to reach the deepest recesses of the largest churches and lecture halls in America. “The Southern rails, I must say, are distinctly lumpy. The degraded product, no doubt, of a Slavocracy. Am I expected to walk to my destination?” the Reverend Starbuck demanded, suddenly stopping dead in his tracks.
“No, sir. I have a buggy.” Galloway was about to request that Adam go fetch the carriage, then realized Adam was too encumbered with the preacher’s heavy carpetbag. “I’ll fetch it directly, sir. It isn’t far.”
The Reverend Starbuck waved Galloway on his way, then peered with a fierce inquisitiveness at a group of civilians waiting for the mail to be unloaded from the newly arrived caboose. “Have you read Spurzheim on phrenology?” he demanded of Adam.
“No, sir,” Adam responded, surprised by the fiercely abrupt question.
“Science has much to teach us,” the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed, “so long as we remember that its conclusions are ever subject to the approval and emendations of Almighty God, but I am interested to observe these proofs of Spurzheim’s treatise.” He waved his stick toward the waiting civilians. “The New Englander generally possesses a noble brow shape. He displays cranial contours that denote intelligence, benevolence, wisdom, and adhesiveness, but even in these upper regions of the South I notice how the shape of men’s skulls betrays depravity, combativeness, destructiveness, and a distinct tendency toward cretinism.”
Adam’s torturing conscience, like his ingrained patriotism, might have driven him to fight against his father’s land, yet he was still a native son of Virginia, and the Northern preacher’s criticism made him bridle. “Was not George Washington a Southerner, sir?” he demanded stiffly.
But the Reverend Starbuck was too old a controversialist to be trapped into recantation. “George Washington, young man, like yourself, was a product of the gentry. My observations are confined solely to the common ruck of people. The general there, you see him?” The peremptory stick, narrowly missing an artillery sergeant, pointed at a plump officer who had shared the passenger car with the Reverend Starbuck.
“I see him, sir,” Adam said, wondering what characteristics the general’s skull shape revealed.
But the Reverend Starbuck had abandoned the subject of phrenology. “That is Pope,” the preacher announced. “He was good enough to pay me his respects during the journey. A fine-looking man, indeed.”
Adam looked with interest at this new commander of the North’s Army of Virginia. General John Pope was a high-colored and confident-looking man with intelligent eyes and a bushy beard. If phrenology did provide an accurate guide to a man’s character, then Pope’s broad forehead and solid, square appearance suggested that he might indeed be the savior that the North had been seeking ever since the war’s sad beginning. John Pope had distinguished himself in the fighting on the Mississippi and had now been brought east to work his magic in the intransigent Virginian countryside where Northern general after Northern general had first been bamboozled and then beaten by the ragged rebel armies.
“Pope has the right ideas,” the Reverend Starbuck went on enthusiastically. “It’s no good being kind to rebels. Disobedience calls for punishment, and defiance demands retribution. The Slavocracy must be smitten, Faulconer, and its lands laid waste. Pope won’t stay his hand, he assures me of that. He is a man for the Lord’s work.” And indeed, General Pope, almost as soon as he had been appointed commander of the Army of Virginia, had declared that the old policy of treating Southern civilians with respect was finished. Northern soldiers would henceforth take what they needed from the Southern population, and any Southerner who resisted such depredations would be punished. The Reverend Elial Starbuck applauded Pope’s zeal. “The Southerner,” the preacher now lectured Adam, “understands only one language. Brute force. It is the language he has used to oppress the Negro, and it is the language that must now be used to oppress him. You agree?”
“I think, sir,” Adam said tactfully, “that the North must gain victory very soon.”
“Quite so, quite so,” the Reverend Starbuck said, not certain whether he had received agreement or not. He certainly deserved agreement, for it was upon the Reverend Starbuck’s generosity that both the future of Adam and of Galloway’s Horse depended. Adam had been penniless when he deserted the South, but it had been his good fortune to know Major James Starbuck, the preacher’s eldest son, and it had been James who had informed Adam about Galloway’s Horse and who had suggested that his famous father might be able to provide Adam with the necessary funds to join the regiment.
The Reverend Doctor Starbuck had proved more than willing to advance the money. Too old to fight, yet too passionate to abstain from fighting, he had watched, impotent, as the North suffered defeat after defeat in Virginia. The defeats had stirred the Reverend Starbuck into contributing his own and his church’s money to the raising and equipping of Massachusetts regiments, only to see those regiments led to disaster. Other men, lesser men, might have abandoned their efforts, but the disasters only fed the preacher’s zeal, which was why, given the chance to contribute to the establishment of Galloway’s Horse, the Reverend Starbuck had been quick to agree. He was not only supporting Adam but donating fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of weaponry and ammunition to Galloway’s regiment. The money was not the Reverend Starbuck’s own but had been raised by God-fearing New England abolitionists. “In the past,” he told Galloway and Adam as they journeyed westward from Manassas in the buggy, “we used such charitable donations for our work in the South: distributing tracts, establishing Sabbath schools for blacks, and, of course, conducting investigations into the evils of the Slavocracy, but now, cut off from those activities, our charities need other outlets for their expenditure.”
“There’s surely much to be spent on the welfare of escaped slaves?” Adam asked, hoping at the same time that he was not talking Galloway and himself out of their funding.
“The contrabands are amply provided for. Amply!” The Reverend Starbuck’s disapproving tone suggested that those slaves who had managed to escape to the North were living in pampered luxury rather than struggling for insanitary survival in makeshift camps. “We need to strike a blow at the root of slavery, not pluck a few diseased leaves from its topmost branches.” Adam, hearing the anger behind the preacher’s words, suspected that the Reverend Elial Starbuck was much keener to punish the slaveholders than actually free the slaves.
The buggy climbed the shallow hill from New Market, passed between deep woods, then plunged downhill toward the Warrenton Turnpike. As Major Galloway drove, he pointed out landmarks made famous in the battle that had been fought the previous summer across this same ground. There were the ruins of the house where Surgeon Henry’s widow had died in the shell fire, and there the Matthews house, which had been used as a hospital. As the buggy rattled down the Sudley road north of the turnpike, Galloway pointed to where the Northern flank attack had come from the river’s far side, but as he talked he became aware that the Boston preacher was hardly enthusiastic in his responses. The Reverend Doctor Starbuck did not want a guided tour of the place where the North had met its first defeat; he only wanted to hear promises of victory, and so the conversation died away as Galloway steered the buggy onto the track leading to the farm he had inherited from his father.
Major Galloway, a kindly man, was nervous around the famous abolitionist and relieved when the Reverend Starbuck announced that he had no intention of staying overnight at the comfortable farm, but instead intended to take the evening train south to Culpeper Court House. “My friend Banks did the courtesy of inviting me,” the preacher said, referring to General Nathaniel Banks, who had once been Governor of Massachusetts and was now a Union general who believed that a visit from his old friend would serve to encourage his troops’ flagging spirits. The invitation had certainly done wonders for the preacher’s spirits. He had been chafing in Boston, taking his war news from newspapers and letters, but now he
