The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
On they came at the breastworks, walking over the dead who lay so
thick they could step from body to body as they marched. On they
came, following the old cocked hat that had once held bloodier
breastworks against as stubborn foe.
On--on--they came, expecting every moment to see a flame of fire run
round the breastworks, a furnace of flame leap up from the batteries,
and then--victory or death--behind old Hickory! Either was honor
enough!
And now they were within fifty feet of the breastworks, moving as if
on dress parade. The guns must thunder now or never! One step
more--then, an electrical bolt shot through every nerve as the old
man wheeled his horse and again rang out that queer old continental
command, right in the mouth of the enemy's ditch, right in the teeth
of his guns:
"Charge, pieces!"
It was Tom Travis who commanded the guns where the Columbia Pike met
the breastworks at the terrible deadly locust thicket. All night he
had stood at his post and stopped nine desperate charges. All night
in the flash and roar and the strange uncanny smell of blood and
black powder smoke, he had stood among the dead and dying calling
stubbornly, monotonously:
"Ready!"
"Aim!"
"Fire!"
And now it was nearly midnight and Schofield, finding the enemy
checked, was withdrawing on Nashville.
Tom Travis thought the battle was over, but in the glare and flash he
looked and saw another column, ghostly gray in the starlight, moving
stubbornly at his guns.
"Ready!" he shouted as his gunners sprang again to their pieces.
On came the column--beautifully on. How it thrilled him to see them!
How it hurt to think they were his people!
"_Aim!_" he thundered again, and then as he looked through the gray
torch made, starlighted night, he quailed in a cold sickening fear,
for the old man who led them on was his grandsire, the man whom of
all on earth he loved and revered the most.
Eight guns, with grim muzzles trained on the old rider and his
charging column, waited but for the captain's word to hurl their
double-shotted canisters of death.
And Tom Travis, in the agony of it, stood, sword in hand, stricken in
dumbness and doubt. On came the column, the old warrior leading
them--on and:--
"The command--the command! Give it to us, Captain," shouted the
gunners.
"_Cease firing!_"
The gunners dropped their lanyards with an oath, trained machines
that they were.
It was a drunken German who brought a heavy sword-hilt down on the
young officer's head with:
"You damned traitor!"
A gleam of gun and bayonet leaped in the misty light in front, from
shoulder to breast--a rock wall, tipped with steel swept crushingly
forward over the trenches over the breastworks.
Under the guns, senseless, his skull crushed, an upturned face
stopped the old warrior. Down from his horse he came with a weak,
hysterical sob.
"O Tom--Tom, I might have known it was you--my gallant, noble boy--my
Irish Gray!"
He kissed, as he thought, the dead face, and went on with his men.
It was just midnight.
"At midnight, all being quiet in front, in accordance with orders
from the commanding Generals," writes General J. D. Cox in his
official report, "I withdrew my command to the north bank of the
river."
"The battle closed about twelve o'clock at night," wrote General
Hood, "when the enemy retreated rapidly on Nashville, leaving the
dead and wounded in our hands. We captured about a thousand prisoners
and several stands of colors."
Was this a coincidence--or as some think--did the boys in blue
retreat before they would fire on an old Continental and the spirit
of '76?
An hour afterwards a negro was sadly leading a tired old man on a
superb horse back to headquarters, and as the rider's head sank on
his breast he said:
"Lead me, Bisco, I'm too weak to guide my horse. Nothing is left now
but the curse of it."
And O, the curse of it!
Fifty-seven Union dead beside the wounded, in the little front yard
of the Carter House, alone. And they lay around the breastworks from
river to river, a chain of dead and dying. In front of the
breastworks was another chain--a wider and thicker one. It also ran
from river to river, but was gray instead of blue. Chains are made of
links, and the full measure of "the curse of it" may have been seen
if one could have looked over the land that night and have seen where
the dead links lying there were joined to live under the roof trees
of far away homes.
But here is the tale of a severed link: About two o'clock lights
began to flash about over the battle-field--they were hunting for the
dead and wounded. Among these, three had come out from the Carter
House. A father, son and daughter; each carried a lantern and as they
passed they flashed their lights in the faces of the dead.
"May we look for brother?" asked the young girl, of an officer. "We
hope he is not here but fear he is. He has not been home for two
years, being stationed in another state. But we heard he could not
resist the temptation to come home again and joined General Bate's
brigade. And O, we fear he has been killed for he would surely have
been home before this."
They separated, each looking for "brother." Directly the father heard
the daughter cry out. It was in the old orchard near the house. On
reaching the spot she was seated on the ground, holding the head of
her dying brother in her lap and sobbing:
"Brother's come home! Brother's come home!" Alas, she meant--gone
home!
"Captain Carter, on staff duty with Tyler's brigade," writes General
Wm. B. Bate in his official report, "fell mortally wounded near the
works of the enemy and almost at the door of his father's home. His
gallantry I witnessed with much pride, as I had done on other fields,
and here take pleasure in mentioning it especially."
The next morning in the first light of the first day of that month
celebrated as the birth-month of Him who declared long ago that war
should cease, amid the dead and dying of both armies, stood two
objects which should one day be carved in marble--One, to represent
the intrepid bravery of the South, the other, the cool courage of the
North, and both--"the curse of it."
The first was a splendid war-horse, dead, but lying face forward,
half over the federal breastworks. It was the horse of General Adams.
The other was a Union soldier--the last silent sentinel of
Schofield's army. He stood behind a small locust tree, just in front
of the Carter House gate. He had drawn his iron ram-rod which rested
under his right arm pit, supporting that side. His gun, with butt on
the ground at his left, rested with muzzle against his left side,
supporting it. A cartridge, half bitten off was in his mouth. He
leaned heavily against the small tree in front. He was quite dead, a
minie ball through his head; but thus propped he stood, the wonder of
many eyes, the last sentinel of the terrible night battle.
* * * * *
But another severed link cut deepest of all. In the realization of
her love for Thomas Travis, Alice Westmore's heart died within her.
In the years which followed, if suffering could make her a great
singer, now indeed was she great.
PART FOURTH--THE LINT
CHAPTER I
COTTONTOWN
Slavery clings to cotton.
When the directors of a cotton mill, in a Massachusetts village,
decided, in the middle '70's, to move their cotton factory from New
England to Alabama, they had two objects in view--cheaper labor and
cheaper staple.
And they did no unwise thing, as the books of the company from that
time on showed.
In the suburbs of a growing North Alabama town, lying in the
Tennessee Valley and flanked on both sides by low, regularly rolling
mountains, the factory had been built.
It was a healthful, peaceful spot, and not unpicturesque. North and
south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness,
with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their
scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the
mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the
mountain, it looked not unlike the chopped up waves of a great river
stiffened into land--especially in winter when the furrowed rows of
the vast cotton fields lay out brown and symmetrically turned under
the hazy sky.
The factory was a low, one-story structure of half burnt bricks.
Like a vulgar man, cheapness was written all over its face. One of
its companions was a wooden store house near by, belonging to the
company. The other companion was a squatty low-browed engine room,
decorated with a smoke-stack which did business every day in the week
except Sunday. A black, soggy exhaust-pipe stuck out of a hole in its
side, like a nicotine-soaked pipe in an Irishman's mouth, and so
natural and matter-of-fact was the entire structure that at evening,
in the uncertain light, when the smoke was puffing out of its stack,
and the dirty water running from its pipes, and the reflected fire
from the engine's furnace blazed through the sunken eyes of the
windows, begrizzled and begrimed, nothing was wanted but a little
imagination to hear it cough and spit and give one final puff at its
pipe and say: "Lu'd but o'ive wur-rek hard an' o'im toired to-day!"
Around it in the next few years had sprung up Cottontown.
The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which
ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several
years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda grass,
holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been
thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before.
This made a beautiful pea-green carpet in summer and a comfortable
straw-colored matting in winter; and it was the only bit of sentiment
that clung to Cottontown.
All the rest of it was practical enough: Rows of scurvy three-roomed
cottages, all exactly alike, even to the gardens in the rear, laid
off in equal breadth and running with the same unkept raggedness up
the flinty side of the mountain.
There was not enough originality among the worked-to-death
inhabitants of Cottontown to plant their gardens differently; for all
of them had the same weedy turnip-patch on one side, straggling
tomatoes on another, and half-dried mullein-stalks sentineling the
corners. For years these cottages had not been painted, and now each
wore the same tinge of sickly yellow paint. It was not difficult to
imagine that they had had a long siege of malarial fever in which the
village doctor had used abundant plasters of mustard, and the disease
had finally run into "yaller ja'ndice," as they called it in
Cottontown.
And thus Cottontown had stood for several years, a new problem in
Southern life and industry, and a paying one for the Massachusetts
directors.
In the meanwhile another building had been put up--a little cheaply
built chapel, of long-leaf yellow pine. It was known as the Bishop's
church, and sat on the side of the mountain, half way up among the
black-jacks, exposed to the blistering suns of summer and the winds
of winter.
It had never been painted: "An' it don't need it," as the Bishop had
said when the question of painting it had been raised by some of the
members.
"No, it don't need it, for the hot sun has drawed all the rosin out
on its surface, an' pine rosin's as good a paint as any church needs.
Jes' let God be, an' He'll fix His things like He wants 'em any way.
He put the paint in the pine-tree when He made it. Now man is mighty
smart,--he can make paint, but he can't make a pine tree."
It was Sunday morning, and as the Bishop drove along to church he was
still thinking of Jack Bracken and Captain Tom, and the burial of
little Jack. When he arose that morning Jack was up, clean-shaved and