Look Away by Harold Coyle

Author:Harold Coyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Winchester, Virginia

Alone in the shade of a tree off in one corner of the field, Mary Beth McPherson sat reading a book written by Herman Melville. Though she didn’t much like stories about the sea, there wasn’t anything that she liked that she hadn’t already read at least twice. Once, after noticing that the Yankee soldiers who made up the garrison of occupation in Winchester were always getting new books from friends and relatives in the North, Mary Beth considered asking one of them if she could borrow the books when they were finished. That idea, however, was impractical. It would have meant striking up a conversation, and perhaps even a friendship, with one of them. And that, Mary Beth knew, was something that no self-respecting Southern woman would do. “I’d rather starve and die a decent Christian woman,” her aunt had told her one day, “than ask a Yankee varmint for anything.”

The bellowing of one of the cows she was tending caused Mary Beth to look up and quickly scan about in search of danger. Since the issuance of Union General Pope’s General Order Number 7, nothing was safe from foraging parties that scoured the countryside like a plague of locusts. “If we don’t look out for ourselves,” her father warned, “we’ll be destitute before winter.” So, like most of the farmers in the occupied portions of the valley, the McPhersons did what they could to hide livestock and harvested food from Union soldiers. Such action, however, put the McPhersons in danger, for shortly after issuing General Order Number 7, Pope issued another order, governing the treatment of anyone in occupied areas suspected of being in sympathy with the rebellion. In what was known as General Order Number 11, Pope directed the soldiers of his Army of Virginia, which included the garrison at Winchester, “to take up all active sympathizers, and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use.”

Union soldiers, already annoyed at being taken away from their homes and having to put up with Army life, used both of these orders to strike back at the people of Winchester for the hostility against their occupiers that few bothered to hide. At a family meeting one night, made solemn by the knowledge that his older son was now fighting before the gates of Richmond in what Northern papers sent to the Winchester garrison called a most desperate struggle, Mary Beth’s father explained what they would do. “We can,” he laid before them, “submit quietly under the yoke of the Northern oppressors, do their bidding, and face certain starvation, or,” he added after a slight pause, “defy them by hiding as much of our crop and livestock as we can.” There was, of course, no debate on the subject. The McPhersons, like all of the people living in and around Winchester, were a proud people. The same spirit that had caused so many of their

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