Borne A Thousand Times

Borne A Thousand Times

A Story of John Ryder and the 24th Michigan

By Tim Gabel

Borne A Thousand Times

A Story of John Ryder and the 24th Michigan

By Tim Gabel

Published by Tim Gabel at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Tim Gabel

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The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Abraham Lincoln

***

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Dear Brother, John Ryder began his letter. Not knowing how he was possibly going to say what he wanted to in fact say, he wrote the salutation with the greatest care. His pen pressed hard into the paper, nearly tearing it, and he traced out the individual letters slowly, being sure of their neatness and proportion. Unfortunately, the two words were finished quickly, and he stared at the great expanse of empty paper.

He leaned back in the chair, ran his fingers through his dark hair, and closed his eyes. It was a hot and humid August afternoon, and the buzzing of grasshoppers outside rose and fell in uneven intervals. The mantle clock beat out a steady rhythm, and he wondered for a moment why he had never realized how loud it was. Unconsciously, he began tapping the end of his pen on the desk in the same cadence as the clock, and his thoughts floated back to the previous winter.

John had not seen Alfred in nearly a year, when his older brother had left with his newly formed cavalry unit for Washington. The war had only just begun. The government’s army had been embarrassed by a southern militia force just south of the nation’s Capital, and once the shock wore off, young men across the north answered the call to defend something they had never given much though about, the union of the states.

John had followed his brother’s example later that year, and in December of 1861 had enlisted with a state militia cavalry unit known as lancers. From almost the first moment he reported for duty, John deeply regretted his decision. The lancer unit had set up its camp just south of Detroit, but didn’t seem to enjoy any recognition as a military force. They had only crude tents as shelter, received food at infrequent and unpredictable times, and wore mismatched uniforms. Ammunition seemed to be an afterthought, so little real training ever occurred. Men grew bored, then weary, and then sick. John actually rejoiced when a spreading rash was diagnosed as measles, as the illness was a ticket home to a warm bed and regular meals.

By March, it was clear that the regiment would never be large enough or outfitted properly for service in the Union army, and so it was disbanded. The men were then asked to sign temporary transfer orders, which most readily did. Those men were foolish, John thought, and he returned home while the others were in fact transferred permanently into the U.S. Cavalry. John was certain that his military career was over, and he had written as much to his approving brother.

Foolish, he whispered to himself. This was Alfred’s greatest insult, for it meant a person wholly unable to use the brains that the Good Lord had given them. Though only two years older than John, Alfred had seemed to have always been an adult, and securing his approval had been John’s top priority for his entire life. Alfred had been very clear that John would be foolish to enlist. After the lancer debacle, the matter was apparently settled.

But a few weeks earlier, August 9, 1862 to be precise, when John had stepped up to the recruiting table set up on the village green in the nearby town of Plymouth, and signed his name to the three year contract to serve ,no one could have questioned the decision. He had been flanked by his best friends from Livonia, and men from all the surrounding communities were there to sign up for the Union. The small but patriotic crowd that had gathered that day had cheered for each man, and John had basked in the attention no less than any other when it had been his turn to step forward. It had been one of the most glorious moments of his young life.

The regiment had assembled a week later in Detroit, and away from the admiring crowd, it was soon obvious that no one, from the regimental colonel on down to himself, really was positive of what they would now be doing in the army. Their brief training sessions had felt almost like a poorly performed play, one where each actor had only a general idea of the part assigned to him and tried to improvise in place of any established dialogue. They had enough to eat, and the officers at least were pleasant. Beyond that, he hadn’t seen much that he could now use to convince Alfred that both Ryder boys were needed in the military.

He tried to think back to Alfred’s own reasons for joining, the ones he had passionately laid out to his parents a year earlier when he had announced his decision to quit the Normal School in Ypsilanti and join the cavalry. That speech was mostly about free land, and his older brother had seen fit to lecture his pioneer parents about carving out a life for one self in a free country. At the time, John hadn’t been exactly sure what his brother meant, but he knew that when Alfred argued for something, it usually happened. His best flourish had been in connecting their father’s life struggles to the greater struggle of the Civil War.

Their father, George Rider, had traveled with his father David from Massachusetts in 1827 to what was then the Michigan Territory. (Another victory for Alfred had been convincing his father to change the spelling of their last name by substituting the y for an i) They had ridden a barge across the great wonder of early America, the Erie Canal, and then come by sailing ship across the Great Lakes to Detroit. David had heard of plentiful and rich farmland just west of the city, so he had struck out one winter morning, following the Rouge River. At last, he found eighty prime acres in what would become Section 26 of Livonia Township, land that had already been cleared. The family moved to the new homestead in the spring of 1828. George was fourteen. Livonia was rough place, and there was little outside help against harsh weather and roving wolves.

George married in 1840, and began his own farm on a slice of the Rider land. Alfred was born in 1841, followed by John in 1843. A sister, Elizabeth, came next followed by a third son, Charles, in 1854. The family grew more prosperous each year, so much so that one generation removed from George’s sometimes terrifying childhood in the wilderness, he had a son in college destined for law school, and fame and fortune after that.

None of this could help him now, John knew, as Alfred would immediately recognize his own words, used by his younger brother in a clumsy way. Instead John wrote a few pleasantries, slowly and carefully. He really did hope that his letter would find his brother in good health and spirits, but writing this did little to get to his point.

What Alfred surely did not know was that the rebellion that he had enlisted to stop had grown into such a national conflagration that the heat could be felt all the way back to Livonia Township and their little village of Newburgh. The South had managed to build for itself a mighty army, and their generals were household names on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Men had trickled away one by one as each new regiment of volunteers was formed. Draft rumors murmured through the area, repeated on the steps of churches and post offices, made more believable after the defeat of the Union invasion of Virginia the previous spring, and there was now a certain inevitability that anyone still at home would soon be gone. Not joining the fight was looking more and more like an option open to only the rankest of cowards.

Finally, the riot in Detroit and its aftermath set of a chain reaction of enlistments. Intended to facilitate the formation of another Michigan infantry regiment, a mid-July rally in Detroit had turned ugly quickly when hecklers, convinced that a draft was soon to be announced, rushed the stage and broke up the meeting. The local papers bemoaned the cowardice, and challenged the men of Wayne County to prove their patriotism and rally to the flag. The call struck a nerve, especially when a leading judge and the county sheriff agreed to command the new unit. New rallies were held, and thousands took the easy route to vindication by attending a rally, nearly a thousand more, including John Ryder, took the more permanent step of signing an enlistment contract. The regiment was raised in record time, and the reputation of the area was restored.

John pursed his lips, and slowly shook his head. There was no way he could possibly tell the entire story to his brother, no way that would make any sense. His nervous pencil drummed louder on the desk. And then his tightly pressed lips loosened into a slight smile, and a saving realization slowly came to him. He didn’t need to explain anything to his brother, because, by God, he had simply done the right thing! For maybe the first time in his life, he knew more than Alfred, at least when it came to this. Men like himself, and all of his friends for that matter, were now needed in their country’s darkest hour. Alfred was perhaps too close to it, too caught up in the daily struggle with fear and survival. But here, safely tucked in behind a writing desk in their farmhouse, John could see the truth. He could see the bigger picture.

I know you will think me a fool, and perhaps time will show me to be one. But I have seen nothing yet to make me believe that I am one.

He couldn’t tell Alfred that he was wrong, so he would simply say that he, John, was most likely right. His heart lighter, John quickly, but still carefully, wrote out the letter. He made only casual references to his new army career, and by avoiding details, reduced the chance of being branded a fool. As he wrote, he could see in black and white the wisdom in his decision. He maybe wasn’t so sure about the details, or even the broader implications, but he couldn’t imagine being anything except Private John E. Ryder, Twenty-fourth Michigan.

CHAPTER TWO

The Twenty-fourth Michigan Volunteer regiment left Detroit for Washington on August 29, 1862, three weeks after John Ryder had signed up to fight for the Union. Their brief training near what is today the southern extreme of Wayne State University’s campus would need to be completed once they encamped near the Capital. The regiment traveled across the rough seas of Lake Erie to Cleveland, where waiting train cars took them through Pennsylvania to Washington.

As a regiment, the Twenty-fourth was technically comprised of ten companies of one hundred men. John Ryder was assigned to Company C, which was made up primarily of men from Plymouth, Livonia, Canton, and Nankin, an early name for present day Westland. The training of the men at first focused on the company level, and how an individual soldier would handle his musket within the unit.

the vast majority of soldiers, north and south, fought with a musket that was loaded by pouring gun powder down the barrel, and then ramming a lead ball down to meet the powder. The soldier then placed a small ignition cap on top of the gun, and then pulled the trigger to release a small hammer on top of the gun. The hammer detonated the cap, which detonated the gunpowder, which pushed the ball out the barrel in a cloud of smoke. This complex process took an efficient soldier twenty seconds, and thus an individual soldier could only hope to get off three shots per minute.

Given the relatively slow rate of fire, Civil War soldiers were at their most effective when massed into firing units. Officers drilled their men for hours upon hours on how to move into different fighting formations together, fire together, and then reform for efficient movement to another part of the battle. The army knew that the most carefully practiced movements could quickly devolve into chaos in the face of enemy fire and the screams of wounded comrades, so drilling was so frequent as to take on an almost comic aspect to new soldiers who did yet know the rigors of actual combat.

The late summer sun in Washington was much harsher than even that of mid-July in Michigan. A wet blanket of humidity clung to the backs of each man as they dragged off the drill field toward their tents. Only a few days into their deployment outside Washington, the men of the Twenty-fourth were already beginning to labor under the monotonous grind of daily drill in the hot sun. Their new uniforms only made matters worse. The light blue wool pants were worn up just above a man’s naval, and a man could feel beads of sweat running down the small of his back. The darker blue uniform coat was also made of wool, and its irregular and cheap fit chafed in the suffocating humidity.

Ryder lay stretched on his back early on a September evening, his head pounding out a dehydrated rhythm. His energetic tent mate, Alfred Noble, wandered back from making the rounds around camp, and plopped down in the grass besides his friend. The day’s drilling had included less than stellar instruction from the regimental second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Flanigan. Flanigan, the sheriff of Wayne County back home was a hulking Irishman who stood six feet four. For Noble, however, his intimidating size and lofty civilian position did not excuse his shortcomings leading the regiment.

Er,...um...men,...ur...umm, bumbled Noble in his best imitation brogue.

Don’t, Alfred, my head hurts too much to laugh.

Ahhh,...ur, yer head be hurtin...umm...I see.

I don’t think I’d let Flanigan hear you, offered Ryder, turning over to squint at his friend.

Flanigan is an imbecile, Johnny, Noble replied. He didn’t get elected sheriff on account of his speech making, I can see plainly.

Alfred Noble was just past his eighteenth birthday, and in addition to being a close neighbor of the Ryders, he was also John’s best friend. The two had grown up together, and both were really de facto members of each others’ families. They had enlisted together, and were now sharing a tent.

Despite being a few years younger, Noble was the only boy Ryder knew who could keep up with his brother Alfred when it came to rapid fire speech. He had a compact frame, and a round, doughy face that belied his intellect. Alfred had a knack for picking up new things on the first try. He was especially good with all things mechanical, and was impatient with anyone who struggled to grasp what was painfully obvious to him. The drill they were doing made perfect sense to Noble. He’d hunted birds with John and Alfred back home, and knew that their best odds were when they were close together and could fire at the same target at the same time. The officers, however, didn’t exactly seem to know just how the drills should go. Colonel Morrow, the regimental leader, had served in the Mexico war, and had a stern military bearing. Most of the others seemed to be learning as they went, which did not go well in forming civilians into a fighting unit, or in keeping Noble from growing impatient. Equal parts energetic and curious, Noble offset his frustrations with drill by taking in the expanse of camp life every evening, and was back on his feet and had sauntered away to see what the commotion was in a distant part of the camp.

Ryder rolled back over, and closed his eyes, and again could see the awful wagon train that had passed by close to camp the previous day. Fresh from the battle field near Bull Run, the wagons’ miserable cargo were the mangled survivors of the field hospitals, now en route to more permanent care in the Capital. A profound hush came over the whole unit, and all joking ceased both in shock and in reverence for what rolled before them. A few soldiers were sitting up on the painfully jarring ride, with an anguished dignity, as if the pain had already been accepted as new companion who would be present at all waking moments. A few had no expression at all but a vacant stare, as if the better part of their life had already leaked out of them. But one man continued to haunt Ryder beyond all the disfigured soldiers that had passed. He had been a young soldier, perhaps the same age as John, with a blood soaked bandage wrapped around what was left of his left arm above his elbow. But when John looked into the man’s eyes, he saw a sinister sneer, a look of utter contempt.

John sat up, too quickly, and his head raged again with a sharp stab in his forehead. He reached into his new knapsack, and pulled out his writing paper to begin a quick note to home. It was his belief, shared by most of his fellow soldiers, that the more often he wrote home, the more likely he would get a return letter.

Ryder thought for a moment about for whom this letter would be. Closing his eyes, he could see the Ryder farmhouse on an early fall evening. In Michigan, the setting sun in September brought on a rapid chill. The air would be crisp and dry, and the rich aroma of new fallen leaves would just begin to drift along on the evening breeze.

Opening his eyes again, he surveyed the encampment, which the men were now calling Camp Shearer. It rivaled the largest cities that John had even seen, and the vast expanse of tents was sectioned by carefully planned streets. Most men, weary from the long day of drill, lounged about or dined on salted pork and coffee. Unseen drums always seemed to beat, and a dull chorus of commingled voices rolled throughout the camp. This time of day had become the time of day when John most missed his home, the feeling coming in stronger each passing evening.

As he began his letter, Noble returned with two other soldiers, clearly in the midst of an argument.

Johnny heard him say it, Alfred was saying to one