She put the letter down, took a deep breath. Looked around the little carriage house, now crammed with a year’s accumulations. She looked down at the bed and remembered their night together.
Wendy stood and knelt by the bed, ran her hands underneath. At last they fell on what she was looking for and she pulled it out; an oversize carpet bag, empty now. She set it on the bed, opened it, considered what to pack.
It was just growing light when Jonathan Paine rose, sat up in the bed he had occupied since the time he had been taken from the family cradle, deemed old enough for a real bed. He looked around the familiar room. It was all gray-and-blue shadows in the weak light, but he did not need any light at all to know what was there. He was like an old man, visiting the scene of his youth, the shadowy remains of a life he had once had.
He swung his one leg over the edge of the bed. He fastened his prosthetic leg in place, pulled his pants on and his shirt. He did not wear his uniform anymore, the only clothes he had known for more than a year. He did not have to. All of his things were there, just as he had left them. His clothes fit loose now, but they fit.
All his things were there. Only his family was gone.
Jonathan stood, limped across the room and down the stairs. He could hear Jenny moving about in the kitchen. Bobby would be rising soon. He would want to help, but Jonathan did not want his help this time. Later, perhaps, but now it was his task alone.
He stepped quietly out the front door, climbed down the steps. The morning light was spreading, the scraps of fog hanging low over the river and twisting around the clumps of trees on the bank. Jonathan walked around the house, up the slight hill to the family plot. He stood for a long moment, looking at the place where his mother was buried, the fresh-turned earth beside it that marked his father’s grave.
Robley had died before the Abigail Wilson tied up. Jonathan had seen the body carried back with him. His father had been born and raised on Paine Plantation, had known all his greatest joys on that patch of land. When his body rotted away and mixed again with the soil, it had to be that soil, it could be no other.
At last Jonathan tore his eyes from the twin headstones, walked back down the hill. In the shed he found a big felling ax. He swung it over his shoulder, headed back to the house.
Jonathan hobbled past the porch, up to the old oak, the earthly remains of his beloved tree. He looked it up and down, the horrible thing his father had created there. But not his father, not really. The gargoyle had been cut by a man driven mad by grief, and that man may well have looked like Robley Paine, but it was not him.
Jonathan hefted his ax, let it rest on his shoulder as he adjusted his grip, then brought it back and swung it at the base of the tree. He felt the good, sharp steel bite into the ancient wood. He wiggled it free, brought the ax back, and chopped again, and this time a chip flew.
It would not be easy. It would take a long time. He was alone now, with only Bobby to help him. His family was gone and the Negroes had mostly all run to the Yankees. But still he knew he would not stop until he had cut down this terrible thing that had once been the Paines’ precious tree, this nightmare the war had made. Rip the stump out, roots and all.
And then he would plant a new oak. It would not be the same—it could never be the same—but it too would grow tall and strong. He would raise it up from the ground, this new and beautiful and good thing.
Historical Note
How much I owe of the pleasure of my life to these much reviled writers of fiction.
— Mary Boykin Chesnut, February 25, 1861
Glory in the Name is fiction, of course. There never was a Samuel Bowater or Hieronymus Taylor, the ships that they sailed did not exist. The men, however, and their ships are based on real men and vessels of the period. Further, the situations in which they are involved, the battles, the trials, of the Confederate Navy, are all real, and portrayed as accurately as I was able, basing my depictions on copious primary source evidence. Other than Bowater and company, the people and events are described as they were.
Here, then, are a few comments on the action covered in this book.
In early 1861, months before the firing on Fort Sumter, which is generally considered the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederate government began its military organization. Initially, already existing militia units were formed into Southern regiments, their numbers swelled by the thousands of men who rushed to join.
For the Confederate Navy, things were not so simple. Officially established on February 20, 1861, the navy had no ships and little means of obtaining them. Sailors were scarce, since the Southern states had never possessed much of a merchant marine. The only thing that the Confederate Navy had enough of was officers, and that was only because they had so few ships that needed them.
The Confederacy had enough officers, but they did not have a glut of them. Officers of the United States Navy showed a greater reluctance to resign and support their home states than did their brother officers in the United States Army. In the spring of 1861 there were 1,385 active-duty officers in the navy, including the midshipmen at the Naval Academy. Of those, only 375 chose to join the Confederacy, and a third of those were Academy midshipmen. Only twelve of seventy-eight captains joined the South. Clearly there was, as Mary Boykin Chesnut put it, “an awful pull in their divided hearts.”
Perhaps the foremost example of that divided heart was Franklin Buchanan, who had entered the navy as a midshipman during the War of 1812. Thinking his home state of Maryland would secede, Buchanan tendered his resignation. Then when Maryland stayed in the Union, “Old Buck” tried to take his resignation back. But it was too late in the eyes of Navy Secretary Gideon Welles.
Buchanan’s predicament illustrates the kind of uncertainty that was rampant in the early months of 1861. With five states seceded from the Union within months of his taking office, Abraham Lincoln wanted very much not to make things any worse than they were. That was the thinking behind the administration’s handling of the threat to Gosport Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, which turned into a debacle for the Union.
In April, Virginia, the most influential of the Southern states, was still teetering on the brink of secession. Lincoln and his cabinet were afraid that any little offense might tip the state into the Confederate camp. So, despite clear threats to the naval yard, Lincoln and Gideon Welles did nothing to defend the place, since that, they felt, would be seen as an act of aggression against Virginia. Nor did they send the ships off to the safety of Fortress Monroe or Washington.
To make matters worse, the yard was commanded by the old and uncertain Charles McCauley, and many of the officers under him were Southern men whose real objective was to see the valuable navy yard in Southern hands. The growing tension both inside and outside the yard and the threat of state militia massing in Norfolk finally reached the boiling point on April 20, 1861. Swept by panic, the Union officers decided to scuttle and burn the ships and flee from the shipyard, burning it in their wake. Even this was poorly done. A wealth of ordnance was left intact, and the fires did not do nearly the damage intended. The sailing vessel Cumberland, all but obsolete in the age of steam propulsion, was towed to safety, while the Merrimack was burned and sunk. A year later, the Merrimack, reborn as the Confederate ironclad Virginia (and commanded by Franklin Buchanan), would batter the Cumberland to death, killing nearly half her crew.