Columbia is the story of Theodore Lomax, a nineteen-year-old Union solider in the American Civil War, who is as committed as any to the ideal of human freedom. After being assigned to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman, shortly after the general’s infamous March to the Sea, he willingly participates in the destruction of civilian property in Columbia, South Carolina, believing his acts are justified by Southern resistance to the Northern cause of emancipation. But when the destruction escalates into violence against the civilians themselves, he becomes disillusioned, and feels compelled to strike out in opposition to his own countrymen.
The novel is told from Lomax’s point of view, but there are ten other supporting characters, each with a story of his or her own. There was a time when I thought these stories, or these “Reflections in Broken Glass,” should alternate with the chapters in Columbia, presenting a richer but perhaps more tangled tapestry of the lives that painfully converge in the novel’s climactic scenes. But Columbia is clearly a more coherent narrative without them. Still, they were valuable to me as an author, and so I’ve decided to share them here.
“Floyd,” centers on the character of William Floyd, and describes his time as a Union artilleryman and the siege that hardened his heart against the Southern people.
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Before the war, William Floyd worked in a butcher shop in Chicago. He himself was not the butcher. That distinction went to the owner of the shop, a fat Irishman named Slattery who taught Floyd everything he knew about the business. Slattery taught Floyd so much that in the last few years before the war, he seldom even visited his butcher shop, relying on Floyd to do all the work and deal directly with the suppliers and customers. Day in and day out for three years, customers could find Floyd behind Slattery’s long wooden table, wearing Slattery’s bloody apron and cutting up meat with Slattery’s long knives, and every day someone would ask Floyd if the butcher was coming in that day.
“Is the butcher coming in today?”
“If you mean Mister Slattery, no, I don’t think so.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, just give me half a roasting chicken.”
For the first month or so, that daily conversation didn’t bother Floyd. He knew the customers were used to dealing with Slattery and were probably a little surprised to see him where Slattery was supposed to be. But after a while he began to resent the question.
“Is the butcher coming in today?”
“I don’t think so. Can I help you instead?”
“Oh. Well, in that case, just give me four pork chops.”
It’s not like he was seeing new people every day. With few exceptions, Slattery’s business was founded upon forty or fifty extremely loyal customers who lived in the neighborhood, people who came in everyday or every other day. After a year of no contact with Slattery, Floyd would have thought they would have stopped asking for him.
“Is the butcher coming in today?
“No. But I can help you with whatever you need.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, just give me two pounds of hamburger.”
It was almost as if they would have ordered something else if Slattery had been there to serve them. Floyd decided to test this theory one day during his second year of independent service.
“Is the butcher coming in today?”
“No. What can I get for you?”
“Oh. Well, in that case, just give me one of the five-pound beef roasts.”
“What would you have ordered if Mister Slattery had been here?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, what would you have ordered if Mister Slattery had been here? You seemed to change your mind after I told you he wasn’t coming in today.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just give me one of the five-pound beef roasts, please.”
It seemed clear to Floyd that was the wrong approach. There was evidently some kind of secret relationship between Slattery and his customers that Floyd had no business stepping on. He never dared do that again, but the question about the butcher’s whereabouts still aggravated him with its frequency. One day during his third year, Floyd decided to try something radically different.
“Is the butcher coming in today?”
“I am the butcher.”
The customer he had tried that on looked at him in silence for a few moments, and then quietly left the shop without saying another word. Floyd never saw that particular customer again, but it was also the last time anyone ever asked him if the butcher was coming in today.
Floyd was one of the first to volunteer for service after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. He hated the Rebels for doing that as much as any other patriotic American, but more than anything else he saw it as an opportunity to get out of Slattery’s butcher shop. As one of the first volunteers, he was allowed to choose from among the different service branches, so he and his best friend Adam McClintock enrolled themselves in the artillery together. They were quickly assigned to a unit attached to one of the newly-formed Illinois regiments and taught how to load, fire, and care for one of the thousands of cannon being forged in support of the Union war effort.
Throughout their training and the early months of the war, Floyd and McClintock were inseparable, much as they had been before the war at the tavern down the street from Slattery’s butcher shop. McClintock was a pipefitter’s assistant, but the two men had known each other since they were children attending the same grammar school together. Neither of them were educated beyond the third grade level, but that was more than most kids in their neighborhood. Following their academic careers, they were apprenticed to their respective tradesmen in order to learn something more practical than reading and writing. From the start they both did well for themselves, Floyd taking to meat cutting and McClintock taking to pipefitting as though it was second nature to them. They both earned enough money to keep roofs over their heads and food in their bellies, and they both had enough left over to spend Saturday evenings out entertaining whichever pair of ladies they were currently seeing. They spent every other night in the tavern down the street from Slattery’s butcher shop drinking beer and throwing darts. At the time of their induction into the army, both men were unmarried and thirty-two years old.
They were careful to get themselves assigned to the same gun crew, which wasn’t too hard for two men as determined as they were. Their first assignment was as part of a four-gun battery commanded by a likable captain from Skokie. They both serviced the third gun in the battery, a twelve-pound Napoleon which the captain had named Annabel after his youngest daughter. McClintock was charged with dropping the ammunition into Annabel’s barrel and Floyd’s job was to ram it home with the plunger. These tasks, combined with others performed by four other men in Annabel’s crew, allowed her to belch forth the fire and death both Floyd and McClintock hoped to soon rain down upon the heads of unsuspecting Rebel sons of bitches.
They got their first chance at Fort Henry. High on a bluff on the other side of the Tennessee River, their battery was placed in a perfect position to fire upon the Confederate-controlled fort. They labored over Annabel for hours, loading, firing, loading, firing, again and again until it seemed their arms would give out on them. But their efforts, combined with the salvos fired from the Union gunboats in the river so effectively pummeled the fort it was surrendered early the next morning with very little loss of life on either side. Exhausted, but enlivened with the raptures of victory, Floyd and McClintock congratulated each other on their success and laughed about how easy this war was going to be if that was the best the Rebels had to offer.
They had a much different experience a few days later at Fort Donelson. In many ways, it was strikingly similar to Fort Henry. They and their fellow gunners worked in combination with Union gunboats to bombard a Rebel-controlled fort with shot and shell, except this time they were not so quick to find an ideal location from which to fire. Their captain, in fact, acting on orders from above, moved their battery four times that day, looking for a position where they could shell the Rebels but the Rebels could not shell them. Floyd and McClintock both learned that day how much more difficult their simple tasks became when live artillery rounds were exploding all around them.
Minutes after establishing their third position of the day, a Rebel shell hit Annabel directly, rupturing her barrel and shattering her carriage in an explosion of metal, wood, and earth. Every man in her crew was thrown to the ground by the impact and, once the smoke cleared, Floyd was quickly able to determine he was the only one uninjured. A fragment of the Rebel shell had torn its way through McClintock’s body and another had effectively amputated his right hand at his wrist, leaving only a portion of his thumb dangling off to one side, before cutting a three-inch groove out of his skull halfway between his ear and the top of his head. Floyd scrambled over to his dying friend as quickly as he could just as another shell landed fifteen feet shy of the second gun in their battery, splattering them all with mud and dirt.
Holding McClintock in his arms Floyd watched as he tried to speak. Failing that, he reached his hand up to touch Floyd’s face, but could only leave a bloody smear across Floyd’s cheek with his mangled stump. After that, he died quietly amid the screams of other wounded men.
McClintock’s death affected Floyd in ways he would never admit, ways Floyd probably wasn’t even aware of. In the battery’s mad rush to retreat from their exposed position, Floyd had to leave the body of his friend where it had fallen. Everything was in chaos. Annabel was destroyed, men and horses had been killed, caissons and carriages had been broken, and all the while, Rebel shells continued to rain down all around them. Most simply ran for their lives, but Floyd stood his ground and was able to help organize enough of a retreat to ensure they left with their three remaining guns and as much ammunition as the functional caissons and unwounded animals could carry.
Throughout it all, Floyd had no fear that he himself would be killed. Other men did, the Rebel shells seeming to strike their company indiscriminately as they worked to remove their equipment from that position, but Floyd felt assured inside he would not be one of them. Floyd would not even realize he had not been frightened until long after the battle had ended and Fort Donelson surrendered. Then he would sit quietly in his tent and shake with the realization of how scared he should have been, but in the heat of battle, Floyd found himself level-headed and strangely calm. His captain noticed it, too. In recognition of his steady temperament and his assistance in organizing their retreat, the captain got Floyd promoted to corporal.
With the loss of one of their guns and many of their men, the battery was forced to reorganize itself after Donelson. There were plenty of men and cannon to replace those that had been lost, however, and in no time at all, it seemed, their unit was back up to four guns and a full complement of soldiers. The cannon which replaced Annabel was also a twelve-pound Napoleon, cast at the same foundry in Cincinnati where Annabel had been created. In fact, the only thing that seemed different about the new gun was the serial number stamped on the small brass plate which had been attached to its barrel. After the loss of Annabel, however, the captain seemed a little less sanguine about naming the new cannon after one of his daughters. In recognition of the men they had lost, the captain instead named the new cannon after the battle they had fought, Donelson.
The men were a different story. Unlike Donelson, who seemed to be Annabel’s doppelganger in every conceivable way, the men who replaced McClintock and the others were strangers. Like most of the regiment, they were all from Chicago, one from Floyd’s own neighborhood, but they seemed alien to Floyd, almost as if they had come from different countries and only recently been taught how to speak English.
Besides Floyd, there was only one man in Donelson’s crew who had served with Annabel, and that was their sergeant whose job it was to aim the cannon and direct all their efforts in loading and firing it. He was a small man named Wilkins with thin arms and thinner hair. He was only slightly wounded in Annabel’s explosion, a piece of her carriage piercing the meat of his calf but leaving him otherwise undamaged. Prior to McClintock’s death, Floyd had hated Wilkins’s position of authority, his shrill voice, and his arrogant strut, but all that began to change after Fort Donelson.
The day the new recruits arrived, Wilkins took Floyd aside and asked him which position in Donelson’s crew he preferred. He had seen how Floyd acted in the aftermath of Annabel’s destruction and he wanted to put Floyd in the position where he felt he could do the most good. Without hesitation and without really thinking about it, Floyd responded by saying he wanted the firing position. He wanted to be the man who lit the fuse and pulled the cord which caused the cannon to fire.
And so, Floyd moved from the front end of the cannon to the back end. His new position offered him two advantages his former position had not. The first was that he spent all of his time facing the enemy rather than with his back turned to them. This gave him the ability to see the field before them and gain a better appreciation of the ebb and flow of battle. Positioned at the front of the cannon with the plunger, Floyd had been too busy and too distracted to take much note of what was going on around him. Drive home the pad, drive home the shell, get out of the way as the gun fired, and then start the process over again. Floyd’s movements had been too regulated to allow for any vision beyond what was going in or what was coming out of the cannon’s barrel. Behind the gun, however, waiting for the rest of the crew to finish their work so the cannon could be fired, Floyd had much more time and a much larger field of vision to begin building an understanding of the tactics the Rebels were using to overwhelm them and the tactics they were using to keep them at bay.
The second advantage was the chance to work directly with Wilkins. In the battles that followed Fort Donelson, except for a dreadfully long afternoon at Shiloh when they had all been chased away from their guns by the advancing Rebels and forced to fight them hand-to-hand in order to reclaim their cannon, Floyd found himself coming to appreciate the small man’s expertise and bravery in a way he would have not previously thought possible.
Floyd was impressed by how precisely Wilkins could aim his cannon. On a clear day when the impact zone could be observed, Wilkins never took more than three shots to hit what he was aiming at, and sometimes only two. It’s the wind, he used to say. That’s the trickiest part. The first shot is for range. I’ve got a pretty good eye for that already so if I don’t get it on the first try, I can adjust what I need and get it on the second shot. On a calm day, that’s all I’m going to need. But the wind can really play havoc with the balls, especially when it’s blowing across your direction of fire. It comes and goes, you see, and varies between you and the target. I hate shooting when the wind is blowing.
Wilkins was a career soldier, not like Floyd and the thousands of volunteers who had joined up after Sumter. He had been an artillery specialist since his graduation from boot camp. For seventeen years he had practiced and honed his trade until this little disagreement between the North and the South had come along and given him the opportunity to put those talents to actual use.
Floyd learned a lot from Wilkins. In the forty-five seconds it took for Donelson to be loaded and fired, when Floyd was not observing the movements of the armies out in the field before him, he was observing Wilkins and the methods he used to manage and aim the cannon. Forty-five seconds may not seem like a lot of time to learn anything, but when one considered the average artillery barrage lasted approximately four hours, and in that time a competent gun crew could load and fire an individual cannon more than 300 times, and the amount of time per firing Floyd needed to perform his function was only about five seconds, one begins to see the extent of Floyd’s opportunity.
It wasn’t long before Corporal William Floyd began to have a different opinion of Sergeant Jasper Wilkins. The authority over the other men was necessary, he soon came to see, because of all the men in the crew, only Wilkins had the ability and opportunity to see what was going on around them and to make adjustments when necessary. Through the battle for Fort Donelson, Floyd had been just another man in the crew, his head down and blackened by gunpowder, with no more idea of what part he played in the larger scheme of things than the horses that pulled the cannon from position to position. After Donelson, Floyd was given an unsought glimpse into the purpose and necessity of command. From that time forward, the voice Wilkins used to bark out their orders did not seem as shrill as it once did, and the arrogant strut, temporarily overpowered from the limp in Wilkins’s injured leg, did not to Floyd’s eyes make its return, even after the wound had healed.
In many ways, Floyd did not realize how much he and the rest of Donelson’s crew depended on Sergeant Wilkins until after he had been captured by the Confederates. It happened at a place called Champion’s Hill, where the irregularities of the terrain forced their battery to position two of their guns on the crest of a hill and the other two about half way down its forward slope. Due to the steepness and rockiness of the hill, it was impossible for one detachment to see the other once in position. Communications between the two, therefore, required runners to move back and forth between the two positions, carrying instructions and orders as necessary.
Wilkins was not selected as one of these messengers, but once it was discovered, about an hour into the battle, that four of the caissons left with Donelson and Mary Elizabeth (another one of the cannon in the battery, still bearing the name of one of the captain’s four young daughters) were empty rather than full as initially thought, he quickly told Floyd to keep up the firing on the Rebel position they had targeted and ran off down the hill to find the captain to make some kind of remedy.
Floyd and the others never saw him again. Although the battle itself was a Union victory, and neither of the battery’s positions were overtaken by the Confederates, the captain told them sadly the next day that Wilkins’s name was included on the list of the handful of Union soldiers captured by the Rebels. In an attempt to figure out what could have happened to him, Floyd took advantage of the calm following the battle to try and retrace Wilkins’s possible steps on the hill the day before. Unhappily, Floyd discovered a fork in the trail they had used to haul their guns up the hill. One path led directly to the Union position. The other curved around to the other side of the hill and would have led Wilkins to a part of the field commanded by Confederates the previous day. As difficult as it was to accept, it seemed Wilkins had been captured only because he turned left when he should have turned right.
Floyd was perhaps the only member of Donelson’s crew who was surprised when the captain promoted him to sergeant and gave him Wilkins’s position within the battery. Although Floyd had enjoyed the advantage of observing Sergeant Wilkins in action for the past fifteen months, Floyd did not believe he was ready to assume those same responsibilities. Ready or not, the captain told him, the job is yours. Do the best you can.
He got his chance a few days later at Vicksburg. Champion’s Hill was the fourth in a series of five victories the Union Army commanded by General Ulysses Grant enjoyed on their march towards Vicksburg, the Rebel stronghold on the Mississippi River. Champion’s Hill had really been the Confederates last determined stand before the gates of Vicksburg itself. The conflict which occurred at Big Black River the day after Champion’s Hill was more of a skirmish than a battle, the Rebels retreating so quickly that the artillery had no real opportunity to position itself and enter the engagement. Floyd and his battery weren’t even anywhere near Big Black River that day, they were still back at Champion’s Hill, Floyd doing his best to figure out what had happened to Sergeant Wilkins. But with the Rebels on the run, General Grant wanted to make Vicksburg the next quick victory in the series, and brought his whole force to bear on those defenses in two determined charges over a period of three days.
Both Grant and Floyd thought they were disasters. Grant because the charges took a bloody toll on his army and failed to achieve his objective, and Floyd because he couldn’t do enough to help the men who were selected to storm the Rebel defenses. Although he had never been the kind of man to doubt his own abilities, Floyd was quietly convinced that Sergeant Wilkins could have done a much better job of providing artillery support to Grant’s charges than he had. It took him most of the first day just to find the appropriate range and all of the second to feel comfortable gauging the effect of the shifting winds on each shot. By that time, thousands of Union soldiers had been killed, and Floyd could not help but feel his own ineptitude only contributed to their deaths.
Of course, Floyd had been the sergeant on only one of the guns in his battery of four, which was only one of the dozens of batteries which were engaged during the two Union charges at Vicksburg. Also, the overall role of the artillery was somewhat lessened by the fact that Grant was determined to take Vicksburg by force, which meant that cannon could not fire on enemy defenses while Union men were actively trying to take those positions. After all the time he had spent in the army and all the observations he had made of the use of artillery in battle, Floyd should have been able to assuage some of his guilt with these simple facts. If he had spoken with some of the other gunnery sergeants in the two-day lull between the two charges, he would have also discovered that his accuracy was at least as good as most of the others, and better than some. Few of the other gunners were required to fill shoes the size of Sergeant Jasper Wilkins’s, and most were much less concerned with where their shells went and much more concerned with how many shots they could get off in a given period of time.
But in many ways Floyd sheltered himself from these considerations. As he watched his fellow soldiers die in such unbelievable numbers, despite his best efforts to provide assistance in their struggle, he could not help judging himself and his talents by the harshest possible measures. In the most graphic and horrifying terms, Floyd clearly saw every shot of his that missed its intended target, be that target Rebel cannon or Rebel soldiers, every such mistake gave the Rebels a greater ability to pour fire and lead into the bodies of the men Floyd seemed charged with protecting. It was an impossible task, protecting those men against what the Confederates had waiting for them, but it was a task Floyd had adopted as his own, one he thought Wilkins, and to some degree McClintock, would have also borne, and one to which Floyd considered himself ill-suited and ill-fated.
The day after the second charge Grant decided the city could not be taken by force, and he ordered his army to settle in for a siege. Strange as it may seem to say, just as the battles for Vicksburg seemed to be a painful baptism for Floyd, the siege of Vicksburg in several ways turned out to be his joyful deliverance.
First and foremost, the siege allowed Floyd the opportunity to hone his skills as an artillery sergeant in a way perhaps nothing else could have. When it started, no one had any idea the siege would go on as long as it did. Grant, after all, had the city completely cut off from the rest of the world. Nothing could go in or out without passing through his army. As a result, Grant saw to it that Vicksburg received no communication, support, or supply from the rest of the Confederacy. The people of that town were trapped, and they weren’t leaving until they surrendered or starved. And unlike the infantry charges with which Grant had first tried to take Vicksburg, in which the artillery had only a limited role to play, cannon were to be the primary weapon of terror in the long siege that was to come.
It lasted forty-eight days. Each and every day the orders were to shell the city continuously. Not just the forts and redoubts that had been constructed in a defensive perimeter around the city, but the city itself. The public buildings and private homes of the citizens of Vicksburg were to be the primary targets selected for demolition by the artillery in Grant’s grand army. Of course, Floyd commanded only one of the hundreds of guns involved in such destruction, but he embraced the orders of his commanding general as a way to purge the shame he felt for the failures experienced during his first few days with sergeant stripes on his sleeves. If Grant wanted the city destroyed, then by God, Floyd was going to do everything in his power to make sure he complied.
In the final analysis, to Floyd’s way of thinking at least, it all came down to a question of time. During the battles for Vicksburg, the emphasis had been placed upon maintaining a furious rate of fire. In order to support the on-going infantry charges, the artillery had been ordered to keep an unrelenting bombardment raining down on the Confederates in their trenches and earthworks. The idea was to keep it so hot that none of them would have the ability to stand up and fire at the advancing Federals. As a newly-christened sergeant, directing the efforts of his gun crew for the first time, the orders were simply too much for Floyd to cope with, the need to fire and keep firing overwhelming his instinctive desire to place his shots as accurately as Wilkins had done.
But the siege was an entirely different story. During the siege, there was no captain screaming at him to keep his rate of fire up, no order from above to keep the storm raging furiously on the heads of the Confederates. During the siege, there was only the order to shell the city, and as it turned out, Floyd and the other gunners had forty-eight days to accomplish that task. Over such a time frame, Floyd could take all the time he needed to sight his cannon, watch the flight path and impact of each shell, and carefully make the adjustments necessary to demolish whatever they intended to demolish.
By the end of the siege, which ended, to the delight of all Union troops in the area, on the Fourth of July, Floyd felt assured he had completely redeemed himself for whatever disaster he may have been responsible for during the two infantry charges. In forty-eight days, through practiced and disciplined study of precision artillery firing, Floyd had gained a confidence of his own ability, the respect of the men who served in his crew, and a reputation within the artillery corps that very nearly rivaled that of his predecessor.
But Floyd’s tactical and mechanical abilities were not the only things sharpened by the siege of Vicksburg. The ordeal not only delivered Floyd from his prison of self-doubt, perhaps even more importantly, the constant and indiscriminate shelling he was forced to inflict on his enemies, and the defiantly stoic way they reacted to it, permanently hardened Floyd’s heart against the Confederates and their cause.
It was the flags. If there was any one thing that finally pushed Floyd over the edge, that finally sucked all his sympathy for the Southern man right out of him, it had to be the flags. When the siege began, there were only a handful of buildings in Vicksburg which flew the Confederate flag from their rooftops. These were primarily the public buildings, most notably the gigantic city hall that seemed to stand on its hill high above the rest of the buildings like a mother standing among her children. With the selection of targets entirely at the discretion of artillery sergeants, these flags naturally drew the heaviest fire. In fact, it quickly became a point of honor among the gun crews to have shot one of them down, to fire the very ball which actually severed a pole to which a flag was attached or pierced a roof in such a manner to cause a flag to fall inward on whatever still resided within.
Although no one was ever able to strike down the flag which flew above city hall (for that they had to wait until the Union finally entered the city and someone was sent up to take the vile thing down and replace it with the Stars and Stripes), every other flag in the city was taken out in such a fashion at one time or another. Such an event resulted in great celebrations within the Union lines, men slapping each other heartily on their backs and officers issuing extra rations of whiskey to the men responsible for the deed. And yet Floyd couldn’t help but notice for every Confederate flag they shot down, one and several more reappeared the next day, flying over both the rubble of its previous abode and a handful of other properties within the immediate vicinity.
There was one building in particular Floyd decided to focus most of his energies on. It was clearly the home of some wealthy citizen, a tremendous structure with gables and wings and painted in awful shades of peach and lemon. At Floyd’s distance it looked no bigger than a wagon wheel, but it easily dwarfed the homes around it. Including the attic it had a total of four stories, and it was topped by a cupola from which flew a Confederate flag of the kind in question. Floyd had no idea how many people lived in the house. Although one could see individual persons at that distance, there was little that distinguished one figure from another. Floyd could generally tell which ones were men and which ones were women, which ones were white and which ones were black, but that’s about it.
The first time Floyd shot down their flag it took him about two hours and sixty cannon balls to do it. A good deal of his shots went too wide, too far, or too short, and missed the house completely, but perhaps an equal number of them tore into some part of that gigantic house. Eventually, one shot finally fell squarely on the roof of the cupola, dragging the Rebel fabric down with it. His men cheered and the other crews in Floyd’s battery congratulated him, and Floyd ordered Donelson turned to target some other unfortunate Confederate stronghold.
In the morning, one of the privates in his crew told him that the flag was back.
“What?” Floyd asked him. “Which flag is back?”
“The one above that house we shelled yesterday. You remember, the Lemonpatch.”
It was a nickname they had invented during their attempt to bring down its flag the previous day, and Floyd remembered it well. He looked over at it and, sure enough, there was the Confederate flag again, flying proudly above the gargantuan home. Floyd took out his field glasses for a closer look and could see that although the roof of the cupola had been destroyed, several of the small supporting pillars still stood, and it was to one of these pillars that someone had tied the flagpole. And it wasn’t alone. The house immediately to the west of the Lemonpatch, although not nearly as large, now also supported a Confederate flag at the peak of its highest gable.
Floyd immediately ordered Donelson turned and sighted to fire at the house again. Remembering roughly the position required to strike the cupola the day before, Floyd was much more quickly able to bring the thing down the second time, achieving success in less than an hour and thirty balls. Nearly every shot, however, hit the house in some fashion and caused a good deal more damage to it than had been done yesterday. Gaping holes riddled its roof and none of the walls facing Floyd’s position were free of blemish. The final shell struck the cupola on one side, tore most of that half off, and caused the structure to collapse in on itself. The flag toppled with its support. Feeling satisfied, Floyd ordered his gun turned towards the neighboring house and spent the next hour shelling that residence until the second flag was also eliminated.
The next day it started all over again. Floyd didn’t need one of his privates to tell him the flag had returned. It was the first thing he looked for when he crawled out of his tent in the morning. Looking through his field glasses, Floyd could see the owner of the Lemonpatch had been busy during the night. Using pieces of the cupola Floyd had destroyed, he had rebuilt that portion of his roof enough to allow his flagpole to stand again and flutter the flag in the breeze from the highest position on his home. It looked to Floyd like the pole itself had been nailed to some pieces of wood jutting out at odd angles from the rest of the roof. Nor was he alone. His neighbor who had shown his support the day before had also been busy during the night, accomplishing similar repairs on his rooftop, and three more of his neighbors had joined the chorus. As difficult as it was for Floyd to believe, where once there had been one, now there were five Confederate flags confronting him. One, in fact, did not appear store-bought, and seemed to have been stitched together out of various pieces of colored cloth.
Floyd’s reaction to this show of defiance was the same as the day before. Under his command, Donelson roared until the first flag had been shot down, and then roared again until each additional flag had been taken out in turn. It took him and his crew the better part of the day to accomplish it all, the winds blowing particularly strong that day, but as the sun set on that area of town, Floyd felt a degree of comfort knowing he had not allowed such an insult to stand.
The collateral damage done to the Lemonpatch over three days of shelling was considerable. Once each day, as the bombardment began, human figures were seen fleeing the house, scattering in several directions and gathering together with neighbors who had come outside to watch the destruction. At the end of the three days, the entire west wing of the house had been demolished, the grand center portion had caved in on itself, looking for all the world like a cake that had fallen in the oven, and the east wing was so riddled with holes that even at his distance Floyd could see right through it in several places.
When he went to sleep on that third night, Floyd was certain the flag would not be back on top of that house in the morning. The building could no longer be fit to live in, and its occupants would surely find some other place to shelter themselves. They would likely take their flag with them, Floyd had no illusions about that. They would naturally take it with them and string it up over whatever they decided to call home, but he couldn’t imagine anyone staying in that broken-down, shell-torn building any longer than they had to.
Despite his bedtime confidence, however, Floyd’s first observation in the morning was of the Lemonpatch, and what he saw astounded him. There were now a total of seventeen Confederate flags in its immediate vicinity, and right in the center stood the first flag which had started it all. It was no longer where the cupola had once stood. There was, in fact, nothing where the cupola had once stood. Too much of the roof had collapsed to allow any access to that point in space. The highest remaining point on the residence was the peak on one of the secondary gables and at its very apex someone had wedged the flagpole flying its soiled and battered original flag.
Of all the flags surrounding it, Floyd judged less than half of them were professionally made. Most of them seemed to have been constructed hastily the night before, the mysterious seamstress stitching together whatever could be found that was of the appropriate color. From a distance they certainly served their purpose. There could be no doubt they were intended to be Confederate flags. Upon closer inspection with his field glasses, however, Floyd could see the unmistakable impressions of pockets and buttons on the cloth, remnants of the shirts they used to be.
Floyd right then and there decided two things. First, he was going to knock down every single one of those seventeen flags before the day was done. Second, after he had completed that, he was going to shell the Lemonpatch continuously until it truly was nothing more than a pile of rubble. To accomplish the first objective, he quickly recruited the sergeants in charge of the other three guns in his battery, assigning each of them a portion of the flags to shoot for, exactly as if he was the captain in command of their unit. He wasn’t, of course, but their captain had long since left them to their own devices, seeking some relief from the dirt and noise of the front line in the protracted siege, and the other sergeants were more than happy to assist Floyd in such a noble deed.
Floyd saved four of the flags for himself and his crew, including the one flying over the Lemonpatch. They went after the other three flags first, bringing them all down within the space of the morning. He gave his men an extended break for lunch, telling them of his plans to keep shelling the Lemonpatch after its flag had fallen, shelling it throughout the night, until there wasn’t a square foot of space within it that could be used for human habitation. Some of the other sergeants heard him talking to his crew, and they volunteered their men to work in shifts throughout the night, allowing all of them to get some modicum of rest without ever letting up on the deluge they planned to inflict upon the house.
It all began at about three o’clock in the afternoon. Donelson’s first shot bounced on the home’s very doorstep and barreled its way through the front door, ripping the thing off its hinges. Immediately, the home’s occupants came flooding out of the structure as they had every other day, scurrying away exactly, to Floyd’s eyes at least, like mice from under a woodpile. Floyd didn’t count them then, and he hadn’t counted them before, but there seemed to be more of them that day than any of the others, almost as if the house Floyd had been shelling had become a refuge for others since the bombardment began. Well, Floyd thought to himself, we’ll see how many of you bastards can live there when I get done today, and ordered his men to keep firing.
The other guns in the battery still had a couple of other flags to knock down, but once that was accomplished, all four of them turned their muzzles upon the Lemonpatch. Its weary flag fell for the fourth time around five-thirty, one of the other sergeants striking the peak of the gable which supported it with a glancing blow, but delivering enough of a punch to cause the banner to teeter over to one side and then flutter down to the ground below. All twenty-four men in the battery cheered when it happened, pausing briefly in their exertions. As soon as the flag touched the ground, however, one of the home’s occupants, a boy from what Floyd could see through his field glasses, ran out from the relative shelter of a neighbor’s porch to retrieve the banner. Floyd and the other sergeants shouted stern commands to their crews to resume firing, and they fell swiftly back to work, but not soon enough to frighten the brave Southern boy away from his objective. He scooped the flag up and darted back in the direction from which he had come, disappearing in the cluster of buildings that surrounded the Lemonpatch.
The escape of the boy with the flag bothered Floyd for only a matter of seconds, as he reminded himself of the destruction to which he had pledged his men. Let him have the damn thing, he thought. It’s not like he’s going to have any place to put it tomorrow.
The resumption of firing on the house clearly took its occupants by surprise. Like the boy, they had also come out of hiding when the flag fell, several of them getting as far as the gardens around the home before being driven back by the shells crashing down before them. All four guns fired on the house in unison until about seven o’clock that evening, each no longer attempting anything nearly as precise as taking down a tattered piece of fabric tied to a slender pole. Now, their objective was to cause as much damage as possible to its structure, something a battery of cannon can be extremely proficient at when the men arming them are given the latitude to do so.
At seven o’clock, the gun crews began to rotate on three-hour shifts, the men off-duty retreating as far as practicable from the position to rest themselves, leaving one crew on duty throughout the night. Although Floyd purposely put Donelson on the last shift and dismissed his men with orders to report back at four in the morning, he decided to stay with the sergeant and crew of the first shift, at least until the sun went down. He wanted to see how much demolition could be done before darkness fell.
The concentrated fire of the full battery had done a good deal of damage to the Lemonpatch, almost as much, it seemed, as Donelson had done on its own in the three previous days. A rough skeleton of the home still remained, tall and broken pillars of stone and wood reaching up with jagged edges towards the sky, but half of the walls had been completely demolished. Those on the far side of the house garnered a little more protection than those on the exposed side, but were so shot full of holes they seemed ready to topple over with a single additional blow. Those closest to the battery had been smashed literally to pieces, the beams and planks which had composed them now laying shattered and scattered among the rooms they had once defined.
Floyd liked what he saw, but he was nowhere near finished. When it became too dark for him to see, he slapped his fellow sergeant on the shoulder and told him to keep the heat on.
“Sure thing, Bill,” the man said. “I’ve got the range and direction, and I’ll pass it on when the next crew comes on at ten. By the time you come back at sun-up, there won’t be nothing left but a goddamn hole in the ground.”
Floyd did not sleep well that night. He had no way of knowing it, but it would be the first of many sleepless nights to plague him throughout the rest of the war. He never really had much of a problem with it before. It’s not unusual for the artillery to be ordered to fire throughout the night, as General Grant had done during the siege of Vicksburg, and Floyd, like all artillery men, learned from early on to tune out the booming of cannon and grab some sleep when the opportunity presented itself. Previously, his only other sleepless night in the war had been the night after McClintock had been killed. Even after the confusion and carnage of Shiloh, Floyd had slept comfortably.
But that night was different, and it would set the stage for hundreds of more nights to come. He couldn’t get comfortable. That’s how it always started, he couldn’t get comfortable, and he tossed and turned on the sticks and stones beneath his blanket until his back was too sore to move. Then he began to think. That was always the worst part, and whenever Floyd caught himself thinking while he was trying to sleep, he quickly tried to clear his mind. Counting sheep, mentally reciting the alphabet backwards, he did whatever he could to wipe thoughts from his mind, but it never did any good. Those thoughts always came back to him, sneaking up on him sometimes from behind, pushing and barging their way to the center of his consciousness through whatever roadblocks Floyd had tried to place in their way. As time passed, and the thoughts visited Floyd more frequently, becoming more vivid and frightening in the process, he discovered the only thing that truly kept them at bay was alcohol. Whiskey if he could get it, but anything with a kick would work if he drank enough of it. After all, passing out and falling asleep were not exactly the same thing, and although the thoughts could keep him from doing one, they had no power to prevent the other.
But he hadn’t yet learned that during his first sleepless night outside of Vicksburg, and the thoughts which would one day taunt him viciously in his waking moments, and influence him strangely in his dreams during those times when inebriation won out over them, were in their earliest and simplest form, nagging at him argumentatively just enough to keep him from drifting off.
It’s those damn flags. One, two, five, seventeen, they seem to be multiplying despite my best efforts to keep them down. What the hell do those lousy Rebels think they’re doing anyway? Haven’t they learned in three days the flags are what we’re shooting at? That the surest way to a destroyed home is to fly one of those ugly flags from your rooftop? It’s almost as if they want the beating, the way they keep flying those flags. Almost as if they know we’re going to shoot them down, but keep flying them anyway.
—What are you going to do if there are more of them tomorrow, Bill? Like you said, so far it’s been one, two, five, seventeen. At that rate there could be fifty of them tomorrow. A hundred the day after that. What are you going to do then?—
What do you mean, what am I going to do then? I’m going to keep shooting them down. As long as they keep putting them up, I’m going to keep shooting them down.
—But what if there’s fifty of them tomorrow? And a hundred the day after that? How can you possibly shoot that many down? It took the whole battery nearly the whole day to clear seventeen of them.—
There ain’t going to be no fifty flags flying tomorrow.
—How many flags you think they got, Bill?—
How the hell am I supposed to know how many damn flags they got?
—Then how can you be so sure there won’t be fifty of them tomorrow? You saw the flags they flew today. More than half of them were hand made. The first two were store bought, but after that they started stitching them together out of old shirts and rags. You know what that means, don’t you?—
No, what?
—It means they can make as many as they want. Oh sure, Grant’s got the city sealed off tight, so they can’t get any more shipments of proud Confederate flags in from Richmond or New Orleans or wherever the hell they come from, but they’re not letting that stop them. No, they’re tearing up their brightly-colored clothes and sewing the strips together into rough imitations. Up close or through your field glasses you can tell the difference, but from cannon distance, flying high above their homes and buildings, they pass for the real thing. Good enough to egg you into shooting at them, at least.—
What are you saying?
—I’m saying they’re working on them right now. Down in their cellars, they got the whole clan gathered around candlelight. The men are tearing up the strips and the women are piecing them together. They’re working together, men and women both, and probably they’re slaves, too, they’re all working together against you.—
Ain’t nobody working together down in that cellar tonight.
—Not the Lemonpatch, maybe. But what about all them other houses? They’re organizing, you know that. They have to be. How else can you explain the way those flags keep multiplying, radiating out in a circle with the Lemonpatch at the center. It’s like your first cannon shot fell into a Confederate pond and caused ripples to spread outward in all directions, and the crests of those ripples are marked by Rebel flags. You’ve seen them gather together when you’re shelling them, gather together with their neighbors and friends and watch as you rain destruction down on their homes. It’s not safe to stand as close as they do, but there they stand, collected together into their little groups, waiting for the shelling to finish so they can go back to their lives. They ain’t going anywhere. They’re going to stay right where they are no matter what you throw at them.—
Ain’t nobody staying in the Lemonpatch when I get done with it.
—Goddamn it, Bill! I’m not talking about the Lemonpatch. Go on, reduce the Lemonpatch to a pile of sticks, what the hell good do you think that’s going to do? Do you think they’re going to give up if you do that? Do you think they’re not going to fly their damn flags from every other rooftop in town if you do that? That’s what I’m talking about. It’s not just the Lemonpatch, it’s the whole damn town. They’re all in it together and they’re all against you. You’re not going to be able to stop them with bullets and grapeshot. There’s too many of them and they draw too much strength from one another. There ain’t enough bullets and grapeshot in the whole world to stop what they’ve got organized against you.—
Unable to sleep with this conversation raging in his head, Floyd dragged himself out of his tent about three o’clock in the morning and quietly made his way down to the battery position. The crew he was scheduled to relieve at four was there, firing their gun again and again with slow and steady precision. Each time the cannon fired, a bright flash of light filled their immediate surroundings, but it was not enough to penetrate the darkness that separated them from the town. There was no way to know if their shots were even hitting their intended target. The sergeant in command nodded silently to Floyd, and Floyd took a seat on a nearby boulder.
At four his crew arrived and relieved the other men. The shelling ceased for a few minutes as Floyd got his crew into position and ran them through their initial firing drills. He took advantage of the relative quiet to strain his ears towards the town, listening wildly for some kind of activity among the rubble that must surely be there. If the Rebels were out and about, however, Floyd could not detect them, the distance between them either too great or Floyd’s artillery-damaged hearing not up to the task. When Donelson and his men were ready, Floyd calmly gave them the order to resume firing and the shelling began anew.
They worked until sunrise. When the sun peeked out over the hills behind them, washing both their position and the town before them with its golden light, Floyd’s crew instinctively ceased their exertions, all men pausing to see what havoc they had been able to wreak throughout the night.
There was no way to know how many of their cannon shots had hit the Lemonpatch in the darkness, but the morning light made it clear enough of them had to reduce the building to little more than a pile of rubble. Nothing of the basic structure remained standing. The wood and stone that had constituted the house were there, but they were scattered and piled together in broken clumps and shards. The building had been reduced to its basest elements and existed no longer as a place for human habitation.
Floyd and his men looked on in silence for a few moments, all of them surprised to see the goal they had worked so hard for actually accomplished, but their attention was soon captured by the fluttering bits of fabric which flapped and waved in the morning breeze in a tremendous ring around what remained of the Lemonpatch. At first glance there seemed to be a thousand of them, Confederate flags all, dotting practically every rooftop in town, but surely there couldn’t be that many of them. Floyd desperately began to count them, and had passed fifty when his attention was distracted again by movement on the streets below him.
People had begun to emerge from their homes, emerging not in the scattered groupings as they had the previous days, but emerging in great numbers in unison as if the entire city had been given a universal signal to do so. Floyd tore his field glasses out of their case and pressed them quickly to his eyes, but even without the benefit of their magnification, Floyd could tell their numbers included men, women, and children, white folks and black folks, the whole population. Together they all began to converge on a central location, walking proudly with their heads held high, as if to church on Sunday morning, to the remains of the Lemonpatch, and slowly forming a ring around the damage Floyd and his cannons had created.
Floyd and his men looked on in disbelief as the ring was closed, the whole sorry lot of them joining hands and facing inwards towards the destruction. Then, and only then, a single man emerged from the crowd, carrying a long pole in his hand, and began to make his way towards the center of their circle. He picked his way carefully through the rubble of the Lemonpatch, progressing steadily towards the largest of the piles of stone and wood, and then gingerly began to climb it until he had found steady footing at its very top. Planting the pole he had brought with him in the debris beside his feet, he shook and spun it gently to allow the fabric which had been wrapped around it to unfurl and hang free. A quick gust of wind caught it and flattened it against the breeze, revealing it as the torn and battered flag which had started the whole affair.
Son of a bitch, Floyd muttered softly to himself and wondered how they were ever going to win this war.
+ + +
“Floyd” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/shermans-march
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