The Invisible Line (21 page)

Although the Union army insisted that blacks stay on their plantations and work under contract, the Gibson family plantations on Bayou Black were ruined. Levees broke; the sugar crop failed; caterpillars ate the cotton; and many of Tobias's slaves answered the repeated calls for colored soldiers. “The blacks are getting worse every day & at the end of this year I think they will be intolerable,” the old man wrote in 1864. On a broader level, he railed against what he saw as the perversion of “American ideas of liberty” in “this Negro War.” Where once he had expressed sympathy for his slaves, now he warned his children that a Union victory would mean one thing above all else: equality with blacks. “As far as I know the white children are to grow up in ignorance or mix in the same cabin with the Negro with the same Yankee Marm for the teacher!” he wrote. “With the prevailing tendency to fanaticism at the North I would not be at all surprised if ‘miscegenation' became the fashion as well as the Sentiment of those people.”
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While his family was suffering, Randall Gibson thrived in the war. As colonel of his Louisiana regiment, he had become not only a technically competent officer but a gallant and beloved warrior, someone his men would name their children after. From the Hornet's Nest at Shiloh to Hell's Half Acre at Murfreesboro, to Perryville and Chickamauga, his regiment came to be regarded as some of the Confederacy's most disciplined and fearless fighters. Gibson developed a taste for “a magnificent battle. The country entirely open. The contending hosts plainly to be seen. The fire of batteries + infantry—the wounded + slain—the charge + retreat—the triumphant Confederate yell—the confusion in the enemy's ranks—the flying Regiments—the riderless horses.” Under murderous fire he charged ahead, planted flags in the enemy breastworks, rallied and regrouped, and inspired his men to fight again and again. In early 1864, as he was falling back to defend Atlanta, Gibson was promoted to brigadier general.
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For years Randall Gibson had complained about incompetent generals. He had fought under Braxton Bragg, his onetime neighbor in Louisiana sugar country, a spiteful, vainglorious fool. During the defense of Atlanta, Joseph Johnston seemed to know only retreat and defeat. For the Nashville campaign, however, John Bell Hood would command the Army of Tennessee. Gibson had thrilled at the prospect of mounting Hood's offensive strategy. When the army decamped from Florence, Alabama, on November 20, 1864, and headed north for Nashville, Gibson had had no doubt that great victories awaited. As his brother McKinley wrote, the soldiers were veterans, well fed and outfitted for winter, amply supplied with “coffee, whiskey and ordnance and ammunition.” By contrast, it was an article of faith that Sherman's March to the Sea would be the ruin of the Union army. “We now look forward to his defeat as certain and his surrender as probable. He is harassed night and day,” wrote McKinley Gibson. “The fruits of four long years of terrible war will be lost to the Yankees, and the flags of the Confederates will again wave in triumph over the strongholds of'62. How much we have to be thankful for!”
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Marching north for nine days through Columbia to Spring Hill, Tennessee, the Confederate army positioned itself to shatter the Union forces below Nashville. On the night of November 29, General Hood ordered an attack, but the order was never communicated. While the army and its officers slept, thousands of Union troops accomplished a silent evacuation that they could only describe as miraculous. The next day, as if to atone for his army's inertia, Hood ordered a frontal assault on a fortified Union position at Franklin, fifteen miles south of Nashville. After five hours of fighting, the Union forces retreated, but Hood's army could not claim victory. Nearly seven thousand Confederate soldiers were dead or wounded, including fifteen generals and fifty-four regimental commanders. Held in reserve at Franklin, Gibson's brigade marched toward Nashville at nearly full strength, but the rest of the Army of Tennessee was in no position to take the city. Arriving on December 1, they formed a series of trenches and fortifications in a three-mile arc in the hills just south of town and waited for the Union army to attack. After two frozen weeks of isolated skirmishes, the Union army advanced with overwhelming force on December 15. After a day of fighting, the Confederate forces retreated two miles and dug in for another pounding.
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Rebel soldiers cut down the trees on Peach Orchard Hill and hauled them about forty feet below the Confederate fortifications, to slow the inevitable enemy attack and keep the charging soldiers under fire for as long as possible. All morning on December 16, Union cannons popped and crackled, and shells pushed through the air. By early afternoon, a Union brigade had begun its advance. They marched across open fields and up the hill, but their strong lines grew ragged and pocked as Confederate cannons took out entire clusters of troops. From the hilltop Gibson's men fired their rifles and in ten minutes killed eighty-three men and wounded hundreds. After the first wave broke and ran, a second began. The Union soldiers marched over the bodies of their comrades, only to be slaughtered themselves. Finally a third wave tried climbing the hill. The closest they got was seventy-five yards. Gibson estimated that that afternoon his men killed two hundred outright and wounded between seven and nine hundred more.
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Just to Gibson's right, the Union soldiers came within feet of the Confederate line. The rebels had held their fire, waiting until the enemy was close enough to massacre—a deadly reception reserved for black troops. For two weeks these new Yankee soldiers had been skirmishing with the Confederate pickets, and whenever the rebels saw that their foes were black, they had timed their fire to be lethal. The Twelfth and Thirteenth U.S. Colored Troops were composed of former slaves who had never been under fire before. As they marched up in tight formation, Peach Orchard Hill was eerily silent. When they were close enough to talk to, the Confederate line rose and blasted them. A Confederate officer commented that the Negro soldiers “gallantly dashed” forward “but . . . came only to die.” Still, the Union troops kept coming. When their color-bearer was killed, a comrade picked up the regimental flag. When he fell, another man took it. Five times the flag went down, and five times another soldier tried to carry the standard up to the Confederate breastworks. Throughout the bloodbath the Confederates displayed “coolness unexampled.” Only when the enemy finally retreated, leaving hundreds of corpses behind and a flag that had been presented to them “by the colored ladies of Murfreesboro,” did the rebel soldiers begin screaming for more blood. The sight of black soldiers had inspired “the intensest indignation,” wrote one soldier from Arkansas, “express[ing] itself in a way peculiarly ominous and yet quite natural for the ‘masters.'” The men wanted to charge down the hill and kill them all. “With great difficulty,” their commanding officer wrote, “I prevented my line from pursuing.”
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During the two-day Battle of Nashville, nearly a third of the Union dead and wounded fell on Peach Orchard Hill. But while the Confederates' right flank was busy fighting off the assaults, Union infantry and cavalry smashed the rest of their line. Thousands of rebels surrendered, while thousands more dropped their guns, abandoned cannons and wagons, and ran south. Finding themselves the rear guard of a shattered army column, just steps ahead of the enemy, Gibson and his men retreated from one skirmish after another, a cold, wet, filthy chaos of killing and being killed. A few miles south, on the banks of the Harpeth River, they were charged by five thousand men and surrounded by Union cavalry but shot their way clear. Three weeks later the rebel army reached Mississippi, staggering and starving and blood-soaked, barefoot, ragged, and freezing, about half its original strength.
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After one of the worst Confederate defeats in the war, Randall Gibson and his brigade headed south to Mobile, Alabama, as winter turned to spring, to help defend the city from a massive Union attack. Gibson took command of Spanish Fort, east of the city across Mobile Bay. As Union forces twenty thousand strong closed in, Gibson ordered his three thousand soldiers and several hundred black conscripts to dig trenches as quickly as they could—with few spades, picks, and axes at hand, they used any tool they could find. For two weeks they endured constant bombardment. Every day the Union lines neared. By nightfall on April 8, the enemy was beginning to breach Gibson's defenses, and Gibson's scouts reported the situation as hopeless. Without knowing it, the invading army had advanced behind their lines; in the morning they would realize their position and attack. Before they could, Gibson and his men escaped in the dead of night through tall grass and marsh, taking off their shoes and walking slowly so no one would hear them. Although Spanish Fort fell undefended, Gibson could describe the escape as one final victory.
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On April 9 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. After holding out for another month, the Confederacy's western forces surrendered. General Gibson stood before his men and told them to regret nothing about their “unselfish patriotism” and devotion to what he called the Confederacy's “eventful revolution.” As he issued paroles for his men, releasing them to their families, Gibson flatly denied that they had been defeated. Although he urged them to be “law-abiding, peaceable, and industrious” citizens, he did not tell them to forget the previous four years. “Your banners . . . were never lowered save over the bier of a comrade,” he said. “You have not surrendered, and will never surrender your self-respect and love of country.” Perhaps there were ways to keep fighting, without guns.
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T
HE SCABBARD FOR O.S.B. Wall's sword bore the words “God Speed the Right,” and there were days when they spoke the truth. In late March 1865, before he headed to South Carolina, the people of Oberlin gathered to see him off. A professor from the college addressed the crowd, remembering the day six years earlier when the U.S. government had indicted Wall for his role in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Now the same government was making him a captain in its army, the first regularly commissioned colored captain in the nation's history. The professor presented Wall with the sword—the town's antislavery faithful had raised eighty dollars for the magnificent weapon. Dressed in his officer's uniform, Wall said that he felt humbled by the joy they took in entrusting him with an awesome responsibility. As he looked out at the adoring crowd, black and white, it seemed as if his cause had already triumphed.
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Although Wall had been commissioned to help recruit newly freed men for the Union army, he arrived in South Carolina to join the 104th U.S. Colored Troops shortly before the dispatches arrived announcing Lee's surrender. It was a moment of singular joy and emotion—prayer, rejoicing, speeches, music, and fireworks. Many of the officers stationed in Beaufort, South Carolina, headed to Charleston to celebrate. At Fort Sumter the original American flag that had been lowered in the war's first battle exactly four years earlier flew again. “Now for the first time” it was “the black man's as well as the white man's flag,” wrote one Union officer. “Let traitors hereafter beware how they rebel against a good government.” In Citadel Square in Charleston, thousands of blacks gathered to pray and rejoice on April 15, 1865. Their children marched and sang, “We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree.”
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The victory seemed complete—it was a new day, as inevitable as the rising sun. Word had not reached Charleston that President Lincoln had been assassinated the night before, a devastating reminder that creating a free society would require continuous struggle. With no more recruiting work to do, Wall was detached to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, a new federal agency devoted to integrating former slaves into civil society. His commanding officer, General Rufus Saxton, was a Massachusetts Yankee who earlier in the war had led the effort to give freed slaves in the South Carolina Sea Islands small pieces of land that had been confiscated from Confederates. Wall revered Saxton as “a Christian Patriot,” “fearless,” “pure hearted,” and unfailingly “true to the Negro.” With Saxton overseeing affairs relating to freedpeople in South Carolina, Wall felt optimistic that right would prevail.
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Based in Charleston, living in a grand home that had been confiscated from a Confederate leader, Wall had the task of convincing freed slaves to work—as salaried employees—for their former masters. The Bureau had begun redistributing thousands of acres of confiscated property to the freedpeople in the summer of 1865, but President Andrew Johnson ordered almost all the land returned to its previous owners, a policy that Wall found dishonorable. Former slaves would not be able to work for themselves as farmers or have any independent source of wealth; they would have to survive as hirelings, dependent on large market forces that determined crop prices, the supply and demand for local labor, and the inclinations of white landowners. All the same, many Northern Republicans, radical abolitionists among them, viewed the ability to enter into employment contracts as the embodiment of freedom. Wall would help free people get “good offers” for work at “fair wages,” and when disputes arose on the job, he would keep the peace and “make an adjustment of [the] difficulty between parties.” In creating and enforcing new contractual relationships between blacks and whites, Wall was trying to establish a new way for former slaves and masters to relate to each other. His goal was “to do justice to the freedmen” while “do[ing] no injustice to white persons.”
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