Signs: an excerpt from Bloody Promenade by Stephen Cushman

Signs

by Stephen Cushman

an excerpt from Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle

MAPS
The Theater of War in
Central Virginia
The Wilderness and Environs
Close-up: South of the Rapidan
Longstreet's Approach:
May 6, 1864

At the last light before home, waiting for a left-turn arrow, I have a minute or two to lift my eyes to the hills above the shopping center on my right, above signs for the bank and burger place, car wash and insurance agency, and to find, if the leaves have fallen, the white dome of Monticello, which from this angle looks nothing like the back of a nickel. When the turn arrow shines, homebound traffic makes the sharp left north, jockeying from two lanes down to one, and soon a small green sign, which identifies Route 20 as "The Constitution Route," shoots by. It's called the Constitution Route because just south of Orange, Virginia, it runs past James Madison's Montpelier. Next, in quick succession, come the no-littering and speed-limit signs, both of which I obey, and after them the large green mileage sign I can't pass without feeling spooked. The white letters of its bottom line read, "Wilderness 51."

Thursday 5th. A and O rode down to the F[ederal] pickets. hear musketry and see clouds of smoke going up from the artilery. There is skirmishing going on this afternoon; now about 1 oclock.

In the spring of 1864, from May 4 through May 22, Katherine Couse wrote a twelve-page letter to some friends who have not been identified. She wrote the letter in diary form, inserting the dates to help her friends follow the chronology of what we now call the Battles of the Wilderness (May 5-6) and Spotsylvania (May 8-21). Originally from New Jersey, Katherine moved with her family to Laurel Hill, Spotsylvania County, Virginia, before the war. Although we don't know for sure where her house stood, her letter mentions both "Alsops" and "the Court-House road," references that locate Katherine near the area that the National Park Service identifies as the site of the "Laurel Hill Engagement," where the Battle of Spotsylvania opened on May 8. Wherever the house stood in the Laurel Hill area, which lies about five or six miles southeast of the tactically crucial unfinished railroad cut that runs through the Wilderness, two of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War erupted around Katherine's house.

later between 3 and 4 oclock
sharp skirmishing on the Court-House road. we heard the yells and the pop and the crack of musketry made me feel faint, it continued some time Confed soldiers around. this eve three Fed soldiers came galloping up. we went out to see them. shook hands with the officer and told him we were glad to see them. smiled and said he was glad they had some friends here, charming weather.

Helpful people in the State Climatology Office found the meteorological journal of the observatory in Washington for May 5 and 6, 1864, and the records show that by the time Katherine was chatting with the Federal officer, a lovely spring day had passed in northern and central Virginia, moving from a low in the forties toward a high in the seventies, with light winds from the northwest keeping the early morning clear before they shifted to the south or southeast and blew in a little haze. Mr. Eastman, the man who made the observations, or at least the one who signed them, noted at the bottom of the page, "A few faint shooting stars about midnight."

Friday, May 6th, 1864. heard the cannon the first thing. they jar the house continually. lovely morning. The whole outdoors alive with voices of soldiers. hear waggons and cannon moving, rumbling. the country is now all excitement. I feel so nervous. Oh! so anxious.

One day this past summer a sonic boom broke over Charlottesville, rattling the windows and scaring everyone in the house to death. If one sonic boom several miles away can send the heart rate soaring, what would two days of continuous cannon fire in the immediate neighborhood do? Histories of the Battle of the Wilderness tend to repeat the accepted wisdom that Lee wanted to force Grant to fight in the thick woods in order to offset the Northern numerical advantage and to keep him from enjoying the benefits of his superior artillery force. One doesn't need a degree from West Point to understand that cannons can't do their best (or worst) firing from low-lying swamps and thickets into more low-lying swamps and thickets. At least with so-called light artillery, cannoneers prefer to fire from elevated positions that look down on clear fields, as they did at Malvern Hill in 1862 or on the third day of Gettysburg in 1863. For this reason, Lee's thinking makes perfect sense and probably saved the Army of Northern Virginia many casualties it could hardly afford. But as Katherine's letter makes clear, the Battle of the Wilderness still included more than enough artillery fire to fray a civilian's nerves.

A rough Federal scouting party came up and acted very badly this morning. They took nearly all our little corn, and a good many fowls--all remonstrance was vain. The crash of musketry is terrific pop pop pop. The cannon shake the very foundations of the house. Two southern soldiers just now came, first one side then the other. now we hear the shells whistling at a terrific rate Oh, it makes me so weak so generally wretched. heard the southern bugles, we are surrounded--yankees on one side southern soldiers on the other pickets and vidette on all sides Confeds are coming up all the time. very warm. They tell us they have taken 3 thousand yankee prisoners. the Court House road is alive with yelling soldiers hear skirmishing at intervals all day up there, charging soldiers this eve late yelling no firing.

Katherine's Northern sympathies don't protect her from the treatment received by many other Southern civilians at the hands of the Federals and a few Northern ones at the hands of Confederates. Throughout Civil War writing, in letters, diaries, memoirs, histories, novels, short stories, and poems, the scene of Federal troops taking food, supplies, and booty from Southern civilians recurs. Union plundering provides Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) with one of its more dramatic moments, for example. Like Mitchell, other Southern women writers have built fictions around pillaging scenes, among them Alberta Pierson Hannum in "Turkey Hunt" (1937), which also appeared in The Best Short Stories of 1938, and Caroline Gordon in "Hear the Nightingale Sing" (1945). Even Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895), written by a northern male and otherwise focused exclusively on Henry Fleming's experience of combat, depicts the intrusion of military need or greed upon the domestic sphere when in a memorable scene a member of Fleming's New York regiment badly underestimates the determination of a young Virginia girl to keep the horse he tries to steal from her, as his comrades cheer for the girl and make fun of him. More recently, Robby Henson's powerful film Pharaoh's Army (1996) and Charles Frazier's best-selling novel Cold Mountain (1997) have dramatized Yankee foraging. But the irony in the case of Katherine Couse, a stranger in a strange land whose food is stolen by her former compatriots, adds unusual complexity to the familiar scene.

In fact, in the turbulence of the fighting, what side she favors loses all significance, as both sides swirl around a house that suddenly finds itself, on the warm afternoon of May 6, in the unmediated presence of what Crane called "the red animal" and "the blood-swollen god." In these circumstances, partisanship dissolves, and civilian nerves have all they can do to hold on.

there has been terrible fighting going on in the Court House road since 3 oclock it sounds almost at the house, it is soul sickening to listen to the continual crack of small arms, then the loud resounding cannon, shell whizzing balls whistling, soldiers yelling and hollowing as they rush on Oh! God human beings killing each other. this wicked war will it never come to an end.

Last fall I went to a college football game with my friend Mack. The stadium holds forty-four thousand, and when it's full it helps me imagine things I find hard to imagine. Forty-four thousand would be about the size of two army corps during the Civil War. Lee brought to the Wilderness slightly fewer than one and a half times this many people, Grant a little more than two and a half times this many. After two days in the Wilderness, more than half of these people would have been killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Way more than half. Say everybody on my side of the stadium and behind both end zones. That man there. The lady with the red scarf. This boy beside me. By the end of May 1864, after Spotsylvania and North Anna, Grant alone had lost nearly enough men to fill this place. When they complete the planned addition to the stadium, I'll have to start thinking about June, beginning with Cold Harbor. Before the game, as we were standing in the parking lot, somebody close by set off a volley of loud fireworks. When I opened my eyes, Mack had his hand pressed to his chest, looking a little shaky. Mack was Eighty-second Airborne in Vietnam.

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen

When I look up the Wilderness in James Robertson's Civil War Sites in Virginia: A Tour Guide (1982), it tells me that in 1864, May 5 and 6 "saw 182,000 men viciously fighting in woods often set afire by bullets" in a struggle that "produced 26,000 casualties and was little more than a momentary check to Grant's advance." The guide also tells me, "Regrettably, only pieces of the Wilderness battlefield survive today." Sifting through the surviving pieces of the Battle of the Wilderness isn't easy, especially for an outsider with no formal training in history and nothing but an urge to know something of what the Civil War was like before it became history. The pieces to sift include all kinds of materials, some of them words, some of them pictures, and some of them moments in day-to-day life in the United States now.

But Robertson's Tour Guide doesn't tell me that Thursday, May 5, 1864, was Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter on which, according to the first chapter of Acts, Jesus "was taken up, and a cloud received him" out of the apostles' sight. In fact, nothing I've read ever mentions that on May 5 the devout Lee, who had camped the night before near Mrs. Rhodes's house at New Verdiersville, would have ridden into the Wilderness having read the collect above, as would have many others on both sides. I've taken the collect from an edition of the Book of Common Prayer published in New York in 1846, the same year Lee began using the Philadelphia edition that he read until 1864, when he exchanged it because its type was too small for him to read. According to Douglas Southall Freeman, the most heavily worn page in the book, which Lee marked with a strip of paper, contains the Psalter for Day 30, which begins with Psalm 144: "Blessed be the Lord my strength: who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight." For Ascension Day, the Psalter reading combines slightly modified excerpts from Psalms 24 and 47, including this verse from the former:

Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty; even the Lord mighty in battle.

and this from the latter

clap your hands together, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.

New Verdiersville is too small to appear on any green sign, and there is now a beauty salon near the spot where Lee camped, but it's also on the Constitution Route, a little more than ten miles beyond Orange, right where county road 621, the old Orange Plank Road, diverges from Route 20, the old Orange Turnpike, and makes its own way into the Wilderness, the way Lee took with A. P. Hill's Third Corps, his mind's ear perhaps hearing in the solemn opening of the collect, Grant, we beseech thee, the faint trace of an echo, Grant, Grant.

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/cushman_excerpt.html

Revised 4/27/99

		Signs
		by Stephen Cushman
		an excerpt from Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle
MAPS The Theater of War in Central Virginia The Wilderness and Environs Close-up: South of the Rapidan Longstreet's Approach: May 6, 1864		At the last light before home, waiting for a left-turn arrow, I have a minute or two to lift my eyes to the hills above the shopping center on my right, above signs for the bank and burger place, car wash and insurance agency, and to find, if the leaves have fallen, the white dome of Monticello, which from this angle looks nothing like the back of a nickel. When the turn arrow shines, homebound traffic makes the sharp left north, jockeying from two lanes down to one, and soon a small green sign, which identifies Route 20 as "The Constitution Route," shoots by. It's called the Constitution Route because just south of Orange, Virginia, it runs past James Madison's Montpelier. Next, in quick succession, come the no-littering and speed-limit signs, both of which I obey, and after them the large green mileage sign I can't pass without feeling spooked. The white letters of its bottom line read, "Wilderness 51." Thursday 5th. A and O rode down to the F[ederal] pickets. hear musketry and see clouds of smoke going up from the artilery. There is skirmishing going on this afternoon; now about 1 oclock. In the spring of 1864, from May 4 through May 22, Katherine Couse wrote a twelve-page letter to some friends who have not been identified. She wrote the letter in diary form, inserting the dates to help her friends follow the chronology of what we now call the Battles of the Wilderness (May 5-6) and Spotsylvania (May 8-21). Originally from New Jersey, Katherine moved with her family to Laurel Hill, Spotsylvania County, Virginia, before the war. Although we don't know for sure where her house stood, her letter mentions both "Alsops" and "the Court-House road," references that locate Katherine near the area that the National Park Service identifies as the site of the "Laurel Hill Engagement," where the Battle of Spotsylvania opened on May 8. Wherever the house stood in the Laurel Hill area, which lies about five or six miles southeast of the tactically crucial unfinished railroad cut that runs through the Wilderness, two of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War erupted around Katherine's house. later between 3 and 4 oclock sharp skirmishing on the Court-House road. we heard the yells and the pop and the crack of musketry made me feel faint, it continued some time Confed soldiers around. this eve three Fed soldiers came galloping up. we went out to see them. shook hands with the officer and told him we were glad to see them. smiled and said he was glad they had some friends here, charming weather. Helpful people in the State Climatology Office found the meteorological journal of the observatory in Washington for May 5 and 6, 1864, and the records show that by the time Katherine was chatting with the Federal officer, a lovely spring day had passed in northern and central Virginia, moving from a low in the forties toward a high in the seventies, with light winds from the northwest keeping the early morning clear before they shifted to the south or southeast and blew in a little haze. Mr. Eastman, the man who made the observations, or at least the one who signed them, noted at the bottom of the page, "A few faint shooting stars about midnight." Friday, May 6th, 1864. heard the cannon the first thing. they jar the house continually. lovely morning. The whole outdoors alive with voices of soldiers. hear waggons and cannon moving, rumbling. the country is now all excitement. I feel so nervous. Oh! so anxious. One day this past summer a sonic boom broke over Charlottesville, rattling the windows and scaring everyone in the house to death. If one sonic boom several miles away can send the heart rate soaring, what would two days of continuous cannon fire in the immediate neighborhood do? Histories of the Battle of the Wilderness tend to repeat the accepted wisdom that Lee wanted to force Grant to fight in the thick woods in order to offset the Northern numerical advantage and to keep him from enjoying the benefits of his superior artillery force. One doesn't need a degree from West Point to understand that cannons can't do their best (or worst) firing from low-lying swamps and thickets into more low-lying swamps and thickets. At least with so-called light artillery, cannoneers prefer to fire from elevated positions that look down on clear fields, as they did at Malvern Hill in 1862 or on the third day of Gettysburg in 1863. For this reason, Lee's thinking makes perfect sense and probably saved the Army of Northern Virginia many casualties it could hardly afford. But as Katherine's letter makes clear, the Battle of the Wilderness still included more than enough artillery fire to fray a civilian's nerves. A rough Federal scouting party came up and acted very badly this morning. They took nearly all our little corn, and a good many fowls--all remonstrance was vain. The crash of musketry is terrific pop pop pop. The cannon shake the very foundations of the house. Two southern soldiers just now came, first one side then the other. now we hear the shells whistling at a terrific rate Oh, it makes me so weak so generally wretched. heard the southern bugles, we are surrounded--yankees on one side southern soldiers on the other pickets and vidette on all sides Confeds are coming up all the time. very warm. They tell us they have taken 3 thousand yankee prisoners. the Court House road is alive with yelling soldiers hear skirmishing at intervals all day up there, charging soldiers this eve late yelling no firing. Katherine's Northern sympathies don't protect her from the treatment received by many other Southern civilians at the hands of the Federals and a few Northern ones at the hands of Confederates. Throughout Civil War writing, in letters, diaries, memoirs, histories, novels, short stories, and poems, the scene of Federal troops taking food, supplies, and booty from Southern civilians recurs. Union plundering provides Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) with one of its more dramatic moments, for example. Like Mitchell, other Southern women writers have built fictions around pillaging scenes, among them Alberta Pierson Hannum in "Turkey Hunt" (1937), which also appeared in The Best Short Stories of 1938, and Caroline Gordon in "Hear the Nightingale Sing" (1945). Even Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895), written by a northern male and otherwise focused exclusively on Henry Fleming's experience of combat, depicts the intrusion of military need or greed upon the domestic sphere when in a memorable scene a member of Fleming's New York regiment badly underestimates the determination of a young Virginia girl to keep the horse he tries to steal from her, as his comrades cheer for the girl and make fun of him. More recently, Robby Henson's powerful film Pharaoh's Army (1996) and Charles Frazier's best-selling novel Cold Mountain (1997) have dramatized Yankee foraging. But the irony in the case of Katherine Couse, a stranger in a strange land whose food is stolen by her former compatriots, adds unusual complexity to the familiar scene. In fact, in the turbulence of the fighting, what side she favors loses all significance, as both sides swirl around a house that suddenly finds itself, on the warm afternoon of May 6, in the unmediated presence of what Crane called "the red animal" and "the blood-swollen god." In these circumstances, partisanship dissolves, and civilian nerves have all they can do to hold on. there has been terrible fighting going on in the Court House road since 3 oclock it sounds almost at the house, it is soul sickening to listen to the continual crack of small arms, then the loud resounding cannon, shell whizzing balls whistling, soldiers yelling and hollowing as they rush on Oh! God human beings killing each other. this wicked war will it never come to an end. Last fall I went to a college football game with my friend Mack. The stadium holds forty-four thousand, and when it's full it helps me imagine things I find hard to imagine. Forty-four thousand would be about the size of two army corps during the Civil War. Lee brought to the Wilderness slightly fewer than one and a half times this many people, Grant a little more than two and a half times this many. After two days in the Wilderness, more than half of these people would have been killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Way more than half. Say everybody on my side of the stadium and behind both end zones. That man there. The lady with the red scarf. This boy beside me. By the end of May 1864, after Spotsylvania and North Anna, Grant alone had lost nearly enough men to fill this place. When they complete the planned addition to the stadium, I'll have to start thinking about June, beginning with Cold Harbor. Before the game, as we were standing in the parking lot, somebody close by set off a volley of loud fireworks. When I opened my eyes, Mack had his hand pressed to his chest, looking a little shaky. Mack was Eighty-second Airborne in Vietnam. Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen When I look up the Wilderness in James Robertson's Civil War Sites in Virginia: A Tour Guide (1982), it tells me that in 1864, May 5 and 6 "saw 182,000 men viciously fighting in woods often set afire by bullets" in a struggle that "produced 26,000 casualties and was little more than a momentary check to Grant's advance." The guide also tells me, "Regrettably, only pieces of the Wilderness battlefield survive today." Sifting through the surviving pieces of the Battle of the Wilderness isn't easy, especially for an outsider with no formal training in history and nothing but an urge to know something of what the Civil War was like before it became history. The pieces to sift include all kinds of materials, some of them words, some of them pictures, and some of them moments in day-to-day life in the United States now. But Robertson's Tour Guide doesn't tell me that Thursday, May 5, 1864, was Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter on which, according to the first chapter of Acts, Jesus "was taken up, and a cloud received him" out of the apostles' sight. In fact, nothing I've read ever mentions that on May 5 the devout Lee, who had camped the night before near Mrs. Rhodes's house at New Verdiersville, would have ridden into the Wilderness having read the collect above, as would have many others on both sides. I've taken the collect from an edition of the Book of Common Prayer published in New York in 1846, the same year Lee began using the Philadelphia edition that he read until 1864, when he exchanged it because its type was too small for him to read. According to Douglas Southall Freeman, the most heavily worn page in the book, which Lee marked with a strip of paper, contains the Psalter for Day 30, which begins with Psalm 144: "Blessed be the Lord my strength: who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight." For Ascension Day, the Psalter reading combines slightly modified excerpts from Psalms 24 and 47, including this verse from the former: Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty; even the Lord mighty in battle. and this from the latter clap your hands together, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph. New Verdiersville is too small to appear on any green sign, and there is now a beauty salon near the spot where Lee camped, but it's also on the Constitution Route, a little more than ten miles beyond Orange, right where county road 621, the old Orange Plank Road, diverges from Route 20, the old Orange Turnpike, and makes its own way into the Wilderness, the way Lee took with A. P. Hill's Third Corps, his mind's ear perhaps hearing in the solemn opening of the collect, Grant, we beseech thee, the faint trace of an echo, Grant, Grant.
		http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/cushman_excerpt.html
		Revised 4/27/99