less fastidious thought
who’d had enough of Yankee righteousness.
We’d take the war to them—we’d take the war
to hell and back—to finish it this month.
We’d whipped them running all the summer long
and had the notion we could do anything.
We hated them enough to die in droves,
and you would too, if you were us, in love
with freedom to do what we pleased and told
that we were sinful by inferiors,
by Yankees—money-grubbers culled
from prisons, slums, and what-not, Europe’s
dregs, ill-mannered, unrefined, and reeking
of the greasy coal their factories spewed.
We Southerners were disinclined to serve
a government—paid for by Southerners,
mind you—a government that had gone foul,
was lording over us majorities
of rough-scruff rubbish from the alleys
of New York. Like our fathers and grandfathers,
we would be our own men or die proving
it. And we had. We had outfought the Yankees
through the summer and knew it, knew we had
to beat them now and finish it before
we were bled out. You may say we were daring
and you might say we were arrogant, but
it was desperation and necessity
that led and pushed us into the Potomac,
run like foxes by the hounds of our own
success. We yelled and cheered as we went down
to the River, wild with defiance, shoeless
lords with snapping flags, free men with no choice
but to lay those flags before the Lord of Lords,
the God of Battles.
Some say sixty thousand
crossed—that doctor counted more—as many,
nearly, as the Federals—but we frittered
down to forty-five, they say, by the time
we got to Sharpsburg, though the Yankees wouldn’t
know it. Then how we came to lose so many
of our men I now commence to tell you.
The Yankees had a thing or two to do
with our eventual disappointment,
and chief among them was their president,
a man we scorned and ridiculed. We said,
“Jeff Davis rode a dapple gray; Abe Lincoln
rode a mule.” But that was a tough old mule.
All Yankeedom went shrieking like a flock
of geese when word of us raced North. Invasion!
Rebel Army Marching on Washington!
Except that man in the White House. He stood
looking out his window west and thinking,
“Come on, come on closer,” like some canny
farmer luring in a fox close enough
not to miss this time, tying down a pullet
by one scrawny ankle so it will flap
and squawk like crazy while the fox drifts closer,
pacing in the brush, calculating, hungry;
and the farmer slowly raises his trusty
old musket to his shoulder—the same one
his daddy used in 1812—and bang!
We didn’t know who we were challenging,
or what, and so we swung route-step into
two long arms, stronger than Lincoln’s. Our God
was simpler than Lincoln’s, understandable,
more down-home and reassuring, righteous
in a predictable way. Who or what
Abe prayed to I don’t know, but he promised
his tall God, some steady-eyed Mystery,
that if the Union boys could lick us this
one time, the president would strike us hard
through our black folk. That God was somewhere
on the battlefield, you might say. Some say
there is no God on battlefields but Chance.
It’s beyond me. But some necessity,
carried by that President like a plague,
cornered us at Sharpsburg. Old Abe Lincoln
didn’t scare. Say what you will about Little
Mac, he thought he was outnumbered and still
came after us. Slow as sap at first, but
sure.
The Old Man split us up like rebels,
sent us out all over Maryland, hither
and yon, to snatch supplies and generally
raise hell—“confuse and mystify,” Old Jack
used to say. And speaking of Old Jack, Marse
Robert sent him down with half the army
more or less to Harper’s Ferry, John Brown’s
old hope, where you might say it all began,
