The election for governor was coming in August, and the Raleigh Standard newspaper was endorsing my candidacy-if I should choose to run. Why, I’d have run for the governorship of purgatory, if the alternative was being outranked by the likes of General Branch and suffering the whims of pettifogging bureaucrats. I had one ace in my hand in this venture: my opponent was not in the military, and soldiers could vote.
The election was not until August, though, and meanwhile I had to soldier on as colonel of the 26th North Carolina, and try to remember that the enemy was the Union army, and not those graven fools in the government back home.
June found me back in Virginia, to join my regiment to Ransom’s Brigade for the Seven Days Battle. The Union forces, under the command of General George B. McClellan, had landed on the Virginia peninsula, with the intention of advancing west and taking Richmond. When you are well below the exalted rank of general, you have very little idea what is going on in the campaign, even if you are in the forefront of the fighting. Seen up close, war is all noise and smoke, shouting men, and belching cannons, and through it all the stench of blood and gunpowder. There may have been some grand design conceived by General Lee and his advisors, but it wasn’t apparent to those of us in the thick of it. Orders failed to reach the commanders. Reinforcements did not arrive. The fighting seemed sporadic and uncoordinated.
The War was prolonged mainly by the fact that General McClellan was just as bewildered as the rest of us. He didn’t seem to know that his army outnumbered the Confederate forces two to one. He didn’t realize that he was closer to Richmond than the defending army was. And he hadn’t grasped the fact that he was winning.
Instead of pushing on to Richmond and to victory, he pulled his troops back to the James River, planning to load them back on the ships they came in and sail away to safety. We should have given him a parade, but instead we chased him on his way, and at the last piece of high ground before the river, he decided to stand and make a fight of it-at a place called Malvern Hill.
He lined up his artillery on the top of that hill, and he stationed his infantry forces at the ready to engage us in the intervals between bursts of cannon fire.
Our orders were to take that hill.
If I had occasion to meet James Melton, we would not slap each other on the back and reminisce about Malvern Hill. It had none of the golden glory that Shakespeare attributed to Agincourt. It had all the filth and squalor of a hog-killing.
Our orders were to charge that hill and take out McClellan’s cannons. To that end, soldiers would charge across the open field, trying to ascend the slope, and a whistling shell would spiral down and blow them to pieces as they ran.
If I am remembered at all for my part in that sorry spectacle, it is for a jest I made in hopes of boosting the morale of my poor beleaguered men. Once when we were pinned down in a hail of bullets, a startled rabbit jumped out of the nearby underbrush and streaked across the field. Seeing this, I shouted, “Run, you sorry rabbit! If I wasn’t the governor of North Carolina, I’d run, too!”
Well, I was two months shy of getting elected, but at least I stood my ground at Malvern Hill, and when the time came to cast the ballots, the troops remembered me favorably, so that I won the election by a margin of two to one.
In September I headed back to North Carolina on furlough, for I would take the oath of office before a judge in mid-September. The 26th North Carolina fought on without me, at Antietam Creek in western Maryland, where they say the very air turned red from all the blood shed in that terrible battle. By the end of the fighting, the dead lay stacked like cordwood, a dozen feet deep in the roadbed. General Lee lost a quarter of his army in that one battle, and with it all hope of foreign alliances that might have equipped us to withstand the onslaught of the Union forces.
I was gone from the army for good before Antietam, ensconced in the Governor’s Palace in Raleigh, where the battles were fought with forms, and requisitions, and letters couched in diplomatic insolence.
But James Melton had no such escape. He would have staggered on in rags and tattered boots, living on hardtack and homesickness, until the bitter end-which came for him in a Union prison camp many miles from home.
No, I would not reminisce about the War with this veteran of the 26th North Carolina. There was nothing either of us wanted to remember.
PAULINE FOSTER
March 1866
March finally wore out, and the fields got green again, but all that meant to me was that I’d be working in the fields as well as doing all the household chores. It made it easier to walk the mile or so to a neighbor’s place to visit a spell, when I wasn’t too tired of an evening to manage it. My fever never did come back, though, and that rash I’d had when I came here had faded away altogether, so I began to think that Dr. Carter’s bluestone cure had done its work. He said I had to keep going to see him, though. Some ailments, he said, were like flies in winter-just because you didn’t see any around didn’t mean they were gone for good.
“I don’t think you are well, Pauline,” he told me, when he gave me my latest dose of medicine. “And I think you might still be able to pass this disease to someone else if you were intimate with him.”
“Oh, I’ll be careful,” I told him. I meant I’d take care in deciding who it was I wanted to infect. Sometimes I felt like that angel with the flaming sword that drove Adam and Eve out of Eden: I had a God-sent weapon that would bring death to ever who I chose.
“We have not seen so much of Tom Dula lately,” I said to Ann one afternoon. I had spent all day planting corn in the field with James Melton, and when I got in, stiff-backed and bone-weary, Ann had told me to wash her bed sheets before I started on supper. I couldn’t refuse for fear of losing my situation, but I figured I owed her a little pain in return, so while I was making biscuits to go with the stew, I made that remark about Tom, as innocent I could make it sound, knowing it would be salt in her wound, and glad of it.
Ann stiffened for a moment, but then she made her voice light, and she said, “Well, it’s planting time. Everybody around here has plenty to do right now.”
I snickered. “Reckon he’s planting something, all right. Over at Wilson Foster’s.”
Ann slapped me hard, leaving a white handprint on my cheek from the flour. I just smiled at her and went back to kneading the biscuit dough. She wiped her hands on her skirt, but she just kept standing there. Her nose got red, and I saw one solitary tear leak out of the corner of her eye and slide down her cheek.
Finally she said, “He don’t care nothing about Laura Foster.”
“Well, in case his mama ever dies, I reckon he’ll need somebody to look after him. He might be giving some thought to that. Besides, a marriage seldom comes about on account of what a man wants. If I was you, Ann, I’d be studying about what Laura wants.”
Ann picked up a ball of dough and began to roll it around in her hand. Then she squashed it flat on the flour cloth and pressed down hard with her palm. “It ain’t like he has anything to offer anybody,” she said.
“I couldn’t say,” I said, taking care to keep my voice light and indifferent. “But her mother is dead, leaving a passel of children and Wilson Foster himself needing to be looked after. No love lost between Laura and her father, from what I hear. Now if it was me, I reckon I’d take just about any opportunity to get shut of all those young’uns and an ornery father who used me as a house servant. Did you not find yourself in that self-same situation when you were fifteen?”