“Anything else would only cause more trouble, I thought,” Grant said.
In the stable, a Federal lieutenant held an army Colt revolver on two men sitting glumly in the hay. Sure enough, they both wore the mottled caps, coats, and trousers of the Rivington men. “On your feet, you,” the lieutenant barked. His captives made no move to obey until they saw Lee and Grant. Then they stood, slowly, as if to show they would have done the same thing without being ordered.
One of them swept off his plain, ugly cap in a gesture that made it seem a cavalier’s plumed chapeau. “General Lee,” he said, bowing. “Allow me to present my comrade, Willem van Pelt.”
“Mr. de Buys.” That smooth bow, so like Jeb Stuart’s, brought the Rivington man’s name back to Lee.
“You know this fellow?” Grant’s voice was suddenly hard and suspicious.
“To my mortification, I do.” Ignoring the proffered introduction, Lee growled, “What the devil are you doing here, Mr. de Buys?”
Konrad de Buys’s eyes were wide and innocent. A catamount’s eyes were innocent, too, just before it sprang. Lee wondered how the Northern soldiers had got the drop on a warrior of his quality. The Rivington man said, “We were just coming up to sell a few guns, General, sporting guns, you might say. Is anything wrong with that?”
“Is anything wrong with pouring oil on a fire?” Lee retorted. De Buys still looked innocent. His comrade, Willem van Pelt, was big and stolid and seemed stupid; Lee would have bet that was as much a façade as de Buys’s innocence.
“To whom were you going to sell these rifles?” Grant asked.
“Oh, there are always buyers,” de Buys said airily.
“No doubt,” Lee said. He could picture the sort of men de Buys had in mind-raiders to sweep down on little towns before the election, or on the day, and to make sure the folk there voted the right way. He turned to Grant. “Will you step outside with me for a moment, sir?” They stayed outside longer than a moment. When they returned, Lee said, “Mr. de Buys, General Grant here has graciously agreed to buy every one of your repeaters, and their accompanying cartridges.”
That got through the fronts both Rivington men held up as shields against the world. Willem van Pelt spoke for the first time: “No way we’ll sell to his bloody sort.”
“Oh, but gentlemen, he will give you a finer price than you could hope to receive from anyone else,” Lee said.
Grant nodded. “That’s right.” He reached into a trouser pocket, took out a silver dollar, and tossed it at Konrad de Buys’s feet. “There you go, for the lot of ‘em.”
An angry flush mounted de Buys’s cheeks. “Be damned to your dollar, and to you, too.”
“You’d best take it,” Grant told him. “With it, you and your friend there can ride back to Tennessee. Without it, you go North under guard for more questions—a lot more.”
Willem van Pelt worked his jaw and tensed, as if to make some sort of move. The Federal lieutenant, an alert young man, swung his revolver toward the Rivington man. “Easy, Willem,” Konrad de Buys said, setting a hand on van Pelt’s arm. He swung his hunting cat’s gaze toward Lee. “So you’d sooner work with the Yankees than with us, eh, General? We’ll remember that, I promise you.”
“The United States have business in Kentucky and Missouri till June, and have handsomely kept their agreements with us. You, sir, do not belong here, not if you are running guns. Now get your horses and go, and count yourselves lucky to have that opportunity.” Lee turned to Grant. “Perhaps your lieutenants will ride with them a ways, to ensure that they do cross the border.” Then, to de Buys, in tones of palpable warning: “You personally and your colleagues shall be held responsible for the safety of the two Federals.”
Grant chuckled: “It seems you needn’t fret over that, General, not when my lads captured these fellows in the first place.”
“They never would have, if they hadn’t come on us when I was in the bushes with my pants around my ankles,” Konrad de Buys growled. Grant’s chuckle turned into a laugh.
Lee laughed, too, but was inclined to believe the Rivington man. With or without their marvelous repeaters, his kind were uncommonly dangerous, and de Buys himself more so than most. “Remember what I told you,” Lee said sternly, and was relieved to see both Rivington men give grudging nods.
They and the Federals rode south from Tompkinsville that afternoon. Grant stayed in town to await the lieutenants’ return, so he and they could start the repeaters on their journey northwards. Lee and Marshall set off for Bowling Green. As they rode out of Tompkinsville, Marshall said,” Are you sure it is expedient, sir, just to give some dozens of repeaters to the Yankees like that?”
“Did I believe they had none, Major, I assure you I should never have done so,” Lee answered. “But they surely possess samples a-plenty, whether seized from prisoners or taken from beside corpses, as our men used to take Springfields to replace the smoothbore muskets they’d been issued. And by ceding the guns, I kept the Rivington men out of Northern hands. As they know about a good many things besides AK-47s, I count them as more important than the rifles.”
“Ah. Put that way, I see your point.” Marshall ran a hand through his wavy blond hair. “They do sometimes seem all but omniscient, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Lee said shortly. That was what worried him about the men of America Will Break. After a moment, he added, “Omniscient they are not, however, for I can think of one thing they surely do not know.”
“What’s that, sir?” Marshall sounded genuinely curious.
“Not to meddle in our politics.” Lee booted his hired horse into a trot. Marshall matched him to keep up. They rode some time in silence.
People argued even as they filed into the Louisville park. It was Good Friday. Under other circumstances, many of them would have been in church. But church would be there Easter Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and the year after that. They might never hear a President—or rather, a recent ex-President—of the United States again.
U.S. flags flew at all four comers of the speakers’ platform. They still displayed thirty-six stars, though eleven states had left the Union for good and two more were wavering. Some of the people in the crowd waved the old banner, too. But others carried one of the several versions of the Confederate flag. Already the rival factionalists were beginning to push and shove each other.
Charles Marshall’s spectacles lent him a supercilious air as he stood at the edge of the swelling throng. Perhaps that was no accident, for his voice held a definite sniff: “Considering where he took his country, Lincoln has considerable nerve to show his face in Kentucky and urge it to follow his lead.”
“Lincoln has considerable nerve,” Lee said, “and this is, after all, his birth state. But I question his political wisdom in coming here—Seymour and McClellan both outpolled him in this state, Seymour by an enormous margin, so how can he hope to sway any substantial number of voters?”
A year before, he would never have thought to make such political calculations. His life had been simpler then, his only problem the straightforward one of beating back the Army of the Potomac when it began to move. With all his soul, he longed for those simpler days, but he knew it would take another war to bring them back, and that was too high a price to pay.
Marshall started to say something, but his words were lost in the peculiar roar, half cheer and half hiss, that went up from the crowd. It reminded Lee of a locomotive with a bad boiler. The man who produced that frightening mixture of hate and adulation stood on the platform, unmistakably tall and unmistakably lean, and waited for the tumult to ebb. At last, it did.
“Americans!” Lincoln said, and with a single word drew all attention to himself, for no one, whether staunch Union man or backer of the Confederacy, denied himself that proud title. Lincoln used it again: “Americans, surely you know I should rather have given up an my life’s blood sooner than see my beloved nation tom in two.”
“We can fix that for you, by God!�
� a heckler yelled, and a savage chorus of jeers arose.
Lincoln spoke through them: “Both sides in the late conflict spoke the same tongue, prayed to the same God. That He chose to grant victory to the South is a fact I can but strive to accept, understand it though I do not, for the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. I bear no animus against the men I still believe my brethren, nor have I ever.”
“It don’t work both ways!” the leather-lunged heckler shouted. Lee thought the fellow wrong, though during the simpler days of the war he would have agreed with him. Lincoln truly saw one nation rather than a federation of sovereign states, and acted on that belief, misguided and mistaken though Lee believed he was.
Now he continued, “You have rejected me, as well you might have, seeing how I failed to preserve the Union I swore to protect and defend. But I am only one small man. Do with me as you see fit; it will be no less than I deserve. But I pray you, men of Kentucky, with an my heart and an my soul and all my mind—do not reject the United States of America.”
More catcalls rang out, along with scattered cheers. Lincoln ignored both; Lee had the odd feeling that he was talking to himself up there on the platform, talking to himself yet at the same time desperately hoping others would hear: “Important principles may—and must—be inflexible. We all declare for liberty, but we do not always mean the same thing by it. In the United States, liberty means each man may do as he pleases with himself and his labor; in the South, the same word means some would do as they please with other men and that which they produce. To the fox, stealing chickens from the farmer looks like liberty, but do you think the fowl agree?”
“Just like honest, backwoods Abe to talk about foxes and hencoops,” Charles Marshall said, a sneer in his voice. Lee started to nod, but thought better of it. Yes, the image was not one he could imagine hearing from Jefferson Davis’s lips, but it illuminated the point Lincoln had made just before more vividly than might many a polished phrase. And that point was far from a bad one. Lee had the uncomfortable feeling of being more in sympathy with his country’s foes than with such friends as the men of America Will Break.
Lincoln said, “Men of Kentucky, men of America, if you vote to go South, you vote to forget Washington and Patrick Henry, Jefferson and Nathan Hale, Jackson and John Paul Jones. Remember the nation your fathers joined, remember the nation so many of you fought so bravely to defend. God bless the United States of America!”
Some cheered; more, Lee thought, booed. He found no small irony in the fact that three of Lincoln’s “American” heroes, Washington, Patrick Henry, and Jefferson, had been slaveholding Virginians; Martha Washington’s blood ran in the veins of his own wife. And the South revered the Founding Fathers no less than the North; he remembered coming into Richmond on Washington’s birthday and finding the War Department closed. And for that matter, Washington on horseback appeared on the Great Seal of the Confederate States. This time, he had no sympathy for Lincoln’s claims.
The former U.S. President descended from the platform. Here and there, instead of dispersing, men held their ground and argued with one another, standing nose to nose while they shouted and waved their arms. But no riot followed Lincoln’s speech. Given the volatility of Louisville—of all Kentucky, and Missouri, too—Lee knew only relief over that.
Marshall in his wake, he strode through the thinning crowd toward Lincoln. He was a tall man himself, and Lincoln, especially after resuming the stovepipe hat he had shed while speaking, possibly the tallest man in the park. The ex-President was easy to keep in sight.
Lincoln soon spotted Lee. He waited for him to come up. “Mr. President,” Lee said, inclining his head.
“Not anymore,” Lincoln said. “And we both know whose fault that is, don’t we?”
The Rivington men’s, Lee thought. Without them, from what they’d said, Lincoln would still be President, and President of a nation intent on taking vengeance on the unsuccessfully seceded Southern states. Yet he did not sound bitter; he seemed wryly amused, as if talking of the world’s vagaries with a friend. Try as he would, Lee could not see in this elongated, homely man the ogre Andries Rhoodie had described.
But all that was by the way. Lincoln dwelt in the White House no more, and the nightmare future would not come to pass. Lee asked, “What do you plan to do now, sir?”
“Till the election, I aim to go through Kentucky and Missouri like Satan going up and down in the world, and do everything I can to hold ‘em in the Union,” Lincoln said, and poked more fun at himself by adding, “Not that some of the people in both states don’t already figure me for the devil, I expect. After that…” His voice trailed away.” After that, I suppose I’ll go home to Springfield, practice law, and get old. When I was younger, I never thought I’d escape obscurity, so going back to it should be easy enough. Maybe one day, when all this fuss has died down, I’ll write a book about how everything would have turned out for the best if it hadn’t been for Bobbie Lee.”
“You will, I hope, forgive me, sir, for holding the opinion that these matters have turned out for the best,” Lee said.
“You don’t need my forgiveness, General, though you’re polite to ask for it. Even under your Southern constitution, every man may hold what opinions he likes, eh? Candide believed to the end that this was the best of all possible worlds.” Lincoln let out a wry laugh. “What does what I think matter, anyhow? I’m going back into the shadows. But you, General, your future stretches out ahead lit with torches and paved with gold.”
“Hardly that, sir,” Lee said.
“No? Where else for the noblest Virginian of them all but at the head of—of his country?” Lincoln’s mouth twisted. Even now, going on a year after the South had won its independence, acknowledging the Confederacy pained him.
Lee also wondered whether he meant the crib from Shakespeare as compliment or sarcasm. He answered, “I am proud to serve my state and my nation in whatever capacity they choose for me.”
Lincoln looked down at him. As always; he found that disconcerting; he was used to holding the high ground in conversation. “Serving a country is all very well, General, but when the time comes, will you be able to lead it in the direction you know it must go?” He did not wait for a reply, but touched a finger to the brim of his hat and departed.
Charles Marshall stared after him. “How could the North have been so misguided as to elect that man its President?” He mimed a couple of steps’ worth of Lincoln’s loose-jointed gait.
“He is peculiar-looking, to himself, I understand, not least. But he knows the proper questions to ask.” Lee also watched Lincoln until he disappeared behind some willows with their full skirts of new spring leaves. The proper question indeed: if he said slavery might possibly have to end one day, who in the South would listen to him?
“Sorry to disturb your supper, General Lee, sir,” a messenger boy said, dumping a tall pile of telegrams onto Lee’s table in the Galt House dining room.
“It’s all right, son.” Lee raised an eyebrow in humorous resignation. Already telegrams leaned in drunken profusion against a platter of stuffed duck, against a bowl of peas, a gravy boat, wineglasses; already they covered the bread and hid the relish trays from sight. Lee went on, “It’s plain I’ll be reading more than eating for yet another night.”
The messenger boy probably did not hear that last sentence; he was hurrying back to the telegraph office for a new load of messages. General Grant said, “When you’re done with those, sir, if you’d be kind enough to pass them my way—”
“Certainly.” Lee went through the sheaf one by one, occasionally pausing to cut another bite from the slice of saddle of mutton in front of him. Behind him, a small colored boy with a large peacock fan stirred the still, muggy air that went with June evenings in Louisville. “Not too hard, there,” Lee warned him as the papers on the table shifted. “You don’t want to blow them into the soup, now do you?” The little slave giggled and shook his head.
Lee finished the pile. “No great irregularities here,” he told Grant.
The Federal general was also going through a stack. “Nor in mine, it seems.” He reached bottom just after Lee did. “Shall we exchange prisoners?”
In return for the reports the Federal election inspectors had sent to Grant, Lee gave him the latest set of messages he himself had received from the Confederate inspectors. As Grant said, the vote had on the whole proceeded smoothly. Some precincts from the south and west of Missouri had yet to report. Lee suspected no one in those parts had voted; regardless of armistices, regardless of Federal occupation troops, the civil war there went on. But the area was thinly populated anyhow. Even had all its votes gone for the Confederacy, the state as a whole would have remained in the Union.
Kentucky was another matter. Grant acknowledged as much when he said, “In the coming week, General Lee, I shall shift my headquarters to St. Louis, so as to maintain them within the territory of the United States.”
“You may even find it more congenial than Louisville, from your previous acquaintance with the city,” Lee said.
“I doubt it.” Grant’s face never gave away much, but his voice turned bleak. “I was out of the army—on the beach, you might say—while I was there, so my memories are not entirely happy ones. And, as you may understand, sir, I cannot rejoice at Kentucky’s having voted itself out of the Union to which I owe everything I have in this world.”
“I respect the sincerity of your sentiments; no, further—I admire it. I hope you will understand that the people of Kentucky are equally sincere in theirs.” By close to four to three, Kentucky’s voters had chosen to cast their lot with the South.
Grant said, “I recognize it, but I own to having a great deal of difficulty admiring it. To speak frankly, I believe the Southern cause one of the worst for which people ever took up arms, and one for which there was not the least excuse. That you fought so long and valiantly for such a patently bad cause has always been a wonder to me.”
The Guns of the South Page 39
