The Other Side of Lincoln - Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.

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and fill canteens their overconfidence was only bolstered when the first Confederate sentries retreated before their celebratory advance. But then came a brief exchange of fire between the Union troops and the Confederates under James K. Longstreet; like his fellow Confederates generals Johnston and Beauregard, Longstreet was still wearing his army uniform. At this first sign of a fight some of the Union soldiers began to have second thoughts. Volunteers nearing the end of their enlistment period quickly decided that this was a good time to request an early discharge.

      McDowell’s army trudged along but at Centerville they were delayed for two days. General Johnston used the time to move about two thirds of his Confederates troops from the Shenandoah Valley to Bull Run by train, giving the armies almost equal strength. In so doing, he made military history: it was the first time that troops used the railroad for strategic mobility-one of many historic first of the Civil War.

      On Sunday, July 21st the battle began in earnest. Initially the Union forces seemed justified in their confidence as the Confederates retreated. But among those troops fresh from the Shenandoah Valley was a brigade of Virginians commanded by Thomas J. Jackson (1824-1863). Born in western Virginia, Jackson was the son of a debt-ridden lawyer who died of typhoid when the boy was two-years old. When his mother died five years later, Thomas was separated from his brother and sister and raised by a bachelor uncle. With the equivalence of only a fourth grade education, he was admitted to West Point in 1842, rising steadily in the class rankings, he graduated in 1846, seventeenth in a class of fifty-nine.

      Daring, calm and tactically brilliant that day at Manassas, General Barnard Bee told Jackson that he was being beaten back, but Jackson said that he would stop the Union advance with bayonets if necessary. What happened next belongs to Civil War mythology. Bee called out, “Oh men, there is Jackson and his Virginians, standing behind you like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer, follow me.”

      Thus Bee supposedly gave Jackson his immortal nickname but Bee would not live beyond this day to ever again call out to one of the inspirations and hero’s that day...Stonewall Jackson and his 1st Virginia Brigade, the “Stonewall Brigade.”

      At a moment when both armies were exhausted by the day’s fighting and the fate of the battle hung in the balance, fresh faces reinforced the thinning Confederate lines. Their arrival had an extraordinary effect. What first looked like a sure Union victory quickly turned into a massive route of the inexperienced Union volunteers, who wilted under the Confederate surge. Stonewall Jackson then issued the order. “Charge, men and yell like the furies...” The General began to yell a fearful high shrill scream and his men began to emulate the man they so admired.

      This was the Union soldiers’ first experience at hearing the blood-curdling “Rebel-Yell,” a shrieking, high-pitched scream that has entered Civil War folklore. First heard from the throat of the legendary Stonewall Jackson whose own natural voice was a high pitched eriesom shrill voice...nearly all woman...a voice Abraham Lincoln would have identified with... for he too had such a voice, but there is little doubt that the old log splitter would have used the Rebel Yell...but who knows for on that day at Manassas, the Yankees were marching to and singing Dixie.

      As one Union newsman reported, “All sense of manhood seemed to be forgotten...even the sentiment of shame had gone...Every impediment to fight was cast aside. Rifles, bayonets, pistols, haversacks, cartridge-boxes, canteens, overcoats, parasols’, champagne bottles, picnic baskets, and broken carriages lined the road.” Self-assured and confident three days earlier, the Union army turned back toward Washington in a riotous dash of soldiers, horses, and all those civilians and the northern press who had come to watch Johnny Reb get his ass whipped, now carried theirs back to the Capital.

      A jubilant Jefferson Davis came over to the Manassas battlefield from Richmond, Stonewall Jackson asked him for ten thousand troops to follow the fleeing Union army right into Washington and end this war. But Davis ignored the request, not out of disrespect but in shame that the Confederacy lacked the funds to supply such an effort on behalf of its valiant fighting men.

      The Confederate press turned on Davis as well, criticizing him for not pursuing the defeated Union army. His Secretary of War, Leroy Brown Walker resigned in disgust as the Confederate Secretary of War due to Davis’s failure to approve the request for the troops. But others were impressed by the stunning victory, the powers of Europe and the Lincoln administration believed the legitimacy of the Confederate

      intent and their competency to win over; numbers, power, equipment, money and cause.

      In the wake of the battle, Stonewall Jackson sent off an envelope to his pastor. Expecting a battle report, the preacher discovered a contribution for his church’s “colored Sunday school,” which Jackson had forgotten to send the day of the battle.

      Chapter 4: Rags to Ritches

      “With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State; I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.” - General Robert E. Lee

      Lenahan stayed with Ima, sitting by the fire...he and Rags comforted the dying woman as she passed. Before she passed, she held Lenahan’s hand tightly...against the pain and as a token of her gratitude.

      “I can go now Leck...life’s duties are as neatly bound as those letters in the box. Strange, my own little girls, lost to the savages, may now be replaced by two orphaned nieces, whom I have never seen, and I must now entrust to you.

      It will not be a burden to you Leck... it will be a blessing...you will see and I know you can sell this farm as well as those hides Gabe purchased... to help offset any cost. Remember Leck, these are not babies...they are near womanhood, twelve...thirteen years old I think.” She said.

      “Ima, there is plenty of money here to take good care of those young girls, and you know with the large family I have there will be no shortage of women folk and love.”

      Lenahan listened hoping that he could remember all she was telling him; so that he could properly relay this information to the girls...he would write it all down before he slept he thought.

      Ima was still speaking...woman to the end he thought. Like an old spicket, hell to open, impossible to stop. Scarp that he thought...you bastard, man shouldn’t be thinking such thoughts at a time like this...probably sacrilegious...he’d stop at St. Joseph Proto Cathedral before he left Bardstown...say a novena, go to confession and pass along the news that these two wonderful Catholics had passed. He saw the vision of a headstone in the old cemetery...GABRIEL CALDWELL RUSSELL...BORN AUGUST 8, 1840...DIED APRIL 15, 1857. LOVING SON, HUSBAND, FRIEND AND HERO.

      “Leck, today’s’ your birthday...isn’t it.” She asked “April 15...makes you seventeen and Gabe...well you know I robbed the cradle...he won’t be seventeen until August 8. Everybody says that I am a wicked woman for taking him...but after saving him from the river and the wound...it was as though he became mine...God’s own replacement for the consuming losses that I had experienced...and you know when you nurse a man back to health...there is a magnetic connection, regardless of the age difference. Nobody will know the feelings I had for him...I am ashamed to admit to you Leck that Gabe was like my father, my son and my husband...at once an enigma...who loved me and filled me.”

      Nearly at the end, as the day began to sink on the other side of noon into the western horizon where two youngsters had gone to fight the injuns in an aura of the hunter’s mist...Ima reached up and touched Leck’s bearded face...a man now...with all the accoutrements...some God given, others picked up along the way by guns, knives, arrows...love and death, the discovery of emotions given only to experience. At fifteen they were invincible... at seventeen...one was dead and the other left to carry on the dream of the hunter’s mist, down in the valley were the grass is always green and the creek flows easily with trout big enough for young boys to catch and carry home proudly.

      “Leck...” she whispered... “One more thing I want to give you

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