The arriving troops were mostly seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys come from New Jersey and Wisconsin, from Maine and Illinois, from Rhode Island and Vermont. They were volunteers, newly uniformed and eager to join this latest assault on the Confederacy. They boasted of hanging Jeff Davis from an apple tree, and bragged of how they would march through Richmond and roust the rebels out of their nests like rats from a granary. They were young and indestructible, full of confidence, but also awed by the savagery of this strange destination.
For Manassas Junction was not an inviting place. It had been sacked once by Northern troops, destroyed again by retreating Confederates, then hastily rebuilt by Northern contractors, so that now there were acres of gaunt, raw-timbered warehouses standing between rail sidings and weed-filled meadows that were crammed with guns and limbers and caissons and portable forges and ambulances and wagons. More stores and weapons arrived every hour, for this was the supply depot that would fuel the summer campaign of 1862 that would end the rebellion and so restore a United States of America. The great spread of buildings was shadowed by an ever-present pall of greasy smoke that came from blacksmiths’ shops and locomotive repair sheds and the fireboxes of the locomotives that dragged in their goods wagons and passenger cars.
Two cavalry officers waited at the depot. They had clearly gone to some considerable effort to make themselves presentable, for their uniform coats were brushed spotless, their spurred boots were shining, and their leather belts polished. The older man was middle-aged and balding, with a pleasant face and thick muttonchop whiskers. His name was Major Joseph Galloway, and he clutched a plumed hat in his nervous hands. His companion was a much younger man, handsome and fair-haired, with a square beard and wide shoulders and an open face that inspired trust. His coat showed a captain’s bars.
Both men were Virginians, yet both fought for the North. Joseph Galloway owned property just outside Manassas itself, and that farm was now the depot for a regiment of Northern cavalry exclusively recruited from Southerners loyal to the government in Washington. Most of the troopers for Galloway’s Horse were volunteers from the border states, the disputed lands of Maryland, and the western counties of Virginia, but a good number were refugees from the Confederate States themselves. Galloway had no doubt that some of his men were fugitives from Southern justice, but the majority were idealists who fought to preserve the Union, and it had been Major Galloway’s notion to recruit such men for reconnaissance work deep behind the rebel lines. Northern horsemen were solid and brave, but they rode the Virginian countryside as strangers, and in consequence they were timid compared to the rakehell Southerners who knew that every Virginian village and hamlet contained sympathizers prepared to hide and feed them. It had been Galloway’s inspiration to raise a regiment that could ride the rebel states like native Southerners, yet the idea had received only lukewarm support from Washington. Raise the regiment, the government’s bureaucrats had told Major Galloway, and we might deign to employ it, but only if it came properly equipped with weapons, horses, and uniforms.
Which was why Major Galloway and Captain Adam Faulconer now waited for a passenger who was supposed to have arrived on the midday train that had just steamed into Manassas. The two cavalry officers worked their way against the flood of excited soldiers toward the train’s last car, which had been reserved for passengers more exalted than mere cannon fodder. A porter lowered the carriage steps, and two ladies, their hooped skirts scarce able to squeeze through the car’s narrow doorway, were handed down. After the ladies came a group of senior officers, their mustaches trimmed, their uniforms brushed, and their faces flush from the day’s heat and from their consumption of the railroad’s whiskey. One officer, younger than the rest, broke away and shouted at some orderlies to bring horses. “Chop, chop now! Horses for the General!” the aide shouted. The ladies’ twin parasols bobbed white and lacy through the mist of tobacco smoke and the crush of dark military hats.
The last man to alight from the passenger car was a thin, tall, and elderly civilian with white hair and beard, fierce eyes, and a gaunt, stern face. He had sunken cheeks, a Roman nose as imperious as his gaze, a black frock coat, a top hat, and despite the heat, a high-buttoned vest over which a pair of starched Geneva bands hung white. He carried a dark maroon carpetbag and an ebony stick that he used to push aside a black servant who was lifting the ladies’ cabin trunks onto a handcart. The gesture was peremptory and unthinking, the act of a man accustomed to authority.
“That’s him,” Adam said, recognizing the minister whom he had heard preach in Boston just before the war began.
Major Galloway pushed through the crowd toward the white-haired man. “Sir?” he called to the newly arrived preacher. “Doctor Starbuck, sir?”
The Reverend Elial Joseph Starbuck, Doctor of Divinity, pamphleteer, and the most famous of all the North’s abolitionist preachers, scowled at his welcomers. “You must be Galloway. And you’re Faulconer? Good! My bag.” He thrust the carpetbag into Adam’s hand, which had been stretched out for a handshake.
“You had a pleasant journey, I trust, sir?” Major Galloway inquired as he ushered his guest toward the roadway.
“It became successively less pleasant, Galloway, as I journeyed south. I am forced to conclude that engineering has reached its apotheosis in New England and that the further one journeys from Boston the less comfortable the conveyance.” The Reverend Starbuck delivered these judgments in a voice trained 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