So, through all that summer they fought, in the bloodiest, cruelest campaign recorded in history, shallow trenches filled with dead everywhere proclaiming the awful sacrifice at which Grant was forcing the desperate and depleted armies of the South into their final strongholds.
As his officers had predicted from the beginning, Bob Bannister was rapidly promoted. For meritorious conduct, for brave deeds, to fill vacancies above him as the grim tragedy of war played itself out, he donned his corporal’s stripes, exchanged them for a sergeant’s, added the orderly’s diamond, and finally, in the fall of ’64, his shoulders were decorated with the straps of a first lieutenant. When this happened his company held a jubilee. He was a mere boy, indeed, not long past eighteen, possibly the youngest commissioned officer in the Army of the Potomac; but the men of his command trusted him, believed in him, loved him, and would have followed him wherever he chose to lead, even to the gates of death.
But Rhett Bannister was not promoted. That was not, however, the fault of his officers. Nor was it that his conduct was not splendidly soldier-like and meritorious,—it was simply because he would not have it so. It was after Cold Harbor that Captain Baker called him one night to company headquarters,—Howarth had long ago been invalided home,—and said to him:—
“Bannister, I am going to make a sergeant of you.”
“But, captain—”
“Oh, I know how you feel, but there’s no help for it. Brady’s dead, Holbert’s a prisoner, and Powelton and Gray can’t do the work. You must take it.”
“Captain, I beg of you not to do it. Be good to me. I’ll fight anywhere. I’ll take any mission. I’ll face any danger. But I can’t accept an office in the army of the United States. I told you this when you spoke of making me a corporal. I repeat it now. If I were to accept this honor I never could fight again, I never could look the boys in the face again, I would feel so cowardly and ashamed and dismayed. Don’t do it, captain, I beseech you, don’t do it! Let me fight in the ranks and be contented and happy as I am to-night.”
And the captain gave heed to his protest, knowing that it came from his heart; and so he continued to fight in the ranks, honored, trusted, and loved by all his comrades. In the midst of the political campaign of ’64, when the contest for the office of President of the United States was stirring the North as no political contest had ever stirred it before; when Lincoln’s enemies felt that they had won the victory, and that the battle of the ballots on election day would only ratify it; when Lincoln himself gave up the hope that he would be permitted to lead the nation back to peace and safety; when only the votes of the soldiers in the field could by any possibility save the day, Rhett Bannister turned politician and went out electioneering. From man to man he went, from company to company, from regiment to regiment, earnest, anxious, persuasive, pleading with his whole heart and soul the cause of Abraham Lincoln. And when the November ballots were counted, and the overwhelming majority proved that the people in the North as well as the soldiers in the field had confidence in the great War President, no heart in the Army of the Potomac beat with more exultant pride and unbounded happiness than did the heart of Rhett Bannister, the Lincoln conscript.