Rodney, the Overseer

by Harry Castlemon

"That's the idea!" said Tom again. "But how can the Home Guards help you?"

"By serving in place of the troops that I am authorized to call on for assistance," answered Captain Roach. "There will be a camp of instruction established somewhere in the vicinity very shortly, and it will be my duty to forward my conscripts to that camp as fast as I can get them together. Of course they will not go willingly——"

"I understand," interrupted Captain Tom. "You want me to send some of my men with them as guards."

"Exactly. It will be a feather in your cap as well as in mine if we can attend to the business without calling upon the government for aid. I don't want to do that if I can avoid it, for every man we can raise is needed at the front to resist McClellan's advance upon Richmond. We must be alive, for there's going to be hot work up there."

"I am with you; and I don't know of anything that would suit the Home Guards better," replied Tom, glad of the opportunity to gain a little cheap notoriety without putting himself in danger; and when Captain Roach rode away from the house after dinner Tom accompanied him to his office in Kimberly's store, and assisted in obtaining some poll-books from which he could make out a list of the unhappy men who were subject to military duty under the terms of the Conscription Act.

Of course there were a goodly number of young fellows in the settlement between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one whose names did not appear on the poll-books, for they were not voters; but Tom had them in his mind, and with his mother's aid and Lambert's he succeeded during the following week in making out a complete list of them. At the head of the list stood the name of Edward Griffin, Drummond's assistant operator, who had warned Rodney Gray that he was to be arrested the moment he left the boat at St. Louis; but Drummond's name did not appear at all.

"Griffin is a particular friend of one of my worst enemies," explained Tom. "Not only is he strong for the Union, but he has had a good deal to say about me and my company behind our backs, and I want you to serve a notice on him the first thing you do. I wish they would make haste and establish that camp of instruction, and when Griffin is sent there I want to command the squad that goes with him. I wish, too, that Rodney Gray was here to go with him."

In the meantime events proved that the people of the South were not as willing to submit to the despotic acts of their government as they ought to have been, especially in Georgia and Arkansas, "where it seemed that a conflict might arise between State and Confederate authorities." Officers of the militia in the former State were arrested by the enrolling officers, but the Governor demanded their release and threatened to arrest the Confederates if they did not let his State officers alone. The Richmond Government yielded the point, but said to the Governor of Georgia, through the Secretary of War: "If you arrest any of our enrolling officers in their attempts to get men to fill up the Georgia regiments now in the face of the enemy, you will cause great mischief. I think we may as well drive out our common enemy before we make war upon each other." In Arkansas Governor Rector threatened to secede from the Confederacy, and called for 4500 men to defend the State, adding that "the troops raised under this call are intended exclusively for home protection, and will not, under any circumstances, be transferred to the Confederate service without their consent." In short, the Confederacy was in a very bad way, and their authorities knew it; for on the 21st of April the congress "adjourned in such haste as to show that the members were anxious to provide for their own personal safety." That was the time when a rebel newspaper invented the word "skedaddle," and that was the time too when McClellan could have taken Richmond; but he "wasted three full months, every day of which was of vital moment to the Confederacy, in doing nothing," and when at last he was ready to advance, he found himself confronted by an army that was larger than his own.

The murmurs of dissatisfaction that arose all over the South when that sweeping Conscription Act was passed were not entirely lost upon the Richmond government, and the next news that came to Mooreville was that another act had been passed providing for exemptions. Rodney Gray's father was one of the first to hear of it, and the next time he went to Mooreville he stopped at the telegraph office and called Ned Griffin to the door. The young fellow had been very much distressed ever since he received notice from Captain Roach to hold himself in readiness to march to the camp of instruction with the first squad of conscripts that left town, and Tom Randolph had been mean enough to let him know how his name happened to be first on the list. Griffin was the only support of a widowed mother, and he knew that things would go hard with her when the small sum he received for his work in the telegraph office ceased to come into her hands every month. More than that, he believed in the Union and the flag that waved over it, and did not want to fight against his principles. When he came to the door in answer to Mr. Gray's hail he looked as though he had lost the last friend he had in the world.

"I came here to cheer you up a bit by telling you that you need not go into the army if you don't want to," was the way in which Rodney's father announced the object of his visit. "The new law provides for the exemption of one agriculturist on each farm, where there is no white male adult not liable to military duty, employing fifteen able-bodied negroes, on condition that the party exempted shall give bond to deliver to the government, in the next twelve months, 100 pounds of bacon or its equivalent in salt pork, and 100 pounds of beef for each able-bodied slave employed on said farm."