two summers and a winter later—or
we could turn the Federal army out
of its forts and dirt around Washington
and break them up this one last time for good.
We had sufficient men; don’t be deceived
by our reports of what befell us later:
a Southerner is hardly better than
a damnyankee if he cannot exaggerate
with honor, and face outrages, insults,
and near universal odds like a man.
The General was no fool: he took a good
fifty, sixty thousand up, the best men
we ever had—a lean and hungry set
of wolves, one woman said who watched us cross
the River, tough and confident and strong
from chasing Yankees, two whole armies of them,
all the summer long, and just last week killed
them worst of all at Manassas. Our guns
were clean and polished, though our shoes were thin
or gone; no two of us were dressed alike;
we talked incessantly, profane beyond
belief, that same woman reported of us—
though how she stood it close enough to tell
escapes me, because of course we smelled like hell.
A doctor up in Fredericktown would count us
next week, accurate to the point of throwing
in the scientific observation that
our smell was “amoniacal.” It was,
if you weren’t used to it. I wish it had
been strong enough to mask the smell of blood
on battlefields—the metal sweet, lead-kneed
odor all the rivers in the world can’t
wash out of your stomach. We splashed across
the River at the ford, some men bundling
their amoniacal long johns atop
their heads—I trust that woman’s modesty
and decency prevented her from watching
close up, although who’d give a damn: a line
of hairy scarecrows in their shirts. We crossed
the River. Bands, our execrable bands,
played “Maryland, My Maryland,” and we
like young fools sang along and whooped it up.
It was the summer of the Confederacy
and the shipwreck of our hopes was around
the bend invisible. The sun shone South.
We were invincible, and we could whip
the Yankees ten to one, although to tell
the truth we had died more numerously
than they had all the summer, but that fact
was like an untruth to a Southerner:
an insult not to be tolerated
where rights and honor are at stake. In fact
some thousands politely declined to cross
because it seemed not right to them to strike
the unionists on their home ground as they
were striking us. The Golden Rule or prudence,
don’t know which and didn’t care. We crossed fast
within the grasp of victories whose logic
ordered us to wade the swirling waters
of necessity. Our black folk followed,
driving miles and miles of wagons filled
with fodder, bandages, and ammunition.
The men who carried doubts across the river
or declined to cross because they wouldn’t do
to others what they’d done to us were few
compared to us of 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