Read The Storm Before Atlanta Online
Authors: Karen Schwabach
The Storm Before Atlanta (31 page)
“I have to write to my pa,” said Jeremy. “He’s in prison.”
“That can happen to a man.”
Jeremy had to trust Nicholas or he couldn’t ask his advice. “I’m afraid to write to him because I ran away from my master.”
“You have a master?”
“Back in York State I was bound over to a man named Old Silas. But he treated me bad, and so I ran away.”
There, now his life was in Nicholas’s hands, so he sure hoped Dave was right. But you had to trust your pardners.
“What’s that got to do with writing to your pa?” said Nicholas.
“Well, if I write to him Old Silas might find out where I am and come and get me.”
“Come and get a Union soldier? I’d like to see him try. Anyway, you say he treated you bad. Didn’t it say in your indenture that he would treat you good?”
Jeremy knew what an indenture was—it was a legal paper. “He never signed no paper.”
“He didn’t? Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“There was no paper at all?”
“I said there wasn’t,” said Jeremy.
“Then you aren’t a bound-boy.” Nicholas dismissed Old Silas from Jeremy’s life with a wave of his hand.
Jeremy couldn’t believe it could be that simple. “Are you sure?”
“I got a book to home called
Every Man His Own Lawyer
. It’s all in there.”
“Oh.”
“So I reckon you can write to your pa.”
Jeremy noticed that Nicholas didn’t tell Jeremy he
had
to write to his pa. It was up to Jeremy.
There was going to be another battle. It was in the air. It might happen today, it might not happen for a week, but Dulcie and Jeremy both knew it was a mountain that lay ahead of them, another mountain to be fought over, another mountain to be climbed, before Atlanta. And then there would be Atlanta. And after that, who knew? How much longer could the war go on? All wars ended
eventually. After them came a broken world that had to be fitted together again, as best it could be, and scattered, broken people to be fitted into it somehow. That would be a long work.
It might be a world with no room in it for people like Charlie, Jeremy thought, but Charlie would make room for himself. Charlie would land on his feet even if he was flat on his back. That was Charlie.
There was no room in the world for Dulcie, not yet, but room would have to be made.
“Dr. Flood’s going back to Tennessee after the war to work in the contraband camps,” said Dulcie. “There’s a plan for turning them into freedmen’s camps, to help the freedmen find jobs and places to live and each other—their families, I mean. He wants me to go with him. He said I could work as a medic.”
“Are you going to?” Jeremy asked.
“I don’t know,” said Dulcie. “I have to find my mother and father first.”
Pa, Jeremy thought, was another person that there wasn’t much of a place for in this world. It was going to be hard for Pa coming out of prison, if he ever did. Jeremy had not written to him yet. He would do it today. After all, tomorrow there might be a battle, and then it might be too late.
Jeremy thought of his two remaining messmates, Nicholas and Dave. In a way that he sensed more than understood, the world didn’t seem to have a place in it for
them, either. But they, like Charlie and Dulcie, would make one. Assuming they all survived.
“You could come to New York with me,” Jeremy said. “If you don’t want to go to Tennessee. We could find No-Joke’s family.”
“I know.” Dulcie smiled big at him, and the light of the setting sun glowed on her face and lit up her smile. “We can do whatever we have to, and whatever we want.”
HISTORICAL NOTES
The 107th New York was recruited mainly from Steuben, Allegany, Chemung, and Schuyler counties. Except for Jeremy and his messmates, the soldiers mentioned in this book were real people. Captain Knox died at New Hope Church. Dr. Flood worked in freedmen’s camps after the war, then became mayor of Elmira, New York. Lieutenant Tuttle kept a journal that was published in 2006.
The story about Charlie Jackson that Dave tells Jeremy in
chapter twenty-three
is true, but the Charlie in this book is fictional. Laws ensuring that slavery “followed the condition of the mother” kept people in slavery even when their owner was their father.
General Benjamin Butler first had the idea of claiming runaway slaves as “contraband of war.” The Emancipation Proclamation made them legally free, but soldiers still called them contraband. Dulcie is fictional, but many freedchildren stayed with the army and were hired to work.
Thousands of underage boys served as soldiers on both sides in the Civil War. They only had to say that they were eighteen—and many weren’t even asked. Hundreds of women claiming to be men also served, and at least one girl enlisted as a drummer boy. There was no minimum age for drummer boys until 1864.
Over 180,000 African Americans served in the Union Army. None appear in this book because none marched in the Atlanta campaign. General Sherman didn’t allow them to.
The “bonnie blue flag” in the song in
chapter seven
was an early, unofficial flag of the Confederacy.
There were many pro-Union groups in the Confederacy, and at least two peace societies in the Confederate Army. There are numerous records of Confederate and Union soldiers meeting to trade, talk, and play cards. Sometimes they even invited each other to dinner.
SELECTED SOURCES FORTHE STORM BEFORE ATLANTABillings, John D.
Hard Tack and Coffee
. 1887. Reprint, Konecky and Konecky.
Blight, David W.
A Slave No More
. New York: Harcourt, 2007.
Castel, Albert.
Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864
. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.
Conklin, Henry.
Through “Poverty’s Vale”: A Hardscrabble Boyhood in Upstate New York 1832–1862
. Edited by Wendell Tripp. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1974.
Kennett, Lee.
Marching Through Georgia
. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Marten, James.
The Children’s Civil War
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Rutkow, Ira M.
Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine
. New York: Random House, 2005.
Scaife, William R.
The Campaign for Atlanta
. Atlanta: self-published, 1993.
Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
. Pt. 2, vol. 46, pp. 93–138, “Record of Events
for One Hundred Seventh New York Infantry, August 1862–May 1865.” Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1997.
Swanson, Mark.
Atlas of the Civil War Month by Month
. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
Taylor, Susie King.
A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs
. 1902. Reprint, Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner, 1999.
Tsui, Bonnie.
She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War
. Guilford, CT: TwoDot, 2006.
Tuttle, Russell M.
The Civil War Journal of Lt. Russell M. Tuttle, 107th New York Volunteer Infantry
. Edited by George H. Tappan. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
Wickersham, John T.
Boy Soldier of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Johnnie Wickersham
. Edited by Kathleen Gorman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.
Wiley, Bell Irvin.
The Life of Billy Yank
. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Wiley, Bell Irvin, and Hirst D. Milhollen.
They Who Fought Here
. New York: Macmillan, 1959.
Williams, David, et al.
Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia
. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Wise, Arthur, and Francis A. Lord.
Bands and Drummer Boys of the Civil War
. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1966.
Wright, John D.
The Language of the Civil War
. Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2001.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI would like to thank Jenny Peer and Elisa Leone of the Savona Free Library; Ken Akins, manager of the Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site; Keith Beason, past president of the Friends of Resaca Battlefield, Inc.; Aaron, Jennifer, and Deborah Schwabach; Suzy Capozzi; and Joanna Stampfel-Volpe. Any errors that remain are my own.