Fair Play
Posted by Jason on March 31st, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl, Check this out dude
(before Act 3)
We’ve been through the mill, you and me. I’m tired but we’re almost there. If you listen you can hear the Neuse – it can’t be far now. You, my best possum and fast friend, have well proven yourself no parlor soldier. We’ll make it yet.
The two we’ve left behind, well, they were not North Carolina’s finest but they were our brothers, and if you want me to opine on the matter, I’d say they would want us to march into New Bern like a pair of hard cases and grab the first fancy girls we could find. Get drunk as imbeciles in their memory and f—k like rabbits. Shall we insult the last wishes of our gallant fallen? No, we shall not. Another mile then.
We are close. I can smell the river. Brother, we have only to put one foot in front of the other. God has cleared our path. What could possibly stop us now?
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Posted by Jason on March 29th, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl, Uncategorized
And here we are, a trio of top-rail possums. Between us and New Bern lie a scant thirty miles as the crow flies, but this is a rough place, Down East. This is the pocosin and off the plank roads it is a snake-infested h–l. We’ll see a hungry black bear before we see another soul. Men have sunk in these peat bogs without time to whimper and never been seen again. Off the roads it is shank’s mare country and a horse is worse than useless.
The people who make these swamps their homes are not kind. They are contrary and don’t carry themselves as gentlemen.
Time is short and we’ve already seen the elephant. We need to get to New Bern before we’re logged as deserters and French leave takers. To do that we are left with an unenviable choice – through the thicket and every horror of a fecund and inclement nature, or along the plank roads through mobs out for vengeance, Nethercutt’s Rangers, and our own Federals keen to put us down like diseased animals.
What shall it be, possums?
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Posted by Jason on March 27th, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl, Check this out dude, Design
(read before Act One)
So that’s it, then. We’re on our own hook now. There’s no help for us – not from Company L, not from our people variously, sure as h—l not from Nethercutt’s Southern Rangers, no not by a jug-full. We have been abandoned, and the curse of Cain is upon us.
What we came to do has been done to a turn and there is some solace in that – we are yet soldiers. What cruel irony then that our own forces will shoot us as deserters if we show our faces just as quickly as the rebels will hang us from any convenient tree. We must rely on one another now. It is a lonely feeling and frankly cold comfort, but I believe we have a slender reed of hope. It lies to the east.
We know the country, her roads and byways. We may even know parties not altogether unsympathetic to our cause. Were we to return to New Bern in good time and under our own power, no one could accuse us of anything but misfortune. So east we go, together, heads held high, with one hundred miles of rebels stirred like hornets between us and our salvation. May God clear us a path.
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Posted by Jason on March 26th, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl, Check this out dude, Uncategorized
(Read this before the Prologue)
It is war, boys, and we are in it now.
It is said with some accuracy that we, known variously as the First North Carolina Cavalry, Company L of the First NC Volunteers, and them Home Guard thieves, are the meanest and most dissolute soldiers ever to turn a traitorous coat against their own kith and kin. Rascals. Those with high-minded feelings against secession or slavery are well gone, shot down or snuck off in disgust or bettering themselves elsewise, and we are what is left. Card sharps, reprobates, drunkards, deserters from the rebel cause and maybe this one as well, criminals and worse. However we each have a fine mount and we d-n well know how to ride them.
Here’s the thick of it – all that’s Federal about the Old North State these days is our gem of a coast, with us and a mess of Yankees set to choke off southern commerce coming and going. Beaufort, Washington, all the nice port towns save stubborn old Wilmington, a tough nut Burnside and his amphibians can’t crack. But not a hundred miles inland there’s a rail road like a pumping artery feeding Robert Lee guns, good imperial staple cotton uniforms, bacon, all manner of things that make an army go. And smack on that road is quaint little Rocky Mount, where I spent many an hour picking pockets at the Pitt county fair in my callow days. The town possesses a splendid bridge across the Tar river that we are going to burn to flinders. We’ll sever the Wilmington and Weldon and we’ll raise the d-v-l generally. Those are General Potter’s orders and it is his raid. Personally I aim to get some of that bacon.
We’re scouts and videttes. The New York cavalry we are to accompany call it a skylark and mock the good Down East boys we came up with, who’ll surely be eager to wipe the stupid grins off their New York faces. It’ll be hard riding through rough country – creek mazes, pocosin, snake-filled holes, cypress-drenched plantations older far than the Union &c – and we southern boys are raised with rifles in our dirty paws. It won’t be a skylark and there will be plenty of killing bothways. The New Yorkers are panting for the forage, to smashing what they can’t steal or drink, and to tell the truth so are many of us, but not all. Not all by a parcel. For us it’s something of a conundrum, owing to our family and friends and general upbringing in these parts. I do not envy any Company L man who falls into enemy hands, for we may be in the right but we’ve turned against our people. If there’s anything that’ll get southern blood boiling, its somebody who don’t know how to act. But as long as we hang together, to paraphrase Mr. Franklin, we won’t hang separately. Unless, of course, we do.
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Posted by Jason on March 26th, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl, Uncategorized
“Wherever the expedition passed the contrabands joined them. Some of them on “Massa’s mules,” some on “Massa’s horses,” others in “Massa’s wagons and carts,” others still on foot. Everywhere the Federal troops passed they were hailed by these persecuted people as their deliverers, and hundreds of them followed the expedition into the city. Here they will soon join the negro organizations, and a terrible retribution to be meted out by them is in store for their masters.” – J.H.H., Utica Morning Herald, July 23, 1863.
“The order to apply the torch to Tarboro bridge, so as to prevent the advance of the enemy from the opposite side upon our rear, was executed a little too soon. A large number of contrabands had just got over; many were still on the bridge and many were yet on the other side all eager to join our column and flee from their masters in Dixie to their worshipers among the Yankees. Some of our own men were also on the other side but with a few exceptions they contrived to make their escape. When the burning bridge fell it carried into the stream below or consumed in the vain effort to extricate themselves five and six hundred poor frantic Negroes.” – Henry Thomas King
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