Joining the Cause

Tuckahoe, Lenoir County

April 27, 1861

I don’t know what history will call this, but I know how it feels. It feels like the ground shifting under your brogans whilst you’re still trying to get your corn in.

The big men up to Raleigh talk about “the Union” and “secession” like they were fence posts you could lay a hand on. But down here, where the Neuse runs brown and lazy, most men I know don’t talk in them big words. They talk about home. About who’s got the say over how a man lives on land his people done worked with their own two hands.

I don’t own nary a slave. Never have. I work alongside my kin and my neighbors, coopering when folks have call for barrels and farming when they don’t, and we make out one season to the next. I ain’t one to go hunting trouble.

Trouble has a way of hunting a man anyhow.

Word is Washington is fixing to put its boot on our necks. Men at the store say if we don’t draw us a line now, there won’t be no line left to draw. So today I walked over to the Tuckahoe precinct and put my name down for Company D.

I told Sarah it’d be short. She had William a-straddle her hip and little Loary in the cradle, and she didn’t say a word. Just looked at me. I told myself the same thing I told her. Most all of us is saying it.

A few months. Show ’em we mean it. Home again ’fore the tobacco’s cured.

Lord, I hope we’re right.

Camp

Summer 1861

A man can get used to most anything if he’s obliged to. Laying on hard ground. Hungry mornings and wet blankets. Marching till your feet go plumb dead and then marching some more.

But I can’t get used to the waiting.

It’s a curious thing. A man can stand up to danger better’n he can stand not knowing. We stand around studying on battles that never come, listening at older fellers talk like they know what war is. I don’t believe most of ’em do. I know I don’t.

There’s some pride in it, I won’t lie. Company D is boys from our part of the country, Lenoir and Duplin men that knows one another’s daddies and uncles. Johnny Howard. Them Harper boys. Henry Cunningham. We call ourselves the Tuckahoe Braves, like a name could make a man braver than he is.

I keep thinking: If we ever do fight, we’ll fight together.

That much I’d bet my life on.

Maps from the printed book