Shouting officers in impossibly clean uniforms did their best to maintain order as the troops disembarked at the wooden shed which served as the Virginia Central depot. They pointed northwest up Broad Street: “Go on, go on! No, not you, sir! Wait’ your turn, if you please. Now go!”
“Come on, boys,” Captain Lewis yelled. “Just like we were back at old Camp Mangum—let’s show these Richmond ladies how we can march.” There was a stratagem nicely calculated to get the best from the Castalia Invincibles, Caudell thought—but then, Lewis had always had that knack.
Bands blared as the assembled soldiers marched up Broad Street, blasting out tunes like “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp! The Boys Are Marching.” The sidewalks were packed with people wearing their holiday best, ladies in hoop skirts and bonnets and lace, men with stovepipe hats that interfered with the view of those behind them. Some waved small flags: the Stainless Banner, the earlier Stars and Bars, and Confederate battle flags of every description. Red, white, and blue bunting decorated every building, as did garlands of bright summer flowers.
The railroad tracks that ran down the center of Broad Street made Caudell careful about where he put his feet; the last thing he wanted was to stumble in front of such an enormous audience. A man who fell here might not live it down for the rest of his life, not with so many witnesses from his own county to keep bringing it up and reminding him about it.
Because he worried more about his marching than where he was, Caudell hardly looked up for the first several blocks of the grand review. When he did, the 47th North Carolina was tramping past the First African Baptist Church, at the northeast corner of Broad and College. The large, sprawling building had a slate roof, no spire, and a low iron fence and gate all around it.
Despite the church’s name, Caudell saw no Africans in front of it. The thought made him pay more attention to the crowd. Richmond had a good-sized Negro population, most slave, a few free, but he spied hardly any colored faces. A few grinning pickaninnies gaped at the parade; that was all. The black folk of Richmond, he suspected, would sooner have come out for a parade of blue coats through their city’s streets.
Across the street from the African Baptist Church was the Old Monumental Church, a two-story building in the classic style, surmounted by a low dome and fenced with stone below and iron bars above. Streamers ran from tree to tree in front of the fence; small boys perched in the trees and cheered the passing soldiers. Caudell reached up to wave his hat to them, then jerked down his hand, feeling foolish—he still hadn’t replaced that old felt he’d lost in the Wilderness.
Capitol Square was just a short block south of Broad Street, but the bulk first of the Powhatan Hotel and then of Richmond’s city hall kept Caudell from seeing as much of it as he would have liked. Across the street from the hotel stood the almost equally massive Greek Revival pile of the First Baptist Church.
“Eyes—left!” Captain Lewis said. Caudell’s head twisted as if on clockwork. Just past the city hall—a building as severely Hellenic as the church—was a reviewing stand. On it stood President Davis, tall and supremely erect. Beside him, in a coat much too large for his slim frame, was his Vice President, Alexander Stephens. Stephens, hardly bigger than a boy of fourteen, looked pale and unhealthy, and seemed to be holding himself upright by main force of will.
Other civilian dignitaries—congressmen, judges, Cabinet members, what have you—crowded the reviewing stand, but Caudell had eyes only for two gray suits in the midst of the black. Just below Jefferson Davis stood General Lee, his hat off in salute to the soldiers marching past. Another, older man in fancy uniform, a man with a high forehead, rather foxy features, side whiskers, and an elegant imperial of mixed brown and gray, was a couple of people away from Lee.
“That’s Joe Johnston,” Caudell exclaimed, pointing.
“By God, you’re right,” Rufus Daniel said. “Is the Army of Tennessee here, too, then?”
“Damned if I know,” Caudell answered. “There was so much confusion at the train station that the Army of the Potomac might be marching along behind us, and we’d never know it.”
All he could see of the parade was the couple of companies ahead of the Castalia Invincibles and, twisting his neck, the company right behind.
Rufus Daniel barked out a couple of syllables of laughter. “Reckon we’d find out right quick if there was bluebellies back there.” Just for a moment, his left hand slid to the sling of his AK-47. Caudell grinned and nodded. He was home from Washington City; the only Federal soldiers to have reached Richmond arrived as prisoners of war.
The 47th North Carolina passed the reviewing stand and the Broad Street Methodist Church with its immensely tall spire. On down Broad Street they marched. As Captain Lewis had asked of them, they did the memory of their Camp Mangum days proud, keeping their alignment and distance from one another with an ease that bespoke their two years of practice in the field. Their step was smooth and elastic, the swinging of their arms as steady as the beat of a pendulum.
A middle-aged woman threw a bunch of purple daisies. Caudell caught it out of the air. If he’d had a hat, he would have put it in the band; Dempsey Eure wore bright buttercups along with his turkey feather. Since he was bareheaded, Caudell reached over his shoulder and stuck the stems into the barrel of his rifle. The woman clapped her hands.
Thus ornamented, Caudell made his way past the depot of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad and, a block farther on, the new and impressive Richmond Theater, with its pilasters reaching from the second floor almost to the top of the building. The railroad tracks continued down the middle of the street for close to another twenty blocks before they swung north toward the destinations the train line’s name promised.
The crowds began to thin out by the time the tracks left Broad Street: that was at the very edge of town. Provost marshals waved the men on. “Out to Camp Lee!” they shouted, pointing north and west. Caudell marched with a fresh wilclass="underline" where better to end the grand review than a camp named for the South’s grandest soldier?
The broad green expanse of Camp Lee lay about a mile beyond the point where Richmond’s buildings stopped. Another tall reviewing stand, its boards still white and new, stood at the western edge of the lawn. A big Confederate flag on an even taller pole flew beside it. In front of it were other banners mostly of red, white, and blue: captured Federal battle flags. Caudell puffed up with pride when he saw how many there were.
“Hill’s corps, Heth’s division?” a provost marshal said. “Y’all go this way.” Along with the other units in Henry Heth’s division, the 47th North Carolina went this way. Caudell found himself off to the left of the reviewing stand, but close enough to the front that he might be able to hear at least some of what a speaker on that stand had to say.
Before any speaker spoke, though, the grounds had to fill. Turning his head this way and that, Caudell saw the whole Army of Northern Virginia arrayed to the left of the reviewing stand, Hill’s corps, Ewell’s, and Longstreet’s, too. Then a provost marshal bellowed, “Bishop Polk’s corps? Over here.” Sure enough, the Army of Tennessee had also come to Richmond to join the review.