The Better Angels of Our Nature (36 page)

“I rest my case,” Marcus whispered.

No daughter could have nursed a father more devotedly. Every hour spraying his body with cool water, sponging him down when he grew hot, drying him with a towel, blotting the sweat from his face and shoulders, covering him with a clean sheet and blankets. She administered the quinine powders when required, some opium for his restlessness and headaches, got lots of fluids down his throat, and washed him when he became uncomfortable. Jacob came to help change the undersheet and to “spell” her, but she would take no rest, trust no other to nurse him. With Captain Van Allen’s “protection” she kept a constant vigil at the commander’s bedside.

Cartwright, Van Allen, and Jackson stood near the entrance and listened in fascination as the girl grasped the sick man’s hand to her freckled cheek.

“
Minnie
?” asked Cartwright of Marcus, with a dramatic raising and lowering of his eyebrows.

“His eldest daughter,” the aide said in a quiet voice, “he appears to believe Jesse is Minnie.”

“Minnie?” The general said staring up with feverish eyes as the girl lifted his head and put the tin cup to his lips. “Minnie—is that you? Have you come to nurse your sick papa?”

“Yes, Papa, I’m here, it’s Minnie, come all the way from school just to take care of you. I shan’t leave you until you’re completely well again, I swear it.”

“You are…a good girl—”

“Thank you, Papa. You have to take another dose of quinine, and drink lots of water. Will you do that for me, Papa?” Jesse raised his red head and held the tin cup to his dry, cracked lips.

Cartwright looked at Marcus again and then at Andy, his brows now dipped in astonishment.

“If you have no respect for the honor…and reputation of the generals who…lead the armies of your country, you should have some regard for the honor and welfare of the country itself,” he said, trying to raise himself from the mattress as he stared feverishly, suspiciously, at his nurse. “Who
are you
?”

“Why, it’s Minnie, sir,” said the indignant, childish, wholly feminine voice, a voice that Cartwright didn’t recognize as Jesse’s own clipped boyish tone. “Your
daughter.
”

Two days later General Halleck issued orders not to attempt any further repairs, he said it was pointless, as soon as Sherman’s men finished repairing the line the Rebels ripped them up again. Instead he was to concentrate on the rail links between Grand Junction and Memphis.

When the Fifth Division began the march to Grand Junction on June 7, the commander was forced to travel in an ambulance, and much to Captain Jackson’s disapproval Marcus gave Jesse permission to stay with him. Most of the time, however, when he wasn’t having snatches of conversation with his “daughter,” Sherman slept, the expression of tension around his brow and mouth now fading. He looked more rested, more at peace.

By the tenth, to the dismay of all concerned, especially his “railroad regiment,” the commander declared himself sufficiently recovered to be carried to the side of the road on a litter, from where he could shout orders, advice, and criticism. Jesse now kept her distance; he was no longer delirious.

So rapidly had his health improved by the end of June, that as July took its place, Sherman was able to march his own and Hurlbut’s divisions from Grand Junction to Lagrange, then from Moscow and Lafayette to Holly Springs, center of all roads to and from northern Mississippi, several times, building railroad trestles and bridges, sending a detachment of two brigades to Holly Springs to protect the railroad, and to fight off Rebel cavalry detachments who dashed down out of the south. He was even fit enough to wage what he termed “everlasting quarrels” with planters over their Negroes, liberated by his officers, who used them as servants, and their fences, liberated by the enlisted men who continued to use them to build bivouac fires.

Near Wolf River, Tennessee, in late June, Jesse helped treat men wounded by Southern civilians, “
guerrillas,
” who had attacked the Yankee soldiers from ambush. When the commander came to visit them in the hospital she heard him declare angrily that they were now at war with the “entire Southern populace,” not merely soldier fighting soldier, army against army, but an occupying force having to fight civilians who took up arms, cowards who shot at his men and then ran home to hide behind their front doors.

“This,” he declared wrathfully, standing by the cot of a handsome Federal lieutenant, shot in the eye by a musket ball fired by a citizen of the area, from his house, “is a new kind of war and I will be ready to answer it.”

While at the hospital, he made a point of thanking Cartwright for the treatment he had received. “I attribute my attack to a small military cap I wore in the hot sun. I’m sorry if I took you away from others who needed you more. If it’s any consolation my death would have left five children without a father.”

Cartwright pushed the untidy wedge of graying black hair off his brow with one hand and blinked from behind his small round lenses. He had to admit it; the old bastard had a nice line in self-deprecating humor. He also had a natty line in headgear. If asked, it would not have been easy for Cartwright to describe what the rail-thin, grizzled, and sun-burned Ohioan looked like in his new, wide-brimmed, yellow straw hat sent down from Memphis to keep the sun off his head, but one thing was for certain, he
didn’t
look like any major general.

“It was malarial fever,” Cartwright said, “and it had nothing to do with your cap. It’s the mosquitoes from the swamps.” He wasted no opportunity to voice his theory, one that his fellow surgeons did not share. “The little red bumps you had on your neck and arms? I think they were insect bites. My guess is that’s how the blood gets inflamed.”

“Well, whatever it was that struck me down, Doctor, I am grateful to you and to your steward.”

“Well, actually, it wasn’t me who—” the surgeon’s voice tailed off as Jesse, standing beside him, stamped on his foot. “I’ll send you my bill,” he concluded.

“Why?” he demanded of her that evening as they snatched a quick supper together; it was a balmy night and the crickets were singing fit to bust their lungs, as the moon coasted slowly across the clear Tennessee sky. On nights like this if it wasn’t for the putrid smells coming off the swamps, the groaning of the sick, and the fact that he was on duty twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours, Cartwright could have given himself over to the nostalgia in his own heart. He would have pretended he was home in Quincy on the back porch, an arm around his redheaded sweetheart as they sat on the swing.

“Proprieties,”
Jesse said, trying to free the sweet corn from the husk with her fork and impale it on the prongs. “He doesn’t believe in a female nursing a man who isn’t her husband or father. Mrs. Sherman was threatening to travel out here with a trunk full of holy relics that she would have waved in his face like some African witch doctor. Then she would have begged him to embrace Catholicism so that he could be given the last rites and make her happy by dying in the ‘
one true faith.
’”

“My
God,
that’s a pretty cynical statement for someone who believes in God.”

“It only
appears
cynical to you because you have no faith, no belief in anything beyond what you can see with your own eyes. Belief and faith have very little to do with holy relics. You’re a surgeon, you see miracles every day, if only you’d choose to acknowledge them.” She took his hands and held them palms upward. “These hands
perform
miracles every day.” He lifted his hand to her smooth freckled cheek but she moved her head out of reach. “Please don’t—” she said.

He leaned forward, picked up the husk and bit into the succulent yellow kernels. “See how it’s done? Get the idea? For such a clever girl, you can be mighty stupid.” He stared at those cushioned mobile lips a second before clearing his throat. No by God, it didn’t do for a red-blooded male to let his imagination run away with him, even on such a balmy moonlit night. “Sherman ought to know how you nursed him. It might soften him up. Make my life easier.”

“Knowing I nursed him would cause him great embarrassment.”

No more embarrassment, Cartwright mused, than if he could see himself as others saw him, in that nifty little straw number he now wore to bully his “railroad regiment.”

When newspaper vendors finally caught up with Sherman’s division between Lafayette and Holly Springs at the beginning of July, the men learned that Federal gunboats had pushed rapidly down the Mississippi and taken the major seaport of Memphis, an extremely useful base for its campaigning in the heart of the South.

On the twenty-third, Sherman was at Lafayette Station when Grant and his escort arrived from Corinth. Jesse saw the small, dusty man dismount and grasp the tall Ohioan by both hands in a rare display of affection. If not for Sherman’s persuasive words and support after Shiloh, the tanner’s son would now be on his way to oblivion, not Memphis, where he was to have his headquarters as commander of the District of West Tennessee, and the Union would be down one general it could ill afford to lose.

On July 4, Jesse gave an impromptu concert for the sick and wounded. Her version of “Home Sweet Home” was rendered with such emotion that men of both sides wept in their cots.

Then, twelve days later, as dawn broke at Moscow, Tennessee, she found herself facing General Sherman across a desk littered with papers.

“I suppose you’ve already heard. I am to take over command of the District of West Tennessee from General Grant and have my headquarters in Memphis.”

Yes, she’d heard that and more. McClellan was out, he would “only” command the Army of the Potomac. Halleck had been summoned to Washington. He was now general in chief of the entire U.S. forces. Halleck’s command had gone back to Grant.

“From Memphis I shall be able to send you on to Nashville by the cars and thence back to wherever you came from. In the meantime”—he tossed a piece of cloth across the table at her—“wear these.”

She stared at the stripes on the table.

“Take them!” Sherman bellowed.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank
me.
These stripes don’t make you a soldier. You won’t survive a month in this army.”

“Really?” She swiveled her eyes to look at him. “I’ve survived five months. I survived the Battle of Shiloh.” Her voice rose with unrestrained pride. “If you find I cannot discharge the duties of a soldier as well anyone in your command then you can send me home.”

Marcus thought Sherman, still weakened from the malaria, was about to keel over as he gripped the table, towering above the girl and bellowing into her handsome freckled face, “You may be damned certain I’ll send you home before that day!”

Outside the headquarters tent, Jesse looked reflectively at the stripes lying in the palm of her hand. First, she had been a private, and then she had been a corporal, and then nothing, not even a soldier. Now she was a corporal. Well, she would sew the stripes onto her sleeves with big, loose stitches to make it easier for Captain Jackson to cut them off once more when the time came, as surely it would.

18

“All the people are now guerrillas”

To describe the Memphis Union soldiers marched into on July 21, 1862, as a ghost town was inaccurate, for to quote General Sherman, “the place was dead—
even the ghosts had fled.
”

Shops were shuttered, businesses, churches, and schools closed, many houses stood empty and neglected, the occupants departing at the first sight of the blue-clad troops after Farragut’s victory. Those residents that remained defiantly flew the Stars and Bars from their rooftops.

This old Mississippi River town had been in Union hands but six weeks and seen three military commanders. The last of them, U. S. Grant, had found it easier to close down the city than to run it. Never a beacon of virtue, what little propriety remained had been undermined to the dislocation of civil war, leaving drunkards, prostitutes, and robbers to rule the nighttime streets, while the decent folk stayed in their parlors and prayed for the “cause.”

However, just one week later, Sherman had his new regime firmly in place.

For a man who had served as a quartermaster, worked as a bank manager, a streetcar president, the superintendent of a military academy, and sometime (in his own estimation) unsuccessful lawyer, administration was second nature. If anyone could shake this sluggish flea-bit old hound into life, he could! And, by God, he did!

While his three brigades encamped in and near Fort Pickering, and Hurlbut’s division spread out along the riverbank, the new military governor made his own bivouac in tents in a vacant lot near the house of a Mr. Moon. From there he gave his undivided attention to the pressing matters of civil affairs, and the drill and general discipline of the two divisions now under his command. Also the continuing construction of Fort Pickering, to which end he daily took Negroes from their masters to supplement his work force, for which they were paid a small wage and their meals, while other Negroes were employed as teamsters or cooks and hospital orderlies.

Amidst an avalanche of paperwork, pointing out the rules of his jurisdiction, Sherman set the mayor and his municipal bodies back to running the civil government. He reorganized the city police and gave the streets back to civilians unable to walk them unmolested since the Rebel army fled in early June.

The provost marshals’ duty was limited to guarding public property held or claimed by the United States and arresting soldiers who were absent without leave or disorderly, and they were kept mighty busy, since every other commercial enterprise on Beale Street was a “grog shop,” and that which did not sell booze sold sex.

Surgeons now treated the diseases of passion, not the wounds of war. Cartwright gave it to them straight, but he didn’t preach. The men didn’t listen anyway. They took their pleasure, paid the penalty, and expected the doctors to deliver relief, not sermons. Most Yankee soldiers agreed they’d rather die from a dose of the clap than lying in the dirt with a Reb bullet in their back. Whoring and boozing had been as much a part of the soldier’s life as marching and fighting since Roman times. Sherman was broad-minded. If he disapproved of drunkenness in his own extended family, he did not impose those restraints on his men.

Steamboats had been idle too long; once more they carried trade northward, their decks crammed with bales of “White Gold,” their holds groaning with tobacco and whiskey, their shrill emotive whistles rending the air as they passed down the mighty Mississippi. The morally righteous expressed outrage, of course, at the same time as they counted their profits. But most agreed that the city had never been so prosperous, so well policed, since the days of their illustrious founders. Stores, shops, and eating establishments, theaters and churches and schools were open for business.

General Sherman had brought a dead community back to life, even the ghosts were grateful.

As for Jesse, while she waited for Sherman to take her back into his army family, she worked at the hospital and indulged her favorite new pastime of poker. For some reason she could not understand, Thomas Ransom had sent her ten dollars to have her likeness done, so she dragged Jacob and Cartwright to the photographer’s studio and all three posed on a long couch with a potted plant. It cost only two dollars, which left her with a nice little stake she had quickly trebled in three consecutive nights of gambling. She had returned the ten dollars to Ransom with interest, in the same envelope as the photograph.

Then at the beginning of August, the summons that Cartwright had been dreading finally came. An eager-beaver lieutenant instructed Jesse: “General Sherman says to pack all your personal belongings and bring them with you.”

There weren’t many personal belongings to pack. The change of underclothes Sherman had given her, the small wooden cross Jacob had carved for her, letters from Thomas Ransom that she used as bookmarks.

Jesse emerged from the tent still lacing her brogues. “It’s all right, sir,” she told Cartwright. “My fate will be not be decided here on earth.”

“It’s not your fate I’m worried about, goddamn it, it’s
mine.
” He helped to put the strap of her knapsack over her head and across her shoulder lest wounded or sick be found on the short journey to headquarters. He wedged her hat down over her thick red curls, and it might very well have been the morning mists but he looked as if his eyes were watering. “Who’s gonna supply my whiskey and tobacco?” His hands were shaking.

He stood with Jacob as officer and prisoner rode away and observed hopefully, “She doesn’t
look
like a victim going to the firing squad.”

“No, Doctor,” Jacob agreed, “but
you
do.”

Cartwright stood outside Sherman’s office at the Gayoso Hotel kicking his heels. It was a bad morning to be summoned. He’d been up most of the night drinking cheap whiskey in the company of several lively females and he didn’t like being jostled by the usual pack of men in blue and excitable civilians, crowded into the narrow corridor. He lifted bleary eyes to Jesse’s face as she greeted him. It was three weeks since she’d been taken away. That’s how Cartwright thought of it. Taken away. Now he said, “Still washing Sherman’s socks?”

“At least he changes his socks every day.”

There the exchange ended, for Miss Sarah-Anne Taylor was coming down the corridor toward them. Utterly committed and hardworking, this young woman had arrived South from her home in Springfield, Illinois, to teach school to the Negroes living in the community they had built on the riverbank and named “Happy Valley.” Whenever the modest Miss Taylor encountered the bespectacled surgeon, what could only be described as a kind of softening of her features took place, as though her face was melting like a block of ice in the hot midday sun. It was melting right now.

“Dr. Cartwright.”

“Miss Taylor.” Cartwright was always polite, if his usual amused, rueful self.

“So busy here, isn’t it, sir? General Sherman has so
many
visitors.”

“He’s an important man.” Cartwright’s rueful smile spread until it became downright twisted.

“Well, yes, he is, but not as important as you, Doctor.” Miss Taylor laid a gloved hand briefly on the surgeon’s arm. “We must have generals to win our battles for us, but when the smoke has cleared, who is responsible for the wounded? You medical men are the
real
heroes.”

“Why thank you, Miss Taylor.”

Miss Taylor’s lovely face flushed and stayed flushed even after Cartwright had been ushered into Sherman’s office. She looked at Jesse, fanned herself rather too energetically with some papers she was carrying, and rushed away.

No one could have accused the Ohioan of reclining in kingly splendor while his men suffered in canvas shelters. Grant had ruled the city from the recently renovated Hunt-Phelan home on Beale Street, convenient for a man who liked a drink and a game of cards. His predecessors, both Federal
and
Rebel, had directed operations from this same hotel, an ugly brick building pretending to be imitation marble, with those large white columns so beloved of the Southern architect, and situated near the lower part of the city, fronting the river. In fact, the view of the Mississippi from the window was just about the only thing that could distract the Ohioan from his duties.

Right now, his tousled red head could be glimpsed behind piles of papers, letter books, order books, and just about every other kind of book. His shirt was already damp with sweat, an ash-stained vest hung open over his narrow chest, and his dusty frock coat was draped across the back of his chair and trailing on the floor. As usual, the length of satin ribbon that passed as a necktie was halfway to the back of his head. It was barely 9:00
A
.
M
. and the room was blue with cigar smoke. Three orderlies stood beside his desk in a pose of absolute alertness. They dare not be otherwise. No one slept around William T. Sherman. Colonel Hammond was swiftly gathering his papers from the floor while a civilian with an unmistakably disgruntled air was being shown the door by Captain Jackson. Hammond said good morning to Cartwright and left, with the distracted air of a man who had a six-day job and three days in which to do it. Sherman, by some trick of eye or ear that Cartwright could not figure out, managed to speak to all three orderlies, write all three sealed orders, followed by detailed verbal instructions, toss some final sardonic barb at the departing civilian, locate a letter he needed to consult, greet the surgeon, gesture him to a chair, and smoke his cigar, all at the same time.

“That was Dr. Cook, Sanitary Commission.
Civilian.
” He made the word sound like the basest of insults. “Come from the North to carry off all our sick. Protested when I said no. I told him, protest away, my answer will still be the same.” He halted this monologue only to answer a query from Colonel Hammond, whose head appeared and disappeared so quickly Cartwright got dizzy. “I told Cook, you hold me up to the people of Ohio as a monster because I won’t let you carry off our sick.” How did he do that, how did he pick up the thread at precisely the place he had let it drop? “What
do you
say, Dr. Cartwright?”

He would have said much, after all this was his subject, he covered sheets of paper with his thoughts, theories, and experiences, but a lieutenant and two more orderlies interrupted and by the time they’d gone he had lost his train of thought, derailed somewhere between a lost commissary report and a short-lived burst of anger against an article in a Memphis newspaper of which Sherman did not approve.

“Sit down, sir, sit down. You know Dr. Derby, the civilian chief at Overton Hospital.”

“Well…yes…I know of him…yes…I know…of him—” Goddamn it, he was starting to repeat himself. He needed a drink.

“Cook’s requested that I forcibly vacate the Female Academy on Vance Street and allow him the property for another civilian hospital. The Sisters of Mercy have only just advertised for more scholars to join their academy and I could not easily have found it in my heart to insist upon the forcible removal of these pious ladies and their young charges.”

Cartwright narrowed his myopic gaze and stared at the red-bearded man in the ash-stained vest and the crooked tie-bow, as if he were trying to understand something. And he was. Did Sherman actually
care
that those nuns and their prissy little pupils might lose their property? Was it so difficult to accept that this fast-talking, hard-faced old bastard, who always looked slightly mad, might have a small glimmer of humanity buried somewhere inside that pockmarked exterior? His soldiers certainly liked and respected him; his staff was devoted to him. Jesse was devoted to him. Her devotion had been made
very
tangible during Sherman’s bout with malaria.

“Is that why you had me ride over here? To discuss nuns and sanitary inspectors?”

“No, that is not why I had you ride over here.” Sherman’s hoarse voice had lost the conversational tone and was becoming edgy. “Before leaving Pittsburg Landing, Dr. Fitzjohn wrote to the medical director strongly recommending that you take his place as regimental surgeon.”

Cartwright, already halfway to the door, swung around and said, “What?”

“You heard me, sir.”

“You’re joking, right?”

Sherman pushed a form across the desk. “The appointment has been confirmed by the Surgeon-General’s Office at Washington, approved by myself and General Grant. I wanted to tell you personally. Congratulations, Dr. Cartwright, you are now a full surgeon and a major.”

In August, General John Pope led his newly designated Army of Virginia to a defeat in the battle of Second Bull Run. His army had been disbanded and he was banished to Minnesota to put down the Sioux revolt. McClellan now had full command of the eastern armies. The news upset Sherman, bringing back memories of the first Union rout. The faith that he had lately been feeling in his government, the army, and the men that led it was once more melting away.