Kristina: A Civil War Woman

By Jerome V. Lofgren

Kristina, A Civil War Woman is a Historical novel about the women of the south during in the Civil War. The heroine is Kristina Augustsson who fought in the Southern Army by disguising herself as a man.
Kristina had emigrated from Sweden to Charleston, South Carolina in August 1860. Because she was big and unattractive, Kristina's disguise as a man gained her free passage as an indentured harness maker. Her nickname was "Pig-Face."
Shortly after landing in Charleston, Kristina was caught up in the War between the States. She fought beside her friend and fellow immigrant, Kurt Petersson and eventually was given the command of the Quaker Artillery Battery of the Army of North Virginia.
Historical records show that she was killed on May 2, 1863, in the battle of Chancellorsville.
When General Stonewall Jackson came upon Kristina dying beside her fallen friend, he said, "I've never seen a braver man." Her dying protest, "I'm a woman," went unheeded. The General thought the dying soldier was delirious. He could not see that his gallant warrior was a woman who wanted to be loved, have a home and children like any woman of her day.
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind showed us the aristocratic Southern women. Kristina,shows us the lower class Southern women who fought the war with whatever resources available to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 9, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469759005

Jerome V. Lofgren

Jerome V. Lofgren lived and wrote in Poulsbo, Washington. His work, "The Search for Jack London" won International EPPIE 2000 Award for the best non-fiction book published in the year 2000. Writing primarily in the historical format he has written a total of six books as well as a collection of short stories. He passed away on January 16, 2014.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

EYES

Tyrants and the oppressed, Deceivers and the deceived, And lovers too, with eyes do engage. Searching eyes, Inviting eyes, Shifting eyes, Eyes that reveal the inner soul, the portals through which it flees. Dead eyes behold the truth that living eyes cannot see. If they can’t see a woman then a man shall I be.

—Kristina, Spring 1859, Setter, Sweden

1

Back to that time long ago when Kristina was seventeen and spring was coming on, her favorite place to go to get away and think her thoughts was the grove of birch trees that grew on the knoll above the farm where she lived with her mother and father. From this knoll, she could see the surrounding hills of Setter coming to life with the bright green of new buds.

In the best of times, life for a tenant farmer in Sweden during the mid-19th century was hard but this previous winter the snows had not come and the ground lay brown and dusty for lack of moisture just when spring planting was about to begin. Kristina was sensitive to the hard life she and her parents were forced to live. It was tough, physical work with little return. What little return there was would be taken by the landlord. But Kristina had her eyes set on greater things. Sitting on her favorite rock, she carefully unfolded the flyer that had been jammed into her hands by a stranger when she was in town for Sunday services at the State Lutheran Church.

The flyer announced that free prairie land waited for any who would come and take it. The soil was so rich and black that a farmer could easily push a stick the length of his elbow into the rich black soil. There were no trees to clear away, no rocks to pick. The land was just waiting for some farmer to come and work the soil. In a few months, the wheat and corn would jump out of the ground to yield hundreds of bushels per hectare. All the land was free to those who would cross the great ocean to the America Land.

Kristina’s imagination spun on to furnished her room in the new house that they would build in the prairie land. Her bed would have a duck down mattress and comforters that only the rich landlords had. She would never again be cold in the winter.

Her room would be on the second floor looking out over rolling hills that lifted up from a pond filled with trout. Wild ducks and geese would swoop in at evening time to feed. Flowerbeds would surround the house so that their fragrances would softly loft in through her open window to awaken her senses each morning.

A big vegetable garden would yield potatoes, carrots, onions, squash and all sorts of other wonderful vegetables. And on the hill behind the house, they would have an orchard of apple, cherry, and even plum trees.

Of course, there would be some milk cows and beef cattle, sheep and chickens, and geese, and a few pigs.

She could hardly contain her anticipation that her dream might come true.

And children! Her dreams always included a lot of children, boys and girls. She loved children. She knew that if she were to have children she would have to find a husband. Then they could go to the America Land and her life would be complete.

Her imagination had no bounds when it came to her fantasy life on the farm in the America land.

When she looked at her father, she saw a man old before his time with hard, callused hands with big swollen knuckles. His fingers were growing stiff from the hard work. Her mother, once a beautiful young girl, now had a face weathered and wrinkled and she was growing more ashen with the onset of the lung sickness sweeping through the farms of Setter that winter. Even her father had that look about him, the look of a dying man.

Kristina dreamt of taking her parents aboard the Valkyrie. It was a schooner that the flyer said would depart Stockholm the first of July bound for America. They would go to the prairie land and start a new life.

We can’t go, said her father sadly, when Kristina showed him the flyer. We’re bound to this farm for two more years.

Her father’s cough had been growing harsher, as had her mother’s. In the night Kristina lay in her attic bunk listening to the duet of coughing that came from her parent’s bed below. They coughed through the night and through the day as their bodies became weaker and weaker, shells of ashen skin and bones. So, more and more of the work of the farm fell to Kristina. She didn’t mind for she was big and strong, as strong as a man.

2

Kristina’s mother looked up from her death bed and whispering in a rasping voice said, My God, Kristina, I’m so very sorry…It’s not your fault that you’re ugly. Then she died with open eyes, fixed and empty, staring into the unknown. In the center of each blue iris was a black, lifeless hole out of which her soul had flown.

Yes, mother, I know, Kristina whispered as tears flooded her eyes. Know I’m ugly.

Kristina wondered, what was the difference between her mother’s living eyes and her dead eyes?

The flame on the candle beside her mother’s bed wavered, then went out. Had the life force just gone out like the flame went out on a candle? Nothing had departed the candle. The condition for combustion had ceased to exist. Was life nothing more than a momentary existence like the flame of a candle?

Or did her mother have an immortal soul as Pastor Larsson had claimed? If so, what happened to it? Where had her mother’s soul gone?

Kristina re-lit the candle.

She refused to accept the possibility that her mother ceased to exist like the flame of a candle. To accept that would mean that all her suffering, pain and tears lacked meaning.

Kristina’s hand swept over her mother’s eyes to close their lids, to cover those fearful dark holes that none could abide because they forced the ultimate question.

In the glen behind the barn, framed with white birch trees, Kristina buried her mother beside her father’s fresh grave. Her parents had died within days of each other from pneumonia that flourished in the cold, damp shed of a house provided by their landlord.

Kristina patted the fresh mound of dirt with the shovel blade then paused to bow her head in silent good-byes to the last of her family. All were dead, her grandparents and now her parents. She was alone.

As the bodies of her loved ones were being sucked into the earth, Kristina bore the heavy burden of remembrance. When the time came for Kristina to remember no more, what then of her loved ones? Would they be like the mounds of dirt that would be slowly reclaimed by the forces of nature until they were no more?

Each summer the graves would be covered with thick green grass and white daisies, in the autumn would come layers of the golden leaves, which would be compressed by the heavy blanket of cold winter snow. There was no marker to tell the world that they had once lived, except the markers Kristina carried in her memory. What will happen to them when she ceases to remember?

3

Inside the drafty farmhouse, Kristina stood before the small mirror on the wall submitting to the harshest critic, her reflection.

Kristina looked into pale blue eyes surrounded by a puffy, fat face, eyes that were like two blueberries pressed into a muffin. With fingertips she felt her high cheekbones and brushed back her bushy eyebrows. She patted down the tufts of blonde hair that flew off her head like startled birds.

Stepping back she viewed a man’s body, big boned and heavily muscled, standing six feet tall. Leaning forward she pressed down the tip of her nose with a finger. When she released it the flaring nostrils popped up again. She puckered her lips to receive a lover’s kiss but her small mouth was lost within her bulging cheeks.

She couldn’t escape the mirror’s judgement.

Pig-face! That’s what you are, a pig-face, she sneered at her reflection.

Kristina was not dumb. Her teacher had said she was the smartest in her class, head and shoulders above her classmates, both physically and academically.

She remembered her father’s words as they labored with the rocks in the field.

"Kristina, it’s important that a man has a strong body and a good mind. A woman needs a pretty face and a comely body to avoid the life of a cowmaid who pulls teats and shovels shit all her life.

God has been cruel. You were given a man’s body and an ugly face. It would be easier for you if you were a man.

4

Because her father and mother had been tenant farmers, Kristina knew that new tenants would soon take over the farm. Then she would be forced to leave. But where would she go? What could she do?

The Sunday after her mother’s death, Kristina walked the six miles into the village of Setter to attend the state Lutheran church.

At that time, the parish of Setter had 1,752 inhabitants. There were 245 farmers who owned their land, 102 tenant farmers, 11 soldiers, and 39 persons were artisans. There were also 247 servants, 3 idiots, 6 whores, and 2 thieves.

Four men governed the parish by virtue of their spiritual and temporal offices. In order of importance and power, they were the pastor of the state church, the sheriff, the biggest landowner, and the churchwarden. It was the same in all parishes in Sweden in the mid-1800s.

In the church, the assembled congregation was divided with the women and girls to the left, men and boys to the right. Front to back according to their station in life, the government officials and wealthy landowners were in the front and in the back huddled the paupers, cripples, halfwits, idiots, whores and ugly Kristina who towered above her pew mates.

Pastor Nels Larsson lifted his eyes over the heads of his congregation, with arms outstretched and powerful hands gripping the pulpit, his deep voice roared forth with the power of Moses.

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the ordinances of God shall receive to themselves damnation.

Pastor Larsson’s black eyes flared with increasing emphasis.

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of their power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same. For he who has authority over you is the minister of God to thee for good. Amen.

Kristina was not paying attention to the sermon though her eyes were fixed on the glowering pastor. Mentally she had slipped away and was stretched out on a bed of grass in her little hillside glen. There, surrounded by yellow wild flowers and protected by the white arms of the birch trees, she looked up at the fluffy white clouds that floated lazily in the blue summer sky. The clouds would challenge her to call out their names and ask them where they came from and where were they going.

Kristina’s feelings were beginning to come alive with strange sensations. The sensations were buried deep within her man’s body. She longed to be a beautiful woman like the prim and proper young ladies dressed in their clean print dresses who sat beside their mothers in the church.

Kristina saw what their mothers didn’t see. She saw the keen predator eyes of their daughters, alive with excitement, flicking over the eligible young men who huddled together on the other side of the sanctuary like sheep penned for the shearing. The young ladies’ eyes were those of the daughters of Artemis, on the hunt for pants. Their roving eyes were careful not to alert their selected victim by dwelling too long.

But such excitement was not for Kristina. She knew that the young men would not respond to her roving eyes. They would not wink and return her coy smile. The young men treated her as one of their own.

During school recesses, while the girls ignored Kristina, the boys included her in their games. She could out wrestle them, out run them, and her arm strength bested them at all trials. No proper man would show attention to another man. So, Kristina sat in the back of the church, unnoticed, observing the love games of others.

5

Upon hearing that Kristina’s parents were dead, the Sheriff drove up to the farm, riding in his buggy drawn by a sleek bay mare. He came to inform her, Kristina, you can’t stay here. Soon, new tenants will be arriving to take over this farm.

Kristina walked the rocky hills that surrounded the farm searching for guidance. She sat on an outcropping of rocks like a fledgling about to be thrust from its nest, to fly or die. And like a fledgling, she was afraid.

Don’t be afraid, Kristina, the voice on the wind whispered. You are not alone. We are here to protect you until the appointed time.

Kristina relished the company of her angels. As an only child of tenant farmers, deep in the forests of northern Sweden, she would slip away to her birch glen. There, surrounded by yellow daisies, she would listen to the wind voices and write their poetic language in her journal.

Where shall I go? What should I do? Kristina asked the wind voices.

The answer came just as the sun was setting behind the western birch trees. It was an obvious answer.

6

The scissors snipped at the clump of blonde hair that crowned Kristina’s head like a dirty mop. She cut and snipped until her hair was short and close.

For a brief moment prior to pulling on her father’s long underwear, she studied her naked body. The small mounds that were her breasts could barely be detected on her broad chest. With a parting farewell, her fingers glided slowly over her tiny nipples.

Quickly, she pulled up her father’s long woolen underwear. Next came his black woolen pants, rough homespun white linen shirt, gray knitted woolen socks and leather boots. Jamming a black, short-brimmed peasant’s cap on her head, she inspected the transformation. She nodded in satisfaction. A moment before she had been an ugly young woman of seventeen, alone and without prospects.

The next morning, Kris Augustsson, a handyman, with a bundle under his arm and the leather strap of his wooden toolbox slung over his shoulder, walked away from the life as the daughter of a tenant farmer in the Swedish province of Dahlena. The year was 1860.

7

In Sweden, the retreating glaciers had spread a thick layer of rocks on the hard clay soil of an ancient seabed. Only a thin layer of poor soil had accumulated over the rocky ground when men began to pick the rocks to make a field, and grub the stumps from the cleared birch and aspen forests. There were so many rocks that massive stone fences were built around every field and farm.

Kris, the handyman walked the narrow roads that twisted through forest and lakes. He found day work as carpenter and handy man. Sometimes he worked as farm labor. A big strong youth such as Kris readily found work for food and shelter. When the task was finished he moved on. Always working his way south in hopes he would find a warm place where he could get the chill out of his bones. Several weeks passed as Kristina was transformed into Kris.

8

A depressing mist hung heavy as the old ox drew the plow slowly over the field, turning up more rocks with each ponderous step. A farmer griped the handles of the plow to steady the furrows. Kris, following behind, dug into a wicket basket to drop seed potatoes into the furrows for the coming year’s crop.

The farmer and Kris stopped beside a stone fence for lunch.

I’ll have a bit more, Kris said.

Here’s some bread. You can’t eat only fish, the farmer answered.

Kris tore off a piece of coarse rye bread from the round loaf and stuffed it into his mouth.

It’s good—Yes? Asked the farmer.

Kris nodded his agreement as he chewed.

The ox stood stoically in the shelter of a birch grove chewing its cud.

After lunch, the farmer labored to roll a large rock, brought to the surface by the morning’s plowing, onto a wooden stone bolt. Kris went to the barn for more seed potatoes.

The farmer resorted to an iron pry bar in his efforts to roll the big rock onto the stone sled. The bar slipped and the large rock rolled back pinning his leg beneath.

The ox stood at harness, unconcerned and indifferent