Musket fire in the distance told them the fighting had spread. Again it was punctuated by the banging of small cannon.
A tall, lean colonel from Pleasonton’s command rode up. He was accompanied by another man in grubby civilian clothes. Salutes were exchanged. The civilian did not salute.
The colonel spoke. “We found them, sir, a whole bunch of them are digging a great big long trench in on a hill to our right front. There may be at least twenty-five thousand of them, General.”
Pleasonton nodded and urged his horse slowly forward. “Spread out. Don’t make a target for some cracker with a twelve-pounder.”
The party did as instructed. Before reaching the crest of the hill, they dismounted and continued on foot to make themselves even smaller targets.
And there was the Rebel army, at least a goodly portion of it. They were directly confronted by at least a brigade, and all that separated them was a fairly steep ravine. As usual with Lee’s men, they were digging in. The King of Spades was living up to his reputation for entrenching.
Pleasonton was no coward, but he kept himself well hidden. Thorne and the others did the same. They were almost within rifle range.
“Colonel, that’s a lot of Rebels there, but it ain’t twenty-five thousand men. Where the hell are the rest of them?”
“Stacked up behind them, sir. What we’re looking at is the point of the spear.”
The general nodded, “And a point that can’t stick us. Whoever is leading them has managed to put himself out on a limb. Look, they’re starting to pack up and find a way around the ravine.”
Despite himself, Thorne grinned. Some officer was going to get sent to bed without his dinner for leading so many men astray. In a way, it was good to know that even the Army of Northern Virginia was capable of making a dumb mistake.
A cannon fired and a shell screamed overhead before burying itself in the soft ground. Pleasonton laughed. “Damned if I don’t think they’ve spotted us and offered a personal invitation to hell.”
Lieutenant General Robert E. Lee had received the messages and reports and was more than pleased. “Thank God. Finally, grumpy old Meade is going come out and play with his army. Only thing is, we are the ones who are going to be playing with it.”
The others gathered around the large fire that tried to keep away the fall’s chill. “You don’t think he’s trying to trick us, do you, sir?” Longstreet said drily.
“Why of course he is, General. However, by his losing and our finding those orders, his secret is out and we will have stolen a couple of day’s march on him. Meade is no fool. I’ve already said he will make no mistakes, and his losing those orders does not qualify any more than the misplacing of my orders before Sharpsburg. No, he will fight well. However, he will fight quite slowly because he has a huge army that he has decided not to divide into more flexible groups. It will be ponderous and vulnerable to attack, in much the same way as the Spanish Armada.”
Longstreet looked mildly surprised. “I thought you had determined not to attack Meade, that he was too strong, just as he was at Gettysburg.”
Lee flushed. It was clear that he did not like remembering that battle. “Of course we will attack him. We must. This time, however, we will attack where he is weak, not strong, and he cannot be strong everywhere. Further, there will be no frontal assaults. We will attempt to turn his flanks at every opportunity and leave him thoroughly confused. General Meade is a very highly strung man who may have been given more responsibility than he can handle. We must play on his insecurities until he and the Army of the Potomac collapse. When that occurs, we pick up the pieces of what was once his army and march into Washington.”
General Hardee nodded sagely. “And when the Union is totally humiliated, we will again have our ambassadors present their credentials to the governments in Paris and London, perhaps even Madrid and Berlin. The Confederacy will be recognized and peace negotiations can commence almost immediately.”
Lee broke out into confident laughter, something his staff hadn’t heard that much lately.
Warned by the sounds of the approaching horses, the guard stiffened to attention and snapped off a smart salute. When the President and his party had passed, he relaxed and thought of home and his family. It was late and dark and he did wonder what the great people were up to. He wondered what the President and the others were planning and if it involved him. Like most soldiers, he had a healthy respect for combat and wished to avoid it if at all possible. No false bravado for him. No sir. If it became necessary to lay down his life, he was ready to do so, but he was not planning on volunteering.
He peered into the darkness, down the direction Lincoln had come. There was nothing out of the ordinary. He took a deep breath and willed himself to relax. He had another hour until he was relieved. He prayed that it would pass peacefully. His prayers might be answered this night, but not too many more times, as the army was stirring itself.
Inside the Executive Mansion, Lincoln attempted to warm himself by standing with his rear end close to the fire. “Don’t fall in,” said Stanton in a rare display of humor.
“Not enough of me to burn for very long,” Lincoln responded. He wrapped a shawl around his shoulders and sat in his rocking chair. On a table beside the chair rested a stack of telegrams.
“General Halleck, just how many of these telegrams can be deemed important?
“Perhaps one in ten, while the remainder are important only in the minds of their creators.”
“Yet I have to read them all.”
Halleck shook his head. “We’ve been over this before, sir, and the truth is that you don’t have to respond personally to more than one in a hundred. In Nicolai and Hay you have fine secretaries and they are more than capable of separating the wheat from the chaff and responding on your behalf.”
“But then I would risk losing touch with the people, and that includes men in the army who constantly complain about their lot.” And sometimes with great justification, he did not add. Corruption and incompetence had been rooted out by simply reading the mail.
“On the other hand,” said Stanton, “you could work yourself into an early death and a freshly dug grave. The nation would be leaderless. If you are not here to guide us, who will? Vice President Hamlin is a good Republican but so harsh and strict in his abolitionist beliefs that a lasting peace would be impossible under his regime. No sir, you must preserve yourself and your health. Your nation needs you.”
Lincoln rubbed his eyes. Everything that had been said was so very right, but also so very wrong.
The downpour had been sudden and drenching. One moment it had been a fairly pleasant fall afternoon, the next, gusts of wind and rain had soaked Cassie and torn her frilly umbrella to shreds. She swore and threw the useless thing onto a trash pile while Mariah giggled.
With great dignity, the two women walked the remaining blocks to their home. “We need hot water,” Cassie shouted as she entered through the kitchen. There was no way she was going to shed gallons of rainwater on the parlor rugs.
Cassie let herself drip dry as best she could on the kitchen floor, and then dashed upstairs by the rear stairs. Two servant girls, friendly, lazy and Irish, were preparing her bath with more haste than she’d seen in them for quite some time.
While they filled the tub with warm water, she laid out some fresh clothing and stripped off her dress and much of her underclothing, which she left in a sodden pile on the floor.
“Enough,” she said and ordered the two women to leave. Once they were gone, she stripped down to her shift and climbed into the water. It was hot and would stay so for a while. When it cooled, the two girls would add buckets of hot to keep her comfortable.
There was a tap on the door followed by her mother’s voice. “May I come in?”
“Of course,” Cassie said. She had expected her mother to come calling. It was well past time to have a talk and was one reason she’d kept her shift on. She felt she was a little too old for her mother
to see her naked. Besides, she didn’t need a full bath anyhow. She’d had one only a couple of days prior.
“Is it time for another talk, Mother?”
“Perhaps. I would like to know your intentions regarding Major Thorne.”
Cassie smiled wickedly. “My intentions are totally dishonorable. I plan on using all of my feminine wiles to seduce him and make him my slave. We will marry and I will have him chained to my bed for the rest of his life. And I will punish him if he does not please me.”
Rachel smiled. “Well, thank God you’re not being impractical.”
“My intentions are honorable and, so far, his are as well. We’ve had some pleasant moments when we could be alone, but your daughter’s virtue is intact. Unwanted perhaps, but intact.”
“Cassandra! Please . . .” Rachel shook her head, then stepped out and returned with two snifters of brandy. “I felt the same way before your father and I got married. Which reminds me, in your wanderings, did you pick up any news about the army?”
“Not even good rumors, Mother. And I assume that our father is at the telegraph office in Washington along with scores of other people trying to pick up crumbs of news. Just think of it—two giant armies could be out there clawing each other to shreds and causing thousands of deaths while we sit here and do nothing. Enough.” She stood and grabbed a blanket which she wrapped around herself.
“Give me a few moments to get dressed and let’s go see what we can find out ourselves.”
Rachel rose. “And I will see if Mariah is ready and wishes to join us.”
★ CHAPTER 15 ★
The ground north and west of Washington was as cold and wet as the ground in any other direction. It had finally stopped raining, but the water still lay in large dirty puddles. If the troops were lucky, maybe they could get a fire going and have a hot meal.
Archie Willis handed Thorne a cup of lukewarm coffee. “Beggars can’t be choosers, honorable Major.”
“At least we can console ourselves with the fact that Bobby Lee and his minions are as cold and miserable as we are. I’ve been looking for a reasonably dry plot of mud to sleep on tonight but haven’t found anything yet. This means, of course, sleeping in the mud.” He shuddered at the thought. “May I assume that guards are properly positioned and ready if the Rebels decide to raid?”
Willis grimaced and threw away the rest of his coffee. “That was truly shitty coffee. Tell me, Steve, what did we learn today?”
Thorne paused before answering. The regiment had spent all day looking for Lee and determining that an army of a hundred thousand men could actually disappear into the mist. Lee was out there someplace and if there was any rhyme or reason to their patrols, they were to find him, pin him down, and then attack him. They had patrolled slowly and cautiously to avoid an ambush. They were not to start a battle, merely find the enemy and, so far, they had failed. Of course, he thought ruefully, the Army of the Potomac was used to failure.
Nor did he or anyone else he knew have an abiding faith in General Meade. Meade had been lucky, was the consensus. Lee had acted out of character at Gettysburg and it had nearly cost him his army. Only the desperate counterattack on what was commonly being referred to as the Day After had saved him, and no one was counting on Lee making the same kind of mistake again.
“Well Archie, first, we learned that the Confederates are just as likely to get lost as we are. I wonder how badly Lee chewed out whoever led what could have been a full corps to that ravine.”
“I understand that Lee is too much of a gentleman to do any real chewing.”
“Then we learned that the Rebel cavalry under Wade Hampton is as good as it was under Jeb Stuart. They did a very effective job of keeping us away from their main army. We really don’t know where they are, and that worries me.”
“Me too, Steve. It’s almost night time and they could come charging out of the darkness and cut us up pretty badly before we got organized.”
Steve wished he had a dry cigar, but couldn’t find one. “I guess we should all be thankful that neither army likes to fight it out at night. There’s nothing but chaos and confusion at night with soldiers shooting and killing men right and left, including their own. Personally, I can think of no worse fate than to be shot by one’s own side.”
“Like what happened to Stonewall Jackson?”
“Yep. From what I’ve heard, Stonewall and some of his staff had been scouting outside his own lines and maybe got lost. At any rate, it doesn’t matter. His own men killed him and now we have Wade Hampton to contend with.”
A few miles away, Meade was thoroughly confused and frustrated. He was receiving information in such quantities that he could not process it all. Yet it all left unanswered the primary question—Where the hell was Robert E. Lee?
The Army of the Potomac was advancing on a broad front. Meade was almost daring Lee to attack. His army would be a bludgeon that would advance to and through the rebel army. His flanks would be well protected. There would be no surprise assault, as had happened at Chancellorsville when the late Stonewall Jackson had launched a devastating flanking attack against “Fighting” Joe Hooker. Meade almost smiled. Fighting Joe had practically collapsed from the shock of that attack and the subsequent bloody defeat. No, the Army of the Potomac would not be surprised this time, and if that meant moving more slowly than either Halleck or Lincoln wanted, well that was just too damned bad. Not only was he not going to be flanked, but the army would not run blindly into Lee as had happened just north of the Potomac. If Lincoln had let him pursue Lee in his own manner, the country wouldn’t be in the mess it was.
“I see you haven’t found the old fox.” It was Halleck. He had arrived an hour or so earlier and had been just “looking around.”
“I think that is painfully obvious, General Halleck. Even though I have a hundred thousand men looking for a creature that must stretch five miles from one end to the other, the area to search is so vast it precludes a quick conclusion.”
“Yet we must find him and bring him to bay. The army cannot simply march around and use up supplies until it has to retreat in ignominy back to its previous positions.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Meade snapped. “And I also realize that I have to keep my army between Washington and where I think the rebels might be to prevent an attack on the capital. Losing Washington, if only for a short while, would be catastrophic.”
“For once we agree,” Halleck said softly. “And despite Lincoln’s protestations to the contrary, I believe he would be quite happy to have Lee south of the Potomac instead of us wasting lives and supplies in an attempt to destroy him. I cannot believe that he truly wishes an Armageddon where tens of thousands would be killed and wounded. To corner Lee and force him to fight a desperate battle and subsequent bloodbath would be more than the nation could handle.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“Only that we do our duty. We have our orders and we must obey them. I am certain that your scouts will be out looking for the elusive Lee at first light if not sooner.”
“A number of them are out as we speak,” Meade said. “Of course, the rebels are seeking us out as well. However, they will doubtless find us before we find them. It’s a sad fact that Hampton’s cavalry is superior to Pleasonton’s.”
Halleck glared at Meade, making his eyes pop out even further. The effect made him look ridiculous. “But when you find Lee, I trust it will be a battle, not a slaughter. You will not allow him to launch another counterattack, and will not push him so hard that he becomes desperate.”
Meade grimaced. “I’ve learned my lesson, General. But what if he defeats me? That could easily result in my being fired and replaced by Grant.”
“General Meade, you cannot permit that to happen. I remain firmly convinced that putting that drunken incompetent Grant in charge would result in disaster. I will do everything in my power to prevent Grant from taking command.”
Then who had been in command at Vicks
burg, Meade wanted to ask? Instead, he kept his counsel as Halleck and his entourage departed. Meade had another reason for wanting Lee found as soon as possible. His own vast army was stretched out over a number of miles and he was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t have divided it into two or three smaller groups that would still report to him. Yet he was afraid of losing touch with his various corps. That had almost happened at Gettysburg when Dan Sickles, another political general, had moved his III Corps too far in front of the rest of the army. As a result, III Corps had been savagely mauled and Sickles grievously wounded, losing his leg. Though some thought Sickles was a hero, his actions had actually endangered the Union Army and nearly cost the Union the battle.
The truth—which he was reluctant to admit—was that Meade had lost control of one of his corps. He could not let that happen again.
Perhaps he should have copied what he understood of Lee’s changes. He had to admit that he really had no idea what was going on with his own soldiers at the other, farther, end of the Army of the Potomac, several miles away.
His stomach had been upset all day long and now it was like a fist had grabbed his gut and wouldn’t let go. Maybe his critics were right. Maybe he really wasn’t up to this important a command. But if he couldn’t do it, then who could? Grant? But Grant wasn’t ready and maybe never would be. Meade was determined to do his best. But would it be enough?
A shrieking in the night was followed by the sounds of many guns firing. Thorne threw himself off his cot and on to the wet dirt floor of the tent. As bullets whistled outside, he reached up and grabbed his trousers. A moment later, he was dressed and armed. The firing had not abated. If anything, it was even closer and the shrieking rebel yell was enough to stand up the hairs on the back of his neck. He ducked down and slipped through the opening of the tent and into chaos.
Dozens of soldiers, dressed and half dressed, were trying to form a skirmish line and shoot back at an invisible foe. Rifle fire was coming from several directions. Was this a major attack or just a raid, Thorne wondered?
The Day After Gettysburg Page 21