Freedom's Banner by Teresa Crane

Author:Teresa Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788633628
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

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It was early summer again, the summer of 1864. War notwithstanding – whilst in Richmond the guns of battle could be heard, the peace of Pleasant Hill remained unbroken – the sun shone, the birds sang, the flowers gave their heavy perfume to the warm and fragrant air. For days now, sometimes weeks at a time, Pleasant Hill was as good as cut off from the world. Their single ancient horse was too precious an animal to use unless the trip was absolutely essential, and the days were gone when a slave could be trusted to walk the long miles to Macon and back without supervision, so news came to them from passing travellers, of which there were few, or from the occasional newspaper that Joshua brought back with him when he did risk old Star in the shafts of a light carriage and make the trip into town to barter precious fruits, vegetables or eggs for staples they did not produce themselves such as sugar, tea or the inevitable rice.

It was from such a newspaper, already two days old, that they learned of fighting in the north of Georgia, a bare hundred and fifty miles from them. The Union commander was that same Tecumseh Sherman who had fought at Shiloh. Mattie remembered, uneasily, other things she had read about him in the past couple of years; how in Mississippi he had openly encouraged his men to live off the land they took, regardless of the needs of its people, how the wholesale looting and destruction of plantation houses had left those landmarks that had come to be called ‘Sherman’s Tombstones’ – the fire-scarred chimneys that were all that was left after the red-headed Ohian and his men had passed through. She scanned the page – there seemed no doubt that the Confederate General Johnstone would hold against the attack; surely, he must? For if he did not, the great Southern storehouse and railhead of Atlanta lay vulnerable, less than a hundred miles south, and only forty or so miles as the crow might fly north-west of Pleasant Hill itself. It was unthinkable that the Yankees should strike so far and so deep into the very heart of the Confederacy.

Yet that was what they intended, and that, as those anxious summer weeks wore on, was exactly what they did. Whilst in Virginia General Beauregard stubbornly held out at St Petersburg, thus preventing Grant from besieging the Southern capital, in Georgia Johnstone, outgunned and outmanoeuvred in a coolly planned and increasingly vicious campaign by Sherman, was pressed back day by day and week by week until, after eleven weeks of savage fighting, the exhausted Rebels fell back for the last time and the enemy, like a wolf, was at the gates of one of the most strategically important cities of the South.

Atlanta panicked. The trains that were still running south from the great terminal through unoccupied Georgia were packed with wounded men and with military supplies being salvaged from the storehouses; there was scant room available for frightened civilians.

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