Bill Creighton Character Analysis

Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was nor regarded highly, there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and not at all for drinking and rampaging about the county, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that […] He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which surely was a fool thing to do unless one as interested in “breakin’ up school.”

“I don’t know if anybody ever ‘wins’ a war, Jeth […] a blaze kin destroy him that makes it and him that the fire was set to hurt” […]

“But the South started it, didn’t they, Bill?”

“The South and the North and the East and the West—we all started it. The old slavers of other days and the fact’ry owners of today that need high tariffs to help ’em git rich, and the cotton growers that need slave labor to help ’em git rich and the new territories and the wild talk […] I hate slavery, Jeth, but I hate another slavery of people workin’ their lives away in dirty fact’ries for a wage that kin scarse keep life in ‘em; I hate secession, but at the same time I can’t see how a whole region kin be able to live if their way of life is all of a sudden upset.”

Jethro could not answer. He stared at the cut above Bill’s right eye, from which blood still trickled down his cheek. Somewhere […] a man shouted to his horses, and the shout died away in a cry that ran frightened over the brown water of the creek and into the darkening woods.

He had heard cries often that autumn, all through the countryside. They came at night, wakened him, and then lapsed into silence, leaving him in fear and perplexity. Sounds once familiar were no longer as they had seemed in other days—his father calling cattle in from the pasture, the sheep dog’s bark coming through the fog, the distant creak of the pulley as Ellen drew water for her chickens—all these once familiar sounds had taken on overtones of wailing, and he seemed to hear an echo of that wailing now. He shivered and looked away from his brother’s face.

“Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”

“I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty of fifty years of my life and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”

“Do you hev to do it then?”

“I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”

“If the editor of the county paper ain’t against freedom of speech, could I jest put one more question to this young ’un?” Without waiting for a reply, the man called Wortman turned again to Jethro. “What I want to ask you is this: is yore pa good and down on Bill? Does he teach you your brother is a skunk that deserves shootin’ for goin’ against his country?”

Jethro felt a great weakness. He had to steady himself against the counter for a second, and when he spoke the words were the first ones that occurred to him.

“My pa don’t teach me one way or the other. He knows that I think more of my brother than anybody else in the world—no matter where he is. And that’s all I’ve got to say to you.” He looked directly at the man with an anger that dissipated his weakness.

If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older members of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

Jethro heard someone shout his father’s name and Bill’s and the word Copperheads.

Matt fumbled his way to the front door. “Show yore faces,” he called. “Come up and give me a chance to talk.”

There was only raucous, drunken laughter at his words. A bundle of something was thrown at the gate, and then the riders galloped on.

Jethro scrambled down the ladder and ran out into the yard. At the gate there was a bundle of switches tied together with a cord, the symbol adopted by local ruffians as a warning of punishment to follow. He tore off the paper that was attached to the cord and carried it inside to the table, where Ellen had lighted a lamp. On the paper in large printed letters was the message: “Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons.”

Has justice been done, gentlemen? Has an ailing man who commands the respect of those in this county who recognize integrity—has this man suffered enough to satisfy your patriotic zeal?

May I remind you that Tom Creighton died for the Union cause, that he died in battle, where a man fights his opponent face to face rather than striking and scuttling off into the darkness?

And just in passing, Gentlemen, what have you done lately for the Union cause? Of course you have burned a man’s property—barn, farm implements, hay, and grain; you have polluted his well with coal oil and terrified his family. Furthermore, you have done it quietly, under cover of darkness, never once asking to be recognized in order to receive the plaudits of the county at large. But, has any one of you faced a Confederate bullet? Well, Matt Creighton’s boy has.

There was, however, no reason why Hig Phillips should have avoided the draft except that he was a lazy bachelor […who] had been known to adhere to the opinion that fools could do the fighting while men of intelligence and property might take pleasure in the prospect of a long and easy life. He was not generally admired for these views, but that fact bothered him hardly at all […] until one moonless night a band of young men visited him—men who knew what gangrenous wounds were like, what marches through cold rain or blistering heat meant, while hunger gnawed at their stomachs or weakness from typhus or dysentery brought agony to every step; men who had seen the dead piled high on smoking battlefields and had come to believe that the soldier of two years had done his share, that the burden should now fall upon other shoulders.

That winter many people were talking of peace […]. A people pushed to the extremities that existed in the South could not possibly hold on […]. But they did hold on, and as the war trailed drearily on, vindictiveness toward the stubborn stand of the seceding states grew steadily more bitter in the North. This vindictiveness was urged on by men in high places who resented the President’s spirit of clemency as violently as they resented the tenacity of the South.

In December Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the Constitution and the Union of the states, to abide by the government’s pronouncements against slavery. He promised, too, that a Confederate state could return to the Union whenever ten percent of its voters should reestablish a loyal Union government within that state.

Ed brought the boy’s letter down for Matt to read. In it the boy told of the burning of Columbia, of how the soldiers laughed as a great wind fanned the flames, of the loot carried off, of mirrors and pianos smashed, and of intimate family treasures scattered to the winds by men who seemed to have gone mad. […]

“What is this goin’ to do to an eighteen-year-old boy, Matt? Kin a lad come through weeks of this kind of actions without becomin’ a hardened man? Is human life goin’ to be forever cheap to him and decency somethin’ to mock at? […] these boys air goin’ to believe that they be heroes for lootin’ and burnin’, fer laughin’ at distress, fer smashin’ the helpless without pity. In some ways Sammy is more of a child than yore Jeth here; he goes with the crowd without thinkin.’ Mary and me has had to guard against that way of his.

Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was nor regarded highly, there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and not at all for drinking and rampaging about the county, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that […] He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which surely was a fool thing to do unless one as interested in “breakin’ up school.”

“I don’t know if anybody ever ‘wins’ a war, Jeth […] a blaze kin destroy him that makes it and him that the fire was set to hurt” […]

“But the South started it, didn’t they, Bill?”

“The South and the North and the East and the West—we all started it. The old slavers of other days and the fact’ry owners of today that need high tariffs to help ’em git rich, and the cotton growers that need slave labor to help ’em git rich and the new territories and the wild talk […] I hate slavery, Jeth, but I hate another slavery of people workin’ their lives away in dirty fact’ries for a wage that kin scarse keep life in ‘em; I hate secession, but at the same time I can’t see how a whole region kin be able to live if their way of life is all of a sudden upset.”

Jethro could not answer. He stared at the cut above Bill’s right eye, from which blood still trickled down his cheek. Somewhere […] a man shouted to his horses, and the shout died away in a cry that ran frightened over the brown water of the creek and into the darkening woods.

He had heard cries often that autumn, all through the countryside. They came at night, wakened him, and then lapsed into silence, leaving him in fear and perplexity. Sounds once familiar were no longer as they had seemed in other days—his father calling cattle in from the pasture, the sheep dog’s bark coming through the fog, the distant creak of the pulley as Ellen drew water for her chickens—all these once familiar sounds had taken on overtones of wailing, and he seemed to hear an echo of that wailing now. He shivered and looked away from his brother’s face.

“Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”

“I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty of fifty years of my life and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”

“Do you hev to do it then?”

“I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”

“If the editor of the county paper ain’t against freedom of speech, could I jest put one more question to this young ’un?” Without waiting for a reply, the man called Wortman turned again to Jethro. “What I want to ask you is this: is yore pa good and down on Bill? Does he teach you your brother is a skunk that deserves shootin’ for goin’ against his country?”

Jethro felt a great weakness. He had to steady himself against the counter for a second, and when he spoke the words were the first ones that occurred to him.

“My pa don’t teach me one way or the other. He knows that I think more of my brother than anybody else in the world—no matter where he is. And that’s all I’ve got to say to you.” He looked directly at the man with an anger that dissipated his weakness.

If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older members of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

Jethro heard someone shout his father’s name and Bill’s and the word Copperheads.

Matt fumbled his way to the front door. “Show yore faces,” he called. “Come up and give me a chance to talk.”

There was only raucous, drunken laughter at his words. A bundle of something was thrown at the gate, and then the riders galloped on.

Jethro scrambled down the ladder and ran out into the yard. At the gate there was a bundle of switches tied together with a cord, the symbol adopted by local ruffians as a warning of punishment to follow. He tore off the paper that was attached to the cord and carried it inside to the table, where Ellen had lighted a lamp. On the paper in large printed letters was the message: “Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons.”

Has justice been done, gentlemen? Has an ailing man who commands the respect of those in this county who recognize integrity—has this man suffered enough to satisfy your patriotic zeal?

May I remind you that Tom Creighton died for the Union cause, that he died in battle, where a man fights his opponent face to face rather than striking and scuttling off into the darkness?

And just in passing, Gentlemen, what have you done lately for the Union cause? Of course you have burned a man’s property—barn, farm implements, hay, and grain; you have polluted his well with coal oil and terrified his family. Furthermore, you have done it quietly, under cover of darkness, never once asking to be recognized in order to receive the plaudits of the county at large. But, has any one of you faced a Confederate bullet? Well, Matt Creighton’s boy has.

There was, however, no reason why Hig Phillips should have avoided the draft except that he was a lazy bachelor […who] had been known to adhere to the opinion that fools could do the fighting while men of intelligence and property might take pleasure in the prospect of a long and easy life. He was not generally admired for these views, but that fact bothered him hardly at all […] until one moonless night a band of young men visited him—men who knew what gangrenous wounds were like, what marches through cold rain or blistering heat meant, while hunger gnawed at their stomachs or weakness from typhus or dysentery brought agony to every step; men who had seen the dead piled high on smoking battlefields and had come to believe that the soldier of two years had done his share, that the burden should now fall upon other shoulders.

That winter many people were talking of peace […]. A people pushed to the extremities that existed in the South could not possibly hold on […]. But they did hold on, and as the war trailed drearily on, vindictiveness toward the stubborn stand of the seceding states grew steadily more bitter in the North. This vindictiveness was urged on by men in high places who resented the President’s spirit of clemency as violently as they resented the tenacity of the South.

In December Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the Constitution and the Union of the states, to abide by the government’s pronouncements against slavery. He promised, too, that a Confederate state could return to the Union whenever ten percent of its voters should reestablish a loyal Union government within that state.

Ed brought the boy’s letter down for Matt to read. In it the boy told of the burning of Columbia, of how the soldiers laughed as a great wind fanned the flames, of the loot carried off, of mirrors and pianos smashed, and of intimate family treasures scattered to the winds by men who seemed to have gone mad. […]

“What is this goin’ to do to an eighteen-year-old boy, Matt? Kin a lad come through weeks of this kind of actions without becomin’ a hardened man? Is human life goin’ to be forever cheap to him and decency somethin’ to mock at? […] these boys air goin’ to believe that they be heroes for lootin’ and burnin’, fer laughin’ at distress, fer smashin’ the helpless without pity. In some ways Sammy is more of a child than yore Jeth here; he goes with the crowd without thinkin.’ Mary and me has had to guard against that way of his.