Brother Against Brother

Considering I don’t read fiction, it’s odd even to me that the only book I’ve read cover to cover seven times is a novel, Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, his Pulitzer Prize winning book about Gettysburg. Over one winter in the 70s I read it into a cassette player so I could listen to it during my spring trip to the battlefield. It wasn’t very good. Charlton Heston or Garrison Keillor I am not.

I’ve always been fascinated with the brother against brother aspect of the war, so the story of the friendship between Union General Winfield Scott Hancock and Confederate General Lewis A. Armistead is a favorite. They first met as members of the 6th Infantry at Fort Towson, Indian Territory, soon after Hancock’s graduation from West Point. They became great friends, and Shaara features their friendship in his book.

The setting is classic, worthy of the historian’s pen and made for fictional embellishment: two soldiers who have shared the dangers and glories of the battlefield (Mexican War), and swapped stories and tall tales of the drudgery and boredom of frontier posts, and the occasional Indian escapade, going their separate ways.

The parting of Hancock and Armistead in California in June 1861, as the nation was breaking apart, one man staying true to the Union, the other remaining loyal to his Southern roots, is a classic of Americana. It has become legendary, largely from the pages of Michael Shaara’s novel.

The Hancocks, Win and Mira (short for Almira), hosted the farewell party at their quarters in Los Angeles. Mira called it a “never-to-be-forgotten evening.” Near midnight, according to Mira Hancock, as the evening was coming to an end, Albert Sidney Johnston, another officer leaving for the South, said to his wife, “Come, sing me one or two of the old songs you used to sing, ‘Mary of Argyle,’ and ‘Kathleen Mavourneen.’” The group gathered around the piano. The latter song was particularly meaningful because it includes the phrase, “Oh hast thou forgotten how soon we must part? It may be for years, and it may be forever. . . .”

While Mira left behind a fine account of the evening, it seems fitting to let the fiction writer take over from here, since the late Michael Shaara’s description is how I like to imagine it happened: Armistead, the night of July 2, at Gettysburg; his brigade has just arrived, having missed two days of bloody fighting, with more to come; he hears the strains of a familiar Irish tune coming from a nearby campfire and he’s reminded of that farewell party. He asks James “Old Pete” Longstreet, his corps commander, if he’s seen Hancock recently. Longstreet replies sardonically, “Ran in to him today,” and gestures to the east. “Over that way, mile or so.” Armistead’s had a few jolts of whisky. He looks down at the ground, and as Shaara portrays it, Longstreet knows he’s going to hear an old story one more time:

“. . . It may be for years and it may be forever. Never forget that.”

He stopped, paused, looked down at his whisky glass, looked up at Longstreet. “You know how it was, Pete.”

Longstreet nodded.

“Well, the man was like a brother to me.... Toward the end of the evening . . . it got rough . . . there were a lot of tears,” Armistead’s voice wavered; he took a deep breath. “Well, I was crying, and I went up to Win and I took him by the shoulder and I said, “Win, so help me, if I ever lift a hand against you, may God strike me dead.”

From here I’ll turn it over to a historian, Blake Magner, whose feature in this issue describes that line, “Over that way, mile or so.”

Editor