A Stillness at Appomattox Read Online Free PDF Page B

falling out by the roadside and watching in despair as the column moved on without them. When they were not storming with rage the troopers were braying with laughter. It struck them as very funny to see a desperately frightened Negro riding a runaway mule, holding onto one of its ears with one hand and its tail with the other. Despite all difficulties most of the refugees kept going, and as they plodded along in the cold rain and mud one of the soldiers felt that the Union Army was "the representative to them of the great idea of freedom." 8
    For that was the myth that this army had created, and it had vitality, and it went like a bent flame down plantation roads and country lanes. When Kilpatrick's division crossed from Richmond to Butler's lines the colored folk greeted it with ecstasy, and the raid that accomplished so little was a light across the sky to many hundreds of people. As the division passed one big plantation house, forty or fifty slaves crowded down to the road to watch. A young woman suddenly sprang up on the fence, waving her sunbonnet and crying: "Glory! Glory hallelujah! I’ se gwine wid you! I'se gwine to be free!"
    The whole crowd came surging out in a moment, and Old Marster was running down from his veranda shouting fruitless threats, a helpless Canute berating an unheeding tide. 4 The scene was repeated, with variations, over and over, until presently the cavalrymen were surrounded and followed by thousands of slaves whom no one any longer owned and for whom no one in particular was likely to be responsible: a devoted shuffling multitude, men and women carrying bundles, tiny children trudging along big-eyed, gray-haired old folk leaning on canes, scores and hundreds of people coming out of the past into the unknown.
    All of this was stimulating to tired soldiers, for it was pleasant to be hosannahed and wept over as bringers of freedom. But finally the men got to New Kent Court House, and there for the first time the cavalry saw colored soldiers—some of Ben Butler's men, trim and neatly uniformed, lining the roadside to greet the cavalry, cheering wildly as the head of the column came up, white eyes a chalkline in a long row of black faces. Cavalry returned the cheers, and one trooper wrote that "a mountain of prejudice was removed in an instant." Yet somehow there was a catch in it, and prejudice had not been removed so far that it could not quickly return. Late that night it began to rain again, and Kilpatrick's men were making a sodden bivouac without shelter, and they suddenly realized that these colored soldiers occupied a warm dry camp with wall tents standing. So along toward midnight tie cavalry attacked the camp, driving the colored soldiers out into the cold with blows and angry words and taking the tents for themselves, and there was no further exchange of cheers. 5
    The soldiers were not the same men they had been three years ago, and they dimly realized the fact. An Ohio soldier looked back wistfully to the time when they had all been recruits, with knowledge ahead of them—to "those happy, golden days of camp life," when each regiment eagerly awaited its marching orders and the only worry was the haunting fear that the war might end before a man got his fair chance to fight. 6 In those days there was a great difference between regiment and regiment, and between man and man. Western regiments derisively yelled, "Paper collars!" at Eastern regiments, which they considered dressed up and dudish, and the Easterners retorted that the Westerners were uncouth backwoodsmen. The city man looked and acted unlike the man from the country, and even a casual glance would show the difference between Hoosier and Ohioan, between Pennsylvanian and down-East Yankee. Now the distinctions were gone, and all of the volunteers looked very much alike. An officer in a Maine regiment mused that the army was a great leveler, and he wrote how "rich men and poor, Christians from pious back-country homes and