The Union Quilters (34 page)

Abel did not know what they were preparing for—he would hazard a guess the men themselves did not know—but no officer drilled his men so intensely for nothing. They were not seasoned troops, but he doubted these drills were merely to compensate for that lack of experience, since nothing could. It seemed to him that they were preparing to make an audacious charge, but where and when, he did not know.

After a day of rest, the 6th was sent back into the trenches near the front line of the breastworks west of the Norfolk Railroad. To their right lay a deep ravine. White troops were deployed there, but when the lieutenant and a few other white officers ventured down that way to pay the usual social courtesies, they were turned back without explanation. Frowning, the lieutenant said only that the sentries were under strict orders to forbid passage along that traverse to anyone, white or colored, officer or enlisted. The lieutenant was not obliged to explain even that much to Abel, and the fact that he said so much underscored the strangeness of it all.

Now and then, Abel and the other men of the 6th would see white soldiers moving out of the ravine with their uniforms encrusted with red clay of a peculiar shade that did not match the dirt of the earthworks or the trenches. When Abel heard that the men belonged to a Pennsylvania regiment, his interest was immediately piqued, but after asking around, he learned that they were from the 48th.

“Them’s your neighbors, ain’t they?” one of Abel’s company asked him.

Abel shook his head. “No. Men from the Elm Creek Valley belong to the Forty-ninth. These men of the Forty-eighth—” He hesitated. “They’re from Schuylkill County, east of home.”

That was coal mining country, and the presence of men from the 48th Pennsylvania in the ravine, their uniforms strangely soiled, suddenly lent credence to the rumors that had circulated in the trenches throughout July that a mining operation was in the works somewhere along the line. The area near the ravine would be a likely place for it. There the Union earthworks arced forward, forming a redoubt the men had nicknamed the Horseshoe, which was only about 130 yards from a four-gun Confederate fort called Elliot’s Salient. Half a mile beyond the fort lay a gradual, gentle slope with long, broad valleys on either side. If the Union could seize those heights, called Cemetery Hill for the graveyard upon the crest, they could easily attack the interior of the Rebel breastworks for a mile in each direction. If that could be done, Abel figured Petersburg would be theirs for the taking, and after that, Richmond.

Rumors flew thick and fast through the trenches. As best Abel could piece together, an officer from the 48th Pennsylvania had proposed digging a tunnel from the Union lines beneath the Rebel defenses to the fort, packing the excavation beneath it with explosives, and blowing it up. The army engineers thought it would never work, but the men of the 48th had mined more difficult terrain than what they now faced, and they were given orders to proceed.

Abel knew better than to pin his hopes on a bold scheme to take out the fort, especially since the only evidence he had that it truly existed was rumor, red clay on uniforms, the secrecy surrounding the ravine, and the intense drills practiced by the 30th and 19th USCT and the others. But with men of the 6th dying in the trenches every day, taken out by sharpshooters’ bullets and bursting shells, he fervently hoped it was true. Something had to be done to push them through the current stalemate.

Then, on the afternoon of July 29, the lieutenant and other officers were summoned to a meeting at regimental headquarters. When the lieutenant returned, he told them that the XVIII Corps would be relieved in the trenches at nightfall by Mott’s division of the II Corps and would move south.

“This is it,” said Joshua as the men dispersed. “They’re going to blow the mine tonight. We’re lining up to attack the fort.”

“Maybe so,” Abel said, thinking of the other colored troops they had observed drilling vigorously while the 6th built breastworks. If anyone were going to lead a charge, he’d put his money on them.

After the sun had set, Mott’s division relieved the XVIII Corps, and Abel and his men were issued rations and cartridges and told to be ready to march at a moment’s notice. When the order finally came, they did not need anyone to tell them they must move quietly. The Confederates were so close that they would hear the shuffling of feet and the clanking of tin cups on belt buckles, drawing their fire or, worse yet, exposing their preparations for the attack.

It was after midnight when the corps reached an open wood near the railroad behind the trenches. They were ordered to halt, but while the other divisions were told to make themselves comfortable, the second division along with Turnerʹs division of the Tenth Corps were sent on to the rear of General Burnside’s troops as reserve supports. There they were told to await instructions as to where and when they would be required.

They had time to rest, to wait, and to speculate. The explosion of the mine was imminent, they heard. After the Confederate fort was destroyed, the IX would sweep forward and take Cemetery Hill. Once they were established, the XVIII would move in to reinforce them.

Abel knew he should rest, but excitement and dread and eager apprehension surged through him. He checked his gear and his rifle; he talked with the other men, trying to glean new information, but no one knew any more than he. Around two o’clock in the morning, a few gunshots cracked in the trenches, which within moments erupted into fierce fighting. Owen speculated that other Union troops moving into position had attracted the Rebs’ notice, but if their luck held out, the Rebels would not catch on that something big was in the works. Abel could only nod and listen to the battle, taking a drink from his canteen to relieve his dry mouth.

After about a half hour the firing subsided and all was quiet again. All around him, Abel heard the quiet shuffling of feet, but it was so dark he could see little beyond the men closest to him. The minutes passed and stretched into hours. The sky grayed with the approach of morning, and Abel thought he could see the line of the Confederate defenses through the mist. Still nothing happened, no orders came.

Dawn began to pink the sky. Men who had slept roused themselves; others gathered in clusters to speculate about the cause of the delay, what might have gone wrong or whether anything more than elaborate troop movements had been intended in the first place. Suddenly, Abel felt the ground tremble beneath his feet, and felt rather than heard a low, dull roar in the distance.

“That’s it, boys,” someone shouted, and as one the men strained for a glimpse of the Rebel fort. Just then, a burst of red flame shot from the earth, and billowing clouds of black smoke, and a terrible rumbling that grew into a roar, with smoke and soil and dust rising and huge masses of clay and cannon and the bodies of the slain flung into the sky only to rain down heavily upon the earth. There was a moment of horrified, shocked silence before the guns on both sides erupted in noise and flame. Five minutes, ten, fifteen, the crashing of artillery went on, and to Abel it seemed as if the Confederate entrenchments were collapsing. Then came the yells of the charging columns, and as he peered through the rising clouds of smoke, Abel watched, bewildered, for leading the advance were white Union regiments, not the colored troops he had seen drilling again and again in preparation for this moment. The white Union troops plunged forward into the crater left behind by the explosion, a massive wound torn into the earth, a chasm at least 160 feet long, 60 wide, and 30 deep. Forward the men hurtled into the chaos and confusion, scrambling over the half-buried bodies of men in blue and men in gray, massing in the pit where a Confederate battery on Cemetery Hill hurled fire upon them.

For three hours, Abel watched with sickening dread as the white divisions struggled to capture Cemetery Hill, but they were pinned down, too late discovering that the crater was no safe rifle pit but a trap. Horrified, Abel watched as the colored forces were sent in after them. They fared no better. The Rebels had overcome their initial shock from the explosion and had massed a terrible counterattack. The IX Corps was being slaughtered. Through the smoke and confusion, Abel sometimes glimpsed the desperate flutter of white cloth, a handkerchief tied to a ramrod, a rag waved in a bloody fist. Sometimes the attempts to surrender were heeded, but sometimes they were not, and eventually awareness stole over Abel that the Confederates were ignoring appeals from colored men. Even as the colored soldiers waved the white flag and yielded their weapons, they were shot, bayoneted, slaughtered—white soldiers taken captive, colored men killed.

“They are soldiers,” Abel heard himself mutter. “They are soldiers.” There were rules even within the misrule of war. But the Rebels did not see soldiers at the other end of their rifles; they did not see men. They saw rebellious slaves. They saw unruly animals.

As if in a daze, Abel slipped away from the lines. There was no wrong to it. He knew now his division would not be deployed to support the IX Corps because the IX Corps would never take Cemetery Hill. No one called him back to the line and he saw he was not the only one compelled forward. White and colored alike had left the ranks and come to the front to do something, anything, to stop the slaughter and, if it could not be stopped, to mitigate the savagery.

He fell in with a stretcher-bearer and carried men from the edge of the crater to the wagons that would take them to the field hospitals. He hauled men out of the trenches where they had fallen and broken bones in the rush to escape the pit of death. With his bare hands he dug men half buried from the explosion out of the red clay and sand.

He was shaking the last drops from his canteen into the mouth of a boy cradling his entrails in his own arms when he felt a tug on his right shoulder. At first there was so little pain that he did not realize he had been hit until he felt the damp of his own blood seeping through his shirt. Clumsily, he knotted his handkerchief around the wound as his right arm went numb from shoulder to fingertips. He waited until the boy died before struggling to his feet and making his way to the rear, faint from lack of sleep and loss of blood. By mid-afternoon he had reached a field hospital where he sat with his back against a tree, dazed, exhausted, picking wool from his uniform out of the wound and listening as the sounds of battle went on and on while he waited for a surgeon to examine him.

He did not see how the disastrous battle ended. He did not need to see the retreat and count the wounded to know that it had been an utter failure.

It was late in the day before he was allowed into one of the tents serving as a field hospital.

“Got it,” said the young assistant surgeon, holding up the minié ball he had dug from Abel’s shoulder with his forceps. When Abel declined his offer to take it as a souvenir, the surgeon shrugged and let it fall to the ground with a soft thud. He wiped the forceps and scalpel on his apron, already wet with the puss and blood of a hundred other wounded soldiers, and called a nurse to pack the wound with lint and bandage it.

Abel took fever that night. Days later when the wound festered and putrefied, he swore at the surgeon who told him the arm would have to come off or it would mean his life, for he was a carpenter and a farmer, and if he lost his arm, it would indeed mean his life, but he was weak from fever and sick and could not put up much of a fight when the orderlies held him down and the surgeon took out his bone saw and someone came up behind him with the ether. When he woke up, his arm was gone and he never did find out which of the piles behind the field hospital it had been flung into, if there were separate piles for colored limbs and white limbs or if they were all heaped up together until they were buried in the same pit or burned on the same fire, as ash unlike as living flesh, colored skin and white skin intermingled and indistinguishable one from the other.

D
orothea.”

Dorothea started and turned away from the window. “Yes, Anneke?”

The younger woman, clad in her dress of Balmoral plaid and carrying her sewing basket, regarded her pensively. “Gerda is here to take us to Union Hall for the meeting. Won’t you come?”

Dorothea knew she should go. Though Thomas had perished, the war went on. The surviving men of the 49th needed her as much as ever. But she could not overcome the dull lethargy that had settled upon her in the wake of Thomas’s death. She could not bear to hear again how her husband was a hero, that he had died for a noble cause, and that her own sacrifice had ennobled her as his black-clad widow. He had died a hero’s death, and for that reason her loss was a public one; it belonged to the town, to the nation. Other women might have found strength and solace in that, but Dorothea did not want to share her private grief with anyone. She wanted to be left alone to mourn.

“I don’t think so.” Her voice sounded distant and rusty from little use. “Not this time.”

“You need to get out of this house. It’s been four months since Thomas passed on. You can’t stay shut up here in your room forever.”

“Can’t I?”

Anneke hesitated. “I suppose you could, but you shouldn’t. We need you, Dorothea.”

Another day and Dorothea might have smiled at her friend’s transparent attempt to appeal to her sense of duty. “You don’t need me. The Union Quilters are thriving under your leadership.”

“Constance needs you,” said Anneke. “Abel is despondent and she’s at her wit’s end.”

Why should he be despondent? He had lost an arm, not his life. Not like Thomas. Abel should count his blessings. But Dorothea could not entertain such selfish, bitter thoughts for long, and she pushed them away. “What do you think I could do?”

“Goodness, I don’t know.” For the first time since the messenger had brought Dorothea the devastating news of Thomas’s death, Anneke sounded impatient. “You always know what to say and do in such circumstances. If I knew what you would say or do, I could do it myself instead of nagging you to do and say it. Furthermore, unlike Abel, you still have two good hands. If you’re going to sit up here and brood with the curtains drawn, at least piece some quilts for the soldiers while you’re doing it. Be useful alone if not in our company.”