The Better Angels of Our Nature (48 page)

While Sherman kept Grant up to date with his movements, Grant sent word of Vicksburg. On the twenty-fifth over two thousand pounds of gunpowder buried under the Rebel positions at the Third Louisiana Redan was detonated. Logan’s division went plunging forward with fixed bayonets. The fighting was desperate, hand to hand, the worst kind. The two-pound howitzers in “Fort Ransom” that the Vermonter himself had personally helped to drag into position did their duty, blazing away as Logan’s men went forward. All in all the assault was another failure. At four in the afternoon of the following day, Logan’s men retreated from the Rebel fort and all fell quiet once more.

News was sporadic from other areas of the war. Rosecrans had pushed Bragg across the Tennessee River in the direction of Chattanooga. Hooker was groping around in the dark for Lee’s army. Then on the twenty-seventh, President Lincoln relieved him of his command. Contrary to popular belief, it was not John Reynolds who was to replace him, but Major General George Meade. It seemed that Meade would have little time to get over the shock of being made commander. It was said every Rebel in the area was converging on Gettysburg.

The booming of the Federal cannons bombarding Vicksburg could be heard at Bear Creek. But at midday on July 3, the booming suddenly ceased and the telegraph lines between Sherman and Grant hummed like a swarm of maddened bees. The reason? Unconditional Surrender Grant had sent Pemberton a letter proposing an armistice, a copy of which Grant sent to Sherman, who replied,

I have your despatch. Telegraph me the moment you have Vicksburg in possession and I will secure all the crossings of Big Black and move to Jackson or Canton—If you are in Vicksburg Glory Hallelujah the best fourth of July since 1776. Of course we must not rest idle only don’t let us brag too soon. Will order my troops at once to occupy the forks of Big Black and await with anxiety your further answer.

Sherman paced outside his tent and in due course Grant responded.

I want Johnston broken up as effectually as possible, and roads destroyed—When we go in I want you to drive Johnston from the Mississippi Central railroad; destroy bridges as far as Grenada with your cavalry, and do the enemy all the harm possible. You can make your own arrangements and have all the troops of my command except one corps—McPherson’s say. I must have some troops to send to Banks, to use against Port Hudson.

It wasn’t until seven the following evening that the eagerly anticipated news came through. Jesse, sent to the telegraph wagon to wait, ran back to Sherman as fast as she could. Pemberton had accepted Grant’s terms. Men leapt out of their trenches at Vicksburg. Sherman’s men, there on Big Black, cheered also, but it was a terrible shame, after all, they, like their commander, had contributed so much to the final fall of the city, yet were unable to be there to enjoy it.

Sherman wrote to Grant,

My Dear General: The telegraph has just announced to me that Vicksburg is ours; its garrison will march out, stack arms, and return within their lines as prisoners of war, and that you will occupy the city only with such troops as you have designated in orders. I can hardly contain myself.

He would now go after Johnston.

The pursuit of Joseph Johnston, who had rushed his army back into the Mississippi capital on hearing of Pemberton’s surrender, was a nightmare, and well described as such, since the daytime heat was so intense that Sherman ordered his men to march at night and rest during the day. Water was scarce, men had only what they carried in their canteens. Johnston had ordered kerosene poured into wells, pumps broken, and horses, dogs, mules, driven into the streams and shot, to be left there polluting the water. The rancid smell followed Sherman’s men all the way to Jackson over dusty roads toward a powerful enemy.

By the tenth of the month, Sherman had reached the Mississippi capital. For the next two days, he ordered the city bombarded. As the Ohioan observed, listening to his twenty-pounder Parrott guns, “I can make the town pretty hot to live in!” and he did. Cannons roared at five-minute intervals from four different batteries, night and day. In a forty-eight-hour period it was estimated that Sherman’s artillery had discharged three thousand shells into the city, now all but engulfed in a pall of choking black smoke that hung there, a giant cloud of doom, presaging the inevitable outcome.

Meanwhile his cavalry was not idle. They broke up railroads, burned locomotives, destroyed the telegraphs, bridges, and ferries. They ripped up railroads, brought destruction to farms and plantations, to fields and smokehouses. Cattle and hogs, sheep and poultry, anything that grew and ate, bleated or snorted or clucked, was descended upon by willing hands, and either strangled on the spot and stuffed into gunnysacks or led away to be slaughtered later. Before the new corn was a foot high, it was “harvested” and thrown into wagons to be fed to mules and horses.

On the third day of the siege, news reached them that Port Hudson had finally fallen.

This made Sherman even more impatient. “If Johnston breaks and runs,” he told his commanders, “pursuit would be impossible in this unbearable heat, men and horses would perish in days. If he moves across Pearl River, and makes good speed, I will let him go.”

On the sixteenth, in the dead of night, Johnston did retreat across the Pearl River. Sherman’s men captured all of his guns and five hundred prisoners. Then they poured into Jackson, and for the second time in three months, they set about punishing the town, plundering, burning, and stealing. When a group of soldiers broke into a tobacco warehouse Jesse was unashamedly and aggressively in the front rank. Small and swift, like a rabbit, she tore through the aromatic-smelling building ahead of her fellow looters, filled her hat to the brim with the precious leaf, stuffed it inside her jacket and vanished before the provost guard arrived to round up the culprits.

Occupied twice by Johnston’s men in retreat and twice by Sherman’s in pursuit, Jackson’s was a sad fate, but one brought about not by Sherman, but her erstwhile defenders. Four days after this last occupation by his men the Ohioan was able to write Grant, “Jackson is one mass of charred ruins, terrible to contemplate. We have desolated the land for 30 miles.”

Ever a man of profound contradiction, he then set about feeding the inhabitants.

Their last evening at Jackson brought dispatches from Grant. James McPherson was to be military governor of Vicksburg. Sherman’s earlier mood of “high feather” was replaced by one of gloom, bordering on self-pity. He had expected that job. He had wanted to do there what he had done at Memphis, bring the citizens back into the Union.

“Sherman is always in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said as Jesse cleared away his untouched supper. “Vicksburg capitulates and I am nowhere near. Let someone else follow Johnston. I’ve written to Brooks Brothers of New York to send me two coats and two pants, sweat and dust have made my clothes shabby.” He stuck out his long leg to show her. “And the bushes have made me ragged below the knee. I took the opportunity of ordering you one jacket and one pair of pants. You may pay me out of your next poker winnings and don’t bother denying that you gamble.”

“Thank you, sir. May I say something?”

“If I say no will it stop you?”

“Without you Vicksburg would never have been captured. Grant knows it. You gave every ounce of energy, strength, and determination to making the seemingly impossible possible. Without you and brigade commanders like Thomas Ransom, without loyal and brave men like Admiral Porter, Grant would still be digging ditches on the wrong side of the river.”

Satisfied with his work, Sherman started his troops back to Big Black, troops who were anticipating nothing more than a short furlough and a long look at loved ones they hadn’t seen for years.

“Wonderful news—” The surgeon was leaning against the tree in shirt and pants, one leg crossed over the other, his forage cap with the broken visor sunk low over his brow, his thumbs hooked around his frayed suspenders. He was watching Jesse groom her horse. “—Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Gettysburg—surely it’ll all be over soon?” There was more hope than certainty in his voice.

After so many disasters, under so many incompetent commanders, it was almost impossible to believe that the Army of the Potomac had met and beaten Lee’s army at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Lee retreated from Gettysburg on July 4, the day after the conclusion of the fierce fighting. Then after Mr. Lincoln had announced it to the country as “a great success to the cause of the Union,” Meade had gone and spoiled it by not pursuing Lee, trapped on the wrong side of the Potomac by swollen waters, finally destroying that army and, in conjunction with Vicksburg and Port Hudson, bringing about the end of the rebellion. For Sherman the battle had brought a personal sorrow. His good friend John Reynolds had been killed on the first day by a sharpshooter.

“Meade should have gone after Lee,” Jesse said.

“The way Sherman went after Johnston?”

She shifted the curry comb from right to left hand and went on brushing the animal’s flanks. “You’re the one usually voting for us all to stay home and knit. Maybe you didn’t notice how the men were collapsing with heatstroke? They’ve been marching and fighting for seven months. They’re exhausted.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a surgeon. Yes, the men are exhausted, all right. It must be all that destruction they heaped on Jackson.”

Jesse gave him that look.

“I’m entitled to my opinion,” he said defensively. Then he remembered he was here to get closer to her, not to alienate her even further. He frowned suddenly. “Hey, where have I seen that horse before? goddamn it—can’t be—it looks just like the horse you rode that day at Pittsburg Landing.”

That was just what Sherman had said. But it was the very same horse, Quicksand by name and shifting sands by nature. One morning Sherman had told her she needed a horse to match her rank. Before Shiloh, he had promised that this palomino would be hers when she became an officer. Now the promise was fulfilled. Only no one believed it.

“Have you had any letters from Major Coopersmith?” Jesse stopped to ask this, leaning on the saddle.

“No—” the surgeon said quietly, shaking his head. “He’s too busy with the wounded, I guess.”

“I’m sure that’s true.” She went back to grooming her horse.

“Have you heard from Sir Ransom?”

She came around to the front of the horse, rinsed the cloth in the cool water, squeezed out the excess moisture, and used it to wash the horse’s face and eyes.

“Is it true what the newspaper reporters are saying, that Sherman’s going to march on Chattanooga or Atlanta?”

Sherman’s new fear was that Washington would send either him or Grant east. He had predicted they would be in Mobile in October and Georgia by Christmas and they were now his favored moves. Cartwright watched her using her currycomb on the horse’s flanks. Her new uniform was already beginning to look shabby, though it fitted better. There was something so inexpressibly attractive and touching about her boyish form and short red hair, the sculptured jaw, and of course, that cleft in the thrusting chin. Evidently, she was in a less talkative mood this morning.

“I’ve been thinking about my father,” he said into the summer afternoon silence, swatting a fly from his face. “About what you once told me—about him being proud of me. I just don’t believe the dead watch us, that’s all.”

“The dead that we have loved are inside of us, all around us, in our hearts and thoughts, in our memories, they share our joys and pain.” She stopped brushing. “Your father is with you.”

“Did you say you haven’t heard from Ransom?”

“Look,” Jesse rounded on him, fire in her eyes. “If you’re trying to find out what’s going on between General Ransom and me you can stop worrying. I have neither seen nor heard from him since we left Vicksburg. I lost my way. I made a mistake. Now it’s over with.” She tossed the wet rag into the bucket. “However, if you think it makes any difference to our relationship, you’d best think again. You and I are true friends, but if you want to keep my friendship you’ll have to give up this…this—” she made a dismissive gesture with her hand—“ridiculous dream of us sitting on the back porch of your house after the war. Because that’s just what it is,
a dream
! Your dream, not mine. You have to accept that, otherwise you can find yourself another whiskey supplier.”

“Is that all you think you mean to me?”

“I know what I mean to you. I’ve tried to avoid meaning that to you since the moment we met. But I tell you now, Doctor, make your choice, friendship or nothing.”

“Everyone’s got a dream, Jesse, even you. What’s the point of living if you can’t have a dream?” Cartwright was staring at her as if she was someone he’d never seen before. All trace of emotion had vanished from her face. He’d heard it all before, the threats to cease their association, but this time he couldn’t help fearing she really meant it. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach by that crazy horse of hers. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said quietly, after a moment’s strained silence.

“
I do,
” she said emphatically.

Something died inside of him. He sunk down onto the ground. “Okay,” he murmured.

“Okay,” she echoed with a jerk of her head, as if putting her voice to a verbal contract.

“Am I allowed to know why you and Ransom—?” He ceased because her expression told him to drop the subject—permanently.

She caught up the canteen from where it hung on the branch of the tree, removed the stopper, and handed it to him. Then she sat down beside him.

“Thanks,” he said and drank. His mouth was dry and his hands were sweating. “Can I tell you something?” Jesse nodded. “I can diagnose erysipelas with my eyes closed; perform the most completed amputation with one hand tied behind my back. At medical school I could relate by heart the properties of a thousand drugs and dissect a frog so exactly you would think his guts were a work of art—Jesus, I ranked so high in my surgical anatomy class they marked me separate to the other students so they wouldn’t get disheartened—but try as I might I can’t understand human nature.”