On the afternoon of June 20th, 1863, a heavy rain fell on Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and gusty winds stirred the leaves on limbs that had been shattered by the leaden hail of the Battle of Stones River. As if driven by the wind, a petite young woman with flaming red hair and deep blue eyes made her way briskly along the Manchester-Nashville Pike. She was Rita Goldstein of Cairo, Illinois, and she was about to descend like a wolf on the long-folded Union Army that lay stretched out unsuspectingly on the long-quiet battlefield. She was “a woman scorned,” and as the poet said, “there could be no greater fury on earth.” Her slender shoulders were draped with a black wool cloak, and with each step she swung a large lace reticule like a pendulum. And with each step she knew that she was moving closer to that lying Yankee who had left her standing alone with the Justice of the Peace. H e could hide in the ranks of the Union Army, but by God she would find him if she had to search every army camp on the North American Continent. And she knew she was not the only woman who had been seduced and abandoned by a nefarious son of man. Adam had probably done the same thing to Eve, and she felt she was doing this for all women. She, Rita Goldstein, would bring Man before that great bar of justice from which there is no escape.
The muddy road was deeply scarred by the footprints of 80,000 soldiers, but Rita Goldstein made her inexorable way through the crevices and holes without wavering, without changing direction, and without even looking at the ground. She seemed to be driven by a demon force as she plunged towards the unsuspecting town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Rita had started walking from Cairo, Illinois on June 9th, and eleven days later her long slender legs were still carrying her small body ever further into the dark heart of the South. The places she had passed and the dim recollections of filthy inns and muddy roads in Benton, Cadiz, and Clarksville, were of little consequence to her. What did they matter? She only knew that Private 1st Class Butch Lassiter was more than two hundred miles away and that she needed to walk more than twenty miles a day to catch him before he could run and hide. Only Nashville and Murfreesboro mattered. In Nashville she was in striking distance of the Union Army, and now she was near her target in Murfreesboro.
As Rita plunged along the muddy turnpike into the outskirts of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Army of the Cumberland was beginning to stir from its winter lethargy like a giant grizzly stretching its huge paws to the sun. Lincoln had unleashed this great beast of over 60,000 men to destroy the Confederate monster, Treason, but after a bloody and inconclusive battle at Stones River in the cold final days of 1862, the Federals hibernated in Murfreesboro, and the Confederates dragged themselves across the Duck River in Tullahoma and hid themselves in the earth. But as the days marched on into summer, General Rosecrans, the master of the Federal beast, a man named affectionately by his troops, “Old Rosie,” stepped from his tent and sniffed the sweet fresh wind that blew gently across the rolling hills of the Cumberland plain. Even in the steady drizzle, there was a faint fragrance of honeysuckle blended with the rank smell of damp, newly plowed earth, and the old general almost forgot the death and destruction of six months ago. In fact, he had already transformed the near disaster of December into a kind of summer victory, and as his orderly handed him his morning coffee, he longed to complete his destruction of the Confederacy.
