Battle Flag Page 2

  "Tom Fool?" Starbuck teased Coffman.

  "A great man, sir," Coffman chided Starbuck.

  "If you say so," Starbuck said, though all he knew about Jackson was that Old Mad Jack had a great reputation for marching, and that when Old Mad Jack went marching, men died. And they were marching now, marching north, and going north meant one thing only: Yankees ahead. Which meant there would be a battle soon, and a field of graves after the battle, and this time, if Pecker was right, Starbuck's enemies would not just be in front of him but behind as well. Starbuck marched on. A fool going to battle.

  The midday train stopped at Manassas Junction amidst a clash of cars, the hissing of steam, and the clangor of the locomotive's bell. Sergeants' voices rose over the mechani­cal din, urging troops out of the cars and onto the strip of dirt that lay between the rails and the warehouses. The soldiers jumped down, glad to be free of the cramped cars and excited to be in Virginia. Manassas Junction might not be the fighting front, but it was still a part of a rebel state, and so they peered about themselves as though the landscape was as wondrous and strange as the misty hills of mysterious Japan or far Cathay.

  The arriving troops were mostly seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys come from New Jersey and Wis­consin, from Maine and Illinois, from Rhode Island and Vermont. They were volunteers, newly uniformed and eager to join this latest assault on the Confederacy. They boasted of hanging Jeff Davis from an apple tree, and bragged of how they would march through Richmond and roust the rebels out of their nests like rats from a granary. They were young and indestructible, full of confidence, but also awed by the savagery of this strange destination.

  For Manassas Junction was not an inviting place. It had been sacked once by Northern troops, destroyed again by retreating Confederates, then hastily rebuilt by Northern contractors, so that now there were acres of gaunt, raw-timbered warehouses standing between rail sidings and weed-filled meadows that were crammed with guns and limbers and caissons and portable forges and ambulances and wagons. More stores and weapons arrived every hour, for this was the supply depot that would fuel the summer cam­paign of 1862 that would end the rebellion and so restore a United States of America. The great spread of buildings was shadowed by an ever-present pall of greasy smoke that came from blacksmiths' shops and locomotive repair sheds and the fireboxes of the locomotives that dragged in their goods wagons and passenger cars.

  Two cavalry officers waited at the depot. They had clearly gone to some considerable effort to make themselves pre­sentable, for their uniform coats were brushed spotless, their spurred boots were shining, and their leather belts polished. The older man was middle-aged and balding, with a pleasant face and thick muttonchop whiskers. His name was Major Joseph Galloway, and he clutched a plumed hat in his nervous hands. His companion was a much younger man, handsome and fair-haired, with a square beard and wide shoulders and an open face that inspired trust. His coat showed a captain's bars.

  Both men were Virginians, yet both fought for the North. Joseph Galloway owned property just outside Manassas itself, and that farm was now the depot for a regiment of Northern cavalry exclusively recruited from Southerners loyal to the government in Washington. Most of the troopers for Galloway's Horse were volunteers from the border states, the disputed lands of Maryland, and the western counties of Virginia, but a good number were refugees from the Confederate States themselves. Galloway had no doubt that some of his men were fugitives from Southern justice, but the majority were idealists who fought to preserve the Union, and it had been Major Galloway's notion to recruit such men for reconnaissance work deep behind the rebel lines. Northern horsemen were solid and brave, but they rode the Virginian countryside as strangers, and in con­sequence they were timid compared to the rakehell Southerners who knew that every Virginian village and hamlet contained sympathizers prepared to hide and feed them. It had been Galloway's inspiration to raise a regiment that could ride the rebel states like native Southerners, yet the idea had received only lukewarm support from Washington. Raise the regiment, the government's bureau­crats had told Major Galloway, and we might deign to employ it, but only if it came properly equipped with weapons, horses, and uniforms.

  Which was why Major Galloway and Captain Adam Faulconer now waited for a passenger who was supposed to have arrived on the midday train that had just steamed into Manassas. The two cavalry officers worked their way against the flood of excited soldiers toward the train's last car, which had been reserved for passengers more exalted than mere cannon fodder. A porter lowered the carriage steps, and two ladies, their hooped skirts scarce able to squeeze through the car's narrow doorway, were handed down. After the ladies came a group of senior officers, their mustaches trimmed, their uniforms brushed, and their faces flush from the day's heat and from their consumption of the railroad's whiskey. One officer, younger than the rest, broke away and shouted at some orderlies to bring horses. "Chop, chop now! Horses for the General!" the aide shouted. The ladies' twin parasols bobbed white and lacy through the mist of tobacco smoke and the crush of dark military hats.

  The last man to alight from the passenger car was a thin, tall, and elderly civilian with white hair and beard, fierce eyes, and a gaunt, stern face. He had sunken cheeks, a Roman nose as imperious as his gaze, a black frock coat, a top hat, and despite the heat, a high-buttoned vest over which a pair of starched Geneva bands hung white. He carried a dark maroon carpetbag and an ebony stick that he used to push aside a black servant who was lifting the ladies' cabin trunks onto a handcart. The gesture was peremptory and unthinking, the act of a man accustomed to authority.

  "That's him," Adam said, recognizing the minister whom he had heard preach in Boston just before the war began.

  Major Galloway pushed through the crowd toward the white-haired man. "Sir?" he called to the newly arrived preacher. "Doctor Starbuck, sir?"

  The Reverend Elial Joseph Starbuck, Doctor of Divinity, pamphleteer, and the most famous of all the North's aboli­tionist preachers, scowled at his welcomers. "You must be Galloway. And you're Faulconer? Good! My bag." He thrust the carpetbag into Adam's hand, which had been stretched out for a handshake.

  "You had a pleasant journey, I trust, sir?" Major Galloway inquired as he ushered his guest toward the roadway.

  "It became successively less pleasant, Galloway, as I jour­neyed south. I am forced to conclude that engineering has reached its apotheosis in New England and that the further one journeys from Boston the less comfortable the con­veyance." The Reverend Starbuck delivered these judg­ments in a voice trained to reach the deepest recesses of the largest churches and lecture halls in America. "The Southern rails, I must say, are distinctly lumpy. The degraded product, no doubt, of a Slavocracy. Am I expected to walk to my destination?" the Reverend Starbuck demanded, suddenly stopping dead in his tracks.

  "No, sir. I have a buggy." Galloway was about to request that Adam go fetch the carriage, then realized Adam was too encumbered with the preacher's heavy carpetbag. "I'll fetch it directly, sir. It isn't far."

  The Reverend Starbuck waved Galloway on his way, then peered with a fierce inquisitiveness at a group of civil­ians waiting for the mail to be unloaded from the newly arrived caboose. "Have you read Spurzheim on phrenology?" he demanded of Adam.

  "No, sir," Adam responded, surprised by the fiercely abrupt question.

  "Science has much to teach us," the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed, "so long as we remember that its con­clusions are ever subject to the approval and emendations of Almighty God, but I am interested to observe these proofs of Spurzheim's treatise." He waved his stick toward the waiting civilians. "The New Englander generally possesses a noble brow shape. He displays cranial contours that denote intelligence, benevolence, wisdom, and adhesiveness, but even in these upper regions of the South I notice how the shape of men's skulls betrays depravity, combativeness, destructiveness, and a distinct tendency toward cretinism."

  Adam's torturing conscience, like his ingrained patrio�
�tism, might have driven him to fight against his father's land, yet he was still a native son of Virginia, and the Northern preacher's criticism made him bridle. "Was not George Washington a Southerner, sir?" he demanded stiffly.

  But the Reverend Starbuck was too old a controversialist to be trapped into recantation. "George Washington, young man, like yourself, was a product of the gentry. My observa­tions are confined solely to the common ruck of people. The general there, you see him?" The peremptory stick, narrowly missing an artillery sergeant, pointed at a plump officer who had shared the passenger car with the Reverend Starbuck.

  "I see him, sir," Adam said, wondering what characteris­tics the general's skull shape revealed.

  But the Reverend Starbuck had abandoned the subject of phrenology. "That is Pope," the preacher announced. "He was good enough to pay me his respects during the journey. A fine-looking man, indeed."

  Adam looked with interest at this new commander of the North's Army of Virginia. General John Pope was a high-colored and confident-looking man with intelligent eyes and a bushy beard. If phrenology did provide an accurate guide to a man's character, then Pope's broad forehead and solid, square appearance suggested that he might indeed be the savior that the North had been seeking ever since the war's sad beginning. John Pope had distinguished himself in the fighting on the Mississippi and had now been brought east to work his magic in the intransigent Virginian country­side where Northern general after Northern general had first been bamboozled and then beaten by the ragged rebel armies.

  "Pope has the right ideas," the Reverend Starbuck went on enthusiastically. "It's no good being kind to rebels.

  Disobedience calls for punishment, and defiance demands retribution. The Slavocracy must be smitten, Faulconer, and its lands laid waste. Pope won't stay his hand, he assures me of that. He is a man for the Lord's work." And indeed, General Pope, almost as soon as he had been appointed commander of the Army of Virginia, had declared that the old policy of treating Southern civilians with respect was finished. Northern soldiers would henceforth take what they needed from the Southern population, and any Southerner who resisted such depredations would be punished. The Reverend Elial Starbuck applauded Pope's zeal. "The Southerner," the preacher now lectured Adam, "under­stands only one language. Brute force. It is the language he has used to oppress the Negro, and it is the language that must now be used to oppress him. You agree?"

  "I think, sir," Adam said tactfully, "that the North must gain victory very soon."

  "Quite so, quite so," the Reverend Starbuck said, not certain whether he had received agreement or not. He certainly deserved agreement, for it was upon the Reverend Starbuck's generosity that both the future of Adam and of Galloway's Horse depended. Adam had been penniless when he deserted the South, but it had been his good for­tune to know Major James Starbuck, the preacher's eldest son, and it had been James who had informed Adam about Galloway's Horse and who had suggested that his famous father might be able to provide Adam with the necessary funds to join the regiment.

  The Reverend Doctor Starbuck had proved more than willing to advance the money. Too old to fight, yet too pas­sionate to abstain from fighting, he had watched, impotent, as the North suffered defeat after defeat in Virginia. The defeats had stirred the Reverend Starbuck into contributing his own and his church's money to the raising and equipping of Massachusetts regiments, only to see those regiments led to disaster. Other men, lesser men, might have abandoned their efforts, but the disasters only fed the preacher's zeal, which was why, given the chance to contribute to the estab­lishment of Galloway's Horse, the Reverend Starbuck had been quick to agree. He was not only supporting Adam but donating fifteen thousand dollars' worth of weaponry and ammunition to Galloway's regiment. The money was not the Reverend Starbuck's own but had been raised by God­fearing New England abolitionists. "In the past," he told Galloway and Adam as they journeyed westward from Manassas in the buggy, "we used such charitable donations for our work in the South: distributing tracts, establishing Sabbath schools for blacks, and, of course, conducting inves­tigations into the evils of the Slavocracy, but now, cut off from those activities, our charities need other outlets for their expenditure."

  "There's surely much to be spent on the welfare of escaped slaves?" Adam asked, hoping at the same time that he was not talking Galloway and himself out of their funding.

  "The contrabands are amply provided for. Amply!" The Reverend Starbuck's disapproving tone suggested that those slaves who had managed to escape to the North were living in pampered luxury rather than struggling for insanitary sur­vival in makeshift camps. "We need to strike a blow at the root of slavery, not pluck a few diseased leaves from its top­most branches." Adam, hearing the anger behind the preacher's words, suspected that the Reverend Elial Starbuck was much keener to punish the slaveholders than actually free the slaves.

  The buggy climbed the shallow hill from New Market, passed between deep woods, then plunged downhill toward the Warrenton Turnpike. As Major Galloway drove, he pointed out landmarks made famous in the battle that had been fought the previous summer across this same ground. There were the ruins of the house where Surgeon Henry's widow had died in the shell fire, and there the Matthews house, which had been used as a hospital. As the buggy rattled down the Sudley road north of the turnpike, Galloway pointed to where the Northern flank attack had come from the river's far side, but as he talked he became aware that the Boston preacher was hardly enthusiastic in his responses. The Reverend Doctor Starbuck did not want a guided tour of the place where the North had met its first defeat; he only wanted to hear promises of victory, and so the conversation died away as Galloway steered the buggy onto the track leading to the farm he had inherited from his father.

  Major Galloway, a kindly man, was nervous around the famous abolitionist and relieved when the Reverend Starbuck announced that he had no intention of staying overnight at the comfortable farm, but instead intended to take the evening train south to Culpeper Court House. "My friend Banks did the courtesy of inviting me," the preacher said, referring to General Nathaniel Banks, who had once been Governor of Massachusetts and was now a Union gen­eral who believed that a visit from his old friend would serve to encourage his troops' flagging spirits. The invitation had certainly done wonders for the preacher's spirits. He had been chafing in Boston, taking his war news from news­papers and letters, but now he could learn for himself exactly what was happening in Virginia, to which end he had arranged to be absent from his pulpit for the whole month of August. He was fervently praying that a month would be long enough to allow him to be the first Northern minister to preach the gospel from a Richmond pulpit.

  But before joining Banks the preacher had agreed to this meeting with Major Galloway and his men. He spoke to Galloway's regiment in the meadow behind the house, where he encouraged them to fight the good fight, but his brusque manner made it plain that he was in a hurry to conclude the day's business and continue his journey. Major Galloway tactfully abandoned the planned display of saber fighting and instead conducted his guest toward the farmhouse, which was an impressive building shaded by great oaks and lapped by wide lawns. "My father pros­pered in the law," Galloway said, explaining the luxurious house.

  "A slave owner, too?" the preacher demanded fiercely, pointing with his ebony cane at the small cabins that lay to the north of the house.

  "I freed all the people," Galloway said hastily. "If I'd sold them, sir," he went on, "I wouldn't be needing to beg money for the regiment. I mortgaged the farm to raise funds, sir, and used all the money to buy the horses and weapons you've just seen, but frankly, sir, I've no resources left. I've made myself penniless in the cause of liberty."

  "In which cause we must all be prepared to suffer, Galloway," the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed as he followed the Major up the veranda steps and into the hallway. The house echoed like an empty building, which it very nearly was, for with the exception of a few essential pieces of furni­ture Galloway had
sent all his books and pictures and drapes and ornaments north into storage so that his rebellious neighbors could not take revenge on his allegiance by steal­ing his valuables. And if his neighbors did not steal the goods, he explained, his own brother would. "My brother fights for the South, alas," Major Galloway told the preacher, "and he'd like nothing more than to take the house and its contents from me." He paused for an instant. "There's nothing sadder, sir, is there, than family members fighting on opposite sides?" The Reverend Starbuck offered a belligerent grunt as answer, and that ill-tempered noise should have warned Major Galloway against proceeding further with the conversation, but the Major was a guile­less man. "Am I right, sir," Galloway asked, "in believing you have a son who fights with the rebels?"

  "I know of no such person," the preacher said, stiffening perceptibly.

  "But Nate, surely—" Adam began, only to be fiercely interrupted.

  "I have no son called Nathaniel," the preacher snapped. "I recognize no person called Nathaniel Starbuck. He is doomed, he is cast out, not only from my family, but also from the loving congregation of Christ! He is a reprobate!" This last condemnation was trumpeted in a voice that might have carried a half-mile into a mighty wind.

  Galloway realized he had been tactless and so hurried on, talking inconsequentially about the house and its amenities until he reached the doors of the library, where a tall, heavy-set Captain waited. The Captain had a ready smile and a quick, friendly manner. "May I introduce my second-in-command?" Galloway said to the preacher. "Captain William Blythe."

  "Sure glad to meet you, Reverend." Blythe extended a hand.

  "Captain Blythe was a horse trader before the war," Galloway said.

  "You should never have told the minister that, Joe!" Blythe said with a smile. "Everyone knows that us horse traders are the crookedest folks this side of tarnation, but God bless me, sir"—he had turned back to the preacher—"I tried to be as honest a trader as a Christian man could."