Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  Twenty-Four – The Story of Samuel Strong

  July 1863

  There was no getting away from it, Sam thought, the White House was a let-down. There was really only one word to describe it: shabby. The carpets were thin and patchy from heavy wear, the tread of ten thousand muddy spurred boots. Souvenir hunters had cut swatches from the ornate drapes. There was dust on the furniture, much of which was scratched and scarred from careless use. All this Sam noted automatically as he followed the soldier down the long corridor towards the President’s office, his feelings a mixture of trepidation and excitement. At long last, he had been granted the interview with Lincoln he had been hoping and fighting for, and it had come, as such things often do, almost as an anti-climax. The Carver carbine was on its way: Sam carried in his pocket letters from a dozen highly-placed military commanders, among them the swashbuckling Armstrong Custer, testifying to the efficiency of the repeating rifle and exhorting the government to equip more troops with it.

  Soon after McClellan was returned to command in September 1862, and immediately plunged into the costly and indecisive confrontation with Lee at Antietam Creek, Sam had set out on a long selling tour. He demonstrated his repeating rifle in headquarters encampment after field command, from the Rapidan in Virginia to the Mississippi in Illinois. He visited Nashville, Louisville, Cairo – where he held exhibition matches for Admiral Porter’s Mississippi flotilla – and dined, through the good offices of his nephew, with General Grant. Out of that dinner had come Grant’s letter of introduction to the President, and out of that had come Sam’s interview with Mr. Lincoln.

  Sam arrived at the White House at eight sharp. The Washington day usually began around half past seven, although they said the President often began much earlier, sometimes at six. It was already warm, although this early in the morning the July humidity had not yet clamped its sticky hand upon the capital. People on the street were cheerful, smiling. What a Fourth of July it had been, Sam thought, with the victories at Gettysburg and Grant’s investiture of Vicksburg coming hard upon each other’s heels! The papers said that Lee’s army was in full retreat, heading back to its lines south of the Rapidan. There would be no more invasions of the North by the Rebel Army.

  Mr. Lincoln’s office was a big square room, about the size of two farm kitchens, in the southeast corner of the White House. A round oak table covered with a heavy green tasseled cloth stood at its center. There were a few chairs and a couple of horsehair sofas. Over the mantel hung a black and white engraving of Andrew Jackson. There were few books: a Bible, a set of Shakespeare, the Statutes of the United States of America. Mr. Lincoln sat reading at his old pigeonhole desk on the southern side of the room near a window. Behind his chair was a velvet pull cord and to one side a small table, on which were stacked all the morning newspapers. They did not look as if they had been read.

  It was obvious that the President had been awaiting his arrival with some impatience. He got up out of his chair to shake Sam’s hand, and Sam found himself reminded of nothing so much as a jackknife unfolding. Mr. Lincoln was just as he had expected him to be, and yet somehow quite different.

  ‘So you’re the fellow who’s invented the repeating rifle that will win the war, are you?’ he said. ‘I’d like to hope it’s true.’

  ‘No more than would I, Mr. President.’ Sam said.

  ‘If we’re agreed on that, sir, then there’s a lot we need not say,’ Lincoln said. ‘Let me see your gun.’

  Sam had the strangest feeling of confusion as he watched the President remove the carbine from its sacking cover. Lincoln wore a frown which was at the same time a smile. His lined face managed to look both tired and alert. Fiddling with the gun, Lincoln felt Sam’s stare. He looked up and nodded, as though to say, yes, this is how I am and there’s not a great deal that can be done about it. He wore a white shirt and a crumpled black alpaca coat with patch pockets. Sam watched him examine the repeater with the sure familiarity of a man accustomed to firearms and unafraid of them.

  ‘Would you be kind enough to take it apart, Mr. Strong?’ he said. ‘I’d like to see the inwardness of the thing.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d do something for me, Mr. President, while I strip the gun.’ Sam said, placing his bet boldly.

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Time me,’ Sam said.

  Lincoln nodded judiciously and took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket. Sam nodded and set to work with the screwdriver. He took the breech apart, turned it so that the President could see easily how the few simple moving parts worked and then reassembled it.

  ‘A little over three minutes,’ Lincoln observed, looking at the young man who had come into the room while Sam was stripping the gun. ‘Pretty good, eh, Stoddard?’

  ‘Very impressive, Mr. President,’ Stoddard said.

  ‘I’d like to see how it shoots,’ Lincoln said. ‘Do we have time?’

  ‘Nothing to stop us, sir.’

  Lincoln smiled, pleased with that. He came across the room and Sam thought, God he’s tall! He seemed to be all arms and legs, elbows and knees.

  ‘Let’s go over by the monument,’ the President said. ‘Stoddard, why don’t you send over to the War Department and ask Mr. Stanton if he’d like to join us?’

  He put his hand on Sam’s shoulder as Stoddard hurried out to implement his order. It was interesting to see how speedily people reacted to the President’s almost deferential suggestions. He could have got no speedier obedience had he yelled his orders at the top of his voice and simultaneously fired a gun at the man’s feet, Sam thought.

  ‘Your name is Strong?’ Lincoln asked. ‘Why, then do you call it a Carver carbine?’

  ‘My partner’s name, sir,’ Sam said. ‘He’s kept the thing going when I would have foundered on my own. He deserves the credit.’

  ‘Well, could be the fellow who knows how to make things deserves his name celebrated at least as much as the fellow who knows how to finance them.’ Lincoln said. ‘Now the name Strong sticks in my mind from a long time ago. Would you have had a sister by the name of Mary, Mr. Strong?’ He saw Sam’s expression. ‘Well, I seem to have succeeded in astonishing you. That’s one for me, I reckon!’

  ‘How on earth could you have known I had a sister named Mary, sir?’ Sam asked. ‘She ran away from home when she was sixteen.’

  ‘Went to Illinois, did she?’

  ‘We never found out, sir.’

  ‘Well, you could take my word for it, Mr. Strong,’ Lincoln said, as if adding, but you don’t have to. ‘Pretty Mary Strong. She had long black hair, and a sweet way with a song.’

  ‘May I ask how you know all this, Mr. President?’ Sam said, still fighting his astonishment.

  ‘Well, sir, you may have heard that I was a militia captain, of less than sterling quality, in the late Black Hawk Indian troubles of 1832. I was little use as a militiaman, no good at wrestling and even worse at foot racing. Not much damned use for anything,’ He smiled. ‘There’s those who’d say it was still so. However, I enjoy a little music. Yes, I do. We were in Galena, as I recall, when a travelling show came through. A man who called himself “Doc” something. And there on the tailboard of the wagon sat Mary Strong, inviting us all to come see the show. Saucy eyes, she had.’ His voice was soft and he paused, as though some particularly pleasant memory was going through his mind. ‘She had such saucy eyes. Later, I asked her to sing “Banks of the Dee” for us. Oh, and the way she sang it would have made the angels envious.’

  Before he could say more, Stoddard came hurrying back with the news that Secretary Stanton had expressed himself too busy to come and see the shooting trial. Lincoln smiled, frowning.

  ‘Well, they do pretty much as they have a mind to, over there. Come, gentlemen, we’ll do this on our own.’

  They walked out of the White House, past the crowd of businessmen, politicians, office-seekers waiting for an interview with Lincoln. He lifted a hand to them as though to say, I know, I know. Sam hea
rd him sigh. They walked up the grassy knoll towards the spot where the huge granite base of the great unfinished monument to George Washington stood. As they walked, Lincoln noticed that one of the pockets of his jacket was torn.

  ‘Well,’ he said, taking a pin out of the seam of his lapel. ‘We can’t have the chief magistrate of this mighty republic seen wearing a torn coat, now, can we?’ He fastened the tear with the pin. The coat looked neither better nor worse.

  Stoddard had brought along a piece of pine board, maybe three feet long and ;ix inches wide. He propped it up against a nearby tree, after making a smudge on it for a mark. Sam slid the seven snub-nosed bullets into the loading tube and locked it into place in the butt of the rifle. He handed the weapon to Lincoln. The President walked over to where Stoddard had set up the target board, and then marched forty paces away from it, the rifle on his shoulder. He looked gawky and inelegant, like an overgrown schoolboy playing soldiers. He raised the rifle, sighted it, and fired. The report was a flat, empty sound; a splinter whirred up noisily into the air and down again.

  ‘Hmm,’ Lincoln said, shifting the butt slightly on his shoulder. Then he fired again, steadily emptying the rifle.

  ‘That’s fine shooting, Mr. President!’ Sam called out, and it was. Lincoln had put the first shot low and to the right. The other six were grouped in a space that could have easily been covered by the palm of a child’s hand.

  Lincoln smiled self-consciously and handed the rifle back to Sam. He nodded abruptly and set off towards the White House as though no further discussion was necessary.

  ‘That sister of yours,’ he said as they walked.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘She marry that medicine man? Doc whatever-his-name-was?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr. President.’

  ‘Well,’ Lincoln said. ‘Saucy eyes, she had.’

  The following day, Sam was called again to the White House. This time Lincoln’s assistant secretary, John Hay, was present. He was a brilliant, active young man from western Illinois, who had been drafted to assist the President’s overworked secretary in spite of Lincoln’s good-humored demurral that he could not bring his entire home state to work in the executive mansion. The three of them loaded and emptied the gun perhaps a dozen times, taking turns to shoot.

  ‘Well, Hay, what do you think?’ the President asked.

  ‘Wonderful weapon, Mr. President,’ Hay answered. ‘Almost foolproof.’

  ‘We could do with something like this for our army,’ Lincoln said, eyes twinkling. ‘Perhaps we’d better pass our Mr. Strong here along to Ramsay, at the Ordnance Department. What do you say to that, Mr. Strong?’

  ‘Mr. Lincoln, I have been knocking on the door of the Ordnance Department for three years,’ Sam said. ‘All I’ve got to show for it so far is sore knuckles.’

  ‘Well, I think we can offer you some salve,’ Lincoln smiled. ‘Hay will remind me to write a note for you to take to General Ramsay. I hope I may assume that your prices are competitive?’

  ‘This gun is the cheapest, most durable and most efficient repeater on the market, sir,’ Sam assured him.

  ‘And you’re rightly proud of it,’ Lincoln said. ‘I am sure we shall find good use for your invention, Mr. Strong. Sure of it. But now, if you will forgive me, I have had my allotment of enjoyment for the day and must return to more pressing matters.’

  ‘A big chore, sir,’ Sam ventured. ‘Running this war.’

  ‘It is, Mr. Strong,’ Lincoln smiled. ‘Especially with the kind of help I have.’

  He ambled back inside, a long, stick-legged figure. He had to stoop to go through the doorway. Hay told Sam to call on the morrow and he would have Mr. Lincoln’s note waiting.

  The President was as good as his word, and, armed with such impeccable recommendations, Sam was granted immediate audience with the new chief of ordnance, General George D. Ramsay. He found Ramsay to be a man totally different to his predecessor. Ramsay was making things hum.

  ‘I’m interested in winning this damned war, Mr. Strong,’ he said. ‘Not making it last!’

  ‘Me, too, general,’ Sam grinned.

  ‘I write tight contracts, Mr. Strong,’ Ramsay went on. ‘If you don’t keep to your delivery dates and prices, I’ll boot your backside out of that door faster than you can blink!’

  ‘I’ll keep to them, general.’

  ‘Then I’ll give you all the business you can handle,’ General Ramsay said. ‘What do you say to ten thousand repeaters as a start?’

  ‘If I had the nerve, General,’ Sam said. ‘I’d say, “Is that all?”.’

  Twenty-Five – The Story of Jedediah Strong

  October 1863

  It was the same dream again. The bad one.

  Dan Holmes had told him about the execution. His words had burned themselves into Jed’s brain. And now the dream kept coming back and he could not stop it. He saw the hate on Edward Maxwell’s face as they bound David Strong’s hands behind him and led him out of the jail to the courtyard. There was a wagon standing there. Soldiers drawn up in two lines. An officer. The flag flying from the top of the courthouse, snapping in the fresh morning breeze. Two men to be executed standing alone in the center of the yard. Orders being shouted. The second man was a deserter named Stoddard, who had killed a woman on a farm near Kelly’s Ford and then raped her fourteen year old daughter. He began to whimper when they put the noose around his head.

  ‘Don’t hang me,’ he whined. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t hang me, Jesus, witness how I repent for what I did, please, please, don’t hang me.’ Over and over, please, please, Jesus, please. And David Strong, who had been silent throughout, spoke his last words as they placed the black hood over his head. His voice was bitter and disdainful.

  ‘What damned fine company you people give a man to die in!’ he said. And then the soldiers shouted the horses into startled motion, and the two bodies were jerked into space, the nooses twanging tight, tighter, burning, cutting, choking.

  And Jed would wake up, bathed in sweat, to find he had kicked his blanket on to the floor and someone was holding him down, Hampson or Herndon or one of the others. He knew the name and the story of every man in the hut by now: Herndon and Mitchell, McMaster and Stern, McElroy, Jordan, Selby, Price, Woodward, Bishop, Nevins, Johnson and McLaughlin, Wortley, Clark, Linton, McHenry, Ganoe, Moskink, Lossing, Weigley, Ropp, Pullen, Henderson, Nicholson, Grant ‘No relation,’ he’d say, showing tobacco-stained teeth). Sixty-four beds crammed into this one makeshift hut, every one of them an amputee. And every one of them had lost not only an arm or a leg or in some cases both legs, but also some other, ineffable part of themselves no surgeon and no medicine would ever replace. A loss of self, a loss of immortality.

  There was no more talk of The Cause: that kind of thing was finished. They knew the bitter truth too well. The Federals could lose and lose and lose, yet still they emerged, like Antaeus, stronger than before. Every battle it fought permanently weakened the South. Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville: what had they proved, except that, in the end the South could not win the war no matter how many battles it won? We whipped them all, the dying boys said, yet still more come, like dragon’s teeth. What future for any of us? Jed wondered, looking around the hut. The war went on, a gigantic ship plowing through an ocean of blood that was huge and dark and unending. But they were no longer passengers.

  October came: rain, colder winds. Jed was able to get out of bed twice daily, and walk up and down the length of the hut, his strength returning slowly. The skies outside were a harder blue: leaves whirled down off the beech trees like snowflakes. And as slowly as his strength came back, Jed was learning, all over again, the things he had learned as a child: how to tie a shoelace, how to fasten your pants, button your shirt. How to live with one hand in a world made for two-handed men. Everything was difficult, and some things you began to believe were impossible.

  One night they did not come around with the morphia, and Jed as
ked the nurse what had happened.

  ‘You’ve been taken off it,’ he said sternly. ‘That arm of yours has healed up real good. You’re one of the lucky ones. There’s plenty needs morphia a lot worse than you and we ain’t got unlimited supplies, you know.’

  With which Jed could hardly argue. Nevertheless the man’s words left him with a vague feeling of unease which grew as the night progressed. His strength left him all at once, like water going out of a tub. He yawned continuously but he could not get to sleep. By four in the morning he was shivering and sweating at the same time and a watery discharge streamed from his eyes and nose which no amount of wiping seemed to stem. He was wracked with cramps until, at dawn, he fell into a restless sleep, tossing and moaning until he shouted himself awake. Great moaning yawns forced his mouth open: he could not in any way control them. He was cold, cold. The pores of his skin were mottled, like the flesh of a goose. Tears streamed from his eyes, mucus from his nose.

  ‘Come on, Jed, get up out of there!’ someone said, his voice urgent. It was Gerry Hampson.’ Jed, get out of bed, quick!’ Jed tried to swing his legs over the side of the cot but he could not make it. A great contraction rolled through his belly and he threw up explosively, spattering Hampson with bloody vomit. Hampson was yelling now: the doctor came on the run.

  Three of them managed to hold Jed down long enough to force something into his mouth. He recognized the sweet-soft taste of morphia. After a few minutes the spasms ceased and he fell back on the bed utterly exhausted.

  ‘He got the sickness, Doc?’ Hampson asked.

  ‘Stand back, soldier,’ the doctor said brusquely, ignoring the question. ‘Nurse, resume morphia treatment for this man.’