Charleston (32 page)

Nothing she'd written in the last few years could compare with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She couldn't help a shameful stab of jealousy, or a certain sense that her time had passed.

 

During the late summer of 1862 Folsey left Wilmington, North Carolina, on a packet bound for Liverpool. At a shipyard on the Mersey he supervised the outfitting of the company's new vessel, christened
Charming Adah
. She was steam powered, built for speed and capable of eighteen knots. She had a shallow draft and a low, narrow silhouette. The Merseyside shipyard painted her fog-gray, the preferred color for befuddling enemy lookouts at sea.

Folsey had a contract to carry British Enfield rifles, cartridges, powder, and Blakely rifled field guns for Gen. Josiah Gorgas's ordnance department. “Our own cargo will be aboard too,” he'd assured Gibbes before he departed from Charleston. “I'm thinking of Belgian lace, plenty of fancy dry goods for dresses, some ladies' corsets from Paris if I can get them. Oh, and French champagne. I'll save a crate for us.”

In the midst of writing a speech he'd been asked to give about his exploits on the Peninsula, Gibbes snapped at his partner. “I don't want to hear about it.”

Folsey laughed. “Fine. You just sit back and grow rich in a state of ignorance. I'll handle the rest.”

 

Of all Union prisons the most feared was Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island near the head of Delaware Bay. Confederate soldiers prayed they would never be sent there.

Pea Patch Island was no more than a muddy shoal. Its two large prisoner compounds stood on the northern end, away from the original fort buildings. In September of '62 there came to the officers' barracks Capt. Richard Riddle, late of the Congaree Mounted Rifles. He had ridden with Hampton against John Pope's Union army at Second Manassas, another Confederate victory.

Richard Riddle was fifty. He looked not merely thin but cadaverous. Long hair brushed his collar, white-streaked and unkempt. His catlike brown eyes with their curious gold speckling were sunken in dark hollows in his face. He was greatly depressed by his new home, a flimsy shed with cracks showing between the pine boards and a heavy infestation of bedbugs, lice, mosquitoes, and flies, not to mention the occasional snake.

He'd enlisted in Columbia, even though he had little respect or sympathy for the loudmouthed nabobs of the Low Country who'd promoted the war. He was cynically sure most of them would manage to avoid any direct encounter with the enemy they reviled. He put his profitable freight business in the hands of his wife, Loretta, and went off to war anyway.

In Hampton's Legion he rode and fought for months without a scratch. Then, at Second Manassas, a sharpshooter's ball killed his horse and threw him into brambles, where enemy soldiers captured him as he tried to fight his way out.

On Richard's third day at Fort Delaware a corporal was singled out for torture by the hated men of the 157th Ohio National Guard who policed the prison. The corporal was hung up by his thumbs for forty-eight hours, his toes inches from the ground. When his right thumb burst, he was cut down, but he was too weak to survive. Richard couldn't be
lieve such brutality. The fort's commandant, Colonel Schoepf, not only encouraged his guards to abuse prisoners, he occasionally watched for his own amusement.

Even worse than Schoepf was the second-in-command, a captain who strutted about with a hickory club, his back protected by two Ohioans carrying bayoneted rifles. The captain liked to harass the lines of men at the reeking sinks, which prisoners were allowed to use only at night. The captain beat any man who took too long at the trench, or displayed what he called “improper attitude.” One night the captain fancied he saw something offensive on Richard's face. He called him out, ordered him to kneel, and beat him. Richard writhed in his top-tier bunk all night.

Each barracks was subdivided into rooms called divisions, named according to the home state of the inmates. There was no South Carolina division at Fort Delaware; Richard's division was identified as “Mixed.” For weeks he met no one from home.

Then a young lieutenant appeared, wearing a bedraggled gray uniform and kepi Richard recognized. Richard guessed him about twenty-five. Richard hobbled across the narrow aisle as the new arrival threw his thin blanket into an empty bunk. Fort Delaware issued one blanket or one overcoat for the winter but not both. A lot of good either would do, given the gaps in the pine walls.

The young lieutenant couldn't help gawking at Richard's face. Purple and yellow bruises spread from forehead to jaw. Richard had trouble articulating; his lip was badly swollen. “Carolina?” he said.

“Yes, sir, Captain. Hampton's Brigade. The infantry. After the Peninsula we were put in Hood's Texas Brigade under Colonel Gary.”

“Old Bald Eagle Gary,” Richard mumbled. “I was with Hampton's horse. They transferred us to Tom Rosser.”

“We never met in the field, sir.”

“No, we didn't, but there were a thousand men in the Legion. I could say welcome to hell but I expect hell's a lot more pleasant than this place. Where did they catch you?”

“Sharpsburg.”

“Word is, that was a hell of a fight.”

“Slaughter. Not much advantage gained by either side. Lee had to run away in the night. Like a whipped dog, those are the words my captors used.”

“I'm forgetting my manners.” He extended his hand. “Richard Riddle, from Columbia.”

“Calhoun Bell Hayward. Charleston. Pleased to know you, Captain.”

Richard scratched his chin. “A long time ago I met a fascinating Charleston girl named Bell. Her father was an attorney. My father hoped to do business with him. Edmund, Edgar, something like that.”

“Edgar Bell. You could be speaking of Alexandra, my mother's second cousin.”

“That was her name, Alexandra.” He sat on the edge of Calhoun's bunk. He remembered the sail in Charleston Harbor; the girl's expert handling of the skiff; his callow efforts to make her like him. “I fell in love with that girl on the spot. She wouldn't pay me any mind. Not too surprising, since my face was blooming like a rosebush. Does she still live in Charleston?”

“No, she left. Went up North.”

“Too bad for Charleston.”

“She's well-known. Speaks a lot on behalf of liberating the colored. You never saw her again?”

Richard shook his head. “When I was twenty-two I married a fine woman named Loretta.”

“You have children back home?”

“We had two boys. The oldest, Joe, died of scarlet fever. Richard junior drowned, swimming where he shouldn't have. Losing both of them just about broke his mother's heart. Mine, too, I'll admit.” He watched a plump rat scurry across the aisle. “Anyway, glad to have another Carolina man for company.”

The young lieutenant glanced around, then bent closer to whisper. “Say, I've some money they didn't find. Possible to buy anything from the guards?”

“Most anything small enough to fit in your pocket.”

“I've developed quite a taste for whiskey. Staying sotted's the best way to survive this misbegotten war.”

“Not the best way to keep a clear head, though.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, have you ever had a man die in your arms? A good soldier, young, decent—never kept a slave and didn't believe in it but he fought for the cause anyway. He was only three months married when a stray shot killed him. It came from our side. Hanged if I need or want a clear head to remember this cursed war every waking hour. The object is to forget.”

“I understand, but—”

“You Goddamn traitors, shut the fuck up.” The sudden yell startled them. Standing, Richard banged his head on the bunk above. A corporal, one of the Ohio guards, grabbed his collar, then Calhoun's.

“You sons of bitches, we don't permit whispering and plotting.”

The young lieutenant began, “We weren't—” The corporal smashed his nose with a club. He bled all over his gray blouse. Both officers were ordered outside, where the corporal made them climb up on barrels with the lids missing. A crowd of guards gathered.

“All right, you two slave-fuckers, hold these.” Guards handed up sizable logs to Richard and Calhoun. “Now, you birds balance there and stay put for two hours. You fall off or drop the logs, punishment's doubled.”

After an hour Richard felt his arms might break. He constantly teetered on the barrel's rim. When the pain became too great he pictured Loretta. He survived the rest of the punishment that way.

 

The sanguinary war ground on, its cost in lives and money and sorrow greater than anyone had imagined, especially the dashing young men and blithe young ladies who'd stood on the Battery and cheered and sung as the first star shells exploded over Sumter. Names of distant places that few had heard of were spread in headlines and written on the butcher's bill. Lincoln shuffled and reshuffled his high command, searching for a general who could win. Lee gambled with an invasion of the North that climaxed in three days in July 1863, at a small Pennsylvania market town called Gettysburg.

At that same time reaction to a new military draft incited riots in New York City. Negroes fled from the rioters, mostly poor whites blaming them for the draft. The rioters torched Negro cottages and hovels and hung their owners from lampposts. Troops fresh from Gettysburg arrived on the cars and helped quell the violence, leaving large sections of the city a wasteland of smoldering rubble.

In Washington, Alex read about the riots with a consuming sadness. The white bigotry she'd found throughout the North, bigotry that had killed her husband, inspired a strange and paradoxical homesickness for Charleston.

On a sultry night in late July she carried an oil lamp to the door to answer a knock. On the landing she discovered a small whiskered man whose boots smelled of the barnyard.

“Miz Bell? Got this for you.” He handed her a crude envelope made of brown wrapping paper. She recognized the handwriting.

“It come through the lines,” the courier added.

“How?”

“Don't know. I just messenger it from down the Potomac a ways.”

She tipped the man and sat down in her best parlor chair with the lamp turned up full. Westward over Virginia a thunderstorm shot lightning bolts across the sky. The letter was written on the front and back of two prescription blanks.

Sowing the wind was an exhilarating chivalric pastime. Resisting the wind is less agreeable.

Civil War diary of George Templeton Strong, a New Yorker

The sins of the people of Charleston may cause that city to fall; it is full of rottenness, everyone being engaged in speculation.

Gen. Josiah Gorgas
Chief of Confederate Ordnance, 1863

The truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.

General Sherman to General Halleck, 1864

A city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant homes, of widowed women, of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets…

Sidney Andrews, newspaper reporter, 1865