Home Ground

South Carolina coast

March 1863

They shipped us clean down to South Carolina to watch the coast for Yankee boats. It’s flat and sandy and the water’s salt, and the skeeters is bigger than ours, which I didn’t think was possible. No fighting to speak of. Picket and dig, dig and picket. The boys say it’s the easiest duty we’ve had, and I reckon it is, but I’d trade it in a minute to be nearer home.

Back in North Carolina

May 18, 1863

They’ve brought us home. I stepped off onto North Carolina dirt and something in my chest turned loose that I didn’t know was tied.

Same pine smell. Same wet ground. Same flat country where the sky looks bigger than the land. Even the skeeters feel like old enemies coming to say howdy. The boys talk different here. You hear county names and river names and roads they walked barefooted as boys.

Then you remember why you’re here.

Gum Swamp, below Kinston

May 22, 1863, night

A rider came in this morning on a lathered horse. Said the Yankees had marched out of New Bern and hit our outpost at Gum Swamp, caught the 56th napping and took a heap of ’em prisoner. Men ran off into the swamp and didn’t come out.

It was like being hit twice in the same place. All I could think was, Not New Bern again. Not here.

We shouldered arms and lit out, brogans sucking in the road, sweat starting before the sun was good up. We got there toward sundown. Artillery barking, smoke lying low over the cypress, glimpses of blue through the trees and then nothing. It ain’t a fight like Sharpsburg. It’s feeling your way through swamp water where a dozen men behind a log can sound like a regiment.

But when our line pressed forward, the Yankees gave back. By dark the word was they were falling back toward New Bern.

It ain’t pride I feel tonight. It’s relief, like the dirt was near about taken right out from under us and we got our feet planted again.

Batchelder’s Creek

May 23, 1863

We followed ’em like hounds down the Dover Road, swamp pressing in on both sides. At Batchelder’s Creek they turned on us and the firing got hot for a spell. Then word shot down the line that their colonel was killed, and you could feel the starch go out of ’em. They fell back inside the New Bern works, and we didn’t follow into them guns.

Standing there so close to New Bern again, I felt two things at once. Glad we ran ’em. And sick that the town is still sitting behind Yankee works like a stolen pocket watch you can see but can’t take back.

Most of our voices were still in the ranks tonight. After Sharpsburg, that feels like a gift from God.

Back to Virginia

June 2, 1863

Orders came today: back to Virginia. Nobody argued much. They just got quiet and went to packing. I walked off a ways tonight and listened at the frogs and the night bugs. For a minute it sounded like the old world, the one before the war.

Then I came back to camp.

South Anna Bridge

July 4, 1863

We’re guarding the railroad bridges north of Richmond while the rest of the army is off in Pennsylvania. Today the Yankee cavalry came raiding at the South Anna Bridge, and we ran ’em off. Small fight, as fights go.

News is coming down from the north of a great battle at a place called Gettysburg. Nobody knows yet how it went. Some boys are sore we missed it. I ain’t.

Maps from the printed book