More shells shrieked by, these from the field guns of a battery east of the junction of the Seventh Street Road and the Milkhouse Front Road. The officer told off a detachment to take that battery in the rear. Most of the soldiers, Caudell among them, he sent south down the Seventh Street Road toward Washington. “Form by regiments if you can, by brigade if that’s the best you can do,” he said. “This won’t be just a parade—we’ll have more fighting to do.”
“Forty-Seventh North Carolina,” Caudell called obediently. “Kirkland’s brigade. Forty-Seventh North Carolina…”
Before long, he found himself with a solid band of North Carolinians, close to half of them from his own regiment. Benny Lang stayed with them. That pleased Caudell: you never could tell when more of those rifle grenades might come in handy, or, for that matter, what other tricks the Rivington man had up his. sleeve. Caudell still wondered why he called his wonderful armor a flapjack.
Then from ahead came the roar of a volley of Minié balls and, hard on their heels, shouts and oaths. Word came back quickly: the Federals had thrown a makeshift barricade of logs across the road and were firing from behind it. “Flank ‘em out!” someone a few feet ahead of Caudell said. “Two squads to the left of the roadway, two to the right.”
“Who are you, to be giving orders?” Caudell demanded.
The man turned. Even in the darkness, his plump features, neat chin beard, and sweeping mustaches were unmistakable. So were the wreathed stars on his collar. “I’m General Kirkland, by God! Who are you, sir?”
“First Sergeant Nate Caudell, sir—47th North Carolina,” Caudell said, gulping.
“Well, First Sergeant, get up there and take one of those flanking squads,” Kirkland thundered.
Cursing his own big mouth, Caudell hurried forward toward the fighting. He passed Benny Lang. “You come, too,” he said. “One of those grenades of yours ought to startle the Yankees enough to make our job easier.” Lang nodded and came.
The Federals had not, had time to extend the barricade far off the roadway itself. They had a few men posted in the bushes, but, thanks to their repeaters, the rebels pushed past them and circled around behind the improvised breastwork.
Benny Lang loaded and fired a rifle grenade. Several Federals started to turn at the odd report. The grenade landed among them. They all shouted in alarm when it went off, and a couple of men its fragments had wounded went on crying from pain. The others, though, fired out into the night in the direction from which the little shell had come; one Millie ball snarled past Caudell’s head.
By then, though, he and his comrades were shooting at the muzzle flashes from the Federals’ Springfields. A Northerner started screaming and would not stop. Others shouted for their lives: “You got us surrounded, rebs! Don’t shoot no more! We give up!”
General Kirkland’s booming, authoritative voice came out of the night: “You Yanks put that barricade up there. You can get to work and help tear it down.” Caudell heard timbers shift, heard men swear mildly, as they often did when a physical task went slightly wrong. Northern and Southern accents mingled as Lee’s troops and their prisoners worked side by side. Even before the logs were all removed, Kirkland said, “Forward, boys, forward. You won’t let ‘em stop us now, will you?”
The sky began to grow light in the east not long after Caudell marched past the junction of the Seventh Street Road and another dirt track that was marked Taylor’s Lane Road to the southwest and Rock Creek Church Road to the northeast. Now Washington City was less than two miles away. Caudell had trouble believing he’d fought all night; only a couple of hours seemed to have gone by. The Yankees still kept up a sullen fire to the front and flanks of the advancing Confederate column, but nowhere sharp enough to do more than harass it.
As dawn progressed, Caudell could see farther and farther. Washington lay spread out before him like a painted panorama. He was surprised at the mixed feelings the Federal capital evoked in him. Excitement, anticipation, the almost hectic flush of triumph—he had expected all those.
But seeing the White House for the first time in his life, seeing the Capitol…up until three years before, those had been national shrines for him as much as for any Northern man. He found they still had the power to raise a lump in his throat. Nor was he the only one for whom that held true. The Confederate advance slowed as men gaped at what they’d come to capture.
“Go on, God damn you all,” General Kirkland shouted. “D’you want to wait until Grant brings the rest of his army over the Potomac on the Long Bridge and makes you fight for the city house by house?”
That got the rebels moving again. Then someone said, “They ain’t comin’ over no Long Bridge, if that’s it straight ahead there. It’s burnin’.” Sure enough, a column of smoke rose from the middle of the Potomac.
Kirkland must have had a telescope, for a moment later he said, “Not only is it burning, by God, but it’s broken as well. The artilleryman who did that deserves a general’s wreath, and I don’t care a jot whether he’s but a private soldier. He’s sealed the victory for us.”
“He’s sealed all the ants in the nest, too, and they don’t much fancy it,” Caudell said to a soldier nearby. He pointed toward the city ahead. At this distance, the people in the streets did seem small as ants. But ants did not drive carriages, and ants generally moved with greater purpose than the throngs who jammed the avenues ahead. All they knew was that they wanted to flee the oncoming Confederates. Any person who got in their way was as much an obstacle as a tree or a post.
The soldier by Caudell spat in the dusty road. “What you want to bet we don’t catch us one single congressman at the Capitol?”
“I don’t care about Yankee congressmen,” Caudell said. “What I’d like to do is catch Abe Lincoln. That’d be about the only way my name would ever go down in history.”
By the look of him, the ragged soldier had never worried about going down in history. But his eyes lit up at the prospect of capturing Lincoln. “Let’s try it, by God! Somebody’s got to be first to the White House.” Then he shook his head. “Naah—even if we are, reckon he’ll’ve run off too, along with everybody else.”
“Worth a shot at it.” Caudell hurried over to General Kirkland; he thought well of commanders who stayed up with their troops. He wondered where Colonel Faribault and Captain Lewis were—maybe dead back in the trenches, maybe just a few hundred yards away in the confused aftermath of victory. Gaining the brigadier’s ear might be worth more now anyway. “Sir, may we head for the White House?”
The ear Caudell had gained was a keen one. “You’re that mouthy sergeant from the fight in the dark, aren’t you?” Kirkland fixed Caudell with an icy blue stare. But his expression warmed as he thought about the suggestion—what Southerner could resist going after the man for fear of whom his state had seceded?
Kirkland looked around, gauging how far other Confederate units had come. “I have no orders to the contrary, and we might get there first, mightn’t we? Let’s see if we can—why the hell not?” He waved his sword, pointed southwest, and shouted new orders. The soldiers cheered.
Into Washington City! The rebels tramped down Vermont Avenue in loose skirmish order, repeaters at the ready. Civilians peered from houses. Some came outside to gape at the spectacle they had never imagined. A few people cheered—Washington had its share of Southern sympathizers.
Caudell coughed loudly as he passed a pretty girl. So did a good many other men; the soldiers sounded as if they’d all caught cold at once. Overwhelmed by such vigorous public praise, the girl flushed and fled indoors.
About a hundred yards farther on, a company of Federal soldiers turned onto Vermont Avenue. They must not have realized Lee’s men were already in the city. The first couple of ranks never knew it; the Confederates cut them down as soon as they came into sight. A few men returned fire. Others dashed for cover. Shrieking noncombatants ran every which way, including right between the rival forces.
“Get out of there, you damned fools
!” Caudell shouted, appalled at the idea of having to fight a battle in a crowd of civilians. When the Federals kept shooting, he found himself without any choice. He dove behind a hedge and looked for targets.
Benny Lang did not seem to care who got stuck in the middle of a fight. He sent a grenade through the window of a house from which Yankees were shooting. A moment later, the blast blew out every pane in that window and the one next to it. Three bluecoats dashed out of the house, as terrified as any ordinary Washingtonian. They would have done better to stay where they were. The Confederates stretched them lifeless before they’d run ten paces.
Rebels darted down side streets to get’ around the Federals. The fight did not last long. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Northern men died or fled. “Keep going!” Kirkland shouted. “Don’t let ‘em stop you now!”
Caudell and his comrades kept going. Neither he nor any of them had slept for a full day; neither he nor any of them cared. He could see the White House ahead. With that for a target, rest could wait.
He felt like crying when a lieutenant waved him onto Fifteenth Street instead of letting him keep on going straight down Vermont Avenue. The lieutenant saw his disappointment. Grinning, he said, “Don’t feel too bad, soldier. Once upon a time, General McClellan lived down this way. His house ought to be worth seeing.”
Caudell thought the house, near the corner of Fifteenth and H streets, a mean hovel, though it was three stories high, with shuttered windows and a railed porch under them from which to receive well-wishers. Who cared where a discredited Federal general had lived when the President’s house was so close?
But he and the men with him had been sent only a little out of their way. Blue-coated officers were hurrying in and out of a brown brick building on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. Caudell fired a quick burst that sent them tumbling back inside. “Guard this place!” he told some of the other rebels on the avenue. He spent the next few minutes arguing them into it; they wanted the White House as much as he did. That afternoon, he learned he’d helped capture the headquarters of the Federal defenses for Washington.
That was later, though. As soon as he had men with repeaters posted all around the building, he hurried west along Pennsylvania Avenue to the big white mansion that had housed his Presidents until 1861 and now was home to the leader of another country.
The White House drew Confederates like a lodestone. Caudell’s delays had let General Kirkland, portly though he was, get there before him. Kirkland was shouting, “You men keep your order, do you hear me? Think about what General Lee will do to anyone who lets harm come to this building or anyone inside it.”
Lee’s name was a talisman to conjure with. It calmed men who, without it, might gleefully have rampaged with torches. Across the lawn, under the front colonnade, stood Federal sentries. They carried rifles, but made no move to raise them to the firing position. They just kept staring at the ever-growing numbers of ragged men in gray and homespun butternut who filled the broad cobblestoned street and now hesitantly advanced over the grass toward them. They did not seem to believe this hour could ever have come.
Remembering Gettysburg, remembering the botched fight at Bristoe Station, remembering the long, cold, hungry winter south of the Rapidan before the repeaters came, Caudell marveled at the hour, too. As he pressed toward the White House with his comrades, his feeling that the world had turned upside down deepened further, for out among the bluecoats came a tall, thin figure dressed in funereal black. Caudell looked around for the private who’d guessed the Federal President would run. By happy chance, the fellow was standing not ten feet from him. He pointed. “See? We’ve bagged Old Abe after an.”
Lincoln’s name ran through the rebels. A few cheers rang out, and a few jeers, but not many of either. The force of the moment seized most men with almost religious awe. Still slowly, they came forward across the White House lawn to the base of the steps. There they halted, staring in wonder at the edifice and Lincoln both. Caudell was in the fourth or fifth row of tight-packed troops.
As they hesitated, Lincoln came down the steps toward them. One of the Federal sentries tried to block his path. He said, “What does it matter now, son? What does anything matter now?” Beneath his frontier twang, he sounded tired past all endurance. The young sentry, beard still downy on his cheeks, stepped back in confusion.
Caudell frankly stared at the President of the United States. Southern papers and cartoonists made Lincoln out to be either a back country buffoon or a fiend in human shape. In the flesh, he did not seem either. He was just a tall, homely man whose deep-set eyes had already seen all the griefs in the world and now this crowning one piled atop the rest.
He coughed and turned his head to one side. When he somehow found the resolution to face the crowd of Confederate soldiers again, those eyes glistened with the tears he would not shed. Caudell thought they were tears of sorrow, not weakness; it was the expression a father would wear, watching his beloved son die of a sickness he could not cure.
Not all the rebels stayed solemn. A short, broad-shouldered corporal in front of Caudell and to his left spoke up brashly: “Well, Uncle Abe, you gonna try and take our niggers away from us now?” It was Billy Beddingfield; Caudell hadn’t realized he’d been promoted again. He was also certain Beddingfield, like most Southern soldiers, had not a single Negro to his name.
Beddingfield brayed laughter at his own wit. A good many men joined him. Lincoln stood on the White House steps, waiting to see whether the rebels would quiet down. When they did, he said, “I did not become President with the intention of interfering with the institutions of any state in the Union. I said that repeatedly, at every forum available; the great regret of my life is that you Southerners would not credit it.”
“What about the Emancipation Proclamation, then?” half a dozen soldiers shouted at once. Some of them profanely embellished the question.
Lincoln did not quail. “Everything I have done, I have done for the purpose of holding the Union together and of restoring it once it was torn asunder. Had I thought that meant freeing all the slaves, I should have freed them all; had I thought it meant leaving them in chains, in chains they would have stayed. As it chanced, I thought the wisest course was to free some and leave others alone—note that even now I have hesitated to touch the institution in those states which remained loyal. The proclamation was a weapon to hand in the war against your rebellion, and I seized it. Make what you will of that.”
“Damn little good it did you,” Billy Beddingfield said. Again, some of the rebels laughed. But Caudell gave his beard a thoughtful tug. He hadn’t known the Emancipation Proclamation was selective; the papers had painted it as a desperate effort to incite blacks to rise up against their masters. So it was, to some degree. But if it was a blow against the Confederate government rather than against slavery per se, that made it more or less what Lincoln claimed it was—an unpleasant ploy, but a ploy nonetheless.
The Federal President said, “Personally, I hate slavery and all it stands for.” That took courage, in front of the audience he faced. He let the rebels’ boos and hisses wash over him. When they slackened, he went on, “It is too late now, I think, to rescind the proclamation I issued. Too much has happened since. But if only the Southern states were to return to the Union, the Federal government would fully compensate former masters for their bondsmen’s liberty—”
The rebels laughed, loud and long. Lincoln hung his head. Caudell, strangely, found himself respecting the man. Anyone who clung to his principles strongly enough to refuse to abandon them even in complete defeat owned more sincerity than he had credited Lincoln with possessing.
Lincoln drew himself up to his full and impressive height. His black suit conformed perfectly to the motion; it was far from new and had been worn so often that it molded itself to its owner’s shape. “If my death would restore the seceded states, I would beg for your bullets,” he said. “If the Union fails, I have no wish to live.”
From most politicians, that would have been just talk. Looking at the sorrow that masked Lincoln’s rough-hewn features, Caudell was convinced he meant every word of it. But if he thought the Federal government had the right to tell states they had to stay in a Union they no longer desired, then he might be sincere, but to Caudell’s way of thinking he was sincerely wrong.
Some of the Confederates were willing to find him most literally sincere, too. Billy Beddingfield started to raise his AK-47. Caudell grabbed the repeater and pushed it back down. “No, Billy, damn it,” he said. “This isn’t like shooting a couple of nigger prisoners.” Nobody had ever assassinated a President of the United States. Caudell could imagine nothing surer to bring on lasting enmity between U.S.A. and C.S.A.
Beddingfield turned on him, scowling. “He don’t deserve no better, all the trouble he brung on us.” He started to swing the rifle back toward Lincoln. Caudell ground his teeth. Benny Lang had handled Beddingfield easily enough, but he knew he couldn’t match the Rivington man. And how strange to think of fighting. a man from his own regiment to save the President whose troops he’d been battling these past two and a half years!
Before Beddingfield could shoot, before the fight could start, a murmur ran from back to front through the crowd of soldiers in gray: “Marse Robert! Marse Robert’s here!” Caudell looked around. Sure enough, Lee sat aboard Traveller. The crowd parted before him like the waters of the Red Sea. He rode up to the base of the White House steps.
Lincoln waited for him, infinitely alone. One of the Federal sentries began to lift his Springfield. Another man slapped it down, as Caudell had with Beddingfield.
Lee took off his broad-brimmed gray felt, bowed in the saddle to Lincoln. “Mr. President,” he said, as respectfully as if Lincoln were his own chosen leader.
“See?” Caudell whispered to Billy Beddingfield.
“Shut up,” Beddingfield hissed back.
“General Lee,” Lincoln said with a stiff nod. He looked from the Confederate commander to the men of the Army of Northern Virginia, back again: His lips quirked in what Caudell first thought a grimace of pain. Then he saw it was a grin, however wry. Lincoln half-turned, waved toward the imposing bulk of the White House behind him. “General, do you want to step into my parlor with me? Seems we have a bit of talking to do.”
The Guns of the South Page 23
