Sunrise was near. The eastern horizon glowed with pink and gold light, the spark that was Venus gleaming through it. Only the brightest stars still shone in the darker sky farther west. But the northern quadrant was ablaze with bursting shells; Jackson might have been watching a Fourth of July fireworks display from some distant house.
By where the smoke was thickest, he could tell that the U.S. gunners were giving the wharves of the waterfront a fearful pounding. Had he led the Yankees, he would have ordered the same, to make the Confederate infantrymen keep their heads down and prevent them from bringing too heavy a fire to bear against the invasion boats. The smoke kept him from discerning much more than that. And, with every passing minute, though the light got stronger, the smoke got worse: smoke from the Yankees' guns on the other side of the Ohio, smoke from bursting shells, and smoke from the C.S. cannon responding to the enemy's fire.
Jackson 's frown was venomous. He wanted nothing so much as to grab a Tredegar and go where the fighting was hottest. But Major General Alexander had the right of it: if he did that, he could not at the same time command. More men were capable of fighting the damnyankees than of leading the entire army against them. And, had he snatched up a rifle and run off to pretend he was a private soldier, he would have been able to see even less of the battlefield than he could from his present vantage point.
He'd already been too long away from his electric eyes and ears. And messengers would be getting back to headquarters from the fighting by now, too. Regretfully, he used feet and reins to start his horse back toward the tent among the trees.
No sooner had he dismounted than the first messenger arrived, dirty-faced, with a torn and filthy uniform, eyes wide and staring from what was surely his first taste of combat. He stared at Jackson, too. Was that because he was meeting a man legendary in the CSA or simply because he was too battered to recall the message he was supposed to deliver?
Then, very visibly, his wits began to turn, as if they were a steamboat's paddlewheel. "General Jackson, sir!" he exclaimed. "The damnyankees have men ashore on our side of the river." He gulped. "Lots of 'em, sir."
Even in the predawn stillness, southern Indiana remained sultry, sticky. Frederick Douglass stood in a field just outside the city limits of New Albany. Every couple of minutes, he would slap at himself as a mosquito bit him. "I'm an old man," he said sadly. "I remember being able to hear the mosquitoes buzzing around, so that sometimes 1 could get them before they got me. No more, not for years. Now they take me by surprise."
That amused the U.S. artillerymen standing by their pieces awaiting the word to commence. "It ain't no big loss, Pop," one of them said. "That goddamn buzzing drives me crazy, nothin' else but." A couple of his comrades spoke up in agreement.
"Better to know the enemy than to let him take you by surprise," Douglass insisted, which drew another chuckle from the Massachusetts volunteers. In the couple of days he'd been with them, they'd treated him welclass="underline" General Willcox had made a good choice in assigning him to their battery when he'd asked to watch the bombardment of Louisville from among the guns.
A rider came trotting down the road. He halted when he saw the guns: big, dark shapes in what was otherwise an empty field. "Open fire at four A.M. sharp," he called, and rode on to give the next battery the word.
Someone struck a match, first stepping well away from the guns and limbers to do so. The brief flare of light showed the boyish features of Captain Joseph Little, the battery commander. "Fifteen minutes," he said after checking his pocket watch. "Men, we'll load our pieces now, so as to get the first shots off precisely on the mark."
In darkness just this side of perfect, the gun crews handled unscrewing the breech blocks, loading in shells and bags of powder after them, and sealing the guns once more as smoothly as they might have done at high noon. Douglass had already seen that the artillery volunteers, most of whom were militiamen of long standing, were trained to a standard close to that of their Regular Army counterparts, which could not have been said about the volunteer infantry.
Captain Little spoke up again: "Mr. Douglass, you'll want to make certain"-his Bay State accent made the word come out as suht'n, almost as if he were a Rebel-"you're not standing right behind a gun. When they go off, the recoil will send them rolling backwards at a pretty clip."
Douglass made sure he would be out of harm's way. The quarter of an hour seemed to take forever. Douglass was beginning to think it would never end when, off to the east toward Jeffersonville, several cannon roared all at once.
"Well! I like that," Captain Little said indignantly. "Still lacks two minutes of the hour by my watch." He must have been staring at it in the faintest early twilight. "Some people think they have to come to the party early. If we can't be the first, we shan't be the last, either." More guns were going off, some of them much closer than the earliest ones had been. Little raised his voice: "Battery B… Fire!"
All six guns bellowed at essentially the same instant. The noise was a cataclysmic blow against Douglass' ears. Great long tongues of yellow flame burst from the muzzles of the cannon, illuminating for half a heartbeat the men who served them. Dense smoke shot from the muzzles, too.
Douglass paid that scant heed for the moment. As Captain Little had warned, the cannon recoiled sharply. A couple of artillerymen had to step lively to keep from being run down by the creaking gun carriages.
"Come on, lads!" Little yelled. "Get 'em back in place and give the damn Rebs another dose of the same." Grunting and cursing, the crews man-handled the cannon up to the positions from which they'd first fired. The breeches were opened, swabbed out to make sure no burning fragments of powder bag remained. Then in went another shell, another charge, and the loaders screwed the breeches shut. The guns bellowed once more, not in a single salvo this time but one after another, each crew struggling to be faster than those to either side of it.
The smoke quickly filled the field. Coughing, Douglass moved to one side, seeking not only cleaner air to breathe but also an unimpeded view of the battlefield. As twilight brightened toward day, it was as if the curtain lifted on an enormous stage set out before him.
Seeing that panorama, he understood for the first time why men spoke of the terrible grandeur of war. Barges and boats packed with soldiers raced across the Ohio so the men they carried could close with the foe. Shells from the U.S. guns poured down like rain on the waterfront of Louisville. Each one burst with a flash of sullen red fire and a great uplifting cloud of black smoke. Douglass could not imagine how any Confederate soldiers compelled to endure such a cannonading could hope to survive.
But the enemy not only survived, he fought. Not only did shells burst along the waterfront. They also burst in the Ohio. Looking across the river, Douglass could see flashes from the muzzles of Confederate guns, cannon similar to those the Massachusetts volunteers served. Their thunder reached his ears, too, attenuated by distance but still very real.
Tall plumes of water flew up from the shells that splashed into the Ohio. When Douglass noticed those, the spectacle before him suddenly seemed less grand. His breathing came short. His palms got sweaty. Remembered terror was almost as vivid as the original. He did not need to wonder what the blue-clad men in the invasion boats were feeling. He'd felt it himself, when the Rebel battery shelled the Queen of the Ohio.