 | CHAPTER IV Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
4. CHAPTER IV
Jim was gone, and the unhappy gap he left in the family
circle forecast a changed manner of life that was to last for
four dreary years. In the summers he had taught his younger
brothers to swim and ride, had cut them fishing poles and carried
them piggie-back. Winters he had helped them with their lessons
and household chores and romped with them when they were finished.
Now he was gone, and life seemed flat in his absence.
When fall came, Chris and Walter and Tom went back to school
as usual, now to the Union Academy where the schoolmasters, two
severe gentlemen named Crenshaw and Hardy, taught the classical cur-
riculum of the day and relied heavily on the hickory stick as an
aid to learning. The Reed boys learned easily and were too
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friends were less fortunate. Several of the less scholarly often
sought their help with their Greek and Latin, in exchange for rides
on their ponies, use of their marbles and similar inducements. It
was an arrangement sanctioned satisfactory to everyone, and sanctioned
by long use.
Although school changed little, life outside it was very
different. Abandoning cowboy-and-Indian as outmoded, Walter and
Chris now played that they were daring Confederate soldiers, and
uttered the hair-raising Rebel yell instead of the Indian warwhoop.
But Tom rarely joined their games any more. He was too old to play
at war, he told them, almost with impatience, and he stuck close to
his father, questioning him about the military developments and
growing daily more restless.
Ma and Laura were continually sewing. They gathered at the
church with other neighborhood ladieswomen, to make clothes for the sol-
diers. Cotton cloth was running out, and it was not long before
spinning wheels and looms were brought down from attics and homespun
garments began to appear again.
How to help the men in the army was the thought uppermost
in every patriotic mind. Pies, cakes, hams and other things to
eat were prepared and sent to the troops. It was not long, however,
before Virginians began to feel the pinch as the food shortage set
in. Desserts disappeared, luxuries went out of common use; all good
things available were saved for the “boys.” As the grip of the block-
ade established by the North gradually and surely tightened, even
such necessities as salt and coffee became increasingly scarce.
Mr. Reed, taking his first taste of adulterated coffee,
choked into his napkin and glared at his wife.
“Good heaven! Ma What is this stuff, Ma?” he demanded.
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“It is dreadful, isn't it?” Ma agreed. “I made it out of
parched corn and dried sweet potatoes, and just the least pinch of
coffee, for flavor. Mrs. Sydnor told me about it. She thinks
sweet potatoe's better than rye. Our coffee is almost gone, and
it's the last we'll be able to get.”
Mr. Reed poured into the despised brew a liberal amount
of “long sweetening,” the sorghum which was replacing sugar, and
stirred it with a resigned expression.
“Well, we shall have to accustom ourselves to it. I sup-
pose we may even get to like it when we're used to it,” he observed.
“Like tobacco, Pa?” Walter inquired smiling.
His father laughed, something he rarely did now. “I hope
it won't be that hard, son!” He added, “Even so, we're much better
off here than they are in Richmond and Petersburg, where only corn-
bread and peas and sorghum are really plentiful. No one except the
blockade runners has any of the luxuries -we used to consider them
the necessities -of food and clothing.”
“And our poor soldiers,” Mrs. Reed sighed, thinking of Jim
with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. His letters were infrequent,
brief and cheerful. He had escaped the measles epidemic; the Yanks
hadn't shot him -yet; the life was hard, the food rough and scanty;
General Lee, adored by his men, shared their hardships and accep-
ted few privileges; he called the Yankees “those people,” never
“the enemy”; a soldier's life left little time for writing letters
and he still hoped to enter the University, if not this fall, the
one after.
The deferment of Jim's plans was significant of the altered
attitude of the South. The Confederates were beginning to grasp
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enemy was giving way to sober realization of his strength. The
northern campaign to capture Richmond in the spring of 1862 came
dangerously close to success. Later in the year, the southern
invasion of Maryland ended in failure at Antietam, the bloodiest
battle of the entire war. For the Reeds this last engagement
fought on the fabled Indian battle ground was not only a serious
reverse to their cause, but a personal grief as well. Jim was
wounded, his left arm shot away by a cannon ball.
All over Virginia boys were coming back like Jim -when they
came back at all. You could comb the state and find hardly an able-
bodied young man -only the very young and the crippled and the old.
Even the University was deserted. Many of the professors had taken
the field, and the few students were all either under military age,
or disabled soldiers.
The war might disrupt the state and the nation, but the south-
ern Methodist Church continued to operate on schedule. At the close
of his two years at Blackstone, Mr. Reed in 1863 was transferred to
a new circuit, this time to Lawrenceville, in Brunswick County, a
few miles from the southern border of the state and a little far-
ther from the front.
But near or far, there was no escaping the war. No matter
where the fighting lines were, it was in their homes. Tom had re-
ceived his father's consent and joined the army. The blockade was
being more keenly felt. Food shortages amounted to acute hard-
ships and the prices forof all commodities, calculated in the almost
worthless Confederate money, were fantastic. Increasingly urgent
appeals flooded the countryside from Petersburg, where the big mil-
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were in desperate need of food, clothing and, above all, medicine
and surgical supplies.
On January 1st, 1863, President Lincoln had proclaimed those
slaves within the enemy lines free. The Mississippi, back door of
the Confederacy's foreign trade, had been effectively stoppered,
and seaport after seaport was falling into the hands of the superior
Yankee fleet. The incomparable Stonewall Jackson, idol of his men
and right hand of Lee, was accidentally killed by his own sentries
after the battle of Chancellorsville, another of those southern vic-
tories which served only to stave off the end. It was God's pur-
pose, a southern minister said later, that the South should be de-
fecated, but, he added quite without impiety, He first had to get rid
of Stonewall before He could accomplish His will. Early in July
Vicksburg, sole remaining southern port on the Mississippi, succumbed
to siege. At the same time Lee, reminding his troops that vengeance
was the Lord's, and not theirs, to execute, tried again to carry
the war into enemy territory and was defeated at Gettysburg. The
tide had already set against the South; now it was running strong.
* * *
“Pa, you can stop worrying about your ink,” Walter, running
to meet his father in the yard, shouted to him. “We've made you
some. It's fine stuff.”
"Mr. Reed, returning from a call on a sick parishoner,
dismounted from Bess and hoisted his son into the saddle.
“How did you manage, manage it, son?” he asked. It had be-
come impossible to buy ink, and to a man who wrote as much as he,
this was as great a hardship as the lack of tea and coffee.
“Ma thought of it,” Walter told him, “and Chris and I worked
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side him, Walter explained about the elderberry wine and soot. They
had made several small batches, to work out the right proportions,
and finally produced a satisfactory ink, smooth and glossy.
Pa was pleased. As he congratulated his wife on her ingen-
uity, he was glad to observe that z her cheerfulness seemed less
forced than it had for some time. Her determined vivacity had not
concealed from him the effort behind it.
“It was quite simple,” she assured him. “The boys did all
the work, anyway. Really, Pa, "it's wonderful how independent of
foreign aid we are becoming.”
“We're doing splendidly,” he agreed heartily. His con-
science compelled him to add, “It's fortunate for us that there is
this lull now, since the defeat at Gettysburg and Lee's offer to
resign his command. It gives us a breathing space.” A breathing
space for what? he could not help wondering.
“That was good blacking we made, too. Remember, Ma?” Chris
chimed in.
“It was indeed. I shouldn't wonder if we were quite self-
sufficient in another year,” his mother answered hopefully.
All at once, in the face of this indomitable, pathetic opti-
mism, the minister found himself unable to evade his settled fears
any longer. The blockade was all but impenetrable, their money
worthless, medicine unobtainable, food scarce, their resources of
materials and man power approaching exhaustion. How could they go
on? He dropped into his chairs, grasping its familiar arms for as-
surance in the whirling world.
“Really, my dear, let us not deceive ourselves any longer,”
he said with sudden, utter weariness. “We are doing remarkably
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do better. But it won't do' do. The war is already lost; soon
it will be over. I am glad,” he added, taking Chris and Walter by
the hand, “that you two boys have been spared the worst of it.
When it is all over, then we will need men as never before.”
* * *
But the sinking Confederacy, like a mortally ill man who by sheer
will prolongs his life for a few more hours, would not die yet.
The fall and winter of 1863 and 1864 dragged past in com-
parative quiet in Virginia. By the middle of January, 1864, there
was only one port still open to blockade runners on the entire
southern coastline, and with the return of spring the pressure on
land began again. The Yankees were swarming irresistibly, in
heartbreaking numbers, all over northern Virginia. Richmond, the
precariously held capital, was continually shaken by alarming ru-
mors and the “croakers” mournfully predicted surrender at any mo-
ment. The rich Shenandoah Valley, a farm region vital to the
half-starved Confederacy, was pillaged bare. Sherman made
his desolating march from Atlanta to the sea, breaking the South
in half. Lee, holed up in Petersburg, stood off Grant's advance
against Richmond for nine months, while the Union foragers plucked
the country clean for miles around. Confederate strength was al-
most spent.
Even while the handful of Sheridan's raiders were cap-
turing the minister's sons and the farmer's boy and appro-
priating their horses on the bank of the Meherrin, southern
resistance was collapsing.
On the night of April 9th, 1865, the cannon boomed one
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days before the news of Lee's surrender was confirmed in the evac-
uated city.
The government had fled south a week before, and President
Lincoln had entered Richmond, while General Lee, rallying his
thirty-three thousand “Miserables” for the last time, retreated
westward. Only eight thousand of his starved and tattered army
remained when he reached Appomattox; the rest, scattered, captured,
demoralized, had melted away on the march. Lee, as serene in de-
feat as in victory, surrendered, and accepted General Grant's terms,
offered with soldierly generosity.
“Our past is a memory,” Pa said sadly to his sons when the
bitter news of defeat reached them, “but there is still the future.
It is up to you, and to boys and young men like you, to make some-
thing of it.”
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| CHAPTER IV Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |