The Book of Luke: A Soldier's Story

By Pat Shirley

THE BOOK OF LUKE: A SOLDIERS STORY, first book in the Civil War trilogy OLD LONG TIME, follows my great-grandfather, Luke Munn, and his regiment, the 149th PA Volunteers, through The Battle of Gettysburg. A third person approach made it possible to add action elsewhere on the field and put the role of the 149th in context. Civil War novels usually have fictional heroes or center on officers or others who were or became prominent. In reading extensively on the period, I have found almost no others that focus on an ordinary soldier in the ranks who actually lived and fought in a specific battle.

From census and military records and family stories, I have reconstructed Lukes personality and his life as a lumberman and soldier and a farmer trying to raise his family in a clearing in the woods. I have defined him not only as an individual but also in terms of his antecedents and descendants. I have alternated the battle chapters with a first-person narrator from each generation of Lukes family who tells about and relates to Luke. In starting with his grandmother, Molly Wolcott Munn, I have traced the family lineage back to 1630 when Henry Wolcott came to America. As the family has been in America for so long and as Mollys branch of it has been quite ordinary as compared to the Wolcott cousins who became governors of Connecticut, I feel that it is Everymans or every Americans story as well as Lukes.

The book emphasizes ethnic influences on the family, and it develops the theme of freedom versus security as, not only an American, but, a basic human conflict, giving the story a meaning beyond family history. My last narrator, my first cousin twice removed and Lukes great, great, great-granddaughter, is of mixed black and white parentage. In coming to terms with her dual ancestry, she gives Lukes story and his devotion to the anti-slavery cause a more modern meaning and appeal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 7, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465314772

Book preview

THE MARSH

Well, welcome home, said Will, throwing himself on the ground. Scarcely can remember the last time I slept on dear old Pennsylvanie soil.

Looks like used dirt to me, said Ben, kicking at the ashes of a fire. Contaminated by Confederates. It’s better to be the leader in follow the leader. They get the best camp sites first. Heard it’s the Samuel White Farm. He can keep it. Shouldn’t we put up the tent? Looks like rain again.

Ben started pounding tent stakes into the ground, and Jake and Luke buttoned the two halves together. Luke Munn, Jake Blair, Ben George, and Will Fleming had shared quarters in Virginia and decided to make two tent halves do for four men with two carrying or finding stakes and tent pole and the other two carrying the tent with their bed rolls.

I almost threw my half of this damned thing away more than a few times, said Jake. Too damned much to carry in the heat.

Luke secured the last corner of the tent. A lot of soldiers froze and got pneumonia the past two winters because they left their winter coats and blankets behind in the heat.

I’d like to throw away the food they give us and the rattling pots and dishes we’re to use to cook and eat it, said Ben. It’s not worth cooking nor fit to eat. The camp food got some better after Hooker took command. I’d as soon eat rocks smeared with bird shit though as this stuff they give us on the march.

Will propped himself on one elbow. Thanks boys. It’s nice to have your house built ‘round you. I don’t suppose you want me to get up and build a fire since no one wants to eat.

I threw my heavy blanket away a while back, Ben said. It was the blanket or the overcoat. I decided I could cover up with a coat better than I could wear a blanket.

Luke leaned against the tent pole. Remember how hot it was when we started these forced marches? He could see those little look-alike towns emerging from the blur of heat—Berea Chruch, Guilford Station, Barnesville, Adamstown, Jefferson, Middletown. June 18 the heat wave broke as they sloshed through heavy thunder showers near the ill-fated battlefield of Manassas, where the Union had been defeated twice in battles they called Bull Run. Sleet and hail had pelted the Rebels on the ridge as if in retribution. Temperatures were fairly moderate for more than a week after that but started to rise a few days ago. They’d crossed the Potomac and come home—come back North—in a drizzling rain June 26. The next day Hooker resigned as commander of the Army of the Potomac. General Halleck, who commanded the armies from Washington, wouldn’t abandon Harper’s Ferry and give him its troops.

You know those troops Hooker wanted? said Will as he tested a piece of hardtack he’d put to soak. We won’t be here long enough to soften these worm castles up. A couple of maggots floated on the water. They say that the Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck triumvirate in Washington is giving Meade those troops they wouldn’t give Hooker. Now do you suppose they didn’t want Hooker more than they did want those troops to stay at Harper’s Ferry?

Ben wheezed a short, sharp laugh. Can’t blame them for not wanting Hooker. I’m surprised he stayed so long after Chancellorsville. Remember how hard we worked on those bridges at Fredericksburg so that Lee would think we were crossing there while half the army went around behind him?

Will was still working at his hardtack. It was a good plan. It just didn’t work. I thought we’d gone to hell without even fighting that night we marched to the rescue at Chancellorsville. It was still dark when we got there. Moon was full like now. There were fires all through the woods to spite the rain and mud. Seemed the mud itself was burning. Shadows moving ghost-like in the red and white light. You couldn’t tell which army those shadows belonged to. That’s the night Stonewall Jackson was shot by his own men. They thought he and his staff were our cavalry. The South will miss Stonewall, crazy as they say he was. He rode around quoting Scripture and sucking a lemon held in one hand while the other hand was in the air. He’d lost part of a finger, and it hurt to let it hang down. The lemon was for his dyspepsia. He wouldn’t eat pepper because it gave him a pain in his left leg. They all laughed but Will. And the errie echoing screams of the wounded burning alive, trapped by those fires. Screams right out of the fires of hell. Reynolds brought us up, the whole I Corps, and got us in position to fight. He sent us Bucktails on up front to spy on the Rebels. We got so close we could hear them talking. Then Hooker pulled us back. Closest we ever came to battle. Or to hell.

Jake rubbed his nose and scratched his head. You know that story they tell about how Thomas Jackson got to be ‘Stonewall’? Those Rebs were all running at First Bull Run. ‘Cept Jackson. He stood his ground on the Henry House Hill, and someone said: There stands Jackson. Like a stone wall. Well. I heard it a little different. It went like this. Those Rebs needed all the help they could get that day. They were all running to the rescue. ‘Cept Jackson. He stood right there on the Henry House Hill. That’s when someone said: There stands Jackson. Like a stone wall.

They say a shot shattered a pillar Hooker was leaning on at his Chancellorsville headquarters, and he was knocked unconscious when he fell, mused Luke. They say that’s why he couldn’t get his wits together. I think that when such a good plan fell apart he did too.

Hooker was a good organizer when no one was shooting at him, said Jake. "We had high hopes for him. He got us off Washington guard duty and down to where the fighting was on the good steamship LOUISIANA with the ¹⁵⁰th. Good Ole Fighting Joe. That shot might just as well have killed him and let him die a hero. He made one awful blunder in pulling Sickles out of the salient at Hazel Grove and leaving it for Alexander’s Rebel guns. They could really pick our Union boys off from there."

That fool Sickles took a gamble moving out in front to Hazel Grove in the first place, said Luke. Of course, he was already isolated when the XI Corps collapsed. Sickles’ III Corps had started out backing us up back in Fredericksburg, and Sickles wanted to be out front and get some glory. It was back at Fredericksburg though that there was glory to be had. By the time our corps got back there, Sedgewick had already taken Marye’s Heights. We missed out as sure as Sickles did. Burnside hadn’t been able to take Marye’s Heights from Longstreet last December. Sedgewick and any with him could have claimed the right to brag if the South hadn’t driven our boys out next night.

We’d already lost at that demon-infested Wilderness around the Chancellor House, continued Jake. Worse than trying to fight in the woods where we lumbered. Swamps, thickets, tangled trees. If Hooker had taken the army out into open farm country like this, we’d have had a chance. He hid in country where he thought Lee couldn’t attack.

It would have been a freak accident if that shell had killed Hooker, said Ben. No general above brigadier ever gets killed by the enemy. Lincoln shoots ‘em down fast though. McDowell, McClellan, Pope, McClellan again, Burnside, Hooker. I still wish it could be McClellan yet again. The third coming of Little Mac! Don’t know much about Meade.

He’s from Pennsylvania like us. Like Reynolds; like McClellan too originally, said Luke. Irvin heard that Reynolds turned down the command.

Reynolds is too honest and has too much sense for the job, said Jake. He’d rather fight Lee than Lincoln and that Washington crowd. I’d rather have Reynolds than have McClellan back. You still hear the rumors that it’s McClellan after all.

Ben was trying to pick maggots from a piece of hard tack.

I broke a tooth last week trying to eat one of those sheet iron crackers raw, said Luke.

The sickening smell of pickled beef was coming from a nearby fire.

It’ll take two days to soften that stuff up, said Ben, pointing at Will’s slowly bloating hardtack. Are you going to fry it up for skilly galee or crumble it and make a nice hellfire stew? I have some half-turned salt pork you can put with it.

Jake leaned back and sipped his coffee. Let’s empty our haversacks. We may as well pool our rations for a big mess of something, as we’ll likely get three days’ rations and sixty rounds to welcome the Rebs to Pennsylvanie. ‘Course they’ve already made themselves to home. They camped here not so long ago. We might finally fight tomorrow.

Irvin says Reynolds doesn’t think so, said Luke. He says Lee’s army’s still too scattered. Longstreet’s still west of the mountains. Lee will want to bring them all up and pick his position before he starts a fight. And we don’t generally start fights.

I ‘spect Reynolds confides in our company commander all the time, scoffed Jake. Like Lee confides in Reynolds.

It was Lieutenant, not Captain, Irvin. John F. Sonny Irvin. And he happened to hear.

I noticed that Lieutenant Irvin is always chatting with you, Luke. I guess that ole Sonny must think that you’re smart adding books to your load and straining your eyes reading by dying fires. I guess he thinks talking to you with your head so full of books is nigh as good as college. I guess he’s trying to further his education. Well, I myself have it on good authority that those Southern gentlemen carry that fat book Victor Hugo wrote about France around with them. THE MISERIES or whatever they call it. They think it’s an ‘indictment of our Northern industrial system and its attendant evils’. You don’t have to read books to have intelligent things to say, even about books.

Will turned to Luke from the soaked hardtack he’d thrown into the grease to fry. Never mind, Luke. You’re a good man in the woods and a good man on the river and a good man on the road. That’s good enough for me even if you do waste your time on foolish things. We don’t know yet who’s a good man in battle.

Are you boys too tired to throw the papers awhile? asked Ben. All right then. I’m off to find a game of five card draw. Connell’s usually good for a few hands.

Damn! said Jake as he drained his tin cup. That’s the last of my coffee ration. I couldn’t have lived almost a year on army food. I must have lived on coffee. He skimmed some maggots from his soaking hard tack. We’ll liberate all the maggots and send them after the Rebs. Remember that flour ration they gave us with nothing to leaven it. We made sticky putty and saw who could hit the highest limb and make it stick. The winner got everyone’s next flour ration. Do you know what I heard about Meade? He was born in Spain, so he can’t be President. That’s why Lincoln picked him. He’s so afraid McClellan will take the Presidency from him next year.

Luke yawned and stretched. Lincoln’s the one who will see this war through. He’ll march the last mile. Lincoln will stay with us till the end.

Having eaten his skilly galee, Will sprawled on the ground inside the tent again. Wake me if it starts to rain. I’ll come out and let it wash my face. That wind this afternoon blew up quite a dust. It’s going to take a harder rain than we had this morning to settle the dust on these roads. It rained after Chancellorsville.

It usually rains after a battle, said Luke. To wash away the blood. Either the gods are angry or want to join the fun.

A chorus of HOME SWEET HOME rose from a nearby tent.

Will came out from under the tent and sat listening. It seemed more like we’d come home in Maryland. They cheered us and gave us free food. Ran out and thrust pies and loaves of bread in our hands. Pretty blond girl gave me a cherry pie. Here you pay three prices and steal sour cherries off the trees.

"Most of those