The Experiences of Uncle Jack: Being a Biography of Rev. Andrew Jackson Newgent

by W. Ed. Snyder

“It is midwinter in east Tennessee in 1863. The rivers are flooded, the valleys desolate, the mountain gaps gorged with snow. It is the home of mountain patriots; it must be held at all hazards to the last. This is Lincoln’s solemn wish; it is a part of Grant’s giant plan when Mission Ridge is stormed. A young cavalryman of Indiana is one of the ten thousand who keep freedom’s vigils along the Clinch, the Holstein, and the French Broad. He munches his meager rations of parched corn; he rides the wild mountain roads night and day; he obeys to the letter his orders to hold to the last man the ford of a remote mountain stream. A buckshot buries itself in his wrist, making a wound which heals long after the war and a scar which he carries to his grave. The old flag stays in east Tennessee.

“He has a comrade from a neighboring county who shares with him the suffering and sacrifice of that desperate campaign, he is the “boy chaplain” of the brigade.

“It is the same winter along the Rappahannock and the Rappidan. The snow, like a measureless shroud, covers the numberless dead of the debatable land between the Potomac and the James. There is another soldier, a mere boy, a young artilleryman from the Shenandoah, who is one of the thousands who hold Lee’s unbroken lines. His battery long since won its title to glory. It helped to clear the mountain gaps of the Blue Ridge; its red guns helped feed the fires which lighted up the valley of death for Pickett’s dauntless charge. Ill fed, ragged, but inbred with the chivalry of the South, he is in it all. There is victory at Chancellorsville, but defeat at Gettysburg; but St. Andrew’s cross still gleams blood red on the breast of the South, The Stars and Bars still flash defiance from Marye’s Hill.

“The young artilleryman also has a comrade from the valley, a young trooper who rides with Ashby’s cavaliers in all their wild forays.

“Two flags, two oaths of allegiance, the culminating hates of a hundred years, separate these two young soldiers of the North and the South. But they are not alien in blood, they are brothers of the same race, Anglo-Saxon from the first Americans to the last. They speak the same tongue, their mothers read the same Bible, prayed to the same God; their forefathers fought for the same country—Nathaniel Greene at Yorktown, Washington on Cambridge Heights.

“It is midsummer of 1904. The cavalryman of ’63 is dying; not in the weary hospital of pain; not on the perilous edge of battle. More than forty years have passed since the grim midwinter of east Tennessee.

“It is the home he has made for his declining years. The rooms are cool and sweet, a broad porch looks down a quiet street, familiar books are everywhere; his escutcheon over the mantel shows his soldier record from ’62 to ’65—the old, old story of duty and glory. A blue book on the table tells briefly his struggle from the farm to the halls of Congress; the faces of statesmen, kinsmen, and friends look down from their appropriate places on the walls.

“The good right hand of the veteran lies in that of another; grief-stricken she keeps her vows, ’till death do us part.’

“A grey-haired man holds the other. It is the soldier of the Rappahannock. Lee’s battery boy of ’63 is the trusted physician, the medical confidant, and ministrant of the Union soldier. With all the knowledge of a learned and skillful physician, he has fought the common enemy for the life of his dying friend. But the odds are too great. Old pains, old ailments, old wounds of ’63 outmatch the medical arts of 1904. But the doctor has known the grief of defeat before. Once a long time ago he yielded to the inevitable in the orchards of Appomattox. He lays his ear close over the failing heart to catch, if he can, its last lingering drum-beats in the battle of life. He places his fingers on the pulseless wrist, searching for its last faint throb—and they rest motionless for a moment on the old scar of ’63. ‘It is over,’ he says very softly.

“A low word of prayer for the widow and fatherless falls from the lips of the grey-haired minister at the foot of the bed. It is the ‘boy chaplain’ of the dead veteran’s old brigade—youthful to the end. Another man beside him, thin-visaged and bent. It is Ashby’s old trooper, and his eyes are full of tears as he walks slowly out of the room.