How Few Remain (74 page)

“Yes, this is so,” Schlieffen said. “A lot, there is. As little as there can be, there should be.” What the United States had snatched from the field of uncertainty was a thumping defeat.

“Maybe,” Rosecrans said, like a man admitting Limburger cheese might possibly taste good in spite of the way it smelled. “Maybe.” He brushed a pale speck from the dark blue wool of his tunic. “The more you talk about it, Colonel, the more I do think the United States should send some of our officers to your country after this blamed war is finally over—if it’s ever over—so we can take a long look at how you go about things.”

“They would be welcome,” Schlieffen said. “Your neighbors who do not love you are allied to the French, who do not love us. Since we have one enemy who is the same, it might for us be good to be with each other friends.” He held up a hasty hand. “You must understand, I speak here only for myself, not for Chancellor Bismarck.”

“Yes, yes.” General Rosecrans nodded impatiently. “I can’t
speak for the secretary of state, either. Speaking for nobody but William S. Rosecrans, though, Colonel, I’ll tell you I like the idea pretty goddamn well.”

Alfred von Schlieffen sat very still, contemplating what he had just said.
The enemy of my enemy is a friend
was an ancient truth. France, so far as he could see, would never be anything but Germany’s enemy. France was the Confederate States’ friend; the Confederate States were an enemy to the United States, also unlikely to be anything else.

So far as he could see, real, close friendship between Germany and the United States made good strategic sense. He wondered what Minister von Schlözer would think of the idea. Up till now, German relations with both the USA and the CSA had been polite, even cordial, but not particularly close. Would Chancellor Bismarck want to continue what had been working well enough, or would he be interested in changing things? If he was, a U.S. military mission to Berlin might be one tooth of the key in the lock.

Schlözer will have a better idea of the chancellor’s mind than I do
, Schlieffen thought. Then he realized Rosecrans had just spoken, and he had no idea what the general had said. “I am sorry,” he said. “You must please excuse me. I was thinking of something else.”

“I guess you were,” Rosecrans said with a chuckle. “The Judgment Trump could have sounded right then, and you never would have noticed. What I said was, I’ll take the notion of sending officers to Berlin over to the secretary of state to see what he thinks of it.”

“That is good. I am glad to hear it,” Schlieffen said.

“Damned if I know what will come of it, though.” Rosecrans’ good humor vanished. “Ever since Washington warned us against entangling alliances, we’ve held apart from ’em. Of course, in Washington’s day we didn’t have nasty neighbors tangled up with foreigners themselves. But he’s like the Good Book to a lot of people here, even if he was from Virginia.”

That Rosecrans was himself talking with a foreigner never seemed to enter his mind. Schlieffen had seen in other Americans the same interesting inability to judge the effects of their own words. It did not offend him, not here; he would not let it offend him. “You will do what you can do, General, with the officials of your country, and I will do what I can with the officials of mine, and we will see what from this comes.”

Before Rosecrans could answer, the box on the wall clanged to let him know someone wished to speak with him. He grimaced and swore fiercely under his breath. But then, like a hound summoned to the dinner bowl by the ring of a bell, he got up and went to the telephone. “Rosecrans here,” he shouted into it. “Yes, Mr. President, I hear you pretty well right now. What were you saying before, Your Excellency?” A pause. “But, Mr. President …”

Schlieffen quickly realized the conversation with President Blaine was liable to go on for some time. He half rose. General Rosecrans nodded permission for him to go. He respectfully dipped his head to the American general-in-chief, then left the inner office.

“Auf wiedersehen, Herr Oberst,”
Captain Berryman said when he emerged; Rosecrans’ adjutant had regained enough spirit to try German again.
“Ich hoffe alles is mit
, uh,
bei Ihnen gut?”

“Yes, everything is well with me, thank you,” Schlieffen answered. “How is everything with you?”

Before Berryman could answer, Rosecrans’ bellow of frustrated fury did the job for him: “God damn it to hell, Mr. President, I can’t give you a victory when the sons of bitches are coming at us five ways at once… . Yes, well, maybe you should have thought about that more before you dragged us into this miserable war… . Maybe you should think about making peace, too, while you’ve still got the chance.” The sharp click that followed was, again, the earpiece slamming down onto its rest.

Schlieffen and Berryman looked at each other. Neither found anything to say. After a polite, sympathetic nod, Schlieffen let himself out of the antechamber.

    Abraham Lincoln appreciated—indeed, savored—the irony of meeting in the Florence Hotel to do battle for the soul of the Republican Party. Here he was, doing his best to make the party remember the laborers who had helped bring it to power, and doing it in a hotel erected by the Pullman Company on part of the city within a city they owned: factories, houses, blocks of flats, all in the holy name of Pullman.

Robert had arranged it, of course. His Chicago connections were far better than his father’s, these days. The room, Lincoln could not deny, was splendid: magnificent walnut paneling, table with legs even more elaborately carved than that paneling, chairs
upholstered in maroon velvet and soft enough to swallow a man, gaslights overhead so ornate, they resembled a forest frozen in beaten bronze.

“I think we are all here,” Lincoln said, looking around the room. Fewer were here than he had hoped. Some of his telegrams had gone unanswered; some men he had hoped would accept had declined. He wondered whether he had enough strength at hand, even if everything went as he wanted, to turn the party into the path he had in mind. The only way to find out would be the event.

Around the table, heads nodded. There sat Frederick Douglass, with his big frame and white mane and beard as solid and impressive as a snow-topped mountain. There was John Hay, a lighter presence, once Lincoln’s secretary, then minister to the CSA in Blaine’s administration till war broke out. There sat Benjamin Butler, a clever mind concealed within a bald, bloated, sagging walrus of a body: before the War of Secession a Democrat who thought Jefferson Davis might make a good president of the United States, at its end a U.S. general who’d had to flee New Orleans in a Navy frigate to keep the returning Confederates from hanging him without trial.

Next to Butler, rotund Hannibal Hamlin fiddled with his spectacles. He had been Lincoln’s vice president, and had gone down to defeat with him in 1864. But he was a Maine man, and secretary of state to boot, and as such more likely than others to gain the ear of President Blaine. Senator James Garfield of Ohio sat farthest from Lincoln. An officer during the War of Secession, he had risen to prominence as a member of the military courts that purged the Army of defeatists after the fighting ended. But for Hay, he was the youngest man in the room.

“I think two questions stand before the house today,” Lincoln said, as if he were addressing the Illinois Assembly. “The first is, where does our party stand now? The second, and more urgent, is, where do we go from here?”

“Where we are, is in trouble,” Ben Butler declared in his flat Massachusetts accent. “How do we get out of it?” He shook his big, round head; the gray hair that fringed his bald pate flew this way and that. “Damned if I know. Hanging Blaine from the Washington Monument might be one place to start.”

“He did what he was elected to do.” Hannibal Hamlin spoke up in defense of the president.

“So he did, and did it damned badly, too,” Butler sneered.

“Fighting the Confederate States, opposing their tyranny, is not and cannot be a sin,” Frederick Douglass declared.

But Butler had an answer for him, too: “Fighting them and losing is.”

“As you will know from the invitations I sent you, I was speaking in more general terms,” Lincoln said. “The question I wish to address is, assuming the war lost, as it seems to be, how is the Republican Party once more to recover its status with the American people?”

“By doing as it was meant to do from the outset: by championing freedom over all this continent,” Douglass said.

“In aid of that,” John Hay said, his voice light and thin after the Negro’s, “I have heard that Longstreet will formally free the Negroes in the CSA once this war ends. His allies are said to have extracted such a promise from him as the price of their aid against us.”

“One more reason for Blaine to come to terms, then,” Douglass exclaimed, his leonine features lighting with hope. A moment later, though, he spoke more cautiously: “If it be true, of course. You, John, will be the best judge of us all as to that.”

“With my few months in Richmond before the fighting started?” Hay said with a laugh full of self-mockery. “I believe it to be true, having heard it from sources I reckon trustworthy, but I can offer no guarantee. Nor, even if it is true, can I guess how much
de facto
, as opposed to
de jure
, freedom the Negroes in the Confederate States are to have.”

“Giving them any at all goes dead against the Confederate Constitution,” Garfield pointed out.

“That doesn’t always stop us,” Butler said. “I don’t see any reason the Rebs will lose a whole lot of sleep over it.”

“Your cynicism, Mr. Butler, has truly astonishing breadth and scope,” John Hay murmured. Butler gave him an oleaginous smile, as at a compliment. Maybe he thought it was one.

Lincoln said, “When a man has
no
freedom,
any
increase looms large. I hope you are indeed correct, John. The Negro unchained will grow in ways the men now his masters do not expect.” Frederick Douglass nodded vigorous agreement to that. Lincoln continued, “Even as the chains may fall from the limbs of the slave in the Confederate States, so they are being fitted to
those of the laborer in the United States. Standing firm against this, we can and shall become the party of the majority once more, after the misfortune of the war sinks below the surface of public recollection.”

James Garfield frowned. “I don’t see how sounding like radicals will take us anywhere we want to go.”

“Justice for the working man is not a radical notion,” Lincoln said, “or, if it is, that stands as a judgment against the United States.”

“But what do you mean by justice, Lincoln?” Garfield demanded. “If you call raising a Red rebellion, the way you tried to do in Montana Territory—if you call that justice, I want no part of it.”

“I make two points in response to that, sir,” Lincoln said. “The first is that I raised no rebellion, Red or otherwise. I made a speech, similar to many other speeches I have made over the years. If the miners in Helena were forcefully of the opinion that it fit the circumstances under which they lived, I cannot help it. Second and more basic is the fact that the people do retain the right of revolution against a government they find tyrannical.”

“Now you do sound like a Red,” Ben Butler rumbled. His jowls shook with the weight of his disapproval.

“Without the right of revolution, we should to this day be British subjects, revering Queen Victoria,” Lincoln said. “We might make discontented British subjects, but British subjects we should be. If we were still British colonies, we would retain the right of revolution against the Crown. How can we not retain it, then, against the government in Washington?”

“In Philadelphia, you mean,” Butler said. “On this theory, you should have let the Confederate States go without firing a shot.”

“By no means,” Lincoln said. “They sought to break, and, sadly, succeeded in breaking, a union; they did not aim to establish a more perfect one for the nation as a whole.”

“A subtle distinction,” said Butler, an admirer of subtle distinctions.

“My view,” Frederick Douglass said, “is that, while Mr. Lincoln exaggerates the likenesses between the position of the Confederate slave and that of the U.S. laborer, we may, if we so desire, use such exaggerations to good effect on the stump.”

“That is what I meant to say, yes,” Lincoln said, “save that I
purpose making this principle the rock on which our platform stands, not just a net with which to sweep up votes when the next election comes.”

Hannibal Hamlin said, “If we take this line, the Democrats will call us a pack of Communards, and that alongside all the other low things they are in the habit of calling us.”

“The Democrats lined up in support of property when that included property in Negro slaves. They have not changed since.” Lincoln did not try to hide his scorn. “If they start flinging brickbats, they’ll have to duck a good many, too.”

“How much good will any of this do, gentlemen, when we are tarred with the brush of two losing wars in the space of twenty years?” John Hay asked.

“Exactly my point,” Lincoln said. “If we go on as we have been, we are surely ruined. If, on the other hand, we make the changes in our course I have suggested, we offer the entire nation a new birth of liberty. Otherwise, I fear, government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall perish from this earth, replaced by government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. The free men who made the United States a beacon to the nations of the world shall be reduced to gearing in the vast capitalist engine of profit.”

“I just don’t see it,” Senator Garfield said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. No room for compromise in any of this. Without compromise, you can’t have politics. The brickbats will be flying, all right, but they’ll be real brickbats with real bricks. That’s the direction whence class warfare comes.”

“Yes, it is,” Lincoln said softly. “Do you think we can avoid it by pretending the seeds from which it springs are not already planted and growing?”

“Whether we can avoid it is one question,” Hay said. “Whether we should embrace it is another question altogether.”