Bright Starry Banner Read online

  ALSO BY ALDEN R . CARTER

  FICTION

  Brother’s Keeper

  Crescent Moon

  Bull Catcher

  Between a Rock and a Hard Place

  RoboDad

  Up Country

  Sheila’s Dying

  Wart, Son of Toad

  Growing Season

  NONFICTION

  China Past—China Future

  NONFICTION FOR CHILDREN

  Battle of the Ironclads: The Monitor and the Merrimack

  The Colonial Wars: Clashes in the Wilderness

  The American Revolution: War for Independence

  The War of 1812: Second Fight for Independence

  The Mexican War: Manifest Destiny

  The Civil War: American Tragedy

  The Spanish-American War: Imperial Ambitions

  Last Stand at the Alamo

  The Battle of Gettysburg

  The Shoshoni

  Radio: From Marconi to the Space Age

  The American Revolution Series

  Colonies in Revolt

  Darkest Hours

  At the Forge of Liberty

  Birth of the Republic

  Illinois

  Modern China

  Modern Electronics and Supercomputers (with Wayne J. LeBlanc)

  The map on page 120 is used by permission of the Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, © copyright 1983

  Copyright © 2003 by Alden R. Carter

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carter, Alden R.

  Bright starry banner : a novel of the Civil War / Alden R. Carter

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56947-381-1 (alk. paper)

  EAN 978-1-56947-381-8

  eISBN 978-1-61695-136-8

  1. Stones River, Battle of, Murfreesboro, Tenn., 1862–1863.

  2. Tennessee—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction.

  3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3553.A7695B75 2004

  813'.54—dc21 2003053006

  Design by Kathleen Lake, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR THE WONDERFUL women of my family.

  My wife, Carol Shadis Carter

  My mother, Hilda Carter Fletcher

  My sister, Cynthia Carter LeBlanc

  &

  My daughter, Siri Morgan Shadis Carter

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Book Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Questions For Discussion

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MANY THANKS TO all who helped with Bright Starry Banner, particularly my agent, Bill Reiss; my editors Juris Jurjevics and Bryan Devendorf; the staff of Stones River National Battlefield; my cousin Charles Paradise; and my friends Don Beyer and Leigh and Linda Aschbrenner. As always, my daughter, Siri; my son, Brian; and my wife, Carol, were an inspiration in countless ways.

  For source material, I am indebted to the fine historians who have written about the battle of Stones River, especially Peter Cozzens, author of No Better Place to Die (University of Illinois Press, 1991); James Lee McDonough, author of Stones River: Bloody Winter in Tennessee (University of Tennessee Press, 1980); and David R. Logsdon, compiler of Eyewitnesses at the Battle of Stones River (Kettle Mills Press, Nashville, 1989).

  This was the last of my books that my mother, Hilda Carter Fletcher, had an opportunity to read and critique before her death in May 2002. She was an exacting editor, a great creative support, and a wonderful mother to the end.

  THE IMAGINATION WORKS best amid scenes half known and half forgotten. When time shall have thrown its shadows over the events of [this] century, and the real and unreal become so intermingled in the minds of men as to become indistinguishable … here the blue and the gray will meet to fight—and to be reconciled.

  —Brigadier General John Beatty

  The Citizen Soldier

  December 1863

  PROLOGUE

  December 23, 1862

  West Point, New York

  HE HAS KNOWN all the soldiers and not a few of the politicians now gracing or disgracing the rank of general. But personalities no longer concern Brevet Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, former general in chief of the United States Army. In his great age and detachment, only the problem of strategy holds his interest. The late afternoons are his best time, the winter light fading beyond the windows of his study overlooking the Hudson, the ache in his gouty foot warmed away by the fire, Spanish sherry, and the anticipation of dinner. He no longer cares to entertain, is content to sit alone, gazing at the wall map where his aide has marked the latest positions of the Confederate and Federal armies.

  The daily reports from the War Department arrive courtesy of his onetime subordinate, Major General Henry W. Halleck, who commands all the Northern armies in this second Christmas season of the rebellion against the national authority. Scott acknowledges the courtesy every so often with a note but rarely offers advice. After fifty-three years in the service of his country, forty-eight of them as a general, he has given all he has to give. In his last months as general in chief, he offered a strategy to win the war. The press derided it as too cautious, labeled it “Scott’s Anaconda” after the lethargic South American constrictor. But the plan was sound: fix the Southern armies in place in the East, split the rebellious states along the line of the Mississippi, blockade the coast, and squeeze. But the people and the politicians demanded battles, rushed ahead to fight tooth and claw.

  Scott shifts his gouty foot, focuses more closely on the map. Burnside is back across the Rappahannock after butchering thirteen thousand of his own men in a frontal assault against Lee’s army on the heights behind Fredericksburg: a result so predictable as to be uninteresting. In the West, Grant has attempted to march overland from Grand Junction, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, and thence to the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg. But the distance is too great. Confederate cavalry rips up his supply lines, burns his base at Holly Springs, and forces him into an ignominious retreat. Again an outcome as predictable as it is dreary.

  Only the third major Federal effort offers promise for a pleasant hour’s contemplation before dinner. The recovery of unionist east Tennessee and the opening of Georgia to invasion are goals dear to President Lincoln’s heart. Scott sees it as a bloody undertaking, yet the campaign offers intriguing problems of supply, maneuver, and battle. The army designated for the invasion is at Nashville, exactly where it had been ten months before when Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell originally took the city. Not that it has been idle. Since first occupying Nashville, the army has fought at Shiloh, in the siege of Corinth, and along the railroad line east toward Chattanooga in a first attempt to invade east Tennessee. But Buell was forced to abandon that effort when General Braxton Bragg invaded Kentucky with his Army of Tennessee. Buell rushed north, intercepting Bragg at Perryvill
e on October 8. Despite a three-to-one advantage in numbers, Buell failed to crush Bragg, who drubbed one wing of the Northern army and then skillfully extricated his force and retreated over the Cumberlands. A disgusted Lincoln relieved Buell three weeks later, replacing him with Major General William Starke Rosecrans. Scott knows Rosecrans more by reputation than personal contact: a brilliant engineer, a gifted tactician, a querulous, impolitic subordinate. But all in all, not a bad choice.

  Rosecrans moved the Army of the Cumberland from Louisville back to Nashville where it could better prepare for an invasion of east Tennessee. Bragg responded by taking a defensive position around Murfreesboro, thirty miles to the southeast. As it always does, the Lincoln administration demanded immediate action. The War Department repeatedly ordered Rosecrans to move against Bragg, but the big, sandy-haired general demurred. He must have more cavalry, horses, repeating carbines, and supplies before he can march. Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton considered relieving him, but that would have meant elevating the army’s second in command, Major General George H. Thomas, a Virginian with a reputation for excessive deliberateness.

  After the debacle at Fredericksburg on December 13, the need for action by the Army of the Cumberland became imperative. Only today Scott has another missive from Halleck complaining of Rosecrans’s recalcitrance:

  Rosecrans doesn’t understand. We must have a victory before the turn of the year. The British parliament meets in January, and our friends in that august body will be hard put to stall southern recognition longer if they have no evidence that we may yet win this war. If the Gladstone government concludes that our defeat at Fredericksburg indicates the utter futility of our efforts to suppress the rebellion, it will urge a vote in favor of recognition. The French will follow without a scruple since Napoleon III wants to go adventuring in Mexico and South America. By spring we can expect to see the combined British and French navies cruising our waters, challenging the blockade, and thus presenting us with the impossible choice of making war on both Europe and our own South or letting the rebels have their independence.

  For a time we thought the president’s Emancipation Proclamation might dissuade the British from intervening in our affairs, but I fear that the general opinion among the diplomats is the same as expressed by our opposition press: the Proclamation is nothing more than a cheap fraud intended to prejudice elements of parliament—the prime minister especially—against granting recognition. That is far too cynical a view, for the Proclamation is a great moral statement as well as an act of military expediency. But for it to have practical benefits in that latter regard, we must have victories to demonstrate to both our friends and foes that it is not merely the desperate act of a desperate government.

  I know, dear General, that nothing I have said here is more than you already know, but if you can offer me any counsel in this exceedingly difficult time I would be even more your debtor than I am at present.

  —Most respectfully, H. W. Halleck, maj. gen.

  Scott reads the note again, returns it to its envelope. He has no counsel for Halleck. Burnside is defeated, the Army of the Potomac in shambles. Grant is stymied, his army falling back in disgrace. Only Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland can win the victory critical to the survival of the Union into 1863 and beyond. There is no secret solution to the problem. Rosecrans must move.

  Book One

  CHAPTER 1

  Christmas Night, 1862

  Nashville, Tennessee

  FOR A MOMENT, Lieutenant Colonel Julius Garesché, chief of staff of the Army of the Cumberland, fears that the window will not open. Patiently, he presses slender fingers along the stile, testing for the point where the damp of early winter in Tennessee has swollen the frame within the jamb. He finds the spot and gives it a firm but not immoderate rap with his knuckles and the sash slides up with only the mildest of squawks. He tests the tension of the counterweight, then dusts his hands absently as he turns to inspect the table where the generals sit with their toddies, cigars, and maps. Reassured that all is satisfactory for the moment, Garesché folds his arms, leans back against the wall, and closes his eyes against the sting of smoke and fatigue.

  If he were a self-conscious man, Garesché might notice the two young lieutenants on either side of the door exchange glances of fond amusement at his expense. No other senior officer in the room would rise from his chair to wrestle with a stubborn window. Not with a dozen lieutenants and captains standing about, any of whom could be ordered to the chore and then blamed if the window proved recalcitrant, made too shrill a protest, or— overcome at last—were left standing too wide or too narrow for the comfort of the generals and colonels. No doubt there are even those among the senior officers who would blame an aide for the coolness and dampness of the evening itself, for the finding of fault is ever the right—even the duty—of superior rank. Or so it seems to the lieutenants who find in Garesché the bemusing exception to the rule.

  But Garesché is not a self-conscious man and he worries not at all about the opinion of the aides standing duty on this Christmas night. The room needed fresh air, and what matter if he or some junior opened the window so long as the service was done? In his twenty-one years in the army, Garesché has opened many windows and doors. He has escorted his generals’ wives on shopping trips and home from parties. He has given his opinion on flower arrangements and ball gowns, tutored the younger children in arithmetic and drawing, and listened to the older sons and daughters complain of how impossible it is to be the child of a general. He has frequently been persuaded to attempt mediation between wife and general or child and general, efforts in which he has a remarkably high ratio of success. He is known throughout the army as the perfect gentleman and the perfect staff officer, and even if it still rankles on occasion to be so labeled and dismissed, by now he is accustomed and largely content to serve greater men.

  Garesché opens his eyes for a moment to study his new general: voluble now, drink in one hand, gesticulating with his cigar to make some point of military history. Yes, this is the man, Garesché thinks: the one who will win for us here in the West and then in Virginia. And I will help him do it. Help him though my poor spirit trembles at what we must do to win this war.

  He rests chin on chest and meditates on the suffering to come and how each hurt, each death, must wound God. He wishes for a moment that he could take some of the suffering upon himself, but he recognizes the sin in that desire and says a small prayer asking forgiveness for his pride. Tonight he will sleep on the floor, let the cold, hard planks remind him of God’s goodness in allowing him to serve in the nation’s ordeal by fire. In the end, the fire may consume them all, every soldier of every army North and South, but no matter if the nation come pure and tempered from the fire.

  Garesché wonders if old John Brown, with so much blood already on his head, prayed to God or to the cleansing flame itself when he stood with his hand on the furnace at Harpers Ferry in the moment before he threw wide the door and let loose the fire. Garesché imagines the old man but a hollow thing by then, a figure of cornstalk and straw with dry, crackling fingers so weak that they could barely lift the latch. Then the bursting fire, setting old John Brown alight, making of him a tower of flame with veins and sinews of blue molten steel. It is then that he rises up, mighty, burning, blazing arm outswept, voice like the voice from the Pit: “Let this nation be purged with fire!”

  Yes, Garesché thinks. Yes. And in the imagining of the fire, he is cooled, refreshed. He opens his eyes to check the table where the generals sit.

  Except for George Thomas, who dozes by the hearth, the generals are a convivial lot. Alex McCook is being encouraged to sing and after a few moments of feigned protest, consents. Why, Garesché wonders, must these Irish always protest when all the world knows they love the stage? He tightens his lips, reminds himself of the charity he owes all made in the image of God—owes particularly on this night of the Redeemer’s birth. But he does not trust Major General Alexander McD
owell McCook, despite the man’s reputation as a fighter. But the Ohio clan of “Fighting McCooks” has powerful connections, and its only West Point graduate, modest though his abilities, now wears two stars and commands the right wing of the army.

  McCook sings a song just arrived from the East in that mysterious way songs, jokes, slang, and rumors fly unerringly between armies while critical orders go wildly astray and routine reports disappear altogether. Honest Pat Murphy of the Irish Brigade is suitably mournful for McCook’s fine tenor, and Garesché is moved by the obvious emotion in McCook’s performance. Maybe it is only his youth I distrust, he thinks. Perhaps he is a better man, a deeper man, than I give him credit for.

  If he is honest with himself—and in this Garesché is rigidly consistent— he must admit that he envies McCook both his youth and his combat experience. In spite of himself, Garesché sighs. If he had only been a little less comfortable in the shadow of generals, a little less inclined by temperament and manners to life in the East, perhaps he would not have become the perfect staff officer. Perhaps he, too, would have been a fighting soldier.

  He had missed the fighting in Mexico where many of his contemporaries had won one, two, or even three brevet promotions. Some even won fame, among them Braxton Bragg, who now commands the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Murfreesboro. Bragg, elected ugliest man in the corps by his classmates at West Point—and not entirely for his scarecrow looks, for even then Bragg was a disagreeable man—became a hero at Buena Vista, when old General Taylor gave the famous order: “A little more grape, if you please, Captain Bragg.” That the actual wording of the order required considerable expurgation before appearing in the press made little difference. Bragg became the public’s ideal of the dashing and hugely competent West Point professional: the new soldier of a nation stretching out to embrace a continent. Garesché and those who know Bragg can only shake their heads, remembering the pallid, petulant martinet that is the true Bragg.