Confederates in the Attic (36 page)

We snoozed beside Stonewall’s arm until the cool of the day, then trudged back to the car. The land all around us was actually twice-fought ground. Almost a year to the day after Stonewall’s wounding, the North fought Lee’s army again in the dense thicket just west of Chancellorsville, known as the Wilderness. In some spots, soldiers stumbled on bones of men left unburied from fighting the year before.

The Wilderness wasn’t so wild anymore; apart from a few roadside exhibits, stray cannons, and trails winding into the woods, much of the battlefield had been lost to development. We followed one line of trenches until it ended abruptly at a vast, brick-walled compound with a sign that said: “Fawn Lake, An NTS Club Community.”

Curious, we followed a shaded entrance road into the community, which was bordered by signs warning “security patrols in effect.” Then came a guard booth. The sentry said only residents were allowed beyond this point, but he let us drive just far enough to glimpse the golf course, artificial lake and wooded homesites that lay beyond. The development was laid out along streets and cul-de-sacs named for Longstreet, Jackson, Burnside, Appomattox—the only hint that minié balls, rather than golf balls, had once sliced through the air all around here.

As we wound back out of the development, Rob pointed to rifle pits still dimly visible in the road’s median strip. “I should go bloat in one of those trenches,” he fumed. “I’d like these rich fucks to have to look at me every time they tee off.”

I had never seen Rob so angry. He’d told me before we set off that every Gasm finds its own theme; the dispiriting leitmotif of ours, at least so far, was the devastation of Virginia’s historic landscape. The Wilderness a golfers’ rough; Stonewall’s flank march a Fas Mart; Jackson and Lee and Longstreet now names of shopping malls and streets built on the ground over which they’d once fought.

Rob and his fellow hardcores often staged marches to raise money for the preservation of battlefields and the landscape surrounding them. But sometimes Rob thought more radical action was required. “I fantasize a lot about my buddy who has a twelve-pound Napoleon firing some solid shot at this shit,” he said, as we drove past a housing development called Lee-Jackson Estates.

We pushed on, past historic markers and realtors’ signs, until we reached Spotsylvania Courthouse, where Grant battled Lee a few days after the Wilderness. By May 1864, both armies had learned the grim lesson of Bloody Lane; here, the trenches twisted and turned so the defenders could “enfilade” attackers, or fire on them from several sides. The rebels also axed trees from in front of their breastworks to create a clear kill zone. Then they sharpened the felled trees and deployed them as pikelike obstacles called abatis, bristling in front of their trenches. Spotsylvania was a long way from Shiloh, where generals regarded trench digging as unmanly and demoralizing, and a short way from the Western Front in World War I.

It was also here, at a salient called Bloody Angle, that some of the most intimate and fevered killing of the entire War occurred. At dawn on May 12, Grant threw 20,000 men at the rebel line; for eighteen hours, often in heavy rain, the two sides engaged in a rare instance of prolonged hand-to-hand combat as they hacked, bludgeoned, bayonetted and blasted away at point-blank range. The attack achieved little, except some 14,000 casualties. Corpses packed the muddy trenches so densely that burial parties simply collapsed the breastworks to cover the dead.

For half an hour I listened to Rob read aloud from accounts of the carnage: “The writhing of the wounded and dying who lay beneath the dead bodies moved the whole mass.… Troops were killed by thrusts and stabs through chinks in the log barricade, while others were harpooned by bayonetted rifles flung javelin-style across it… I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania.” The horrors of it all were starting to numb me. Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and the Wilderness ranked three, four, and six in the list of bloodiest Civil War battles; Fredericksburg rounded out the top ten. All told, the ten-mile-square territory we’d
traversed that afternoon claimed 100,000 casualties. The writer Bob Schacochis called Civil War Virginia “the abattoir of the South.” At Bloody Angle, I felt as though we lay near the center of that slaughterhouse.

Butchery on the scale that occurred around Spotsylvania was hard to grasp, even for those who committed it. Curiously, many of the soldiers’ accounts described a single oak tree, almost two feet in diameter, felled in the hail of small-arms fire. After the battle, the bullet-riddled stump was featured at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and later installed at the Smithsonian. “The death of this single tree,” one historian observed, “was a way of measuring the scale of combat that surpassed understanding.”

The death of a single man was also easier to grasp than the massacre of thousands, particularly if that man happened to be Stonewall Jackson. Even the nonpartisan Park Service literature referred to his death site by the name Southerners gave it: the “Jackson Shrine.” As shrines went, it was modest: a small frame cottage at a sleepy rail spur called Guinea Station, where doctors sent Jackson to recover after the amputation of his arm. During the twenty-seven-mile ambulance ride, civilians lined the route, offering the wounded general fried chicken, biscuits and buttermilk.

We waited until full dark, then crept along a half-mile gravel road leading from the old railroad station to the Shrine. Except for a caretaker’s house and a few dogs howling in the dark, there wasn’t much to worry about. It was a fine, starry night and the A-frame cottage stood clearly silhouetted in a small clearing not far from the railroad tracks. Unfurling our bedrolls on the building’s front porch, we took turns reading aloud about Jackson’s final days.

At first, Jackson seemed headed for a brisk recovery. But after a few days, nausea and fever set in. Doctors diagnosed this as pneumonia, though modern physicians suspected that Jackson’s falls from his stretcher at Chancellorsville may have caused internal bleeding as well. Doctors treated the pneumonia with crude measures common in that day, such as bleeding Jackson and cupping his chest with hot glass to raise a blister and draw out ill humors. But on the morning
of May 10th the general’s doctor informed Jackson’s wife that her husband would not last the day. When she told her husband, Jackson asked the doctor for confirmation, then announced: “My wish is fulfilled. I have always desired to die on Sunday.”

The scene recalled an interview with Shelby Foote I’d read, in which he talked about the deathbed rituals of the mid-nineteenth century. “When you are dying, the doctor says you’re dying,” Foote said. “You assemble your family around you and sing hymns and you are brave and stalwart and tell the little woman that she has been good to you and not to cry. And you tell the children to be good and mind their mother, Daddy’s fixing to go away. That was called making a good death, and it was very important.”

Jackson’s death wasn’t just good, it was sublime. After consoling his distraught wife and cuddling his newborn daughter, he declined the doctor’s offer of brandy, declaring, “I want to preserve my mind, if possible, to the end.” Then, as Foote told it in his narrative of the War, Jackson slipped into a deathbed delirium, “alternately praying and giving commands, all of which had to do with the offensive. Shortly after 3 o’clock, a few minutes before he died, he called out: ‘Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front. Tell Major Hawks—’ He left the sentence unfinished, seeming thus to have put the war behind him: for he smiled as he spoke his last words, in a tone of calm relief. ‘Let us cross over the river,’ he said, ‘and rest under the shade of the trees.’”

Bizarrely, legend held that Robert E. Lee also ordered A. P. Hill into battle from his deathbed. “Tell Hill he
must
come up,” Lee said, before making his own good death by uttering, “Strike the tent.” A. P. Hill was a hot-tempered, gonorrhea-wracked commander who wore a red shirt into battle and feuded with his superiors. Judging from Lee’s and Jackson’s last words, Hill obviously got under their skins. I wondered whether Hill reciprocated by mentioning either commander on his own deathbed.

“Don’t know, but I doubt it,” Rob mumbled sleepily. “Hill got waxed at Petersburg, near where Pickett was getting loaded at a fish fry while losing the Battle of Five Forks.”

“Hunh?”

“We’ll see it all later in the Gasm,” Rob said, drifting off to sleep.

I lay awake for a while. Night erased all sign of the twentieth century, as it had at Antietam, and lying there on the wood-slat porch, a few feet from where Jackson died, I felt the mournfulness of our campsite. Eight weeks after Jackson’s death, Lee’s army self-destructed at Gettysburg. Southerners and Civil War buffs had speculated ever since that Gettysburg—and, consequently, the whole course of the War—might have gone differently had Jackson been there. “That old house,” the English prime minister David Lloyd George observed on visiting the Jackson shrine in 1923, “witnessed the downfall of the Southern Confederacy.”

Guinea Station also possessed a spare dignity that suited the man it enshrined. The cottage bore little resemblance to the grand manses of the plantation South, just as Jackson had little in common with patricians such as Lee, who hailed from one of Virginia’s leading families, married into another, and spent his adult life shuttling between vast estates. Jackson, by contrast, married a minister’s daughter and when she died in childbirth he married another, honeymooning each time at Niagara Falls. He settled in a modest town house near the Virginia Military Institute, where he taught until the War broke out. His professor’s salary didn’t allow for much extravagance, even if his Presbyterian temperament had permitted it.

My musings were interrupted by Rob, who rolled over and mumbled, “Forgot something.” Then he pulled out his notebook and scribbled: “Gasm, Day Two.”

5:30	wake up, Bloody Lane
6:00	breakfast at diner, look at bloaters
7-9:30	antietam: cornfield, dunker church, museum
12-1	fredericksburg (drive-by)
2-5	chancellorsville, wilderness, Stonewall’s arm
6-8	Spotsylvania
10-1	jackson shrine. cosmic. read about death

We were only to May 1863, the midpoint of the War. “Get some rest,” Rob said, pulling a blanket over his head. “Tomorrow we’ve got to do Jeb Stuart’s death, plus Richmond and the rest of ’64.”

T
OMORROW ARRIVED
a few hours later when a freight train roared past, just fifty or so yards from our campsite. In the dim predawn light I peered through the windows of the cottage, which revealed itself now as a handsome weatherboard structure with a shingle roof, wide pine floors, white walls and a stark Shaker beauty. In one room stood the bed in which Jackson died, a four-poster with ropes beneath the mattress and a jack to tighten the hemp before bed (hence the phrase “sleep fight”). A clock sat on the mantel, the same one that had ticked away the last minutes of Stonewall’s life. It was set to 3:15, the exact time of Jackson’s death.

A year and a day after Stonewall’s death, Lee’s army lost its most renowned cavalryman. The site of Jeb Stuart’s mortal wounding, Yellow Tavern, sounded appropriately romantic: the sort of rustic saloon where Stuart might have danced in his spurs on the night before battle. Though a teetotaler and devout Christian, like Stonewall, Stuart cultivated the image of a wanton Cavalier, with his extravagantly coiffed beard, silken yellow sash, crimson-lined cape and ostrich plume poking up from his slouch hat. Stuart spoke of his daring rides around the Union army as if they were fox chases; after one narrow escape, he declared he’d rather “die game” than accept surrender.

Stuart fell gamely enough, shot off his horse while emptying a pistol at George Custer’s cavalry just north of Richmond. Only thirty-one, he quickly joined Stonewall in the pantheon of Confederate gods. But the site of Stuart’s last battle seemed as elusive as the fleet horseman had been in life. The crossroads where the eponymous Yellow Tavern once stood now featured a car lot, a body shop, and a Go-Kart store. Even the name had vanished from the map. The commercial sprawl surrounding the crossroads now belonged to a Richmond suburb called Glen Allen. Apart from a roadside historical marker—perched beside the Cavalier Motel—there was no hint of the fight that claimed one of the War’s most colorful and courageous figures.

Finally, after wandering a maze of cul-de-sacs and housing tracts—Jeb Stuart Parkway, Stonewall Glen, Lee’s Crossing—we
found an obelisk within earshot of the interstate. Erected in 1888 by Stuart’s men, the monument bore a classic paeon to Southern manhood: “He was Fearless and Faithful, Pure and Powerful, Tender and True.” We stood there for a few minutes, trying to conjure the gallant Cavalier over the roar of truck traffic on I-95 and the insistent pock-pock of a tennis ball from a nearby court.
Sic transit
Yellow Tavern.

Later, after talking to historians and touring other lost corners of the Civil War landscape, I began to grasp the melancholy logic of Yellow Tavern’s demise and that of so many other sites. While other wars on American soil occurred largely along the frontier, the major clashes of the Civil War were mostly fought for control of rail junctions, crossroads, and river or sea ports: Manassas, Atlanta, Charleston, Chattanooga, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, and so on. During America’s rapid industrialization in the fifty years after the War, many of these transportation hubs naturally grew into commercial and manufacturing centers. What highways and office blocks hadn’t yet claimed, suburbs were now devouring. Only at isolated battlegrounds such as Antietam and Shiloh was there much hope of the historic landscape remaining relatively pristine.

L
EAVING
Y
ELLOW
T
AVERN
, we sidled around Richmond, as Lee and Grant had done in 1864. Once again, the armies met on ground they’d fought over before: the gentle hills and swampy streams east of Richmond, where Lee drove back George McClellan in 1862. We decided to tour only the latter campaign and headed for Cold Harbor, where the fighting climaxed in early June of 1864.