How Few Remain (58 page)

    Frederick Douglass wished he could go home to Rochester. In fact, nothing save his own pride and stubbornness kept him from going home to Rochester. If he went home, he would be admitting defeat: not only to those who read his despatches from the Louisville front in their newspapers, but also, and more important, to himself.

As he got out of a carriage Captain Richardson had furnished him and headed for the newly built wharves several miles east of Louisville, he knew defeat was there whether he admitted it or not. Captain Richardson kept right on being obliging, still, Douglass was convinced, in the hope that he could get him killed. With each new time Douglass crossed the Ohio into Kentucky, the total chance of his getting killed grew more likely, and he knew it. He kept crossing anyhow, every time he could.

The United States now held two tracts on the southern side of the river, one inside battered Louisville itself, the other projecting toward it from the east. The shape of that second salient, sadly, was deceiving; the front had not advanced more than a couple of furlongs in the past several days. Hope that the flanking maneuver would drive the Confederates from Louisville had all but died. With it had also died a great many young men in U.S. blue.

Confederate artillery pounded away at the U.S. positions east
of Louisville. This salient was bigger than the one in the city, and had pushed the Rebels out of range of the Indiana side of the Ohio. The amount of ground gained, however, was not the be-all and end-all of the campaign. The
be-all
had not come to be, and the
end-all
was not in sight.

Another barge was loading. Barges were always loading, sending in more soldiers to do what they could against the Rebels’ entrenchments and rifles and cannon. Some soldiers came back on barges, too, shrieking in anguish. Some stayed in Kentucky and fought and did not go forward. Some stayed in Kentucky and died and were hastily buried. Some stayed in Kentucky and died and were not buried at all.

Sometimes Douglass had trouble persuading the soldiers he had the right to cross. This time, though, he met no difficulties. Even before he drew from a pocket Captain Richardson’s letter authorizing him to go into Kentucky, one of the men tending to the barge’s engine waved and said, “Got a letter from my cousin, sayin’ she really likes the way you’re writin’ about the war.”

“That’s very kind of her.” the Negro journalist said as he stepped aboard the barge. Had he been white, he thought the soldier would have called him
Mr. Douglass
. Few white men could bring themselves to call a Negro
Mister
. Making an issue of an act of omission, though, was much harder than doing so about an act of commission. Douglass kept quiet, consoling himself with the thought that he might have been wrong.

Once the one white man had accepted him as an equal, or something close to an equal, the rest did the same. He’d seen that before, too. People all too often put him in mind of sheep. Had that fellow mocked him and called him a nigger, the others packing the barge likely would have followed that lead as readily as the other.

U.S. guns on the Kentucky shore not far from the riverbank belched smoke and flames as they tried to put their Confederate counterparts out of action. Near the guns lay wounded soldiers who would go back to Indiana aboard the barge once it had unloaded the men it carried. Some cried out, some groaned, and some lay limp, too far gone in suffering to complain. Along with the soldiers headed toward the battle line, he averted his eyes from the bloodstained evidence of what war could do.

He did not accompany the fresh troops to whatever position they had been assigned. Instead, he made his way toward the men
of the Sixth New York. They had come closer than any other U.S. troops to breaking the Confederate line and smashing into Louisville as General Willcox had envisioned. Only a desperate countercharge by a Rebel regiment—led by a lieutenant, some said, though Douglass didn’t believe it—had knocked them back on their heels and let C.S. forces bring in more troops and solidify their position.

Several Confederate shells came screaming down within a couple of hundred yards of him. He took no notice. Back before the battle began, they would have sent him diving, panicked, for the closest hole he could find. He was astonished at how blasé he’d grown about shellfire.

On toward the line of battle he tramped, not at any great speed but as steadily as if powered by steam. That comparison made him smile. He puffed less now on such hikes than he had when he’d first made them; his wind was better than it had been for years. He’d always been blessed with a robust constitution, which served him in good stead today.

He’d gone up to the Sixth New York’s position so often by now, some of the troops behind the line had grown used to his presence. One made as if to set his watch by Douglass. “How are you this morning, Uncle?” another called. The Negro answered that with a nod and nothing more; as usual,
Uncle
straddled the line between polite and insulting.

Another U.S. soldier whistled and waved and said, “Good morning to you, Fred.”

“And to you, Corporal,” Douglass answered, this time feeling his face stretch into a broad, almost involuntary grin. A white man who called him
Fred
might be short on formality, but was also short on prejudice. Douglass reckoned that a fair exchange.

He was drawing near the front line, up into the area where entrenchments seamed Kentucky’s smooth fields as scars from the lash seamed his own back, when an officious provost marshal whom he hadn’t seen before challenged him: “Who the devil are you, and what business have you got here?”

“Don’t you recognize Jefferson Davis when you see him?” Douglass demanded. The joke fell flat; like most provost marshals, this one had no sense of humor. Douglass produced the letter from Captain Oliver Richardson. The soldier read it, moving his lips. At last, reluctantly, he returned it to the journalist and stood aside.

Up in the trenches, the men of the Sixth New York hailed him as an old friend. “You’re a crazy old coot, you know that?” one of them said by way of greeting. “We’ve got to be here, and you don’t, but you keep comin’ anyhow.”

“He reckons we’ll keep him safe, Aaron, that’s what it is,” another soldier said. “Looky! He ain’t even carrying his six-shooter no more.”

“As you say, I am among heroes.” Douglass smiled at the blue-coat, who, along with his companions, hooted and jeered. Many of them
were
heroes, but they bore that heroism lightly, as if mentioning it embarrassed them. Douglass had stopped wearing a revolver once the line stabilized, no longer seeing much likelihood he would need it for self-defense. Instead of a Colt, he pulled out a notebook. “And what has gone on here since my latest visit?”

“Snaked a raid over into the Rebs’ trenches yesterday afternoon, we did,” Aaron said proudly. “Killed two or three, brought back a couple dozen prisoners, only had one feller hurt our ownselves.”

“Well done!” Douglass said, and scribbled notes. Inside, though, he winced. This was what the bold if tardy flank assault had come down to: little raids and counterraids that might move the front a few yards one way or the other but meant nothing about when or if the Army of the Ohio would ever drive the Confederates out of Louisville.

Douglass listened to the volunteers as they talked excitedly about the raid. They were caught up by it; because they’d done well in a tiny piece of the war, they thought the whole of it was going well. Douglass had not the heart to disillusion them, even had they chosen to listen to him in turn. He pressed on up to the foremost trench, knowing he would find Major Algernon van Nuys there.

Sure enough, van Nuys squatted by a tiny fire, eating hardtack and waiting for his coffee to boil. “Ah, Mr. Douglass, you come back again,” the regimental commander said. His knees clicked as he straightened up. “You must be a glutton for punishment. Here, you can prove it: have a hardtack with me.” He offered Douglass one of the thick, pale crackers.

“Why do you hate me so?” Douglass asked, which made Major van Nuys laugh. Accepting the hardtack, Douglass took a cautious bite. When fresh, the crackers weren’t bad. By the way
this one resisted his teeth, it might have been in a warehouse since the War of Secession. After he’d managed to swallow, he said, “Do I rightly hear that you poked the Rebels yesterday?”

“A poke is about what it was, a little poke,” van Nuys said with a sour smile: he knew too well this wasn’t what Orlando Willcox had intended for the flanking move. “Today, tomorrow, the next day, the Rebs’ll try to poke us back, I expect. We might as well be playing tag with ’em.”

“No, thank you,” Douglass said, and the colonel chuckled again. Van Nuys stooped to see how the coffee was doing, and, as if to confirm his words, Confederate artillery opened up on the Sixth New York. Now Douglass did throw himself flat; these shells came crashing down far closer than a couple of hundred yards away. Fragments scythed through the air above his head, hissing like serpents.

Through the din of the shelling, the roar of rifle fire also picked up. “To the firing steps!” Major van Nuys shouted. “Here they come! Let’s give it to ’em, the sons of bitches.”

A moment later, he cried out wordlessly and reeled back into the trench. The cry was necessarily wordless, for a bullet had shattered his lower jaw, tearing away his chin and leaving the rest a red ruin. He gobbled something unintelligible at Douglass. Maybe it was I
told you so
, but it could have been
Tell my wife I love her
or anything else. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and, mercifully, he swooned, his blood pouring out onto the floor of the trench. Douglass wondered if he would ever wake again. With that wound, eternal sleep might be a mercy.

High and shrill, Rebel yells rang out from the stretch of ground between C.S. and U.S. trench lines. “Reinforcements!” Douglass shouted. “We need reinforcements here!” But no reinforcements came. Cleverly, the Confederates were using the artillery bombardment to form a box around the sides and rear of the length of entrenchments they had chosen to attack. Anyone who tried to get through that bombardment was far likelier to get hit.

A U.S. soldier a few feet away from Douglass fired his Springfield. One of the Rebel yells turned into a scream of a different sort. But as the bluecoat was slipping another cartridge into the breech, a Confederate bullet caught him in the side of the head. Unlike Algernon van Nuys, he never knew what hit him. He slumped to the ground, dead before he touched it. The rifle fell from his hands, almost in front of Frederick Douglass.

He grabbed for it, wishing it were a carbine, whose shorter barrel would have made it easier for him to reverse it and blow out his own brains. But all his resolve about not being taken alive came to nothing, for a Confederate in dirty butternut leaping down into the trench landed on his back. Pain stabbed through him—a broken rib? He didn’t know.

He didn’t have time to think, either. “Come on, nigger!” the Reb screamed. “Up! Out! Move! You’re caught or you’re a dead man!” No matter what his head thought, Douglass’ body wanted to live. However much it hurt, he scrambled out of the trench and, after getting jabbed in a ham by the Confederate’s bayonet, stumbled toward the C.S. lines.

A Rebel captain was shouting, “Come on, you prisoners! Move! Move fast!” When he saw the journalist captured with eight or ten U.S. soldiers, his eyes widened. “Good God,” he said. “It can’t be, but it is. Frederick Douglass, as I live and breathe.”

“The nigger rabble-rouser?” Three Confederates asked it at once. “Him?”

“Him—the same.” The captain had no doubt whatever. The soldier who’d captured Douglass jabbed him again, harder. “Let’s string the bastard up!” His friends bayed approval.

XIII

As the Louisville campaign ground on, Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen found himself with ever freer access to Orlando Willcox and to the map-filled tent where the commander of the Army of the Ohio planned his operations. He found himself less and less happy each time he visited the U.S. general. It was too much like having ever freer access to a sickroom where the patient grew visibly more infirm as day followed day.