It is the duty of a great commander to compose a memoir detailing his glorious actions in battle, as well as those of his famed troops. I am Colonel Reginald P. Beauregard, commander of the Anthrax Brigade, the finest outfit of horsemen in the Confederate Army. First things first. I have been asked many questions about the name, so read carefully because I will only say this once. The gentleman who named things for the brigade was killed at the First Battle of Manassas, so we were pretty much on our own from then on. This led to somewhat awkward monikers like “The Battle of Quite a Lot of Grass,” “The Reginald P. Beauregard Memorial of Adequacy,” and “The Wet Lake,” which we discovered in our adventures out west. Sure, the names sound bad now, but try to imagine seeing these things for the first time. It’s not as easy as it looks. These sounded perfectly suitable at the time. Really.
But it seems I have strayed from the central point of this memoir. I do that sometimes. I tend to stray off whatever the key theme happens to be from time to time. I recall this day when I was a young lad. I was attending my lessons. The headmaster was prattling on about arithmetic…or was it Ovid? No matter. Who can recall such things? I was gazing out the window, thinking of how such book learning was unbecoming in a true Southern Gentleman, when I noticed one of the clouds was curiously shaped like my uncle Ezra. Ezra was a hearty cherub of a man, though seemed to have a predilection to be lumpy and pale. So perhaps he resembled the cloud more than t’other way round. The chicken or the egg, as they say. But enough of my carefree boyhood days. I have taken it upon myself to compose a memoir to chronicle the glorious deeds of the Anthrax Brigade, and that is what I shall do.
No doubt the name is familiar to you. I am well aware that the brigade received a great deal of press, publicity, and to-do throughout the course of the war, and I think people should hear our side of it. My goal is to demonstrate through a clear, chronological ordering exactly what my brigade accomplished during the Great Northern War of Aggression. I hope to show that the loss of the war was not entirely our fault, that we did not precipitate disaster by what our beloved General Lee described as, quote, “gross incompetence,” and that our accidental firing on General Jackson can best be described as ill-timed.
We started as a group of well-to-do gentlemen who would gather each Sunday afternoon to have money fights, and discuss who had the tallest top hat, the smallest monocle, and so forth. Our gentleman’s club consisted of Cyrus Anderson, Ephraim Blanchard, Mordecai Evans, Noah Paxton, Amos Taylor, Eli Lewis, and myself. These men would later serve as officers under my command. We were having one of our usual meetings and discussing which of us had the longest watch chain, when suddenly Daniel, the young lad who lived down the road, burst into the parlor and declared that the great state of South Carolina had seceded from the United States. A mighty cheer went up from my companions. We all knew this had been coming for a good while. Young Daniel then proceeded to tell us that six other southern states had already joined this new nation, and were already gathering armies to defend themselves from the forces of the union, which were bound to strike us. I hadn’t seen the paper in a few days, so I just assumed Daniel was telling the truth. He had come to our door and made similar wild claims before, but we always believed him. One time he told us that the state capital was destroyed by men from space. Naturally we rounded up our horses and rode to their aid. Boy, were our faces red when we arrived to the intact and unharmed city.
But despite past deceptions, we answered the call to aid our state. We took to our horses and rode throughout the countryside, rounding up soldiers wherever we could find them. We usually had to resort to bribery or threatening to shoot the citizens’ families if they wouldn’t join us, but in a matter of weeks we managed to put together five decent sized regiments of mounted cavalry. Our brigade was formed. All we needed was a good battle to prove ourselves.
We chose to attach ourselves to a local general, in hopes that he would be involved in the first fight. We chose P.G.T. Beauregard. He is no relation to me, but I told people he was. It made me look more impressive. We rode with him all around South Carolina training for the inevitable war. Though when I say “rode with him,” I may be overstating a bit. The government of the Confederacy never actually allowed us to be an official part of their army. All applications were denied. And whenever I went to Richmond to speak to President Davis and his officials in person to discuss the situation, somehow everyone in the capital was mysteriously “out to lunch.” On other occasions I saw their lights on when I approached, but they were quickly extinguished as I drew near. I suppose that it’s unlikely all their lights burned out at once, but it’s not impossible. And when we approached General Beauregard himself, he told us to “clear out” before he gave his men orders to “shoot us.” So when I say we rode with him, I mean we rode a good ways behind so that it would be easier for them to ignore us, and harder for them to kill us.
Then, in April, the time came for us to prove ourselves once and for all. Beauregard’s troops started an artillery barrage on Fort Sumter, right here in South Carolina. Seeing my opportunity to lead my troops in a glorious display, I ordered my bugler to sound the call ordering the brigade to charge the fort. As we made our way through Beauregard’s lines, a number of soldiers, including the general himself, were waving at us violently and shouting words a gentleman’s ears should not hear. I assumed it was their particular way of wishing us well, so I increased my speed to encourage the brigade. When we were within a certain range, somewhere between 1,000 and 100 feet (as I have said, a gentleman has no need for such crude book learning), we opened fire, and quickly broke off and returned to our lines. We didn’t appear to do any damage to the fort, though somehow we managed to kill one of Beauregard’s horses. They were behind us, so I really have no idea how that might have happened.
As can be expected of such hot-tempered men as the good general, General Beauregard spent most of the afternoon “reading me the riot act,” as they say. A whole lot of talk about the battle. To be honest I wasn’t listening too carefully. I was thinking of how I would word our actions in this memoir. But I do recall him using the words incompetence, ineptitude, and stupidity with a good deal of frequency. The phrase “criminally negligent” also seemed to have undue prominence in our heated discussion. To this day I still believe he was forced to say such things by those who ranked above him. Say what you want. I could see the admiration in his eyes.
-Steve McGladdery
