The Day After Gettysburg

by Robert Conroy

  “Abe Lincoln would be prime evidence that mankind had interbred with gorillas.”

  Dean allowed himself a chuckle.

  “That is, if we didn’t already have the niggers.”

  Dean chuckled once again. The man gave his stick a twirl. “You like that one?” He regarded Dean a moment before going on. “So you’ve been in battle?”

  “Awful hard to avoid it the way things have been going.”

  “That’s true. Ever kill anybody?”

  “Yes I have.”

  The eyes regarding Dean narrowed. “You’re telling me you killed a member of the Confederate forces?”

  Dean felt his face redden. “Well, no . . . I actually never killed anybody.”

  The man smiled. “I didn’t think so. Killing leaves a mark on a man. But you know your firearms.”

  “Yes I do. Explosives as well.”

  “Explosives?” He raised the stick to rub his chin.

  Two men appeared from the stage entrance. They were clean-shaven, dressed in business suits and, despite being young and large, were not military officers. For a moment Dean thought they might be businessmen trying to sell something to Mr. John T. Ford, the founder and owner of the theater that had only recently reopened following a fire. He wished them well if that was the case. Mr. Ford was not free with his money.

  “That’s him,” the taller man said. Dean had scarcely time enough to stiffen before they lay strong arms on him. He tried to break free but it was use.

  “What the devil is going on here?” They had shoved the actor aside as they closed in on Dean. He stood facing them with stick upraised.

  “Who are you?” the bigger of the two demanded.

  “My name is Booth, and I perform at this theater.”

  The bigger man nodded at the other, who said. “Sorry, Mr. Booth. We didn’t recognize you. This one here,” he gave Dean a shake. “Is a deserter from the Army of the Potomac.”

  “A deserter?” Booth lowered his stick. “You don’t say?”

  Dean flinched as the bigger man clapped a pair of manacles on his wrists. “Mr. Booth . . .”

  “This is nothing that concerns you, sir. We are from the Metropolitan Police. Now please step aside.”

  “I meant no harm,” Booth said, and backed up quickly. Dean was dismayed. He’d idolized John Wilkes Booth, and had thought he was as brave as the parts he played. Now he knew it was all a sham. Booth had been acting, was always acting.

  “Let’s go.” The two men ushered Dean toward the rear entrance. He looked over his shoulder. Booth was gazing after him with no expression at all on his face.

  Dean shook his head. His position was hopeless. Out in the alley, the two men steered him toward the street. He heard a voice behind him and turned to see Booth heading in the opposite direction, calling out to someone.

  Reaching the street, they came to a halt. “Where is the carriage?”

  “He said he was turning around . . .”

  “Ah, there it is.” The big man gave him a shove and they started down past the theater façade. He was dragged to the closed carriage and thrust inside. The two men sat on either side of him as a third man drove the horses at a good rate of speed. It began to occur to him that the men weren’t police officers at all.

  “Cassandra, are you awake and dressed?” her father hollered up the stairs. “Come down to the kitchen. There’s something you absolutely must see.”

  Cassie did as she was told and, curious, quickly made her way to the kitchen. To her surprise, the room was crowded. Two large men were holding a third and smaller man by his arms while her father sat smiling benignly.

  “Turn him around,” the colonel ordered and the men complied.

  Cassie gasped and her legs felt weak. “Richard? My God, Richard, you’re alive!”

  Then it dawned on her. “Richard, how can this be? Everyone said you were dead . . . and yet here you are. Why didn’t you tell anyone you’d survived the battle?”

  Richard shrugged off the hands of the two men and addressed her father. “Colonel . . . if I may beg the privilege of conferring with your daughter alone?”

  Colonel Baird snorted and gestured toward the dining room. The two large men glanced uneasily at each other but said nothing.

  Cassie led the way into the dining room. She turned to Richard. He stood there smirking at her. “Well?”

  Richard shrugged. “You see, my dear, I didn’t survive the battle, so to speak, because I was never in it. Only fools go charging up hills to their deaths. I gave a man a twenty-dollar gold piece to take my place while I took his as a messenger. In the chaos afterward, I simply slipped away and began to live a new life.”

  “Richard, that’s awful.”

  “On the contrary, dear Cassie. It’s commonplace. Almost accepted procedure.”

  Her head was clearing from the shock of seeing the man she’d been mourning standing in front of her. “But . . . what if the other man had been killed?”

  “He was killed.”

  “Richard!”

  “Ah, Cassie, he was merely an Irishman. You wouldn’t wish me dead in the place of some papist immigrant, would you? You’ve never witnessed their popish rituals. Horrible stuff.”

  She stared wordlessly at him. Sensing movement behind her, she half turned to see the duller-looking of the big men eying them from the pantry doorway. He touched his hat and retreated.

  “. . . and in any case, I have discovered where my real talents lie, and what path awaits me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took a step away, eyes turned upward as if fixed on some far horizon. “I always told you I thought the war was wrong, that the Great Ape was wrong, and that freeing the colored was wrong. Or weren’t you listening to me?”

  “But then you went and enlisted, Richard.”

  Richard laughed. “So I made a mistake. At least I didn’t compound the error by remaining where I wasn’t meant to be. After only a couple of weeks, I saw the bloody results of what someone said was a small skirmish and decided I wanted nothing to do with risking my life for something I didn’t believe in. I joined up to impress you in hopes that you’d marry a brave warrior. But Cassie, that is not what I truly am.”

  Cassie crossed her arms. “What are you exactly, Richard?”

  He cast an arm into the air. “I have learned that I have a knack for the theatrical arts. That I can touch the souls of onlookers, and change their way of thinking, without them even being aware of it. Therein lies my opportunity to make a real contribution.

  “You cannot know, dear girl, how corrupt is our commonwealth, how terrible the lies which we endure, and how difficult it is to put across the truth.” He shook a fist in the air. “But I have discovered a way. The newspapers are all Republican, owned by abolitionists and lackeys of the Great Ape. To confront people with the truth, we must utilize another means.

  “The theater will be that means. I envision a travelling program, making its way from town to town, both informing and entertaining the people at once. We will present a series of tableaus that will reveal the true nature of this war, the enormity of the Ape’s crimes, the actual status of the colored. Ahh, you have not spent any time among the niggers, Cassie. I am here to tell you, they are but small children, little more than beasts of the field. They need a strong white Anglo-Saxon hand to—”

  “I see,” Cassie said. “And who, may I ask, is the Great Ape?”

  “Why, that would be none other than Abe Linkhorn, soi disant president of this sorry republic.”

  She gazed at him in silence. Rubbing his hands together, he drew nearer. “So you see, Cassie, I need you to ask your father to dismiss those two detectives so that we can sit down and discuss how much he wants to invest in my effort.”

  “Invest.”

  He nodded. And to think, she thought to herself, that I was willing to get married to this.

  Gathering up her skirts, she returned to the kitchen. Her father was saying, “. . .
believed he was dead on the Fredericksburg battlefield. That’s why my daughter is dressed in black.”

  “Well, she’ll be able to treat herself to more colorful finery now, Colonel.”

  Colonel Baird looked up. “Ahh, Cassandra, are you finished?”

  “Well and truly, Father.”

  “Very well, then. Gentlemen, take him away.”

  The two men got up. “What will you do with him, Detective?”

  “Well, miss,” the smaller man said. The other moved toward the dining room. “We will take him to Fort Monroe, and once there—”

  From the dining room came the sound of a window sash opening. “Goddammit . . .” the dull-looking man shouted as he dashed from the kitchen.

  “Excuse me,” the other detective said.

  Cassie turned to her father. “Oh dear . . .”

  ★ ★ ★

  Dean didn’t stop running until he was a hundred yards from the house. He paused to catch his breath with one hand on a tree trunk. Hearing shouts behind him, he pushed on.

  He’d gotten no more than another twenty yards when he heard a crackling in the brush and stumbled to a halt. A man on horseback emerged from the trees to his right.

  “Dean?”

  He let out a breath. The face was familiar, even though he didn’t know the name. The man was thin-faced, high-cheekboned, and glaring-eyed, an abolitionist’s nightmare of the typical Rebel. The voice matched the face.

  “Name’s Jessup. Booth sent me.”

  Dean nodded wordlessly. Jessup swung the horse around. “Come along now.”

  They’d nearly reached the road when they heard the clop of horse’s hooves up ahead. Jessup pulled his horse to a halt and stretched to look over its neck. Nodding to himself, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a large-caliber Colt pistol. He took aim and fired one shot. There was a shriek of animal agony followed by confused shouting.

  Cocking the pistol, Jessup fired another round, then paused with the barrel held high. Dean heard the sound of footsteps receding through brush.

  “They gonna need another horse or two,” Jessup assured him. He spat to one side. “Pinkertons. I hate ’em. Come along.”

  He said no more until they returned to the road another half-mile on. “Let’s get some speed on.”

  “Give me a hand up,” Dean told him.

  “You ain’t sitting up here with me. You grab that strap on the saddle and you run.”

  Jessup rode forward about ten yards then stopped and glared back at Dean. He caught up and grabbed the strap. A moment later they were clattering along at a slow trot toward Washington.

  ★ CHAPTER 6 ★

  All his life, Captain Steven Thorne had been taught that it was immoral—sinful—to keep a fellow human being in bondage. In his mind, it was both a blasphemy against the Creator and an insult to humanity. He didn’t understand the rationale that asserted that people who were not white were not quite human, and could thus be bought and sold like cattle, and forced to work for the benefit of others. It was a foul and base excuse. All men were made in the image of God Almighty, and all men deserved the same treatment from their fellow creatures.

  On the other hand, he had his doubts that the problems surrounding race and slavery could be solved peacefully. The war was evidence aplenty of that. It was a conundrum, one that he hoped that wiser heads than his own would be able to solve.

  Even though Indiana was a Union state, there were many in it who sympathized with the Confederacy and there were some who’d slipped off to the South to join either the Army of Tennessee or the Army of Northern Virginia. There would be some interesting reunions and recriminations when the war ended. If it ended, he corrected himself for the hundredth time. He was almost resigned to spending the rest of his life in a uniform.

  He’d applauded the Emancipation Proclamation, even wishing that it had included the slaves of the Border States. The lawyer in him understood the legal impossibility of freeing those poor souls at this time. The Supreme Court had pretty much decided that issue with the Dred Scott decision. A slave was still a man’s property. Lincoln’s Proclamation declared a southern man’s property forfeit, thus freeing the slaves within the Confederacy. The rationale was that freeing the slaves in the rebelling states hurt the South’s war effort just as much as burning her crops or defeating her armies did.

  Again, the lawyer in him wondered what would happen to the freed slaves when the war did end with Union victory. Would they still be considered property and returned to their former owners? Not bloody likely, he thought as he considered the many thousands of contrabands camped around Washington.

  He had no idea where the freed blacks should go. They might go back down south and work for pay instead of being slaves. Like most people, even hard-core abolitionists, he had no desire to work with Negroes or live near them. The freeing of millions of colored was already causing chaos as contraband camps sprang up.

  Where would the freed slaves go? Well, this group would not be going back south in chains. Word had come that a group of slavers had gathered up nearly a hundred contrabands from nearby camps and were herding them like cattle south towards the Potomac and safety—so to speak—in Virginia.

  Fortunately, the slaves could not move very quickly, which gave Thorne the opportunity to set up an ambush. A few miles behind the slavers, Archie Willis had one company of soldiers while Thorne commanded the rest of the regiment. Willis’ men would drive the slavers on to Thorne’s position. There were only a couple of dozen slavers, and using the regiment to take them might have been compared to using a sledgehammer to hit an ant, but it was a splendid opportunity to maneuver his men and get them used to each other.

  Scouts had told him that the slavers suspected that they were being trailed and had picked up the pace. That was rough for those in chains. Thorne sent a scout back to Willis telling him to close in on the slavers but to avoid contact.

  “Here they come,” said Sergeant Maury. A number of men and women were spilling out of the stand of woods to their front and entering a farmer’s field. The crops had been harvested, so they stood out clearly.

  “Mount,” he ordered. This day the Sixth Indiana Mounted Infantry would function more as cavalry than infantry. He signaled and sixty horsemen breasted the hill behind which they’d been hiding and cantered towards the slavers and their captives.

  Thorne fought the urge to order a charge. His men were good horsemen, but not as good as true cavalry. He didn’t want any injuries.

  Some of the slavers turned and opened fire while their prisoners threw themselves on the ground. A horse screamed and collapsed, shot in the leg. The rider fell face forward, hit the ground, and lay still. “Shit,” said Thorne. He aimed his pistol at a man with a rifle, fired and missed. The man threw down his rifle and ran.

  Scattered gunfire came from the rest of the slavers. Another soldier fell and then the horsemen were among them. Thorne was just about to shoot a slaver only a few feet in front of him when the man dropped his rifle and held up his hands. A couple of slavers were down and the others were giving up. The former slaves looked about in stunned disbelief. A couple of them started punching and kicking a slaver. Thorne broke it up, one of the Negroes telling him through gritted teeth that the man had beaten and whipped them repeatedly on the road south. The slaver was bloody but would live. Thorne had no pity for him and was tempted to let his former captives work him over some more.

  Thorne checked over his men. He had one dead. The man who’d fallen face down had broken his neck and died instantly. Another trooper had been shot in the flesh of the arm and would likely recover if infection didn’t set in. Several others had bruises from falling off their horses, thereby proving that they were mounted infantry and not cavalry. Jeb Stuart would have nothing to fear from the Sixth Indiana. That said, it had been a good day. His men had fought together and fought well.

  Perhaps he should stop by the colonel’s residence and have another excellent dinner. The colonel
would surely like to know just how well his old regiment was doing, wouldn’t he?

  The men of Wade’s Tennessee Volunteers were facing an uncomfortable truth. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was no longer the land of plenty, the fabled Cornucopia spilling its largesse on the soil. The longer the Confederate army remained in position, the harder it became to keep it fed. Not only had the farms within an easy ride of Lee’s camps been stripped of both cattle and crops, but so too had properties farther away. In many cases, crops had been burned so that the army could not get at them, and this was the case at the farm they’d just ridden through.

  The usual pillars of smoke had attracted them to the scene and the Volunteers had arrived only a little after the Union patrols had left. There’d been some thought of chasing the Union detachment but the threat of an ambush ruled that out.

  The family that had lived there was just leaving as the cavalry rode up. They were not harmed. Colonel Wade would not permit that—he was no Blandon. Instead, he had taken their horses and two oxen and given them receipts in the name of Jefferson Davis. The extended family would now have to walk, with all their possessions left by the side of the road for anyone to pick through.

  There was pure hatred in the eyes of the Pennsylvanians as they realized the extent of their disaster. Their buildings would be burned as well as their fields. That was war.

  “You are barbarians,” said the oldest woman in the group. She doubtless felt that her age made it safe to say such things, and she was right. “How dare you invade our homes and steal our possessions?”

  “I believe we bought them,” Wade said calmly, although he wanted to punch all of them. There were even two Negroes in their group and they looked terrified.

  Since Pennsylvania did not have slaves, these were likely free men. He would leave them alone as well. If they were caught by slavecatchers, well, it would be too bad. He hoped they didn’t run afoul of Blandon.

  “And as to our being invaders,” Wade continued, “try telling that to the people of Virginia and Tennessee where your Union armies have marched and ravaged in a manner far more barbaric then anything you have seen today. You northerners are the cause of this war. You are the ones who will not let the people of the South go their own way. You want peace? You want to be able to farm without armies trampling over your fields? Well then, why don’t you just stop invading our land and we’ll leave yours alone as well.”