Authors: Thomas Fleming

When This Cruel War Is Over (31 page)

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over

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“I'm hoping that you'll serve as my chief of staff,” Gabriel Todd said to Paul. “That's the best way we can all draw on your training and battle experience. You'll have the rank of colonel.”

“I'm honored,” Paul said. “I've had some experience on staff. I think I can be of service. Who's your quartermaster? Do you have a chief of artillery? A medical department? We should begin assembling supplies as soon as possible. How much ammunition do you have in reserve?”

“Whoa now!” Rogers Jameson said. “This ain't no West Point operation, Colonel Stapleton. This here's goin' to be a quick campaign. A sort of rampage, you know? Every man's got orders to bring a week's rations with him in his haversack. We 'spect to be in Indianapolis in five days, where we can dine off the federal government. The town's full of warehouses with all the chow an army can eat for a good year.”

“They're only shipping five hundred and forty rounds of ammunition per gun,” Paul said. “That's not a lot for even a week's campaign.”

“We'll capture all the ammo we need in 'Napolis the same way we'll get the grub,” Jameson replied. “The town's crammed with everything an army needs. Once we free the Confederate soldiers they got locked up
there, our boys can relax. There'll be a trained rebel army in the heart of the state, ready to operate. My boy Adam will have the cavalry.”

“What about artillery?”

“We'll get that in 'Napolis too,” Jameson said.

“Is this your thinking too, General?” Paul asked.

“Substantially, yes,” Gabriel Todd said.

“How many men do you estimate Governor Morton and General Carrington can put in the field?” Paul asked.

“We guess about six thousand,” Gabriel Todd said.

“Is this based on observation? Actual knowledge?” Paul asked.

“On the best information we have,” Gabriel Todd said.

“They'll have artillery?” Paul asked.

“We'll have Greek fire,” Jameson said.

“I don't think much of that as a tactical weapon,” Paul said.

“There he goes again with the West Point lingo,” Jameson said. “You think people are gonna fight if we can send their houses up in smoke?”

“It might make them fight very hard. You might find Democrats and Republicans from Indianapolis fighting for General Carrington.”

“I don't think so. General Todd don't think so. Neither do the other leaders,” Jameson said.

“I consider myself overruled,” Paul said.

“With them Spencers, our worries are as good as over,” Jameson said. “The federals have got a coward for a general. Carrington won't fight. He'll run for cover and his army will follow him.”

“You talked of putting thirty to fifty thousand men in the field. Will any of them bring their own guns? We don't have enough Spencers to go around.”

“A lot of'm have got guns,” Jameson said. “We'll get the rest in 'Napolis.”

“What about battlefield exercises?” Paul asked. “Have you maneuvered your brigade as a unit?”

“How can I do that without givin' the game away to every sneakin' federal spy in the county?” Jameson said. “There ain't goin' to be any real opposition. We don't have to worry about maneuvers.”

“I'm sure we can give adequate orders depending on the situation,” Gabriel Todd said. “The men are in high spirits. They're eager to strike a blow against the Lincoln dictatorship.”

“I see we have almost nothing to worry about,” Paul said.

He looked at Janet, his face grave. She was back in New York, hearing him tell her the Mexican muskets were worthless. Was he telling her, silently, that her father's and Rogers Jameson's plans were also worthless? Noâthere was something more subtle in his voice. With an inner tremor, Janet recognized it. Paul did not
care.
He did not care if their plans were worthless. He did not care if the Sons of Liberty won or lost. The bodies of those murdered blacks had become a wall between them. She realized he was here for only one reason: because he still loved her.

“How do you plan to get the Spencers to the men?” Paul asked. “Fifteen thousand rifles are a lot of metal.”

“Each regiment'll send wagons to rendezvous points along the river on certain nights,” Jameson said. “We'll move âem from Evansville in flatboats. We can transport two or three thousand a night. By August twentieth we'll have 'em completely distributed.”

“You've got the boats and the oarsmen?”

“Yes.”

“Aren't there federal gunboats patrolling the river?”

“They haven't been seen since the water went down,” Jameson said.

“God is on our side,” Janet said.

“I'm more certain of it every day,” Gabriel Todd said.

Almost mechanically, her mind still gripped by her insight into Paul's uncaring, Janet noted her father was
lying. Gabriel Todd did not believe in God. He was a man with nothing to lose. That was why he did not criticize Rogers Jameson's haphazard plans. He wanted to do something, anything, to defy the raging futility the war had inflicted on him. She wondered if he hoped to die in this rampageâand fling in fate's face a final snarl of defiance.

Janet trembled. Why did she always see so much, understand things it would be better to ignore? Her throat swelled with pity. She would somehow sustain Gabriel Toddâand Paul. Father and lover, she would sustain them both with her adventuress's indomitable heart. Somehow.

THIRTY-THREE

COLONEL HENRY GENTRY PONDERED THE calendar on his desk. It was August 15. General Grant was still stalemated before Richmond. General Sherman was not doing much better before Atlanta. In Sherman's rear, a Confederate cavalryman named Nathan Bedford Forrest was doing fearsome damage in Tennessee, burning railroad bridges, capturing railroad trains loaded with supplies and money, routing a Union force sent to stop him. Guerrillas still rampaged through Kentucky. In retaliation, General Burbridge had executed another twelve captured men.

Still not a word from Amelia Jameson. Was his plan going awry? It was exactly what he deserved, Gentry mused. He was acting like a swine. Perhaps that was another word for intelligence officer. He imagined Amelia, watching the clock hands, the calendar, as time plodded inexorably toward the date when Robin would be drafted: September 1. His stomach twisted with disgust at himself, the war, General Burbridge, General Carrington, President Lincoln.

Every other day, Major Stapleton invented another excuse that took him across the river to Kentucky. Janet Todd was ill. It was her father's birthday. Janet's mother was ill and had taken a great fancy to him. None of these was a very clever lie. But Gentry made no attempt to challenge him. From other informants, such as Luther Sprague, the typesetter at the
Keyport Record
, he knew that they were moving toward the moment of explosion. Sprague had sent him a surreptitiously printed front
page of the
Record
proclaiming the birth of the western confederacy.

From one of the Keyport ferry hands he learned that there was a great deal of activity on the Ohio River after dark. The man had been offered twenty dollars a night to pull an oar. He had pleaded a bad back and rushed to Gentry, who paid him twenty-five dollars for the information. Did he know what was in the boats? “Guns,” the man said.

Gentry telegraphed the commander of the federal gunboat flotilla in Louisville, asking him why he was not patrolling the river at night. He was told it was too dangerous. The low water created unexpected sandbars and shallows that could only be detected by the naked eye. Charts were next to useless.

Gentry sipped his bourbon and wondered if he should do something. Perhaps advise Burbridge to arrest Rogers Jameson? That would remove Amelia's fear of immediate retaliation. He decided it would be superfluous. Gentry knew why she was unable to act. She was torn between Adam and Robin. Between the ape and the angel. She loved both of them.

Another day passed. The drought, the heat wave, continued. The temperature dropped below ninety-five only for an hour, between dawn and sunrise. Gentry responded to a choleric letter from General Carrington demanding to know if he had anything to do with getting the deserter Robert Garner pardoned. Gentry blamed Lincoln's mercy on Major Stapleton. Gutless coward that he was, Carrington would think twice about attacking the younger brother of a major general.

A hobbling Lucy brought him a letter for Moses Washington. She had written it herself! The handwriting was at about the third-grade level but she had decorated it with a string of heartsâno doubt at Dorothy Schreiber's suggestion. Moses was still in a federal hospital in Louisville, fighting an infection that had developed
in his wound. Gentry's mother continued to make nasty remarks about a Negro sleeping on the second floor of her house, just down the hall from her. Gentry continued to ignore her.

At noon on August 16, Dorothy Schreiber called down to Gentry in the cellar, “Colonel, Mrs. Jameson is here! Can she visit you for a moment?”

Gentry lumbered to the foot of the stairs with a candle. “Be careful,” he said. “The last step is higher than the others.”

Amelia let him take her hand. The touch of her moist palm ignited strange sensations in his body. Not exactly desire. Something closer to longing. That made him certain she was here to tell him once and for all that she despised him.

Amelia declined a drink of water. Arranging her skirts, she wiped her face with a handkerchief. “Now I see why you hide out down here. It's cool.”

“And Mother can't negotiate the stairs.”

She almost smiled. “Robin's been drafted,” she said.

“IâI had no idea. It's done by each stateâ”

“I begged you to do something for him.”

“I tried. But General Burbridge has a hard heart.”

Tears trickled down her cheeks. “Henry, I can't do it! I can't betray Adam.”

“I understand.”

“But you still won't do anything?”

“It's out of my hands, Amelia.”

“Pompey came down the other day with a message for Rogers.”

“Did he say anything about Saltville?”

“The battle? Only that you got whipped.”

“I'm surprised.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought he might have said something about the blacks. What Adam's men did to them.”

“What?”

“They shot the wounded. One by one. They must have shot two hundred of them.”

Amelia just sat there. In the distance, Gentry heard the German sergeant, Adolf Schultz, drilling his men: “Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” The German had a voice that could be heard in Chicago. Still Amelia sat there. Upstairs, Dorothy Schreiber began playing “Weeping Sad and Lonely, or When this Cruel War Is Over” on the piano. The tinkling notes fell around them like snowflakes. Still Amelia sat there.

Finally she said, “You're lying.”

“I wish I were. I saw it, Amelia. I rode up the hill and asked Adam to come out and tell them to stop it. But he ignored me. He said he'd see me in Indiana.”

“Adam,” she said.

She sat there. A steamboat hooted on the river. Bees droned around a hive under the eaves. Birds chirped in the hedges just outside the cellar door. Once the hedges had been part of a maze his father had constructed for want of something better to do in his middle age. Gentry remembered wandering through the leafy labyrinth with Amelia on his seventeenth birthday. He made her kiss him every time she got lost. Only he knew the way out. Now they were in another labyrinth but he was not at all sure he knew the way out of this one.

“This war is evil. I knew it from the start.”

“So did I.”

“But you didn't try to stop your friend Lincoln from starting it.”

“Like him, I thought it would be over in a month.”

She sat there. “I believe I will have a drink of water,” she said.

He poured it for her. She sipped it. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

“As much as possible,” he said. “Above allâthe date.”

“What if I don't know it?”

He opened his hand helplessly.

“I don't know it.”

He opened his hand again. “Anything will be better than nothing.”

“I understand.”

Was she trying to bargain with him? Or was she telling the truth? He preferred the latter judgment. Naturally. He was still a fool in love. Gentry's heart swirled with longing for a time forever lost. He ordered himself to say nothing. He sat there, waiting, watching. She was still beautiful. Perhaps only to him. The patina of beauty was visible beneath the lines of care on her face.

“I really don't know,” she said.

She left him. He listened to her footsteps mounting the stairs. He went out in the yard through the cellar door and watched Schultz drilling the poor Germans in the heat. A man crumpled to the ground. Two of his friends carried him into the barn. “By the right flank, vorwÃ¤rts!” roared Schultz. “Eins, zwei, drei, vier!”

Sheriff Monroe Cantwell rode into the yard on a small gray horse. Gentry noticed Democrats preferred small horses. The party of the people. “Henry,” Cantwell said. “I just got a report of two deserters at the Murray farm.”

“You have work to do, Sergeant,” Gentry said.

In a half hour, Schultz and his hundred Germans clattered out of the yard. Gentry went back to his cellar and wrote another letter to Lincoln, reporting his latest information about the Sons of Liberty. He told the president about the guns moving up and down the Ohio at night. He enclosed his copy of the
Keyport Record's
front page announcing the western confederacy. He recommended detaching 10,000 men from Grant's army. If Lincoln put them on trains, they could be here in two days. Ten thousand veterans would squelch these amateur desperados in a day.

The railroad has revolutionized warfare. Why not
take advantage of our mobility?
No. Portentous. He was talking to a man who had been running a war for three years. Lincoln knew all about mobility. The problem was manpower. He remembered what Lincoln had told him a year ago. Desertion alone was costing the Union fifty thousand men a year. Yet it would be worth weakening Grant to stop this explosion before it occurred. The men leading it were not stupid. They knew it did not have to succeed to bring Lincoln down. The mere fact that twenty or thirty thousand men had taken up armsâthe Democratic newspapers would swell it to a hundred thousandâwould be enough to ruin Lincoln in November.

The thing had to be
suppressed.
Why couldn't Lincoln see that? His tired brain had fallen into a military groove. Victory had become something won with the gun. The man who said he was against appealing from the ballot to the bullet was now relying on the bullet.
Abe, Abe, we're doing it the hard way.

An hour after the Germans departed, Major Stapleton returned from his latest foray to Kentucky. He was upset to discover there was work to be done in Indiana. “You should have sent for me,” he said.

“I didn't know where you were, Major,” Gentry replied.

“At the Todds'. You knew that.”

“I've had reports of you riding far afield.”

“Janet has decided to ride each day for exercise.”

“Ah.”

The Major galloped off to the Murray farm. Two hours later, one of the Germans rode wildly into the yard.
“Eine grosser Schlacht!”
he shouted. “Many
Feinde!
Many
tod
. Wagons,
bitte! Schnell!”

Gentry translated: “A big battle! Many enemy! Many dead. Wagons please! Quickly!”

He sent the German galloping to the fields with a message to his farm manager. In a half hour ten of his
hands were in the yard. They hitched horses to six wagons and lumbered toward the Murray farm, which was at the far end of the county. Gentry rode with them, after dispatching a messenger to Dr. Yancey. As they approached the farm, a spiral of smoke curled into the blue sky. Major Stapleton galloped down the road to meet them, his face flushed.

“It was another ambush. Much bigger, this time. At least forty men. When Schultz charged them they stood their ground around the farmhouse for a half-dozen volleys. Then they vanished through the corn. It was over by the time I got there.”

“How many men did we lose?”

“At least twenty,” Stapleton said.

“Did they catch any deserters?”

Stapleton shook his head. “I don't think there were any.”

“Who set the Murray house on fire?”

“The Germans. They're angry about their losses.”

As Gentry rode into the Murray yard on the lead wagon, a tearful Margaret Murray rushed up to him. She was his age. They had danced together at more than one youthful hoedown. “Henry, they're burning our house! We didn't do anything! The Sons of Liberty came from nowhere and took over the farmâ”

Flames were gushing from the second floor windows. It was much too late to save the house. Stout Stephen Murray stood to one side, glaring at him. “Is this the kind of protection you're giving citizens who've tried to stay neutral?” he shouted. He was a Democrat, like his father before him. He had three daughters and no sons. It was interesting, the way people's neutrality or partisanship reflected what they stood to lose in the war.

The dead and wounded were in the dust in front of the Murray barn. Sergeant Schultz dragged a tall thin boy of about seventeen over to Gentry. The boy was groaning
and whining with pain. His right leg was drenched in blood. “Do you know this man, Colonel?” Schultz shouted.

Gentry shook his head.

“He says he's a member of a regiment of the Indiana Sons of Liberty! He wants to be treated as a prisoner of war.” Schultz's face was streaked with black powder. “What craziness is this? They shoot my poor fellows for no reason.” He babbled about getting a doctor for his men.

“There'll be one waiting at my house,” Gentry said.

On the ride back Schultz wanted to know where the Sons of Liberty got their guns. “They had repeating rifles. No wonder they shot us to pieces.”

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over

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