Читать книгу Sharpsburg - Kent Gramm - Страница 7

I am a Rebel

Now, everyone is born a rebel or

a unionist. I wonder which you are.

Might could be, you aren’t what you think you are.

I was a Rebel and I’m still a Rebel.

I’m not ashamed to tell you what I was

and what I am. Some say the War is over

but I have yet to see the evidence.

We are still here. Sharpsburg is anything

but in the past. September Seventeenth

of Sixty-Two: the worst day of the War.

The thing went on another thirty months

and several times we could have won it back,

but the Confederacy was killed that day

along Antietam Creek in Maryland;

it’s just we didn’t know it for awhile.

That was one day—a day to wish undone,

if but the Good Lord worked that way. That day

the War became a war to free the slaves—

became so by old Abe Lincoln’s order.

Of course our institution was the war,

but be that as it may, I’m here to tell

you true: I didn’t enlist for slavery,

except I wasn’t about to permit

some damnyankee government, tell me what

exactly I might do and how and when.

If you were born with rights and property,

you wouldn’t give them up without a fight.

I did not join this fight for slavery

personally, but for the principle.

My household owned no servant property,

but would defend to the death a man’s right

to ownership, however rich or poor.

A lot of good it did us in the end.

I rue it all some days; on better days

I’d do it all again. A man must learn

there comes a time in every decent life

to fight Yankees, whatever form they come.

Possession might be nine-tenths of the law,

but Rights are all the law and what it’s for.

That is the truth. That is the Rebel truth.

So I will tell the truth and nothing but

the truth and many other things

to supplement the truth, so help me God.

Freedom

Freedom is the let-alone all of us

Americans receive when we are born,

a trust passed down from every Patriot

who left his home and family to die

in battle for the cause of Liberty.

Our word for this was Rights. For Rights we pledged

our lives, our liberties, and sacred honor

to the South. At bottom, we’d not be told,

right or wrong, what to do; and they

would just as soon kill every one of us

as let us go our way. Their righteousness

was such that they’d invent a new machine

to kill us with for every point of conscience

in their busy minds, for our property

offended them, was our liability.

They shouldered our responsibilities

because to them freedom was for someone

else, always someone else, whether children,

servants of their betters, posterity,

or anyone in need of fixing as they

saw fit. A man can’t live with such people.

It’s worse than having a churchgoing wife

who’s always better than you, and tells you.

Across the Potomac

The Old Man knew what he was doing. General

Robert E. Lee: the name still sets the heart

afire, and I would follow him again,

right or wrong, as I did in September

1862, the summer of our lives.

The Old Man ordered us across the river

because it was the only move he had.

The victories in Virginia had run

their course, and we could wait

to be destroyed—which happened, sure enough,

two summers and a winter later—or

we could turn the Federal army out

of its forts and dirt around Washington

and break them up this one last time for good.

We had sufficient men; don’t be deceived

by our reports of what befell us later:

a Southerner is hardly better than

a damnyankee if he cannot exaggerate

with honor, and face outrages, insults,

and near universal odds like a man.

The General was no fool: he took a good

fifty, sixty thousand up, the best men

we ever had—a lean and hungry set

of wolves, one woman said who watched us cross

the River, tough and confident and strong

from chasing Yankees, two whole armies of them,

all the summer long, and just last week killed

them worst of all at Manassas. Our guns

were clean and polished, though our shoes were thin

or gone; no two of us were dressed alike;

we talked incessantly, profane beyond

belief, that same woman reported of us—

though how she stood it close enough to tell

escapes me, because of course we smelled like hell.

A doctor up in Fredericktown would count us

next week, accurate to the point of throwing

in the scientific observation that

our smell was “amoniacal.” It was,

if you weren’t used to it. I wish it had

been strong enough to mask the smell of blood

on battlefields—the metal sweet, lead-kneed

odor all the rivers in the world can’t

wash out of your stomach. We splashed across

the River at the ford, some men bundling

their amoniacal long johns atop

their heads—I trust that woman’s modesty

and decency prevented her from watching

close up, although who’d give a damn: a line

of hairy scarecrows in their shirts. We crossed

the River. Bands, our execrable bands,

played “Maryland, My Maryland,” and we

like young fools sang along and whooped it up.

It was the summer of the Confederacy

and the shipwreck of our hopes was around

the bend invisible. The sun shone South.

We were invincible, and we could whip

the Yankees ten to one, although to tell

the truth we had died more numerously

than they had all the summer, but that fact

was like an untruth to a Southerner:

an insult not to be tolerated

where rights and honor are at stake. In fact

some thousands politely declined to cross

because it seemed not right to them to strike

the unionists on their home ground as they

were striking us. The Golden Rule or prudence,

don’t know which and didn’t care. We crossed fast

within the grasp of victories whose logic

ordered us to wade the swirling waters

of necessity. Our black folk followed,

driving miles and miles of wagons filled

with fodder, bandages, and ammunition.

The men who carried doubts across the river

or declined to cross because they wouldn’t do

to others what they’d done to us were few

compared to us of less fastidious thought

who’d had enough of Yankee righteousness.

We’d take the war to them—we’d take the war

to hell and back—to finish it this month.

We’d whipped them running all the summer long

and had the notion we could do anything.

We hated them enough to die in droves,

and you would too, if you were us, in love

with freedom to do what we pleased and told

that we were sinful by inferiors,

by Yankees—money-grubbers culled

from prisons, slums, and what-not, Europe’s

dregs, ill-mannered, unrefined, and reeking

of the greasy coal their factories spewed.

We Southerners were disinclined to serve

a government—paid for by Southerners,

mind you—a government that had gone foul,

was lording over us majorities

of rough-scruff rubbish from the alleys

of New York. Like our fathers and grandfathers,

we would be our own men or die proving

it. And we had. We had outfought the Yankees

through the summer and knew it, knew we had

to beat them now and finish it before

we were bled out. You may say we were daring

and you might say we were arrogant, but

it was desperation and necessity

that led and pushed us into the Potomac,

run like foxes by the hounds of our own

success. We yelled and cheered as we went down

to the River, wild with defiance, shoeless

lords with snapping flags, free men with no choice

but to lay those flags before the Lord of Lords,

the God of Battles.

Some say sixty thousand

crossed—that doctor counted more—as many,

nearly, as the Federals—but we frittered

down to forty-five, they say, by the time

we got to Sharpsburg, though the Yankees wouldn’t

know it. Then how we came to lose so many

of our men I now commence to tell you.

The Yankees had a thing or two to do

with our eventual disappointment,

and chief among them was their president,

a man we scorned and ridiculed. We said,

“Jeff Davis rode a dapple gray; Abe Lincoln

rode a mule.” But that was a tough old mule.

All Yankeedom went shrieking like a flock

of geese when word of us raced North. Invasion!

Rebel Army Marching on Washington!

Except that man in the White House. He stood

looking out his window west and thinking,

“Come on, come on closer,” like some canny

farmer luring in a fox close enough

not to miss this time, tying down a pullet

by one scrawny ankle so it will flap

and squawk like crazy while the fox drifts closer,

pacing in the brush, calculating, hungry;

and the farmer slowly raises his trusty

old musket to his shoulder—the same one

his daddy used in 1812—and bang!

We didn’t know who we were challenging,

or what, and so we swung route-step into

two long arms, stronger than Lincoln’s. Our God

was simpler than Lincoln’s, understandable,

more down-home and reassuring, righteous

in a predictable way. Who or what

Abe prayed to I don’t know, but he promised

his tall God, some steady-eyed Mystery,

that if the Union boys could lick us this

one time, the president would strike us hard

through our black folk. That God was somewhere

on the battlefield, you might say. Some say

there is no God on battlefields but Chance.

It’s beyond me. But some necessity,

carried by that President like a plague,

cornered us at Sharpsburg. Old Abe Lincoln

didn’t scare. Say what you will about Little

Mac, he thought he was outnumbered and still

came after us. Slow as sap at first, but

sure.

The Old Man split us up like rebels,

sent us out all over Maryland, hither

and yon, to snatch supplies and generally

raise hell—“confuse and mystify,” Old Jack

used to say. And speaking of Old Jack, Marse

Robert sent him down with half the army

more or less to Harper’s Ferry, John Brown’s

old hope, where you might say it all began,

to take the Federal arsenal and bag

twelve thousand Yankee troops. And we must have

shaken loose some ten or twenty thousand

of the boys, marching, foraging, straggling,

sick, hungry, and tired, those two weeks—until

McClellan got the gift of a lifetime

when someone on our side became careless

with a copy of Lee’s orders, and then

the Army of the Potomac came on

like fire in a dry cornfield. D. H. Hill’s

division saw their campfires from all along

South Mountain, and never felt so alone,

with the scattered pieces of our army

miles to the west, and Jackson down across

the river—eighty or ninety thousand

Yankees coming, and hell following after.