1862

by Robert Conroy

  “And this is what Grant is doing?”

  “Certainly.” Nathan replied. 'There have been a score of small battles, and a hundred skirmishes. Lee is bleeding from each one and using up supplies he can’t replace. Perhaps a better analogy would be a Mexican bullfight, where the mighty animal is weakened by small spears and then finally dispatched by the matador's sword. Soon Lee will weaken if he hasn't begun to already. He has lost men, ammunition, and supplies. Soon he will turn and then retreat south.”

  Scott checked a clock on the wall. It's late and I'm tired. We need to get home. I need sleep and you should be with your lovely Rebecca. But tell me. What do you think Lee will do when he begins to retreat?”

  Nathan pushed thoughts of Rebecca out of his mind. “That's the troubling part. I don't know what he will do. But I don't think he'll go peaceably back to the South. I think he'll be like that pain-maddened bull confronted by the matador. I think Lee will be more dangerous to us than at anytime in this campaign.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Fort Stephens was one of two score forts that ringed the city of Washington. It consisted of thick, low earthen walls that were pierced by gun ports housing the largest cannon available. As they were not intended to be moved, the guns could be the largest built by the foundries of the North.

  The fort was a squat and malevolent scar on what had been an otherwise pleasant land. The trees that had stood before it had been chopped down to provide a clear field of fire for Stephens's defenders. The same was true for all the other fortifications that protected Washington. Trees that had stood for decades had been reduced to kindling.

  Between the forts were lines of trenches, rifle pits, and emplacements for individual guns. Fields of fire overlapped each other, and the trenches were wide enough to handle two ranks of massed infantry. The effect was to reinforce the notion that Washington was the most heavily fortified city on the face of the earth. Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, was deemed a close second.

  Washington was also the largest prison.

  Abraham Lincoln stood behind one of the giant cannon and looked north into Maryland. In the distance, he imagined that he could see Pennsylvania. Once these had been friendly lands, but now they were occupied by Lee's Confederates. Only temporarily, he had been assured, but the fact remained that they were held by the enemy. The president of the United States was a prisoner in Washington.

  Oh, he could flee to Baltimore or Philadelphia like so many members of Congress had, but he felt it was his duty to remain in his nation’s capital. He had been castigated for skulking into Washington prior to his inauguration, and had vowed never to take part in a similar travesty. No, his duty was in Washington.

  Lincoln climbed onto the earthen parapet and looked around. Like lemmings, several of his entourage accompanied him, along with a handful of grinning soldiers from the garrison. As always, Lincoln wore a dark suit and a top hat that made him look seven feet tall instead of six foot four.

  “He looks worried,” Nathan said to John Hay. They had declined to climb onto the parapet.

  “Wouldn't you be?” Hay replied wryly. “He is surrounded by his enemies, both figuratively and nearly literally.”

  Access to Washington from the rest of the Union was only by one Baltimore amp; Ohio rail line and a bad dirt road, the Bladensburg Pike. Both ran from Baltimore and it was feared they could be cut at any time. Nathan recalled travelling the Bladensburg road so many months before.

  Two of Mr. Lowe's three observation balloons soared thousands of feet into the air, where observers confirmed the obvious-no Confederate army was in the vicinity. To further confirm this and to assist the balloons on those days when weather kept them grounded, numerous patrols were undertaken by the army.

  At President Lincoln's insistence, his small entourage had taken carriages to Fort Stephens just so the president could see the defenses. He had done it before, and appeared to enjoy the opportunity to interact with the soldiers who manned the guns. He also liked to get away from the pressure of his office, both literally and figuratively. Washington might be a prison, but his office on the second floor of the White House was his cell and the place in which he was held in solitary confinement.

  The previous day he had cleared his schedule and announced that he would be “inspecting” Fort Stephens the next day. This courtesy gave the commander of Stephens an opportunity to make sure the place looked good, and gave an opportunity for those who didn't want to accompany him to come up with a reasonable excuse. Lincoln was rarely alone on these tours, as many of his staff also liked the chance to get away from it all.

  Nathan heard a distant pop. It sounded like a bubble bursting. “What the hell?” he said, and then recognized the sound. “Gunfire?”

  A couple more pops followed and then the sound of a scream. A body toppled back behind the earthen wall. A soldier standing near Lincoln had been hit in the face and lay twitching on the ground. To Nathan's horror, Abraham Lincoln was still exposed on the parapet, although the others were scattering rapidly. Nathan jumped up beside the president. Lincoln looked stunned.

  “Why did they shoot that boy?” he asked in confused disbelief.

  More gunfire was heard and Nathan saw clouds of gun-smoke from about two hundred yards out. He grabbed the president and unceremoniously shoved him off the embankment and down to safety. As he landed behind Lincoln, he heard the thwack of bullets smacking the earth where they had just stood.

  “Sir,” Nathan gasped, “they weren't shooting at that boy. They were shooting at you.”

  Lincoln had regained control of himself. He realized that he must have made a splendid target in a top hat and standing exposed on the wall of a fort. He was about to say something when the great guns of Fort Stephens opened up on the place where smoke from the sniper's guns still hung in the air. Nathan didn't think any enemy sharpshooters would be hit because they were a small target and probably hidden in the fold of the ground, but their lives would be damned miserable until they were able to slink away under the cover of nightfall. He hoped Meade would send a patrol out quickly to find them.

  Then he began to wonder if the shooting was a coincidence or not. It seemed rather unlikely that a rebel patrol would be hanging around Fort Stephens just at the time Mr. Lincoln decided to take a stroll on its walls.

  The soldier struck by the first bullet was dead. Looking at the wound that had blown his face away, it seemed that he had died virtually instantly and that any motion observed earlier had been nothing more than involuntary spasms.

  “I thought this place was safe,'^: said John Hay. He, too, was visibly shaken. People who work in the White House do not ordinarily see violent death close up even though they frequently cause it.

  “The observation balloons and the patrols can find armies,” Nathan said, “but a handful of men bent on murder can generally slink in like what just happened.”

  The cannon had ceased and Nathan saw with relief that a large unit of soldiers had clambered out and was headed towards the place where the gunfire had been observed. He noticed that they were having a great deal of difficulty moving through their own defenses. At least that much works right, he thought. General Heintzelman commanded the forts and their garrisons under the overall command of Meade. Heintzelman had been near Lincoln on the parapet and was in telegraphic communication with neighboring Fort De Russey, which had also sent out a patrol.

  President Lincoln had just about made it to his carriage when there was another brief burst of gunfire. One of the patrols had stumbled onto the Confederates' hiding place. A distant shout informed them that at least one prisoner had been taken. Now they might find out just how and why a Confederate patrol just happened to be at that place and at that time.

  Nathan glanced towards the president, who smiled quizzically. “Do you believe in coincidences, Mr. Hunter?”

  “Not really, sir.”

  “Nor do I. Mr. Hunter. Coincidences belong in novels.”

  Abi
gail Watson had hung back in the hallway while General Wade Hampton was carried into his room by men who awkwardly handled his stretcher up stairs and around corners. She had not been noticed by his accompanying officers and doctors as they finally managed to carry his stretcher into the Haskills' largest bedroom. She was just a darky slave and nothing more important to them than a piece of furniture.

  It had not been the first time that a wounded or ill Confederate officer had been brought there instead of to one of the numerous military hospitals that ringed Richmond. The city's hospitals were overwhelmed, overworked, staffed by unqualified personnel, and hideously unsanitary, even by the lax standards of the time. People stayed in hospitals to die, not to get better. The powerful, important, and those who could afford it found their own doctors and medicines.

  General Hampton had stayed at Haskill's Hotel on a couple of previous occasions, so his presence was taken pretty much in stride. The only difference was that he had taken a Union bullet in the shoulder and now required both care and continuous observation lest the wound reopen and cause him to bleed to death.

  With only so many people available, some of the responsibility for watching over Hampton while he slept as soundly as the drugs given him would permit had fallen on Abigail's slender shoulders. Abigail would sit on a chair in the corner and simply watch while the general slept, his chest heaving rhythmically beneath the massive bandages that swathed him.

  She had mixed emotions about her assignment. Part of her rejoiced that a Confederate of Hampton's stature was out of the war, while another part of her was angered that he hadn't been killed outright. She wondered if she was capable of finishing the job by putting a pillow over Hamptons face and suffocating him.

  She decided it wasn't worth the risk. First, he might wake up and push her away. Even in his weakened state he looked like an enormously strong man. If caught, even if she succeeded, she would guarantee herself the same awful death that had befallen Hannibal. No, she wanted to live. She had a son and, while he hadn't seen his mother in a long time, she knew he needed her alive and not a martyr.

  Other thoughts impeded her ability to commit murder. There was the practical matter that Hampton, while both famous and important, wasn't all that essential to the Confederate war cause. He would be replaced, and both slavery and the war would continue without missing a step. Next was the fact that Hampton, in his previous stays at Haskill's had been correctly courteous in his dealings with her. No swearing, no hollering, and certainly no physical punishment or attempts to force himself on her sexually like so many other guests had done.

  In short, Wade Hampton had been a gentleman and Abigail considered herself a lady, and ladies do not murder gentlemen.

  The thought of her being a lady to a white man’s gentleman made her smile while she kept watch over the lightly snoring general. Bored, she stood and walked about the room. There was a pile of papers on a desk near the bed. He had informed his aide and secretary that he intended to keep up with his business ventures and other correspondence while he recovered from his wounds.

  Abigail Watson reached a conclusion. If she could not kill the man, then the least she could do was read his mail. Keeping careful watch over his prone form for any changes that might indicate that he was awakening, she began to shuffle though the correspondence for anything interesting. Much was the stuff of routine. Forms from the army needed completion, and there were reports from his landholdings that told of wealth that was inconceivable to her. But there was nothing that was particularly interesting or compelling.

  But then she noticed two documents that were pinned together. The signature on the second one was that of Jefferson Davis and it was in response to an earlier one sent by Hampton. She read the two in growing wonderment. She knew little of the ways of the world outside Virginia, except that there was such a world and that there was a place called England that fought on the side of the Confederacy. Until just a moment earlier, she hadn't given any thought to what life was like in this place called England. She simply presumed that it was a land full of plantations and fields that were tilled by Negro slaves. Now she knew differently.

  Abigail breathed deeply. With trembling hands, she took both letters, folded them, and hid them in her dress. If they were discovered as absent from the pile, their loss would easily be attributed to the administrative chaos the pile of papers represented. Abigail was confident she would not be blamed for their loss. After all. what would a nigger want with letters she couldn't read?

  She had no idea what to do with the letters. She only hoped an answer would come to her.

  “Retreat is an abominable word,” said Knollys. His eyes were focused on the small campfire on which an unknown something in a small greasy pan was trying to form itself into a biscuit.

  “So, too, is starvation,” Wolsey responded from the other side of the fire. “Of the two, I'll choose the former any time. Starving to death is so final, while one can always recover from a retreat. Well, almost always.”

  “True enough.”

  “As they say, Knollys, there is a time and a place for everything, and, God knows, this is the time to pull back to Virginia and determine just what, if anything, we have accomplished.”

  And what had they accomplished? Knollys wondered. As feared, there had been no major battle with Grant's forces, which had stayed maddeningly out of reach of the longed-for climactic battle. There had been many skirmishes and small battles, some involving corps-sized detachments, but Grant had not permitted the size of the conflicts to escalate. When a Union force had been threatened by a reinforced Confederate one, he had withdrawn the Union force rather than match the rebel one.

  It had resulted in a campaign of attrition that had only benefited the Union. In the weeks of campaigning, the combined Anglo-Confederate army had lost nearly twenty thousand men. It was estimated that the Union forces had lost several thousand more, but they had more to begin with and continued to gather reinforcements. Thus, the Union forces actually grew while the Confederates dwindled.

  By now the food supplies were virtually nonexistent. Knollys turned over the thing in the pan that might be a biscuit if it had actually been made from flour. He had no idea what it was made of and only prayed it wouldn't kill him. He almost hoped it was weevily, as the bugs did constitute a kind of meat, which had been scarcer than flour lately. He no longer wondered why there were so few dogs around. If America was a land of abundance, why was he so damned hungry?

  The ex-rebel he'd hired as a servant had disappeared, taking with him some of what remained of their foodstuffs. At least he'd had the decency not to take everything. “My only question is whether we'll go back below the Potomac without making one further attempt at Grant,” Wolsey wondered. “What do you think?”

  Normally, a brigadier would not ask the opinion of someone of a lesser rank, but the situation was far from normal. Living in a state of continuous hunger broke down many social and military barriers. Also, Wolsey had the habit of making such inquiries of his subordinates. It endeared him to them. The fact that Knollys was still liaison to Lee’s headquarters made the inquiry even more relevant.

  “Lee keeps his own counsel,” Knollys said. “He does not lack for suggestions from others, however. There are those who say he must make a last and major attempt to take Baltimore or Washington, and those people are far more numerous than those who feel he should simply retreat.”

  “Who is on which side?”

  “Stuart favors attack, to no one’s surprise. Longstreet and Jackson tend towards it if it has a chance of success, while Beauregard is in favor of retreat without further conflict.”

  “You've said this to Napier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then which, in your opinion, will occur?”

  “An attack, but only if it can be pulled off. Scouting forces are out now trying to determine if an attack in overwhelming force at a particular point can tip the scales and give us. however temporarily, a major Union city. Baltimore
and Washington are the only two choices. Philadelphia is too far to the northeast and it would be too easy for Lee to be trapped there. No, it must be either Baltimore or Washington, where he can keep his line of retreat open.”

  Wolsey nodded concurrence. “And which will it be?”

  Knollys split the biscuit in two and gave half to Wolsey. They each took a tentative bite. It was hard, but it didn't taste too awful. Knollys decided it wouldn't kill him.

  “There can only be one target,” Knollys said. 'Washington. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “My dear Nathan,” Rebecca said, “if the president and his lady will not depart Washington, then why should I?”

  “Because, dearest Rebecca, the city may be in danger, and you as well should the Confederates come this way. As it seems apparent that they must pass by, there will be a threat until they have gone.”

  They were seated in the kitchen and eating a breakfast of pancakes and bacon. It had been prepared by Bridget Conlin. who listened in amusement to their first quarrel since becoming lovers.

  “I was not aware that the Confederates waged war on women,” Rebecca persisted. She was in an ill temper. She had begun her monthly flow, which, along with being uncomfortable and painful, meant she and Nathan could not make love until it ceased. At least it meant she was not with child. She did not need that complication at this particular time.

  “They don't,” he replied. His frustration matched her own. Her safety was paramount to him. “But their cannon shells and bullets cannot determine friend from foe, man from woman. Battle is a storm of lead and flying metal and no one knows where it will land. Congress and most of the cabinet have departed for Philadelphia and safety, and why not you?”

  She reached across and grasped his hand. “Because I wish to be here with you. Congress are a bunch of cowardly rascals and their flight is of no surprise or consequence. I saw them flee like rabbits after Bull Run. so this doesn't surprise me. Besides. I'm confident that the city's walls are strong enough to withstand any attack.”