did not. And if President Lincoln ordered the abolition of slavery, I told him, I would not feel a moment of grief. You talk about what Virginia has given this country. Beside our founding documents, Virginia has given us hundreds of thousands of darkened minds that are beginning to catch glimpses of the sun of a better life now rising before them.

      “This time Lee was silent. He walked past me, without expression, and I have not set eyes on him since.”

      His speech was guarded and emotional at the same time.

      “I lost my great friend that day, William. I lost my family, too. I wired them with my decision from New York City, but they never responded, and I will never talk to them again. People in the South are polite only up to a point; if you threaten what they hold most dear, the system that enables them to live well, you have done something worse than murder. It is an act of disloyalty that is beyond indecency. My parents were already dead, thank goodness, but people I still communicate with in Southampton Country have told me that my sisters have turned all my pictures to the wall and refuse to speak my name….

      There was a long pause, a deep breath.

       Then, suddenly composed, he took my hand and thanked me.

      4

      A few minutes later, as I walked unsteadily to my horse in the drizzle that had started up again, all I could think of was an old hymn I learned back home, one the free Negroes of Vernon knew as well as I did and sang just as often:

      There is a land of pure delight,

      Where saints immortal reign;

      Infinite day excludes the night,

      And pleasures banish pain.

      There everlasting spring abides,

      And never withering flowers;

      Death, like a narrow sea, divides

      This heavenly land from ours.

      General Thomas was going to deal out death to get the rest of us, somehow, closer to that land where day excludes the night. I knew at that moment that he himself would have stayed behind in that “narrow sea,” if that is what it took.

      By the time I had gotten back to my own men two miles away, I thought I understood a more personal reason that General Thomas chose to fight for

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