Free Bull Run by Paul Fleischman Page A

services offered to her defense. At last the nation’s eyes would behold the Negro’s energy and courage!
    We set up two recruiting stations. They were filled at once with scores of volunteers. Cheered by this magnificent response, we planned a second meeting at a schoolhouse. Arriving, I found the building all but ringed by a crowd of clamoring whites. Many had clubs. Several were drunk. “It’s a white man’s war!” one addressed me point-blank. “You’ll do no damn parading about with guns!” I’ve tried to forget the coarser things said. I inserted the key in the door’s padlock, but a police captain roughly drew it out. He announced that our meeting was canceled and our entire enterprise with it, on the grounds of inviting mob violence. “Go back to your miserable homes!” he ordered us, rather than the whites. “And stay there!”
    I vowed that I would do otherwise.

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FLORA WHEELWORTH
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    Lupine and honeysuckle bloomed as before, the oaks put out leaves, whippoorwills called. Outside it might have been any spring. But within the walls of the house it was the spring Virginia left the Union, a season separate from all before it. My three daughters came, with their families, and didn’t their needles swoop like swallows, stitching up uniforms for their husbands. All the talk was of war, and all the singing. Each night we set candles in every window, proclaiming our joy at joining the Confederacy. “Nonilluminators” were suspect.
    We remarked the train whistles coming from Manassas Junction while we sewed. The day arrived when we drove our men there to send them off to war. Each daughter held up her husband’s sword and consecrated it with a kiss. Then they took their tearful farewells, and our brave knights boarded the train for Richmond, each followed by his servant. Banners flapped. A band played. Women cut buttons off their clothes and handed them through the windows as keepsakes. The church society gave the men Bibles, each inscribed with “Fight the good fight.” Girls whose beaus hadn’t joined shamed them by giving out flowers to soldiers. Finally the whistle blew. The cars moved, drawing taut and then snapping dozens of parting conversations. “Stain your sword to the hilt!” shouted the waving woman beside me. Susannah, my eldest, scurried after the train. She’d supplied her husband with razor, mirror, hairbrush, nail file, calfskin slippers, and a fine suit of clothes to be saved for his triumphant entry into Washington. “Do try not to soil the coat!” she called out.

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JAMES DACY
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    Never was there such a send-off as that given the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, the first to leave for Washington. Thousands saw the trains off from Boston, the cheering loud enough to stir the saints. Great geysers were shot into the air by fire trucks when the cars passed through Worcester and Springfield. In New York, the regiment marched down thronged Broadway to an elegant breakfast at the Astor House. Their gunstocks were oiled, their bayonets bright. I was traveling with them as sketch artist for the New York Illustrated News and was similarly fitted out for the conflict, armed with paper and three dozen pencils. I was to send back drawings that would let readers stand where I stood and view the war as if there, lacking naught but the singing of bullets past their ears. I’d no notion I’d hear that sound so soon.
    We reached Philadelphia that night and Baltimore the following noon. We’d been warned that Baltimore was no Boston. Taking horsecars from one station to another, we were startled to see men and women wearing Confederate ribbons and rosettes. In place of cheers, we were greeted with insults. Plug-ugly toughs, spoiling for a fight, were drawn our way like moths to a light. The crowd about us thickened, grew bolder, then brazenly halted the horses. We disembarked and attempted to