March Toward the Thunder (28 page)

Faithfully yerz, Mr. Artis Leander Cook

Louis walked back to the chair and sat again. It was time he had some employment, now that he was all healed up. It wasn't right that M'mere should be the only one earning money—though he was still drawing his pay and could apply for a pension as a disabled soldier.

Except I'm not. I'm fit as a fiddle
.

He thought about what it would be like that night. His birthday supper. He'd finally turned sixteen. Only sixteen. After all he'd seen, he felt like it ought to be sixty. He was a long way from the killing fields of Virginia, but even further away from the boy he'd been. He woke up every night missing the feel of his Springfield next to him. Despite his mother's remedies, he still had bad dreams.

Azonis and her parents and her brothers would be at dinner that night. She was no longer a little girl for sure. He saw the two of them marrying and settling down. He smiled at the thought of the way Azonis looked at him. As if he was some sort of hero.

Not a man who'd deserted his friends
.

Louis sighed. He knew how they'd react when he told them tonight.

Strong as she was, his mother would cry. But she'd realize that her son, who was just as stubborn as his father, had made up his mind.

Louis raised his eyes beyond the hills. He saw in his mind those Virginia mountains, those tidal rivers, that terrible beautiful landscape he realized he couldn't leave behind just yet.

He held up Artis's letter.

“Be seeing you boys soon,” he whispered to the wind.

Louis's journey through the battles of the Irish Brigade's Virginia Campaign in the summer of 1864

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This novel is deeply rooted in fact. The events it describes in the Civil War, the weaponry, the military terms, the language used by the characters, the food they eat, even the songs they sing, are all real and the result of many years of research on my part.

Although the protagonist and his closest companions are fictional, all of the other characters and events are from the historical record. Plus, though I chose to call my main character by a different name, Louis Nolette is based on my own great-grandfather, an Abenaki Indian from Canada who did serve in the Irish Brigade in 1864.

Like many Americans, I've always felt a close connection to this war. When I was a child, my family drove south each summer to spend time with my great-uncle—my grandmother's brother Orvis Dunham. A Northerner, he had chosen to live in Virginia, where he managed the Warm Springs Hotel. Our stops along the way always included Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where we would tour the battlefield, and Washington, D.C., where we visited museums and historical sites. We always knew when we crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, for it was a segregated South that we entered back then. The gas stations had separate drinking fountains for White and Colored. My grandfather Jesse Bowman, whose own Indian skin was the darkest in our family, only made that trip with us once after being told by a gas station attendant that he could not use the restroom with the sign WHITES ONLY on its door.

In Virginia, Great-Uncle Orvis took us on more battlefield tours, reliving stories he'd learned from men who'd survived those grim struggles. He also took us to visit African American friends who'd been his employees at the big hotel, bringing them food or presents for their children. Their shacks were a sad contrast to the homes of white Virginians. If the war had really been fought to free the slaves, I remember thinking back then, then why were things still this way in Virginia? Although it all happened long before I was born, the American Civil War was never just a distant memory to me.

My grandfather Jesse Bowman's own father, Louis Bowman, was a Civil War veteran. But I knew little about it. Grampa Jesse told me that his father would never say anything about his experience in the war. It was better not told. But the memories of it were always with him, for he'd been gravely wounded and left for dead on the battlefield. “When I told him I'd enlisted for World War I,” my grandfather told me, “my father broke down and cried.”

I knew that my great-grandfather had served in a New York regiment, but I didn't know that much about the details of his service until my sister Margaret, our family's best historian and most dogged researcher, came to my aid as she always does. (You'll find Marge credited in the author's notes of many of my historical novels.) Among other things, she managed to get the pension records from the National Archives of our great-grandfather, listed not as Louis, but “Lewis” Bowman. Despite the discrepancy in the first name, there was no doubt from the details that it was he.

Soldier's certificate # 208738
Lewis Bowman
5' 8½", dark complexion, dark hair, black eyes
born in Canada
farmer and laborer
resident of Porter's Corners
Town of Greenfield, Saratoga
recruited by Captain Forsythe at East Troy, New York
Private, Company E, 69th New York Infantry
Commander Peter W. Sweeney
Medical discharge August 14, 1865 at Stanton General
Hospital, Washington, DC

My great-grandfather was Canadian, but a Canadian of Native descent whose ancestral roots were in what became the United States. Records list his birth place as St. Francis, the name then used for the Abenaki Indian reserve of Odanak, a mission village made up largely of refugee Indians from New England who fled north to escape the English during the eighteenth century. (I've written about the eighteenth-century experiences of Odanak Abenakis in two of my earlier novels,
The Arrow Over the Door
and
The Winter People
.) Like numerous other young Canadian Indian men, my great-grandfather came south to find work because little was available around the reserve.

And, in 1864, it was in the United States that a recruiter for the Irish Brigade found him.

THE IRISH BRIGADE

During the Civil War, it is estimated that more than 150,000 Irishmen fought for the Union. There was also an entire Southern brigade of Irishmen that fought on the side of the Confederacy. Why was this so? The answers can be found in recent Irish history.

Despite centuries of struggle against British rule, throughout the nineteenth century Ireland was still a colonial possession of England. Although Irish men and women had already been coming to the United States for many years in large numbers, the greatest influx of Irish immigrants occurred in 1846, as a result of a blight that destroyed the Irish potato crop in 1845. In one of the greatest disasters in history, the population of Ireland dropped from about 8.5 million to 6.5 million. Many starved, but an estimated 1,600,000 Irish men and women came to the United States.

These new immigrants were generally not welcomed. They were Catholic in what was then a largely Protestant nation. They were competing for scarce jobs in a struggling economy. Many refused to hire anyone with an Irish name. Signs reading NO IRISH NEED APPLY began to appear in American cities.

In 1851, well before the Civil War, the Irish citizens of New York City formed a volunteer militia that was accepted as part of the New York State Militia as the 69th Regiment. After the attack on Fort Sumter, the 69th, led by Colonel Michael Corcoran, fought at the first battle of Bull Run, serving as the rear guard during the Union retreat. Two more New York regiments that were mostly Irish, the 63rd New York and the 88th New York, and two other regiments, the 28th Massachusetts and the 116th Pennsylvania, were added to the 69th to form the Irish Brigade.

With a lack of opportunity for other jobs, the example of prominent Irish Americans, the generous cash bonuses being offered to recruits . . . it's not surprising that many Irish jumped at the chance to enlist. Moreover, by the mid-nineteenth century the Irish already had a long and honorable history of military service, having signed on as mercenary soldiers in wars all over the European continent. Becoming a solider was a familiar path for a young Irishman with no other road to take. Although the cash bonuses offered for volunteering were attractive, their motives were not just monetary. Some saw it as a way to gain military experience that they might use when the American Civil War was won, in a later battle to free their own homeland from British rule.

There is no doubt too that after years of struggle against “English despotism” that made the proud Irish people feel like slaves, many identified with the Union cause. A recruiting advertisement that appeared in the
Boston Herald
on July 30, 1862, begins with these words, which appeal to that Irish pride and patriotism:

Faugh au Ballaghs
is a Gaelic phrase that means “Clear the way.” It became the battle cry of the largely Irish regiments that became known as the Irish Brigade, men who combined the pride of being Irish with their desire to fight for freedom. In large part, the men of the Irish Brigade lived up to that motto. They were usually the first into battle where the fighting was the worst. By the end of the war, no other Brigade had been more praised for gallantry, dash, and discipline. They also suffered the third-highest casualty rate in the Union army. Of the 7,715 men who served in its ranks, over 4,000 were killed or mortally wounded.

Riamh Nar Dhruid O Saprin lann
. Those words, also in Gaelic, mean “Who never retreated from the clash of spears.” They were emblazoned on a field of green, under a sunburst and an Irish harp, on the regimental colors of the 69th New York, that first and most famous of the five regiments that made up the Irish Brigade. Their nickname, the “Fighting 69th,” was given them by none other than Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was less than pleased whenever he saw their green flag facing his lines.

Because their losses were always so great, the Irish Brigade went through several periods of major recruitment. One of them was in the early part of 1864. And although the Brigade was still mostly Irish, other men who had been common laborers, men from communities with an equal lack of opportunity, joined up. Some were American Indians, some were Canadians, and some, like my own great-grandfather, were both.

Selected Bibliography

I read hundreds of volumes in researching this novel. Here are a few I found especially useful and interesting, books that should also be helpful for any reader wishing to know more about the history behind my story.

Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War
by Laurence M. Hauptman. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861-1865
by E. B. Long with Barbara Long. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971.

Civil War Weapons and Equipment
by Russ A. Pritchard Jr. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Civil War
by Alan Axelrod. New York: Alpha Books, 2003.

The Everything Civil War Book
by Donald Vaughn. Holbrook, MA: Adams Media, 2000.

The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns
by David Power Conyngham, edited by Lawrence Frederick Kohl. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994.

The Life of Billy Yank: the Common Soldier of the Union
by Bell Irvin Wiley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

The Life of Johnny Reb: the Common Soldier of the Confederacy
by Bell Irvin Wiley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

The Negro's Civil War
by James M. McPherson. New York: Vintage Books Civil War Library, 2003.

They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War
by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. New York: Vintage Books, 2002.

Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca Chief
by William H. Armstrong. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1978.

What They Didn't Teach You About the Civil War
by Mike Wright. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.