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DISCLAIMER: Shitepoke.com blog attempts to authenticate its content. Disclosure of substantive errors is solicited and will be acknowledged. Accordingly, readers are encouraged to explore and enjoy this content, in its own right, but to always obtain additional sources for historical or academic research.
My grandmother was Mary Esther Nance Nations (1900-1986). She grew up at Nance’s Spring, barely over the county line in Whitfield County — one of nine children of Charles Robert (Grandaddy) Nance [1856-1934] — and Bertie Stroud (Mig Mama) Nance [1878-1964].
Charles Robert — or Bob as everybody called him — grew up in Whitfield County. His father James Nance (1825-1904), had
been deployed by the Confederate army in the Civil War and sent into battle a
half dozen times, each time being sent home to recover from bouts of chronic
asthma. His wife Matilda Clemie Hayes Nance (1824-1886), barely a year older, was also a local girl.
When Sherman marched through Whitfield County en route to Resaca, James
was once again away with his company in Alabama, leaving his wife Clemie alone with their six children.
Eight-year-old Bob’s
memory of the Civil War, at the age of eight, was sufficiently lucid that the
epithet Blue Belly — given to the
brutal Federal Troops dressed in blue uniforms — was annealed in his mind as
the Waffen-SS Troops were to Ann Frank.
On Tuesday morning, May 10, 1864, Clemie, aware of the progress of the Federal
army, under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman, awoke to the distinct cracks of artillery fire to the north. Within an
hour, mounted Federal reconnaissance troops had made their way past the Nance’s
meager farmstead, heartbreakingly bearing the flag of the United States — until
mere months ago their very own symbol of unity and security.
Indeed
being attacked by your own government was an experience writ so extravagantly
large in the minds of the rank and file Southerner, that it canonized the
mistrust of authority — all authority — a visceral vein of conservatism shot
through the political mindset to this very day, much to the chagrin of
pluralists who fancy ceding the levers of power to an all-benevolent state.
Clemie
gathered the children, bade them dress quickly, flung the windows and doors of
their house wide open, caught and harnessed their pair of mules and hitched
them to a plow, untied the docile milk cow and threw rocks at her in an attempt
to shoo her out of sight into the woods.
She
solemnly ushered the whole lot into the steamy dew-drenched field where they
feigned the routine of working the early summer cotton crop, an attempt to
signal their defiance — that home and personal effects (indeed nations and
governments) were utterly disposable — that only life and land spoke truth to
power.
When
the first dusty wave of cavalry came into focus, Clemie and the kids stoically
watched as troops dismounted and bounded up the steps to the front porch of
their shotgun house, so-called owing to the unobstructed central hall that
bisected the structure, front door to back door —figuratively allowing a
shotgun to be fired straight through without hitting a thing.
They
watched as precious kitchen provisions were hauled out, as bed linens and
blankets were stuffed into toe sacks, as the precious few yardbirds were picked
off with minié balls and strung up by the feet for provisions. As the troops
surveyed their loot, the milk cow, her udder painfully swelled from want of her
morning milking, ambled out of the underbrush in hopes of relief. She was
ruthlessly felled, bled, and quartered.
Clemie
silently prayed that the ransacking bunch of war criminals would not set fire
to the house. With that, the constabulary head paused for long moments and
surveyed the pitiful Nance family who stood paralyzed in sheer terror, the
stunning silence broken only by the sweaty mules pawing, snorting, and swishing
the horseflies with their brushy tails.
Whether
by some atavistic compunction or by sardonic depravity, he gallantly tipped his
hat to the Nance tableau and signaled his charges to mount and depart.
Young
Bob snubbed wet tears of fear as phalanx after phalanx of Federal infantrymen
marched by, the final company passing well into the afternoon. Only under cover
of darkness did Clemie and the kids return to the defiled house, praising sweet
Jesus, if only for their very lives and an intact roof.
On Friday — May 13, 1864 — the 98,000 Union troops of the selfsame General Sherman that had defiled Clemie Nance's meager homestead would square off — 5-miles' south —with 60,000 Confederate troops under the command of Joseph E. Johnson — in the the historic Battle of Resaca. The lopsided carnage lasted the better part of three days.
When Sherman's troops crossed the Oostanaula River, Johnson's troops were forced to withdraw — ceding victory to the Union — clearing the way for Sherman's advance to Adairsville — and ultimately to the storied incineration Atlanta.
At the last, some 5,000 combatants lay wounded — untold many of whom would ultimately die from mortal systemic infections — with utterly no medical attention — and some some 3,000 American fathers, sons, and nephews lay dead — mutilated and dismembered in the red clay dirt of North Georgia.
Witnesses say that Camp Creek (today just west of I-75 Exit 320) ran quite literally red with human blood — only yards before the swiftly flowing Oostanaula River diluted its life-draining fluids into history.
This weekend — untold hundreds of people will participate in — or witness — the re-enactment and re-creation of the Battle of Resaca — trivializing the human carnage — and romanticizing the atrocity, death and destruction of war. They will dress-up in period regalia — buy cheesy souvenirs — and down sugary funnel cakes and Co-Colas. They will bring their children — and inculcate the legacy of commemorating the Confederacy as their honorable and godly birthright.
Most will not tell their children what the Confederacy stood for: the establishment of a fascist state — promoting the buying and selling of human beings like livestock.
I instinctively wonder what my great-great- grandmother Clemie Nance would think about this.
Calhoun GA 05/21/2017
Most will not tell their children what the Confederacy stood for: the establishment of a fascist state — promoting the buying and selling of human beings like livestock.
I instinctively wonder what my great-great- grandmother Clemie Nance would think about this.
Calhoun GA 05/21/2017
