southwest, at Centerville, and just behind him was Burnside's Ninth. Ord's men were still filing into Carlisle, and as he stood on the veranda, he watched them pass.
The town was rich, prosperous, not really touched by the war. Gaslight illuminated the main thoroughfare, this incredible valley pike, the type of road he'd have given a right arm for while struggling through the back lanes and swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi. Broad, well macadamized, the crushed limestone pavement glittering in the glow of the gaslight.
The troops marched by in good order, their spirits up. They were on the move and in the East. All day long the men he had brought with him from the Mississippi campaign had been in high spirits. Though over eighty degrees, the air was relatively dry. There were no foul humors in this Pennsylvania air carrying ague or yellow jack. For them twenty-five miles in such conditions was all in a day's work, though some had found the paved pike to be hard on the feet after the soft mud or powder of western roads.
What had captivated him and his army was the outright celebration of the citizenry. The pike was lined with thousands of civilians. They had been behind the rebel lines for over a month, and though Lee's men had treated them with the utmost respect, still it had been an occupying army, and now the liberators had come. It was a heady experience for all of them, civilians, soldiers, and even their general. For the first time on a campaign march they had been greeted as friends and not as alien invaders.
That thought, of being aliens in their own country, had often troubled him. Nearly twenty years earlier, during the build-up before the war with Mexico, he had spent a winter in Louisiana and had found it to be a pleasant memory, of cool winter nights and days usually filled with a nice touch of warmth when compared to Ohio or the freezing nights at the Point. Back then they had been treated as heroes about to go off to war. But those days were long gone. Not since the start of all this current misery had he seen such a march as they had experienced this day.
Pretty girls, many wearing patriotic ribbons of red, white, and blue, stood at farm gates, waving flags, cheering as each regiment passed. Mothers had looked on smilingly, passing out fresh-baked biscuits and bread; little boys had run up and down along the fencerows bordering the pike, laughing and playing friendly pranks. When the march broke for ten minutes' rest at the end of every hour, civilians had mingled freely among the men, bearing buckets of cool fresh well water and passing out yet more food.
So many soldiers in the ranks who were fathers found themselves, for a few minutes, transported back home, a child in their lap, tickling it, trying to get the infant or toddler to smile, and everyone laughing even when the child burst into tears and reached for its mother. Men began taking bullets out of a cartridge box, tearing them open and tossing a handful of loose powder into a quickly made fire to give the children a thrill as it burst with a puff of sulfurous smoke, then passing the minie ball to some wide-eyed boy as a souvenir. So many were doing this that word passed down the ranks that the practice had to be stopped before someone got hurt, and besides, multiplied a hundred thousand times, it was enough ammunition to keep an entire brigade on the firing line for a long day's fight.
When the bugles and drums sounded for the march to resume more than one man had tears in his eyes as he hugged and kissed a child who had been 'his' for ten brief minutes. Younger men, boys of seventeen and eighteen, fell in love a dozen times that day, for at each stop there was a pretty lass, scores of pretty lasses. At such a moment all the restraints and decorum were set aside for a few minutes, though parents still kept a watchful eye, usually chatting with a captain or older sergeant as they watched. Boys who at home had stammered at the sight of a girl now boldly asked their names, how old they were, and if they had any brothers or sweethearts in the army. Girls looked into young soldiers' eyes and would not turn away, would smile, offer kind words, perhaps even the touch of a hand to a cheek or even a chaste kiss and a tearful, 'Good luck soldier. I'll pray for you tonight.' Addresses were hurriedly scribbled and exchanged, with the usually unfulfilled promise of writing after 'all this is over.'
And so the columns would form up and move on, passing through small villages of prosperous homes, past rich farms with neatly painted barns as big as churches. The fences bordering the pike were sturdy, well-built affairs of post and rail, enclosing orchards, wheat fields, and corn head high on the other side. The fences were often piled thick with honeysuckle in bloom and morning glories fading in the midday heat The air was rich with the scents of an abundant land, of ripening apples, corn, flowers, and over all a sheen of softness, almost of a memory forming that could haunt those who outlived the weeks ahead, haunting them fifty years hence with dreams of at least one day when war did have a touch of glory to it as they marched ever west and south.
The column, stretching back twenty miles, all the way to Harrisburg, had thus moved throughout the day, thousands of rifles on shoulders swaying, sparkling as they caught and reflected the sunlight Behind each brigade moved a couple of dozen wagons, the limit set by Grant before the march, one wagon with additional ammunition for each regiment, a second wagon for regimental supplies, and one ambulance per regiment for the surgeon, his equipment, and room enough for four men to ride who might be too sick to keep up with the day's march. It was a lean army marching fast.
Cresting low rises along the pike, a soldier could stop for a moment, looking back and then forward. As far as the eye could reach there were the long serpentine columns, dark blue, dull white canvas tops of wagons, the glint of bronze from batteries of Napoleon twelve-pounders, and always the flags. On this first day of march, a march carrying them down through loyal Pennsylvania, all the flags were uncased and held high, the light breeze out of the southwest gently lifting the banners.
National colors, the flag of the Union, state flags, many never seen before by the civilians, flags of Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and Illinois mixed in with the more familiar banners of Ohio, New York, and, of course, Pennsylvania. Most of the flags were shot-torn, some little more than tattered rags, which had been lovingly patched, sewn, and resewn by those who bore them. Faded gold lettering was emblazoned upon them, names of distant battles from what seemed almost to be another war… Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, Jackson, and in new, yet-to-fade letters, Vicksburg.
The colorful new flags of divisions and corps marked the head of each column, boys by the side of the road eagerly arguing with each other at the sight of them.
'Red means First Division, blue Second Division, and that is Thirteenth Corps!'
'No, Jimmie, you darn fool, white is Second and blue is Third, and I tell you that is Ninth Corps!'
At the passage of the colored division of Ninth Corps many at first stood silent, for such a sight had never been seen before, colored men, in uniform, carrying rifles on their shoulders and heading to war.
The men of that division, knowing they were being more closely watched than others, made it a point to march in. proper style, rifles shouldered, not slung, hour after hour sergeants chanting the cadence, 'Your left, your left, your left, right, left.'
At the front of each regiment were brand-new national colors, beside them the unique yellow regimental flags of the United States Colored Troops. No battle honors were emblazoned on them yet, but all knew they soon would be.
As the first regiment in that division passed through ham- lets and towns, past farms and workshops, most onlookers stood silent. But the sight of them, their new uniforms, the way they marched, keeping step, thousands of them, made their mark, and by the time the second brigade of the divi- sion passed, scattered applause would break out, and then cheers as the men, thousands of voices joined together, would sing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' 'He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never sound retreat '
They must have sung it twenty times that day, each time as heartfelt as the last, and those lining the road joined in. And each time as they finished there was a strange, momentary silence. White citizens of a republic locked in the third year of a desperate war, looking now upon black men who perhaps indeed were the major cause of that war, armed and heading south. Such a sight would have been unimaginable passing through Pennsylvania only a few years before, but all things change, and war brings far more changes than anyone ever expects.
Their passage carried that message, that realization. More than one person watching them pass had lost a son, a brother, a husband to the inferno, and some felt tears come to their eyes. Perhaps, after all, there was worth in their loss; perhaps these men represented that.
For the men of Third Division, Ninth Corps, this was not just a war about the preserving of the Union, it was a war of liberation. When someone cried out, 'Good luck, soldier,' they felt a swelling pride within.
For those in that column that one word, 'soldier,' carried with it a weight undreamed of by those who cried it. It was no longer 'boy,' or even a kindly 'uncle,' or the dark, bitter insult of 'hey, nigger.'
Now it was 'soldier.'
