Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  April 1865

  The Confederacy fell on the first Sunday in April. No one knew it then of course. No banner headlines announced it to a joyful Northern populace, and yet it was so. Shortly after a prayer for the President of the Confederacy, offered by the Reverend Dr Charles Minnigerode in the pulpit of St Paul’s Episcopal Church on Grace Street in Richmond, a messenger from the War Department tiptoed down the aisle, and whispered something in Jefferson Davis’ ear. A few hours later, with the dull, booming sound of distant guns in the air, Davis, his cold, stern face expressionless, explained to his Cabinet that Richmond must be evacuated. At eleven that night, the government train moved out in gloomy silence across the James River and headed south for Danville. The next day the Cabinet was reassembled in the home of Major W.T. Sutherlin at 975 Main Street, but it was no more than an empty gesture. It was the end, although Lee and Johnston still had battles before them. The next day the Stars and Stripes flew above the dome of the Capitol.

  Petersburg was in ruins, Richmond in flames. Lee and his tatterdemalion army were in retreat towards Amelia courthouse. There was a jubilance in the air at Grant’s headquarters in City Point. President Lincoln, who had come down at Grant’s invitation on March 26 aboard the River Queen said, ‘Do you know, general, I have had a sort of sneaking idea for some days that you intended to do something like this!’

  He looked old and sick, Andrew thought. Much older than a man of fifty-six ought to look. Lincoln was thirty-five pounds underweight. He walked like a man with sore feet and did not refuse help in and out of carriages as he once would have done.

  ‘My intention was never to take Richmond as such, Mr. President,’ Grant said. ‘Nor to defeat Lee in actual battle. I wanted to remove him and his army from the contest, maybe even have him use his influence to get Johnston to surrender. I don’t want him to break and run for the mountains and leave us with a dozen guerrilla armies to fight!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Lincoln said. ‘We must now press for a peaceful end to this thing.’

  He toured Richmond for two days, and learned on his return to City Point that Secretary Seward had fallen from his carriage and suffered serious injuries. They had the Washington newspapers.

  GRANT

  RICHMOND OURS!

  Weitzel Entered The Rebel Capital Yesterday Morning

  MANY GUNS CAPTURED

  Our Troops Received With Enthusiasm!

  With the President haunting the headquarters office, Grant began the pursuit. ‘We have Lee’s army pressed hard,’ he wrote to Sherman from Burkesville, ‘He is endeavoring to reach Danville ... I shall press the pursuit to the end. Push Johnston at the same time and let us finish up this job at once.’

  He almost had his wish. The two armies collided near Farmville on a tributary of the Appomattox River called Sailer’s Creek, and when the day was done Popeye Ewell’s corps had surrendered along with half of Anderson’s.

  At headquarters, Lincoln penned a telegram for Grant.

  GEN. SHERIDAN SAYS

  ‘IF THE THING IS PRESSED I THINK THAT LEE WILL SURRENDER’.

  LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

  ‘Well, Andrew?’ Grant said, passing the telegram across for Andrew to read. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘What all of us would say, General,’ Andrew replied. ‘Lee must know it’s hopeless, too. Why not put it to him?’

  ‘I think I will,’ Grant muttered. ‘I think I will.’

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d try to get it done as soon as possible, General,’ Andrew grinned. ‘I’ve got an invitation to a wedding on April fifteenth.’

  ‘A wedding?’ Grant said raising his eyebrows. He looked worn and his unadorned uniform was dusty and stained. But there was a tense anticipation in the man, an eagerness. He had victory in his hands and he knew it. ‘Well, we’ll just have to see if we can’t arrange things to suit.’

  He wrote to Lee on the seventh. Lee’s reply was equivocal but encouraging. Meanwhile the armies jockeyed, men died. On Palm Sunday, April 9, Robert E. Lee made one last, bold try at moving his battered, tired men south to join up with Joe Johnston. Coming out of a small valley, his lead regiments saw horsemen on the ridge ahead of them. It was ‘Little Phil’ Sheridan’s cavalry. To the left, blue-clad infantry streamed out of the pines on the road to Appomattox Station: Edward Ord’s Army of the James, supported by the 5th Corps, commanded by the fiery Griffin. Behind Lee lay two more Federal Army corps, Humphreys with the 2nd, Wright with the 6th. Captain Simms of Longstreet’s staff came forward with a flag of truce, which was received by Major-General George Armstrong Custer and sent to the rear. The sun was getting hot. The last shreds of the mist which had veiled the greening swell of the farmland disappeared.

  It was over.

  How many times will they write about this? Andrew thought, as he watched Grant ride down to the McLean house, where he was to meet Lee. He did not look like a winner. He wore a shabby, field-worn private’s uniform, and he still looked seedy. For the past few days he had been suffering from a severe headache which nothing would shift. Truce flags fluttered all around. Everywhere men stood in groups or lay on the soft spring grass, two mighty armies come to rest at last. General Lee arrived with his secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Marshall. Lee wore his best full-dress uniform. He greeted the officers, waiting below the board steps to the porch of the two-story house, in a grave, sad voice. There were great furrows in his forehead; his eyes were red as if he had been weeping. His cheeks were sunken and haggard, his face devoid of color. He went inside, leaving his orderly to hold his gray horse, Traveller. The orderly took out the horse’s bit and let him crop the grass in the twenty-foot front yard.

  Andrew stood waiting, envying the men who had been invited to witness the surrender. One of them was Edward Ord. He clapped Andrew on the back as he went into the house.

  ‘A long way from the Spokane River, Andrew,’ he said, laughing. Sheridan went in, Custer, Parker, Babcock, Porter, the others. It was very quiet. For the first time in as long as Andrew could remember, there was no sound of cannon.

  All at once General Lee appeared, tall, the embroidered belt and dress sword flashing in the sun. Every Federal officer nearby saluted by raising his hat. Lee, no longer in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, no longer in command of anything, returned the salute in the same fashion. He looked out across the fields to where his men were waiting. Then, quite unexpectedly, he stretched his arms to their full length and clapped his hands three times. Traveller’s head came up, startled. The general smiled and came down the steps. As he did Grant emerged from the house. Lee mounted his horse and gathered up the reins. Grant touched his hat. The sad-faced man on the tall gray horse returned the salute, then turned away.

  As soon as Lee was out of sight, Grant mounted and returned to headquarters. The officers who had been waiting outside the McLean house crowded in, vying to buy some memento of the surrender from the owner of the house. Wilmer McLean was one of the war’s most astonished men. The battle of First Manassas had been fought in his back yard. He brought his family south to make sure such a terrible thing never happened to them again. Now this: the surrender signed in his living room! Andrew watched Armstrong Custer skipping down the steps with the table on which Grant had drafted the surrender terms. Everyone was shouting, jostling for McLean’s attention.

  That day Andrew would always remember. Barefoot Confederates, their clothes no more than tatters, walking alongside Lee’s horse, weeping. A gray-uniformed cavalry officer snapping his saber across his knee. General Grant sitting on a roadside stone, writing out the telegram advising Washington that Lee had surrendered. General Meade, his grave, scholarly face radiant with happiness, shouting to his men with his arms held high in the air, ‘It’s all over, boys! It’s all over!’ Campfires hissing in the light rain that began to fall around midnight. A boy sitting on the grass, his head in his hands, sobbing, the torn colors of his regimental flag lying by his side. Another, no more than fifteen, tuggi
ng at his sleeve, and asking, ‘Does this mean we can go home, sir?’

  ‘Yes, son,’ Andrew said, gently. ‘We’re all going home.’

  Thirty-Two – The Family

  April 1865

  At ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday, April 15, Henry Strong and Ann Beecher were pronounced man and wife at the little, gray-brick Episcopal church of St Stephen’s in Culpeper. Before the same altar at which they took their vows David Strong had once knelt with his Joanna.

  They rode back to the old house in open carriages, the bride and groom in a landau especially rented for the occasion. Its owner said it was the only one left intact in the county, and the odds were, Andrew thought, that he was right. Henry looked prosperous and befuddled in his full-dress uniform. Ann Beecher, the plainest of girls, was as pretty as she would ever be in a dress of white satin that had once belonged to her mother. With Andrew and Jessica rode the Reverend Stanton Beecher and his wife Selina. Behind them came Sam Strong, his daughter-in-law Louise, and her two little boys, Joab and Jonathan.

  ‘Not many,’ Andrew said to Jessica. ‘Not many of us made it home.’

  She laid her hand on his and said nothing. She knew he was thinking of the ghosts who rode behind the third carriage. David Strong, Jedediah, Travis, Abigail. She felt sometimes as if she knew them better than her own parents, and in many ways it was true.

  Aunt Betty was waiting for them on the porch of the house, hands on hips, beaming. There was a table on the front lawn, glasses, a bowl of punch. Toasts were drunk to the bride and groom. Henry made a little speech. Ann blushed and said little.

  Andrew walked through the house while the guests chattered outside. It smelled of fresh-planed wood and paint. Jessica had transformed it from a ruin into something approaching its former beauty. There were only a few sticks of furniture in some of the rooms, but he had told her in his letters how the place had looked, and she had tried, wherever it was possible, to buy pieces like the ones which had been there before. The long table in the airy dining room was laid for the wedding breakfast with gleaming silver and shining crystal which Jessica had brought down from her family’s house in Washington. Through the tall Georgian windows, the terraced garden, falling away to the river valley below, was bright with spring flowers. The willows along Mountain Run were a pale, delicate shade of green.

  Andrew felt tears prickling in his eyes. He could almost see his father sitting at the head of the table. I guess I’ve got as many faults as the next man, but bein’ wrong ain’t one of them. He turned away from the window and went into the library. There were books on the rebuilt shelves; not the ones that Andrew had read so avidly as a sixteen-year-old, but the same titles. He had written them all down, as many as he could remember. And Jess had bought copies from book dealers in Washington, New York and even as far afield as Chicago. The portrait of Davy Strong, repaired by expert craftsmen, hung again where it had always hung. He stood looking up at the smiling, sturdy figure.

  ‘I’ll bet you’d be surprised to see us all now, Davy Strong,’ he said. He turned to find Jessica watching him, a smile on her lovely face.

  ‘Jess, my darling, you’ve done marvels!’ he said. ‘Wonders!’

  ‘Shucks,’ she mumbled, pretending to kick at the carpet, hands behind her back like a farm-boy talking to his sweetheart. ‘It warn’t nuthin’.’

  He laughed out loud and took her in his arms. ‘You know, this marrying business must be infectious. I keep on getting the strangest urge to ask you if you’ll marry me.’

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Marry, a broken-down ex-soldier with no job and no prospects? You must be joking!’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ he said softly. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? That’s all any of us are now. The great men: Lee, Grant, all of us. Just broken down ex-soldiers.’

  ‘My father wants to talk to you,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Outside.’

  They went out into the warm sunshine. Senator McCabe was talking to the bride and groom. He saw Andrew and excused himself. Taking Andrew’s arm he led him to one side.

  ‘Well, young feller-me-lad,’ he said. ‘You’re looking healthy enough.’

  ‘Thank you, Senator. And how are you?’

  ‘Feel like I’m going to live to be a hundred!’ McCabe said, banging himself on the chest. ‘Andrew, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Rest up some,’ Andrew said. ‘Think. You don’t have time to think while you’re fighting a war.’

  ‘I saw Grant in Washington,’ McCabe said. ‘Just for a few minutes. Asked him about you. He said you were one of the best-organized men he ever met in his life.’

  ‘That’s very generous of him.’

  ‘Said you were reliable. Said he could always depend on you.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Andrew murmured, slightly embarrassed to think of the taciturn Grant delivering such encomiums. ‘Said you saved his bacon at Shiloh. That true?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Ahah!’ McCabe said. ‘That damned honesty of yours. He mentioned that, too. Said that was one of your worst faults, lad. Said you never knew when not to tell the plain damned truth. We talked of that once. Do you remember?’

  ‘I remember.’ And afterwards I made love to your daughter, beneath your roof, and with your knowledge.

  ‘I want you to come in with me, Andrew,’ McCabe said. ‘The years ahead are going to be difficult. We have to rebuild the nation. It won’t be easy and the government will need the very best men the country can provide. It’s my feeling you may be one of them.’

  Andrew looked past the senator to the top of the hill where the main gate opened on to the road. There was a coach coming down the drive at a gallop, driven by a man in a dark cloak. He was shouting something.

  ‘My God!’ Andrew said. ‘Excuse me, Senator!’

  The bearded man driving the coach was near enough for him to recognize now, and Andrew ran, scattering the guests on the lawn, shouting his brother’s name. Jedediah leaped down from the coach and hugged him, swung him around with his one arm, laughing, shouting with pleasure.

  ‘Jed, Jed, it’s so damned good to see you!’ Andrew said. ‘Where the devil have you come from?’

  ‘All the way from St Louis,’ Jed answered. ‘And before that, Texas.’ His face sobered. ‘I found the Maxwells, Bo. That chapter’s over.’ He walked to the door of the coach and opened it. A dark-haired woman got out and stood smiling at him. She was a classical beauty in the Spanish style, with great, dark, liquid eyes, and hair as black as ebony.

  ‘This is Maria,’ Jed said. ‘Maria Gonzales y Cordoba, from San Antonio, Texas. She has done me the great honor of consenting to be my wife.’

  ‘Then I am doubly delighted to make you welcome, señorita,’ Andrew said. ‘And to use the only Spanish phrase I know: mi casa es su casa.’

  ‘If you had to learn one,’ she smiled, ‘that was the best.’

  ‘You’ve come from St Louis, you say?’ Andrew asked. ‘Have you had a good journey?’

  ‘It had its moments,’ Maria said, with a smile he did not understand. Jedediah jerked his head towards the crowd on the lawn in front of the big house.

  ‘What’s going on, Bo?’

  ‘A wedding,’ Andrew said. ‘Cousin Henry and a lady from Cincinnati called Ann Beecher.’

  ‘ “Mary Ann” got married?’ Jed grinned. ‘Well, well! Wonders’ll never cease.’

  ‘Tell me, what the devil were you doing in St Louis?’ Jed’s face sobered.

  ‘I ran across a man who’d been up in Colorado,’ he said. ‘Told me he was at that Indian fight, Sand Creek.’

  ‘Massacre, you mean,’ Andrew said. ‘Damned drunken lynching party rode into a defenseless Indian village and butchered women and children.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe,’ Jed said. ‘I don’t know much about it. Only, this man I met, he said he’d seen Travis up there. ‘

  ‘Travis? Alive?’

  ‘Look, Bo,
I don’t know for sure,’ Jed said, with an anxious glance towards Sam Strong, who was talking to Senator McCabe on the lawn. ‘It could have been some other fellow. But this man described him so well … and said he remembered him on account of him having been named for Travis of the Alamo.’

  ‘So you went up there?’

  ‘Wasted my time,’ Jed answered. ‘I never found hide nor hair of him. So I sent word to Maria to meet me in Independence and we came back home by train. I had no idea all this would be going on.’

  Andrew glanced towards Sam. The last few years had taken their toll of his uncle. He found Louise among the crowd; she caught his look and nodded. No question about it, he thought. Louise was on her way to becoming a grand lady. She ruled Sam and the house on Clover Hill with a rod of iron. What would be served by telling them what Jed had just told him?

  ‘You think we ought to say anything?’ he asked his brother.

  ‘Hell, no, Bo,’ Jed said. ‘It wasn’t much more than a rumor. We don’t want to get their hopes up for nothing.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Andrew said. ‘And the Maxwells?’

  ‘I told you,’ Jed said. ‘I found them.’

  ‘He killed them,’ Maria interjected. ‘All three of them.’

  ‘Jed, Jed,’ Andrew put his hand on Jed’s shoulder. ‘Did you have to do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jed. ‘I did.’

  Andrew nodded and drew in a deep breath. ‘Well, you’re home now. Both of you. Home to stay?’

  ‘A while,’ Jed said. ‘We’ve made some plans.’

  ‘You can tell me all about them later,’ Andrew replied. ‘But for now, come on over and join the family again. This is one of the happiest days of my life!’

  He put his arm around his brother’s shoulder and they walked across the lawn smiling. Maria watched them go, tears of pride in her eyes. At last, she thought, the war is over.