The South Shall Rise Again, page 1
THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN
MIKE MOSCOE
Copyright Information
Published by KL & MM Books
Copyright © 2022 by Mike Moscoe
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CONTENTS
Untitled
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Thoughts for my Reader
UNTITLED
Surrender? Hell, we just started this business!
1
It was raining . . . again.
It came down in a cold drizzle that never seemed to stop. It was the kind of day, back on the farm, when Jethro would have run off with his best friend, Tristram, the yellow-bellied coward, and hunted something for Ma to make into a nice warm soup. Then he’d have curled up near the fire with the soup warming. Maybe he’d carve a new toy for sis. Maybe he’d help Pa mend a harness.
Jethro could almost smell the soup, the saddle soap, and the leather.
He scowled at the memories.
He wasn’t home with the family. Instead, this miserable spring, he was out in the chilly wet, campaigning with Master Robert and the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Jethro pulled his blanket tighter around his body as he stared into the fire. The damp wood gave little light and less warmth. It did give off a lot of smoke. The squad huddled on the upwind side, squatting on the wet grass, trying to avoid the mud.
“You got anything left in your rucksack?” Caleb asked, himself producing a scant handful of roaster corn to toss in the squad’s cook pot.
With effort, Jethro rummaged in the bag he wore around his neck. It had bread in it a couple of days ago. Once, it had even had half a ham in it. That was back in the wonderful days when they’d been marching through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Days before things went sour at Gettysburg.
It was a mighty small handful of roasted corn that he pulled out tonight.
“That all you got?” Darius asked. Darius was usually hungry, and, maybe because of that, he was the best forager in the squad. But today, all he’d had to toss into the communal pot as it simmered was a bit of crumpled hardtack. He was on scanty rations just like the rest of them.
Jethro pulled his sack from his neck and upended it over the pot.
A few crumbs from last week’s bread floated lightly over the pot. That, and some dirt.
“Get that away,” Basil almost shouted. “You’ll ruin my ambrosia.”
Any other time, Basil would have shouted, maybe even followed it up with a couple of good-hearted blows from his cudgel. Today, he was as exhausted as the rest.
Worse, he’d scraped his cooking hand a couple of weeks back. Like so many small cuts and scrapes the men had, it hadn’t healed.
His ambrosia, food for the gods . . . or the squad, you decide . . . would be lightly stirred and mighty thin.
For a long while, the squad joined Jethro in staring at the smoking fire and saying nothing. They’d marched fifteen miles today. It was a short march by standards of late, but on an empty stomach and in the chill and damp, it had been a long and exhausting day.
Jethro glanced away from the fire, forcing himself to break the trance. He made himself take a good look at the camp.
He wished he hadn’t.
There were painfully few fires tonight. Camped nearest them was a battery of six-pounders. At least they had six-pounders a week ago. Tonight, they were camping as infantrymen, their guns and horses left somewhere behind them. The guns had stuck in the mud up to their hubs, the horses were too spent to pull even an empty limber.
Jethro turned back to the fire.
It was better to get lost staring into it and the sparse cooking pot, than to take the scant measure of what was left of the proud Army of Northern Virginia.
Zebulon sauntered up; they made a space for him by the fire. It was Zebulon, never Zeb. He settled in, warmed his hands for a moment, scowled at how little warmth the fire gave his hands, and asked, “Have you heard the news from headquarters?”
Zebulon liked to hang around headquarters. Sometimes he even learned something.
The squad, as one, shook their heads, but said nothing.
“Bobby Lee has been writing them blue bellies.”
Zebulon liked to carry on as if he was one of those headquarter types. The men in the squad might talk of Uncle Robert, or Master Robert, but they’d never use something as familiar as “Bobby Lee.”
“What’s he writing for?” Basil asked.
“Who’s he writing?” Jethro wanted to know. “Hell, man, I’ve talked to them blue bellies on picket duty. They got nothing to say I want to hear.”
“Well, Bobby Lee is writing Ulysses S. Grant himself,” Zebulon said, telling them something, but not nearly enough. He liked to draw his show out as long as he could.
“You got any food in that rucksack you’re carrying?” Basil asked. If Zebulon was going to ignore the business, the cook was quick to get at what mattered to him and the entire squad.
Zebulon scrounged in his sack and produced a small handful of jerked meat. He grinned as he eyed them all, taking his time before dropping it in the pot.
That Zebulon usually had something good in his sack was the main reason he was Zebulon, not Zeb.
“Where’d you get the good stuff?” Jethro asked, careful like.
“I picked up some extra chow when we all got our last good meal, back at Farmville, what, one, two days ago?”
“Some of us did,” Caleb muttered.
“Some of us just saw the backside of the supply train when it pulled out,” Jethro added.
“Right,” Zebulon said, “you were at the back end of the column, weren’t you?”
Basil stopped further talk along that line by giving the pot a couple of authoritative stirs. Everyone eyed the pot . . . and studiously ignored Zebulon.
He looked about to pop, like a fat sow ready to drop a load of new pork.
“Bobby Lee is talking to Ulysses S. Grant about surrenderin',” Zebulon finally blurted out.
“No!” came in full throated denial from everyone present.
“Yes! He wrote Grant and they’ve set up a meeting for tomorrow.”
“That can’t be right. Uncle Robert would never give in to those damn blue bellies,” Caleb said. “We ain’t whipped . . .not yet.”
Jethro let his gaze wander around the half-empty field where cold and tired men just like them huddled around smoking wet fires and waited for whatever their pot might have in it. Only a couple of days ago, there’d been a whole lot more. More infantry in gray. More artillery, guns, caissons, and horses.
The army was about as scarce as the food in their cook pots.
Still, Jethro shook his head, remembering all those who had died fighting beside him. “We can’t give up, not for all them that fought and died,” he muttered.
“But if our general says to . . .,” Caleb said.
“Not all the generals say we got to give it up,” Zebulon said. “General Porter Alexander, he’s not for giving it through. He says we should slip away and let them yellow belly blue bellies come and get us.”
“Go bushwhacking, like they done in Missouri?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah,” Zebulon said, in an earnest whisper.
“But Missouri's bled as white as Kansas,” Basil said. “I hear tell that the grays still ain’t run off the blue bellies that they ain't kilt or burned out.” He stirred the pot. “It’s a slaughter field they made of the place.”
He put down his cudgel and eyed the squad. “We want to make our homes just as bad?”
“If that’s what it takes to send the blue bellies back north where they belong,” Zebulon said, “then I say we do what has to be done to send them on their way. Besides, back home, who’s gonna do anything again us? Some draft dodger? A yellow deserter? There ain’t enough blue bellies to chase all over Virginia. Not leastwise if there’s sharpshooters like us bushwhacking them from behind every tree.”
The squad looked into the smokey fire. Each of them saw what they could of their future and the future of those they loved.
“I’m hungry,” Caleb said. “You think the Yankees have much grub on their patrols?”
“I’m for finding out,” Zebulon said.
“There’s only six of us,” Jethro said. “Six can’t take on the entire U. S. Army.”
“The captain, he says he’s willing to go out tonight if enough good rifles will go with him. He says the Yankee
“Yeah,” Jethro said with an evil grin. “Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?”
“Iffen he crosses my sights,” Caleb said, “he’s gonna be dead.”
Jethro took the measure of the men around him. Their lieutenant died at Chancellorsville. Their sergeant was buried somewhere near Gettysburg. Their corporal had got a belly full in the trenches before Petersburg and died of a fever. Jethro was the one the captain gave the orders to. It was Jethro who reported to him when they were done.
“Basil, you keep stirring that soup," he said. I’ll go see the captain.”
2
Captain Allgood had a tent for his headquarters before the trenches of Petersburg. There, they’d all had some kind of shack to live in through the dismal winter. Now, he had nothing but a smokey fire for his staff.
Jethro joined a half-dozen men. Most wore no rank, but all of them had earned their stripes in the hard knocks of three years campaigning. Silently, they hunkered down and just as silently, they polled each other.
“We ain’t whipped,” Randolph Makin finally said. Jethro grunted his assent to that.
The captain met each one of them, eye to eye, then nodded.
“If Master Robert says we should lay down our arms, it may go hard on those that don’t,” the captain told them. He chopped off each word as if he wielded a sharp knife.
“They got to catch us first,” Nathaniel Barber said. Then added, “And we’re mighty good at not being seen when we don’t want to be seen. We know the Okefenokee like it was the back of our hand.”
Again, the men around Jethro grunted their assent.
The captain stared into the fire. “We’ll need to capture horses. Every horse in camp is just about done in. No use in us takin’ one away from the poor sod who owns it. No, we’ll need to capture some good Union mounts.”
He thought for a moment, then added, “And some good Union grub.”
That got a grunt of approval.
The captain reached out his right hand, palm up. As one, they rested their own stacked his right hand on his, palm down.
“Tell your men to eat what they can. In thirty minutes, those that are coming with us will meet by that tall oak. The one a few paces out from the rest of the woods. It’s going to be a hard night and I won’t have you questioning any man who doesn’t want to come with us.”
With a grunt, they raised their hands, and Jethro went to tell the men they had their marching orders.
3
That night, Jethro led what was left of his squad out of camp. Their hunger was hardly slacked by the thin lukewarm soup they’d gulped down. Still, not one held back. They weren’t the only ones slipping out of the sparsely occupied camp. Around the field, he spotted five or six other groups of men skulking into the woods. Companies they might call themselves but they were sadly reduced in size.
No pickets challenged them. There were no pickets to be seen.
It was inky black that night. If there was a moon, the clouds gave it scant chance to shine its light. Still, these troops knew the woods, and they had a good idea where a trail was that would lead them south.
The captain soon found the muddy track. The forty men who now made up the proud Company G strung themselves out along the trail. They stumbled through the night, more sleepwalking than marching. Every half hour or so, the captain would trade off the two lead scouts with anyone who looked fresh enough to stay awake and alert. He charged the scouts with keeping a sharp eye on what they were walking into.
Jethro had the last watch. He struggled to see into that kind of deep dark that only comes a bit before the first light of dawn. From the feel of the mist that swirled around him, there would be little light when the sun did come up.
He smelled the blue bellies first. He sent Caleb back down the line to the captain and creeped ahead cautiously. The whinny of a horse and the rattling of a horse picket line told him he was close, even as somewhere up ahead a cook added wood to the fire. Smoke and the delicious smell of beans and bacon told him it had to be a well-fed Yankee camp.
Now, if it just wasn’t too big of a camp.
He spotted a picket. He couldn’t have been much more than a boy. He was on his feet, but his chin rested on his breast. If the kid wasn’t asleep, he was sure doing a good job of imitating it.
Captain Allgood came up beside Jethro with Caleb and two of the best hunters in the company. Wordlessly, Jethro pointed out the standing picket. On the ground beside a tree, the picket’s fellow night guard was asleep, rolled up in his blanket.
The captain scowled at the sloppy field craft and motioned to the two hunters. They pulled out big, wicked knives, so sharp they gleamed even in the dark of this night. Silently, they glided forward.
The standing picket came awake only after the knife cut his throat. His scream died with him. The sleeper in the bedroll awoke only in hell.
The captain motioned the company forward, knives and bayonets in hand.
More sleepers died in their bedrolls. The cook was telling stories to his helper fit to scare the dead. Between the talk and the chow, they were so intent on their own world that they failed to notice what was happening behind their backs.
Once again, the hunters glided up behind them. Once again, men tried to scream their last alarm through a slit throat. With them down, the company spread out quickly to finish what they’d begun.
The captain himself entered the officer’s tent. He emerged a few moments later, his sword dripping gore.
“We have the camp,” the captain said, the first words spoken that night. “See to the mounts. Jethro, check for pickets on the other side of camp. Cooks, let’s get some grub for the troops.”
Jethro and Caleb headed up the trail, passing from the tiny dale that had provided space for this hasty camp and into the trees.
They spotted him before he spotted them. He died before he knew they were there.
A mineé ball whizzed by Jethro’s ear, close enough for him to feel the breeze, a not unfamiliar experience during these last three years.
Jethro spotted where the fire came from – and the man running away into the woods.
No, two men were running.
He and Caleb raised their muskets to fire, but the two figures disappeared into the mist, like ghosts fleeing the gates of Hades.
“Damn,” Caleb muttered.
“We best go tell the captain we may have company before too long.”
Captain Allgood did not seem surprised. “We had more luck than a man has any right to, tonight. Nathaniel, get the horses saddled. Randolph, see that the mules are loaded up. Everyone, if you want to trade in your bit of rag for one of these blankets, grab them fast. Cooks, as soon as we’re ready to ride, deal out the chow, cooked or raw. We ride in fifteen minutes.”
Nathaniel stooped to roll a still bleeding Yankee out of his bedroll. “Nice boots he got there,” he said. “They look to be about my size, too.”
Most of the men’s boots were more twine and newspaper than leather. In a moment, the rest of the company was pulling boots off and tossing them around to get a better fit.
“Iffen we going to be bushwhackers, is there any reason we can’t bushwhack them blue bellies in a warm blue suit?” Randolph asked.
The captain shrugged. In a moment the men were stripping out of their rags and pulling on warm, blue wool uniforms. The captain disappeared into the officer’s tent and returned in a few minutes in a handsome Yankee captain’s rig.
“Let’s mount up,” he ordered
The men grabbed what beans and bacon they could wrap in some sliced bread, and quickly obeyed his order.
Five minutes later, with everyone mounted on a fat Yankee horse, they rode out. Behind them the left the naked bodies of the dead cavalry men for the Yankees to find and bury as they saw fit.
