“Malheureusement, the body of our dear Joe White lies in the same wagon with Gallagher . We buried the rest on the field.” Balthazar looked off to the west for a moment. “Please speak to my wife of my love for her and our children.”
“Of course, Concannon, find Captain Devereux a horse or mule somewhere…”
“Sor.”
“Please tell Victoria of my desire to return to Europe.”
“Yes. I will notify your embassy.”
“I would stay with my men until their release. It cannot be more than a few months…”
“They will not allow that.”
The infantry lieutenant detailed to escort these prisoners to Winchester came forward. “Sir, I could not help hearing. May I ask who you are?”
“Devereux, War Department, is there a problem?”
The junior officer thought about it and then replied that there was not a problem.
“They will cause you no difficulties. What is your name?”
“Frederick James, Sir, 14th New Hampshire.”
Devereux gave him a note. “Send me a telegram from Winchester as to where they are going. I will speak to your colonel of you.”
“Thank you, General.”
Devereux left them in Lieutenant James’ care as they marched north in the dark. There was nothing else that could be done. Some might escape.
He took his group east to Front Royal on a connecting road.
Corporal Concannon rode behind him with Jake and the Georgia color sergeant. In the night, Concannon eased his horse forward to ride beside Devereux. “Ginrul, I’ve seen and heard all this. Whut am I to do?”
“Well, Concannon, I can shoot you, or I can carry you into Washington where you may have too much to say or we can go there together in a friendly way. Then I will recommend you for promotion and the new medal. What do you say?”
“I came to America after the Crimea. I am new here and joined the national army because it was easy to do…”
“Regiment?”
“Eighth Irish Hussars, Sor.”
“Balaclava?”
“Yes.”
“Which is it to be?”
The trees hung low over the road. There were birds in the trees. They flew away when they heard the metallic sounds on the road. They were afraid of the clatter of the horses and wagon. The moon was full.
“Well, Sor, I am happy to be of assistance. If there was a chance…”
“There is not. This will all be over soon. You trust me?”
“I saw you today, Jinrul.”
Jake Devereux reached across to shake Concannon’s hand.
“I will see that you go quickly to the west.” Claude told him. The Indians can kill you there, he thought.
That evening, Amy Biddle brought her frustrated lover, Colonel Wilson Ford, to the Devereux house on Duke Street. He had come to see her again and to hold her hand if he could. They sat together in the front parlor of the Sanitary Camp headquarters building on Shuter’s Hill in Alexandria. The low settees and lace covered arms of the chairs marked the room as a reflection of Amy’s middle class New England upbringing. The room served as a place for Amy’s necessary reception of official guests. Ten feet away behind a wooden wall there was a bed in which Amy’s passionate embraces of Claude Devereux took place. Ford had never seen that room.
Her visitor spoke of the telegrams that had arrived in the War Department that day. The army telegraph stations in Winchester and Front Royal described the vast battle underway south of Winchester.
Amy knew from Ford that the lover who owned her body and soul was at risk in that fight, and knowing that, she could not remain alone with this man, a man who could never possess her as Devereux possessed her. “We should go to Hope, to General Devereux’s family,” she finally said to Ford. “She will be terribly concerned. Does she know that he left to go to the battle?”
This was not as Ford expected the conversation to develop. He had imagined that his placement in Devereux’s office by Secretary Stanton and Lafayette Baker would improve his chances with her. He thought that he would soon have information of the man’s guilt and that proof of his treason would turn her away from Devereux.
George White answered the door and took them to the front parlor. They sat awkwardly waiting for someone, anyone, to come and deal with the distance that had abruptly appeared between them with Devereux’s unseen presence. He was there in the very atmosphere of the room. His cigar smoke lurked in the corners. The smell of his sweat on a hot summer day was there as a faint trace. She knew that smell.
Clotilde Devereux joined them. She was in her sewing room off the kitchen, when the butler told her who had arrived in her house. She looked at a watch suspended from a broach. It was eight thirty. “My, word, George,” she said softly. “I suppose it may be bad news. Go, and get her up. I will join them until she can dress.”
Coal burned in the black marble fireplace against the chill October night. Clotilde was an accomplished hostess. She kept conversation alive.
Ford told her what little he knew.
Hope entered the room more uncombed than anyone commonly saw her, but that was explicable in the context of her exertions of the last twenty four hours. She dominated the room. Her beautiful complexion glowed in the gaslight.
Clotilde, by contrast, seemed drained of color. The news of the battle struck her hard. She rose from a chair. “They will tell you. I must speak to the Whites.” With that she left for the kitchen.
Amy stared at Hope as Ford explained what was known of the day’s events. Hope did not seem as distressed as she had expected. She seemed concerned but not distraught. Her attention to Ford’s words appeared divided as though something distracted her from the full impact of the danger to her husband.
Ford knew of Smoot’s presence in the household, but only as a former employee who had been badly injured in a streetcar accident somewhere in the North. He did not connect Smoot in his mind with the “coachman” who had worked for the bank in 1863. There was no picture of Smoot in the file about that man. Turnover of employees had been high in the Washington office. Major Johnston Mitchell, his superior in 1863 might have made the connection, but he was dead, killed at Devereux’s direction the previous year. In all innocence he enquired of Smoot by his new “name.” “Is Mr. Howard’s injury mending?”
Without a second’s hesitation, Hope replied that he was “on the mend,” and that in a few more months should be able to take a position in the bank. “That is what we are all hoping,” she said smoothly. Only the deeper pink of her ears and neck betrayed her.
In the buggy on the way back to “Soldier’s Rest”, Amy thought this state of affairs through and decided that she had been a fool. At her door she asked a delighted Wilson Ford if he would like to come in for a glass of Sherry.
The next morning at breakfast when they were alone, Clotilde Devereux told her beloved daughter-in-law that she must move Smoot out of the house. “No. No. Don’t explain anything to me. I know my son. I know you have been severely provoked, but this is impossible and a likely source of scandal. Just move him.”
“To the old house?”
“Yes. Excuse me,” Clotilde said rising, “but I do not wish to speak more of this matter.
Claude Devereux arrived the following afternoon.
He had commandeered cars at the US Army railhead in Front Royal. His little group rolled the wagon onto a flat car. The horses were put in a boxcar. Devereux was careful to make sure the horses were provided with fodder and water and covered with horse blankets against the cold. He spent a few minutes fussing over the Morgan in a mood that surprised even him. US Military Railroad people helped. Concannon and Jake Devereux sat at one corner of the boxcar to watch over the animals and Gallagher on the long rail trip home. Whether or not the wounded man would survive was unknowable. At Front Royal an army doctor was found to look at Gallagher. He dressed the wound and then took Claude aside to say that if Gallagher survived to reach Alexan
dria his chance of survival would still be poor.
The provost marshal wanted to take charge of Jake and Ogilvy but Claude stared him down.
“I’ll be telegraphing ahead,” the provost officer said defiantly.
“You do that,” Claude said quietly. “You do that.” To avoid officious interference, he halted the train one station short of the end of the line and went the rest of the way home without it.
Smoot was at the house on Fairfax Street. He had lived there in 1863 and did not expect that he would be lonely there. He had sat down that afternoon to write his wife a letter. She was at Haymarket in Fauquier County with his two children. The boy was ten years old, and the girl six. He knew that he had to tell his wife that he had found someone else…
The Whites stood by the wagon in the street outside the Duke Street house and looked down on their dead son. Claude and Jake had covered their cousin with a horse blanket. Betsy rocked back and forth, weeping and keening her grief.
Jake, who had not been home since the war began, climbed down from his horse to hold her in his arms. “Aunty, he was so good to all of us. Balthazar cried for him. We all did. It was quick.”
She hugged him back. “Jake, so good to see you home, so good. She reached out to her dead son’s body.
George White gripped Jake’s arm as he stood by his wife in the street.
Clotilde came down the stairs.
Jake detached himself to hold his mother.
Claude and Hope looked at each other from opposite sides of the wagon. They looked calm. The inevitable passion of their reunion would come later.
“We should get this man into the house,” he told her. “Is Smoot still here?”
She shook her pretty head.
Claude had been gone less than two days but so much had changed for her. “We can put him in that room,” she said. “I will send for Doctor Harrington.”
The men carried Gallagher up the three flights of stairs. He was still breathing when the doctor arrived. Harrington offered the opinion that Gallagher should be moved to the Sisters of Mercy hospital in the morning.
Gallagher died in the night. The body was buried in the Devereux plot in St. Mary’s Cemetery. He would rest next to Charles Devereux and close to Richard Devereux, the grandfather who had brought the family from Catholic Maryland.
Sherman continued his march to Savannah in November and December. The imminence of Southern defeat and the end of their government drove the Confederate agents in Washington to a frenzied state. The intensity of planning against Lincoln’s person grew steadily. Hope Devereux and her lover, Smoot, were at the heart of this plotting. She accepted Claude’s demand that she remain invisible and not directly involved with the plotters, but, in fact, Bill White and James Fowle were deeply and directly involved in coordinating the actions of various Confederate groups, among them the circle of agents around John Wilkes Booth. Brigadier General Claude Devereux was essential to this effort. He nearly always knew where the president was. He had access to the president’s schedule and he passed it to his wife.
She adapted to the circumstance of her loyalty to two men. She was not the first woman to do so.
Lincoln continued to dote on Devereux. A few days after his return from Cedar Creek, Claude decided that he should take his brother, Jake, and the Georgian color sergeant, Ogilvy, to Army Headquarters on 17th Street and confine them in the basement. He did this to protect them from the Washington provost marshal.
As he promised a Union Army officer at Front Royal had telegraphed to inform the provost marshal and Colonel Lafayette Baker of the National Detective bureau of Devereux’s strange behavior concerning these two prisoners.
Devereux’s mother was not amused. Her attitude toward him had changed. She treated him with the reserve that he had associated with his father, Charles.
Claude told her that Jake would be back in a few days, paroled into his custody.
She said nothing to that.
He told the president of his brother’s presence in the basement of the War Department. The day had ended. Except for the telegrapher on duty, they were alone in the telegraph office on the second floor.
Lincoln went to the cellar stairs and descended to his private dungeon. Jake and the Georgian were in separate cells. “Good Evening, Captain Devereux,” the president began. He did not offer his hand through the bars. Perhaps he was uncertain what the gesture might elicit. There was a guard. The soldier brought a three legged wooden stool from a corner. Lincoln sat a few feet from Jake’s cage. “I understand that your brother found you on the battlefield. You had been taken prisoner?”
Claude stood in a corner with his arms folded.
“Yes, that is correct, sir.” Sensing a further question he continued. “My battalion was destroyed. The survivors were all captured.”
Lincoln nodded. “It must have been terrible, terrible. What battalion was that?”
Claude nodded slightly behind Lincoln.
“The Second Confederate Infantry Battalion. It was not a state unit.”
“Ah, yes. This is the battalion commanded by the German mercenary ‘Palteeser,’ isn’t it? I have seen it mentioned in telegrams from the front.”
Claude shook his head slightly.
“Yes that is correct, Mr. President. He was killed near Middletown, a brave man.”
Lincoln turned to the Georgian. “I heard that groan when Captain Devereux addressed me as ‘president.’ You don’t approve?”
“You’re not my president. You’re not Captain Devereux’s president either. He should remember that…”
Lincoln had carried a paper wrapped parcel into the basement. He rose and walked to the sergeant’s cell. He pushed the package through the bars. It was the battalion flag of Cobb’s Georgia Legion. “You should have this. General Devereux says he took it from you. You and your friends fought hard for this. I return it to you. Take it in their name. I wish you well and hope that someday we can be friends again.” With that he left the cellar. He could be heard climbing the stairs. He sounded unsteady.
Claude ordered the guard out of the cellar. He looked at the Georgian. “There is no reason to talk to him like that. We are not the only sufferers. He has left you both in my hands. My brother and I are agreed that he will take the Oath of Allegiance and remain here. In your case, I cannot simply let you go. If I do someone may raise the issue. I will send you to the prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. What you do there is up to you.”
“Major Devereux… I will take the oath there and report back to you in Alexandria…”
“Good, come to the house on Fairfax Street when you do. Ask for me. Guard!”
The man came down the stairs.
“Let these men out. The president has asked me to take them with me.”
During November and December Sherman continued his progress through Georgia. He devastated the countryside as his armies passed through the state from Atlanta to the Atlantic. This was done in much the same way that Sheridan had wrecked the Shenandoah Valley earlier in the year. Both of these expeditions of merciless havoc were launched by specific order from the general-in-chief, US Grant. As in the case of his decision to halt the exchange of prisoners, Grant reasoned that the South must be utterly crushed before it would give up its hope of independence.
Claude Devereux watched this process, as well as the creeping defeat on the Petersburg front from his chair in the War Department. He tried to sound out Lincoln on the subject of an ending that would be less than absolute subjugation. The president was unresponsive, saying that the country had come so far and suffered so much that it would accept nothing other than a total victory. Nevertheless, after thinking about it, Lincoln said that he was still open to the idea of a negotiated peace. Claude passed that to Bill Fowle in Richmond through a courier. In this case the messenger was John Surratt.
In fact, the North prospered. Money flowed from military contracts and the licensed trade with the South that continued across the li
nes. Because of the blockade, this trade was the only outlet for the cotton and other staple agricultural products of the seceded states and men grew rich in the North from that commerce. The money spread from them and there was little north of the Union Army’s front lines that resembled the destitution in what was left of the Confederacy.
The last great battle of the Confederate Army of Tennessee was fought at Franklin, Tennessee on the 30th of November. The commander of that army, Joe Johnston had been removed when Atlanta fell during the summer. He was replaced by John Bell Hood, a fine soldier, but a man much affected by the loss of an arm and a leg in the war.
John B. Hood
When Sherman abandoned his supply lines and marched away to the southeast, Hood decided that the way to stop Sherman was to invade Tennessee and attack the supply base there. He believed that this would cause the US government to order Sherman back into Tennessee. He was mistaken.
Sherman calculated correctly that Georgia was a fat enough “turkey” to supply his army by foraging and looting. The army would have to continue to move forward in order to find enough to eat but there were no sizable forces in Confederate Georgia south of Atlanta. Keeping his forces together and moving forward was not a problem in the presence of a swarm of guerrillas who dealt severely with stragglers.
Hood found that Union forces in Tennessee outnumbered him two to one. In spite of this, he decided to attack them at Franklin. Before the assaults began his veteran senior officers advised him of the folly of this effort. He insulted them and called them cowards.
Patrick Cleburne
One of them, Patrick Cleburne of Arkansas, spoke to a friend after this meeting saying “if we are to die let us die like men…” Hood lost half his force at Franklin in a series of hopeless attacks against entrenched superior numbers. The next morning the bodies of six Confederate generals lay on a porch in the town. Among them was the body of Patrick Cleburne. A few days later the rest of the Army of Tennessee was wrecked in another futile attack at Nashville.
Down the Sky: Volume Three of the “Strike The Tent” Trilogy Page 16
