Escape by Night (8 page)

Tommy was four years old when the Civil War began. Parades of finely dressed soldiers marched down Broad Street, and citizens cheered as they sent their men off to fight. For the next two years, spirits remained high.

Then the South suffered major defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Refugees poured into Augusta. Daily, the trains brought in bandaged and bloody soldiers, who hobbled, shuffled, and limped from the railway depot to nearby hospitals.

In the fall of 1863, First Presbyterian Church was converted into a hospital, and Yankee prisoners were kept in the fenced churchyard. Because Tommy Wilson lived across the street, he witnessed firsthand the death and devastation of war.

Everyone in Augusta was involved in the war effort, making bandages, housing the wounded, providing food for the hospitals, donating money and goods. Most of the ammunition for the South was made in Augusta, and one Sunday Tommy's father dismissed church early so the congregation could go to the arsenal and help prepare badly needed ammunition.

There is no information to confirm that Tommy Wilson had contact with any Confederate or Yankee soldiers. However, he must have known soldiers from Augusta, and he likely met a number of other soldiers who were wounded and found themselves in the city.

Tommy Wilson lived only a block from the railroad depot, and this exposed him to much activity. As an adult, he wrote of watching the captured Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, being led in chains from the depot to the Savannah River for the trip to Washington. He also wrote of meeting Robert E. Lee at the Augusta depot and shaking his hand.

Woodrow Wilson served as president of Princeton University and then governor of New Jersey, so he is thought of by many as the president from New Jersey. But he lived his first eighteen years in the South, thirteen of those in Augusta, Georgia. On October 13, 1904, Woodrow Wilson made this statement:

A boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him, that were bred in him when he was a child.

Woodrow Wilson's early impressions of war were evident when he was president of the United States during World War I. He worked diligently for peace and in 1919 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Porter Fleming Foundation.

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Text copyright © 2011 by Laurie Myers

Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Amy June Bates

All rights reserved.

The extract in
Chapter 15
is from “We Wait Beneath the Furnace Blast” by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Myers, Laurie.

Escape by night : a Civil War adventure / Laurie Myers ; illustrated by Amy June Bates. — 1st ed.

p.         cm.

ISBN 978-0-8050-8825-0

1.  United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Juvenile fiction. [1.  United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction.   2.  Conduct of life—Fiction.   3.  Christian life—Fiction.]   I.  Bates, Amy June, ill.   II.  Title.

PZ7.M9873Es 2011       [Fic]—dc22       2010030117

First Edition—2011

eISBN 978-1-4299-7496-7

First Henry Holt eBook Edition: June 2011