The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (18 page)

He turned to look.

It was his secretary, Hay.

“Sir, we just got a message from General Grant. His courier boat had some boiler problems, and he won’t arrive till this evening.”

“No problem,” Lincoln replied softly. “It’ll give me time to think.”

ON THE WAY TO THE FRONT

Having cast off, the small packet boat began to pick up speed, water foaming up from under the stern. The small deck was packed, mostly with officers returning to the front line. What space was still available was stacked with crates and barrels. At least the weather promised to be fair, because except for a few of the higher ranks, most would be sleeping out on the deck tonight for the run down to City Point.

A few joked that they preferred the night boat; those running during the day would, on occasion, draw some long-range fire from Rebel militia. The militia, far behind the lines, enjoyed taking potshots at anything that steamed by. Recently, a major had been killed by just such a random shot.

“Damn bushwhackers, we should hang ’em when we catch them,” someone announced, and there was a chorus of agreement.

“Aren’t you Pleasants with the 48th?”

James saw a colonel approach and extend his hand.

“I’m MacArthur, 33rd Ohio. We were on your right in the Wilderness.”

He extended his hand, Pleasants took it, and for several minutes MacArthur tried to engage him in conversation but was met with only monosyllabic replies. The Ohio man finally drifted away, and as he did, James realized that Pleasants was staring at him. There was no sense in pretending he had not seen him, so James smiled and came over to his side.

“We were on the same boat this morning,” James said, extending his hand, which Pleasants shook for a brief instant. “James Reilly with
Harper’s Weekly
. Remember?”

“Yes.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Mr. Reilly, I am tempted to ask if there is a provost guard on this ship and have you put under arrest.”

“Sir?”

“You followed me today.”

“I don’t quite understand what you are saying, Colonel.”

“You most certainly do,” Pleasants replied, his voice cold, tense. “We checked into the same hotel.”

“No crime in that,” James said easily. “I was in town to make sure my drawings went to a courier to take them to New York. Sometimes you have to do that yourself.”

“Then why did you follow me when I left the hotel?”

“Sir, I am afraid you are confusing me with someone else,” James replied, staring the colonel straight in the eye.

“You make a rather poor spy, Mr. Reilly. At least change out of that long duster you insist on wearing when following someone. I spotted you when I walked out of a particular shop.”

James did not reply for a moment.

“I am a correspondent with
Harper’s,
” James finally said. “But I can assure you I am not some damn Rebel spy.”

“Then why did you follow me and go into that shop?”

“I will confess curiosity took hold. I’ve been with your corps for two weeks now.”

“I haven’t seen you.”

“I am not allowed to see you. Your sector is sealed off from any reporters.”

“With good reason, damn it,” Pleasants snapped.

“I’ve mostly been with the Fourth Division since they joined the corps.”

Pleasants looked at him with a good poker player’s gaze.

“If you doubt me, sir, when we dock at City Point, call over a provost, have me put under arrest, take me to General Burnside’s headquarters, and check directly with him.”

Pleasants did not reply.

James sighed, drew out a flask, offered it, which Pleasants refused, and took a drink.

“All right, I was curious as to what you were up to. I think I have it figured out.”

Pleasants looked past him and there was a nervousness about him.

“Sir, I am a Union man. I’ve been covering this war ever since McClellan’s Peninsula fiasco. I hate loud mouths, boasters, and especially reporters who don’t know when to keep their mouths shut as much as you do.”

He hesitated and tried to smile.

“And officers who talk too much as well.”

There was an ever so slight nod from Pleasants.

“And I lost a brother at Cold Harbor.”

Already that battle was being buried and forgotten. No one spoke of it the way they did of Gettysburg, Antietam, or even the two Bull Run fights. Cold Harbor would be forgotten. It was too bitter and painful a defeat to be remembered or glorified. Its memory had been buried with its dead.

“The desk clerk told me that someone claiming to be my brother asked for me at Willard’s as I checked out,” Pleasants retorted. “He described you perfectly.”

“That was me.”

Pleasants gazed at him coldly, then finally nodded.

“So why are you interested in the Fourth Division of my corps?”

“The boys with one of the black regiments were doing burial detail at Lee’s old mansion. I went there to see my brother buried, got to know a couple of their men, and asked if I could draw them as they got ready for whatever was coming up.”

“Coming up?”

James extended his hand in a calming gesture.

“I want this war over just as much as you do. For what it is worth from a newspaperman, you have my oath I’ll not breathe a word of what I’m thinking.”

Pleasants did not reply.

“I’ll say no more, sir. My offer stands. Report me if you wish when we get to City Point. I’ll be camped with the men of the Fourth Division if you decide not to, but then change your mind later.”

Pleasants seemed to hesitate and then finally spoke.

“What do you think of those colored soldiers?”

“Sir?”

“Is this some sort of stunt by the Abolitionists? I’ve heard mixed reports. Everyone knows about the charge of the 54th Massachusetts last year down in front of Charleston. They were courageous in the face of entrenched firepower. It was good press at least, but by God, they got slaughtered for nothing. Then, on the other side you hear reports that they panic easy, that if they don’t have their white officers telling them what to do every step of the way they break down and run. What do you think of them?”

It was the most Pleasants had said to him on either leg of this journey.

“I think they’re trying very, very hard to be good soldiers,” James replied, after thinking it over for a moment. “Better than some, not so good as others. None of them have seen the elephant, of course, so they are all fresh fish. But on the whole I’d stack them up alongside any white regiment in this army who were going into their first fight.”

“Will they charge into Hell, if ordered?” Pleasants asked and then he seemed to draw back slightly, as if knowing he had just said far too much.

Reilly looked at him closely. The moment was ironic, for the steamer was rounding the great bend of the Potomac past the run-down mansion of General Washington. He was a man who had owned slaves, and yet by the end of the Revolutionary War, had agreed to the enlistment of thousands of colored troops into the ranks.

“They have something driving them we don’t have,” James finally said.

“And that is?”

“They have to prove something.”

Pleasants did not reply, as if wanting more.

“Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Well maybe for you it isn’t as much, but for me it is.”

“How is that?”

“I’m from Ireland,” and he forced a smile. “Accident of birth not of choice, believe me. My parents brought me to these shores when I was fourteen back during the famine. Me ma…”

He paused, realizing he was drifting into dialect, “My mother died on the passage over. My father remarried and we moved to a godforsaken place called Chicago where he took work on the railroads. There was no place for me with them, so I lit out.”

He smiled.

“I found a kindly lawyer who allowed me to sleep in his office in exchange for keeping it clean, plus four bits a week, which was all he could afford back then, and that was where my life started in a way.”

“Kindly lawyer?” Pleasants laughed and then spat over the railing. “That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.”

James did not know the meaning of the word, but he caught the sense of it and continued to smile.

“There are a few, a precious few. The point is, we Irish have had to claw every inch of the way for what this country claims is the right of all men, but those rights get forgotten by a lot of people once they get those rights for themselves.”

Pleasants said nothing, but James could see his words might sound like preaching.

“All I am saying is, you asked me if they would charge into Hell. And I say, hell yes. The same way the Irish Brigade charged and died at Fredericksburg.”

“Ghastly fight,” Pleasants sighed. “I was there.”

“So was I, and I wept at the sight of it, the memory of it.”

It would haunt him for the rest of his life, the way those men cried,
“Erin go bragh,”
as they swept up the blood-soaked slopes of Marye’s Heights, died nearly to a man, and gained immortal glory and perhaps, just perhaps, the first step to the realization of many that the Irish were as much Americans as anyone else. He had personally carried the drawings of that charge back to New York, slammed them on his editor’s desk, and was not ashamed of the fact that, in tears, he begged the man to print them, which he did. His everlasting shame in a way was that he had not gone in with his brothers from Erin and instead had fought that battle with just a pencil and a stick of charcoal in his hand.

“What I’m trying to say”—He realized his voice was slightly choked and was angry that emotion was getting the better of him. “I’m trying to say that the men of the Fourth Division have a fire in them. The first battle will most likely quench it, as it does with most regiments. Oh, they’ll fight after that to be certain, but like all veterans, they will do so as their sworn duty, not with that fire of idealism in them. Those colored soldiers will charge into Hell because by going to Hell, if need be, they will prove they are men and as that Frederick Douglass of theirs said, with rifle in hand they will prove their right of citizenship to the entire world.”

James fell silent and realized his voice had pitched upward and several others were looking over at him. A couple of them snickered; he heard a whispered laugh of “Damn, stupid darkies will run all right, straight in the opposite direction, to the rear.” He turned but the man who said those words would not identify himself.

But one did nod and smiled.

“Bully for you, I’m with you, Irish,” he announced, shook James’s hand, and then after shooting a telling glance at another officer, walked off toward the bow of the ship.

James looked back at Pleasants.

The colonel stood silent in the shadows and then finally replied.

“I pray to God you are right.”

Without another word to James, he walked, off as did the other officers around him.

James was tempted to offer a taunt that he had a good quart of store-bought Irish whiskey in his haversack and would drink it with a man who would drink to the Fourth or the Ninth, but he knew better. No point in starting a personal fight on the deck of a boat going back to the war.

Summer darkness had descended. By dawn, they would be rounding Fortress Monroe and by midday be back at City Point. The quart should last him till then, he thought, and curling up in a corner between two barrels, filled with what he suspected was whiskey bound as priority shipment to some headquarters staff, he uncorked the bottle and rationed out his first long drink.

It helped to still the memories, and he was soon asleep.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Abraham Lincoln leaned back in his chair, scanning the papers and maps, turning them over one by one and then, at last, placing them back on his desk.

“Do you honestly think this will work?” he asked.

General Grant, who had sat while his President evaluated the proposal, was silent for a moment.

They had gone over why Sherman was stalled in front of Atlanta, the southern campaign wearily dragging into a third month, with no end in sight. The utter fiasco of an entire army venturing up the Red River out in Louisiana and Arkansas, rather than marching east to take Mobile as ordered, had been passed over. It was an embarrassment to Grant that a general in charge of an entire army had claimed to have misread orders and set off 180 degrees opposite from where he was supposed to go. In front of Charleston that pathetic siege continued without any end in sight. That the Rebels were dug in like ticks on a hound was now a well-worn and overused analogy.

The only hope of a shift of fortunes before the Republican and Democrat conventions, and with that any hope of winning the national election come November, rested on Petersburg, and what Grant had just shown him was the most radical of plans to end it.

“I will admit, Mr. President, I have not studied it as closely as I could have. I have delegated that to General Meade, who is in direct command of that army. But I think there is at least a chance of success.”

Lincoln nodded.

“From some of your questions, sir,” Grant ventured, “it seems you have had some foreknowledge of this idea.”

Lincoln just smiled and said nothing.

Grant did not probe further, for it was not his place to do so. That was something Lincoln appreciated about him. He knew how to give honest straightforward answers without any “varnish,” but also knew when not to ask or push. Grant was unlike so many of his generals, especially McClellan, whom he would undoubtedly face in the fall election.

“I feel it is time to make a few things absolutely clear,” Lincoln finally replied. As he spoke, he raised his long legs and put them up on his desk, folded his lanky arms over his stomach and leaned back in his chair, with the forelegs rising off the floor so that he was perfectly balanced. Somehow, however, this casual gesture did not diminish his authority in the slightest.

“If this fails, it could turn into an absolute slaughter, could it not? The same as happened at Cold Harbor?”

Grant visibly winced at the mention of that fight.

“Yes, sir, it could.”