The marshals did their best. Slowly, the procession began to advance. The journey to the base of Washington’s statue took three times as long as it should have. Lee fidgeted nervously as he went along at slow march. Jefferson Davis set a calming hand on his arm. “The crush does not matter, not today. As the good colonel said, without you we have no show.” Caught out like a small boy at some naughty act, Lee spread his hands in a show of guilt.
The band, still playing lustily, took its place to one side of the wooden platform after the marshals cleared away the numerous citizens who had thought the area ideal for viewing the inaugural ceremony. That only packed the rest of the square more tightly; crowds spilled out onto Ninth Street and Capitol Street, snarling traffic on both thoroughfares and creating a hubbub which, in both volume and intensity, seemed inappropriate to the celebration about to take place.
Having displaced the improperly situated spectators, the marshals spread out along the front of the platform. There were at most a dozen of them; it was no great show of force. Lee thought of Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural in a country coming apart, where sharpshooters peered from the windows of the U.S. Capitol and a battery of artillery remained just out of sight in case insurrection broke out without warning. No such fears disrupted the Confederate States, not today.
Lee and Jefferson Davis ascended to the platform. So did Alexander Stephens and Albert Gallatin Brown. The members of the Joint Committee on Arrangements already stood up there. Congressman Rogers had another list in his hand. “Yes, Bishop Johns, your place is up here, as is yours, of course, Judge Halyburton. Colonel Dimmock, you too, if you please, and the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and you, Governor Smith. For our other distinguished guests, we have seats waiting down here at the front.” He pointed to the rows of wooden chairs there, marked off by a gilded rope.
There was only one problem with those wooden chairs—not enough of them had been set out. Senators and members of the Virginia House of Delegates, reporters and congressmen and Cabinet members rowed like Kilkenny cats as they tried to stake out places to sit. Lee watched the unseemly spectacle for a couple of minutes, then turned to Charles Dimmock. “Mr. Chief Marshal, may I beg a favor and ask that my wife be brought up here? Given her infirmity, I fear she may not be altogether safe in that seething crowd.”
“I’ll see to it, sir.” Dimmock leaned over, called a couple of junior marshals to his side. The husky young men pushed their way through the squabbling dignitaries—seeing a minister pull a congressman’s beard, Lee wondered how many duels would arise from the day’s events—make their way to Mary Custis Lee, whom her children had protectively surrounded, and, with the help of her sons, got her and her chair onto the platform.
“Thank you, Robert,” she said. “This is much better for me.” A gust of wind tugged at her bonnet. She snatched up a hand to keep it from being blown away.
When all the chairs were taken and those unable to gain them had been banished beyond the pale of the gilded rope, the band, at a signal from Sion Rogers, fell silent. The congressman shouted, “The Right Reverend Bishop Johns will now ask the Lord’s blessing on this auspicious day.”
The noise from the crowd did not cease, but it did diminish as the bishop, splendid in the glistening silks of his vestments, stepped forward to the edge of the platform. “Let us pray,” he said. Lee bent his head, but not before he saw the wind blow off the bishop’s miter. Johns made a catch a baseball player would have been proud of, set the runaway headgear more firmly in place. Several people cheered.
Ignoring them, the bishop repeated, “Let us pray. Almighty God, guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which, by your blessing, our fathers were able to vindicate, establish, and transmit to us, their posterity. Our hope remains reverently fixed on you, whose favor is ever vouchsafed to the cause which is just. With humble gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the. Providence which has so visibly protected the Confederacy during its brief but eventful career, we trustingly commit ourselves to you, so that, with the continuance of your favor gratefully acknowledged, we may look forward to success, to peace, and to prosperity for our nation. Amen.”
“Amen,” echoed from the crowd as Bishop Johns stepped back. Judge J. D. Halyburton of the Confederate Court at Richmond strode ponderously forward to take his place. The judge had a Bible under his arm. His voice was a bass rumble that suited the massive frame his black robe could not altogether conceal:
“The President of the Senate of the Confederate States of America having informed me that Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of the state of Mississippi has obtained a majority of the electoral votes cast for the office of Vice President of the Confederate States of America; I now have the honor to invite Senator Brown here to me, to set his hand upon the Holy Scriptures and take his oath of office.” Judge Halyburton held out the Bible to Brown. “Raise your right hand, sir.”
As his running-mate was formally invested with the Vice Presidency, Lee looked out at the sea of faces, all turned toward the platform. Most were still and attentive, watching and doing their best to hear Brown take his oath. A small commotion a hundred yards away, or perhaps a bit more, drew Lee’s eye—several men were trying to elbow their way closer to the platform through the tightly packed crowd. Lee wondered why; most of them were tall enough to see over the heads in front of them.
Judge Halyburton was booming, “I now have the honor to invite General Lee here to me, to set his hand upon the Holy Scriptures and take his oath of office.”
Lee took off his hat as he walked over to the judge. The wind kicked up again, blowing his coat open. He tried to keep it in place with his arms, and hoped the chilly breeze would not cause him to catch cold.
“Set your hat down for a moment, if you would,” Halyburton said quietly. Lee obeyed, putting his foot down on the edge of the brim so the hat would not flyaway from him. His left hand went onto the Bible. At full volume once more, the judge said, “Raise your right hand.”
Again, Lee obeyed. Then, phrase by phrase, he repeated the Presidential oath: “I, Robert Edward Lee—do solemnly swear—that I will faithfully execute—the office of President of the Confederate States—and will, to the best of my ability—preserve, protect, and defend—the Constitution thereof.” On his own, he added, “So help me God.”
Judge Halyburton’s plump cheeks got plumper as he grinned and stuck out a hand. “Let me be the first to offer you my best wishes, President Lee.”
“Thank you, sir.” Lee retrieved his hat. As if that were a cue, the band played “Dixie” again. The crowed cheered and clapped over the music. Lee used those couple of minutes to review his inaugural address. He hoped it would not slide out of his mind the moment he began to speak. He’d spent the last several days working to memorize it, but knew he lacked the lifelong politician’s gift for storing away long stretches of prose.
The music stopped. The crowd grew…quieter. When Lee decided they were as quiet as they were going to get, he took a deep breath and began, wishing he owned Judge Halyburton’s stentorian tones: “The trust you, the people of the Confederate States of America, have reposed in me makes me all too conscious of my own inadequacies. Further, the great achievements of my predecessor, the illustrious Jefferson Davis, founding President of our happy Confederacy, set a standard I despair of emulating. In the face of formidable odds, he secured for us our independence from the government of the United States, which was determined to deny us our right to such independence. He—”
Just then, the fickle wind flicked his hat out of his hand, leaving him with the unpalatable choice of losing his dignity by letting it blow away or losing his dignity by bending to pick it up. It lay at his feet, as if mocking him. He glared down at it. Before the wind could sweep it off the platform, he stooped down and grabbed it.
Something craacked through the space his head had just occupied. A bullet, the unsleeping soldier’s part of his mind reported. He started
to straighten. Another bullet tugged at his coat sleeve, parting the material neat as a scissors.
Judge Halyburton had never seen combat. All through the war, he’d served on the bench in Richmond. But nothing was wrong with his reactions. He swept out a thick arm and knocked Lee off the platform. He stumbled and went to all fours when he hit the ground below. An instant later, the judge crashed down beside him with a cry of pain, blood soaking his robes from a shoulder wound.
Lee leaped to his feet, started to scramble back onto the platform so he could see what was going on—a dignified, even boring, occasion had turned to horror in the wink of an eye. Judge Halyburton grabbed his ankle and held him back, “Stay down here, you damned fool,” he shouted. “It’s you they’re shooting at.”
That had not occurred to Lee. Despite reading of Lincoln’s assassination in the Picture History of the Civil War, he still found the idea of political murder in America as alien as that sideways world wherein the South had lost its war for freedom.
Thinking of that other world, and of having seen those big men elbowing through the crowd, made him suddenly, dreadfully certain who the “they” doing the shooting were. “The Rivington men!” he exclaimed, and tried to break free of Judge Halyburton’s grip. “Let me got” But the judge clung to him, limpetlike, with all the strength in his unwounded left arm.
Bullets kept flying, with the extravagant frequency that marked the use of repeating weapons. Through his own startlement, through the rising tide of shouts and screams from the crowd, Lee noted that these repeaters, whatever they were and to whomever they belonged, sounded different from the AK-47s to which he’d become accustomed.
He also noted that, while the assassins had failed to slay him with their first shots, they were not giving up. All but one of the marshals who had served as ceremonial guards in front of the platform were down, dead or wounded. The sole unhurt man had his repeater on his shoulder, but hesitated to fire because of the crush of people between him and the gunmen, and because of the innocent people behind them. The assassins had no such compunctions.
Lee finally twisted free from Judge Halyburton. He leaped up onto the platform, only to be knocked flat by Jefferson Davis. “Stay low!” the just-become-former President bawled in his ear. As if to underline his words, another stream of bullets buzzed by.
The platform was a charnel house, blood and bodies everywhere. Wounded men shrieked. Mary’s chair lay on its side, two wheels in the air. Ice ran through Lee. “My wife,” he gasped. He had wanted her to be able to see his moment of triumph. Now—”Mary?” he said again. Davis did not, or perhaps would not, answer him.
The crowd surged like the sea gone mad. Most people were trying to flee the assassins, but some men moved purposefully toward them. Amidst the continued chatter of the strange repeaters, single pistol shots began to bark. A fair number of citizens habitually went armed, and almost all of them had fought in the Second American Revolution. After the initial shock, their instinct was to hit back.
The marshal with the AK-47 fired three quick rounds. Then he reeled backwards; the rifle flew from his hands as he clutched at his neck. A dignitary in frock coat and top hat snatched up the weapon and began to shoot with a confidence that showed he had been a wartime infantry soldier. Within moments, three other men grabbed fallen marshals’ rifles and followed his example.
But the assassins kept shooting, too. Lee wondered how that was possible, given the fire now coming against them from every side and their lack of any cover save the panicked folk around them. Yet the repeaters that were not AK-47s snarled on and on; men and women toppled and screamed. More bullets cracked by, some just above Lee’s head.
After what seemed forever but was, Lee’s pocket watch insisted, only a couple of minutes, the assassins’ weapons at last fell, silent. Jefferson Davis cautiously raised his head. When nothing happened, he let Lee up.
“Dear God!” Lee groaned, getting his first long look at the slaughter all around. He’d known the aftermath of battle ever since his days in Mexico, more than twenty years before; during the Second American Revolution he’d seen more slaughter than one man had any business knowing. But never in his worst nightmares had he imagined a firefight in the midst of a crowd of civilians—combat was for soldiers, not innocent bystanders.
If the murderers out there had ever heard of that rule, they laughed at it. Men in silk cravats and men in farmers’ overalls, women in faded calico and women in glistening taffetas bled and moaned and cried, for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And up on the platform, where the assassins had concentrated their fire—
Lee had trouble telling who was slain, who wounded, and who merely splashed with other people’s blood. Then he saw that Albert Gallatin Brown, for one, would never get up again; the new Vice President of the Confederate States had a neat hole above his right eye, while the back of his head was a white and crimson horror of blown-out brains and bone.
Jefferson Davis yanked off his coat, began tearing at it to make bandages to help the injured. Lee knew he ought to do likewise, but he couldn’t, not yet—he’d just noticed his wife’s skirts, behind her overturned chair. “Mary?” he said. She did not answer, but she might well not have heard him through the groans and wails all around. He hurried to her.
Death had been kind, as far as death ever is. She looked surprised, not hurt, but her staring eyes would never see anything again. Blood soaked her breast and pooled all around her; a single round had gone in one side of her throat and, quite neatly, out the other.
As if from very far away, people shouted, “General Lee, sir! President Lee!” The titles reminded him that public duty came before private pain. He made himself turn his head away from the woman with whom he’d shared almost thirty-seven years. Tears would come later, when he had time for them. Now… now someone was yelling, “One of the bastards is still alive, President Lee!”
Even through shock and anguish, that could still surprise him. Like a splash of cold water, it helped clear his head. He said, “Then he must be kept so. We shall have answers for this. Bring him up here at once.” While he waited, he leaned over the edge of the platform, down to where Judge Halyburton sat holding his shoulder with his good hand and using some most unjudicial language. “Your honor,” Lee said, and then again, more urgently: “Your honor!”
“What do you need?” Halyburton growled.
For this day never to have happened. As fast as the thought appeared, Lee forced it down: no time for it, and no use to it. He said, “I believe, and hope momentarily to confirm, that the men who committed this cowardly atrocity belong to the society that calls itself America Will Break. That society has for some years housed itself in the building across from Mechanic’s Hall.” He pointed toward the western corner of Capitol Square. Sure enough, through the trees he saw the Rivington men’s flag still flying. “Will you grant us a warrant to search those premises?”
“Goddam right I will,” Halyburton said. “And if that’s where the snake’s lair is, sir, I’ll tell you to get yourself somewhere else besides here. A good shot could hit you from there.”
“He’s right, Mr. President,” Jefferson Davis said. “Get to cover at once, behind Washington’s monument.” He did not wait for Lee to argue, but forced him down off the blood-soaked platform and then behind the sheltering marble and bronze. At the same time, he shouted,” A guard for President Lee!”
The guard detachment was surely the highest-ranking in the history of the Confederate States, as a good half of its members were generals who had come to watch one of their own inaugurated. They held bared swords, weapons hardly more likely to be useful than the drums and fifes and horns of the bandsmen who also crowded round to protect Lee.
Despite the guards, despite Davis’s warnings, Lee looked around the base of the statue of Washington. More folk than Judge Halyburton alone must have heard what he said about the headquarters of America Will Break, for men marched purposefully toward it thro
ugh the still-milling crowd.
“This is a hard day for the country,” Lee said. “We shall sorely miss Vice President Brown, as well as the other casualties we have suffered. And—” His voice broke. If he let himself think about and, he would not be able to do what manifestly had to be done. And would wait, would have to wait. Davis set an understanding hand on his shoulder. He nodded gratefully, said, “I hope—I pray—Mrs. Davis is safe?”
“Yes, she is well, praise be to God—I saw her. Your own loss—” Davis looked uncommonly grim. “We shall have a reckoning for this day, and hang these wretches higher than Haman—a better end than they merit, too.”
Lee’s sons, big men like himself, forced their way through the guards to him. Blood splashed Custis and Rob; by the way they ignored it, it was not their own. Lee’s mouth twisted when he saw Roonie cradling a wounded hand against his other arm. For a moment, he could not help being father rather than leader. “Your sisters, your wives?” he demanded harshly.
“None of them hurt,” Custis said, and Lee’s shoulders slumped in thanks. Then Custis went on, “But sir, is Mother—?” Tears cut clean tracks through the crimson stains on his cheeks.
“Yes, my dear boys, she—” Lee again checked himself before he dissolved in sorrow with his sons. Just then, a congressman and a fellow in the ragged clothes of a day laborer dragged Konrad de Buys up to him. He knew a crazy kind of relief; duty always pulled him out of his private concerns. How often Mary had taken him to task for that. Mary—He scowled and focused his attention on de Buys.
The Rivington man’s face, usually bold and boyish, was pale and twisted with pain. He’d been shot in the right wrist and left shoulder; blood soaked hastily—and no doubt grudgingly—applied bandages. His eyes widened, just for an instant, when he saw Lee. Then, as best he could through the torment of his wounds, he set his features to reveal nothing. He even managed an ironic nod of greeting.
The Guns of the South Page 56
