Across Five Aprils Essay Research Paper This

Across Five Aprils Essay, Research Paper

This story begins in mid-April in the year 1861 and centers on the Creighton family. Ellen Creighton, the matriarch of the family was a small woman, who had been a pretty girl in her youth when she married Matthew Creighton in the 1830’s. She had given birth to twelve children and Jethro, with whom this story follows, was the youngest of her children. He was born in 1852, the same year that she lost three of her children to the dreaded childhood disease known as “child paralysis”. Jethro had somehow managed to survive the illness and because of this, Ellen favored her youngest son and allowed him to get away with things that her older children would have surely been punished for. She saw special talents in Jethro and was sure that he had been marked by destiny and she looked after him very carefully. Jethro’s older sister, Jenny was 14 and she was a woman in most ways, she cooked meals and tended to the family as a woman would do. She was in love with the schoolmaster, Shadrach Yale, and he was a very close friend of the family. Shad was a largely built man of twenty. He had come from Pennsylvania in 1858 to study at McKendree College, where his uncle was a professor of Natural Philosophy, what we know now as Physics. He began teaching as a stepping stone to further education and it led him to the school where Matthew Creighton was a director. The first year that Shad was there he had come down with Typhoid fever, and Ellen Creighton had nursed him back to health. Because of this, she considered Shad as a part of her family and cared about him as if he were her own son. After he had been there for a few years he hired himself out as a farmhand to Matthew for the summer.

Jethro’s brothers and his cousin had been talking about going off to war and this thought really excited Jethro. His thoughts on war were, to say the least, seriously misconstrued. He thought war was all brass bands and shining horses and men in uniform. He knew that men had died during war, but all he had ever heard were stories of war by the men who had lived through it. These survivors were his great grandfather, who had survived the revolution, his father had survived the Mexican war, and his uncle had survived the War of 1812. Only men from distant lands had died in war, or so Jethro thought. No one, especially his brothers would parish in the war. They would return home with great stories to tell, that’s what Jethro wanted to believe. Talk of war and slavery found it’s way to the Creighton supper table one evening when a cousin, Wilse Graham, dropped in to see the Creighton’s. He had talked about Abraham Lincoln being “two- faced”. Wilse told his family that the south could fight for years if they needed to, but they just wanted to be left alone to live as they saw fit. John, one of Jethro’s brothers had asked Wilse if he thought that slavery was the cause of all of this trouble, but Wilse told him that it was greed and not slavery that had caused all of this.

They had all been waiting on Shadrach Yale to return from Newton with news about the war. When he finally returned that evening he had told everyone that a General Beauregard, a southern general, gave Anderson, at Fort Sumter, an hour’s warning, then opened fire on them. Shad said that Anderson and his men held out for more than thirty hours, but they were very hungry and tired and they ended up, giving up and losing the fort to the south. The papers had said that no one was killed in the fighting. Jenny asked Shad if this meant that they were going to go to war for sure, but Shad said that Congress was the only ones who could declare war and that, at the moment, congress was not in session, but he added that Abraham Lincoln had asked for 75,000 volunteers, from the militia of the states. Matthew Creighton believed that they would be at war, with or without congress. Bill, another of Jethro’s brothers, was also getting ready to go to war, but he would be fighting for the Southern Confederacy. Another of Jethro’s brother’s Tom, and his cousin Eb were already gone to war and were fighting for the North. They assumed that the boys were fighting with Grant’s Army, but they really had no way of knowing without written word from the boys themselves.

During the month of February in 1862 the bells rang twice in every city throughout the North. It was during this time that young Jethro had heard talk of Ulysses S. Grant, who was responsible for the fall of Fort Henry in Tennessee, which was very good news to everyone, since the upsetting news of the fall of the forts at Bull Run and Balls Bluff and Fort Sumter. Finally, they thought, some much needed good news from the North.

Grant then conquered Fort Donelson, things were beginning to look up. Matthew and Ellen Creighton were worried about Tom and Eb, and they finally received a letter from Tom saying that he and Eb were fine. He talked of young men dying in battle and of them freezing to death, because they wanted to lighten their load so they dropped their blankets and their coats, then they hit cold weather. He said to tell Jethro that being a soldier wasn’t so much. Shad and John were planning to leave soon to enlist, and Shad was upset by the fact that Matthew felt that Jenny was too young to get married, he loved her and wanted to marry her before he left, but Matthew wouldn’t hear of it. Before Shad left, he spent an evening