by Bob Mayer
“Come on,” the Confederate officer said, indicating a bunker built into the parapet. “Let’s get this over with.”
Cord entered the rebel headquarters. Despite the years between, he instantly recognized Buckner. The Confederate general looked up and frowned, but did not return the recognition given Cord was covered in mud.
Cord pulled Grant’s reply out of his pocket and held it out.
Buckner took the note. His jaw set as he read it. “This is outrageous! These are not the words of a gentleman. This can’t be from Grant.”
“They’re Sam’s words,” Cord said. He wiped a sleeve across his face.
Buckner finally recognized him. “Elijah Cord? Why would Sam do this to me?”
Cord was in no mood to argue. “Just think of this as a visit from a higher Vigilance Committee.”
Chapter Ten
20 Feb 1862, Washington DC
“You were right about Grant,” Lincoln said. “The press is saying the U.S. in his name stands for Unconditional Surrender.”
Rumble sat stiffly on the bench in the President’s office. The jubilation over Grant’s dual victories at Henry and Donelson had swept a north desperate for good news since Bull Run. In contrast, the mood inside the White House was somber and Lincoln appeared in a particularly depressed mood. He was looking at some drawings on his desk without any particular interest and his greeting to Rumble had been perfunctory and distracted.
Rumble waited, wondering why he’d been summoned. He’d been touring McClellan’s camps the past few weeks at the President’s behest and assumed a report was wanted, but Lincoln showed no desire to be updated on ‘Little Napoleon’s’ progress, or rather lack thereof. The deadline for the President’s War Order #1 was two days away, and there was no sign the Army of the Potomac was within two months of moving.
Lincoln lowered his head, resting his forehead in his large hand for a moment, then rubbed his eyes. He finally looked toward Rumble, eyes puffy and bloodshot. “You will have to excuse me, Sergeant Major Rumble. We’ve been having a hard time of it in the residence. I suppose you’ve heard.”
“I’m sorry ‘bout your boys being sick, sir,” Rumble said. “I can come back at another date.”
“The war will not wait,” Lincoln said, “even though McClellan acts as if it does for him.” Lincoln shook his head and dismissed McClellan with a wave of his hand. “You need not report on the general. I can read the papers as well as anyone. He trains them well at least?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But he will not move?”
“Not soon, sir.”
“Grant moved,” Lincoln murmured. He looked down at the drawings. “Something else is moving soon. Something very interesting. I want you to go with it. That’s why I called for you.” The President slid the top drawing across the table.
Rumble took the parchment, but could make little sense. “What is it, sir? Some kind of ship?”
“The ironclad Monitor,” Lincoln said.
“I’ve never seen the like. It looks like a raft with a hat box on top.”
“Two guns,” Lincoln said, finally showing some enthusiasm. “They’re in a turret that rotates in a circle. Most of the ship is built so low to the water, very little shows. Which means very little for the enemy to shoot at. And it’s all iron up top. Of course, the wooden shoe Navy fellows are concerned she won’t sail well. Or fight well.”
Rumble lay the drawing back on the President’s desk with a sense of trepidation. “And what is it you’d like me to do regarding it, sir?”
“Go with it,” Lincoln said. “We hear the fellows from the south are building an ironclad at Norfolk to break the blockade. So the Monitor will be taken down there and have a showdown. I’d like you to go on board and observe the result.”
When Rumble said nothing for a few seconds, Lincoln arched a bushy eyebrow. “You’ve never before hesitated on a tasking, Sergeant Major.”
“It’s just, sir, that, I’m not fond of the water.”
“I would suppose you’re not fond of being shot at either,” Lincoln said, “yet you made it all the way through Mexico and Bull Run.”
“True, sir. Why not send a navy man? I know nothing of ships.”
“Which is exactly why I want you there,” Lincoln said. “Pretty much every navy fellow is dead set against the Monitor. I had to force their hand to even have it built. They seem to want it to fail. Like most people, they fear change.”
“It seems a most strange vessel, sir,” Rumble said.
Lincoln sighed. “It seems as if we can invent the most marvelous machines to kill.” He stood up and Rumble followed suit.
“Walk with me,” the President said.
Lincoln went into the hallway, which was eerily empty. Outside the White House, darkness was descending on Washington.
“I know I ask you to go in harm’s way,” the President said. “I’m asking that of hundreds of thousands of men. It is not something I do lightly. I—” a clock began chiming five o’clock somewhere in the house and Lincoln abruptly halted, placing a hand over his heart, as if stricken by some unseen force deep inside. “Excuse me.”
Lincoln opened a door to the right. The room beyond was dimly lit. Looking in, Rumble could see a large, rosewood bed with a tiny figure nestled in blankets. Mrs. Lincoln was hovering over the boy while a doctor stood helplessly by on the other side. The President went to his wife.
The doctor had his hand on the boy’s wrist. He murmured something and Mrs. Lincoln let out a wail that penetrated to Rumble’s marrow.
He reached forward to gently close the door, but slowed as he heard the President’s voice clearly. “Mother, our poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die.”
Headquarters, Fort Donelson Ten
Dear Wife,
I am most happy to write you from this strongly fortified place, now in my possession, after the greatest victory of the season. Some 12 or 15 thousand prisoners have fallen into our possession to say nothing of 5 to 7 thousand that escaped in the darkness last night
This is the largest capture I believe ever made on the continent.
My impression is that I shall have one hard battle more to fight and will find easy sailing after that. No telling though. This was one of the most desperate affairs fought during the war. Our men were out three terrible, cold nights and fighting through the day, without tents.
Kiss the children for me.
Ulys.
Chapter Eleven
8 March 1862, Palatine, Mississippi
St. George had his feet up on what had once been a beautiful silk encased stool. It was now dirt and soot smeared. He was lounging in front of the large fireplace in Tiberius’ private study, taking a long draft from the bottle of tequila Sally Skull had just given him. She was seated in a high backed chair. In one of the shadows of the room, Gabriel stood still as a rock, the Spencer in her right hand, almost a part of her.
“Miss Violet just up and left him behind?” Skull asked.
“She a cold woman,” St. George said. “Rode off w’ her one-legged boy to Rosalie, leaving husband behind. I got a slave taking care of him. He aint been out of his bed for a long time. Jus’ drinking.”
“She’ll come back,” Skull told St. George.
“You here ten minutes,” St. George said, “and already you beating me with your words. Enjoy the fire. Musta been cold traveling the river this time year.”
“The weather is the weather,” Skull said.
St. George scowled. “What that mean?”
“Means I don’t control it, so I ignore it. You sure she give that nigra who tried to kill you the gun?”
St. George’s dead eye glinted in the firelight. “He was her special boy. Brought him here from Tennessee. She gave it to him and sent him after me. Bitch.”
“Why didn’t he use the gun on you, then?”
> “Too dumb.”
“Don’t take too much smarts to use a gun,” Skull argued. “Wait ‘til them Yankees start handing them to the nigras.”
“Never happen,” St. George said.
“This go on long enough, enough Yankees get killed, it will.”
“Why you always so focused on the bad happening?” St. George asked. “And your mulatto back there bothering me. Tell her put that gun down.”
“She likes the gun. It gives her comfort.”
St. George sighed. “You sure—”
“Damn you!”
An emaciated Tiberius Rumble stood in the doorway, gripping the frame with a sweat-soaked hand. In his other hand he held a dagger. His face was pale and his eyes were bloodshot, but he was dressed in his finest suit. He had a growth of grey beard stubbling his face. He was not looking at any of the people in the room, but at the six-foot high stone relief to the left of the fireplace. Carved into the stone were the figures of a group of Roman soldiers gathered around an altar on which was a bull. One of the soldiers was slitting the bull’s throat.
Gabriel had the Spencer at the ready, but Skull signaled for her to stand down. Tiberius staggered into the room, going from doorframe to table, to a chair back, temporary anchor points to steady his drunken course. He stopped in front of the stone, his right hand sliding up the front. The hand stopped on the plumed helmet of a Roman centurion on the right side, halfway up. He slid the dagger into what had appeared to be a crack in the stone. A clicking noise echoed through the room. Tiberius removed the dagger and stuck it in his belt.
Then he leaned forward, as if falling into the carving. But the entire thing rotated with a loud screech, revealing a hidden passage. Tiberius pressed between stone and fireplace brick and disappeared into the darkness. A dry musty odor filled the study.
Skull got to her feet and grabbed a torch, lighting it in the fireplace.
“What you doing?” St. George asked.
“Following,” Skull said. “I want to see the secret of Palatine.”
She slid through, torch first. St. George pushed ahead of Gabriel, ignoring her glare. Two dozen stone steps led down into a brick lined cave. It was fifteen feet long and ten wide. Skull’s lantern illuminated Tiberius at the far end, kneeling in front of a stone altar. His sobs echoed off the brick.
“What in damnation?” St. George exclaimed.
Skull stepped closer, lighting the top of the altar. Reddish stains covered it and extended down the front to the floor. On both sides, pressed up against the brick, were piles of bone. Human bone.
Skull leaned closer, inspecting the gruesome piles. “Children.”
“What this?” St. George asked.
“I didn’t do it,” Tiberius was saying between sobs. “I didn’t kill like you, father. I didn’t.”
Then Tiberius collapsed in a heap at the base of the altar. Skull knelt next to him. “He alive, but not by much.”
“I don’ get it,” St. George said. “Who died here?”
Skull ignored him. “You lucky,” she said to Gabriel. “Before this old man, his father and father’s father and who knows how far back killed their ‘problems’ right here on this stone.”
Gabriel stepped up next to Skull. She looked at the piles of bones, the blood stains. Then she knelt next to Tiberius. She placed a hand on the old man’s forehead, almost tenderly. With the other she drew the dagger from his belt. Then the hand on the forehead slid up and gripped Tiberius’ thinning white hair in its fist.
Before Skull or St. George could react, Gabriel drew the blade across Tiberius’ neck. A crimson jet spouted forth on top of the dried blood from generations of mixed children before her.
Chapter Twelve
8 March 1862, Norfolk, Virginia
“Sir, today is the Sabbath,” King said. “I believe we should celebrate by killing Yankees.”
“Going west didn’t calm you down in the slightest,” Captain Buchanan, former Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, noted. He was scanning the Union fleet blockading Hampton Roads through a telescope. “Laundry day in the fleet. Their riggings are full of it. I suspect they don’t anticipate being attacked on a Sunday.”
Both men were standing on top the C.S.S. Virginia, once the U.S.S. Merrimack, which King had watched burn when the Confederacy seized Norfolk. The hull and the steam engines were the only things the two had in common. From the waterline up, the ship had been completely rebuilt with a radical design. The hull had been sliced along the waterline and a deck planked on. Over that deck was built an armored casemate framed with two feet of oak and layered with four inches of iron armor. The sides were sloped to deflect cannon fire. In sum, she looked like a barn’s metal roof placed on top of a raft. She had fourteen gun ports, four on each side and three forward and aft. She was heavy, she was slow, but she was almost impregnable to cannon fire.
King and Buchanan were on the narrow, flat top of the ship, forward of the smoke-stack. The Virginia was lumbering down the mouth of the James River, toward the Yankee fleet. Their approach was noted as laundry started to get scooped out of the rigging and sails deployed. There were five Union man-of-war ahead: the Cumberland, the Congress, the St. Lawrence, the Roanoke and the Minnesota. The odds excited King as they extended the opportunity for a great victory, which the South desperately needed. Travelling east had been galling as the south reeled from the twin defeats of Forts Henry and Donelson and the mood of the people he met was glum.
“’And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them’,” King quoted.
Buchanan smiled. “Let us rebuke, Captain King. Order the gun crews to prepare to fire.”
“Aren’t you coming below, sir?”
Buchanan held up a Spencer rifle. “I prefer to deal my rebukes directly. I’ll relay orders through you in the hatch.”
“Permission to pass on the task to an ensign and join you, sir?”
“You have your orders.”
King clenched his fists, but went to the hatch and climbed halfway down. He got the gun crews ready. Then as Buchanan shouted back his instructions, King relayed them, one step removed from the fray either way as a mouthpiece between captain and crew.
The Cumberland opened fire first. Initial shots splashed in the water, but the Union warship quickly found the range. The bang of shot bouncing off the iron plates echoed inside the Virginia, adding to the tumult of the steam engines. Then the ironclad’s guns added to the din as King relayed the order for the forward three to fire. One of the guns was firing hot shot, the cannon ball placed in the ship’s furnace long enough to be get red hot, then removed and carefully loaded, a procedure fraught with potential disaster. Fired at wooden ships, the ball not only shattered wood, it ignited it once it came to rest.
The Virginia bore down relentlessly on the Cumberland. King took a rung higher on the ladder, so he could see more clearly. Buchanan was methodically firing the Spencer at the oncoming Union ship, as if every bullet was a year he’d spent in the Union navy being sent back at it.
As the distance closed, King realized the inevitable and what Buchanan intended to do. He ducked his head down into the smoke filled interior of the Virginia and shouted: “Prepare for ramming!”
The Virginia had been outfitted with an iron ram, due to rumors the Yankees were building their own ironclad and another form of attack might be needed. While the armor was a step forward, the addition of the ram, just below the surface, harkened back to the days of the Greeks.
The Cumberland’s guns continued to blaze away, to little effect. A cannon ball whizzed by Buchanan as he was reloading, passed over King’s head so close he could feel the breeze, and punched a hole in the smokestack, the extent of the damage to the Virginia so far; besides all the dings in the armor plating. The Congress was adding to the barrage and the other three Union warships were coming closer for battle.
King could see the f
aces of the Union sailors over the Cumberland bulkheads peering at the approaching behemoth. Blood from the dead and dying was dribbling down the badly battered and splintered wooden side of the ship. Flames from hot shot were blazing throughout the hulk. But the Yankee flag still flew and the guns that were functional still fired.
The Virginia shuddered at the ram punched through the hull of the Union ship. Looking up, King recognized a lieutenant, an Annapolis graduate, shouting commands for a gun to be depressed far enough to fire at the attacking ship. The two men locked eyes for a minute, much as the Virginia was locked into the Cumberland. King saluted, giving credit to bravery. The lieutenant returned the salute, then gave the order to fire to the one remaining gun facing the Virginia. As he did so, a bullet from Buchanan caught him in the chest and he fell backward into the flames.
The cannon ball hit just in front of the Virginia’s captain, bounced off iron plate and ricocheted away. The concussion knocked Buchanan to the deck, dazed for the moment. Not life threatening, but the situation was, King quickly realized. The ram was stuck in the side of the Cumberland, and as the Union ship began to sink, it was pulling the Virginia down with it.
King sprinted to the hatch and jumped inside. “All back!”
Levers were thrown, reversing the thrust of the propeller. The Virginia shuddered, still tethered by iron to the Cumberland. There was a loud screeching sound, then a resounding gong as the ram broke off, leaving its beak in the Union ship. King quickly clambered up the ladder to review the tactical situation. Buchanan was on his feet, using the Spencer to prop himself up. He pointed and his meaning was clear: The Congress was closest.
King shouted commands. The Virginia slowly turned toward its next victim.
The Captain of the Union ship could see the Cumberland’s fate: sinking, survivors jumping overboard, flames consuming what wasn’t already submerged. He was no fool. As the Virginia drew close, he ordered the Union ship into shallow water, committing a cardinal sin for every ship’s captain: running aground. But at least the Congress would not sink.