The Better Angels of Our Nature (30 page)

“Because General Sherman doesn’t
want
me to go home,” Jesse said, smiling at him.

Cartwright threw his head back and laughed. “Looks like old Jacob ain’t the only one who’s been imbibing lamp oil.”

14

Wag the world how you will

There had never been, in the whole history of Pitts Tucker’s Landing, such feverish activity.

The injured were being loaded onto steamers for hospitals on the Ohio River, at Evansville, New Albany, Louisville, Saint Louis, and Cincinnati.

For some this would be their last journey, but it would be more bearable now because of the presence of physicians, nurses, medical orderlies, Sisters of Charity, and agents of the Sanitary Commission, all steaming up the Tennessee, their ships filled with medical supplies, their hearts overflowing with tenderness and mercy.

While the men organized, the women, mostly matrons, displayed no-nonsense manners tempered with kindness as they tended the wounded and read from the Bible. The civilian surgeons applied a dressing and then disappeared. Unfortunately, the women with the Bibles
didn’t
disappear, much to Cartwright’s ire. As he was often heard to say now, he had nothing against women as nurses, it was the demanding, dictating, counterordering; the purity and self-righteous piety, he couldn’t take. These sharp-eyed creatures had seen him swigging from the bottle he kept in his apron. Now they watched his every move. On and off duty.

“Not so very charitable” was Jacob’s opinion of these charity workers.

That morning charity was the last thing on William Sherman’s mind.

“Pestiferous newspaper fellows, they don’t fight, they merely hang about the enlisted men searching for malicious stories and rumors they can print in their scurrilous rags!” He was talking to members of his staff as he stood outside his headquarters tent, watching a small group of these “pestiferous fellows” scribbling into their notebooks, surrounded by soldiers only too willing to tell a story, be it truth or fiction, for a cheap cigar. “Look at them, spies, every one of them, catering to the crassest appetite of our people.
By God,
I feel a loathing toward these people.” A loathing that had taken root in San Francisco in ’54, when exaggerated newspaper reports had helped start a run on the financial institutions of that fledgling city, eventually ending Sherman’s unsuitable, troublesome career in banking. That same disgust had flared up again in Kentucky, when those accusations of “insanity” had appeared on the front pages. The Ohioan started forward, striking his riding crop against his thigh with his left hand.

“Here we go—” murmured Captain Jackson. “—Now the darn fur’ll fly. It’ll be fricasseed reporter for supper.”

“Get away from here.” Sherman marched directly into the group, waving his stick into the reporters’ astonished faces, scattering the soldiers, as well as the reporters. “Go on, I say, get away from here, before I have you all shot!” He tried to drive them off like dogs, but even dogs can protest their treatment, and these particular dogs could do more than just bark.

“You have no right to talk to us that way, General Sherman, we’re just doing our jobs,” came the whinging protest.

“The people are anxious to know what’s happening on the battlefield,” called out another, as he retreated swiftly from the inexorably advancing division commander with the wild eyes and the energy of a whirling dervish.

“Yes sir, is it not our business to tell the truth of what we see and hear?” demanded another, waving his chewed pencil.

“We do not want the truth told about things,” Sherman stated emphatically, circling this last reporter like a predator trying to decide if he will devour his prey on the spot, or drag it off to a lair for a midnight snack. “We do not want the enemy any better informed about what’s going on here than he is!” He tapped the man’s notebook with his stick. “You write your stories telling how many troops we have deployed here, when and where we shall be moving, and you print them in your scurrilous rags for
our enemies to read.
You give aid and comfort to the enemy, is that not clear to you!”

“You already have enemy spies in your camp, General!” said this reporter, so keen to give the public
and
the enemy this elusive thing called “truth.”

“Yes
sir, you sir
!” Sherman thrust his crop up under the man’s nose. “You newspaper reporters are the biggest enemies of this army, libeling our best officers, telling filthy lies about the men who fought the hardest, and praising those who ran away. This hue and cry against General Grant is scandalous, all wrong!” He swung around to address them all. “The real truth, if you have the nerve to print it, is that the private soldiers in battle left the ranks, ran away, and raised these false issues and
you,
hiding on the boats, believed them! The political leaders dare not lay the blame where it belongs lest they lose the votes of their constituents. It is far easier to blame the generals than the sons and fathers and brothers who vote!”

“They’re writin’ it all down—” Andy whispered to Marcus as they stood and watched. “—His words’ll be all over the damn papers in a few days.”

“The politicians are afraid of the men,” Sherman was lecturing, “but I’ll speak the truth and I believe there are still honest men enough to believe me!”

“Sir, can we quote you?”

“You quote me, sir. It would offer me real pleasure to personally shoot one or two of you Cincinnati boys and save the government the money.”

It was easy to spot the Buckeye scribblers, for they all, as one man, took a step to the rear, while the general requested that Captain Van Allen pass him his sidearm.

“We’re trying to get an idea of how it feels to be a soldier,” explained the reporter who was “just doing his job,” a smart-looking man in civilian clothes, well-fed and well-watered, judging by the full cheeks glowing under a shining brandy hue.

Sherman confronted him square on, for he knew no other way. “If you
want
to get a better understanding of how it feels to be a soldier why don’t you pick up a musket and
fight
instead of asking your endless questions?” He marched to a nearby stand, snatched up a musket, and tossed it at the reporter, who tried to catch it before it clattered to the ground, the stock striking his foot. There was laughter, which Sherman curtailed with a wave of his arm. “You’re cowards, the whole damn lot of you,” he spat with utter contempt, “cowards and fawning sycophants. If this war were left to you and the politicians, Varina Davis would be taking inventory in the Executive Mansion right now. Make no mistake”—he raised the Colt to eye level, his clear, resonant voice booming out—“if you’re still clinging to the edges of my camp by nightfall like some pestilent vermin, I’ll shoot you myself and save the country the trouble of hanging you as spies!” There was silence as he turned on his heel. “Same game as Bull Run,” he asserted, going back into his tent. “Men run away, won’t obey their officers, won’t listen to threats, remonstrance, and prayers of their superiors, but after the danger is passed they raise false issues to cover their infamy. Same damn game as Bull Run.”

For once Sherman was not the target of their malicious campaign to discredit a Union general. He was described as “dashing along the line, encouraging his troops everywhere by his presence, and exposing his own life with the same freedom with which he demanded their offer of theirs.” But no flattering reports of his own role on April 6 could calm him. In fact, this sycophantic rubbish made him angrier.

“Today I’m the hero of the people. Tomorrow they’ll be attacking me again. Next month Grant will be their hero and I’ll be accused of insanity. Vox populi, vox
humbug
! Newspapers now rule, and for one to prosper one must ignore the old government and acknowledge the new Power of the Press.”

Most reporters had printed stories of the battle so full of errors they might have been reporting a completely different battle. Grant’s name was being maligned in the capital and the newspapers had gone to town on him, like hyenas tearing apart a half-dead sheep. He was drunk, absent for most of the battle, and when he did arrive he stood about confused and afraid. Buell and McClernand had wasted no time in giving good accounts of themselves. “It is our opinion,” wrote one reporter, after interviewing Buell, “that while Grant had allowed his men to be bayoneted in their beds, only General Buell emerges from this slaughter as a hero.” And McClernand, in his battlefield report to his friend Abe Lincoln, had written, “My division as usual has borne the brunt. We pushed back the continuous Rebel onslaught by repeatedly changing front.”

Sherman sat down at his desk and stared hard for a moment at his injured hand. When he looked at the hand, he thought of the girl, and when he thought of the girl, his face got very red, his eyes glittered, and he got mad all over again. The fingers had stiffened almost to the point where he could no longer flex them without severe pain. He looked up at Jackson and said quietly, “Find
her.
” He was holding hard to the desk as though he could barely contain his rage, and he might be tempted to fling it and the papers across the tent. “It’s time. Bring her to me
at once.
Frog-march her here if you have to, under armed guard. Take a company of Missouri cavalry, the meanest set of men you can find and place her under arrest. Lash her to the back of a horse. If Dr. Cartwright tries to prevent you, place
him
under arrest and the Dutchman, place them both under arrest. But find her and bring her here to me
now,
do you understand, Captain Jackson?”

“Yes, sir, Gen’al—” Andy said smartly, his hand snapping up to salute. “I just about got the drift,” he muttered, leaving the tent. “Though I reckon that’s overdoin’ it, even for that sneekin’ lyin’ little female.”

“The gen’al sent me for the girl,” the aide told the surgeon, who was outside in the bright April sunshine checking the latest batch of wounded before they were transferred to the wagons for the short journey to the Landing.

“What girl?” Cartwright gently patted the soldier’s foot. “How’s the leg feel, Sergeant?”

“Still there, Doc, thanks to you.” With feverish eyes, now swelling with tears, and abruptly dropping the forced cheer, the soldier reached up and clutched tightly onto Cartwright’s hand. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you, you were the only one who—”

Without waiting for the soldier to finish Cartwright snatched back his hand and moved to the next litter. “When did the orderly last change this dressing?” he asked the patient sitting against the tree with a bloodied, bandaged stump on the end of the arm held across the young officer’s knee that Jackson could smell long before he reached the surgeon’s side. The patient didn’t know. Cartwright crouched to inspect the dressing more closely. “Orderly!” The boy who was supposed to be assisting him that morning came slouching over. “When did you last change this dressing?”

“Kain’t ra’tly re-call,” admitted the orderly, blinking at the stump.

“You
kain’t ra’tly re-call
?” Cartwright repeated, shading his eyes from the sun.

“Nope,” the orderly confirmed crisply.

“Jacob!” Cartwright bellowed before turning back to the boy and saying bitterly, “Get away from me. Go way, go wash bedpans, that’s all you’re fit for, you dried-up piece of cow dung.” He drove a trembling hand through his untidy hair and let rip with a string of curses.

“The girl, Doc,” Jackson said, keeping his voice low, trying not to breathe too deeply, in fact trying not to breathe at all, or look at the green and brown ooze on the soldier’s filthy dressing. “The gen’al sent me for the girl.”

“So you said—what girl might that be? I’m not aware of any females around here.” He nodded toward the female representatives of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions moving between the litters with fresh fruit and comforting passages from the scriptures. “Unless you’re referring to those Bible-thumping old biddies.”

“Come on now, Doc, don’t insult my intelligence.”

“I wish to hell you’d have Sherman come out here and see what we have to work with—”