Walt Whitman's Secret (21 page)

H
OW DID THINGS EVER
get this far out of control? Here's how.

Like all societies, like all of us who comprise them, the South is good at some things, not so good at others. For two full generations it has contributed its young martial geniuses to the national pool of military talent, where they accounted for a greatly disproportionate share of the whole. Now the Southerners are in business for themselves, and it is a desperate affair. They sweat glory and are soaked.

In the fight they are in now, there are none better. None better at the fancy card-trick flanking maneuver, the clever feint, the holding action that suddenly gives way to suck in an enemy that will find itself trapped and confounded. Certainly none better at the mad daring gesture, however futile it may be. But strangely, for all the cosmopolitan ease and buttery charm, those who make up the small stratum of educated and wealthy Confederates are not so skilled at diplomacy. They speak and dance beautifully. You'll never catch one of them making an error in French grammar or leaving an engraved calling card with the proper corner not turned down. But they don't have a Ben Franklin to romance the courts of Europe. If only Prince Albert had lived, many have been saying, our British cousins (often
literally) would have come over here and broken the asphyxiating blockade of our ports. If only the French, who've always hated the Yankees anyway, for the sheer perverse enjoyment of doing so …

As an obviously immoral person may be a splendid human being who happens to be missing only a single essential component of his character, so might a society be so full of accomplishment yet lack one necessary aptitude. If diplomacy is a retail trade, the selling of public policies in foreign capitals, then espionage is diplomacy that is made to measure by secret tailors. So they're not very good at espionage either.

Military strategy and tactics are where they excel. Robert E. Lee's overriding ambition is to relieve pressure on his beloved Virginia and somehow move the war northward. Let the enemy see what war's like for a change. For their part, his political masters think a victory on Northern soil might be just the ticket for getting recognition abroad, and thus outside help. Lee's first attempt ended in Maryland, the state that interposes itself between Virginia and the North and supplies men to both sides.

Lee, being the underdog, has had to be bold as well as tenacious. Invading the invaders— imagine. He crossed into Maryland and met an army twice the size of his own and fought it to a standstill, but in the end had to fall back to Virginia. The North frequently names its battles after population centers, while the South, a more rural society, often chooses the names of nearby rivers, streams or other natural features. This case, however, was one of the exceptions that prove the rule. The North calls the battle Antietam, after Antietam Creek; the South calls it Sharpsburg, after the nearest town: an engagement with two names, as both sides claim the naming privilege that belongs to the victor. In truth, it was a draw; in truth, everybody lost. This was the bloodiest battle ever fought in North America up to that time, with 23,000 dead and wounded in forty-eight hours.

The next year, 1863, Lee tried again. This time he made it to the middle of Pennsylvania, to a place no one had ever heard of, written as Gettysburg, pronounced Gettisburg. The armies fought for three days, two of them touch-and-go, back-and-forth, in the biggest battle ever fought in North America. The third day was a decisive Union victory, the turning point of the war, people are still saying. Again, Lee pulled back to Virginia. Again, a new record: 51,000 dead and wounded. The North can rebuild its ranks with more conscripts. The empty spaces in the Southern lines aren't so easily filled. The population isn't large enough. And while the South has a draft, it awards no medals. Southern men know what the stakes are.

For the South, every decision is a life-or-death one. Boldness and daring are the tools of underdogs who don't give up and can't afford to be more conventional. Their ideas are costly when they fail, as they usually seem to do, but if they were to work— you never can tell, a big-enough kick could well prove fatal to the enemy or, at the very least, ensure that a peace candidate would take the presidency from Lincoln, though that might happen anyway (with George McClellan, whom Lincoln fired as commanding general, the likely successor).

The next Summer, 1864, Lee (West Point ′29 and eventually its superintendent) tries one more time. General Jubal Early (West Point ′37) is a misogynistic lawyer who has been protecting Richmond. Like Lee, Early had opposed Virginia's secession, but unlike Lee, he believes in the slave system. He loves a teeth-wrecking fight. Lee orders him to leave Richmond's fortifications (a brave gamble in itself), push north into Maryland and, if victorious there and conditions are favorable, attack Washington. The moment is right, because the capital's sixty-three forts are under-garrisoned and many of the troops stationed there are old or wounded or both, serving out their obligations with passive duty. Attack Washington. At the very least, that'll put the fear of God in 'em.

Early has only twelve thousand troops, albeit tough ones. When, however, he meets resistance in Maryland, at a place called Monocacy Court House, only a few miles south of Frederick, it is from fewer than half that many Federals. They are commanded by General Lew Wallace, the military governor of Baltimore, whom history will remember not for the battle resounding through the fields that day but for being the author of
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
, the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century. He will write it while serving as governor of New Mexico Territory in the days of Billy the Kid (whom he meets).

Wallace's casualties are heavy when this, the Confederacy's northernmost victory, is over. Of greater importance strategically is that the fighting has put Early behind schedule. He circles around to Fort Stevens, at the northwestern extremity of Washington, uncertain about whether to proceed farther. There is just enough time, barely, for General Grant to hurry some of the troops he has menacing Richmond to relieve the pressure on his own capital. The two commanders fight fiercely before Early pulls back to Virginia— essentially trading places with the enemy troops who have come to rescue Washington. During this confrontation at Fort Stevens, President Lincoln insists on leaving the Executive Mansion and the District to go see the battle for himself. He ignores advice and stands on the earthen breastworks to get a better view. He is totally exposed and makes an unmistakable target, what with his absurd height, so exaggerated by his famously tall hat, also absurd, and of course that face— there can't be two people in the world who look like that. Finally, the soldiers around him defy their commander in chief and pull him back down to safety, but not before he becomes the first and only president to come under enemy fire while in office.

Wilkes is not around either capital city during these events, or indeed for much of that summer. He is on the road, but not touring
with a play. He's acting all right, but there are no stages, no lights, no audiences and no applause. When he pays a visit to his sister Asia, she tells him that a man has come by the house asking for him, calling him Doctor Booth. Oh, Wilkes explains, the man makes that assumption because I am smuggling to our valiant troops one of the most valuable commodities being denied them by the Yankees: quinine. He then raves on about politics. She knows to let him rant until he runs out of rage, like a horse that must be allowed to exhaust itself before it will accept the bit.

The war is certainly grimmer than it has ever been. Indeed, everyone knows in his or her heart that it is hopeless now, that absent the English or the French, divine intervention is called for. But God— sometimes He works in ways that aren't so mysterious as Scripture would have us believe, for however bad the military situation, the political one looks as though it may start running in the South's favor. As this election year progresses, it is increasingly felt that Lincoln, notwithstanding enormous unequivocal successes on battle fields both east and west, has as much chance of winning a second term as he does of being elected the Pope in Rome.

His life is threatened routinely. He is burnt in effigy as a matter of course. Such members of the cabinet as are still loyal nonetheless consider him a buffoon. Large numbers of people who voted for him now regret having done so, believing him a tyrant, a betrayer of the Constitution, a man with an insatiable thirst for blood. Additional prisons are constantly being built to house the people who dare disagree with him. The army sets up extra-constitutional courts to try civilians whose loyalty is considered lackluster and to frighten everyone else. In one terrifying instance in Indiana, such a commission has sentenced freely elected opposition politicians to death. Some of the more studious commentators express regret that the fathers of the nation tossed out the parliamentary system that would have seen
the government fall on a vote of non-confidence long ago rather than have the country stuck four years with a dictator. Well, let it not be eight. In any case, never again.

The president's best hope is to press the mounting advantage against the crumbling enemy as hard and as quickly as he can— before the ballots can be tabulated. The two nations have a combined population of only thirty-one million; in the end, six hundred thousand will have died in the war. Lincoln calls for another million men to be drafted. Now he will take the war into Southern parlors. Now there will be war against children and women and cattle and pigs and chickens, against railroads and telegraph wires and crops and pastures and public buildings and food stores (such as they are), against houses and books and artworks and pianos: against everything that moves and a great deal that does not. Hell, cut off the head and cut out the heart at the same time. A young cavalry officer named Dahlgren, son of the man who designed the Dahlgren gun used to pound Southern emplacements from ships far out at sea, is sent on a raid to Richmond to kill Jefferson Davis and his cabinet in their own lair. He is himself killed along the way. He has stupidly carried his signed orders with him, and his killers find them on the body. Now the metaphorical gloves are off, if in fact they had ever been on.

The Southerners fight the way poor people who lack the enemy's numbers, money and technology always fight when the lives of their families and their homes are on the line. They fight the way people fight against invaders, the way people without powerful friends must fight when it's either that or give up and die. In time, there will be reports of Southern soldiers actually going into battle stark naked, as there are no stores for them and no means of resupplying them if there were.

The problem, however, is not merely how poorly they're equipped and fed, but how few they are. The South decides to release a great
mass of its Northern prisoners. This goodwill gesture, coming at a time when simple rancor has turned to murder all around, could well give further encouragement to the Democrats up north, who, when elected in November, might accede to the growing peace movement and seek some sort of settlement that would at least leave many still alive who will otherwise soon be among the dead. It also of course may lead to the release of prisoners on the other side, a resumption of the old accord that would let the South reinflate its ranks, at least a little. Besides, turning the prisoners loose means that the South doesn't have to feed them anymore, as it has been largely unable to do for quite some time. Many of those sent on their way home are little better than skeletons in rags. Instead of encouraging moderation, their appearance enrages people in the North and makes matters worse. In Washington, Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war who many say slickly manipulates the dull-witted Lincoln, orders Southern prisoners be kept where they are. Then he orders their rations cut.

Britain's refusal to take sides in the war is owed to more than simply the South's failure to persuade it to do otherwise. It comes also from Lincoln managing to do something right. Britain came closest to getting involved early on, after the United States boarded a British ship at sea and took off two Confederate diplomats. Later, by keeping Northern belligerents away from the Canadas, Lincoln has ensured that Britain will be nothing more than a distant observer. Of course, there have been moments when Britain has been wary nonetheless, doing what it always does in these colonial situations, sending out some leisured aristos to inspect the fortifications and write reports on the state of Canada's defenses. In the normal way, such reports are followed by the reinforcing of the main garrisons. Montreal is now home to the Household Brigade, consisting of the First and Second regiments of Life Guards, the Royal regiment of
Horse Guards and three regiments of Foot Guards— the Grenadiers, the Coldstream Guards and the Scots Fusiliers. They drill and peer over the border both anxiously and impatiently, and amuse themselves as best they can.

In Britain, there is wide support for the Confederacy, especially in commercial circles and among the intelligentsia. In Canada as well, to the extent that Jefferson Davis will be greeted as a hero when he visits Toronto almost immediately after getting out of prison once the war is over. Such a show of support for the South is not an endorsement of slavery, which was outlawed in Britain long ago, even longer ago in the Canadas. It is mostly a wish for a humbler and less menacing United States, which has not yet become the world's most power ful nation but is perceived as the most dangerous. The Empire isn't pro-slavery, it's anti-Union.

The Confederacy has set up a mission in Montreal, and the city instantly becomes a nest of Northern spies, freelances and mercenaries: interesting people. Because Britain does not recognize the Confederate States (no one does), this is not an official embassy but only a commission, run by a commissioner. There is a branch in Toronto and another in Halifax. At first, the primary business of these commissioners is the remote cultivation of the so-called Peace
Democrats and Copperheads. But the extent of true antiwar sentiment in the North is difficult to gauge and easy to misinterpret, for the administration is always able to shut the mouths of opponents simply by calling them unpatriotic. In any case, the commissioners operate independently of one another, indeed are answerable to different parts of the Confederate cabinet— War and State. Later that Summer, too much later in fact, they switch to hatching plots: plans to free Southern prisoners by force, plans to strike at Northern civilians as Lincoln had struck at Southern ones, plans to have third parties donate clothing infected with the yellow fever bacillus to Union hospitals.