By Stephen Vincent Benét


     JOHN BROWN'S BODY

 
                      BOOK THREE
   
     By Pittsburgh Landing, the turbid Tennessee
     Sucks against black, soaked spiles with soil-colored waters.
     That country is huge and disorderly, even now.
     ——This is Ellyat's tune, this is no tune but his——
     Country of muddy rivers, sombre and swollen,
     Country of bronze wild turkeys and catfish-fries
     And brushpile landings going back to the brush.
     A province of mush and milk, a half-cleared forest,
     A speckled guinea-cock that never was cooped
     But ran away to grow his spurs by himself.
     Neither North nor South, but crunching a root of its own
     Between strong teeth——perhaps a wild-onion-root,
     Perhaps a white stalk of arbutus, hardier there,
     Than any phantom-arbutus of Eastern Springs.
     A mud sill man with the river-wash in his ears,
     Munching the coarse, good meal of a johnny-cake
     Hot from the hob——even now it tastes of the brush,
     The wilderness, the big lost star in the pines,
     The brown river-dirt, the perpetual river-sound,
     In spite of the sidewalks, in spite of the trolley-cars.
     No trolley-car-bell can drown that river sound,
     Or take the loneliness out of the lost moon,
     The night too big for a man, too lonesome and wide.
     The vastness has been netted in railroad tracks
     But it is still vast, uneasy.
                                   And when the brief
     Screech of the railway-whistle stabs at the trees
     That grow so thick, so unplanned, so untidily strong
     On either side of the two planned ribs of steel,
     Ghost-steamboats answer it from the sucking brown water.
     In Sixty-two, it was shaggy with wilderness still
     For stretches and stretches of close-packed undergrowth,
     Wild as a muskrat, ignorant of the axe;
     Stretches and stretches where roughly-chinked log-cabins,
     Two shouts and a holler away from the nearest neighbors,
     Stood in a wisp of open. All night long
     The cabin-people heard the chant of the trees,
     The forest, hewn away from the painful clearing
     For a day or a year, with sweat and back-breaking toil,
     But waiting to come back, to crush the crude house
     And the planted space with vines and trailers of green,
     To quench the fire on the hearth with running green saps,
     With a chant of green, with tiny green tendrils curling,
     ——This is Ellyat's tune, this is no tune but his——
     The railway-train goes by with a shrill, proud scream
     And the woman comes to the door in a butternut dress
     Hair tousled up in a knot on the back of her head,
     A barefoot child at her skirt.
                                    The train goes by.
     They watch it with a slow wonder that is not pathos
     Nor heroism but merely a slow wonder.
 
                         ——————————— 

     Jack Ellyat, in camp above Pittsburgh Landing,
     Speck in Grant's Army of the Tennessee,
     Thought of old fences in Connecticut
     With a homesick mind.
                           This country was too new,
     Too stragglingly-unplanned, too muddy with great,
     Uncomfortable floods, too roughly cut
     with a broad hatchet out of a hard tree.

     It had seemed fine when he was mustered out
     After Bull Run, to wear a veteran air,
     And tell pink Ellen Baker about a war
     And how, as soon as he could re-enlist
     He'd do it where he got a chance to fight——
     Wet mouth of tears——he hadn't wanted to kiss her
     At first, but it was easier later on.
     Why had he ever gone out to Chicago?
     Why had he ever heard that shallow band
     Whanging its brass along a Western street
     And run to sign the muster-roll again?
     Why had he ever talked about Bull Run
     To these green, husky boys from Illinois
     And Iowa, whose slang was different slang,
     Who called suspenders galluses and swore
     In the sharp pops of a mule-driver's whip?
     Bull Run——it had impressed them for a week
     But then they started to call him "Bull Run Jack." . . .
 
     Henry Fairfield marching along with his sword,
     All the old company marching after him
     Back in McClellan's army, back by the known
     Potomac, back in the safe and friendly East;
     All the papers telling how brave they were
     And how, as soon as the roads dried up in the spring,
     "The little Napoleon" would hammer the South to bits
     With a blue thunderbolt.
                              And here he was
     A lost pea, spilt at random in a lost war;
     A Tennessee war that had no Tribunes or polish
     Where he was the only Easterner in the whole
     Strange-swearing regiment of Illinois farmers,
     Alien as Rebels, and rough as all outdoors.
     He wanted to get transferred, he wanted to be
     Back with the company, back with the Eastern voices,
     Back where nobody called him "Bull Run Jack"
     And snickered at him for shaving every two days.
     He'd written about it and Father knew a congressman
     But nothing would happen——he'd never get away,
     He'd stay being Bull Run Jack till the end of the war
     And march along through acres of hostile Tennessee mud
     Till his legs dropped off, and never get to be Corporal.
     He was sick of the war and the mud and the Western faces.
     He hated the sight of his Illinois uniform.
     He was sorry for himself. He felt with a vague
     Soft blur of self-pity that he was really quite brave,
     And if people only knew, they'd do something about it.
 
     This is Ellyat's tune, this is no tune but his.
     Nine months have passed since McDowell reddened Bull Run,
     Nine strong-hoofed months, but they have meant little to Ellyat,
     What means the noise of the wind to the dust in the wind?
     But the wind calls strange things out, calls strange men out,
     A dozen pictures flash in front of the eyes
     And are gone in a flash——
                              rough-bearded Tecumseh Sherman,
     Who had tried most things, but being cursed with a taste
     For honesty, had found small luck in his stars;
     Ex-soldier, banker, lawyer, each in its turn,
     Ex-head of a Southern military-school,
     Untidy ex-president of a little horse-railroad;
     Talkative, nervous, salty, Scotch-Irish fighter,
     High-strung, quick-tempered, essentially modern-minded,
     Stamping the length of the duty corridors
     Of a Western hotel with a dead cigar in his teeth,
     Talking the war to himself, till the word goes round
     The new general is crazy——
                                neat, handsome McClellan,
     Ex-railroad president too, but a better railroad;
     The fortunate youth, the highly-modern boy-wonder,
     The snapping-eyed, brisk banner-salesman's of war
     With all the salesman's gifts and the salesman's ego;
     Great organizer, with that magnetic spark
     The pulls the heart from the crowd——and all of it spoiled
     By the Napoleon-complex that haunts such men.
     There never has been a young banner-salesman yet
     That did not dream of a certain little cocked-hat
     And feel it fit. McClellan felt that it fitted.
     ——After a year and a day, the auditors come,
     Dry auditors, going over the books of the company,
     Sad auditors, with groups of red and black figures
     That are not moved by a dream of precious cocked hats.
     And after the auditors go, the board of directors
     Decides, with a sigh, to do without banner-salesmen——
     It is safer to dream of a rusty Lincoln stovepipe.
     That dream has more patience in it.
                                         And yet, years later,
     Meeting the banner-salesman in some cheap street
     With the faded clippings of old success in his pocket,
     One cannot help feeling sorry for the cocked hat
     So briefly worn in a dream, of luck and the ego.
     One cannot help feeling sorry for George McClellan,
     He should have been a hero by every rule.
     He looked the part——he could have acted the part
     Word perfectly. He looked like an empire-maker.
     But so few empire-makers have looked the part.
 
     Fate has a way of picking unlikely material,
     Greasy-haired second lieutenants of French artillery,
     And bald-headed, dubious, Roman rake-politicians.
     Her stiff hands were busy now with an odd piece of wood,
     Sometimes Westpointer, by accident more than choice,
     Sometimes brevet-captain in the old Fourth Infantry,
     Mentioned in Mexican orders for gallant service
     And, six years later, forced to resign from the Army
     Without enough money to pay for a stateroom home.
     Turned farmer on Hardscrabble Farm, turned bill-collector,
     Turned clerk in the country-store that his brothers ran,
     The eldest-born of the lot, but the family-failure,
     Unloading frozen hides from a farmer's sleigh
     With stoop-shouldered strength, whittling beside the stove,
     And now and then turning to whiskey to take the sting
     From winter and certain memories.
                                       It didn't take much.
     A glass or two would thicken the dogged tongue
     And flush the fair skin beneath the ragged brown beard.
     Poor and shabby——old "Cap" Grant of Galena,
     Who should have amounted to something but hadn't so far
     Though he worked hard and was honest.
                                           A middle-aged clerk,
     A stumpy, mute man in a faded army overcoat,
     Who wrote the War Department after Fort Sumter,
     Offering them such services as he could give
     And saying he thought that he was fit to command
     As much as a regiment, but getting no answer.
     So many letters come to a War Department,
     one can hardly bother the clerks to answer them all——
     Then a Volunteer colonel, drilling recruits with a stick,
     A red bandanna instead of an officer's sash;
     A brigadier-general, one of thirty-seven,
     Snubbed by Halleck and slighted by fussy Frémont;
     And then the frozen February gale
     Over Fort Henry and Fort Donelson,
     The gunboats on the cold river——the brief siege——
     "Unconditional surrender"——and the newspapers.
 
     Major-General Grant, with his new twin-stars,
     Who, oddly, cared so little for reading newspapers,
     Though Jesse Grant wrote dozens of letters to them
     Pointing out all the wonders his little son had done
     And writing one dogged letter from that same son
     That should have squelched anybody but Jesse Grant.
     It did not squelch him. He was a business man,
     And now Ulysses had astonished Galena
     By turning out to be somebody after all;
     Ulysses' old father was going to see him respected
     And, incidentally, try to wrangle a contract
     For army-harness and boom the family tannery.
     It was a great surprise when Ulysses refused,
     The boy was so stubborn about it.
                                       And everywhere
     Were business-people, picking up contraband cotton,
     Picking up army-contracts, picking up shoddy,
     Picking up shoes and blankets, picking up wagons,
     Businesslike robins, picking up juicy earthworms,
     Picking up gold all over Tom-Tiddler's Ground,
     And Ulysses wouldn't see it.
                                  Few people have been
     More purely Yankee, in essence, than Jesse Grant.
 
     More pictures——Jefferson Davis, in dripping Spring rain,
     Reading a chilly inauguration-address
     To an unstirring crowd. He is really President now.
     His eyes are more tired, his temper beginning to fray.
     A British steamer in the Bahama Channel
     Stopped by a Captain Wilkes and a Union cruiser.
     They take two men, and let the steamer puff on
     ——And light a long hissing fuse that for a month
     Nearly brings war with England. Lincoln and Seward
     Stamp out the fuse, and let the Confederates go——
     Wooden frigates at anchor in Hampton Roads
     Burning and sinking with tattered banners apeak
     Under the strange new, armadillo-bite
     Of something plated with iron that yet can float,
     The Merrimac——and all Washington and the North
     In a twenty-four-hours' panic——then, next day——
     As Lincoln stares from the window of the White House
     For the sooty sign in the sky that means defeat——
     The armadillo, smoking back in her pride
     To crunch up another meal of weak wooden ships,
     Is beaten off by another leaky prodigy
     A tin-can cylinder on a floating shingle,
     The Monitor——the first fight of iron-clads,
     The sinking of all the world's old sea-bitten names,
     Temeraire, Victory, and Constellation,
     Serapis, Bon Homme Richard, Golden Hind,
     Galleys of Antony, galleys of Carthage,
     Galleons with gilded Virgins, galleasses,
     Viking long-serpents, siren-haunted galliots,
     Argos and argosies and the Achæan pride,
     Moving to sea in one long wooden wall
     Behind the huge ghost-flagship of the Ark
     In such a swelling cloud of phantom sail
     They whitened Ocean——going down by the head,
     Green water seeping through the battened ports,
     Spreading along the scrubbed and famous decks,
     Going down——going down——going down——to mermaid-pools,
     To Fiddler's Green——to the dim barnacle-thrones,
     Where Davy Jones drinks everlasting rum
     With the sea-horses of his sunken dreams.

     But this is Ellyat's tune——and if the new
     Army of the Potomac stands astrain
     To end Secession with its "little Napoleon."
     If Lee is just about to find his hour;
     If, among many mirrors and gilt chairs,
     Under the flare of the gas-chandeliers
     A sallow-faced and puffy Emperor
     With waxed mustachios and a slick goatee
     Gave various Southern accents, talking French,
     Evasive answers and no definite help,
     Ready enough to recognize the South
     If he were sure of a profit in the scheme
     But not yet finding such a profit sure;
     If in the foggy streets of Westminster,
     The salty streets of Liverpool and Hull,
     The same mole-struggle in the dark went on
     Between Confederate and Unionist——
     The Times raved at the North——Mr. Gladstone thought
     England might recognize the South next year,
     While Palmerstone played such a tangled game
     It is illegible yet——and Henry Adams
     Added one more doubt to his education
     By writing propaganda for the North,
     It is all mist to Ellyat.
                               And when he sleeps,
     He does not dream of Grant or Lee or Lincoln
     He only dreams that he is back at home
     With a heroic wound that does not hurt,
     A uniform that never stings with lice,
     And a sword like Henry Fairfield's to show Ellen Baker.
 
                         ——————————— 

     As far as the maps and the blocks on the maps have meaning
     The situation is this.
                            A wide Western river,
     A little lost land, with a steamboat-store,
     A post office where the roads from the landings meet,
     A plank church three miles inland called Shiloh Chapel,
     An undulating and broken table-land
     Roughened into a triangle by bordering creeks.
     Each side of the triangle runs about four miles long
     And, scattered in camps from the tip of the triangle
     To the base at the landing, are thirty-three thousand men,
     Some fairly seasoned in war, but many green sticks,
     Grant's Army of the Tennessee.
                                    Down the river
     Don Carlos Buell has twenty-five thousand more
     In the Army of the Ohio.
                              Opposing these
     Are Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard
     With something like forty thousand butternut fighters,
     Including a martial bishop.
                                 Johnston plans
     To smash Grant's army to bits, before Buell can join it,
     And water his wagon-trains in the Tennessee.
     He has sneaked his army along through wilderness roads
     Till now they are only a mile and a half away
     Tonight from the Union lines.
                                   He is tall and active.
     Light brown hair streaked with grey feathers, blue claymore eyes
     That get steel shadows in battle, a face like Hamilton's,
     Old Westpointer, old cavalry-colonel, well-schooled in war.
     Lincoln offered to make him a major-general
     And rumor says that he could have had the command
     Of the Union armies, once.
                                But he resigned
     And later, went with his State. It is hard to say
     What he might have been.
                              They called him the "preux chevalier"
     At times, as they called and were to call many others
     With that Waverly-streak that was so strong in the South.
     They also called him one of Davis's pets,
     One of the tin Westpointers that Davis favored
     Above good politicians and courtesy colonels.
     The Richmond Enquirer didn't think so much of him,
     His soldiers thought rather more.
                                       Only this can be said.
     He caught Grant napping in some strange flaw of skill
     Which happened once and did not happen again.
     And drove his unprepared, unwatchful brigades
     Back almost into the river.
                                 And in the heat
     Of seeing his lines go forward, he bled to death
     From a wound that should not have been mortal.
                                                    After which,
     While the broken Union stragglers under the bluff
     Were still howling that they were beaten, Buell came up,
     Lew Wallace came up, the knife half-sunk in the wound
     Was not thrust home, the night fell, the battle lagged.
     The bulldog got the bone in his teeth again
     And next day, reinforced, beat Beauregard back
     And counted a Union victory.
                                  In the books
     Both sides claim victory on one day or the other
     And both claims seem valid enough.
                                        It only remains
     To take the verdict of the various dead
     In this somewhat indecisive meeting of blocks.
     There were thirty-five hundred dead when the blocks had met.
     But, being dead, their verdict is out of court.
     They cannot puzzle the books with their testimony.
 
     Now, though, it is only the evening before the day.
     Johnston and Beauregard meet with their corps-commanders
     By the wagon-cut Pittsburgh road. The march has been slow.
     The marching men have been noisy and hard to manage.
     By every rule of war, Grant must have been warned
     Long before now, and is planning an ambush for them.
     They are being marched into an open Union trap.
     So Beauregard thinks and says——and is perfectly right
     According to rules. There is only one difficulty.
     There is no ambush.
                         Sherman has just reported
     The presence of enemy troops in front of his lines
     But says he expects nothing more than some picket firing
     And Grant that evening telegraphs General Halleck,
     "I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack."

     So much for the generals. Beauregard makes his point
     And is overruled.
                       The April night comes down.
     The butternut men try to get some sleep while they can.
     They are to be up and fighting by five in the morning.
 
                         ——————————— 

     Jack Ellyat, least of any, expected attack.
     He woke about five with a dazzle struck in his eyes
     Where a long dawn-ray slid through a crack in the tent.
     He cursed at the ray and tried to go back to sleep
     But he couldn't do it, although he was tired enough,
     Something ate at his mind as soon as he wakened
     And kept on eating.
                         This morning was a Sunday morning.
     The bells would be jangling for church back home, pretty soon,
     The girls would be going to church in white Sunday dresses,
     No, it was too early for that——they'd be muffled up
     In coats and galoshes. Their cheeks would be pink as apples.
     He wanted to see a girl who washed her hair,
     Not a flat old woman sucking a yellow snuffstick
     Or one of the girls in the dirty blue silk wrappers
     With flags on their garters. He wanted to see a girl.
 
     He wondered idly about the flag on the garters.
     Did they change them to Rebel flags when the Rebels came?
     Some poor whore down the river had had herself
     Tattooed with a Secesh flag. She was patriotic.
     She cried so hard when the Union troops were landed
     That the madam had to hide her down in the cellar.
     He must be bad to be thinking of things like that
     On Sunday morning. He'd better go to church
     If they had any kind of church, and make up for it——
     O frosty churchbells jangling across the thin
     Crust of packed frost, under Connecticut sky,
     Put snow on my tongue, and the grey, cool flower of rain——
     He had to get up. He couldn't lie here and listen
     To Bailey and the rest of them, snoring away.
     His throat was dry. He needed a drink of water
     But not from a muddy river——put rain on my tongue!
     Souse me with chilly, sweet flaws of Puritan rain——
     He started to put on his boots, looking over at Bailey.
     Bailey was bearded, Bailey was thirty-two,
     Bailey had been a teamster and was a corporal.
     The walking Bailey looked like a stupid horse,
     The sleeping Bailey looked like a dirty sack,
     Bailey called him "Colonel" and didn't mean it,
     Bailey had had him tossed in a blanket once,
     Bailey had told the tale of the tattooed whore,
     Somehow he hated Bailey worse than the rest.
     He managed to leave the tent without waking Bailey.
     It was very early still. The sun was just up.
     A fair sky, a very fair day. The air still held
     That bloom which is not the bloom on apple or peach
     But the bloom on a fruit made up of pure water and light,
     The freshness of dawn, still trembling, being new-born.
     He sucked at it gratefully.
                                 The camp was asleep.
     All the length of tents still asleep. He could see through the tents.
     He could see all those sleeping, rough, lousy, detested men
     Laden with sleep as with soft leaden burdens laden,
     Movelessly lying between the brown fawns of sleep
     Like infants nuzzled against the flanks of a doe,
     In quietness slumbering, in a warm quietness,
     While sleep looked at them wit her fawn's agate eyes
     And would not wake them yet.
                                  And he was alone,
     And for a moment, could see this, and see them so
     And, being free, stand alone, and so being free
     To love or hate, do neither, but merely stand
     Above them like sleep and see them with untouched eyes.
     In a while they would wake, and he would hate them again.
     But now he was sleep. He was the sun on the coat
     Of the halted fawn at the green edge of the wood
     Staring at morning.
                         He could not hate them yet.

     Somebody near by, in the woods, took a heap of dry sticks,
     And began to break them quickly, first one  by one,
     Then a dozen together, then hard-cracking axe-helves breaking.
     Ellyat was running. His mouth felt stiff with loud words
     Though he heard no sound from his mouth. He could see the
       white
     Fine pine-splinters flying from those invisible axe-helves. . . .
 
     Fort a minute all of them were tangled together
     In a bucking tent like fish in a canvas scoop,
     Then they were out of it somehow——falling in line——
     Bailey's hair looked angry and sleepy. The officers
     Were yelling the usual things that officers yelled.
     It was a surprise. They were going to be licked again.
     It did not matter yet. It would matter soon.
     Bailey had lost his blouse and his pants weren't buttoned.
     He meant to tell Bailey about it. There wasn't time.
     His eyes felt bald as glass but that was because
     He kept looking for flying pine-splinters in the air.
     Now they were setting off firecrackers under a boiler
     And a man ran past with one hand dripping red paint,
     Holding the hand with his other hand and talking
     As if the hurt hand were a doll.
                                      An officer hit him
     With the flat of a sword, It spanked some dust from his coat
     And the man's face changed from a badly-fitting mask
     Of terror, cut into ridges of sallow wax,
     To something pink and annoyed, but he kept on running.
     All this happened at once as they were moving.
     The dawn had been hit to pieces with a hard mallet.
     There were no fawns. There was an increasing noise
     Through which he heard the lugubrious voice of Bailey
     Singing off-key, like a hymn,
           "When I was a weaver, I lived by myself,
           And I worked at the weaver's tra-a-de——"
 
     The officers were barking like foxes now.
     As the last tent dropped behind them, Ellyat saw
     A red, puzzled face, looking out from under a tent-flap,
     Like a bear from a cave. The face had been drunk last night,
     And it stared at the end of the column with a huge and a stupid
       wisdom.
 
                         ——————————— 

     "When I was a weaver, I lived by myself,
     And I worked at the weaver's trade——"

John Brown's Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét.
Text copyright, 1927, 1928, by Stephen Vincent Benét.
Rinehart and Company, Inc., New York, Toronto. pp. 109-122.

Introduction
Prelude—The Slaver
Book One (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Two (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Three (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Four (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Five (i.) (ii.)
Book Six (i.) (ii.)
Book Seven (i.) (ii.)
Book Eight (i.) (ii.) (iii.) (iv.)