The Mockingbird's Ballad

The burden of rebuilding "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Lincoln knew that this must be done without vengeance and this task suddenly fell on the broad shoulders of a tailor turned Tennessee politician.

In the months since becoming president, Johnson had slowly and intentionally followed his mentor's charge. His initial toughness towards the defeated had softened and he'd allowed the wayward southern states to return to the union with what the radical Republicans thought a drastically too lenient process. The common soldier had to take an oath of loyalty. Many of the higher ups in the rebel government - Jefferson Davis and several of his cabinet - and many Confederate military leaders were still in prison in Fort Monroe and Fort Delaware. Joseph Wheeler was in the middle of the Delaware River in Fort Delaware Union Military Prison.

===

Joseph Wheeler, 29 years old, former Major General, former Chief of Cavalry, the Army of Tennessee, Confederate States of America, extinct, awoke from fitful sleep. He had a nightmare in which he saw himself and a few of his troopers riding in a land of death - bloated, butchered corpses everywhere, burned houses, dead fly-infested horses, trampled down crops under a full moon against a slate blue Alabama sky. The feeling was uncertainty, grief and loss. His face and shoulder ached. His prison cell in the bowels of Fort Delaware was 10 x 10 with a cot, table and chair. A washstand sat in the corner of the stone room. A rickety four-drawer clothes chest sat against one of the damp walls and a coat rack stood beside it. His terribly worn two-year-old uniform coat, vest and slouch hat hung there. His worldly goods were thus diminished. Everything he owned was in his cell. All had been spent for a dream which became phantom then nightmare.

After his capture, May 13, 1865, near Atlanta, Georgia, he was held prisoner of war by his Union captors. Taken to Augusta, he had been visited aboard the prison boat by his father and two sisters. Shipped from there down the river, the prisoners of war were placed on another prison boat, the Tuscarora and escorted by a US Navy man-of-war north. These orphans of the southern Confederacy included President Jefferson Davis, Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens, former USA/CSA Senator and national leader Clement C. Clay of Alabama and his wife, former Governor Francis R. Lubbock of Texas, Postmaster General/Secretary of Treasury John H. Reagan of Tennessee/Texas, the president's small staff, Colonel Stevenson, Captain Muskgrove and the general.