How Few Remain (75 page)

“You mean that, John.” Lincoln’s voice was full of wonder, full of grief. Hay was his protégé. Hay was nearly as much his son as was Robert. As far as Lincoln could see, his own course of thought had followed over the years a perfectly logical, perfectly inevitable path. And yet, the handsome young man who was now an even more handsome middle-aged man had not gone in the same direction. For that matter, neither had Robert Lincoln.

Hay said, “I think everyone here, with the possible exception
of Mr. Douglass, feels the same as I do.” He sounded sad, too, the way a doctor sounded sad when he had to tell a family the situation for a sick man was hopeless, and that he would soon die.

Lincoln looked around the table, silently polling the men he had asked to join him in Chicago. With him, they could have swung many in the Republican Party to his views. If they were against him, reform along the lines he desired would not come, not through the Republicans. “Gentlemen, think again, please,” he said. “Can you not see that this country needs a new birth of freedom if it is to go on being the wonder and the envy of the world?” He knew he was pleading. The last man with whom he’d pleaded was Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States during the War of Secession.

He’d failed then. After Lee’s victories in Pennsylvania, the British government had recognized the Confederate States as a nation among nations and, with France, had forced the USA to do likewise. He was failing now, too. He saw that by the way his comrades would not meet his eyes.

Garfield said, “Lincoln, if we Republicans tried to go down your road, I think you would split the party not in two but in three. Some would go with you, and I expect you would gain a few among the Socialists and others who believe in notions even more radical than yours.”

“Thank you so much,” Lincoln murmured.

“I mean no offense. I speak the truth as I see it, as you do.” Garfield was earnest, sensible, in the middle of the road. He proved as much, continuing, “Some would probably try to hold the party on the course it has now. I lean that way myself, truth to tell. And some would bolt to the Democrats.”

“And,” Hannibal Hamlin added, “the devil would come down with chilblains before we won another election.”

Benjamin Butler said, “It occurs to me that what we may need is not more freedom but a little less. Compared to any European country, this is a land full of bomb-flinging anarchists. We’re so damned free, we’ve thrown two wars away because we did not properly prepare for either of them. Take Germany, now—nothing in Germany but coal and potatoes, far as the eye can see. But they’ve got discipline there, by God, and they’re the strongest power on the continent.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as Mr. Butler,” Hay said, “but I am
compelled to believe there is some truth in what he says.” Hamlin nodded. So did Garfield.

Lincoln discovered he’d only thought he knew despair. He turned to Frederick Douglass. “What of you, Fred?” he asked.

Douglass had less political clout than any of the others, but more moral authority. After staring for a while at something only he could see, he answered, “My own people, both in the Confederate States and in the United States, need more freedom, not less. I must believe the same also holds true for white men.” Had he stopped there, he would have aided Lincoln. But he went on, “Neither am I convinced that taking the Republican Party into the streets, so to speak, is the way to gain a majority for it.”

“Let me ask the question another way,” Lincoln said: “Other than taking the Republican Party into the streets, how is it to gain a majority? Only sixteen years of accumulated disgust at Democratic fecklessness let us win this latest election. Things being as they are now, when do you gentlemen foresee our winning another one, and by what means?”

For close to two minutes, no one answered. Then James Garfield said, “Whatever the means may be, they shall not include riots and rebellion, which would only raise enmity against us.”

“Like pressure from steam in an engine, pressure for change
will
rise in the United States,” Lincoln said. “Whether it rises
through
the Republican Party or
outside
the party remains to be seen. I would sooner see it rise through the party, that we may channel it for the nation’s good and for our own.”

He looked around the table again. Not even Douglass looked as if he agreed with him. Ben Butler said, “If workers go into the streets, soldiers go into the streets, too. Soldiers carry more rifles. They always have. They always will.”

“Unless and until they turn those rifles against the men who give them orders they cannot in good conscience obey,” Lincoln said, which produced another long silence. Into it, he continued, “Gentlemen, I say this with a heavy heart, but I say it nonetheless: if, as this meeting makes it appear likely, the Republican Party cannot find room to encourage change, I shall work outside the confines of the party to encourage it. For change, sure as I live and breathe, is coming. And, though they may not be here today, there are those calling themselves Republicans who will follow me.”

“You would deliberately split the party?” It was half a gasp from Hannibal Hamlin, half a wheeze.

“No, I
would
not,” Lincoln answered. “But I
will.”

“If you try, we shall read you out and pretend you were never in,” Butler said. “The way the Democrats have campaigned against you ever since the War of Secession, we might be better off reading you out.”

“An ostrich may bury its head in the sand and pretend the lion is not there,” Lincoln said. “Will that keep the lion from enjoying a supper of ostrich?”

Butler got to his feet. Since he was short and squat, drawing himself up to his full height was less impressive than it might have been otherwise, but he did his best. “I think we have heard enough,” he said. “Thank you for inviting us here, Mr. Lincoln. I expect each of us can find his own way out, his own way back to his hotel, and his own way home.”

One by one, the Republican leaders filed past Lincoln and toward the door. As John Hay went by, the ex-president softly asked,
“Et tu
, John?”

“Et ego
, Mr. Lincoln.” Hay’s voice was sad, but it was firm. Like the others, even Frederick Douglass, he left without a backwards glance.

Lincoln stood all alone in the room poor men had built so rich men might confer in it. “Labor first,” he said, as he had so many times. “Labor first,
then
capital. If they cannot remember that on their own, I shall make certain they are reminded of it.” And he left, too, his back straight, his stride determined. He had been a Whig. He was—no, he had been—a Republican. Now …

    “They have lost the war,” General Thomas Jackson told Major General E. Porter Alexander. “If they cannot realize that on their own, I shall make certain they are reminded of it.”

“Yes, sir.” Alexander was not a young man, but retained a large measure of boyish enthusiasm. “President Longstreet’s tried to make ’em take their medicine. If they won’t open their mouth, we’ll just have to yank it open and shove the pill down their throats whether they like it or not.”

“Well put.” Jackson studied the dispositions on the map. “Everything appears to be in readiness.”

“Everything on my end is, sir,” his chief artillerist answered. “The guns await only your order to begin.”

“Tomorrow morning at half past five,” Jackson said. “The end of the day, if God grant victory on our arms, should see the removal from our soil of more than half the Yankees now infesting it.”

“Here’s hoping you’re right, sir,” General Alexander said. “And if you are, I’m damned if I can see how they’ll be able to go on fighting after that.”

“Do not speak so lightly of damnation.” Jackson put a rumble of reproof in his voice. “To tell the truth, though, I cannot see how they have gone on fighting so long when so little has gone right for them. Much as I hate to say it, they are braver than I reckoned.”

“Hasn’t done ’em much good, and that’s what counts,” Alexander answered.

Absently, Jackson nodded. “Courage and the goodness of one’s cause, unfortunately, do not always go hand in hand.”

“Yes, sir, that’s a fact.” His artillery chief nodded, too. “If Douglass taught us anything, he taught us that.” Alexander’s chuckle had a slight nervous edge. “And, looking out of the other side of the mirror, he learned the same thing from us, I reckon.”

“Goodness does not depend on the position from which one observes it,” Jackson said sternly. “Goodness
is.”
He sounded very certain. He
was
very certain. Even so, he did his best not to think about Frederick Douglass. He also noticed that E. Porter Alexander didn’t reply, which might well have meant Alexander, too, carefully wasn’t thinking about the Negro.

He went to bed that night with the rattle and bang of rifle fire from the trenches in Louisville and to the east of the city and the occasional rumble of artillery in his ears. Everything sounded as it had since the U.S. flank attack bogged down. Thus lulled, he fell asleep almost as soon as he finished his prayers. Neither too much noise nor too little would give the Yankees anything out of the ordinary with which to concern themselves.

An orderly shook him awake with the words, “Half past three, sir, like you ordered.”

Yawning, Jackson got into his boots and stuck his hat on his head. The orderly gave him a big tin cup full of coffee strong enough to try to climb over the rim. The handle burned his fingers. The coffee burned his mouth when he gulped it down.

“Ahh,” he said—a gasp of approval. “I’m ready. Now off to meet up with General Alexander.”

He reached the artillerist, at batteries east of Louisville that had come to Kentucky gun by gun from all over the CSA, about half an hour before the show was scheduled to begin. “Good to see you, sir,” Alexander said, saluting. In the dim gray of early dawn, he seemed as much a ghost as a man. “Everything is ready. We await only the hour.”

“As it should be,” Jackson said. Every so often, he would hold his watch next to a lantern. Time moved more slowly than it had any business doing. He’d seen that before. It always bemused him. At last, a little after he could see the time without putting the watch up to the light, he said, “The hour is come.”

As if his words had been a signal, a great bellow of artillery rose west of him: all the guns that had defended Louisville against the flanking attack now sent their full fury against the line upon which they had halted the U.S. forces. The flashes from their muzzles lit up the horizon, as if the sun were rising from the wrong direction.

E. Porter Alexander beamed. “Isn’t it bully, sir?”

In searching for a description, Jackson would sooner have found one in the Book of Revelations. Even so, he did not reprove his gayer subordinate. “It will do, General. It will do.”

U.S. artillery, both in the salient east of Louisville and on the far side of the Ohio, was quick to respond. All through the fight for Louisville, the U.S. cannon had given Jackson more worry than anything else. The United States had brought a lot of guns into the fight, and handled them well. Their artillerymen might lack Porter’s imagination, but they were solid professionals. Their shells would punish the Confederate entrenchments.

In spite of that counterfire, the C.S. soldiers in those entrenchments opened up on the Yankees in front of them with their Tredegars: a hailstone-on-tin-roof accompaniment to the big guns’ thunder. Jackson was sure Rebel yells rang out all along the line as the Confederates there went over to the attack, but the roar of the guns drowned them.

“I pity those poor fellows,” Alexander said. “They can’t possibly break through, and they’ll pay a stiff price for trying.”

“It is the price of victory,” Jackson said in a voice like iron. His chief artillerist grimaced, but finally nodded.

The sun rose. Jackson waited, still as a statue, while messengers brought word of the fighting to the west. As General Alexander had predicted, the U.S. position facing Louisville was more than strong enough to keep the attacking Confederates from doing much past getting into the first couple of lines of trenches. Jackson had hoped for more, but he had not really expected it.

An hour passed. Turning to Alexander, he asked, “Do you think they are fully engaged, reserves coming up, all their eyes turned on the fight right in front of them?”

“Sir, if they’re not, they never will be,” Alexander replied. With a faint hint of scorn, he added, “They have so much trouble seeing what’s right in front of their noses, they sure as the devil aren’t going to look any further.”

Jackson considered. From the outset, he had held this moment in his hands and his hands alone. He stared eastward. His nostrils flared, like a wolf’s when it takes a scent. He nodded, a sharp, almost involuntary motion. “Let it begin,” he said.

E. Porter Alexander shouted an order. All the guns within the sound of his voice let loose. That roar signaled the eruption of all the guns the Confederates had assembled along the southern flank of the Yankees’ salient. Up till now, nothing much had happened along that flank. Jackson had kept it strong enough to discourage U.S. forces from trying to shift direction and move against it, which hadn’t been hard: the enemy’s aim remained focused on Louisville alone.

Along with guns, he’d been quietly bringing men forward over the past few days. Now, as they burst from their trenches and dashed toward those of the Yankees, he did hear Rebel yells through the gunfire, a great catamount chorus of them.

“The men must go forward at all hazard, so long as any hope of success presents itself,” he said aloud, as he had in the orders he’d sent to the brigade commanders south of the U.S. salient. “If we are to roll up the Yankees’ strong fortified west-facing line, we can only do so by an unexpected assault from the flank and rear.”

“Pour it on, boys!” Porter Alexander was yelling. “Pour it on!” Jackson tried to inspire his men to the same clear, cold despisal of the foe and certainty God was on their side as he felt himself. Alexander was warmer and earthier at the same time. “Give ’em a good boot in the ass!” he shouted. “Come on, you mangy bastards,
work
those guns!”