Patriotic Fire Read Free Page A

one who went off to fight in the Civil War—inherited a small part of it, about 225 acres, which upon his return from the war he used as a hunting and fishing retreat. After his death in 1924, my grandparents built a home there on the banks of a creek off that lazy blackwater river, where I played as a little boy amid gardens of azaleas and camellias and mossy oaks and pines, and later as a young man hunted quail and fished the river’s fertile waters. About half the remaining property was sold off in the 1950s and ’60s, and the rest I myself inherited upon my father’s death. Over the years I’ve donated it all as charitable gifts—to my father’s college, to my old prep school, and to my own alma mater—all except for a few solitary acres, much of it marshland, which I keep for sentimental reasons. And upon which I still pay the taxes.
    O ne more thing. I may have Elijah’s sword from the Battle of New Orleans. It was the sword that always hung above my grandparents’ fireplace in my earliest memories, and which now hangs above the fireplace in my own office; it was my great-grandfather’s sword during his service in the Civil War cavalry—this much I know from my grandmother, who knew my great-grandfather Fremont well, since he lived until she herself was in her late thirties. When I inherited the sword in the 1990s, I took it to a dealer in antique arms to see what else could be learned about it.
    “It’s not from the Civil War period,” he said authoritatively. “This sword was manufactured in the era of the War of 1812.” Then he proceeded to explain why.
    That was always puzzling until just lately when I got to thinking and began going through all the family papers. My great-grandfather Fremont left Springhill College in 1862 at the age of eighteen to join the 56th Alabama Cavalry Regiment, which, like all Southern cavalry, was expected to arm, equip, and mount itself, not relying on the Confederate government at Richmond. Might it not be too far a stretch to assume that the sword probably had been handed down to him from his own grandfather Elijah Montgomery—the same sword that Elijah had worn at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814—and that Great-grandfather Fremont took it along himself into the Confederate army? After all, the South didn’t have many sword factories then, and a sword was just a sword in those days, wasn’t it? At least it’s interesting to think so.
    And by the way, this was a
working sword,
not a fancy dress-up ornament for parades and balls. There’s a dark, long-dried, brownish-red substance on the top crease of the sword that family tradition has long had it must have been the blood of some Yankee, hacked out in Civil War combat.
    Might it not instead be the “blood of an Englishman” from fifty years earlier—“Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum”? It’s sometimes said there were giants of men at that time, too. Which brings me back to the subject at hand.
    Point Clear, Alabama
MARCH 11, 2005

Prologue
    H istory is strewn with stern and peculiar endings, and were it not for the tenacity of Andrew Jackson and his makeshift army, the whole American experience might have been different. The Battle of New Orleans was fought in a thunder of electric-like flashes, of swords, cannon blasts, and rifle fire that became almost Shakesperean in its final, epic crescendo. When the battle ended, the American civilian-soldiers from the Southland had held the field against a trained and experienced British army, a force conceded by everyone to be the best in the world: men who had arrived riding the crest of recent victories over Napoleon’s fabled legions, men who had run over the feeble American militia and burned down the American capital at Washington—an enemy that had crossed the Atlantic with all the accumulated knowledge of its civilization to crush the upstart Americans.
    This great force was defeated by men wearing rags, derided as “dirty-shirts,” men without proper military