A Lincoln Conscript

by Homer Greene

And they did. No man who heard those impassioned words that night ever again opened his lips in complaint of his commanders.

Letters came from Mount Hermon almost daily, sometimes a half-dozen in a bunch. People up there wanted Rhett Bannister and his son to know that they were appreciated at home. But the letters that came from Mary Bannister, strong, cheerful, splendid letters, were the ones that brought most joy to the hearts of their recipients. At last she felt that the ban had been lifted, and that she was once more a woman among women. She was not insensible, indeed, to the dangers that surrounded her loved ones night and day. She knew well enough that any mail might bring her terrible tidings about one or both of them. But such anxiety was as nothing to the agony of mind she had endured through many weeks before her son and husband went down to the war. And as there drifted up to her ears now and again news of the brave conduct and manly bearing of those so near and dear to her, she went about her household labors, happy in the thought that from this time forth she could look any man or woman in the face and say: “Behold my heroes!”

One day there came down to Rhett Bannister a letter from Sarah Jane Stark. A wise, impetuous, laudatory letter, such as no one on earth could write save Sarah Jane Stark herself. Over the first two pages Bannister laughed like a boy, but when he had finished the last line of the letter, tears were streaming down his face.

“To think,” she wrote, “that the one-time copperhead of Mount Hermon is serving his country in the ranks. I would give Billy my cat to see you in your blue uniform, and you know how much I love Billy. And that dear boy! I never cried about a boy in my life before, you know that; but I cry about that boy of yours every time I hear from him! I’m so proud of him, and so fond of him! Heaven bless both of you!”

And down at the end of the letter a postscript was hidden away. It said:—

“I’ve induced Mary Bannister to come up to town with Louise and live with me this winter. It’ll be pretty lonely down at your place, and I’ve got a big house and plenty of room, and I want company, and I want her. She’s such a dear, brave, patient little woman, and we’ll have a glorious time together.”

So, with no disquietude on account of their loved ones at home on their minds, Rhett Bannister and his son faced the enemy and, with their comrades in arms, fared on.

When Grant, in the spring of ’64, began his arduous and bloody campaign from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan and from the Rapidan to the James, they were in the forefront of the conflict. Yet they seemed to lead charmed lives. Out from the tangled depths and thousand pitfalls of The Wilderness, from the forest scarred and seamed across with fire and shell and bullet, from the ghastly field with its blood-soaked herbage and its piled-up heaps of dead, they came unscathed. At Spottsylvania Court-House and up and down and across the North Anna, through all of May they marched and fought. At Cold Harbor, in the early days of June, they faced, with their comrades, the merciless fire of those Confederate riflemen, until, scorched, winnowed, withered, the Union army, with ten thousand dead and wounded on the field, retired from the hopeless and unequal contest. Yet father and son came out of it without serious injury. Shocked, sickened, exhausted, they were indeed; scratched here and there by hissing bullets, but otherwise unharmed. Again, in the awful fiasco before Petersburg, in the crater left by the exploding mine, hemmed in, helpless, horribly entangled, black soldiers and white falling by hundreds under the pitiless enfilading fire of a thousand down-pointed Confederate guns, even from that pit of death they escaped, wrenched, bruised, battered, buffeted, but whole.