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,
to take the Federal arsenal and bag
twelve thousand Yankee troops. And we must have
shaken loose some ten or twenty thousand
of the boys, marching, foraging, straggling,
sick, hungry, and tired, those two weeks—until
McClellan got the gift of a lifetime
when someone on our side became careless
with a copy of Lee’s orders, and then
the Army of the Potomac came on
like fire in a dry cornfield. D. H. Hill’s
division saw their campfires from all along
South Mountain, and never felt so alone,
with the scattered pieces of our army
miles to the west, and Jackson down across
the river—eighty or ninety thousand
Yankees coming, and hell following after.
Army of the Potomac, United States
The Army of the Free
The free are not free, only think they are—
but that makes all the difference in the world.
A soldier does exactly what he’s told,
more or less—such is life, and such is war:
nothing comes without its opposite.
To save your freedoms you become not free:
you fight for peace, and kill your enemies.
To save his life, the poet sits and writes,
renouncing everything for poetry.
And they went in and died to save their rights.
The poet calls on God to help him out—
I do so here—surrendering his mind,
though not his heart, and giving all to doubt.
The soldier writes his fortunes on the wind
and marches down a road of circumstance,
his every step a metrical decline
from that unchosen, free Nothing whence
he came. He is a child of God and chance
begotten in a short, shocking romance.
He lives only to hold that shaky line.
*
We saw the President in Washington
a few days after we had lost Bull Run
again—Old Abe the railsplitter, shirt-sleeved,
tilting awkward-tall as a whooping crane
over four soldiers on the White House lawn.
His lined face showed both cheerfulness and grief.
Wounded boys lay everywhere. He had come
out carrying a pail of lemonade
and got to talking. He was a good man.
You wanted to say, “We’ll do all we can,
Old Abe. We’ll settle up with them at the next
dance.” We knew the Rebs had crossed the Potomac
and filled the roads of central Maryland.
But it would be all right. Our Little Mac
would stir the Army back in shape and deal
with Bobby Lee at the right time. Our man,
McClellan was, like none after. To feel
devoted to a general makes an army—
the saucy graybacks had it; so did we.
You needed more than uniforms and steel
to win battles, and Mister Lincoln’s army,
the Army of the Potomac, would stay
the course until the gentlemen in gray,
who put their rights and so-called “property”
ahead of Old Glory and posterity,
would yield to justice and to law. Today
the Army rests, tomorrow binds its wounds,
and on the third day rises, shouldering
its knapsacks and its muskets to the sound
of its own bugles, and our men will sing
“John Brown’s