I Survived the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863 Page 4

His head pounded. He could feel the blood gushing from his leg. It was a bad cut. Very bad.

  The smoke burned his eyes and his lungs. It was hard to breathe, to even think.

  Down in the grass, there wasn’t as much smoke. A breeze blew and for a few seconds the air cleared. Thomas could see across the field.

  He froze in terror.

  There they were, rebel soldiers ready to charge. There were thousands of them — men in front on horseback, waving gleaming swords. Behind them, two lines of men stretched across the entire meadow, soldiers with their rifles raised.

  Suddenly there was a noise, rising above the booms, a howling scream that rushed across the meadow like a raging wind.

  The rebel yell.

  The men were screaming as they began their charge across the meadow.

  Thomas had to get away. But where could he go?

  The rebel cannons still boomed, sending their deadly balls and shells into the hills behind him. Thomas turned to climb back up to the high ground.

  But now there was the thundering of thousands of pounding rebel boots.

  It was too late. A rebel soldier was running toward Thomas, his eyes glowing bloodred through the smoke, his face twisted into an awful killing grin.

  “No!” Thomas screamed.

  He couldn’t die here.

  He couldn’t leave Birdie!

  Boom!

  The bullet hit Thomas, and his chest seemed to explode.

  The world around him spun. The sky fell, and the air turned bright white.

  Thomas hit the ground hard, his body sinking into soft, blood-soaked grass.

  Later, there was pain.

  And voices calling to him.

  Was he dead?

  No, he was back with Mr. Knox.

  That must be why his entire body hurt. Because he was back on the farm, working dawn to dusk.

  He could hear Birdie, feel her little hand gripping his.

  But who was that other man calling his name?

  “Thomas!”

  “Thomas!”

  Thomas tried to open his eyes, but there was just darkness.

  He tried to speak, but his voice was like ashes.

  He wanted to move, but he felt hands holding him down.

  Or were they chains?

  Searing pain ripped across his chest.

  Mr. Knox! Please don’t whip me!

  He was a slave again.

  Or was he dead?

  Two days passed before Thomas realized that he was alive, and that he was not back at Mr. Knox’s farm.

  He was in a hospital tent, still in Gettysburg.

  He’d been carried off the battlefield along with thousands of others. His pants had been soaked in blood. His eyes were swollen shut.

  When the ambulance crew was searching the field for wounded, at first they thought Thomas was dead. But then they heard him shout.

  “Birdie!”

  They had put him on a stretcher carefully, wondering how on earth this boy had gotten himself onto this battlefield, assuming he was a servant to one of the officers.

  Most of his blood had spilled into the grass, from the enormous gash on his leg.

  The rebel’s bullet had bruised his chest.

  It would have killed him, ripped right through his heart.

  Except it was stopped by the tin-covered book in his shirt pocket.

  Mary’s book of paintings.

  That’s what saved his life. Not a rifle or a sword.

  He was saved by a book filled with pretty pictures of a world Thomas had never seen.

  The doctors stitched him up and left him, caught between life and death, as battles raged all around Gettysburg. They fought for three days in all. They battled in meadows and fields, in orchards and woods, on hilltops and in valleys. Streams ran red with blood. Twenty-three thousand men were killed or wounded before the rebels finally retreated.

  The Union troops held their high ground.

  But Thomas knew none of this.

  He didn’t know that Homer was killed by a shell.

  And that Captain Campbell was brought down as he tried to protect two of his men from charging rebel soldiers.

  And that Henry was hit by a bullet, which shattered his leg.

  Thomas learned all this days later, when his head finally cleared.

  And in that first moment after he opened his eyes, he thought he was dreaming, or in Heaven.

  Because there was Birdie, smiling at him through tears.

  And next to her was the man who’d been calling Thomas’s name:

  Clem.

  Thomas sat at a desk next to Birdie, carefully writing out his letters.

  All around the schoolroom, children sat quietly as their pretty teacher watched over them. Every so often she came to Thomas’s desk.

  “Fine work, Thomas,” said Miss Ashford — Mary.

  Henry’s sweetheart.

  Thomas nodded, hoping he didn’t look too proud. It had been five months since they arrived, and his handwriting was looking better. He practiced for hours every night, sitting at Henry’s old desk as Mr. and Mrs. Green sat nearby and read. Henry’s parents still weren’t sleeping much, and they seemed glad to have a reason to keep their candles burning into the night.

  “Look at mine, Miss Ashford!” Birdie said, holding up her paper, covered with wobbly letters.

  Miss Ashford smiled at Birdie, then put her finger in front of her lip with a gentle shush.

  Birdie loved school more than anyone, but she kept forgetting she wasn’t the only student.

  At lunchtime Thomas and Birdie sat under a tree. It was getting colder, and the sky was gray. Soon winter would come. Mrs. Green had already sewn three wool dresses for Birdie, and two new pairs of trousers for Thomas.

  Thomas ate his lunch and looked around the schoolyard. The air smelled like apples.

  Just like Henry had said.

  Thomas swallowed hard, and glanced at Birdie.

  She didn’t have to ask him why he was sad.

  No, Henry hadn’t made it.

  But they had come here to Vermont, like he told them to, and his family had welcomed them, just like he promised they would. The whole town did.

  Thomas had been shocked to see the stacks of letters Henry had written, pages filled with stories about Thomas and Birdie.

  “What a gift to have you here with us,” Mrs. Green had said when they first arrived. “A gift from Henry.”

  It was Clem who’d brought them here, on the train, one month after Gettysburg. During that long ride Clem had told them every detail of what had happened to him after he was taken away from Mr. Knox’s. The plantation in Mississippi had been a brutal place, where slaves were worked to the bone picking cotton in the blistering sun. After a year, Clem escaped.

  He’d traveled more than six hundred miles on his own, dodging snakes and bears and slave catchers. “I was coming to get you both,” he said. “I wanted us to go north together.”

  But in North Carolina, he was caught by a band of rebel soldiers, taken just like Birdie. They got him halfway back to Mississippi when he was freed by a band of teamsters, who attacked the rebel camp at night and helped Clem and four other men escape.

  Clem went to work with them, running wagon trains filled with supplies.

  After Gettysburg, Clem had loved being in Vermont with Thomas, Birdie, and Mr. and Mrs. Green.

  But he could only stay one week before he headed back down south. Mr. and Mrs. Green wanted him to stay longer, but Clem had a new plan: to be a soldier for the North. He had already signed up to be in one of the first black regiments of the Union army.

  “I’ll be back here,” Clem had said as he’d hugged them all good-bye. “I promise I’ll be back when it’s all done.”

  He wrote to them almost every day now, and Thomas would sit for hours sounding out every word. He could hear Clem’s voice in his mind, describing the battles, the people he met, his plans for after the war.

  “We’ll be t
ogether,” he wrote. “Can you picture it?”

  And Thomas could.

  His mind was filled with bright pictures now.

  At first, most of the pictures had appeared in his nightmares: the wagon in flames, the vultures that had circled above the battlefield as he lay wounded, the glowing red eyes of the rebel who shot him.

  But there were happier pictures, too: the memories of Birdie and Clem standing by his bed in the hospital tent, of Mr. and Mrs. Green waiting for them at the train station.

  And now, in the schoolyard, he closed his eyes, and he saw the newest pictures, the pictures of his hopes: that this terrible war would end; that Clem would be back with them soon; that they would be here, together and free.

  His eyes were still closed when he felt something cold on his cheeks.

  He looked up and saw white flakes drifting in the air.

  “Thomas!” Birdie cried. “It’s snow!”

  Thomas put his arms around his little sister.

  And together they watched the icy flowers fall from the sky.

  Each I Survived book takes me on a trip back in time. Sometimes I get so deep into my research that I imagine I really am in the midst of events that happened decades or even centuries ago.

  I’ve “traveled” to some frightening moments as the author of this series — to the decks of the Titanic as it was sinking, to a creek invaded by a man-eating shark, to the shores of Hawaii as bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor.

  But I don’t think there is a darker or more frightening time in American history than the Civil War.

  During those four long years, Americans were fighting against other Americans. Our nation came incredibly close to being torn in two. Beautiful cities of the South were burned to the ground. And thousands of soldiers died every month. Nobody knows exactly how many people died during the war, but historians estimate that it was about 750,000. That’s more than the number who died in all of the other wars America has fought combined. Almost every American lost somebody in the Civil War.

  And even before the war began, there was slavery. By 1860, nearly four million people were slaves. They were men like your father, women like your mom and me, kids like you. Can you imagine what it would be like to be owned by another person, to be treated like a dog or a horse, to have no say in what happened to you?

  To try to understand this time in history, I read thirty-one books — histories, diaries, novels, biographies, and autobiographies. I studied maps, watched movies, stared at photographs taken 150 years ago.

  I also visited Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with my husband and our two youngest kids, Dylan and Valerie. If you go there — and I hope you can — you will think it is one of the prettiest places you’ve ever seen, a charming little town surrounded by green rolling hills, sweeping meadows, and quiet forests.

  We toured the battlefields and visited its amazing museum. Afterward, we climbed up to Little Round Top. This is the rocky hill where some of the fiercest fighting took place.

  As my own children climbed on huge boulders and my husband took pictures, I looked out on the meadow below and imagined how it must have looked in July of 1863. There were thousands and thousands of dead bodies in the grass by the last day, each one someone’s son or husband or brother or best friend. If we had been alive in 1863, my two oldest sons — who are now nineteen and twenty-two years old — would have been soldiers in the war, and it’s likely they would have been a part of this battle with one of the Connecticut regiments that fought there.

  As I stood there, I thought of the words of a young Confederate soldier in one of the histories I read. He had written a letter to his sister back home in Alabama, sent from Gettysburg just after the final rebel charge.

  “I ask myself,” he wrote, “if many years from now, anyone will remember what happened here, if they will ever think of those who were lost.”

  Yes, I wanted to tell him. We remember.

  The Civil War lasted for four years, 1861–1865. It is a huge and fascinating subject, and I learned so much while researching and writing this book. I wish we could spend about a month together so I could tell you everything I discovered. But I know you’re very busy. So here are answers to a few questions I thought might be on your mind.

  Is the story of Thomas and Birdie true?

  All of the books in my I Survived series are historical fiction. That means that the facts are all true — the dates, the settings, the names of generals and presidents. But the characters come from my imagination, inspired by details I discover from my research.

  Thomas and Birdie were not real people. But everything that happened to them really did happen to other kids — they were slaves, they weren’t allowed to learn to read or write, their family members were sold, they escaped and found safety with Union troops.

  Thousands of slaves attempted to escape from the South. They followed the North Star. They braved terror and hunger. Most died on their journeys or were captured by slave hunters and brought back to their owners.

  But some succeeded, such as Harriet Tubman, who escaped and then returned to the South over and over to lead others to freedom. Her story and those of others like her are unforgettable and far more thrilling than any stories I could ever make up.

  What caused the Civil War?

  This is the most complicated question of all, and people have written whole books explaining it. But here’s the simplest answer: The war was about slavery.

  Remember, America was supposed to be “land of the free.”

  Think of the words in our Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.”

  These words are at the very heart of what America was supposed to be.

  And yet by 1860, four million people in the South were slaves. That makes no sense, right?

  No, it doesn’t. Many things in history are almost impossible to understand when we look back on them. Even smart people we admire had beliefs that we can’t understand today. They did things that we now know are wrong and shameful.

  Owning slaves is one of those things.

  But sadly, slavery has been a fact of human life for thousands of years. In America, before the first Europeans arrived, Native American tribes kept slaves captured during wars and raids. When the European settlers arrived here, they brought slaves to do hard work.

  George Washington owned slaves. So did Thomas Jefferson.

  But over time, ideas about slavery changed. People came to see that it was evil and wrong. When Abraham Lincoln became president, more and more people in the North were saying that America should not have slavery anywhere. Already it was illegal in the North. They said it had to be banned in the South, too.

  There were big fights about this. For many people in the South, slaves were their most valuable possessions. A strong young slave like Thomas was worth at least one thousand dollars, which is more than it cost to buy a large home. On big farms known as plantations, owners depended on hundreds of slaves to do the back-breaking work in the fields. If slavery became illegal, these plantation owners would have to pay people to do the work. The slave owners were sure they would go out of business.

  People in the North and South argued about slavery for years. Finally, leaders of eleven Southern states decided that they didn’t want to be a part of America anymore. In 1861, these states “seceded” and became their own country, known as the Confederate States of America. President Lincoln couldn’t let that happen. He believed that keeping our country together was a cause worth fighting for.

  Do you agree?

  Why was the Battle of Gettysburg so important?

  There were many terrible and bloody battles during the Civil War. You might have heard the names of some of them: Bull Run, Antietam, and the Battle of the Wilderness. Gettysburg was the bloodiest of all. More men were lost there than in any other battle. (“Lost” means soldiers who were killed, wounded, captured, or missing.)

  But there’s more to Gettysburg than death and destruction. The Battle of Gettysbur
g “changed the tide” of the war. That means that before Gettysburg, the war was heading one way — the South was winning. After Gettysburg, they no longer were.

  In the year before Gettysburg, the Southern troops had won every major battle except for one, Antietam. Many people, including powerful people in the North, said the Union should give up. They were losing faith in President Abraham Lincoln. An election was coming up. Most people predicted that he wouldn’t win.

  Gettysburg changed that. The Union victory at Gettysburg gave people in the North the will to keep fighting — and the belief that they could win. President Abraham Lincoln was reelected. He vowed not to give up the fight.

  For people in the South, the loss was devastating. They lost 28,000 men during those three days, more than a third of their army. The North lost 23,000, but their army was bigger, and there were more people living in the North. So there were always new soldiers to take the place of those who had died.

  The war didn’t end with Gettysburg — far from it. It dragged on for two more years. Thousands and thousands more soldiers died. Southern cities were burned to the ground.

  But the Union did finally win. And many say that the road to victory began at Gettysburg.

  And some last (very important) words

  Before I say good-bye to you, I’d like to take you with me on one last trip back to the time of the Civil War. So close your eyes, and let’s travel back to November 19, 1863, to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

  It’s a cold and dreary day. We’ve taken a train to Gettysburg because we want to attend a special ceremony in honor of a new cemetery. More than four thousand Union soldiers are buried there, all killed on the Gettysburg battlefield. We listen to a speech by a man named Edward Everett, a former president of Harvard University.

  He speaks for more than two hours. And though he’s a great speaker, we are probably eager to leave when he’s done.

  But then a second speaker gets up. He is extremely tall — a foot taller than the average man in those days. It is our president, Abraham Lincoln. The war has taken a terrible toll on him. His face is worn and tired. But his eyes are bright with intelligence, goodness, and bravery.