Authors: Thomas Fleming

When This Cruel War Is Over (25 page)

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over

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Blam Blam.
What was that noise? Gunshots. Single gunshots. The pain in Moses Washington's chest was worse. It jangled through his whole body every time he breathed.
Blam Blam.
He raised his head and saw about twenty Confederate soldiers on the far side of the battlefield, shooting the wounded men lying there.

“Here's 'nother one!”

“Send him to nigger heaven!”

Blam.

They were shooting the wounded blacks. They walked past the white wounded without touching them. Jasper Jones was lying only a few feet away from Washington. He was curled up on his side, his fingers still clutching his bloody belly.

“Jasper,” Washington whispered. “They're gonna kill us.”

He took a better look at Jasper. He was dead. For another five minutes Washington lay there, breathing in small gulps to reduce the pain, trying to figure out what to do. His shirt was soaked with blood. He felt so weak, he was afraid he'd fall down if he tried to run.

Behind him he heard someone shout, “Stop! Stop! I demand you to stop!”

It was Colonel Henry Gentry. He was on a big black horse. He was all by himself. There was not another federal soldier in sight. Several of the Confederates walked toward him, their rifles leveled on their hips.

“What'n hell do you want?” asked one of them, a short red-faced boy. He did not look more than fourteen years old.

“I want to see Colonel Jameson. I'm a friend of his mother's. I'm Colonel Henry Gentry.”

“You wait here. I'll see what the colonel says.”

The boy vanished into the fort. A wounded white soldier rolled over and cried, “Water! Jesus won't someone give me some water?”

One of the Confederates handed the man his canteen. The wounded soldier gulped it greedily. This Confederate was not a boy, though he was almost as short as one. He had a scraggly brown beard.

“What you tryin' to do? Stop us from killin' these niggers?” he asked Gentry.

Gentry said nothing.

“We took a blood oath. Every nigger we see in a blue uniform is gonna get kilt,” the veteran said.

The boy emerged from the fort. “Colonel Jameson says he's got nothin' to say to you!” he called. “He told me to tell you he'll see you in Indiana!”

Gentry turned his horse and started down the hill. Moses Washington realized the one-armed colonel was his only chance. In Keyport he had seemed like a pathetic
imitation of a soldier but he had come up here to try to stop the killing. Maybe he would help him.

Washington sprang to his feet and staggered after Gentry, calling, “Colonel!”

Gentry looked over his shoulder and slowed his horse. Washington clung to the pommel and they went careening down the hill. Washington's feet dragged on the ground but somehow he kept his grip.

“Hey!”

“He's got that nigger!”

“Kill him!”

The shouts were followed within seconds by a scattered volley. The bullets whistled high and only inspired the horse to increase his speed. In sixty seconds Gentry was on the road, heading for the Union camp. A few more bullets followed them but they were soon out of range. In another two or three minutes Union soldiers were helping Washington into a hospital tent, full of groaning men and cursing doctors.

A white-bearded doctor gave Washington a half-glass of whiskey. Two orderlies jammed a rag in his mouth and held him down while the doctor probed for the bullet with some sort of long wire. The whiskey did not do much for the pain, which was ten times worse than the original wound. Finally the doctor growled, “Got it,” and held the bullet in his bloody fingers for Washington to admire.

“You're one lucky nigger,” the doctor said. “It missed your lung and didn't break any bones. You'll live if it doesn't get infected.”

The orderlies bandaged the wound and Washington stumbled into the hot July sunshine. A swirl of darkness forced him to lean against a tree. Around him lay about two hundred wounded men, screaming and moaning for water. Washington realized he was desperately thirsty himself.

“Moses!” It was Colonel Gentry holding out a canteen.
There were tears on his face. “They shot us to pieces,” Gentry said.

Washington realized the colonel was talking about the Keyport troopers. He swigged from the canteen. It was brandy. “We done our best, Colonel.”

“I know you did. If only we had a better general. I told him a frontal assault was crazy. I wanted to send a flying column up the road to seize Saltville. That would have given us waterâ”

“Wish we'd done it, Colonel.”

“Can you come with me? I want you to tell General Burbridge what you saw.”

Washington felt too weak to walk more than a step but he managed to follow Gentry down the road to where General Burbridge was standing with his colonels. Gentry said he had rescued a witness to mass murder. He wanted Burbridge to file charges against Adam Jameson and every other officer in his command. He wanted them prosecuted after the war.

“Get out of my sight, Gentry,” General Burbridge said through gritted teeth. “Haven't I got enough to worry about without you making me responsible for a lot of wounded niggers? This is your mess as much as mine. I don't think you'll telegraph Lincoln about it.”

Gentry turned away from this humiliation as if Burbridge had kicked him in the stomach. For the first time it dawned on Washington that the man really cared about black people. “I'm sorry Moses,” he said as they walked slowly back to the hospital.

“Nothin' to be sorry about, Colonel. I knows it wasn't your fault.”

“I'm still sorry,” Gentry said. “Sorry as hell.” He gave Moses the canteen full of brandy and wandered into the trees.

At sundown the Army of Kentucky retreated. Moses Washington spent the night in a jolting wagon with about two dozen wounded blacks who had been lucky
enough to stagger off the battlefield. Every rut in the road sent a bolt of pain through his chest. Only one of the wounded belonged to the Keyport troop. They had been wiped out almost to the last man. Washington grieved for Jasper Jones. They had been friends since grammar school. Jasper had been his cornerman in his prizefights.

“Oh why did I ever leave Mas'r?” cried the soldier next to Washington. The doctors had cut off his leg below the knee. He was a typical slave nigger, ready to crawl back to the plantation.

Wait a second,
Washington thought. Once and for all he was banishing that idea from his mind. Every time he thought about the way he had used that phrase to make himself feel superior, his chest seemed to hurt worse. Slave or free did not make any difference to those Confederates who had vowed to kill every colored man in a uniform. Moses Washington was part of their fight for freedom now.

This change of mind made Washington think of Lucy. They had whipped her almost to death because she had stopped being a slave nigger and tried to win the war for her people. Washington told himself he was going to write her a real letter soon. He was going to tell Lucy that her people were his people now.

TWENTY-SEVEN

WILL,
PAUL THOUGHT, GAZING AT Janet Todd as they stood on the prow of a Baltimore and Ohio ferryboat, crossing the Hudson to New York. The sheer intensity of this woman's determination was carrying them deeper into this conspiracy, in spite of the portents of failure. She simply refused to listen to anyone, from John Wilkes Booth to Robert E. Lee, who intimated that the South was losing the war and the western confederacy was a desperate gamble.

Love.
That was the other reality in the equation. Did
will
negate it, producing zero? For some men, that sort of mathematics might be persuasive. They might fear their manhood was at risk with such a woman. But Paul had never seen Janet Todd as sweet-tempered or submissive. This formidable will only multiplied the risk of love somewhat beyond his original estimate.

There was now another factor in the equation that Major Stapleton was juggling in his aching head: The Crater. Before they left Richmond, Paul had accepted an invitation from their host, John Hayes, to visit it. They had ridden by back roads from Richmond to Petersburg. Hayes knew the Confederate commander, Pierre Beauregard, and he had allowed them to go into the fort adjacent to the site of the explosion. The scene beggared anything Paul had seen at Antietam or Fredericksburg. Thousands of dead Union soldiers, many of them African-Americans, were piled on top of one another in the huge hole. The sickening stench of decaying flesh
rose in the humid air. A swarthy Confederate major about Paul's age said, “They've sent a flag of truce, asking permission to collect them. But we're going make the bastards part of the foundation of a new fort.”

Stupidity,
Paul thought. How long could a professional soldier remain loyal to an army that committed such colossal acts of stupidity? The word kept echoing in his head all the way to New York. He did not know how this idea functioned in the equation he was trying to construct. He only knew it was acquiring ominous power.

From the ferry they hurried onto cobblestoned West Street, where they hailed a hack to ride uptown. It was the first of August; the temperature was in the nineties, with a soggy humidity that almost matched Washington D.C. Gotham's streets were a tangle of hacks, wagons, carts and carriages. Dense crowds surged along the sidewalks, the faces a mixture of white and black, Irish and German and English. Prosperity was visible everywhere, in the freshly painted buildings, the shops crammed with goods, the expensive clothes of the passersby. It was an almost cruel contrast to Richmond's bleak poverty.

Janet was thinking different thoughts. “How nice to be in the most pro-Southern city in the North,” she said.

“It was until the draft riots last July,” Paul replied. “Now I fear they take a dim view of the Confederacy.”

In the summer of 1863, New York had erupted in violent protests against the draft. For almost three days the city was in the hands of a mob. Only the intervention of federal troops had restored order.

“Why do you constantly have something
negative
to say about our cause?” Janet asked.

For a moment Paul almost admitted he was trying to make her see the South's cause was hopeless. “I'm only being negative about mob rule. Like General Lee, I
don't think mobs accomplish much. Here in New York the Democrats murdered every Negro they could find. They hanged them from street lampsâit was ugly.”

Mentioning Lee only increased Janet's irritation. They had quarreled about the general on the train from Washington, D.C. Janet had complained that he had not even tried to understand what they hoped to do in the western confederacy. Paul had insisted that Lee's concern about the Sons of Liberty turning into a mob was a legitimate worry. He declined to abandon the argument now. “You can't support an honorable cause with dishonorable acts,” he said.

Janet said nothing. She looked away from him at the crowded sidewalks.

“I thought we were going to be absolutely honest with each other. I assumed that meant I should say exactly what I think about everything, from Colonel Adam Jameson to General Lee.”

She clearly thought that clause of their contract should be either revised or revoked. Paul stubbornly continued, “The night before my roommate, Jeff Tyler, left the military academy, we agreed that the South's only hope was to fight an honorable defensive war. They should portray themselves as people being invaded by fanatics who were trying to change the fundamental structure of their society. It was their best hope of winning the world's sympathy.”

“What has that wonderful idea accomplished?” Janet said. “France, England, have toyed with us. Taken our money and sold us blockade runner trash. While we've neglected our natural alliesâthe Democrats of the North.”

At the Astor House, a huge granite pile on lower Broadway, they registered as brother and sister actors and obtained adjoining rooms without the slightest difficulty. Once more they were forced to pay in advance.

“I begin to feel sorry for theater people,” Paul said as they went up in the hydraulic elevator. “They seem universally distrusted.”

The elevator operator was a white-haired black man who stared straight ahead, paying no attention to them. “It's almost as bad as being a southerner in the North,” Janet said.

“Or a northerner in the South, I suppose,” Paul replied.

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder where we'll live, when all this is over.”

“My father is leaving me Hopemont. I'd be happy there, if you would be.”

“I'd be happy anywhere that you were happy.”

The elevator stopped at their floor, and the black operator opened the door to reveal a fat redfaced man and his equally fat wife. The woman stared at Janet's hand and gave Paul a glare as she and her husband stepped back to let him and Janet off. The whine of the descending elevator seemed to underscore the woman's disapproval.

“Did you notice her looking for a wedding ring?” Paul said. “I can imagine them telling friends over dinner about these two terrible young people on their way to an
assignation.
It's an old New York custom.”

“Have you ever done it?”

“Not until today.”

He thought his tone was playful but Janet's response was a frown.

In an hour, bathed and in fresh clothes, they were riding uptown in a horse-drawn trolley to a brownstone off Fifth Avenue on 36th Street. Paul handed an envelope to a short swarthy butler. He examined its contents and escorted them to a booklined study. A man with a distinctly Jewish-looking face and gray hair sat playing solitaire on a card table. He did not look up as they walked into the room.

“I'm told you need money,” he said with a brief
smile. “Something in the vicinity of two hundred thousand dollars?”

In Richmond, the morning after their meeting with Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, they had conferred with Judah Benjamin, the tall brilliant Jew who was serving as the Confederacy's secretary of state. He had given them this address and told them they would get additional instructions here, along with the money.

“We're buying thirty thousand rifles,” Paul said. “They could easily demand twenty dollars a gun.”

“If they want more money, we'll pay the balance later. A lot will depend on the kinds of guns that are on the market at the moment.”

The man opened a wall safe and counted out the money in $500 bills. “I'm adding another twenty-five thousand to buy yourself some newspaper coverage,” he said. “If your western revolution gets going it wouldn't hurt to have a New York paper backing you.”

Paul put the money in a belt around his waist. The mere act made him feel uneasy. He had sensed General Lee's disapproval of his decision to join the Sons of Liberty's conspiracy. Accepting this money as an agent of the Confederate government meant he had crossed the line from treasonous words to treasonous action. If the business ended in a court-martial, he would have only Henry Gentry's testimony to exonerate himâand he might be strongly inclined to say he had begun to distrust Major Stapleton.

“Do you have a newspaper in mind?” Paul asked.

“The
Daily News.
Fernando Wood backs the Southern Confederacy, thanks to the annual stipend we pay him. He'll be behind the western confederacy for the right price.”

There was more than a hint of sarcasm in the way he balanced the two confederacies. Paul suspected he believed in neither of them.

“Don't Mr. Wood's convictions have anything to do with it?” Janet asked.

“Fernando Wood has no convictions.”

The man resumed playing solitaire. The butler led them to the front door. “At least he could have wished us good luck,” Paul murmured.

As they boarded another horsecar, Paul bought a copy of the New York
Daily News
from a newsboy.
MORE ABOUT THE CRATER FIASCO!
was the headline over the lead story on the right-hand side of the page. The reporter described the disaster in grisly detail. He confirmed Lee's estimate that the Union troops had exploded more than four tons of gunpowder under the Confederate forts. He told how General Ambrose Burnside had been ordered to cancel the attack shortly after the explosion, when it became evident that the crater was an obstacle, not an open sesame to victory. But he had sat in his bombproof shelter and done nothing for five hours while his men blundered into the slaughter pit. Two other Union generals cowered in similar bombproof shelters, drunk, while their men died.

Stupidity.
The word gnawed at Paul's brain.

He paged through the rest of the paper. Toward the back, he saw a smaller headline:
Another Union Repulse.
The writer described the Army of Kentucky's attack on the Confederate saltworks near Saltville in western Virginia and its rout by the men of General Morgan's division under the command of Colonel Adam Jameson. An editorial tied this minor disaster into the crater fiasco and ended with a call for Ulysses S. Grant's dismissal as commander in chief of the Union Army:
How much longer are the American people expected to tolerate such gross incompetence? How many more men must die to support this failed president and his ruined administration?

“Doesn't that make delightful reading?” Janet asked.

“What?”

“The mess Grant is making,” Janet said.

Paul had almost forgotten she was sitting beside him, reading the same stories. He had instantly grasped the significance of the Union attack on Saltville. It was an attempt to destroy Adam Jameson's division before he could march to support the Sons of Liberty uprising.

The last paragraph of the Saltville story included a list of Union casualties. Paul was startled to find Captain Simeon Otis among the dead. He pointed out the name to Janet. “Colonel Gentry must have been involved,” he said.

“That makes me feel even better,” she replied.

Henry Gentry's intelligence network had obviously learned a great deal about Gabriel Todd's conspiracy. It meant an incursion by Adam Jameson was unlikely to have the advantage of surprise. Should he point this out to Janet? No, it would only lead to another argument.

They left the horsecar at Washington Square and hurried across the green park to a side street shop with an innocent name: GREYSTONE'S RARE BOOKS. Inside, a muscular balding man with a brown handlebar mustache was behind the counter. He studied them warily.

“I've been told you'd have this order ready,” Paul said, handing him another envelope. This one had been given to them by a Confederate secret service official in Richmond's Treasury Department, across the street from Thomas Jefferson's capitol.

“I'll be with you in two minutes,” the man said.

The message was in cipher. He undoubtedly had the codebook in the back of the store. He returned in a moment and held out his hand to Paul. “Miles McDonald's my name,” he said. “We've been expecting you.”

Paul introduced him to Janet. “She's the real commander of this expedition,” he said. “I'm only along as an ordnance expert.”

McDonald sent a clerk racing off to summon three
other members of the group. They soon joined them in the back room, where McDonald served everyone bitter coffee into which the men poured stiff shots of Irish whiskey from an open bottle on the table. Two of the new arrivals had Irish names and looked it; the third, a short, potbellied sidewhiskered Englishman named Bartholomew Mason, described himself as a Jeffersonian Democrat from the slums of London. But there was no trace of cockney in his accent.

When McDonald introduced Paul, the two Irishmen reacted with disbelief to his surname. “Are you related to the general?” one asked.

“He's my brother.”

“Last summer he killed about a thousand good Democrats over on Second Avenue around Fourteenth Street,” the other Irishman said.

“Are you talking about the draft riots?” Janet asked.

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over

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