The Invisible Line (20 page)

Federal cavalry rode in hot pursuit just miles behind. Gunboats patrolled the Ohio River, and tens of thousands of militia volunteers made “every bush an ambush.” The rebels' horses wore out and had to be replaced every day. But General Morgan and his men never dreamed that their raid was doomed. They figured they could always outrun the enemy. They rode into the southeastern hills and headed for the West Virginia border, confident they would cross in the shallows near Wheeling. Instead, the river was running high, and on July 19 the brigade found itself facing a flotilla of gunboats with deadly artillery, with ten thousand federal cavalry and infantry closing in. While some men succeeded in crossing into West Virginia, seven hundred were captured. Gibson, General Morgan, and several hundred others escaped the trap and turned north, riding over steep hills to elude their pursuers. A week later, ninety miles south of Lake Erie, Morgan surrendered, nowhere left to ride.
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The general and his officers, Hart Gibson among them, rode by steamer to Cincinnati, then by train to Columbus, jeered by crowds along the way. Instead of being sent to a camp for prisoners of war, they were locked up in the state penitentiary. As guards and inmates watched, Morgan's raiders were stripped naked and scrubbed by convicts with horsebrushes, their hair and beards shorn. On behalf of the men, Gibson wrote to Ohio's governor in protest over being “subjected to the ordinary discipline of convicts.” The punishment was harsh, particularly the long stretches of solitary confinement, but a gentleman warrior could endure such hardships. What galled Gibson was the notion that other captives were living in much better conditions. Thinking like the lawyer he once had been, he came to believe that equal treatment was the hallmark of fairness. “Who are we,” he wrote, “how different from ordinary men, or of what crime are we guilty, that we are put beyond the pale of civilized warfare, the utmost limit of law overleaped to inflict upon us as a punishment at variance with and abhorrent to the moral sense of mankind?”
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O
.S.B. WALL ADVANCED SLOWLY through the heat and dust. The hills of southeastern Ohio were simple country, a rolling progression of farmhouses, barns, orchards, and hedgerows, tens of thousands of sheep grazing on the hillsides, fields swirling with corn, flax, hay, and wheat at their late-summer heights. Wall was far from Oberlin. The area more resembled western Pennsylvania and the western Virginia counties that had opted to remain in the Union at the outset of the war, a border between plains and mountains, east and west, north and south. His brother-in-law John Mercer Langston had grown up in nearby Chillicothe, but Wall was more than a hundred miles away from any place that he knew well. He had to find his way directly from farm to farm and town to town; he could not rely on strangers to guide him.
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Just days earlier Morgan's raiders had swept through the area. When Wall began his travels, hundreds of the Confederate cavalrymen had been cornered and captured trying to cross the Ohio River into West Virginia, but General Morgan and a remnant of his men remained at large. The signs of recent terror abounded, from trees felled along the roads to burnt bridges and buildings.
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Even without the fighting, the area was torn by conflict. Virginians had settled the Ohio hills and were staunch Democrats. For decades before the war, they had opposed civil rights for blacks, whom they viewed as economic competition and political foes. When the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in 1831 that anyone who was more than half white had all of the rights of a white man, whites in southern Ohio refused to enroll blacks in white schools and stationed themselves at the polls on Election Day to challenge the blood quantum of dark-skinned voters. In court they insisted, despite settled law to the contrary, that one drop of black blood made a person black, that “the term white, as applied to persons, has . . . been . . . applied as expressive of the pure white race.” As late as 1851 southern Ohioans at the state's constitutional convention labeled as trespassers the tens of thousands of people of color who lived in their communities, presenting numerous proposals to restrict immigration and send blacks to Africa so that “this should be a State for the white man and the white man only.”
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When the South seceded, some southern Ohioans joined with Republicans to form a coalition Union Party, but many remained unapologetically opposed to the war. Their primary spokesman, Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham, supported secession, openly denounced Lincoln, and characterized the war as an illegal invasion that would establish black rule over whites. In 1861 the Ohio legislature banned marriage and sexual relations between the races and entertained petitions to expel black residents. As long as the Union's prospects for victory remained remote, supporters of Vallandigham—known as Copperheads or Butternuts—could find sympathetic ears. President Lincoln regarded them as serious threats to internal order. In May 1863 Vallandigham was tried by a military tribunal, sentenced to two years in prison for disloyalty and sympathy for the enemy, and then exiled across enemy lines on the president's orders. The following year Ohio's Democrats would nominate Vallandigham as their candidate for governor. In the hill counties the Butternuts were unintimidated, even energized, by recent events. Wearing pins that symbolized their political allegiances, they were spending the summer of 1863 breaking up Union Party meetings with fists and pointed pistols.
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Riding into unstable, contested country, following in the hot wake of Morgan's raid, Wall had a delicate task. Although he was not a soldier, his business was war. Where Confederate sympathizers abounded, Wall had come to recruit volunteers for a new Union regiment composed entirely of colored men. His mission represented everything the Butternuts were fighting. They did not simply fear black men with guns—they knew that black men in the military would have an unimpeachable claim to equal rights. From the war's outset, leaders of the race had sought to raise colored regiments for precisely this reason. “Once let the black man ... get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pockets,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”
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Northern politicians understood that allowing blacks to enlist in the army would change the debate over civil and political rights forever. Initially, it was too radical a move for states that recognized blacks as free but not equal. Northerners from President Lincoln down suggested that blacks were too cowardly, passive, or feminine to fight—that their presence on the battlefield would undermine army morale and would destroy any prospect of peace with the Confederacy. In Ohio, where Republicans were working to keep Unionist Democrats in their governing coalition, the issue seemed impossible. In 1862 John Mercer Langston offered to raise “a thousand and one” colored men for a regiment. In a face-to-face encounter Ohio's Governor David Tod humiliated him. “Do you not know, Mr. Langston, that this is a
white man's
government; that white men are able to defend and protect it, and that to enlist a negro soldier would be to drive every white man out of the service?” said Governor Tod. “When we want you colored men we will notify you.”
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By the end of 1862, however, after nearly two years of defeat on the battlefield and with manpower shortages looming, the notion of blacks serving in the military seemed less sinister and preposterous. When Massachusetts sought colored volunteers for its 54th Infantry Regiment in early 1863, Governor Tod asked Langston if he would lead the recruiting effort among black Ohioans. O.S.B. Wall joined him in working for the Massachusetts 54th, and together they enlisted hundreds of men. Wall's two younger half brothers, John and Albert, joined, and at the very moment O.S.B. Wall was heading toward southeastern Ohio, they were charging Fort Wagner in South Carolina.
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Not yet forty, Wall left his wife, three small children, and shoemaking business in Oberlin and moved to Columbus, where he coordinated the transportation of the Ohio volunteers to Massachusetts. After the 54th was filled, Langston and Wall recruited troops for the Massachusetts 55th. On June 15, 1863, just after Wall received word that the 55th was full, four dozen recruits appeared at his office. Rather than sending them back to their homes, Wall found beds for them in Columbus. He walked to the statehouse and waited for an audience with Governor Tod, urging him to consider the forty-eight recruits as the first members of an Ohio regiment. Tod telegraphed the War Department, and the next day Secretary of War Stanton authorized the creation of a new regiment, the Fifth United States Colored Troops.
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While Wall masterminded the logistics of getting all the recruits to the muster, he also traveled extensively, making direct appeals to black communities across the state and recruiting three hundred men. At the end of July he rode eighty miles southeast to the university town of Athens and by early August was holding meetings along the West Virginia border. Although many in the area supported slavery and secession, had long opposed the war, and blamed blacks for the suffering that it had caused them, Wall kept riding. The threat of violence did not deter him, nor did it intimidate his volunteers. Everywhere he went, he collected commitments to fight for the Union: five men in Jefferson County, two in Harrison County, another six in Belmont County. He shared the stage at large rallies with prominent Ohioans and stood alone at quieter, less public gatherings. His message was unchanged. Joining the fight would “elevat[e] the race from degradation to equality.” It was more than a matter of simply “conferring the boon of freedom on their fellow men of the South”; for all blacks, North and South, military service would change the very meaning of freedom. “If the colored citizens of Ohio are such men as they aspire to be,” he said, “now is the time to show it.”
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A
T TWILIGHT RANDALL GIBSON could look down from the breastworks at the dark forms in the fields below. They were small, indistinct mounds mostly, but occasionally a hand or leg jutted into the air in agonized silhouette. Just minutes before, in the final light of day, the mounds had been recognizably human, bodies mired in cold mud, snapped, disemboweled, blood running in the hard rain. They were still clothed; Gibson's soldiers had not had time to strip them naked, as many Confederates had done with enemy corpses the night before. It was difficult to make out their individual features, but earlier that afternoon they had been breathing and alive, young men from Indiana charging up the steep rise by the hundreds.
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As the light faded on December 16, 1864, Gibson could allow himself a moment of relief: the Army of Tennessee's right flank had held. But his struggle was only beginning. The army's left and center were falling in a sickening cascade. Within moments, it seemed, Union soldiers were behind his position. Confederate soldiers on all sides were dropping their rifles and sprinting “frightened and routed” for the Franklin Pike, their only path of escape.
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Three weeks earlier, while the Union army under William Tecumseh Sherman was marching from Atlanta to Savannah, the Army of Tennessee had headed the other way, northward into Union-occupied territory. For months, as Sherman advanced into Georgia, the rebels had been in retreat, their morale battered by the fall of Atlanta and Lincoln's reelection. Instead of continuing to stand in Sherman's way, General John Bell Hood believed it was time for a grand offensive. With forty thousand men, the second-strongest Confederate force aimed to take Nashville, move through Kentucky to Cincinnati, and even threaten Chicago. In the alternative, they would drive east through Tennessee, raise tens of thousands of additional volunteers, cross the Cumberland Gap, and reinforce Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. President Jefferson Davis himself had declared the offensive the beginning of a final victory for the Confederacy. Randall Gibson was pleased to be moving forward again. After so much bitter defeat in Georgia, after half his men died in a single charge, 480 in one hour, Gibson described his soldiers as “a defeated army.” Perhaps Hood's lofty plans would reverse what seemed an inevitable decline.
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At the end of 1864 the Gibsons were all but a defeated family. Randall's brother Hart had just been released after more than a year in captivity. He had lost everything; Union officials confiscated his plantation, Hartland. His main contribution to the war effort had been helping his general escape from the Ohio Penitentiary in November 1863. Hart's wife had sent him boots with a hollow heel stuffed with cash, funds that allowed John Hunt Morgan to flee south and fight another nine months before being ambushed and shot dead. After a brief, undistinguished career as an artillery lieutenant, Claude Gibson, Hart and Randall's brother, had died in 1863 of consumption, the same disease that had killed their mother. That same year their sister Sarah's husband died after a long illness, leaving her a young widow with three children and vast estates in Union-occupied Kentucky that were worse than worthless—they were expensive, overgrown, and unproductive, and she had no means of supporting her family. McKinley Gibson, a younger brother and Randall's aide-de-camp, was also battling consumption; before invading Tennessee, Randall ordered him back to Mississippi for his health.
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Their father, Tobias, home on the family plantations in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, was also in crisis. In late 1862 the Union army had occupied southern Louisiana and confiscated almost all his horses and mules, wagons, livestock, and corn. Tobias Gibson noticed an immediate change in his labor force. After failing to take Randall's advice to move the best slaves to Texas for safekeeping, he found “many of the negroes led astray by designing persons, believ[ing] that the plantations & everything on them belong to them, the negroes.” “They quit work, go & come when they see fit,” Tobias and three neighbors wrote the Union commander. “Negroes in numbers from one plantation to an other at all hours night & day—They travel on the railroad—They congregate in large numbers on deserted plantations—All these things are done against the will & in defiance of the orders of their masters . . . In a word we are in a State of anarchy.”
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