This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE SECRET TRIAL OF ROBERT E. LEE Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Fleming
TO RICHARD FLEMING, SON AND COLLEAGUE
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Slavery is a moral and political evil in any country. . . I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race.
— ROBERT E. LEE
The war is over—the rebels are our countrymen again.
— ULYSSES S. GRANT
“O’Brien,” said the resonant voice. “I’m glad to see you’re vertical. Have you finally drowned your sorrows? We have work to do.”
Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana stood on Pennsylvania Avenue, outside the entrance to the White House, where a new president sat in an alcoholic haze. Dusk was beginning to shroud the major features of the federal landscape. George Washington’s unfinished monument was a shapeless mass to the south. Eastward, the dome of the Capitol loomed against the darkening sky. Nearby on Fifteenth Street rose the immense edifice of the U.S. Treasury. Dana was a fitting human complement to these imposing structures.
He stood tall, well over six feet, with a full dark brown beard that gave him a vaguely Jehovah-like aura. His hair rested in a debonair wave on his noble brow. His black wool pants were stuffed into knee-high boots, and a black slouch hat was tilted somewhat rakishly on his large head. As usual, his dark blue eyes were aglow with the unique brightness given unto those who worship righteousness. All he needed was a flaming sword to make him look like a warrior angel. The title of assistant secretary of war was totally inadequate to his looming presence.
For a moment I felt unutterably weary. Dana’s animal magnetism was so overpowering, he sparked a sullen resistance in my grieving soul. I half understood why I no longer responded to the organ timbre of his mellow voice and the brilliance of that magisterial smile. Once I had followed this man with a strange blind confidence. Dana had a rare ability to inspire this kind of allegiance in men far older than my years. I was especially susceptible because I was so alone in this American world. When we met I was an orphan without a single relative, living by my wits on the streets of New York. I was prime material for conversion to a mystic faith in the omniscience of Charles A. Dana.
For a heady moment, I was back four years. We—mainly Dana with some scurrying aid from me—were presiding over the most influential newspaper in the country, the New York Tribune. The South was talking war and secession. Someone had to rescue the United States of America from catastrophe and moral squalor. Dana showed me how this miracle would be achieved one muggy afternoon in May, after most of the South had seceded, formed the Confederate States of America, and blasted the U.S. Army garrison out of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
The new president, Abraham Lincoln, had called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to serve for ninety days to suppress the rebellion. (The ninety days are a forlorn commentary on Lincoln’s hopes for a brief relatively bloodless war.) The South had responded by creating an army to defend their capital, Richmond. But no one seemed sure what to do next. There was an unspoken suspicion in many quarters that after a month or two of military posturing, both sides would agree that killing fellow Americans was unthinkable, as outgoing president James Buchanan had pathetically insisted, and in the great tradition of American politics, a compromise would be worked out that satisfied neither side, but averted calamity. The great republic would muddle along, half slave, half free, for another hundred years. Lincoln’s obvious reluctance to do anything decisive seemed a veritable guarantee of this relapse into moral mediocrity.
Dana’s answer to this retrograde lurch was a front page on which the Tribune shouted: MR. PRESIDENT, WHEN SHALL THE BAYONETS FLASH TO THE ‘FORWARD’? ON TO RICHMOND IS THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE! AGAIN, WE REPEAT, ON TO RICHMOND! Day after day, we ran this and similar exhortations. Horace Greeley, the putative owner-editor of the paper, sent us frantic protests from Peoria, Paducah, and other stops on his lecture tour, warning us against starting a war. Dana ignored Greeley and everyone else who reproached him. He was serenely confident that he alone knew the answer to the crisis and would have no difficulty changing Greeley’s erratic mind when and if he returned to regain the Tribune’s helm.
Never had my faith in Charles A. Dana been more immaculate, more ecstatic. It was multiplied by the way the slogan was picked up by newspapers in Boston and Chicago, two cities where war fever was already festering. We were giving guidance and courage to that elongated incompetent oddity from Kentucky-via-Illinois that the people in their unwisdom had elected president of the United States. We were infusing the “Brainless Bob-O-Link of the Prairies,” as Lincoln was called in New York and New Jersey, and the inert amoral mass of the commercial republic with a vision of the higher good.
My sense of participation in a noble destiny doubled and redoubled as we watched Lincoln crumple under the relentless repetition of “On to Richmond!” Finally the harried president thrust aside the advice of his generals and ordered a hefty portion of his still-untrained volunteers into Virginia for the first of many marches on the Confederate capital. Posted to Washington as a Tribune correspondent, I rode out with the chortling Republican congressmen and senators to watch the virtuous men of the North send the effete immoral slave owners scrambling for the horizon. Ten hours later, your reporter and the discomfited legislators became part of a fleeing mob of fugitives in blue uniforms. Behind us on a battlefield called Bull Run lay the first but by no means the last carpet of corpses on the loamy soil of northern Virginia.
The following four years of the most horrendous civil war in the memory of the civilized world had slowly eroded my faith in Charles A. Dana. The coup de grace to my tottering religion was the murder of the man I had begun to think might save America from another century of ruinous hatred. Lincoln’s assassination had sent me spiraling to the bar of the Willard Hotel, where I had sought oblivion for most of the last miserable month.
“ I thought our work was over,” I said sullenly.
“You’re wrong as usual, O’Brien,” Dana said. “You Irish are a strange tribe. You let your feelings tell you what to think. It makes you good writers— as long as there’s an editor around to add the intellectual ingredients.”
I wondered if I should grovel in the dust at Dana’s feet to acknowledge his immense superiority. For a moment I was almost ready to do it, so he could lift me up, pat me on the head, and assure me that I had a place in this war-ravaged American world after all.
“ Lincoln’s death leaves a void,” Dana said. “You see it as a tragedy. I see it is an opportunity. So, I begin to think, does Stanton.”
Edwin Stanton was the secretary of war. I had long since concluded that this abrupt, disagreeable lawyer seldom saw anything that Dana did not see first. In the early days of the war I thought this was rather marvelous. Not many people could handle Stanton. John Hay, Lincoln’s genial private secretary, once told me that rather than ask Stanton for another favor on the president’s behalf, he would gladly spend several weeks in a smallpox hospital.
At the moment, with President Bourbonbrain in the White House wondering what day it was, Edwin Stanton was the most powerful man in America. That meant what he thought, thanks to Dana, could be more than a little important. My all but extinguished reporter’s instincts stirred somewhere in my sodden soul.
As Dana and I stood there, exchanging pregnant stares, a regiment from the Army of the Potomac advanced down Pennsylvania Avenue toward us like a gigantic blue centipede. Every bayoneted rifle was at precisely the same angle. Every kepi was firmly set on every brow without a millimeter of difference between rim and nose. Every crisp sleeve swung simultaneously at the exact same distance from the hip, as if they were all pendulums on some inhuman machine. Even in the dusk the shine of their shoes was enough to make a man believe in revelations.
On the sidewalk not far from us, we heard a chorus of guffaws. We turned to discover about two dozen members of the Union Army of the Tennessee lounging against the White House fence. Crispness was not exactly a characteristic of their uniforms. There was not a pressed sleeve in sight. In fact, more often than not, there was only a dirty shirt and a pair of tattered pants, held up by a rope. Shoes were also conspicuously absent. Bare feet seemed to be part of the uniform of the day in the Army of the Tennessee.
“Jesus,” howled one of them, “you ever see anything like them tin soldiers? No wonder they only won a battle once in four years.”
Dana frowned. For a moment something close to anxiety clouded those glowing eyes. These soldiers of the Army of the Tennessee were the men who had marched through Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina, tearing out the guts and the heart of the Southern rebellion. They were from the West, a region that loomed in the mind of even the most omniscient Easterner (who else but Dana?) as a terra incognita that had already produced that most exotic of political plants, Abrahamensis Lincolnia.
Now seventy thousand of these weedy unpredictables were camped across the river in Virginia in a very ugly mood. Secretary of War Stanton, at Dana’s urging, had insulted their Ohio-born general, William Tecumseh Sherman, for giving overgenerous terms to the last Rebel army worth mentioning when they surrendered to his irresistible host a few weeks ago in North Carolina. Stanton aka Dana had repudiated the terms in the newspapers, publicly humiliating Sherman. Not a few members of the Army of the Tennessee were now talking about repudiating Stanton and perhaps the entire government of the United States, as currently personified by President Bourbonbrain nearby us in his splendid white house.
Like the rest of Washington, the executive mansion was festooned with black bunting in mourning for the murdered Lincoln. Perhaps that gesture toward their fellow son of the West had restrained them from reaching for their guns. So far, their angry talk had not led to any revolutionary action.
“ What sort of work have we got to do?” I asked.
“The sort that will make you the most famous newspaperman in the country and possibly the world,” Dana said.
“How are you going to manage that?” I said, intrigued in spite of my sadness. After all, I was only twenty-five years old. I did not expect to stay sad for the rest of my life—and I had to make a living somehow. Why not as a reporter? Even though I was convinced that all the news in this divided and subdivided country would be depressing for the next twenty years.
“In three days,” Dana said, “the armies of the Union are going to parade down this avenue. The Army of the Potomac will come first, then Sherman’s wild men. It will be the greatest display of armed might in the history of the world.”
That put Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon in the shade. Dana had a fondness for hyperbole. “So?” I said. “What happens after that?”
“The country—the entire world—will be awed. Intimidated would be a more exact word. Especially our beaten, bedraggled Rebels south of us. That will give us the opportunity to put on trial and execute for treason the one than that could reignite this rebellion if he so chose, a half-dozen years hence.”
“Jeff Davis?” I said. “Is that what you’re going to do with the pathetic old buzzard?” On a tip from Dana, I had dragged my besotted bones to Fortress Monroe, on the shore of Hampton Roads, Virginia, a week ago to see the ex-president of the Confederacy marched from a ship to a dungeon in that huge pile of stone. It was hardly worth the trip. Davis looked like a bewildered scarecrow. The only color in my story was supplied by the fort’s second in command, one of those potbellied regular-army types who had arranged to spend the war avoiding any and all Rebel gunfire. He loudly proclaimed that Davis would live on bread and water, just like any other criminal.
“Not Davis,” Dana said, exhibiting an impatience with my stupidity that usually reduced me to obsequious silence. “He’s a mere failed politician, without a shred of glory left to his name. I’m talking about Robert E. Lee.”
For a moment I was too stunned to speak. “How can you do it?” I finally said. “Grant paroled him when he surrendered at Appomattox.”
Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant was currently the commander in chief of the U.S. Army, the leader of a half million men. That made him more powerful in fact if not in law than Stanton, Dana, and the entire Congress of the United States, plus President Bourbonbrain.
“I can handle Grant,” Dana said. “Don’t give him a thought.”
I had no reason to doubt Dana’s confidence on this point. Without Dana, Lieutenant General Grant at this very moment would have been puking into the mud of a St. Louis, Missouri, gutter—one of the many drunken slobs who infest that hard-drinking Western metropolis—instead presiding as the commander in chief of our invincible, soon-to-be-paraded host, the Grand Army of the Republic.
“And Sherman? What are you going to do with him?”
“Cashier him, if he says another defiant word against Stanton. That’s been passed to him, sotto voce, already.”
I had no doubt that Dana had done this—nor much doubt that Sherman would swallow it. Soldiers are acutely sensitive to power. With Grant behind him, Stanton (aka Dana) was invincible.
“Where do I come into this drama?”
“You’ll be the only newspaperman admitted to the trial. You’ll have the exclusive story of Robert E. Lee’s conviction as a traitor—and his execution.”
Another regiment of the Army of the Potomac came down Pennsylvania Avenue with the same machinelike perfection. This one differed from the previous automatons in one very important aspect. Every man in the ranks had an ebony face. There were thirty or forty thousand Negroes in the Army of the Potomac. The loungers from the Army of the Tennessee gave them a very different reception from the one they had preferred the white regiment.
At first there was stunned silence. There were no black regiments in their army. Then one of them shouted: “I hope none of you niggers is thinkin‘ of settlin’ in Indiana!”
Similar shouts from other members of their group made it clear that those colored men would be equally unwelcome in Illinois and Ohio. “Halt!” shouted Dana. The regiment came to an abrupt stop. The bulky white colonel in command rushed from the front of the column with fiery eyes.
“Who said halt?” he roared. His voice had a Yankee twang.
“ I did,” Dana replied. “I’m Charles Dana, the assistant secretary of war. ” I want you to put these men under arrest.“ He pointed to the Westerners, who were retreating into a surly clump.
“What’s the charge?”
“Didn’t you hear them insulting your soldiers?” Dana said. “This won’t be tolerated in our newly united country. Every citizen will be required to treat every other citizen with respect, no matter what their color.”
“Major Bigelow!” bellowed the colonel. A lanky, somewhat effete-looking officer hurried to his side. The colonel pointed to the Westerners. “Arrest these fellows and put them in the Navy Yard prison. Charges will be preferred by Mr. Dana here, the assistant secretary of war.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bigelow summoned a white captain—all the officers were white—and he quickly detached a platoon from the black ranks. “You ain’t gonna get away with this!” one of the Westerners shouted. “Uncle Billy Sherman will hang you from a sour apple tree.”
“We’ll see about that,” Dana said.
Suddenly I was in another dimension, another life, those halcyon prewar years when I was Dana’s adopted son, meeting men such as the eloquent champion of Negro freedom, the escaped slave Frederick Douglass; the world-famous author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe; the fiery founder of the abolition movement, William Lloyd Garrison. Thanks to Dana I became acquainted with the great idealists of America and was soon convinced by the homage they paid my mentor that he was the greatest of them. My admiration for Dana was boundless; my joy in being chosen by his extraordinary man almost compensated for the loss of my parents on our immigrant ship. Dana was my spiritual guide, urging on Jeremiah O’Brien’s cynical Irish soul the value, the power, the beauty, of ideals.
I wanted to regain that relationship now. I wanted to be reborn again, after four years in an approximation of hell. Perhaps this daring idea, to put Robert E. Lee on trial, would restore my corrupted faith.
I waited until the arrested Westerners and the black regiment had receded into the dusk. “What’s our goal, Dana?” I asked.
“To break the spirit of the South, once and for all,” Dana said. “We’ve broken their armies. But we haven’t broken their spirit. This will do it. Lee dangling from a federal gibbet will do it.”
“I wonder,” I said.
“That’s not part of your job, O’Brien. I’m in charge of the wonder.”
The godlike Dana smiled at me with implacable, irreducible righteousness. I wanted to succumb. I wanted to embrace him and his plan with my old awe and new fervor. But some unnamed inner force or power stopped me. Was it because dusk was shrouding that triumphant smile, darkening those invincible eyes? Or was it because too many brave men had died in the name of that righteousness—or in defiance of it?
Dana’s wisdom had been my guide, Dana’s orders had been my regimen for too many years. I could not escape him. “I’m at your service, Mr. Assistant Secretary,” I said, with a mock bow.
You can’t let him do it! Do you hear me, Jeremiah O’Brien? You can’t let him do it! I will never speak to you again if you participate in such a hideous business!“
In the glow of the oil lamp in her Willard Hotel room, Sophia Carroll was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. But there was not a hint of the flirtatious affection I had become accustomed to enjoying in her expressive brown eyes. She looked like, if anyone, the biblical Judith, the midnight slayer of King Holofernes, ready to take my severed head and fling it out the window.
“What is this sudden passion for Robert E. Lee?” I said.
“ It’s not a sudden passion. It’s an admiration of long standing. An esteem—a respect—I felt the moment I met the man, and it’s grown with my every waking thought of him. He’s a unique human being. A rare compound of nobility and courage and compassion!”
“ I thought you were no longer in love with the Southern Confederacy,” I said.
“ I’m not,” Sophia said. “Thanks to you.”
This was said with such a mingling of gratitude and affection in that sultry Louisiana accent, I was incapable of suspecting that my beloved was telling me an egregious lie. I was too flustered at finding this worship of Robert E. Lee in the one person whose opinion of Dana’s venture was important to me. It was almost as discomfiting to discover that Sophia Carroll’s worship of the defeated Southern hero proved that Dana was right. Lee was the cynosure that would keep the spirit of Southern resistance alive. I thought I had destroyed all the other myths that had inspired Sophia’s allegiance to the now lost cause.
“Surely you must realize I don’t control Charles A. Dana,” I said. I had intimated more than once my uneasiness about Dana’s looming presence in my life.
“You’ve made that very clear. But I see no reason whatsoever why he should control you.”
“What does control have to do with it? He’s offering me the story of a lifetime! Every newspaper in the country will run it. I’ll follow it with a book that will make me rich and even more famous.”
“Isn’t there something in the New Testament about the ugliness of blood money?”
“I’m not a believer in the divinity of Jesus.”
Sophia shook her inky black hair at me like a whip. “The ultimate free thinker becomes the ultimate greedy cynic. What a transformation! I don’t care what you say about it, I say it’s ugliness—ugliness unto infinity!”
“Are you suggesting that Robert E. Lee is a Christ figure—and I’m Judas Iscariot? I don’t recall enlisting in General Lee’s particular program of salvation.”
“I’m leaving for Richmond. If I have to walk all the way.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” I roared. “Unless you want to join Jefferson Davis in Fortress Monroe’s dungeons.”
“I almost hate you,” Sophia sobbed. “I never should have let you lure me away from my true allegiance.”
“Avoiding the hangman’s rope no doubt had something to do with it,” I snarled.
“At first perhaps it did. But your marvelous ability to twist words and arguments convinced me that I was enlisting in a noble cause.”
“It was noble, as long as Lincoln was alive,” I said. I swigged bourbon from my flask. My nerves were a mess. The last thing I needed was an argument about causes.
Eighteen months ago, Sophia Carroll had been arrested by the sentries at the Long Bridge across the Potomac. She was on her way to a house in Virginia where Confederate agents awaited her. In the lining of her skirt she carried sketches of every federal fort guarding Washington, D.C. Someone in her network had betrayed her, thanks to a large infusion of federal greenbacks.
Dana considered her a prize catch. Her father was descended from Charles Carroll, the signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Carrolls owned huge chunks of Maryland. Sophia’s father had taken some of the family cash and bought thousands of acres in Louisiana, where he swiftly became intimate with all the state’s bigwigs. Sophia had been working for Judah Benjamin, the former senator from Louisiana, now the Confederate secretary of state, and head of their secret service.
Instead of throwing Sophia into Fortress Monroe, Dana confined her under guard in the Willard and sent for me. I was just back from Gettysburg, gulping bourbon by the pint, trying to obliterate another image of slaughter. It did not console me that this time the dead were mostly Confederates. The war’s madness was starting to obliterate any and all explanations for it, including Dana’s. He leaned back in his chair, lit one of his small thin cigars, which had an ungodly acrid stench, and told me about Sophia. Between reporting for the Tribune, I was an unofficial part of Dana’s intelligence network.
“Go talk to her, one Celt to another,” he said. “Convince her that the South’s cause is doomed—and her best hope, if she wants to protect her family from punishment, is to switch sides. She could be a very valuable double agent.”
“What am I supposed to say to her, Celt to Celt?” I asked. “The Carrolls came to Maryland a hundred years before the American Revolution. They were rich long before your New England heroes fired the shot heard round the world at Lexington. Why should she listen to a mick who’s barely off the boat?
Dana sighed with ostentatious weariness. “This only proves how difficult it is for the truth to penetrate biased minds,” he said. “You’re as American as she is, O’Brien. True Americanism resides in the spirit, and you’ve been given a rare opportunity to achieve it.”
Dana was talking about my immersion in the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and other sages of New England. He would not or could not see how the war had shaken my faith in Yankeedom’s moral superiority.
The assistant secretary exhaled a cloud of speculative cigar smoke. “Of course, you can’t change a woman’s mind with ideas. Tell her your sad story. Your rescue from ignorance and want by a man who believed—truly believed—in the great traduced principle of American equality. Convince her that the one hope of rescuing the South from moral disgrace is a similar baptism for all its people, white and black.”
At that point, I still more or less believed Dana was right about that goal, no matter how much I had come to question the awful means that were being employed by the federal government to reach it. I was still clinging to some shreds of rationality. After all, only three hundred thousand or so men were dead. We were nowhere near the six hundred and twenty thousand corpses that our marvelous war machine eventually accumulated.
I agreed to talk to Sophia Carroll. It was better than getting drunk and having nightmares about Gettysburg. I was feeling puissant, except for my memories of the staring eyes of the dead. My dispatches from the battlefield had made the front page of the Tribune for days. Dana had congratulated me for the one that began: “I am lying behind a rock on Little Round Top, an odd knob of a hill near the town of Gettysburg, with a perfect shower of bullets passing within inches of my head. Twice Robert E. Lee’s howling Confederates have attacked and twice they have been beaten back—”
“O’Brien, I wouldn’t change a line of it,” Dana had said. That was his ultimate compliment. In earlier days he had changed a great many of the lines I wrote—until I submitted to the creed of his small but potent band of apostles: There is no God but Dana.
I went to see Sophia Carroll. She was nineteen years old, with the face of a Botticelli angel. I thought I saw proof of the imminent collapse of the Southern Confederacy. Only desperate men would have risked such a creature in Washington, D.C., where women with her looks were passed from general to general like prize horses. A half hour later, I had revised my opinion, viz: no one, including her mother, her father, or her powerful family friend Judah Benjamin, could have stopped Sophia Carroll from doing what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it.
She dared me to hang her. She said she would be proud to die for Southern liberty—which was, she vowed, far superior to the Northern version. I flung slavery in her face—and she flung Northern factory workers in my face. Who was better off, Negroes growing fat on hogmeat and hominy on the farms of the South or the half-starved women and children working at clattering looms twelve hours a day in the hellish textile factories of New England?
I offered Dana as the exemplar of Northern nobility and generosity. I told her how he had plucked me from a swarm of newsboys lining up to get their daily ration of Tribunes and taken me into his house. He had given me a crash course in history and literature. He had cleansed my atrocious New York Irish accent and taught me the newspaper business. I had become a member of his extended family.
Sophia was unimpressed by Dana’s compassion for a bereft Irish orphan. She reminded me of an ugly fact I already knew: anti-Irish sentiment was widespread in the North. Over a million refugees from the Irish famine of 1847-52 had cascaded into Boston, New York, and other cities. They lived in some of the most degraded and degrading slums in the western world. Irish had become synonymous with violent crime, prostitution, and political corruption. The Tribune regularly carried advertisements such as: “WOMAN WANTED—to do general housework. English, Scotch, Welsh, German, or any country or color except Irish.”
In contrast, Sophia recited the names of prominent Irishmen in Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, all of whom had been accepted as Americans and for that reason were committed Confederate patriots. She dwelt with pride on the thousands of Irish in the ranks of General Lee’s army.
Her words stirred long-concealed pain in my troubled soul. Two years ago at the battle of Fredericksburg I had watched New York’s Irish brigade go up the steep hill against the entrenched Confederates. Blasts of rifle and cannon fire tore through their ranks. Later I would find that some of the most deadly fire came from an Irish regiment in Confederate gray.
The money-grubbing North, Sophia concluded ferociously, lacked the spiritual sine qua non the South possessed in abundance: nobility of soul. She pointed to the moral heroism of hundreds of officers like Robert E. Lee, who had resigned from the U.S. Army to fight for Southern independence, even though they knew the chance of victory was slim. The Southern Irish were motivated by the same idealism. They were risking death and defeat for the principle that had inspired the American Revolution—the right to govern themselves.
I found myself struggling with another memory. On the night after the horrendous slaughter of the Irish brigade at Fredericksburg, I wandered disconsolately along the north bank of the Rappahannock River when a voice called from the water’s edge. “Help me!”
I dragged an exhausted swimmer from the water. He was wearing a Confederate uniform. I assumed he was a deserter and was about to tell him where to go to surrender himself when he whispered in an unmistakable brogue: “Take me to the Irish brigade. I’ve got something for them.”
I escorted him to the Irish camp. There, the swimmer pulled from beneath his shirt the brigade’s green and gold standard, which had been lost when the color-bearer was shot down a few feet from the Southern entrenchments. “I thought you’d want this. I thought—you deserved to have it,” he said to the stunned survivors of the day’s slaughter. His fellow Celts gave him a slug of whiskey and escorted him to the riverbank for his swim back to the Confederate lines.
The memory had tormented me ever since. I gazed into Sophia Carroll’s beautiful plaintive face and for a moment wanted to confess my revulsion at the two years of slaughter I had already witnessed. Before I could speak, a harsh cold voice hissed in my head. “Break her. Now is your chance to break her.” It was Dana, still in charge of my soul.
“I’ve often heard that General Lee was a great general and a great man,” I said. “I was ready to believe it until I watched him send twenty-five thousand of the bravest men I’ve ever seen to their deaths on Gettysburg’s third day.”
With carefully disguised heartlessness, I read her my dispatches describing the slaughter of Pickett’s men as they went up Cemetery Hill. I watched, coldly, as Sophia Carroll’s defiance crumbled. “Oh, oh, oh,” she sobbed, clutching her sides as if Northern bullets had struck her. “Oh, oh, oh.”
I took her hand. “Was someone you knew in Pickett’s division?”
Tears poured down her lovely cheeks. “My brother, Charles.”
I felt like the veriest piece of slime in America. Were there no limits to what I (aka Dana) was ready to do for victory? I left the weeping prisoner under the surveillance of a thick-necked National Detective Police guard and rushed to Dana’s office in the War Department.
Sophia’s story was enough to melt even Dana’s heart—so I told myself—although I had seen no evidence of such a capacity for impulsive warmth. Dana’s kindness depended on what he called “moral algebra.” He computed from his principles what degree of generosity was due a person. He listened patiently to my self-reproaches and said: “Let’s use her as a peace negotiator. Tell her we’re ready to entertain any reasonable offer for reunion. It isn’t true, of course. But it could shake some of the fanaticism out of their souls.”
Back at the Willard, I took Sophia to dinner in the hotel’s dining room. I mixed sympathy and prophecies of doom as we dined on Maryland crab cakes and a good Moselle. If the South fought to the bitter end, there was a very good chance that the vengeance of the North would fall hardest on men like her father. Maryland had not seceded. He was likely to be accused of making a choice that he could have abjured—he was not defending the soil of his ancestors, like a Lee or a Davis. If Sophia became part of the search for an early peace, her family could use her role as proof that they were not totally committed to the Southern cause.
Sophia began talking about life in New Orleans. The city had been seized by the Union forces in April of 1862 and beefy General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts became its military dictator. When the women of the city treated Butler and his men with undisguised contempt, the general issued a famous order, directing his soldiers to regard any woman who displayed disrespect to a man in Union blue as “a woman of the streets, plying her trade.” Some of the more oafish Union officers began demanding bows of submission from women when they passed on the sidewalks. The goal was to humble Southern pride.
Sophia gazed warily at me. “I hope I can trust you, Jeremiah,” she said.
“Of course you can,” I lied.
The words poured out. One day Sophia and her mother passed a burly captain in blue. He seized her mother by the arm and demanded a bow. As she tried to free her arm, he pressed his lips, foul with tobacco juice, against her face. Mrs. Carroll drew a pistol from her purse and shot him through the heart. Friends smuggled her and Sophia out of the city and eventually they reached the dubious shelter of Judah Benjamin’s house in embattled Richmond. Through him they soon met the Lees and others in the Confederate hierarchy. In revenge, General Butler arrested her father and sentenced him to ten years in prison for attempting to sell contraband cotton to Northern factories—something half the officers in Butler’s army were doing every day.
I sat there, once more ashamed of myself and our supposedly glorious cause. Sophia wiped away tears. She told me about the growing hardships of Richmond, the food shortages, the deterioration of the Confederate dollar, the disillusion with President Jefferson Davis.
She admitted that Judah Benjamin talked of retreating to England if the Confederacy reached extremis. He was born in the West Indies and thereby was a British citizen. He was prepared to take Sophia and her mother with him. “I don’t want to go to that insufferable place,” she said. “I’d hate myself if I ended up married to some red-faced English aristocrat. My Irish ancestors would spin in their graves. My father would disown me.”
“Then you’ll be a courier—an agent—for peace?” I said.
“If Mr. Dana promises that my mother will never be prosecuted for that—that act of self-defense.”
“Of course he will,” I said. “I’ll promise you now, in his name.”
I rushed back to my rooms on Thirteenth Street and wrote two thousand words on Richmond’s woes for the Tribune. When I finished the story, I was tempted to tear it to shreds. I saw myself as the most disgusting scum on the planet. Did it have something to do with writing for newspapers? Did my trade reduce everyone to the status of a story—and to hell with their humanity? I vowed that this would not be the case with Sophia Carroll—but I sent the story. After all, it was front-page stuff.
In Dana’s office, I received warm congratulations for my powers of persuasion. “I’ll put together a letter to Stanton, purporting to be a readiness to talk peace,” he said. “She can claim to have obtained it from one of her contacts in the War Department. We have no intention of accepting anything but unconditional surrender, of course. But it will be interesting to see what they offer.”
I told him about Mrs. Carroll shooting the Union captain in New Orleans and Sophia’s request for amnesty. “Of course,” Dana said. “I’ve investigated the Louisiana Carrolls. They own at least three hundred slaves. Their relatives own hundreds more here in Maryland. Such people have no standing in the moral universe. We can tell them anything.”
“You mean we’ll be lying to her?”
“If you want to call it that. I consider it disinformation. Have you ever read the lies Washington told the British in the American Revolution?”
“That was before my time,” I said. “I want a letter from you, stating that her mother is exempt from prosecution, in return for her daughter’s services.”
“Services,” Dana said. “That’s a loaded word, O’Brien. It’s how we describe the sort of things a woman spy does to pry secrets out of a man. Make sure this Jezebel doesn’t pry anything out of you.”
“She won’t,” I said, my belly leaden with renewed self-reproach.
Dana gave me a mocking smile and sucked on his cigar. “Write it up. I’ll gladly sign it.”
I saw he had no intention of honoring either the letter or a verbal promise. For Dana, Southerners had surrendered their humanity by owning slaves and fighting a war to defend the reprehensible institution. Dana had me in an exquisite moral bind and he knew it. If I did not obey orders, he was perfectly capable of informing the Confederate government that Sophia would hang as a spy—unless they surrendered her mother for the murder of a Union officer. Dana liked to play moral games. It was a kind of hobby with him.
For me, this was no longer a game. I was in love with Sophia Carroll.
So we began our dirty dance. Sophia was sent to Richmond with Dana’s letter to Stanton, suggesting the North was receptive to peace proposals. It was the beginning of a torturous process that revealed some significant fissures in the Confederate government’s resolve. By 1864, not a few of their leaders thought the war was lost and they ought to cut the best deal they could get. But Jefferson Davis—and, according to Sophia, Robert E. Lee—refused to settle for anything but Southern independence.
Eventually, to quell the peace-now chorus, Jefferson Davis was forced to send the vice president of the Confederacy, pint-sized Alexander Stephens, to meet Lincoln on a warship off Hampton Roads on February 3,1865. The conference failed, as Dana of course knew it would, because Lincoln refused any deal that permitted slavery to continue, and the Southerners retaliated by insisting once more on independence. This set the stage for the savage closing battles and the final surrenders, which were as close to unconditional as one could get without using the term. Once more I was reduced to awe at Dana’s ability to manage this immense drama. From “On to Richmond!” to Appomattox, he was behind the scenes, manipulating the fate of millions.
My responsibility in this torturous process was to keep hope alive in Sophia Carroll’s troubled heart. She was sustained by Dana’s worthless promise to protect her mother, which I invoked so often I started to believe it in spite of myself—and by the memory of her brother who had died, as she had feared, in Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. When she came to Washington, Sophia stayed at the Willard. When I returned from my visits to the Army of the Potomac, I took her to dinner and to the theater and finally to the White House, thanks to my friendship with Lincoln’s secretary John Hay. I often made confidential reports to Hay about hidden problems in the Army of the Potomac. A general who was drinking too much—or in the arms of the wrong woman—or in the business of making money instead of war. It was a role Dana had played for a while, but now he was acting on a larger stage.
At the White House’s 1864 New Year’s reception, I introduced Sophia to Lincoln as a “daughter of the South.” For a moment we stood in the swirl of visitors, face-to-face. Lincoln’s mournful eyes studied Sophia with a penetration that was almost metaphysical. “I consider myself a son of the South,” he said. “I reckon anyone born in Kaintuck can make that claim. Where are you from, Miss Carroll?”
“Louisiana.”
“I hope you haven’t suffered losses—”
“My brother died at Gettysburg,” Sophia said. Her voice was cold, almost toneless.
“How awful, how sad,” Lincoln said. “Is your dear mother alive?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. President.”
For a moment Lincoln’s eyes became opaque. He seemed to be speaking more to himself than us. “After such losses, death almost becomes a friend,” he said.
He braced his shoulders, as if he were determined to bear an invisible burden. “Tell your mother that she—and you—are in my prayers, for whatever those mumblings are worth. If God listened to me, Miss Carroll, your brother would be alive to dance at your wedding. But He seems to have closed His ears to my woes—and yours. His purpose is wrapped in darkness as total as the primeval chaos that preceded Adam.”
“Thank you for your prayers, Mr. President,” Sophia said.
Dana strolled up to us. Sophia knew him well by now. He had interrogated her for hours after her capture and he questioned her closely after each of her trips to Richmond to ascertain the precise status of the peace party within the Confederate government. “What did Father Abraham have to say to you?” he asked. “I haven’t seen him speak with such intensity at one of these things in a year.”
“He promised to remember me and my mother in his prayers,” Sophia said.
“An odd habit, these prayers,” Dana said. “We were assured the man was a worshiper of the unknown God, like other intelligent men. But he suddenly seems to have discovered a new deity. One who cares about us petty mortals.”
“You think that idea is ridiculous, Mr. Dana?” Sophia asked.
“Most of New England’s thinking men drew that conclusion decades ago, Miss Carroll,” Dana said, with the ghost of a smile. For a moment I wondered if he regretted this loss of religious faith.
“Another proof of the South’s hopelessly retrograde state,” Sophia said. “They not only pray to God. They sing hymns to Him,” she said.
“I could not put it better myself,” Dana said.
Back at the Willard, Sophia sank onto her bed. “How can Dana and Lincoln be fighting the same war? One man suffers, the other sneers.”
“I’m fighting Lincoln’s war,” I said. “Did you feel some of what I feel when I see him?”
“Nobility,” Sophia said. “I wish I saw it in you, Jeremiah.”
Something began pounding in the room. I realized it was my heart. “Sophia,” I said. “Maybe—if you believe in my nobility, I can, too. I’ve been so—so adrift, living from day to day, story to story.”
Sophia took my hands and raised them to her lips. “Jeremiah, you already have the ingredients of nobility in your soul. Your compassion for both sides—your refusal to sit in judgment on anyone—”
Her eyes filled with tears. “In a better world, Jeremiah, I think—I know—I could love you.”
“Doesn’t Lincoln promise us at least the hope of a better world?” I asked.
Sophia smiled sadly. She said her secret struggle for peace had entered a new dimension on the strength of Lincoln’s prayers. Wildly, I told myself I would, like those ancient Greek philosophers, the Cynics, first make my fortune and then practice virtue. I would discover nobility in some as yet hidden dimension between Dana’s righteousness and Sophia’s love.
For a while, I found myself believing in the possibility of happiness. But the war’s madness showed no signs of diminishing. In the spring of 1864, Grant crunched toward Richmond with 120,000 men. Robert E. Lee met him in the forests of the Wilderness in the most titanic battle of the millennium. I was there, staring at more fields carpeted with corpses, hearing wounded men screaming for help as fires started by exploding shells crackled toward them. At the end of the third day’s fighting, at least twenty-five thousand were dead or wounded.
I was near Grant’s tent, talking to one of his staff officers, when the stumpy little man emerged. “Hallo, O’Brien,” he said in his rough Ohio twang. “Are you heading back to Washington with your story?”
“As soon as I can get some casualty figures, General,” I said.
“That’s confidential,” Grant said. “But I’ve got a message for Lincoln I’d like you to deliver. You can paraphrase it for the public.”
I whipped out my notepad, ready to take down a resounding paragraph, forgetting I was dealing with a man who was as parsimonious with words as he was prodigal with men. “Tell Lincoln there’s no turning back. I’ve taken a bloody nose and I’ve given one. Tell him we’re going to fight it out along this line if it takes all summer.”
“Can I use that in my story for the Tribune, General?”
“Sure.”
I wrote in my notebook the words that became part of Ulysses Grant’s legend. Mounting my nag Bucephalus, I headed for Washington, D.C. It proved to be a harrowing trip, dodging Confederate guerrillas and hostile Virginia civilians, many of whom were as heavily armed as the fighting men. But I got to Washington in one piece and headed for the White House. There I found everyone in a panic. The Confeds had cut the telegraph lines (something Grant had not bothered to tell me) and no one had heard a word from the Army of the Potomac. Rumors of catastrophe were floating through the city.
Lincoln looked like a corpse that had been recently exhumed. His cheeks had twice their usual quotient of chalky yellow pallor. The circles under his eyes were caverns where evil spirits seemed to cluster. When I gave him Grant’s message, sunlight burst across his face. He embraced me like a schoolboy. “O’Brien,” he said. “Your Irish phiz has become the loveliest thing I’ve seen since the Mona Lisa!” He hurried me upstairs to his oval study, where the cabinet was clustered in a cloud of gloomy cigar smoke. I repeated the story and they cheered. I felt ten feet tall. For a moment I forgot the screams of the wounded in the burning woods.
Lincoln accompanied me downstairs to the door of the White House, where he took my hand. “I won’t ask you for details, Jeremiah,” he said. “I could see some of them in your eyes when you came in the door. Yet you’re going back to the army. I’m not sure I could do it in your place, boy. You could quit anytime but you don’t. That’s a wonderful thing. Many a time I’ve thought about quitting. The whole thing is such a waking nightmare. But I can’t quit. You could—but you stick.”
As Lincoln said this, all I could see was Sophia Carroll, waiting for me at the Willard. All I could hear were the screams in the burning woods. I wondered if I was crazy. Why not persuade Sophia to flee this insane city and its berserk war and go back to New York with me? Maybe I could talk Horace Greeley into sending me to Europe or South America or maybe Toronto, where nothing ever happened. We could love each other in perfect peace for twenty or thirty years.
That was the night I discovered Lincoln’s sixth sense. He read my thoughts before I even had them. Others—his secretary, John Hay—had told me similar things. “You—won’t—quit, will you, Jeremiah?” Lincoln said slowly, warily.
I gazed at him in bewilderment. “No, Mr. President, I won’t quit, as long as you don’t.”
“That’s a deal, Jeremiah,” he said. “When it’s over, I hope you’ll marry that Louisiana girl. I’ve checked into her status. She—and her mother— have nothing to fear from Stanton or Dana. I’ve made that clear. I’ll get her father out of jail, too, the day after the war ends.”
Was there anything about the war this man did not know? I suddenly wondered if Dana too was one of his puppets, along with Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, all the way down to insignificatos such as Jeremiah O’Brien. “Thanks, Mr. President,” I said.
Lincoln hesitated, then grew even more serious. “The war’s divided your people as much as mine. But you’ve somehow reached across the chasm and touched her heart. That’s made me think we can not only win this thing, we can triumph over the hatred that started it—and has driven so much of it.”
I was so awed by this glimpse of what Abraham Lincoln was thinking, I could say nothing. I stumbled into the night, my brain a battlefield of memory and doubt and hope.
A week later, as I was preparing to return to Grant’s army, a messenger from Dana summoned me to his office. “We’re going to the White House,” he told me. “We need someone to make a record of a rather important meeting—someone who’s guaranteed to keep his mouth shut.”
My shorthand skills—and my submissiveness to Dana—qualified me for this assignment. At the White House, Lincoln greeted us with a grim nod. He was not the mournful man who spoke to me and Sophia on New Year’s Day. I slowly realized that this was the man his secretary, John Hay, called “the Tycoon.”
The President led us into the second-floor oval study, where a cluster of gentlemen were conversing in low tones. We were introduced to their scowling leader, Joseph Medill, a name that instantly produced vibrations in my newsman’s cranium. He was the owner of the Chicago Tribune, the most powerful paper in the Midwest—and renowned for being a prize son of a bitch. He had been one of Lincoln’s most obnoxious critics for the last three years.
We all sat down and Medill stated the reason for the Chicagoans’ visit. They wanted a “significant reduction” in Chicago’s latest draft quota of 6,000 men. Medill yammered on about the city’s sacrifices—they already had 20,000 men in the Union Army out of a population of 150,000, et cetera, et cetera. Dana crisply stated the War Department’s objections to giving anyone a break—if it got out, it could lead to a tidal wave of similar requests from all parts of our so-called union. Everyone was heartily sick of the war.
There was a pause as the group waited for my shorthand to catch up with Dana’s rapid-fire delivery. Then Lincoln got up and started walking up and down—something I gather he usually did at cabinet meetings in this same room. Suddenly he started talking in a low intense voice. Each word landed like a blow on every man around the oval table.
“Gentlemen, after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. You called for war until we had it. You called for emancipation of the slaves and I have given it to you. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for the men I need to carry out the war you’ve demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You, Medill, are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any paper in the Northwest in making this war. Go home and send me those men.”
Whereupon Abraham Lincoln spun on his heel and stalked out of the oval study. The Chicagoans sat there like men who had just had a shell explode in their laps. Medill could think of nothing to do but scowl. I began to wonder if the expression would be permanently engraved on his ugly mug. Finally, a small slight man in a checkered waistcoat said: “Gentlemen, that old man is right. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”
I took this down, too. Dana and I sat there while Medill and his whipped delegation clumped out of the White House. I stared at Dana, waiting for something to clarify this astonishing statement. Had I or hadn’t I heard Abraham Lincoln say that abolitionist Boston and their outpost, Chicago, had started this war? (Dana, as a Bostonian on detached duty in New York, was easily included in the generalization.) For two minutes, Dana stroked his glossy black beard. Finally he spoke—more to the walls of the study, decorated with portraits of previous presidents, than to me.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that man say things that worry me. Let’s hope it’s the last.”
Back at the Willard, when I read my notes to Sophia, including Dana’s comment, it was her turn to pace the floor. Finally, with a tremor in her voice, she said: “It’s time I told you something. The last time I came here, I brought twenty-five thousand dollars in secret service money. I gave it to a man named John Surratt. He has orders to kidnap Lincoln and hold him hostage for Southern independence.”
I rushed to Dana with this news. “Your Jezebel would seem to playing a quadruple game,” he growled. “I wonder if she’s ever stopped working for the Confederate secret service.”
“What does that matter?” I asked. “Doesn’t this information transcend petty loyalties?”
Dana wrote down the name Surratt with the utmost care. Nine months later, he and I were in Charleston, South Carolina, celebrating the collapse of the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, more or less ending the war, and a delegation of abolitionists had sailed into Charleston harbor to raise the Stars and Stripes over the ruins of Fort Sumter and strut the debris-strewn streets of the city that was widely regarded as the nursery of the rebellion. Dana had summoned me from Grant’s army to write a eulogy of their performance for the Tribune.
At the end of three days of triumphant oratory, a telegram had arrived from Washington. It was a copy of a dispatch from the Associated Press. I will never forget the first line. THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT IN A THEATER TONIGHT AND PERHAPS MORTALLY WOUNDED.
Long before we got back to Washington, Lincoln was dead. As the details of the murder plot unfolded, Mary Surratt, John Surratt’s mother, was among the arrested, but her son remained a fugitive. The actor John Wilkes Booth, who pulled the trigger, was soon dead, shot while trying to escape from a burning barn. Why wasn’t he captured and forced to talk? I wondered. The rest of the conspirators were lamebrains and bruisers, none of whom had the intelligence to plan such a stupendous crime.
Two weeks later, as I was getting drunk at the Willard Hotel bar, I saw Dana stroll into the place with Lafayette Baker, the head of the National Detective Police, a bland name that disguised their mission—espionage and counterespionage. I reeled over to them and seized Dana’s arm: “John Surratt. Why didn’t you arrest him? I gave you his name!” I said.
“ I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dana said, freeing his arm.
“Yes you do!” I said.
Lafayette Baker glared at me. He was a small hatchet-faced man who had gotten his start as a vigilante in 1856 San Francisco, when the citizens of that purportedly civilized city started hanging criminals without the formality of a trial. Dana spent a lot of time with Baker. The secret service and its murky doings were part of his mandate as assistant secretary of war.
Dana’s smile was never more brilliant. Wisdom glistened in his supremely confident eyes. “Dear Jeremiah,” he said. “When will you understand that some things can be made to happen and other things can be permitted to happen?”
That was when I started wanting Dana to be proven totally, finally wrong.
For three days, sweating carpenters have hammered and sawed to create a covered pavilion, decorated with flags and flowers and evergreens, in front of the White House. On the pavilion’s roof are scrolled the names of the great battles: ANTIETAM SHILOH GETTYSBURG. Opposite this reviewing stand will be another covered platform for state governors, members of Congress and Supreme Court justices. Additional stands for VIP guests, army and navy officers, the press, and convalescent soldiers are being knocked together at the same perspiring pace on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. Arches of blue and white flowers are soaring above the broad street. On other avenues, swarms of government workers are decking every public building in blue and white bunting.
So went the lead of my front-page story in the Tribune the day before the Great Parade. That night, I discovered I had another responsibility besides a follow-up account of the triumphant march. Dana informed me that his sister’s daughter, Tabitha Soames, had come to Washington to enjoy the celebration. He assumed I would be delighted to escort her. How could I refuse? Dana had been trying to promote a romance between me and Tabitha for the last two years.
When I explained my new assignment to Sophia Carroll at the Willard, and assured her Tabitha Soames would welcome her company, I was icily informed that she had no desire whatsoever to spend two days watching smug Yankees strut vaingloriously down Pennsylvania Avenue. She would stay in her room and write letters to her mother and friends in Richmond. As I departed, she asked: “Have you had any second thoughts about Dana’s despicable plot against General Lee?”
I shook my head and slammed the door just in time to avoid the large heavy edition of the Bible that the Willard’s owners left in each room. It thudded against the jamb, leaving me with a sense of being pursued by an avenging angel.
Tabitha Soames was waiting for me in the lobby of the Washington Arms Hotel. Tall and angular, she wore her brown hair in braided loops around her narrow head. Her traveling dress was the plainest imaginable gray broadcloth. In her eyes was the same righteous glow that made Dana so formidable. “Dear Jeremiah,” she said with a smile that added surprising warmth to her usually solemn face. “You’re looking well in spite of your trying years in the field.”
“Ducking bullets is good exercise,” I said.
“Your stories have contributed much to this wonderful victory, Jeremiah,” Tabitha said.
“Thanks,” I said. Tabitha had been a frequent correspondent throughout the war, often praising my work. For her the struggle had been a great moral enterprise, the triumph of good over evil. I had avoided telling her that by the time it ended, I found it hard to see much meaning in the slaughter.
We hurried through the crowded streets to Pennsylvania Avenue. Enormous throngs were surging into the capital from Maryland, Delaware, and other Eastern states as far away as New York. Every hotel and boarding-house room in the city was taken. Attic rooms in the Willard Hotel were going for triple the usual price. By the time we reached Pennsylvania Avenue it was evident that the day would be oppressively hot. Clouds of choking dust filled the air as chaises and carriages and wagons carried spectators to the various reviewing stands.
Thanks to Dana, Tabitha and I had tickets to the congressional pavilion. Opposite us, with the White House in the background, sat President Andrew Johnson (aka Bourbonbrain) with his wife and numerous family, each one looking more disreputable than the next. The president had the dazed look of a man with an atrocious hangover. I waited impatiently for the parade to begin for reasons very different from Tabitha’s anticipation. There were rumors afloat that the two armies might come to blows. Yesterday a congressman had told me that General Sherman was in the city talking to his brother, John, the U.S. senator from Ohio. The general was said to be nursing a stupendous rage against Stanton. Was I hoping for some sort of upheaval? Was I that eager to escape the court-martial of Robert E. Lee?
At nine o’clock, a signal gun boomed and the Army of the Potomac headed down Pennsylvania Avenue. From the moment the first ranks appeared in the distance, cheers began. This was the army that had defended Washington, D.C., from the oncoming Confederates in a score of desperate battles. Their commanders and many of their lesser officers were familiar faces.
I soon realized from overheard remarks that few of the congressmen in our pavilion were siding with General Sherman. They all hoped the Easterners would shame Sherman’s marauders with the precision of their marching and the magnificence of their uniforms. A few feet from us, Charles Sumner, the austerely handsome Republican senator from Massachusetts, informed gaunt Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, the voice of Radical Republicanism in Pennsylvania, that he had urged the president to order Sherman to disperse his “ruffians” without the courtesy of a parade.
Old Bourbonbrain had apparently infuriated Senator Sumner by telling him Lincoln would have welcomed the Westerners as heroes. “I told him Lincoln’s dictatorship was as dead as he was and good riddance,” Sumner said. “The leadership of the country was now in the hands of Congress, where the Constitution intended it to be.”
“Did you hear that?” Tabitha Soames whispered to me. “Last night at dinner, Uncle Charles told me some of this awful dispute. I’m sure you agree that Sherman should have been cashiered for the peace treaty he signed with those despicable rebels. The mere idea of letting them negotiate with our victorious army sickened me. I’m sure you felt the same way.”
Another Massachusetts Republican told Sumner not to worry. He was sure the Easterners would make Sherman’s bummers look like the rabble that they were, and thinking citizens would turn on them and their commander. Sumner muttered that he hoped so. He wanted to see Sherman and his “scarecrows” become “political nullities.” Abuse of General Sherman was clearly the order of the day in this pavilion, where New Englanders and transplanted Yankees from the Midwest predominated.
The first regiments of the Army of the Potomac tended to fulfill this Radical Republican hope. Like the regiments I had seen rehearsing on Pennsylvania Avenue last week, the stamp of their feet and the swing of their arms were as measured as the pistons of a steam engine. Their muskets shone like a wall of steel. Uniforms were spotless, shoes gleamed, and every man gripped his gunstock with a white-gloved hand. They passed our pavilion in perfect formation, twelve men to a rank, while two gigantic bands, each the size of a symphony orchestra, played “When Johnnie Comes Marching Home,” “Tramp, Tramp Tramp the Boys Are Marching,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” At the head of the column rode frozen-faced Major General George Gordon Meade, the winner at Gettysburg.
People rushed into the street to throw garlands of flowers around the neck of Meade’s horse. The “Old Snapping Turtle,” as his men called him, managed to summon a frosty smile. But in the crowd as well as on our pavilion, I could hear voices asking: “Where is General Grant?”
Grant was the commander of both armies and the quintessential Northern hero. Theoretically, he had the right to lead each one. As necks craned, I spotted the general hurrying through the White House grounds and taking his place on the presidential reviewing stand, without the least fanfare. Not a smidgen of gold braid adorned his blue uniform. I pointed him out to Tabitha.
“The man is incredibly modest,” I said. “He’s decided to let Meade and Sherman have the cheers.”
“It’s admirable in a way but I wonder if it’s sound policy,” Tabitha said. “Uncle Charles thinks he should have dismissed Sherman for that abominable peace treaty.”
Behind General Meade and his staff came the cavalry. Again there were murmurs of puzzlement and distress. “Where is Sheridan?” went the cry. Major General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Union cavalry, almost equaled Grant on the scales of public adoration. He was on the Rio Grande at the head of fifty thousand men, grimly warning the puppet emperor Maximillian and his French backers to get out of Mexico. Even so, there was more than enough cavalry—seven miles of it, according to one estimate. It took them a full hour to pass before our glazed eyes.
In Sheridan’s absence, the star of the men on horseback was twenty-five-year-old General George Armstrong Custer. Ignoring regulations as usual, he wore his golden hair long, descending to his blue-clad shoulders. To this he added a crimson necktie and buckskin breeches. A woman rushed out of the crowd and threw a wreath of flowers to him. As he lunged forward to catch it, his horse, already distracted by the cheering crowd, bolted. Custer’s hat blew off and he went hurtling past our reviewing stand with his yellow hair streaming out a foot behind him.
“He looks like a Sioux chieftain!” Tabitha exclaimed.
“He acts like one, too,” growled Senator Sumner. “The sooner we get Democrats like him out of Washington, the better.”
After the cavalry came some of the more colorful regiments of the Army of the Potomac: Zouaves in gaudy blue and red, Irish regiments with sprigs of green in their hats. Then came the artillery, the arm that had made the crucial difference in more than one bitter battle. The gunners sat stiffly on their caissons behind their horse-drawn weapons.
For most of us, the most moving sight in the long line of march was the battle flags. Bullet-riddled, some of them bloodstained, many in shreds, they were the rallying points around which brave men had died on so many hard-fought fields. On this day they were hung with ribbons and garlands. Many people rushed into the street to press their lips against the torn folds.
Leaving Tabitha to enjoy the spectacle without further comments from me, I crossed the street and whispered “Dana” to several White House guards to gain the presidential box. Soon I was standing beside General Sherman, who was telling an aide what he thought of the Easterners. “Look at the way they’re marching, turning their eyes on us big shots like country gawks as they pass this stand.”
The general gave the Army of the Potomac a contemptuous glower. “My boys won’t do that, I promise you,” he continued. “We won’t need those big pampered bands, either. You can see those fellows would all prefer to be playing the latest operas.”
As the Army of the Potomac continued tramping past—it would take them seven full hours— General Sherman planned tomorrow’s parade. “Tell everyone to be careful of his intervals and tactics,” he told the scribbling aide. “I’ll give the boys plenty of time to go to the Capitol and see everything afterward. I want every man to keep his eyes fifteen feet to the front and march by in the old customary way.”
I was scribbling shorthand notes even faster than the aide. This would make hot copy for my evening report to the Tribune. One of Sherman’s corps commanders, Major General William Hazen, got his other ear. “General,” he said. “I need an order from you to get my wild men to cut their hair.”
“You won’t get it,” Sherman snapped. “I want everyone to see the army the way it looked on the march through Georgia.”
“General,” I said. “Is it true that General Grant is going to ask for your resignation?”
Uncle Billy’s red hair all but stood erect. The infuriated General Hazen checked an impulse to reach for the pistol on his hip. “Who are you?” Sherman growled
“O’Brien of the Tribune.”
“O’Brien of the Tribune,” Sherman said. “Go to hell.”
After the last rank had trudged past, I escorted Tabitha Soames back to her hotel and invited her to dinner at the Willard. I asked if she would mind if Sophia Carroll joined us. I explained Sophia’s sad plight, a captured spy not yet released from federal custody—but nonetheless now a warm supporter of the victorious Union. Tabitha said she would be delighted to meet her.
Thus began the worst night of my life. Sophia detested Tabitha on sight and vice versa, in that mysterious way that women judge each other before they even know they differ on such things as politics. In this case the dislike was compounded by irreducible sectional hostility.
Tabitha tried to overcome her instinctive dislike with earnest cordiality. “Jeremiah tells me you’ve changed your allegiance in the course of the war,” she said. “How admirable.”
“Admirable?” Sophia said, “idiotic might be a better word. I made the mistake of trusting the blandishments of Charles A. Dana, who now stands convicted of being the most coldhearted liar in America.”
Benevolence vanished from Tabitha’s eyes, “I don’t know a more honorable, more totally honest man in my circle of acquaintance.”
“Your social circle must be pathetically small,” Sophia said. “Mr. Dana promised me that the North did not and would not seek a vengeful peace. Now I learn from Mr. O’Brien that he’s the leader of the cabal that is determined to reduce Southerners to subjugation lower than our former slaves.”
“I think he’s pursuing a peace of justice. I have no doubt that the mass of Americans support him,” Tabitha said. “Slavery was the most terrible, the most inhuman crime ever perpetrated. Worse than murder or rape. Justice requires punishment for the slave owners and their military coadjutators.”
I flinched at the righteousness glowing in Tabitha’s eyes. Why did I no longer agree? Four years ago I would have had no difficulty mouthing such heartless words.
“My father owned three hundred slaves. What should happen to him— and my mother and me?” Sophia asked.
“You must surrender your lands to your former bondsmen in payment for two centuries of labor without compensation,” Tabitha said.
“What is to become of us? Must I sell myself on the streets?”
“You can find a profession. Women will come into their own in this new America, where equality will become the golden rule. Haven’t you heard of the great declaration of women’s rights at Seneca Falls in 1848? My mother was at that convention.”
“The South frowns on masculinized women,” Sophia said. “We believe there are other ways to make the female presence known.”
Tabitha flushed and her eyes darted in my direction. Was she suspecting the worst? “Wouldn’t you prefer to make your own living, without dependence on men?” she said. “You could teach school as I’m doing. Perhaps teach your blacks. I hope to come South and do something similar, as soon as peace is firmly established.”
“Is that what you have in mind for me, Mr. O’Brien?” Sophia said. “Do you think I’m the schoolteacher type?”
The mockery in those flashing brown eyes gave me acute indigestion on the spot. “I’m in no position to control your destiny,” I murmured.
“But you’re wholeheartedly in favor of Miss Soames’s solution for my family—and the rest of the South? Righteous punishment, administered for a lifetime?”
“No,” I said.
Tabitha Soames was stunned. “Did you say no, Jeremiah?”
“I said no. I don’t think vengeance was part of Mr. Lincoln’s plans.”
“Mr. Lincoln was a mere factotum in this business,” Tabitha snapped. “Whatever authority he assumed was granted to him only with the approval of the chosen men and women of the North. An approval that would have been withdrawn in an instant if he had demonstrated the tendencies of his oafish successor.”
“We don’t agree,” I said.
“Jeremiah! I am shocked. Truly shocked!”
We ate the rest of the meal in icy silence. After coffee, Sophia returned to her room and I escorted Tabitha Soames back to the Washington Arms Hotel, half a dozen blocks from the Willard. On the steps she turned to gaze sadly at me. “I came down here to plight our troth, Jeremiah. Not without difficulty, I’ve persuaded my mother to accept you as a son-in-law, in spite of your Irish blood. I convinced her that Uncle Charles had transformed you from a mick to a genuine American.”
“Tabitha, I’ve always had the greatest respect for you. But I’ve never felt the—the desire to make you my wife,” I said. “That requires another dimension, impossible to put into words.”
I might have added: We’ve never even kissed. But that would make too explicit what I was feeling—or better, not feeling.
Rage swept Tabitha’s whole body. She literally trembled. “I should have known you were likely to relapse into the arms of someone from your own detestable tribe.”
Tabitha stalked into the Washington Arms without another word. I called after her: “That was unworthy of you, Tabitha. Unworthy of our friendship.”
“Our friendship has ended!” She flung the words over her shoulder without breaking stride as she pushed through the hotel’s swinging doors.
I walked the darkened streets of Washington for another hour, while drunken Army of the Potomac men reeled past me in search of women. Several asked me for recommendations and I directed them to the streets around the Capitol, where houses of ill-fame, as Tabitha Soames would call them, flourished by the dozen, full of cheerful women who knew how to separate a soldier—or a newspaperman—from his greenbacks. Several invited me to join them but I politely declined. Tonight of all nights, Jeremiah O’Brien was not in the mood for that sort of revelry
My thoughts were elsewhere, in my days of innocence, when I escorted Tabitha to parties and the theater in New York, acting as Charles A. Dana’s surrogate. Her father had died in her girlhood and her uncle had long since become a parent she adored. I yearned for the unaffected pride her affection had stirred in me. I writhed over the revelation of her parting words—deep down she shared the contempt of the Irish that permeated so much of the North.
I struggled to tell myself it was all part of the war, part of the overpowering sense that history was a dark force dragging me willy-nilly in its wake. I dimly perceived that Sophia Carroll was part of that force. She might well turn out to be my destruction instead of the salvation, the manhood, I dreamt of finding in her arms. For the moment, I could discover no alternative to yielding to the somber flow that had so mysteriously joined us—and thanks to Dana now threatened to sunder us.
“Would y’help a poorrr soldier?” said a husky voice with an unmistakable Irish brogue. I stared dazedly at a legless man in a chair with makeshift wheels on its feet.
“The Irish brigade?” I asked.
“And proud of it,” he said.
I stuffed the contents of my wallet—about thirty dollars—into his tin cup. “God bless ye,” he said.
I headed for my favorite refuge, the Willard Hotel bar, where I could drink on credit. For a while I jousted with a reporter from the New York Times about how things would go tomorrow. The Timesman, a Radical Republican to his boots, like most of the paper’s staff, predicted that Pennsylvania Avenue would be virtually empty tomorrow when the Army of the Tennessee marched. No one in the East had any interest in Sherman’s bummers.
The next morning, precisely at nine A.M., cannon boomed and the Army of the Tennessee rounded the corner of the Capitol and headed down Pennsylvania Avenue. Tabitha Soames sat in the congressional pavilion, looking forlorn. Guilt combined with my hangover to intensify my misery.
My only consolation was the vivid refutation of the New York Times reporter’s prediction. The avenue was even more jammed with spectators—at least a third as many more—than the previous day. The weather was not quite as warm, which may have encouraged the turnout. But the chief reason was what the people came to ogle: the exotic creatures who had marched from Atlanta to the sea.
Down the avenue the Westerners came, rank on rank, a good half of them barefoot. They marched with a rolling springy stride, perhaps two to four inches longer than the men of the East. Sherman rode at the head of the immense column, wreaths of roses around his horse’s neck. His old slouch hat was in his hand and his red hair glistened in the sun.
The spectators went wild. Sobbing women held up babies; others simultaneously praised God and wept. Thousands of white handkerchiefs fluttered from male and female hands. Rooftops, windows, even the trees were full of cheering civilians. For some of the men in the ranks, the excitement was too much. Wild cheers burst from their throats. I could see Sherman wondering if his boys were about to lose all self-control. In an agony of uncertainty, he turned in the saddle as they reached the crest of the slope before the Treasury Building, only minutes from the presidential reviewing stand.
A glow of almost beatific happiness transformed Sherman’s grizzled features. Every man was obeying Uncle Billy’s order to keep his eyes rigidly to the front. Their cheers, their excitement, had not altered his last command. As Sherman passed the reviewing stand, he raised his sword in salute. The crowd exploded into hitherto unparalleled acclamation. Every man, woman, and child on Pennsylvania Avenue shouted their lungs out.
Behind Sherman, his massed bands burst into “Marching Through Georgia.” Flowers poured down like raindrops from the roofs and trees until the avenue was ankle deep in blossoms. As the Fifteenth Corps, the outfit whose commander, General Hazen, sought in vain for a universal haircut, passed the stand, they whipped off their hats and bellowed a cheer for the president and General Grant. Their haircuts were as long as Custer’s but they kept their eyes locked to the front.
Sherman swung his horse into the White House grounds, dismounted, and joined the dignitaries on the reviewing stand. I followed him and watched from the rear of the pavilion while he embraced his wife and son Tom and shook hands with President Johnson and General Grant. Next in line was Secretary of War Stanton and behind him, Assistant Secretary Dana. Stanton put out his hand. Sherman’s face turned scarlet and his red hair seemed to glow in the reflection from his skin. He ignored the hand and sat down in an empty seat next to Grant. Neither general henceforth paid the slightest attention to the infuriated Stanton—or Dana. I suddenly remembered Ulysses S. Grant was from Ohio, too.
The Army of the Tennessee continued its triumphant progress down Pennsylvania Avenue. Not only the rolling stride and the resolute frontward gaze hypnotized the spectators. Equally fascinating were the accoutrements of war they carried with them. Signalmen lugged sixteen-foot staffs with mysterious flags like talismanic banners. Behind almost every company was a captured horse or mule loaded with cooking utensils, chickens, and an occasional pig on a rope. Here was an explanation of how they had marched through Georgia unsupplied, except, according to Sherman, by “sweet potatoes sprung up from the ground.”
Behind each division came a pioneer corps of Negroes from the plantations of Georgia and South Carolina, marching in double ranks, with picks, staves, and axes across their brawny shoulders. Behind them came six horse-drawn ambulances for each division, their bloodstained stretchers strapped to their sides. At the sight of the ambulances the cheers died away and a hush fell on the nearest spectators.
On the presidential reviewing stand, the German ambassador, a caricature of an aristocrat complete with monocle, could scarcely believe his eyes. “An army like that could whip all Europe,” he gasped at the end of the first hour. At the end of the second hour, he said: “An army like that could whip the world.” An hour later, he reached the summit of hyperbole. “An army like that could whip the devil!”
For seven and a half hours, the men of the West strode past us on those sinewy legs that had carried them farther than most armies had marched in the history of warfare. In the end, I began to sense that their aura of invincibility came from something invisible, intangible, something profoundly connected to Abraham Lincoln. He had summoned these grandsons of the pioneers from the nation’s heartland to settle the ancient antagonism between the founding sections. More and more, I began to think it was the murdered president in his Western prime that we saw striding past us on this unforgettable day of days.
I crossed the avenue and studied the presidential reviewing stand. Sherman and Grant were talking cheerfully, their eyes fixed on the marching men. A few seats away, Stanton and Dana looked dour. President Bourbonbrain stared straight ahead with no discernible expression. He was apparently oblivious to the drama that was swirling around him.
One thing was obvious. After this performance by the Army of the Tennessee, no one was going to sack General William Tecumseh Sherman. The relaxed warmth of General Grant’s conversation with his old friend made it clear to all and sundry that he did not give two pins what Secretary of War Stanton, Assistant Secretary of War Dana, and all the Radical Republicans in Washington assembled in righteous panoply had to say about that.
For the first time in a month, my newsman’s instincts were alive and well. Power, an almost indefinable entity in this churning American democracy—a compound of legal authority and public emotion—was shifting away from Stanton and Dana. Toward whom? Certainly not President Bourbonbrain. I began to suspect the chief recipient was not General Sherman, either, but the man who had given him the chance to receive this gigantic acclaim—that dosemouthed son of Ohio; Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Maybe the story of the century was not the one Charles A. Dana had in mind.
The next day, I was sitting at my desk in the Tribunes Washington office, pondering the Associated Press’s survey of the nation’s newspapers. From Chicago came a burst of sweet reasonableness, according to the peculiar definition of the term, by that terrorizer of Southern slave owners, Joseph Medill. His paper had carried a splendidly detailed account of the great parade. But Medill saw much important work that yet needed doing.
The battles have been won but the war is far from over. In fact, the real war, the struggle for the soul of the south, is scarcely begun. To cleanse the soul, contrition is essential. The first step to contrition is punishment. Let us show them we mean business by putting Jefferson Davis and his military coadjutator, Robert E. Lee, on trial for treason immediately, and hang them with all possible dispatch. That done, we can begin examining other blood-drenched miscreants, using as our benchmark the condemnation of these two criminals. The rule of thumb should be one so obvious as to be beyond argument. Anyone who resigned positions of trust in the federal government—and in Lee’s case—had the privilege of a West Point education—is de facto a traitor if he fought for the rebellion.
Wonderful, I thought. Here was a true spirit of reconciliation. I turned to the page that sampled Southern opinion, and came across the following:
Three hundred thousand Yankees
Are stiff in Southern dust
We got three hundred thousand
Before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot
I wish it was three million
Instead of what we got.
This too was not exactly the voice of reconciliation. As I contemplated asking Sophia Carroll what she thought of this effusion, a crisp voice spoke in my ear. “It was written by Innes Randolph, one of the ultimate Virginia aristocrats. He has so much blue blood in his veins, he urinates in two colors.”
It was Dana, of course. “It’s time for us to go see General Grant,” he said. “But first, I wonder if you can explain this?”
He showed me a letter constructed by clipping out letters and words from a newspaper. It said: “DANA quit this thing with Lee or you will soon be as dead as Lincoln.”
“You think this came from me?” I said.
“Of course not. No one is more loyal than you, Jeremiah.”
Was that sarcasm I heard in Dana’s voice? His smile was intact—but did it express suspicion, or merely the usual condescension? “Who else knows about this project?” I asked.
“Only a handful of men. Sumner, Thad Stevens, Stanton—no one likely to send this.”
Was it Sophia? She was perfectly capable of sending it. And shooting Dana in the bargain. She had seen her mother handle a gun with deadly effect. I vowed to protect her no matter what it cost me—including Dana’s friendship.
With Dana was a huge Negro soldier from one of the colored regiments in the Army of the Potomac. Dana introduced him as Jupiter Hemings. “Thomas Jefferson was his great-grandfather,” he said. “Jupiter has volunteered to be my bodyguard.”
Jupiter held out an immense black hand. I risked my pale paw in its grip and was rewarded by a crunch that left me wondering if I was a first cousin to an amputee.
“What am I supposed to do while you talk to Grant—take notes?” I asked, putting on my coat.
“Of course not. You’re an eyewitness to certain things that it may be necessary to recall to the general’s mind,” Dana said. “You’ll also be a witness to his capitulation.”
Dana paused to smile briefly at Jupiter Hemings. “Except for his color, this fellow is a virtual twin of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson,” he said. “Amazing, how bloodlines reproduce themselves.”
Hemings seemed to like this comparison. “I aims to go back there and get me some land that’l make me as rich as Ole President Tom ‘fore I dies.”
“As well you should—and shall,” Dana said, his smile a veritable beacon of hope.
I was thinking about my role in the coming interview with General Grant. I did not like it. I had grown fond of this laconic soldier, not only for his ability on the battlefield, but also for his humanity. I remembered one night during the clashes in the Wilderness when we noticed an unusual number of large campfires on the Confederate side of the lines. An inquiry shouted to enemy pickets produced an explanation: the Southerners were celebrating the news that General Pickett’s wife had just given birth to a son.
When Grant heard this, he said: “Can’t we do something for young Pickett?” Grant and Pickett pere had been friends in the pre-Civil War army. In an hour, answering bonfires were burning on half a dozen hills held by the Union Army. The following day Grant’s men and Pickett’s men went back to killing each other. But I remembered this glimpse of a man who did not hate an old friend for wearing a different uniform.
We headed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the War Department, a decrepit brick building west of the White House. Beside it leaned similar aged buildings that housed the State and Navy departments. All seemed humbled by the looming Treasury Building, whose gigantic size suggested to several of my acquaintances, notably Sophia Carroll, that making money was the paramount concern of the republic. Sophia had pointed out that when Washington had celebrated the news of the capture of Richmond, the Treasury had hoisted out its windows a gigantic ten-dollar bill instead of an American flag.
As we walked, I tried to explain what had happened between me and Tabitha Soames. “Don’t worry about it,” Dana said. “She told me the story in some detail. You’re obviously under the influence of your Southern Jezebel. By the time we hang General Lee, that infatuation will be a thing of the past.”
As we approached our destination, a familiar odor assailed our nostrils. The wind was blowing from the south, wafting to us the stench of the Potomac flats, an unsavory marsh just south of the White House, formerly an outlet for sewage. My friend John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, once compared the smell to ten thousand dead cats. I had grown used to thinking of it as a metaphor for the accumulated stink of the war as I had seen it in the gambling houses and bordellos of the capital. For a moment I was tempted to tell this to Dana.
At the War Department, Dana (and I) needed no introductions. Sentries at the door came to attention as we sauntered past them. Inside, Dana told Jupiter Hemings to wait in an anteroom and led me upstairs to Grant’s office. The general’s chief of staff, Colonel John Rawlins, an Ohio attorney before the war catapulted him to fame’s proximity, greeted us with an anxious smile. General Grant was seeing a visitor. Did we have an appointment?
In a far corner of the office I spotted Colonel Adam Badeau, Grant’s secretary who wrote most of his dispatches. A New Yorker, he was a smooth operator who made a policy of befriending reporters on Grant’s behalf. He greeted me with a toothy smile that unsuccessfully tried to conceal not a little uneasiness.
“I didn’t think I needed an appointment to see General Grant,” Dana said. “Nor did Mr. O’Brien. He was the reporter who transmitted to the nation those electrifying words about fighting it out all summer. He’s followed him across almost all his battlefields, from Vicksburg to Cold Harbor, glorifying him whenever possible.”
The choice of Cold Harbor, Grant’s worst blunder as a general, was deliberate, I was sure of it. On that awful day Grant had killed ten thousand men in futile frontal assaults. Rawlins visibly wilted. “I’ll tell General Grant you’re waiting.”
He vanished into the inner office. A few minutes later, the door opened and Grant emerged, arm in arm with a large black-bearded man in a tan ill-fitting civilian suit. For a moment neither I nor Dana could believe our eyes. The visitor was James “Pete” Longstreet, until recently a lieutenant general in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
“Hallo, Dana, hallo, O’Brien,” Grant said, in the most cheerful imaginable voice. “Look who dropped in to shake hands with me.”
He introduced us to ex-General Longstreet, who shook our hands with a wary look in his eye. He clearly did not regard Dana as a friend. Was he part of the group who had sent the assistant secretary that murderous warning? Pete looked capable of doing a great deal of harm to someone he disliked. I had no trouble visualizing his large hands around Dana’s throat— and mine.
“I told this fellow I could hardly wait to take his money in another round of brag, as I did without fail in the old army,” Grant said. Brag was a favorite army card game.
“Sam was the luckiest son of a gun with a deck of cards I’ve ever seen,” Longstreet said, using Grant’s West Point nickname. He beamed down on the Union commander in chief, whose head barely reached his shoulder.
“Old Pete asked me about pardons,” Grant said. “He’s anxious to get to work in some job that will put bread on his table. I said it wasn’t my department but I was sure we’d get around to settling that sort of thing in a week or two.”
“Or three,” Dana said. “Congress may have something to say about it, General.”
“Anyway, I want this fellow’s name near the head of the list,” Grant said. He clapped Old Pete on the back and got clapped in return. Pete departed, seemingly oblivious to the anxiety on the faces of Colonels Rawlins and Badeau. Both these young gentlemen had finely honed political instincts. On several nights in the last year of the war, I had discussed with them the strong likelihood that Ulysses S. Grant would become Lincoln’s successor as president of the United States. They did not want to see him do anything that might derail their trip to that delicious destination.
“What can I do for you, Dana?” Grant said. “Are you going to foist O’Brien on me for a series of Tribune specials on ‘How I Won the War’? I’m not available for that sort of thing. I think the less said in a boastful way by our side, the better, at this point.”
“I’m sure you’re right, General,” Dana said. “I have something rather different to discuss with you. I brought Jeremiah along in case some note-taking becomes necessary.”
The general waved us into his spacious but minimally furnished office. There were no pictures on the walls. A set of bookcases was devoid of books. “I’m just camping out here as yet,” Grant said apologetically. “I’ve spent so much of my time in a field tent for the last few years I’ve pretty near forgotten what belongs in an office, besides some chairs and a desk.”
“The country will gratefully forgive you that sort of lapse, General,” Dana said. “Without you and that tent, we might still be fighting this war.”
Grant nodded, as if he pretty much agreed with that observation, and lit a cigar. “What’s on your mind, Dana, old friend?” he said.
“We’ve won the war, General. But will we win the peace? Jeremiah here, who attended the surrender ceremonies in Charleston a month ago and traveled back to Washington overland, found that the spirit of resistance was by no means crushed. Tell the general about the poem you saw in a Southern newspaper, Jeremiah.”
One of my peculiar gifts is a photographic memory. I recited the Innes Randolph poem. Grant was disturbed. He leaped up from his desk and paced the room. “You know what inspired that poem, Dana?” he said. “I’ll lay you ten to one it was those ceremonies in Charleston. I thought they were a bad idea but they were none of my business—”
“They were a necessary reward to those who had supported the government when millions of others had fallen by the wayside,” Dana said. “You can think what you please about the abolitionists. I agree that their rhetoric has too often been excessive. But we’ll need their continued support if we hope to achieve a peace that survives the exhaustion that has produced this—this truce.”
“Truce?” Grant said. “I don’t see any justification for that word, Dana. The South has been whipped, fairly and squarely. That’s what Pete Longstreet just told me. What he says almost every man who fought in their armies believes.”
This was a moment to savor. I naturally said nothing and let Dana respond. He had exulted in every moment of that three-day orgy of self-satisfaction and moral triumph in Charleston. Was he going to admit this to Grant—even correct the general’s obviously inadequate evaluation of the spiritual significance of the great event?
I should have known better. Dana had gotten where he was—the man who linked the War Department and the Grand Army of the Republic—by being many things to many men. Only a handful of us who knew him in perspective grasped the hidden contours of his soul.
“To a certain extent, that military viewpoint is correct, General,” Dana said. “But there are realities beyond the battlefield that have to be addressed. There’s more than a little evidence that the South does not think it has been defeated on the battlefield of the spirit. That poem Jeremiah just recited is only a sample of this deplorable fact. Far more significant are Robert E. Lee’s farewell orders to the Army of Northern Virginia. He said the South had been defeated by the overwhelming numbers and resources of the North. He made no reference whatsoever to the moral issues that underlay the war. On the contrary he praised his men for faithfully performing their duty to their country—and assured them of God’s blessing and protection.”
“I’m not sure I would have said anything different, if I were in his shoes,” Grant said.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. One of your signal virtues, General, has been your willingness to listen to advice. Lee sought no advice in composing that treasonous farewell message. If advice had been proffered to him by someone with the proper point of view, I doubt if he would have listened to it.”
“He was a very tired, thoroughly beaten man,” Grant said, obviously remembering the opponent he had met at Appomattox Courthouse three months ago.
“In the eyes of the Southerners, he was—and is—much more,” Dana said. “He’s a towering figure around whom the extreme Rebels are trying to construct a secret spiritual victory—which will, they hope, annul their battlefield defeats.”
“Do you think so, O’Brien?” Grant said.
The way he whirled on me and fired the question with the speed of an eyeblink made me dizzy for a moment. I sensed that Grant suspected where this discussion was going—and he was resisting the flow, like a clever boxer facing a stronger opponent.
“I—I think Mr. Dana’s view—which I’m sure is based on secret service reports as well as my own limited observations—has considerable merit.”
“Really!” Grant said. There was more than a little mockery in his voice. I sensed he was saying, not very politely, O’Brien, I didn’t know you were Dana’s complete toady.
With considerable malice aforethought, I responded to this sneer. I was a man, after all, and had risked my hide on as many battlefields as Grant. “Perhaps you haven’t read Mr. Dana’s report of his visit to Richmond, shortly after its fall. I found one sentence particularly striking. ‘The malignity of the thorough rebel here is humbled and silenced, but only seems more intense on that account—’”
“I somehow missed that, O’Brien. I’ll have to take a look at it,” Grant said.
Dana cleared his throat—a sign that he sensed Grant’s resistance. “There are people in the army—and in the civilian government—General, who are very concerned about the game Lee is playing, or letting others play lor him. Important people in the Republican Party—senators, congressmen, editors of powerful newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. Secretary Stanton himself is deeply troubled—”
Almost imperceptibly Grant paused in his pacing. Dana had just played a very important card. He was telling the general that the man who had the theoretical authority to fire him was part of this contest for the soul of the South—and possibly the nation.
“The president—the new president,” Grant said. “Is he in agreement?”
I sensed in that verbal stumble that Grant too found it hard to believe that Lincoln was dead. My resentment dissolved in a our common grief. I wanted to tell the general we were spiritual brothers, lost pilgrims in the now empty temple of Father Abraham’s nobility.
Dana’s smile emanated confidence. “I saw the president at the White House the day before yesterday. While he persists in arguing that the mass of the Southern people should be treated with forbearance, he soon grasped the point of punishing those who fomented this rebellion and turned it into a national bloodbath. ‘Treason is a crime and must be made odious,’ he said. I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
My God, I thought, first Stanton, now President Bourbonbrain has become Dana’s ventriloquist dummy. My old awe of the godlike Dana seized me by the throat with a grip worthy of Jupiter Hemings.
“What are you thinking of doing about this, Dana?” Grant said.
Dana produced a copy of the Medill editorial from the Chicago Tribune and read it aloud. He followed it with a similar diatribe from Henry Raymond, the publisher of the New York Times, calling for Lee’s immediate arrest and trial on a charge of treason. The reasoning was similar. Lee had held a position of trust in the federal government. He had abandoned it to join the rebellion. If this was not treason, what was?
“What about the parole I gave General Lee at Appomattox?” Grant askcd. “Wasn’t the full faith and credit of the U.S. government behind that document? I signed it as commander in chief of the Union Army.”
“Full faith and credit of the U.S. government” was pretty good. Grant had a way with words, even though he used them parsimoniously. Dana pursed his lips and decided to light one of his small black cheroots. “I’ve talked to Attorney General Speed about that problem, General. He feels your terms were almost as far over the divide between the military and the civil government as General Sherman’s. Secretary Stanton felt the same way at the time. But he chose to say nothing because the president—President Lincoln—seemed to approve them.”
“Seemed to approve them?” Grant said. “Goddamn it, Dana, he told me he approved them. He would have approved Sherman’s terms, too.”
“I have no doubt that he might have leaned in that direction. Mr. Lincoln was a man who tended to lean with various political winds. He was a politician, after all. When he took office, I don’t think ten men in the country thought he would ever free a single slave. But moral pressure— unremitting moral pressure from men who felt that this war would have no meaning without emancipation—soon had him leaning in that direction. Now these men—the same men who supported you unto the last casualty, General—are running the country. Not Mr. Lincoln. He never had much of an organized following. Whereas these men are organized.”
Dana drew on his cigar. The word organized spun around the room like a carom shot on a billiard table. It carried with it the implied threat that these nameless men, abolitionists all, had the power, thanks to their newspapers and their battalions of vocal clergymen and their fulminating followers in Congress to demolish the reputation of anyone who opposed them.
Dana exhaled a cloud of acrid blue smoke. I coughed violently. “O’Brien,” Dana said. “If you’re going to spend much time with me or Grant, you must take up cigars. Otherwise you’ll never stop choking for breath.”
I nodded, my eyes watering. Grant gazed sourly on me, no doubt thinking: This mick is not only a complete toady, he’s the ultimate toady.
“So it’s a treason trial you want?” Grant said. “You won’t get me to testify. I’ll stay out of it—totally. I’ll make it clear that the civilian arm of the government launched the prosecution.”
Dana sucked in more smoke, and exhaled it. Now seated, he tossed one long leg over the other leg and smiled at Grant with more than a hint of condescension. “I never said that was what we wanted, General. In fact, a treason trial is out of the question. Under the Constitution, acts of treason can only be tried in the state where they have been committed. That would mean Robert E. Lee would be tried before a jury of Virginians. The verdict would be so foregone, we’d look like the veriest idiots in the entire western world to have indicted him.”
Grant wheeled and stalked back to his desk. He sat down on the edge of it, facing us in our chairs, using elevation to assert at least a shred of authority. But he folded his arms over his chest, adding a hint of defensiveness. The general realized he had blundered. He had conceded to Dana and Stanton and their faceless legion of insisters on vengeance the right to prosecute Lee. Now he could not hope to extricate himself from the path of the juggernaut that was roaring into the room, courtesy of Dana’s implacable determination.
“What we want to do, General, is try General Lee before a military commission. Similar to the ones that have been used in the Midwest to deal with Copperheads and other forms of Democratic treachery—and to the one that’s currently sitting in judgment on the men and the woman who assassinated Lincoln. We want Lee condemned, not by a clutch of unknown civilians, but by a representative sample of the leaders of the Grand Army of the Republic, the spokesmen for the men who bled and died to win freedom for the Negro.”
“The answer is no, Dana. An emphatic absolute no,” Grant said.
He said this in an amazingly calm, quiet voice. He was as imperturbable here as he was on the battlefield, even though he knew he was at an enormous disadvantage. Somewhere within him there must be turmoil but it was invisible in those usual betrayers of inner disturbance, the mouth and the eyes.
“General,” Dana said. “Once upon a time, in a land far away from this political city, I offered you good advice, and you took it, most of the time. Can you—would you—consider taking more advice?”
Dana was talking about the winter of 1863, when he came to the Army of the Tennessee as it marched on Vicksburg. He had orders from Secretary of War Stanton to tell him the truth and nothing but the truth about Ulysses S. Grant. Was he, as some claimed, a binge drinker who vanished into his tent for days at a time? Did he have secret ambitions to become president? Did he regard with contempt any and all soldiers who did not have a diploma from his supposedly exalted alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy better known as West Point?
Dana’s reports had rescued Grant from political extinction, giving the general time to unfold his brilliant campaign that ended with Vicksburg’s capitulation on July 4, 1863. Dana and I had stayed with the Army of the Tennessee throughout that march to glory. My dispatches to the Tribune had not a little to do with making Grant a national name—and Lincoln’s favorite general.
We had been part of the general’s inner circle for those five heady months. Nothing was concealed from us, even Colonel Rawlins’s frequently expressed anxiety that Grant might start drinking if the gloom of imminent defeat or the euphoria of imminent victory got the better of him. The verbose, profane Ohio lawyer was Grant’s conscience, frequently exhibiting and occasionally waving in the general’s face his written promise that he would not touch alcohol until the South surrendered.
All this was crammed into that loaded word advice, making it a sort of sputtering mortar shell that was liable to explode at any moment and blow us all out of this office onto the White House lawn. Grant saw this, felt this reality as acutely, perhaps more acutely, than I did. But he still retained his extraordinary calm.
“I valued your advice then and I would value it now, Dana, if you spoke as an advisor—and a friend. I don’t see that man in front of me now. I see an advocate—even a conspirator.”
Dana sighed. “General—O’Brien here will testify to my reluctance to play this role. In fact, I undertook it only because I still consider myself your friend—and even your protector. If you resist this thing, any hope you might entertain of becoming president is gone forever.”
“I don’t entertain any such hope—or desire,” Grant said. “I’m a soldier. I never wanted to be anything else. I don’t think I’m fitted for anything else.”
“The country may force you to change your mind, General. Your reputation with the common people is as high or possibly higher than Washington’s at the summit of his glory But what are they, General? Clay—the people are clay to be molded by stronger, more determined men, who know how to make the masses feel and even to achieve some rudimentary forms of thought, at their dictation. These men want you as their partner, eventually as their spokesman, General. But not if you refuse to work with them on something so crucial to their vision of this nation.”
“Dana—you and your determined friends don’t understand the dangerous game you’re playing. Lee could have prolonged this war—not by a few months, but by a dozen years. He could have let his men scatter into the hills and start a partisan war that would have left the South a desert. He chose honorable surrender and a promise of decent treatment. If you hang him, don’t you see that the rest of his generals will immediately head for the hills? Does Pete Longstreet look like the kind of fellow who’ll let you hang him without a fight?”
“You have a point—a very large and important point, General. Don’t you think so, Jeremiah?”
“Absolutely” I said.
“I think the people who have sent me here would be more than satisfied with the conviction of Lee and Davis. Then would come the time for magnanimity. A general pardon for everyone else who applied for it and was willing to take a solemn oath of allegiance to the federal government.”
Dana exhaled another cloud of acrid smoke. “All that can be accomplished, General, by your cooperation. I guarantee it. I’ll back it with my word of honor—and the full weight of my friendship.”
With his arms still across his chest, Grant leaned forward slightly as if he were trying to suppress an acute inner pain. “What about my honor, Dana? My pledge to Lee in the parole I signed at Appomattox?”
“I don’t think any fair-minded man would consider your honor impugned, General, for obeying an order from your civilian superiors. This trial will be at the order of the president. The officers who sit on the board will do so at the express order of Secretary Stanton.”
Grant rocked backward on the edge of the desk. “What part does O’Brien play in this drama?” he asked.
“Jeremiah will be the only reporter permitted at the trial. He’ll tell the story to the American people, after the verdict has been handed down. You can be assured that he’ll write nothing that impugns your honor, General. You surely recall the proof of his loyalty the day we went up the Yazoo—”
For the first time, I saw Grant’s imperturbability waver. The arms barricading his chest tightened, his hands clutched the cloth of his blue coat. What happened on our voyage up the Yazoo River on June 6, 1863, was known only to a handful of people. On that day the outcome of the Vicksburg campaign was still unclear. Grant had failed to breach the city’s defenses in two costly frontal assaults and had settled into a siege. He decided to board a steamer at Haynes Bluff, on the Mississippi, and voyage up the Yazoo River to inspect operations aimed at keeping at bay Confederate attempts to lift the siege. Our destination was Sartartia, Mississippi.
A worried Rawlins had already written Grant one of his by now patented letters begging him not to go “where the wine bottle has just been emptied.” Maybe it was one letter too many. Maybe Grant was simply worn out by the six-month struggle to win Vicksburg, with its unnerving melange of defeats and victories. At any rate, within two hours of the start of our voyage, Grant reeled out of his cabin decidedly drunk. He ordered the steamboat to the riverbank and called for a horse. He was going to make a personal reconnaissance of the countryside.
Dana persuaded him to return to his cabin, where he ranted about being persecuted by certain newspapers, including the Tribune. He continued to drink wine by the gulp. Dana ordered me to guard the cabin door and keep any and all visitors at bay. He stayed with Grant until the general passed out. Exerting his authority as Secretary of War Stanton’s representative, Dana ordered the captain to turn the steamboat around as soon as darkness fell.
In the morning, Grant came to breakfast in a clean shirt, his usual smiling imperturbable self. “I suppose we’re close to Sartartia,” he said.
“No, General,” Dana said. “We’re back at Haynes Bluff. I thought it best to return, considering how ill you were last night.”
Grant nodded and simply said: “I feel much better now.”
That became our story. General Grant had become “ill” and Mr. Dana had wisely decided to return him to his army and its corps of doctors. But many of the steamboat’s crew had seen too much to remain silent. Soon the army swarmed with exaggerated versions of the story which had Grant riding cross-country with Dana in wild pursuit and finally taking a header from his horse that left the general unconscious for six hours. Although several reporters questioned me about the tale, no one wrote a line about it for their papers, partly because I vehemently denied it was true.
As far as I know, Grant did not touch another drop of liquor until Vicksburg surrendered. Nor did I ever see him drunk again, in my numerous encounters with him in the field thereafter until Appomattox. I found myself sympathizing with him now, as he contemplated the probability that Jeremiah O’Brien aka Charles Dana’s toady had kept extensive notes on this misadventure and was perfectly capable of using them to destroy Ulysses Grant’s reputation.
“Where would this trial take place?” Grant asked.
“At Arlington,” Dana said.
“Lee’s house?”
“It belonged to his wife, actually She forfeited it when she failed to pay her taxes during the war. The place is empty. We can fit up the drawing room as a courtroom and surround it with a regiment of troops to keep the curious at bay. If anything gets out about Lee’s presence, we can say he’s trying to reclaim the estate. It’s eleven hundred acres—well worth a trip from Richmond. The judges, witnesses, can get there from Washington in a half hour.”
“There’ll be no other reporters present?”
“None.”
“Will General Lee be represented by counsel?”
“Of course, assuming he wishes it.”
“What if he refuses to cooperate with the court in anyway—simply defies it?”
“We have been told by people who know General Lee that he’s more likely to accept the challenge of defending himself against a charge of treason.”
“Where is he at this moment?”
“He’s rented a house in Richmond, where he’s living with his wife and daughters.”
Grant heaved a long, shuddering sigh. I wondered if, alone in his tent, he had sighed that way when Rawlins presented him with the latest casualty figures. “Who do you have in mind for the board of judges?”
“That’s a difficult question, General. I had hoped for some help from you,” Dana said, his smile still intact, in spite of Grant’s glare. “I’ve thought of three generals I consider essential. Ben Butler, Oliver O. Howard, and Jonathan Stapleton.”
For a moment I was breathless. Dana’s gall was unlimited. Benjamin F. Butler was totally identified with the vengeance party. He was also one of Ulysses Grant’s most outspoken enemies in the Army of the Potomac. After Lincoln’s reelection last year, when Butler’s value as a Democrat-turned-Republican vanished, Grant had relieved him from his command of the Army of the James.
Oliver O. Howard was probably the most outspoken abolitionist in the Grand Army of the Republic. He had recently been appointed a commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, the organization Congress had just created to raise the educational level of the ex-slaves. A West Point graduate, he had served with distinction as one of General Sherman’s corps commanders but was widely considered a political pet of the Radical Republicans, who frequently bestowed the thanks of Congress and similar honors on him that generals who were Democrats seldom received. It was not hard to see him as a voice of vengeance.
As for Stapleton—he was something of a wild card. His father had been a prominent Democratic senator from New Jersey which the family virtually controlled thanks to their ownership of the state’s railroads and numerous textile factories. The son had raised a regiment and marched to Bull Run, where he was one of the few who won praise. He soon became a major general commanding a division that was famed for its ability to stand fast when regiments on both flanks were collapsing. His nickname among the troops was “Old Steady.” He had a brother, a West Pointer, who had been killed at the Battle of Nashville, leading colored troops. Perhaps that was a clue to where he stood politically.
Dana, of course, had more than a clue. I had no doubt he had explored the case against Robert E. Lee with each of these men. Naming them—and giving Grant an opportunity to suggest two other men—was a daring gambit that bolstered Dana’s portrait of himself as a mere intermediary in this messy business, trying to preserve Grant from harm by consulting him behind the scenes.
“I think Secretary Stanton would approve almost anyone you named, General, except Billy Sherman. His performance yesterday at the Grand Parade has made him persona non grata. The same might apply to some other generals in his entourage, but I would offer you my unqualified support, if you chose any of them.”
“Sherman’s entourage used to be my entourage, Dana,” Grant said. His Ohio twang reminded us, if we needed it after those words, that he was a Westerner.
“Of course, General. Your achievements with the Army of the Potomac tend to make one forget your Western glories.”
“I think this stinks, Dana,” Grant said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I won’t write the order to form this military commission. That will have to come from you and Stanton.”
“Of course, General.”
“I won’t approve its findings.”
“I think some kind of approval will be required, General. A pro forma thing, as part of your position at the top of the chain of command.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Why don’t we wait and see what evidence the court produces about Lee’s treason before debating this? You may be surprised at what you hear, General. There’s much more to General Lee than the admirable soldier you thought you were fighting. That’s mostly a façade.”
“How soon do you want those two names?”
“Three days is all we can spare. This thing must be done swiftly if secrecy is to be maintained.”
“You’ll have them tomorrow,” Grant said.
Dana stood up. I also got to my feet. Grant turned his back on us and walked over to the window, which gave him a fine view of the White House in its green park. Dana hesitated, wondering if some sort of soothing farewell was in order. He decided against it and gestured me toward the door.
Without turning his head, Grant said, “You’re a son of bitch, Dana. Are you aware of that?”
“There may be times when I deserve that title, General. But always for a noble cause.”
Grant continued to contemplate the White House. Dana closed the door softly and smiled at me. It was the same mixture of implacable condescension and transcendent self-confidence that had awed me for eight years. I followed him down the corridor, hurrying to match his long-legged stride. “On to Richmond,” he said.
The U. S. Army train, a collection of freight cars rumbling behind our borrowed Baltimore & Ohio parlor car, chugged through a green Virginia landscape so peaceful, it was hard to believe several hundred thousand men had ever tried to kill each other to control these random hills and scattered woods. Occasionally, a charred house would be visible in the middle distance, confirming memory’s wavering claim to the war’s reality.
Sophia Carroll sat beside me in the plush green velvet seat, her face stony with resistance to the purpose of our journey. No longer a semiprisoner of the federal government, she was returning to Richmond to resume living with her mother. Dana had enlisted her as our covert partner in gathering information on General Lee by blandly pointing out that her mother could still be prosecuted for murder for shooting the abusive Union captain in New Orleans.
Across the aisle sat Dana and the head of the National Police, Lafayette Baker, who handed Dana documents from a large valise. Behind us sat Jupiter Hemings and another equally gigantic colored soldier, named George Bullitt. Dana had gotten a second death threat, justifying this enlargement of his personal guard.
When Baker boarded the train, he had expressed considerable dissatisfaction with Dana’s taste in protectors. “Jesus Christ,” he snarled. “Do you want to get us killed? The army’s pulled all the nigger regiments out of Richmond after two of their sentries got shot dead by snipers.”
Dana had consented to add half a dozen of Baker’s detectives to our entourage. They were a collection of shifty-eyed thugs that made me vow to barricade my hotel room door when and if we got to Richmond unscathed.
I spent a fruitless hour trying to convince Sophia Carroll that General Lee would get a fair trial. I told her he would be able to choose his lawyer. Grant was certain to name two generals who would be predisposed to vote for his acquittal. That meant if one of the other three judges favored him, he would be a free man.
“Stop talking to me as if I were a child,” she hissed. “Do you expect me to believe any court with Ben Butler on it is impartial?”
“Ah,” Dana said, gazing out the window. “We approach Sodom at last.”
Dana had been using that biblical name for Richmond for at least a year. Soon the city was visible on its numerous hills in the late afternoon sunlight. The pillared capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson, was the preeminent sight, followed by numerous majestically spired churches. As we drew closer, we realized that many of the spires stood beside ruined naves. The fire set by the retreating Confederates had consumed the heart of the city. Along the river the destruction was almost total. No less than twenty blocks had been reduced to blackened walls and solitary chimneys. Main Street, once one of the most prosperous thoroughfares in the South, was an equally complete ruin.
“Do you think we could argue this destruction was the result of a failure to find ten just men in their midst, O’Brien?” Dana asked.
He was recalling the Patriarch Abraham’s plea to Jehovah on behalf of Sodom. Abraham persuaded the Divinity to be merciful to the city by producing ten just inhabitants. That agreement apparently did not stop Jehovah from destroying the place with fire and brimstone at a later date. The ten just men must have moved elsewhere.
“Do you think I should institute a search?” I asked. “What if I found ten—or even twenty just men?”
“We’d prosecute them as frauds for their failure to condemn slavery” Dana said.
Thus we sounded the keynote of our journey. Debarking from the train in a temporary shed not far from the ruins of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad depot, we found Major General Godfrey Weitzel and a detachment of cavalry eager to welcome Assistant Secretary of War Dana to Richmond. A brilliant engineer who had designed many of the forts that defended Washington, D.C., the lean Ohio-born Weitzel was one of those regular army men with a minimal interest in politics. He swallowed Dana’s story that he was here to report on the “pacification” of the Confederate capital. I noticed Dana rather pointedly introduced me as a reporter from the Tribune before he introduced Lafayette Baker.
“We have a peaceful city,” Weitzel said, as we rode in an open carriage into the desolated center of Richmond. “That may have something to do with my continuing to post sentries on numerous corners.”
Several dozen Negroes were picking through heaps of furniture and other goods moldering in the streets. Few whites were visible. Weitzel said most still kept to their homes, except to venture to depots set up by the Union Army to supply them with food.
“No signs of a desire to assert the spirit if not the reality of the rebellion?” Dana asked.
“None,” Weitzel said. “I think these people want to return to the Union and get on with their lives.”
“What of Robert E. Lee? How does he conduct himself?”
“He mostly keeps to his house on Franklin Street, where he has occasional visitors.”
“Have you kept a record of the names of these visitors?” Dana asked.
“It never occurred to me that I should. I never had a word from you or Secretary Stanton—”
“It never occurred to us that it would be necessary,” Dana said. “But Mr. Baker here has had some alarming reports of secret resistance—”
Lafayette Baker squinted at Weitzel in his crude conspiratorial way. The general saw a man who could ruin him. “I’ll assign an officer to begin compiling a record immediately,” he said.
“It won’t be necessary, General. My friend Baker has had agents doing exactly that since Mr. Lee arrived home from his murderous career as the Lucifer of the rebellion.”
Weitzel blinked. It was clear that he did not consider Robert E. Lee worthy of such a designation. But the general was in the presence of power. You could see it eroding his self-confidence, his air of command.
“Mrs. Lee was a bit troublesome the night we arrived,” Weitzel said. “We posted a colored sentry in front of her house. She sent one of her servants to ask me if the soldier was ‘perhaps an insult?’”
“Interesting. Extremely interesting,” Dana said.
“The provost marshal, General Ripley, advised me to replace him with a white man,” Weitzel continued. “Ripley dealt with Mrs. Lee during the Peninsula Campaign, when we overran her family’s mansion, the White House, on the Pamunkey River. She’s a very outspoken woman, who makes no effort to restrain her opinions, political and otherwise.”
“And you replaced the Negro soldier?”
“It seemed best to give her no cause for complaint. Especially in those first days, when the city was in a very restless state, full of deserters from both armies, and the lower classes, black and white, all hell-bent on looting anything portable.”
“A wise decision, General,” Dana said. “Mr. O’Brien will say nothing about it in his dispatches to the Tribune.”
Dana’s smile could not have been more effulgent. He had General Weitzel exactly where he wanted him—in a politically supine position, eager to cooperate in every imaginable way with the assistant secretary of war.
We debarked before the Spotswood Hotel, a handsome five-story structure, built in 1860, with all the modern conveniences. The fire had come within a few hundred feet of it and inexplicably burned itself out. Sophie Carroll fished a letter from her purse and called to a passing Negro youngster: “You there! Do you know where Franklin Street is?”
The colored boy allowed that he knew. “Take this to Mrs. Carroll. She lives two doors from General Lee’s house.”
She gave him the letter and a dollar bill. The youngster leaped a foot in the air and took off as if someone had attached a rocket to his epidermis.
Dana was unamused by this presumption of white authority. “In a month or two, you may not be able to give such peremptory orders,” he said. “The habits of freedom will begin to take effect.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Dana,” Sophia said.
Dana and Baker ascended to their rooms with General Weitzel. I stayed in the lobby with Sophia until Mrs. Carroll arrived. By this time twilight was darkening the windows and oil lamps were aglow. Sophia introduced me to her mother. Loretta Carroll was flamboyantly blond. She did not look even slightly Irish. Charles Carroll had obviously married an Anglo-American— hardly surprising in view of his wealth and family prestige.
I said nothing while they exchanged fervent kisses. Finally Mrs. Carroll turned to me. “I presume you’re the gentleman who protected Sophia for so long?” she said in a liquid Southern accent.
“I did my best, when I wasn’t pursuing the news on various battlefields,” I said.
“We’re deeply grateful,” Mrs. Carroll said. I thought her eyes communicated something very different from gratitude. Disdain? Suspicion? Perhaps a mixture of both these less than positive emotions.
“Do you plan to stay in Richmond?” I asked.
“Until my husband is released from captivity,” she said, “I have no place to go. The government confiscated all our property in Louisiana.”
“President Lincoln promised me that he would release him—in return for Sophia’s, er... services,” I said.
“Sophia told me of that merciful impulse. A pity Father Abraham didn’t live so we could see if he meant it,” Mrs. Carroll said.
I suddenly saw her on the veranda of her plantation, hurling orders in all directions, while her slaves scurried obediently. Maybe Dana had a point about these people.
“I’ve had the same thought,” Sophia said, giving me an unnerving glare.
To change the subject, I asked them if they knew General Lee. “Of course. We’re neighbors,” Mrs. Carroll said. “He’s especially fond of Sophia. They’ve corresponded.”
“Oh?”
“Lighthearted reveries,” Sophia said. “I think it helped him escape the terrible burdens he bore.”
“No doubt,” I said, wondering why Sophia had never mentioned this correspondence to me.
“Last Sunday,” Mrs. Carroll said, “we had a scene at our church that I will never forget. At communion, the first person to advance to the altar was a newly freed black man. He knelt there in lonely splendor for five minutes. Not a soul in the congregation would join him. Our minister, Mr. Minnigerode, sat speechless. Then General Lee rose from his pew and knelt beside him. It was breathtaking. Dozens more whites followed him.”
“I’ve been trying to tell Mr. O’Brien what a remarkable man General Lee is,” Sophia said. “Perhaps now he’ll believe me.”
“The other day,” Mrs. Carroll said, “some neighborhood boys began beating up a Northern boy who had come over to Franklin Street in the hope of seeing General Lee. His cries of distress got him an audience. The general rushed into the street and dispersed the attackers. He gave them a stern lecture about the way a Southern gentleman should treat Northern visitors, and invited the boy into the house for a glass of milk while his foes retreated.”
“Mother thinks General Lee is one of those rare beings who emanate spiritual nobility,” Sophia said. “Our cause may be lost but we remain unconquered in spirit, thanks to him. I agree with her wholeheartedly.”
My head took another spin. Mrs. Carroll was confirming everything Dana had been saying about Robert E. Lee. Sophia was obviously taking delicious pleasure in telling me this. I escorted mother and daughter to awaiting carriage and went up to Dana’s room. He and Lafayette Baker were poring over more documents, spread across the bed and a nearby table.
“There’s interesting stuff here, O’Brien,” Dana said.
“Lee’s aide, Colonel Walter Taylor, hated his guts. Baker thinks he can be persuaded to be a hostile witness. His artillery commander, Alexander, has an even more negative opinion. He thinks Lee prolonged the war by a year and killed another two hundred thousand men.”
“Fascinating,” I said.
“Mosby, the so-called guerrilla, may be persuaded to testify against him in return for an amnesty. We have more than enough evidence of his crimes to hang him—Mosby, that is—twenty times.”
John Singleton Mosby had headed something called the Partisan Rangers, a band of desperadoes who terrorized northeastern Virginia in the last year of the war. He specialized in murdering prisoners. Rather than surrender, he simply disbanded his troops and they all went home, hoping their grisly deeds would be forgotten.
Abruptly, with considerable malice, I told Dana the story of General Lee kneeling beside the black man at the communion service in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Dana’s eyes gleamed with unmitigated delight. “Jeremiah,” he all but crooned, “it’s wonderful to see how wholeheartedly you’re joining this project.”
I had difficulty concealing my surprise. “What do you make of it?” I said.
“The communion-rail performance is part of the prearranged plan to elevate him to saviorhood. It shows he’s cooperating with it. At the trial, we’ll reveal his true opinion of the Negro. He despises them, with the scorn the Southern aristocrat reserves for all lesser orders, black and white. It only convinces me all over again that these people must be extirpated. In spite of your passion for your Louisiana spitfire, I have no doubt you’ll agree with me, within two weeks’ time.”
I retreated to my room, more than a little fearful that Dana was right. It was incredible, the power the man had over my mind. Would a verdict of guilty—and Robert E. Lee’s swift execution—put Sophia Carroll forever beyond my reach? My encounter with her Confederate mother made me think this doleful outcome was more than probable.
After dining alone in the Spotswood’s largely empty dining room, I embarked on a reporter’s stroll around ruined Richmond. Sentries were posted on numerous corners but there no longer was a curfew, so they allowed me to pass without a challenge. Few people were willing to grant me an interview. One told me in acid tones that since Lincoln’s assassination, General Weitzel had issued orders forbidding more than two men to gather in a public place.
I finally struck up a conversation with a pair of middle-aged colored men who were hurrying past the ruins on Main Street. Were they happy to be free? I asked.
“Be a sight happier if there was some payin‘ work,” one said. He was taller and better dressed than the other man.
What sort of work had he done as a slave?
“I was butler to Secretary of State Benjamin,” the man said.
“Judah Benjamin?”
“That’s him.”
“Was he a kind master?
“The best I knew of.”
I asked the other man where he had worked. “I was President Davis’s cook,” he said.
“Was he a kind master?”
“Kinder than most. I served him on his farm in Mississippi as well as here in Richmond. He had a hospital and a doctor there for his people. They ate better than many a white in Richmond, the whole war.”
“But you’re glad to be free?”
“Oh, yeah. Long as we don’t find out it means free to starve.”
“There’s talk of giving every colored man forty acres and a mule.”
“Lot of good that will do us,” the first man said. “We don’t know one end of a hoe from another. We’re fixin‘ to open a restaurant, if we can raise some money.”
They vanished into the darkness, leaving me to puzzle about how complicated the world was, compared to the slogans of the politicians.
On Franklin Street, I struck up a conversation with a bulky Irish sergeant who was making the rounds, inspecting the sentries. He readily pointed out General Lee’s tall brick house. It was owned by a Scotsman named Stewart, the sergeant said. He worshiped General Lee and refused to take a cent in rent for his stay there.
“Does General Lee mingle with the people in the city?”
“Now and then he goes for a stroll such as the one you’re takin‘,” the Irishman said. “One of his daughters is his usual companion. They visit some old friend. Everyone rolls out the red carpet for him, to be sure.”
Apparently Lee was more gregarious than General Weitzel thought he was. Did it mean what Dana wanted it to mean? I went back to my room and sought sleep, which eluded me for hours. Well past midnight, I went down the hall to answer a call of nature. Lights were blazing in Dana’s room. His ability to go without sleep was one of his several uncanny gifts. I suddenly felt extremely discouraged. Maybe bourbon was the only answer to my dilemma. I descended to the lobby and obtained a pint from the hotel clerk. That procured me a few hours of dreamless oblivion.
The next morning, Dana looked like a man who had enjoyed twelve hours’ sleep, while I felt like a dishrag. He discussed Lafayette Baker’s documentary evidence of Lee’s guilt in cheerful tones. “They show a man who has consistently attempted to portray himself in the rosiest possible light, while artfully concealing the vilest deeds and opinions,” he said. “There’s enough here to convince you ten times over—but I prefer to have it emerge during the trial, so you can communicate to your readers your rising tide of revulsion.”
Dana was thoroughly aware that Sophia Carroll had been laboring to convince me of Lee’s nobility. Dana-as-editor saw it as adding a delicious ingredient to the story. Once more I felt overwhelmed by my mentor/master’s omniscience. Was there anything he did not foresee in advance, in his relentless pursuit of a transformed America?
Not for the first time, I puzzled over the source of Dana’s incredible self-confidence. I had long since abandoned my faith in the nobility of the average man, as well as the exceptional man. Men were not angels and they never would be these divine biblical creatures, immune to the hungers of the flesh and the vagaries of the spirit.
Accompanied by our two gigantic black bodyguards, and trailed at a discreet distance by half a dozen of Lafayette Baker’s detectives, we sauntered to Lee’s residence at 707 East Franklin Street. Although it was only nine o’clock, already a crowd of curious tourists was on the other side of the street, ogling the house. “Baker tells me this is a daily occurrence,” Dana said, gazing disdainfully at the gawkers. “It’s enough to make me think we shouldn’t have repaired the railroads to this place.”
The jangle of the front door bell pull produced a young dark-haired woman who politely asked us our business. Dana introduced himself as the assistant secretary of war and blandly identified me as a “colleague.” No doubt he thought it would be simpler if I was not immediately known as a reporter. The young woman said she was Agnes Lee. “Come in,” she said. “My father is expecting you.”
Dana was surprised by this offhand assurance but concealed it well. We were led through a spotlessly clean front parlor to a back parlor, where a gray-bearded man in a somewhat ill-fitting gray suit sat reading a newspaper. He put the paper down on a side table and rose to greet us.
Agnes Lee introduced us, giving Dana his title and leaving my name unadorned. Lee gestured us to seats in nearby wing chairs.
“Mr. Lee,” Dana said. “I’m here on a somewhat unpleasant errand. One that I did my utmost to avoid. But I’m sure you’ll understand that even civilians in the War Department must obey orders.”
“There’s no other way to run a war department,” Lee said, with the flicker of a smile.
“Did I hear you correctly, sir?” said a woman’s voice, from the hall. Agnes Lee reappeared, assisting an older woman hobbling on a cane. A one-word description leaped into my mind: formidable. She was one of those women who in her youth was undoubtedly called handsome. But age had sharpened her strong features until only one emotion seemed to predominate: anger.
“Gentlemen,” Lee said. “May I introduce my wife, Mary Anne Randolph Custis Lee.”
I heard a riffle of ironic humor in that parade of names. Lee was telling us we were face-to-face with George Washington’s great-granddaughter— as well as a descendant of the Randolphs, aristocrats related to virtually every famous name in Virginia, from Thomas Jefferson to John Marshall.
Mrs. Lee glared at Dana with undisguised loathing. “Did I hear you correctly, sir? You addressed my husband as ‘Mister Lee’?”
“I believe that is his correct title. He resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army some four years ago,” Dana said.
Mrs. Lee’s glare became almost incandescent in its intensity. “Sir,” she said. “When the British oppressors attempted to communicate with General Washington in 1776, they handed his adjutant general a letter addressed to ‘Mr. Washington.’ The adjutant rejected it with scorn, saying, ‘We have no such person as Mr. Washington in this army’ It is my task to inform you that there is no such person as Mr. Lee in this house.”
I found myself silently cheering this defiant woman. Why? She was the personification of the Old South. But she was also furiously alive with a righteousness that I found fascinating. Perhaps she, not her husband, would be the main character of my forthcoming book. I need hardly mention my secret pleasure at seeing Dana discomfited.
“Calm yourself, dear Mary,” Lee said. “I don’t care in the least what Mr. Dana chooses to call me.”
“But I care. Every Southern woman with an iota of pride cares. Every Southern man with a scintilla of courage cares. He’s telling us that the Southern Confederacy was not a nation. It had—or has—no standing in the annals of our age. Its representatives in the legislature and in the field were worthless impersonators of legitimate authority, mere scheming ragamuffins without honor or morality. We know this is a base and despicable lie. Why should we tolerate it, even for a moment, though the slander is confined to these four walls?”
“You have a point,” Lee said, with a smile that was both grave and strangely sly. I suddenly wondered if this whole scene was a performance being staged for our benefit.
Lee gazed at Dana with remarkable self-assurance. Or was it magisterial contempt? One thing was certain. He did not display any of the attributes of a beaten man. “I think you had better revise your terminology, Mr. Dana, or this interview will cease, forthwith,” he said.
Dana rose to the occasion with no visible damage to his aplomb. He bowed to Mrs. Lee. “If it pleases you, madam, I shall be glad to call your esteemed husband General Lee. But I must point out the title no longer has any meaning, since the government that conferred it on him has ceased to exist.”
“Brute force may extinguish a government, but it persists in the hearts and minds of its people,” Mary Lee said. “Witness the resistance of the Irish nation to the pretensions of Great Britain or the Hungarians to the corrupt monarchs of Vienna.”
“A lady who combines learning with such righteous indignation deserves every gentleman’s respect,” Dana said. “Don’t you agree, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Mrs. Lee glared at me with a scorn that made me wish there was a way to tell her I did not share Dana’s mocking tone.
“Let me come to the point, General Lee,” Dana said. “The government of the United States has decided that certain leaders of the late rebellion must face judgment for the crime of treason. I’m here to inform you that your trial before a military commission will take place in one week’s time. Mr. O’Brien, a reporter for the New York Tribune, will write the story of the proceedings, after the verdict is handed down.”
As Dana spoke, General Lee underwent a transformation that was so extraordinary, I found it difficult to believe my eyes. His chest seemed to gain dimension, his height seemed to increase by several inches. His eyes emanated a dark fury that was doubly amazing because it was so perfectly controlled.
“May I ask if General Grant concurs in this decision?”
“He does. He gave me his approval the day before I left Washington.”
“I suppose he had no choice in the matter,” Lee said.
“To be absolutely candid, the general at first evinced a certain reluctance,” Dana said. “But he soon became convinced of the rightness of the decision. Too many men have died, too much of our nation has been desolated. The people of the North cry out for some evidence that justice is at work in the aftermath of this catastrophe.”
“A military court suits me perfectly,” Lee said. “If I can’t convince a board of fellow officers of the United States Army that I’m innocent of this charge, I’m perfectly willing to take the consequences of a guilty verdict.”
“General Lee presumes that these officers will be men of honor,” Mrs. Lee said. “Will that be the case, Mr. Dana?”
“I assure you that they will all be bound by the standards of truth and justice that animate every officer,” Dana said.
I winced at the thought of Ben Butler being included in this apostrophe. As if the thought were father to a wish, instead of the usual reverse process, General Lee said: “Can I presume the right to challenge your choices for the court? I have no intention of submitting my fate to someone like Ben Butler.”
“I’m afraid that’s a privilege we can’t concede, General,” Dana said.
“Will General Butler be a member of the court-martial board?” Lee asked, in a cold cutting voice.
“No. I can assure you of that much,” Dana said.
This meeting was not going the way Dana had envisioned it. His abandonment of Ben Butler made that obvious. If the godlike assistant secretary was surprised, I qualified for astounded. This was a contest for which General Lee was amply prepared. Someone, perhaps the same people who had sent Dana death threats, had given Lee foreknowledge of our plan.
Dana now concentrated the full force of his personality on Robert E. Lee. “General Grant’s reluctance sprang from the fear that your trial could produce public unrest among the survivors of your army and the civilian populace of the South. From a close scrutiny of your conduct since you arrived here from Appomattox, we concluded that you perceive such resistance would be futile and ultimately destructive. I’m here to ask you to cooperate in keeping the trial a secret from everyone except members of your family, whom I presume you can persuade of the wisdom of such a course.”
“You can be assured that there will be no difficulty on that score, Mr. Dana,” Lee said. “Now I have some questions for you. I presume I can select my counsel?
“Of course. Do you have someone in mind?”
“I’ve already contacted him. Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland.”
“Isn’t he involved with defending the murderers of Abraham Lincoln?”
“He’ll soon find a way to extricate himself from that forlorn endeavor,” Lee said. “I presume we may call witnesses in our behalf?”
“Of course.”
“Where will this auto-da-fe take place?” Lee asked.
“At Arlington.”
Lee simply nodded. I was astonished. So, I’m sure, was Dana. He had been certain the choice of Arlington as the site for the trial would reduce Lee either to outraged humiliation or infuriated defiance. It did neither— because Lee obviously knew about it in advance, and had had time to digest the dimensions of Dana’s malice.
Dana chose to ignore Lee’s reaction and continued in his dry matter-of-fact tone. “The grounds are now a cemetery for the Union dead. That makes the house even more secluded from the general population, guaranteeing us the secrecy we both agree is wise. We’ll reinforce that wisdom with a regiment of troops. We’re already refurnishing the house. You and anyone who accompanies you can live there. The other participants can easily reach the place from Washington each day.”
“You have a taste for irony don’t you, Mr. Dana,” Lee said.
“I’d call it sadism,” Mary Custis Lee said.
Dana chose to ignore this barb. “I’ve discussed with General Weitzel how best to proceed. He suggests your family tell people you’re going to visit friends in Alexandria for a few days. He’ll give you a pass to travel thither, and spread the word among his troops to guarantee you safe-conduct. If anyone hears that you visited Arlington, it can be passed off as a sentimental detour.”
Mary Custis Lee rapped impatiently on the floor with her cane. “I wish to share this ordeal with my husband,” she said. “General Lee’s decision to side with his native state was taken with my heartfelt approval and support. I’m as guilty as he is for that supposedly heinous act.”
“Madam, whatever you feel as a moralist, in the legal sense you can’t be guilty because you didn’t hold a position of trust in the U. S. Army,” Dana said.
“Save your canting rhetoric for the trial,” Mrs. Lee said. “This foul scheme is about nothing but morality, Mr. Dana. Your perverted version versus our humane version.”
As a reporter, I struggled for a word that surpassed formidable to describe Mary Lee. She was a figure out of Aeschylus, with her streaming dark hair, her strong-boned face and metaphysical eyes. Was this Washington’s voice, speaking to us out of the murky depths of eternity?
I had no trouble imagining what Dana would say about that wild idea. You Irish have too much imagination and not enough intellect, O’Brien. No, Mary Anne Randolph Custis Lee was simply a very articulate, surprisingly well educated woman. She was formidable, but not as formidable as Charles A. Dana, with his web of connections to the power gods in Washington from President Bourbonbrain in the White House to Stanton in the War Department to Sumner in the Senate to Stevens in the House.
Dana clearly wished he could think of some way to dissuade Mary Custis Lee from coming with her husband. But the situation called for another strategic retreat. “I’ll send a telegram immediately, madam, ordering them to prepare a bedroom in the house for a lady.”
“I don’t wish it, Mary,” Lee said. “I fear what the strain may do to your health.”
“Husband,” Mary Lee said. “It’s a matter beyond your wishes—or your commands. I’m coming. I intend to be a witness to every moment of this trial. So I can, if necessary, give public testimony when this hireling from the New York Tribune publishes his slanders against you.”
“Mr. O’Brien will write nothing without my approval, madam,” Dana said. “Not a word of it will be slander. It will be the unvarnished truth.”
I tried—and failed—to come to terms with this new description of me. If I was the ultimate toady to General Grant, here I was reduced to some sort of ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Mr. Dana,” Mrs. Lee said. “Do you dare to presume that I think that you’re on a higher spiritual or moral plane than Mr. O’Brien? You’re both part of the same vicious conspiracy that has succeeded in your mad wish to destroy the South, indifferent to the six hundred thousand dead, the five times that number cruelly wounded, and the millions of heartbroken parents, brothers, wives, sisters, children of the soldiers on both sides. You’re two monsters, sir, that I at first refused to allow in my house. Only General Lee’s insistence changed my mind. I urged him to summon his men from their native valleys and mountains to meet your foul challenge in one last clash, an Armageddon that would show the civilized world the depth and passion of our faith. But he has too much pity for those poor brave remnants. He thinks they want to live in a defeated South. While I believe every one of them would prefer to die in its ruins.”
Mrs. Lee leaned forward in her chair, flinging these ferocious words in Charles Dana’s face—and my face. With the latter sentences her voice thickened and the last words were a hoarse gasp. She slumped in the chair and struggled for breath. I feared she was on the brink of some sort of fatal collapse.
“Agnes,” General Lee said. “Please take your mother back to her bedroom. I’ll settle the rest of the details with these gentlemen.”
Agnes helped her mother to the door. Lee strode across the room and kissed his wife on the cheek. “Have no fear, Mary, have no fear,” he whispered. “All will be well. I’m certain of it.”
He turned to face us, his eyes dark with barely restrained fury. A memory from Appomattox leaped into my head. After the surrender, Lee had come out on the porch of the house in which he had met Grant. He stood there for a moment, putting on his gloves. I was among those near enough to see a deep flush color his neck, his face and forehead— testifying to the terrific strain his imperturbability had cost him as he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. The same thing was happening now. We stood there silently for a full two minutes, while Lee struggled for self-control.
“When do you wish to see me and my lawyer at Arlington?” Lee finally asked in a choked voice.
“In three days,” Dana said.
“We’ll be there. I’ll probably ask my oldest son, General George Washington Custis Lee, to accompany me. He served as my aide in the last months of the war. Before that, he was on President Davis’s staff. Mrs. Lee will probably bring one of our daughters as her companion.”
Dana nodded, though I could see the presence of Mrs. Lee was a problem he still wished he could evade. “We’ll furnish the house accordingly,” he said.
“Will you attend the trial, Mr. Dana?” Lee asked.
“Of course.”
“We’ll meet again, in that case. I suppose that also applies to you, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Of course, General.”
“I think we’ve said all that needs to be said for the moment.”
Lee’s voice had a declarative, commanding ring. He was in charge of this situation, something that clearly left Dana more than a little uneasy. He had pictured a flustered, beaten man wearily consenting to the trial for want of a better alternative. Never did he imagine General Lee would be eager for the contest.
The general escorted us through the house to the front door, where our two black bodyguards were waiting. We proceeded down Franklin Street, while Lafayette Baker’s detectives sauntered out of various alleys in our wake. Dana said nothing. But I was sure he was trying to make sense of what we had just encountered in the Lee house.
“You know what I think?” I said, as we trudged along.
“I can’t imagine,” Dana said.
“They’re on to us in Richmond.”
Back in the Spotswood Hotel, a telegram from General Grant awaited Dana. I HAVE ISSUED ORDERS TO MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE GORDON MEADE AND MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM FARRAR SMITH TO REMAIN IN WASHINGTON DC AT THE WILLARD HOTEL AND AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS FROM YOU. Grant had made his two choices for the court-martial board. Both took me by surprise, at first.
George Gordon Meade had fought Lee at Gettysburg, and in all the sanguinary battles after that turning point in the four-year death grapple between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. Could the Old Snapping Turtle look favorably on a general who had killed tens of thousands of his men? One of his aides once remarked to me that General Meade exercised “less of Christian charity” than any man he knew in a command position. He was cold, abrupt, aloof—and unpopular among his subordinates.
William Farrar “Baldy” Smith seemed an even stranger choice, at first. He was an officer who never knew when to keep his mouth shut. In early 1863, he had stirred a huge uproar by writing an open letter to Lincoln, objecting to General Ambrose Burnside’s leadership of the Army of the Potomac and offering his own plan to get to Richmond. The Radical Republicans in Congress called for Smith’s head, and Lincoln had to work overtime to save him. The president shipped Smith west, where his clever brain devised the plan that Grant used to lift the siege of Chattanooga and rescue that theater of the war from disaster. But the Radicals’ grudge against Smith continued, and when he faltered as commander of the Army of the James in 1864, Grant yielded to their pressure and relieved him.
Dana pondered the telegram, no doubt thinking similar thoughts. “At first glance this makes no sense,” he said. “Meade and Smith hate each other. Smith is one of the dozen-odd generals that Meade has quarreled with. But Grant is never to be underestimated. Smith hates me and all other Radical Republicans with a totally consuming passion. He would never agree with anything we wanted, even if the Archangel Gabriel appeared with a flaming sword to ratify it. What he thinks of Meade will have no bearing on his vote. As for the Old Snapping Turtle, according to Baker’s spies, Meade was the first Union general to pay Lee a visit after the great man arrived in Richmond from Appomattox. They spent over an hour in private conversation. One of Lee’s servants is on Baker’s payroll. He reports Meade advised Lee to declare his willingness to swear an oath of allegiance to the federal government and apply for an immediate pardon. He all but offered to hand-deliver the letter to the White House for him.”
“How do you explain that?”
“They’re friends from Mexican War days and later postings in the old army. And the West Point connection, of course. West Point is a kind of secret society within the army that frequently makes a mockery of its noble credo, ‘duty, honor, country’.”
“Are you going to remove Ben Butler from the court-martial board?”
“Certainly,” Dana said, lighting one of his cigars. “We’ll make him one of the prosecutors, instead. Before the war, he was the most successful criminal lawyer in the United States. General Holt has agreed to act as chief prosecutor but he’s heavily involved with the Lincoln conspirators. We can use another bold voice on the prosecution side.”
He was talking about Joseph Holt, a wealthy Kentucky Democrat who had switched sides at the start of the war and backed ruthless suppression of all dissent. Lincoln had made him judge advocate general, and he presided over numerous trials of dissenting civilians with a ferocity that made him famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view.
“We’ll replace Butler with Burnside,” Dana continued. “Stupidity has made him used to obeying orders—and he’s had lots of experience with court-martial boards and military commissions.”
It was hard to disagree with any of the above. Ambrose Burnside was arguably the worst general on either side of the battle line throughout the war. At Antietam, he mishandled the command of the left wing of the Union Army, enabling Lee to escape annihilation. At Fredericksburg, in command of the Army of the Potomac, he threw away twenty thousand men in a doomed assault on Lee’s army, entrenched on the heights outside the town. Sent to the Department of the Ohio, he issued an order banning the New York Herald from the Midwest and shutting down the equally anti-Lincoln Chicago Times. He was forced by outcries from editors of all political stripes to retreat, but that did not stop him from organizing military commissions to deal with outspoken dissenters. Dana obviously assumed he would sentence Lee to death without a qualm.
Only one thing made this conclusion less than certain.
“Isn’t he a West Pointer?” I asked Dana.
“He’s a politician first,” Dana said. “He started out as a conservative Democrat but he got aboard the antislavery express very quickly.”
He paced the room for a few moments, pulling on his cigar, then got down to more business. “Your first assignment is to find out if there’s any dirt that can be attached to Senator Reverdy Johnson’s name. Has he a mistress stashed somewhere? Has he taken money under the table for his vote on any issue? Has he written or said anything that would suggest he flirted with treason before or during the war?”
“As far as I know, he was largely responsible for keeping Maryland in the Union,” I said.
“He likes to claim credit for that, but it’s mostly hot air,” Dana said. “Maryland stayed in the Union because Lincoln, on our advice, threatened to arrest the entire state legislature to prevent them from voting for secession. Senator Johnson trimmed his sails to stay afloat in that crosswind. He’s a Confederate at heart. He was counsel for the defense in the Dred Scott case!”
Ah, Dred Scott. My first exposure to Northern righteousness ablaze. Dred Scott was a Missouri slave whose master took him into Illinois, a state where slavery was illegal. Scott sued for his freedom. The case went to the Supreme Court in 1856. The seven Southerners on the court ruled against Dred, declaring that a slave had no legal standing. Constitutionally he was a nonperson, no matter where he happened to live.
At Dana’s side, I traveled through New York and New England collecting outraged opinions from the abolitionists. Almost to a man they declared it was time to stop prattling about the rule of law. Some called on the North to secede from the South. Not a few said rifles would now be the final arbiter of the quest for justice. One of the most outspoken men we encountered was a fiery old fellow named John Brown who talked of creating a “slave republic” in the Southern mountains.
Dana knew many of these people intimately. He had met them when he worked at Brook Farm, an experiment in communal ownership that flourished in West Roxbury Massachusetts, for several years in the 1840s. It was there that Dana became acquainted with Horace Greeley who later hired him as managing editor at the New York Tribune. In the great metropolis, Dana had also cultivated friendships with numerous antislavery Yankees who had migrated to Gotham in search of wealth. When the Republican Party emerged from the turmoil of the 1850s, these men became an invisible but extremely powerful force in its upper echelons. They were the chosen ones, the biblical saving remnant, and the core of the so-called Radical Republicans, who were now calling for vengeance against the South.
Another invisible but powerful force within the government was apparently opposing these men’s plans for the defeated South. Dana turned to this topic as he packed his bags for our return to Washington, D.C. “General Lee has had advance knowledge of this trial that would seem to extend far beyond anything he might have gotten from your Louisiana spitfire,” he said.
I was more than a little irked by his assumption that I had told Sophia Carroll about arresting Lee the moment I heard it. (Though it was true. I make no pretense to consistency in my dealings with Dana.) “I swore her to secrecy, using you as chief ogre,” I said. “She’s terrified of you.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I want you to obtain any and all letters that she exchanged with General Lee. There may be some allusions to clandestine meetings that would prove useful.”
I was staggered by Dana’s apparent omniscience—and outraged by his assumption that Sophia was so lacking in female virtue. “How do you know about them?” I asked. “Are you suggesting—”
“One of Lafayette Baker’s female operatives was sitting only a few feet from you while you talked with the Carrolls in the lobby,” he said.
“I resent being spied on!” I stormed.
“Be a little more trustworthy and I may take you off Baker’s list. Why didn’t you tell me about the letters?”
“Aren’t there some limits to this prosecution, imposed by traditional standards of decency?”
“Were there any limits to the indecent savagery with which the South abused its slaves for two hundred and fifty years?”
I was reduced to surly silence, though I found myself wondering why Robert E. Lee was being singled out as the symbol of this dark legacy. He didn’t look like a man who abused slaves or anyone else. What about his gesture of kneeling beside the colored man at the communion rail? I did not buy Dana’s theory that this was part of a contrived performance.
“I’m putting Lafayette Baker to work on finding out more about our secret opposition,” Dana said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the trail leads to the White House.”
“President Bourbonbrain?” I said. “Is he capable of anything as coherent as a conspiracy?”
“There are men around him who are more than capable. Senator Reverdy Johnson is one of them. Lee’s choice of him as his lawyer convinces me all over again that we’re face-to-face with a plot that aims at nothing less than undoing the victory we’ve won on the battlefield. The Democratic Party is at the heart of it. Eventually, we must extirpate that public disease, root and branch.”
I trekked back to Franklin Street and rang the bell of the Carroll house. While I waited for an answer, I wondered how a woman who claimed she was destitute could be living so well. A black maid answered the door and said Sophia would see me in the front parlor. When she arrived, her expression struck me as strange. It was an odd mix of excitement and expectation. “How did your meeting with General Lee go?” she asked.
“It was a bit surprising. He seems ready and willing for a fight to the finish.”
“So we heard,” she said.
I was astounded and not a little alarmed. “General Lee confided in you?”
“Agnes Lee and I are close friends.”
“You must tell her to remain absolutely silent! Any publicity about this thing could start the war all over again.”
This was hardly a good preparation for the request I was about to make. Nevertheless, I made it. “Dana wants all your letters to General Lee, if you have copies, and his letters to you.”
Sophia was stunned. For long moment she could only gaze at me with undisguised loathing. “Did you tell him?”
I told her about Lafayette Baker’s spy. “I don’t think you’re in a position to bargain with Dana. You know your mother’s vulnerability. I’ve never seen Dana so ruthless. Let him have them. I presume they’re perfectly innocent.”
“Where shall I bring them?” Sophia asked, her voice choked with disgust that I could only hope was focused exclusively on Dana.
“The Spotswood Hotel. We’re getting a four o’clock train.”
I rode back to Washington, D.C., reading Sophia Carroll’s correspondence with Robert E. Lee. The letters had little or nothing to do with the conduct of the war or its causes. Their main topic was love. Sophia’s mother was a troubled woman. Her husband had succumbed to a common New Orleans temptation, and maintained a beautiful mulatto as his mistress. In Richmond, Mrs. Carroll was pursued by several Confederate officers.
Lee’s responses were a mix of consolation and practical advice about matters of the heart, a subject that obviously fascinated him. He and Sophia debated whether a man or woman could love more than one member of the opposite sex simultaneously. Lee favored this idea, arguing that love was an emotion that transcended its physical expression in marriage. “Love lives in the flesh and in the soul, and as we grow older, the soul’s love takes preeminence,” he wrote. “The soul is capable of transcending time, of fleeing the unhappy present to memories of love that are unblemished by human failings and the passage of years. That may be the best course for your mother. I pray she can do it. Her other choices are so full of difficulties and possible pain.”
As we rumbled into Washington, D.C., Dana asked me if I had found anything worth his attention. “Only if you want to start wondering if you’re making a very large mistake in pursuing this thing,” I said, handing the letters—about forty all told—to him.
Dana thrust the letters into his valise. “Baker has a man on the scent of another series of letters Lee wrote to a young cousin of his wife’s. Where there’s so much erotic smoke, don’t you think we’re bound to find a fire eventually?”
“Good luck,” I said, using the phrase to mean its opposite.
“Get to work on Johnson,” Dana said, ignoring my hostility. “I want something juicy by tomorrow night.”
I headed for the bar of the Willard Hotel, where I knew there was a ninety percent chance of finding Jim Hovey, the New York Herald’s chief Washington correspondent. A hulking bear of a man, he had covered the capital for twenty years and had reams of information in his capacious cranium. Sure enough, he was at his usual post, at the north end of the bar. From there, in prewar days, he had gazed with lofty contempt on fellow reporters, politicians, and mere citizens. The Herald was the largest, most powerful newspaper in the country, with a circulation two or three times the size of the Tribune’s. It was also the most unprincipled paper. It had brought the art of “faking it”—mingling facts and fiction to create sensation—to something close to perfection. That in turn meant a Herald reporter was tacitly for sale—if you gave him a story that he could twist into front-page stuff. If you slid some money into his hand, that too was part of the game— providing the story was good enough.
“How would you like to do a job on Senator Reverdy Johnson,” I said.
“Reverdy? Old Reverdy?” Hovey said, stirring his usual double bourbon and water. “I’ve followed that brilliant two-faced bastard through more twists and turns and down more blind alleys than a pig in a slaughterhouse.”
“Dana says he can give you something juicy if you help us get started on him.”
“That’s easy. I’ve got the clips on the Galphin scandal. Johnson was attorney general under Zachary Taylor. He had to decide how much money the family of George Galphin had coming to them for land that was ceded to them by the Creek Indians before the Revolution and later seized by the state of Georgia and handed over to the federal government. He decided the U.S. owed the heirs a hundred and ninety thousand dollars in interest, dating back to 1776. Only then did a couple of good reporters find out that half the money would go to George Crawford, the secretary of war and Johnson’s best friend in Washington. George was the Galphins’ lawyer.”
“Were you one of the reporters?”
Hovey shook his head. “I was only a cub in those days.”
“So Reverdy’s a crook?”
“Now, now. I didn’t say that. He was cleared by a congressional investigating committee. He swore he had no idea his old pal George was getting half the loot. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge across the Potomac I want to sell you.”
“A congressional committee chaired by Democrats?”
Hovey shook his head. “Reverdy was a Whig in those days. See what I mean about twists and turns?”
The Whigs were the forerunners of the Republican Party. “I didn’t know there were any Southern Whigs,” I said.
“There were a lot of them. Especially thick in the border states like Kentucky and Maryland. They had no use for secessionists. They were into making money from the status quo. Old Reverdy was counsel for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for a long time. He was the richest man in Baltimore by the time he was forty.”
I was taking notes. “How did he manage to switch to the Democrats?”
“He’s a Maryland institution. He could run as a Mohammedan and get elected. Especially after he won the Dred Scott case. The Chief Justice, old Roger Brooke Taney was another best friend. He thought Reverdy walked on water. Johnson pretty much dictated the Scott opinion to him.”
“So he thinks Negroes have no legal rights?”
“Under his reading of the Constitution.”
“Is he a slave owner?”
“Nope. He freed all the slaves he inherited from his father. When he gets a little drunk, he holds forth on slavery being God’s curse on America.”
I suppose I was looking more and more confused. Jim Hovey slurped his bourbon and grinned at me. “Complicated, isn’t it,” he said. “That’s life in Washington. What’s Reverdy up to, that makes Dana want a piece of his hide?”
“I can’t tell you that yet.”
“Is he out to get him for his refusal to take an oath of allegiance at the assassination trial?”
The trial of Lincoln’s assassins was being conducted on the third floor of the Old Penitentiary on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal. The sessions were not open to the public. I had heard nothing about this contretemps. But Washington was a town where information had a way of slithering through cracks in supposedly sealed doors. No one was better at penetrating government secrecy than Jim Hovey. When they banned reporters from General Phil Kearny’s funeral, Hovey had sneaked into the burial procession wearing a surplice and carrying a prayer book. I asked for enlightenment.
“Johnson was supposed to be defending Mrs. Surratt. A couple of days ago, when he got up to speak, one of the members of the military commission asked him if he had sworn a loyalty oath—and if he regarded these oaths as binding. Judge Advocate General Holt, our local Torquemada, had decreed that all the defense attorneys had to swear their allegiance before they could say a word.
“Reverdy practically breathed fire. He reminded the commission that he practiced before the Supreme Court of the Unites States and was a member of Congress, with the power to vote on creating armies, generals, and military commissions. Reverdy’s style sent General David Hunter, the chairman of the commission, up the wall. He pounded on the table and shouted that the day was over when the people of the North would be bullied and insulted by the humbug chivalry of the South. Johnson walked out of the courtroom and hasn’t come back, apparently leaving poor Mrs. Surratt to her fate. They’ve appointed two other lawyers to defend her, both as green as the grass on the White House lawn.”
I suddenly heard Robert E. Lee telling Dana that Reverdy Johnson would soon find a way to extricate himself from the assassination trial. Apparently, the vengeance seekers on the military commission had handed him a perfect excuse to withdraw.
“Is Mrs. Surratt guilty, in your opinion?”
“Guilty of renting a room to John Wilkes Booth, but nothing else that I’ve been able to discover. That won’t save her from the noose, though. Hunter and a lot of other people on that commission are out for blood and they don’t want to stop with these poor slobs, all of them victims of Booth’s charisma. The Rads want Davis, Lee, and Judah Benjamin if they can catch him. The other night at a White House reception I heard Hunter say the whole thing reminded him of the crucifixion of Jesus, with Benjamin as the high priest and Davis as Pontius Pilate.”
These sentiments reminded me of a speech that Judge Advocate General Holt had given in a Charleston hotel the night Lincoln was shot. He advocated mercy for the deluded masses of the South but not for their leaders. “For these miscreants, the Iscariots of the human race,” Holt had roared, “may God in his eternal justice forbid that there should ever be shown mercy or forbearance.” Dana shared this fanatic hatred. But he masked it behind smiles and evasions. Why had I let myself get sucked into this business?
“What about General Lee?” I asked. “Are they getting anything on him in the sessions at the Old Penitentiary?”
“He’s on their list, but they don’t seem to be finding much evidence against him. The prisoners are ready to say anything about Davis and Benjamin in the hope of beating the noose. The Confederate secret service offered them money—that sort of thing. But none of them will say a word against Lee.”
I gulped my bourbon and said nothing.
“Isn’t it ironic,” Hovey said. “They’re trying Lincoln’s murderers before a military commission. The Radicals talked Lincoln into setting up these goddamn things back in 1862 and Holt went wild with them, arresting everybody and anybody who criticized the war. The commissions convinced lots of people that the president was a tyrant. From there it was only a short step to someone like John Wilkes Booth deciding that a Brutus could save the republic.”
“Did you know Booth?”
“I know the whole family. The father’s middle name was Brutus. Junius Brutus Booth. How’s that for a coincidence? Not everyone thinks John Wilkes is a villain. A friend mailed me a poem that was published last week in a Texas paper.”
In a low urgent voice, Hovey recited:
He has written his name
In bright letters of fame
In the pathway of liberty’s portal
And the serfs who now blame
Will crimson with shame
When they learn they have cursed an immortal.
“Some people think the Radicals murdered Lincoln,” I said. “What’s your opinion?”
Alarm spread across Jim Hovey’s wide, creased face. “Do you want to get us both a trip down the Potomac with hundred-pound weights around our necks?” he hissed.
I was too amazed to answer him. I thought of the death threats to Dana, of Lafayette Baker’s thuggish detectives. Was America on its way to becoming a South American republic, with gunmen lurking in every alley?
“Irony. That’s the only safe refuge these days, Jeremiah,” Hovey muttered. “It’s ironic that Abe’s assassins are being tried by one of these same military commissions that led to his murder. It’s ironic that the Radicals’ indifference to the Constitution and the rule of law led to Lincoln’s death.
But don’t ever say that the Radicals murdered him—or connived in murdering him. That’s not a safe idea, Jeremiah.“
Hovey’s words triggered another unnerving thought: Dana’s knowledge of everything I was doing and saying, thanks to Lafayette Baker’s ubiquitous detectives. I looked uneasily over my shoulder. At mid-afternoon, the Willard’s big bar was mostly empty. The nearest drinker was a good forty feet away.
Jim Hovey gulped his bourbon and leaned toward me like a mountain on the move. He was twice my size. “Something’s cooking, Jeremiah. I’ve told you a lot. How about tellin‘ me a little?”
“I told you—Dana isn’t quite ready to talk.”
Hovey grunted impatiently. “Lafayette Baker’s been investigatin‘ the hell out of General Jonathan Stapleton. Sent one of his gumshoes to ask me all sorts of questions. Wanted to know if he was a good Republican. A man who could be trusted with large responsibilities and difficult decisions. Is he in this story you’re not tellin’ me? Are they thinking of running the guy for president?”
“Maybe,” I said. “What did you tell them?”
“I sent them to see his best friend, Colonel Ben Dall—his former roommate at Columbia College. One of the Radical tribe. I’m sure Dall said there wasn’t a man in the country more committed to what they call total victory.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I ain’t so sure,” Hovey said. “I knew his father, the senator. He was a Democrat all the way. For peace with the South. Bought old Buchanan’s idea that the whole thing was a disease of the public mind, with the abolitionists the sickest of the bunch. Have you met Stapleton?”
“I’ve seen him in action,” I said. “At Cold Harbor, among other places.”
For a moment I was crouched behind a tree on that horrendous battlefield, while swarms of Southern bullets hissed around me. General Stapleton had led his division into that hurricane of metal. I never expected to see him alive again. A half hour later he was back, his uniform powder stained and streaked with mud and dirt. I asked him to describe what he’d seen in the woods. “Hell,” he snarled.
General Stapleton had attacked again, with the same appalling result: another regiment decimated. Could anyone doubt his commitment to total victory? Yet there must be something about this civilian soldier that Dana distrusted. Why else would he have Lafayette Baker investigating him?
“They won’t get any of the usual dirt on him,” Hovey said. “No mistress. His wife died last year in childbirth. He’s not the play-around type.”
“How about Reverdy Johnson?”
Hovey shook his head. “He’s another one-woman man. He’s had fifteen kids by the same wife.”
“Sounds positively biblical,” I said.
Hovey was leaning forward again, threatening to crush me against the wall. “Come on, Jeremiah. Tell me what’s up.”
“When we’re ready, you’ll be the first to know,” I said.
“How do you put up with being an errand boy for the Rads, Jeremiah? Don’t all that Yankee self-righteousness turn you queasy in the gut now and then? They’re so goddamn sure they’re right. The one thing I’m sure of is, no one was right in this mess since it started, including Old Abe. He began it, you know. He could have evacuated Sumter and kept Virginia in the Union. But he didn’t want to be a one-term president. He buckled to the pressure those abolitionist bastards like Dana and their Chicago cousins like Joe Medill put on him.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Weren’t you one of them? What about the story you wrote on Bull Run? That was the worst piece of Radical bullshit ever printed.”
On the Herald’s front page, Hovey had told how a Northern private had carried a wounded Southerner to the shade of a nearby tree, where he gave him a drink from his canteen. The Rebel drew his pistol and shot his benefactor through the heart. Hitting his stride, Hovey told how Rebel cannoneers had trained their guns on groups of Northern wounded awaiting treatment at field hospitals. They had taken the bayonets of dying federal soldiers and thrust them into their bellies. Others had severed the heads of the dead and amused themselves by kicking them around like footballs. Prisoners had been tied to trees and tortured by bayonets. Such barbarities, Hovey declared, were typical of the boasted chivalry of these Rebel fiends.
For a minute I thought Hovey was going to swing at me. But his face went from rage to something like remorse in about thirty seconds. “If there’s one story I regret it’s that one,” he said. “The Rads paid me a lot of money. But I still regret it.”
I escaped into the humid Washington dusk, wondering if I was going to end up like Jim Hovey, clinging to the edge of an expensive bar, brooding about my sellouts. A reporter’s lot is not a happy one.
Back in the Tribune’s offices, I wrote a report on what I’d learned about Reverdy Johnson for Dana. As I turned off the lamp, a figure loomed in the doorway: Colonel Adam Badeau. “General Grant would like to see you,” he said.
“When and where?”
“He thought you might enjoy a spin in the country tomorrow morning. He’ll pick you up at six A.M. in front of Washington’s monument. Baker’s detectives won’t be up that early.”
“I hope not,” I said.
I lay awake for several hours that night, wondering what General Grant had to say to me—or I to him. The reference to Baker’s detectives made it clear that Grant knew a lot already. Was he going to ask me to switch sides? What did I have to offer him? I was a mere amanuensis, a note taker.
Nevertheless, I set my alarm clock for five A.M. and trudged through the dawn’s gray light to Washington’s unfinished monument, surrounded by the remnants of the slaughterhouse that had once engulfed it in a stink that sent tourists fleeing. Barely a minute after I arrived, Grant rocketed toward me in a light chaise, pulled by two of the biggest, most powerful black horses I had ever seen.
“Hallo, O’Brien,” he said. “Thanks for getting up so early.”
In five minutes we were on Connecticut Avenue, heading out of urban Washington into the country at an ever-increasing rate of speed. “How do you like these fellows?” Grant said, nodding toward the horses. “Pure Arabians. What’s his name, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio, gave them to me. A little token of his appreciation for sending a couple of regiments to stop the Rebs from blowing up his tracks and bridges in western Maryland.”
By this time we were traveling faster than any train on which I had ever ridden, including several that were encouraged to their highest speed by Confederates shooting at them. The chaise’s wheels seemed to be barely touching the ground. If we were to hit a rock or a hole in the road we would be splattered all over the landscape. Grant was enjoying every minute of it. I was getting a glimpse of his remarkable nervous (or better, nerveless) system.
After about a half mile, Grant said something to the horses in a language I did not understand and they slowed to a civilized trot. “Adam Badeau thinks you’re a reasonable man, O’Brien,” Grant said, while the day brightened around us.
“I try to be,” I said.
“He told me how and why Dana’s got your balls in his wringer,” Grant said. “I understand that sort of thing. But Dana and his crowd aren’t going to get their way much longer. The men who really won the war are going to take charge of things. I mean the soldiers and the men they back. They’ve got no use for the abolitionists and their ideas about New England running the country.”
Ahead of us loomed a farmer on a loaded wagon, pulled by a plodding dray. The road was barely wide enough for our two-horse team. Without slowing our brisk pace, Grant edged his Arabians to the right and we missed Reuben by inches. In spite of my quivering nerves, I grasped what Grant was saying. A new set of power gods was coming on stage and I would be stupid not to join them.
“You know why Dana’s got me in a corner,” Grant continued. “I wonder if you could promise me that if things turn really nasty, you’d deny anything unusual happened on that trip up the Yazoo in 1863.”
There it was, a play for my allegiance in the most direct imaginable way. I sat there, the cool wind of morning swirling in my face, trying to think of a clever answer. “General,” I finally said, “I would need to give that suggestion very careful thought.”
“Of course you would,” Grant said. “I didn’t expect an answer on the spot. But here’s another question I would like you to answer, yes or no, right now. Can you arrange to get me daily transcripts of the trial? I gather you’ll be taking shorthand notes. I’ll have a man contact you at your boarding-house. If you give him a look at your squiggles between dusk and dawn each night, he’ll have a copy to me by the end of the day. Will you do that much?”
“I’ll be glad to do that, General. I think you should be in close touch with the proceedings, from start to finish.”
“You’re a good man, O’Brien. Now let’s see if we can get these fellows to show us some real speed.”
He leaned forward and said something to the Arabians I could not catch above the clatter of the hooves. I had heard Grant had uncanny power over horses. The Arabians swung their heads wildly, as if protesting this unreasonable demand. Grant crooned something else. It sounded like a singsong lullaby. Suddenly we were traveling at a speed that seemed physically impossible for two animals to achieve. Nearby trees and houses merged into a blur. After about a mile, Grant pulled lightly on the reins and slowed the Arabians to a trot again. In half an hour we were back at George Washington’s unfinished monument, without exchanging another word.
“My shorthand man will contact you,” Grant said, and trotted on toward the War Department.
What had the general tried to tell me with that burst of speed? He was a man who liked to live dangerously? Maybe that he even enjoyed the sensation? Perhaps I could persuade him to give me lessons in that arcane art. There was, unfortunately, another possibility. Was he telling me that it would be absurdly simple to nudge me out of a similar carriage, traveling at the same rate of speed, and watch my brains decorate the road? A man who had sent thousands of men to their deaths at Cold Harbor and similar battlefields would not quibble about another death, especially if the demise eliminated an embarrassing witness to an episode he wanted to forget. Perhaps it was a tribute to Grant’s humanity that he did not give me that fatal nudge on our just completed excursion. Perhaps I had saved my neck by promising to give him those trial transcripts. Perhaps, like most generals, he preferred to have others do the killing for him.
For the moment, all I knew was the likelihood that I would need a steady supply of bourbon to get some sleep for the next two weeks. The folks at the Willard Hotel bar were going to see a lot of me in the late hours of the night.
The next morning, Dana and I had breakfast in his suite at the Willard Hotel with General Jonathan Stapleton, General Oliver O. Howard, and General Ambrose Burnside. Dana introduced me to them and explained my role in the coming drama. “I hope you’ll give interviews to Mr. O’Brien as the trial proceeds—and after it, if necessary,” he said. “We want the record of this undertaking to be as full and candid as possible.”
All three regarded me with expressions ranging from hostile to dubious. The most hostile was General Howard. He stepped back a pace at Dana’s words and fingered the empty left sleeve of his uniform, which was pinned across his chest. He had lost the arm in Virginia, at the battle of Fair Oaks in 1862. His blue eyes fixed me with an arctic glare. He was clearly telling himself he was not going to say a word to this smirking little Irishman.
“I see no need for such a process, Mr. Dana,” Howard said. “All I wish to do in this extremely difficult and unpleasant business is cast my vote. My reasons for or against General Lee’s guilt should and will remain private.”
“I think you’re being much too naïve, General,” Dana said. “Mr. O’Brien is not here to embarrass you or anyone else. He’s here to defend you—or better, help you defend yourself—against attacks that will certainly be made on you by newspapers determined to make Lee a martyr around which the South can rally. The more access he has to your thinking on the evidence presented at the trial, the more effective he can be.”
“You have a point, Dana, a very substantial point,” General Burnside said, pulling at his side-whiskers. He grinned cheerfully at me. “O’Brien and I are old friends. He’s done his best to defend me against the allies of the slavocrats before. I’m perfectly willing to let him do it again. There isn’t a better writer in the newspaper business.”
General Burnside was probably referring to my account of the battle of Fredericksburg, written on Dana’s orders, so at least one newspaper made the disaster less horrendous to the voters. It was widely reprinted by other Republican Party papers. The story was the exact opposite of what I really felt, after witnessing the slaughter of the Irish brigade.
I managed a half-smile of gratitude for the general’s praise of my talents. It was hard to dislike Burnside. He was one of those beefy affable men, a regular fellow, even if he was a general. Then there was his humility—he was almost too eager to confess his limitations, as long as he was permitted to keep wearing his stars.
“You seem to assume, Mr. Dana, that my mind is already made up about General Lee’s guilt,” General Howard said. “That’s not the case. General Lee was superintendent when I was at the military academy I admired him extravagantly. I’ll never forget how he urged us, North and South, to consider ourselves a band of brothers. I’ll find it extremely difficult to vote for his execution as a traitor.”
“You won’t be the only man to cast such a vote with regret in his heart,” Dana said. “I daresay there won’t be a man involved in this trial who doesn’t have a retrospective admiration for Lee. But I think the evidence—and the proceeding itself—will change your mind. Have you heard whom Lee’s selected as his lawyer? Senator Reverdy Johnson—the man who persuaded the Supreme Court to sentence Dred Scott to eternal slavery.”
Howard was staggered. “Does Lee intend to defend the whole slave system, down to the last stroke of the lash?” he asked.
“We’ll soon find out,” Dana said.
“The mere fact that we’ll have to listen to a professional liar like Johnson makes my stomach turn,” Burnside said. “It pains me to think he’s a U.S. senator. Is there any better proof that the Democratic Party has become immoral to its heart’s core?”
General Jonathan Stapleton listened to this exchange with something less than agreement on his gaunt bony face. He was taller than Dana and Burnside by several inches and towered over me and Howard, who was, comparatively speaking, a shrimp. A Confederate bullet had left a livid scar on Stapleton’s right cheek. This added to the overall harshness of his appearance, which was compounded by his prematurely white hair.
“Careful what you say about Democratic senators, Ambrose,” Stapleton said. “My father was one.”
“You’ve atoned for that family sin tenfold, General,” Dana said.
“I’m glad you think so,” Stapleton said. “My mother and several other members of the family are far from convinced that such is the case.”
“Women don’t think, General,” Dana said. “That’s the secret of their eternal charm. They enable us to escape the world of thought, with its harsh moral imperatives. And they give us those consolations of old age, children.”
I found myself baffled all over again by Dana’s complexity. This man adored his four children. They lived in Westport, Connecticut, with his charming wife. When Dana talked about his family his whole demeanor changed. He was a different person, free of the cold inner anger that drove his campaign for a morally transformed America.
“I’ll be glad to talk to Mr. O’Brien,” Stapleton said. “If I can have the privilege of seeing in advance what he selects to print as my remarks. I’ve been interviewed by too many reporters to expect accuracy. I don’t mean to impugn Mr. O’Brien. It’s a universal failing of the profession.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, General. But I can assure you that I’ll see Mr. O’Brien’s book before it goes to press. I give you my personal guarantee that there will be nothing printed you would not heartily approve.”
Stapleton wavered in the face of Dana’s self-assurance. I realized his gray hair and gaunt battered face gave a false impression of age. In fact, the general was several years under forty. Dana was ten years his senior. “I hope I won’t have to remind you of that promise when the book comes out,” Stapleton said.
“You won’t,” Dana said.
A bustle in the hall rescued us from this contretemps. A big-bellied man in a blue federal uniform was shouting orders to several colored soldiers, who were manhandling a trunk down the passageway. “Hurry up, for Christ’s sake!” he bellowed. “The thing isn’t that heavy—”
General Benjamin Franklin Butler had arrived. He was wearing his full-dress uniform, with enough gold braid on the epaulets and sleeves and kepi to capitalize a good-sized bank. The other generals were wearing field dress, with their stars inconspicuously displayed on shoulder straps. Butler apparently felt that this display was necessary to counter Grant’s decision to relieve him in late 1864. That had been the coup de grace to his hopes of winning fame on the battlefield.
Butler strutted toward us, a slanted smile on his florid snub-nosed face. To his medium height he added a five-foot girth. He greeted Dana and each of the generals by their first names as they shook his big mitt. He pointedly neglected to shake hands with me. “I’ve only had two hours’ sleep for the last three nights—but I’ve got all the evidence in that trunk in my head,” he boomed. “We’re going to hang General Lee higher than Haman. He’s as guilty as John Wilkes Booth and his crew. Maybe we can arrange to hang them all on the same day.”
“I think not, General,” Dana said. “Robert E. Lee’s execution must not be distracted by the fate of those simpleminded miscreants. It should be an event of the greatest possible solemnity. You can’t become solemn over the death of a boardinghouse keeper and an assortment of day laborers.”
“You never should have shot Booth. I’m sure we could have persuaded him to turn state’s evidence against Lee and Davis,” Butler said.
“Perhaps,” Dana replied. “But there’s also much to be said for him being dead at the moment. He too could be a distraction from the larger quarry. After Lee, we must try Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin. I have no doubt we’ll track the latter down wherever he’s hiding.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Butler said. “Hebrews tend to stick together. I’m sure Benjamin’s lying low on some rich Jew’s plantation, slurping wine from gold cups, at this very moment. They’ll get him out of the country one way or another. What do you think, O’Brien?”
I gazed at General Butler with what I hoped was undisguised dislike. Sophia Carroll had convinced me that he was one of the most foulmouthed men in America. He sneered at Jews, Irish, Negroes.
“I think most Southerners regarded him as a patriot, General,” I said. “His Jewishness had little to do with it. Almost anyone still loyal to their cause could be concealing him.”
“Ah!” Butler scoffed. “The Rebs kept Judah around for only one reason: to get money from the Rothschilds and the rest of his hook-nosed tribe in Europe. They’d loan money to Genghis Khan himself if he promised them twelve percent interest. The Southrons don’t admire Jews any more than anyone else in America. Only your benighted race is lower on the scale of social respect, O’Brien.”
A knock on the door. I answered it and found myself confronting another full-dress uniform (in this case of a brigadier general). Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt was a handsome, burly man whose dark eyes emanated assertiveness. Dana introduced him to the other generals and to me. He shook hands heartily with everyone and turned to Butler. “I trust you’ve brought all the pertinent documents in that trunk, General?”
“I conducted them here with an armed guard,” Butler said. “Mr. Dana alerted me to the possibility that there are people about who would like to end this trial by force, before it starts.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” Jonathan Stapleton asked.
Dana produced the two threatening letters and everyone read them. “Mr. Stanton convinced me I needed a bodyguard. I told him I would be happy to take my chances with a loaded pistol under my coat.”
He opened his coat and displayed a shoulder holster.
“But Lafayette Baker, our master of intrigue, persuaded me I should rely on both. Hence the two large colored companions you may have seen touring the capital with me for the last few days. One of them is Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandson.”
Dana casually repeated the old story about Jefferson’s sexual peccadilloes. “He had a tribe of mulattoes by several of his slaves,” he said.
Ben Butler guffawed. “Was there a slave driver in the whole South who didn’t enjoy that privilege?” he asked. “I had my share of their charms in New Orleans. They’re so eager to please—you can’t resist them, gentlemen.”
General Howard gave Butler an extremely frosty look but said nothing. General Stapleton hesitated, clearly reluctant to speak. His expression suggested he had no great regard for Ben Butler. “I don’t think the whole South can be blamed for the weaknesses of a minority. My father was a good friend of John C. Calhoun. He visited his plantation. A more upright, morally correct man never lived, no matter how wrongheaded he was about secession and disunion.”
“I believe Mr. Calhoun preached the doctrine that slavery was good for the Negro race, General,” Dana said. “I’m sure you don’t agree with that idea.”
“Of course not. We’re talking about sexual morality here. I don’t think the South was a scene of perpetual racial debauchery.”
“Perhaps not,” Dana said. “But a man who believes a whole race is inferior is making a moral statement—creating a moral universe, one might say, in which his kind will always have a major share of wealth and other attributes of human happiness. Isn’t that an act of immorality infinitely greater than random sexual congress?”
“No question about it,” General Howard said. “I remember debating the point with Southern cadets at the military academy They could never answer that charge.”
“Amen,” Ben Butler said.
I thought I saw doubt clouding General Stapleton’s deep-socketed gray eyes. Was this man as dependable as Dana thought he was? He was not a politician; he had no reputation to defend before the voters. Nor was he a professional soldier who had to worry about what the federal government could do to his career in the years to come.
Waiters began clearing away the breakfast dishes. Judge Advocate General Holt and General Butler adjourned to another room in Dana’s suite to reexamine the evidence and discuss their strategy for the trial. The conversation at the table turned to the government’s policy toward the defeated South.
General Howard said he thought the Freedman’s Bureau was the key to creating a new political reality. If they could educate enough blacks to play leadership roles in the next few years, in a decade or two there might be more racial equality in the South than in the North. Dana heartily agreed with him. General Burnside thought otherwise. “Sambo,” as he called the Negro, was never going to become educated anytime soon. The country simply lacked the resources to educate four million people, many of whom were too stupid to learn anything in the first place. “In my campaigns along the North Carolina coast, I saw the magnitude of the problem,” Burnside said. “The runaways who flooded into our lines were simpleminded to the point of idiocy.”
Jonathan Stapleton disagreed. His family had once owned slaves but had freed them after the American Revolution. Many had continued to work for the family, and he knew firsthand that they were capable of becoming well-educated, productive citizens. “A great deal will depend on the generosity of the North,” Stapleton said. “No matter what the government does, if men of wealth and idealism put money behind the effort to educate these slaves, much can be accomplished. My family is prepared to pledge a million dollars to the task.”
“A great deal depends on the attitude of the Southern masses,” Dana said. “If they can be convinced that their cause was fundamentally unjust, and a great wrong must be righted, progress could be unimaginably swift. That’s why this trial of Robert E. Lee—followed swiftly by the trial of Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin—is so important.”
Again, I saw doubt cloud General Stapleton’s gray eyes. “I wonder if you can expect benevolence or understanding from people whose cities have been burned and their countryside devastated,” he said. “The war was fought in the South. The whole region is a wreck. Railroads destroyed, businesses bankrupt. Someone told me the other day that there are only three banks still functioning—out of fifty-three before the war.”
Burnside weighed in with another pessimistic opinion. “It’s the attitude of the Northern masses that you better think about changing, Dana,” he said. “You should spend some time in the Midwest. There isn’t a state that wants any free niggers—to use their terminology—flooding into their cities from the South.”
“He’s right about that,” General Howard said gloomily. “Most of the officers and men in the Army of the Tennessee were definitely of that unfortunate opinion. A gigantic educational task is confronting us, gentlemen. It would be foolish to deny it.”
“Not everyone agreed with Mr. Lincoln’s shift from saving the Union to freeing the slaves,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “A lot of New York and New Jersey Democrats felt deceived, even betrayed.”
“I trust you weren’t one of them, General,” Dana said.
General Stapleton said nothing for a long, ominous moment. “I joined the Republican Party and voted for Lincoln,” he said. “I saw the logic of the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure. I endorsed the use of Negro troops. My younger brother Paul died leading a regiment of Africans at the battle of Nashville.”
“I believe he was recommended for the Medal of Honor,” Dana said.
“So I understand,” Stapleton said. “I’ve never heard another word about it.”
“The mills of the federal war gods grind slowly, General. But they eventually produce something fine.”
From his inner coat pocket Dana extracted a small leather packet. Inside, against a background of red, white, and blue silk, lay Major Paul Stapleton’s Medal of Honor. Jonathan Stapleton cradled it in his big hands. “This is—is extremely thoughtful of you, Mr. Dana,” he said in a low, choked voice.
Ambrose Burnside’s thick hand clutched Stapleton’s shoulder. “I saw him in action at Antietam,” he said. “A braver soldier never lived.”
“He was hit in the chest that day. I dragged him out of the creek,” General Stapleton said. “I wanted him to quit then. But he came back and was hit again at Gettysburg—” His voice was hollow with grief.
“Duty, honor, country. Your brother undoubtedly lived those words,” Dana said. “Let’s hope this trial will give new meaning to them—by making it clear that the United States is prepared to punish those who violate that great credo.”
Unquestionably, this was one of Dana’s better performances. He had transformed a potentially disastrous conversation about the purpose of the war and its outcome into an appeal to patriotism. I was the only one to note the irony of the godlike one invoking West Point’s motto within twenty-four hours of denouncing the military academy’s graduates as a secret society inside the army that should be destroyed.
General Butler and Judge Advocate General Holt rejoined us. Oblivious to our elegiac mood, Butler ordered a bottle of brandy from the hall porter. “I have news that calls for celebration, gentlemen. Judge Holt has given me permission to share with you a new discovery. Evidence that connects Lee to the assassination of Lincoln.”
Everyone was instantly agog. I began taking notes. “That’s amazing,” Dana said, though I would have bet a large sum that he knew all about it.
“Lewis Powell alias Payne, the fellow who tried to kill Secretary of State Seward on the night of the president’s assassination, is a former Confederate guerrilla who fought with Mosby. Someone in the Confederate high command sent him to Washington, D.C., to work with John Wilkes Booth.”
“Can this be confirmed?” Dana asked.
“Judge Holt reports Mosby has agreed to surrender in Lynchburg tomorrow,” Butler said. “We’ll bring him to Washington immediately. In exchange for amnesty for his crimes, he will, I’m sure, tell us a great deal.”
“I get the feeling providence is smiling on our enterprise,” Dana said.
“I have no doubt of that. None whatsoever,” Judge Holt said. “I’ve put the trial of the Lincoln conspirators in the hands of my second in command, Colonel Bingham. I intend to give you all the assistance in my power.”
The generals departed, agreeing to meet us tomorrow in the Willard lobby at six A.M. for the trip to Arlington. Dana had hired carriages to accommodate all of us. As they went down the hall, we could hear Butler telling them more about the evidence in his usual stentorian tones.
Dana lit a triumphant cigar. “What do you think, O’Brien?”
“A good start,” I said.
“Now comes the hard job,” Dana said. “We’re going upstairs to meet Generals Smith and Meade.”
We strolled down the hall to the Willard’s big steam elevator and hissed up another three floors. “I’m a great believer in parleying with the enemy,” Dana said, with a thin smile.
The expressions on the faces of Generals Smith and Meade made it clear that they were unquestionably the enemy. The short, portly Smith was not as bald as his nickname suggested and he compensated for his thinning pate with a shaggy light brown mustache. Meade’s lined taut face was dominated by his imperious nose—a perfect complement to his disposition. Nevertheless, Dana greeted them with almost effusive cordiality. He knew them both well, of course. After introducing me, he declared himself ready to answer any questions they had about the trial of Robert E. Lee.
“We have none,” Baldy Smith said, “Except the fundamental one about why it’s taking place.”
“I think that will become apparent when you hear the evidence,” Dana said. He descanted upon the government’s determination to make the trial a model of military justice—and to give the American people the fairest and fullest report of the proceedings. That was why he had chosen me as the sole reporter of the trial. It would remove the chief source of public confusion about great events—contradictory newspaper accounts. He strongly urged them to consider granting me interviews during the course of the trial, to flesh out the background of their thinking—and eventual decision.
Meade’s reply was quintessential Old Snapping Turtle. “I will do no such thing,” he growled. “In the first place, I’ve avoided talking to reporters throughout my army career. I see no reason to change my policy now. In the second place, I have nothing to say to this man other than my intent to vote to acquit General Lee of this outrageous and utterly baseless charge.”
“General,” Dana said. “This is not a trivial matter. It’s of the highest concern to Secretary of War Stanton, the leaders of Congress, and President Johnson. I presume you intend to stay in the army. If you have any interest in your future postings and promotions, I would retract what you just said and listen with an open mind to the evidence you’ll soon be hearing.”
“If my future postings and promotions depend on sending Robert E. Lee to an ignominious death, to hell with them,” Meade said. “I wouldn’t want to be a member of an army that perpetrated such a barbarity”
Baldy Smith pulled at his drooping mustache and gave us a sly grin. “Hell, I’ll talk to your newshawk, Dana,” he said. “I’ll fill up his damn notebooks with so many arguments, his brain will shrivel like a six-month-old pumpkin tryin‘ to keep track of them. Are you ready for that, Jeremiah?”
“I’ll start sharpening my pencils now, General,” I said, managing a weak smile.
Dana offered to provide the generals with transportation to Arlington the following morning. They frostily declined. “I’ll ride my plain old horse,” General Meade said.
“I may choose a donkey, so I can play Sancho Panza to the general’s Quixote,” Smith said. “I’ve already told him he’s tilting at a huge government-constructed windmill in his determination to see General Lee acquitted.”
“General Smith—I’ve always found your cynicism charming,” Dana said. “But I assure you it’s misplaced in this case. Robert E. Lee will be convicted—or acquitted—on the facts of the case. Your fellow judges are as open-minded about his guilt or innocence as I would hope you and General Meade are.”
“Dana, you’re full of shit,” Baldy Smith said. “I begin to think every politician in this town is full of shit. Or maybe just plain crazy. Do you seriously think you’re going to change any minds or hearts in the South if you hang this man?”
“Justice, not changing hearts or minds, is our goal, General,” Dana said.
Smith and Meade exchanged morose looks. “I begin to think Baldy is right,” Meade said. “This is a hopeless quest on my part. But I intend to bring my lance to Arlington, nonetheless.”
“We’ll see you there tomorrow morning, General,” Dana said.
Over a light meal in Dana’s suite, I asked him what he thought he had accomplished with Smith and Meade. “We’ve sown tares between them,” he said. “Do you think the Old Snapping Turtle is going to put up with being compared to that military idiot Don Quixote? Like most cynics, Smith really worships power. The more he thinks Lee’s conviction is inevitable, the more likely he is to vote for it.”
Dana invited me to join him on a trip to Arlington to make sure all was in order for the reception of the Lees. It was three o’clock by the time we located a coachman willing to take us into Virginia. Most hackmen preferred short trips around Washington, with a rapid turnover in fares. I struck up a conversation with our redheaded young driver, whose name was Michael O’Donovan. He was from Philadelphia, and until recently had been in the army stationed at Fortress Monroe. Since his discharge, he had spent his pay on “dice and wild women” and was now working to make enough money to get home.
He told us his recollections of Jefferson Davis and the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, arriving at Fortress Monroe. “Old Jeff was wearin‘ woman’s clothes when they caught him,” O’Donovan said with a snicker. “But they let him change out of the bloomers before he came ashore.”
“Do you think we should hang him?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. He didn’t look worth the price of the hemp, I’d say.”
“You don’t think secession is treason?”
“I guess it is, sort of. But the Rebs put up a devil of fight. Maybe we should just shake hands and try to forget the whole thing.”
“Do you think the Negro should have the vote?”
“Are you crazy?” O’Donovan said. “You let niggers vote and the next thing they’ll be after white men’s jobs. We settled that in Philadelphia twenty years ago. Any nigger that went for a white man’s job ended floatin‘ facedown in the Delaware.”
As we crossed the Potomac on the Long Bridge, O’Donovan asked me if I favored the vote for Negroes. I suspected if I gave him the wrong answer, I might have to start swimming for my life. I hastily explained I was only trying to sample the opinion of the great American public.
“I can tell you what every Irishman thought, and still thinks,” O’Donovan growled. “We joined the fight to save the Union and prove we was loyal to the American flag, in spite of bein‘ Democrats. Freein’ Sambo was the last thing on our minds—much less gettin‘ him a vote.”
Dana shook his head, disgusted with my naïveté. It was not the first time he disapproved of my eagerness to find out what the common man thought about the issues of the day. I could almost hear him telling me: When will you get it straight, O’Brien? The common man doesn’t think.
On the Virginia side of the river, we swung off the main road and followed a winding drive through Arlington’s cemetery. Row on row of white wooden tombstones glistened in the June sunlight. Above us on the height loomed Arlington, with its huge white pillars. It’s like a temple, I thought. A temple to someone or something.
Dana was having other thoughts. “It seems especially fitting to try Lee here, don’t you think? Surrounded by the graves of the men he helped to kill?”
“Are there any Confederates buried here?”
“No,” Dana snapped. “This is consecrated ground.”
At the mansion, we found a youngish harried-looking officer on the porch. He looked vaguely familiar. Past him trudged blue-coated soldiers lugging furniture, bedding, groceries, lamps. I was somewhat taken aback by their skin color. Except for the officer, the soldiers were all Negroes. Dana had not bothered to mention to Lee—or to me—his decision to surround Arlington with a colored regiment.
I was tempted to ask Dana if he had deliberately chosen the regiment to humiliate Lee and his wife. I held my tongue, partly to avoid sounding sympathetic to the Southern hero, partly because I foresaw Dana’s answer. Humiliation is, of course, in the equation. But equally important is the need for secrecy. Blacks are less likely to mingle with the nearby white population, and whisper who’s on trial at Arlington.
The officer all but came to attention when Dana introduced himself. “Mr. Assistant Secretary?” he said, in a Boston twang. “I’m Colonel George Bigelow, commander of the Twenty-third Colored Volunteers. Do you recall our meeting in front of the White House, when we arrested those big-mouthed Army of the Tennessee stragglers for you? Colonel Lodge has resigned and gone back to Boston. I succeeded him. We’re doing our best to furnish this house per your orders. But it hasn’t been easy. The place was as bare as a barn, with three years of dust and dirt on the floors and walls.”
“All we need is a superficial cleansing and rudimentary furniture, Colonel,” Dana said.
“That’s all you’re getting,” Bigelow said.
We walked through the house, which retained a stripped, desolated appearance. There were no paintings on the walls. The floors were devoid of carpets. Chairs and a sofa were scattered randomly in the parlor. A large dining room and a smaller one nearby contained more respectable furnishings—well-made sideboards as well as moderately expensive tables and chairs. “The Lees will dine here,” Dana said, at the door of the smaller dining room. “We’ll eat in the other room.”
Dana led Colonel Bigelow and me down into the cellar. There, in carefully sealed boxes, were hundreds of pieces of valuable china. Dana said these heirlooms, some of them from Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, had been transferred to the Patent Office vault during the war, to prevent theft. He told Bigelow to open them and procure enough dishes to feed fifteen or twenty people.
Next we visited the drawing room, where other black soldiers were setting up a courtroom. Across one end was a long wooden table, covered with green baize. Prosecutors would sit at a smaller table on the right, the defense lawyer and the defendant at a table on the left. Behind them were chairs for perhaps twenty spectators. Dana pronounced himself pleased with the appearance of the room. It had, he said, just the right level of desuetude.
“Staging is important in these matters, O’Brien. We want to emphasize the extent of Lee’s defeat—while the house itself will testify to the height from which he fell.”
A magnificent sunset was vanishing behind the Blue Ridge Mountains in the west as we emerged onto Arlington’s portico. A carriage was laboring up the drive, drawn by two worn-looking horses. In it were General Lee, his wife, and a dark-bearded younger man whom I took to be his son Custis. Beside Mrs. Lee sat a younger woman who was wearing a veil over her face, as many ladies did to keep the dust of the road from their complexions.
As they reached the portico, the younger woman lifted her veil. I was momentarily speechless to find myself gazing at Sophia Carroll. My body went warm, my sinews loosened at the sight of her. Dana summoned two black soldiers to help Mrs. Lee out of the carriage. General Custis Lee brushed them aside and helped his mother down to the road, then assisted her up the steps on her cane.
“I came out here to make sure the house was in order for you, madam,” Dana said.
“This is my son, General George Washington Custis Lee,” she said.
Custis inclined his head but made no attempt to shake hands. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll assist my mother upstairs to her room,” he said.
General Lee helped Sophia Carroll from the carriage. She stood in the road, staring at me. Lee took her arm and they came up the steps together. “Would you like to look through the house, General?” Dana said. “If there’s anything that displeases you, we’ll try to remedy it.”
“Thank you,” General Lee said.
They went inside, leaving me alone on the portico with Sophia. Numbly, I asked her why she had been chosen to escort Mrs. Lee. “I thought it would be one of her daughters,” I said.
“I volunteered. Agnes and the others are all prostrate with anxiety. I hope you and your friend Dana appreciate the havoc you’ve already wreaked in the family. Custis Lee vows he’ll shoot Dana down like a mad dog if his father is convicted. If that happens, Jeremiah, I think you should know, now, I’ll never speak to you again to the day of my death.”
“What can I say?” I murmured.
“What can you do?” Sophia said. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”
Back in Washington that night, Dana invited me to a meeting between the opposing counsels. I found Generals Butler and Holt in the parlor of Dana’s Willard suite with uncomfortable expressions on their faces. As I hesitated in the doorway, a sonorous voice from the other side of the room proclaimed: “The rules of evidence, gentlemen, should make no allowance for the whims of judges or the momentary passions of the multitude.”
My head swiveled to the opposite side of the room. In a wing chair sat a large gray-haired man with the most majestic mien I had yet encountered in America. This was a man who knew he was somebody and did not particularly care what you made of him. Dana, obviously glad to change the subject, introduced me to Senator Reverdy Johnson, the man who would defend Robert E. Lee against the charges that the government of the United States was about to lodge against him before the military commission.
“I’ve already told Senator Johnson about your projected book,” Dana said. “He’s agreed to see you as often as his time will permit.”
“How do you do, Mr. O’Brien,” Johnson said, rising to a formidable six feet and shaking my hand. “May I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Did you volunteer for this assignment or were you drafted by your employers, the New York Tribune?”
“I volunteered,” I said.
“Is Mr. Greeley aware of this experiment in symbolic revenge?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t have much contact with Mr. Greeley. I mostly talk to Mr. Lockridge, the managing editor.”
“And he’s given his approval for you to withdraw from the daily scene for perhaps two weeks, and send no stories about Washington’s ever more byzantine politics?”
I glanced nervously at Dana. He had assured me that Lockridge was enthusiastic about the idea and looked forward to a whole series of front-page stories when the trial ended in Lee’s conviction and execution.
“The Tribune has a half-dozen reporters in Washington. I don’t think he’ll miss me,” I said.
“I assure you that the Tribune will have no influence on what Mr. O’Brien writes,” Dana said.
“But you’ll have a great deal of influence, won’t you, Mr. Dana?” Johnson said. “I’ve been told by more than one person that this man is your creature. He never has a thought you haven’t put in his head.”
“That is a gross exaggeration,” Dana said. “Mr. O’Brien has earned a reputation as a reporter of the war second to no one in his profession. He achieved this with no help or advice, editorial or otherwise, from me.”
“Is that true, Mr. O’Brien?” Johnson said, virtually calling Dana a liar to his face.
I stood there, absorbing the force of Senator Reverdy Johnson’s personality. When he said something accusatory, the words were almost solid objects, thudding against their target, in this case, me. I could only think, He’s everything you are not. I did not really know this at the time. I simply sensed it—the pride, the assurance of being a spokesperson for a place, a way of thinking and feeling, a tradition, a civilization. Seldom had I felt my status as a member of an alien race more acutely.
With a tremor in my voice, I replied: “Senator Johnson, I can assure you that I’m fully aware of what’s at stake in this trial. I intend to do justice to every point of view, to be as fair and as impartial as humanly possible.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Johnson said, a sudden disarming warmth in his voice. “We can put you to the test immediately. Judge Advocate General Holt here says I can’t appear before this august tribunal unless I take a loyalty oath. Do you think a senator of the United States, someone who is qualified to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court, should have to submit to such a humiliation?”
“My opinion has no weight in the proceedings, Senator,” I said.
“ I want to find out if it will have any weight in your book! It will give me some idea which way the literary wind is going to blow.”
I glanced uneasily at Dana, hoping he would extricate me. Apparently nothing occurred to him. His eyes remained opaque—though I knew what he wanted me to say. This demand for an oath was part of his policy to humiliate the ex-rebels and their sympathizers, to make them pay and pay and pay for the sins of slavery and secession. As a central figure in the Dred Scott decision, Reverdy Johnson was high on his list of sinners.
Senator Johnson cleared his throat impatiently. “Perhaps I should add that I was deeply sympathetic to the Southern cause. That I consider myself by blood and inheritance a Southerner. Though I never condoned the act of secession.”
“I’m aware of that, Senator Johnson. I’m fairly familiar with your background,” I said. “Personally, I don’t think you should have to take that oath. I hope the military commission will vote on it at the outset of the proceedings. That would be the best way to clear it up. Rather than relying on one man’s opinion.”
Judge Advocate General Holt looked ready to put me in jail as soon as possible. Dana was clearly disappointed. Ben Butler harrumphed and growled: “I begin to think this fellow’s book will need a lot of editing, Dana.”
“No one is going to edit my book, General Butler,” I said. “Neither you nor Mr. Dana.”
Reverdy Johnson eyed me with wary respect. “For the first time I see a glimmer of fairness in this business—if all this isn’t a carefully rehearsed performance.”
“It isn’t, Senator,” I said, defiantly meeting Dana’s stare. I felt almost grateful to Johnson. He was helping me define my role in this affair. If I hoped to write a decent book, I had to convince Lee’s side to trust me enough to speak frankly to me. I would never get anything worth writing out of them if they assumed in advance I was Dana’s toady.
Moreover, I wasn’t Dana’s toady. The unvoiced but unmistakable wish to see Dana proven wrong surfaced violently in my mind, like a great fish lunging from the depths, a kind of Moby-Dick that lurked in my deepest consciousness, threatening to turn me into another Ishmael.
Reverdy Johnson resumed the discussion he had been having when I arrived—about the rules of evidence and other procedures in the coming trial. “There’s one matter of procedure in these military commissions that I can’t abide—and don’t intend to tolerate in this case. The judge advocate general functions as both a prosecutor and the presiding judge of the trial. He can rule out evidence and permit intimidation of witnesses. I want the judicial power conferred on the judges themselves. They can consult with the judge advocate, but they’re not bound by his decisions.”
“That’s out of the question!” growled Judge Advocate General Holt. “This trial will be conducted with the same rules and procedures as all previous commissions.”
“Joe,” said Johnson. “Remember when you were a Democrat? We were rather good friends in those bygone years. I trust you’ll agree that I’m not a man who makes idle statements. Unless I get my way on this point, I’ll go directly from here to the offices of the New York Herald. I’ll reveal this forthcoming trial, denounce it, and announce my withdrawal from the proceedings. I would say within twenty-four hours, a guerrilla war will break out across the South.”
Dana lit one of his cigars. “Who’ll be to blame for that catastrophe, Senator?”
“Who else but you and your friends?” Johnson replied.
“I think a fair number of people would blame you. I even think a fair number of votes could be mustered to expel you from the Senate of the United States as a traitor.”
Johnson did not blink. “I suspect you’re right. But my fate is not the point here. Will you or won’t you accede to my request?”
“We’ll let you know tomorrow morning, before the trial begins,” Dana said.
“One more point. I want a telegraph line strung to Arlington immediately. I don’t care if takes all night. We may need it to summon rebuttal witnesses.”
“That’s already been arranged, Senator,” Dana said. “We may need it to summon our rebuttal witnesses.”
Senator Johnson stalked from the room without saying good night. “Well, gentlemen?” Dana asked. “Shall we change the rules of procedure and strip the judge advocate general of one of his crucial powers?”
“I say tell him to go to hell,” Ben Butler said.
“I heartily second that motion!” Judge Advocate General Holt said, to no one’s surprise.
“I’m outvoted, in that case,” Dana said. “I’m inclined to let him have his way. Our case is strong enough without any need to go to extremes.”
“There’s nothing extreme about the procedure for military commissions,” General Holt roared. I began to think he had more lung power than brains.
“Not while the war was raging, I agree,” Dana said. “Then it was necessary to procure swift justice against people whose legal guilt was ambiguous while their treasonous intent was not. But this trial strikes me as a different matter.”
“I see no reason to surrender any advantage,” Ben Butler said. “From what you’ve told me, these people are well prepared and ready to use any and every maneuver to win an acquittal. Reverdy’s performance tonight is plain proof of it.”
Dana shrugged. “Have it your way. You’re the legal experts.” He turned to me and produced an almost cheerful smile. “Your performance with Senator Johnson was very well done, Jeremiah,” he said. “You almost had me fooled.”
“I meant every word of it, Mr. Dana,” I said.
“Get rid of him, Dana,” General Butler growled. “I told you a month ago you can’t trust a mick. They’ve infested Boston and New York with their corrupt politics. There’s not one of them that isn’t for sale to the highest bidder.”
“And I told you, General Butler, that I trusted Jeremiah O’Brien’s sense of justice, his appreciation of the evils of slavery. I consider him a member of my spiritual family—those who think and feel as I do about the future of this country and its dolorous past.”
Butler grunted, unmoved by Dana’s confession of idealism. The word was not in the general’s vocabulary, as an operative code of conduct, at least.
I reeled in the renewal of Dana’s power over me. It was sonship and much more—that original awe and a demoralizing debt of gratitude. “Will the trial begin tomorrow?” I asked.
“Johnson says he’s ready. He’s obviously been preparing his case for several days,” Dana said. “Our meeting with General Lee left little doubt on that score.”
“Will there be another counsel joining Senator Johnson?” I asked.
“He hasn’t mentioned it. We’re not suggesting it,” Holt said.
“It’s somehow more fitting that Lee should be defended solely by a fellow Southerner, imbued with a full measure of the South’s arrogance,” Dana said.
I slept poorly that night, in spite of a double shot of bourbon before retiring. My only consolation was the suspicion that everyone else was finding sleep equally elusive. I arose to the clang of my alarm clock at five A.M. and joined the generals in the lobby of the Willard Hotel at six. We rode to Arlington in two carriages, Dana and I and the prosecutors in one, the three judges in the second.
At Arlington, Colonel Bigelow had a guard of honor on both sides of the portico steps to greet the arrivals. The black soldiers came to attention as the snorting horses, winded by the long climb from the road, clopped to a halt at the white-pillared porch. General Stapleton, the first man out of the lead carriage, gave Bigelow a glare that wilted him from the neck down. “What’s the point of this, Colonel?” he asked.
“I thought your rank—and the ranks of the other generals warranted some—some—” Bigelow said.
“It’s entirely inappropriate,” General Stapleton said. “Make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Yes, sir!” Bigelow said.
In Arlington’s doorway, Baldy Smith grinned approvingly “I was hoping someone would point that out,” he said. He shook hands heartily with General Stapleton. Their divisions had fought side by side in a dozen battles in the East.
Smith also offered to shake hands with Burnside but the Rhode Islander declined. “Oh, Ambrose, are you still brooding about that letter I wrote to the president, calling you a military asshole?” Smith said.
General Howard shook Smith’s hand with a minimum of pleasure. He must have had a very strict upbringing; his manners were perfect. Behind Smith stood General Meade, who shook everyone’s hand with equal lack of warmth—par for his course.
Soon the judges were seated at the long table in Arlington’s drawing room. Pads and pencils were beside each chair. Generals Holt and Butler sat at the prosecutors’ table on the right, with several thick folders, presumably evidence, open before them. On the other side of the room, Senator Reverdy Johnson sat alone at the defense table, without a single folder, or even a pad for taking notes. Off to the left was a shorthand-trained soldier who would serve as the official stenographer.
I was directed to a seat in the first row, behind Johnson. My satchel bulged with notepads and pencils. Directly behind me sat Dana. Before he took his seat, he strolled to Senator Johnson’s table and murmured in his ear. I could only pick up the word negative. I gathered he was telling him that his demand for a revision of the rules of the procedure had been rejected.
Robert E. Lee was among the last to arrive. He was accompanied by his son Custis Lee, who carried himself with the squared shoulders and erect carriage that was de rigueur for all West Point graduates. General Lee was wearing the same gray suit he had worn in Richmond. It was obviously cut from a Confederate uniform.
Custis looked as if he might explode at any moment. I recalled Sophia’s warning that he planned to gun down Dana and wondered if I ought to warn someone, to make sure the trial did not end in a slaughter that might well include me. General Lee seemed as calm and composed as legend portrayed him. He shook hands with Reverdy Johnson and I heard the senator ask if he slept well. “Perfectly,” Lee replied.
So much for my theory of universal insomnia. Behind me there was something of a bustle. I turned in time to see Sophia Carroll helping Mrs. Lee into the courtroom. I should have known Mrs. Lee was unlikely to sit in her bedroom and accept a secondhand report of the proceedings. Sophia escorted her to a seat several rows behind me, with the assistance of a blue-uniformed colored sergeant who was acting as doorkeeper.
Finally, the door swung open and Lafayette Baker sidled into the room, his crafty smile barely suppressed on his canine face. Behind him marched three very powerful gentlemen: Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. What a gallery, I thought, as they took seats in the back row. Each face was more funereal than the next one. Stevens in particular looked like an exhumed corpse, with sunken cheeks and a brownish-red wig atop his bald head. Sumner sat with a grimace of pain on his face. He had never fully recovered from the caning he had received from a South Carolina congressman in 1856 after delivering a philippic against the South for “embracing the harlot slavery.” Stanton was a kind of glowering chin-whiskered mountain, who looked ready to hurl Zeus-like thunderbolts at anyone or anything that displeased him.
To my amazement, Senator Reverdy Johnson leaped to his feet and hurried to the rear of the room to shake hands with Senator Sumner. The Massachusetts legislator seemed vaguely embarrassed by this gesture, but he returned the handshake with a smile of considerable warmth. Johnson also held out his hand to Stanton, who shook it perfunctorily. Thaddeus Stevens got up and limped—he had a clubfoot—over to Lafayette Baker to whisper something to him, pointedly avoiding any expression of toleration on his part.
General Jonathan Stapleton was quickly appointed the president of the court—the presiding judge. All the generals willingly took solemn oaths to do their duty to the best of their abilities. Stapleton picked up a gavel and rapped it on the table. “Let the record show this military commission commenced hearing the case of the U.S. Government versus Robert E. Lee at 8:17 A.M. on June 2,1865. Will the prosecutors for the government read the charges?”
Judge Advocate General Holt rose and swaggered around the table. He had the courtroom presence of a veteran lawyer who relished his work. “The U.S. Government will seek to prove the following charges.
“One: Robert E. Lee, while an officer with the rank of colonel in the Army of the United States, carried on negotiations with the government of the Confederate States, then in unlawful rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States. This was a clear violation of his oath of loyalty to the government of the United States.
“Two: In early 1861, the then Colonel Lee refused an offer by Major General Winfield Scott to name him commander in chief of the American army to put down said rebellion. Instead, the then Colonel Lee deepened his violation of the trust the American government placed in him by becoming a prime coadjutor and exponent of that rebellion in a war that resulted in the deaths of six hundred thousand Americans.
“Three: The Confederate Army under General Lee’s command conducted said war in the most barbarous imaginable manner. Colored American soldiers were massacred at Fort Pillow in Tennessee without any hint of a reprimand from him or any other member of the Confederate high command. A similar massacre took place a few months later at Saltville in West Virginia, again clearly tolerated and encouraged by the Confederate Army. In 1863, Confederate partisans fighting under the command of General John Singleton Mosby murdered five prisoners of war from the command of General George Armstrong Custer—again without a word of rebuke from General Lee. In fact, we will show that this judicial murder was committed with General Lee’s explicit approval.
“Four: We will show that General Lee dispatched Union prisoners of war to a hellhole known as Andersonville in Georgia, where they endured starvation and disease beyond the bounds tolerated by any civilized country in the history of warfare. Captured records show that no less than twelve thousand brave men died there. The officer in command of Andersonville, Major Henry Wirz, has been arrested and charged with murder. We will assert and show that he acted as a mere proxy for Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, in a fiendish scheme to destroy the lives of these helpless men.
“Five: We will show that General Mosby with General Lee’s approval, ordered one of the most vicious killers from his partisan band, a desperado named Lewis Powell, also known as Payne, to go to Washington and cooperate with the men who were planning to murder President Abraham Lincoln.
“Six: We will further show that General Lee confided to several subordinates as early as 1863 that he knew the war was lost but he continued to prosecute it, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of additional soldiers in his own army and the federal armies opposing him. These needless deaths amount to murder by proxy and cry out for justice.
“For these unmistakable acts of treason and for crimes against the humanity of the soldiers opposing him, both black and white, the government of the United States asks this military commission to sentence Robert E. Lee to suffer the fate of a common criminal—death by hanging.”
Judge Advocate General Holt stalked back to his chair. General Jonathan Stapleton turned to the defense table. “General Lee, would you stand, please?”
Lee rose to his feet.
“How do you plead to these charges?”
“Not guilty.”
General Benjamin Butler rose to address the court. “Gentlemen, on such a solemn occasion, I think it is a necessity for all parties to swear their full allegiance to the government of the United States, without any qualifications or hesitations. It has come to our attention that General Lee’s counsel, Senator Reverdy Johnson, has repeatedly refused to do so before other judicial bodies. Are we to tolerate suppressed or evasive treason in General Lee’s spokesman? It seems to me that would make a mockery of this entire trial.”
This was the reply to Reverdy Johnson’s request for a pass on taking an oath of loyalty Butler and Holt were telling the senator that they intended to humiliate him as much as Robert E. Lee.
“What is your reply to this question, Senator Johnson?” General Stapleton asked.
Reverdy Johnson rose and took several steps toward the center of the room. “I’m glad this issue has arisen early in our proceedings,” he said. “I discussed the possibility of my being forced to accept such a demeaning obligation with General Lee before we retired last night. He gave me his immediate permission to withdraw from his defense, saying he was prepared—and even confident—that he could repel any charges against him without my assistance.”
Johnson turned and smiled at Lee. “That is a glimpse of the measure of this man’s generosity of spirit—and his conviction that he is innocent of all these dastardly slurs on his honor. Confronted by such an offer, how would any of you respond, gentlemen? I am sure you would say exactly what I said to General Lee. I declared my readiness to take this superfluous oath to a government I never betrayed, wondering all the while what my colleagues in the United States Senate and the judges of the United States Supreme Court, before whom I frequently plead, will think of a system of justice that inflicts such obligations on an attorney who is here to defend an innocent man against a shameful death.”
Score one for their side, I thought. Already, Reverdy Johnson was demonstrating why some people called him Daniel Webster’s heir. My eyes roved the faces of the five judges. I saw nothing. Generals seldom displayed their emotions. General Meade spoke first in his peremptory way “Senator Johnson, I for one see no need whatsoever for you to take such an oath. I’m fully convinced of your loyalty to the government of the United States.”
“I’m not,” said Ambrose Burnside. “I see Senator Johnson’s remarks as an attempt to undermine the authority of this court, before any testimony is even offered against the prisoner.”
Senator Johnson’s smile was broad but not warm. “I think General Burnside is reflecting a certain uneasiness about my often stated opinion throughout the war that these military commissions should have no jurisdiction in areas of the country where civilian courts were still in operation. As an advocate, not to say the initiator of these commissions, the general naturally resents my opinion—and, I am sure, my very presence in this courtroom. I can appreciate and even tolerate the general’s animus. But I would urge him to distinguish between this philosophic disagreement and something as fundamental as my loyalty to the government of the United States. Is he impugning the loyalty of the Maryland state legislature, whose members sent me to the United States Senate in 1862?”*
*Senators were not elected by direct vote until 1913.
“Yes,” Burnside growled. “I’m impugning the loyalty of anyone and everyone who voted for you.”
“On behalf of the citizens of Maryland, I can only regret your prejudices, General. May I add I sincerely wish we were in a court of law, instead of this travesty of a genuine trial? Any judge in the country would immediately dismiss you from the proceedings for such a flagrant display of constitutional ignorance and personal hostility.”
As I scribbled all this in shorthand, my mind was reeling. Johnson was making fools of them! Was I supposed to put all this in my book? I glanced over my shoulder at Dana and was shocked by the pleased smile on his face. I realized the answer was yes, he wanted it all in the book. Burnside’s aggressive hostility and Johnson’s condescension. The book was not aimed at Democrats, either North or South. Its goal was to justify the Radical Republicans’ claim that the South deserved no mercy.
“I think the only answer to this dilemma is a poll of the court,” General Stapleton said. “May I ask the judges to state their opinion of whether the court should require Senator Johnson to take an oath of loyalty?”
“General Stapleton—with all due respect,” Johnson said. “May I advise you that such a poll is pointless? Only Judge Advocate General Holt has the power to rule on matters dealing with the court’s authority.”
Stapleton seemed genuinely surprised by this statement. “Is that true, Judge Holt? This is different from a court-martial?”
“It is different, General Stapleton. But I will, of course, be ready to consult with you and your fellow officers on any matter that arouses your concern.”
“This is clearly one of them. Will you permit me to proceed?” Stapleton said. His tone was close to being curt.
“Of course.”
Stapleton polled the court. Generals Meade and Smith said no, Senator Johnson did not have to take an oath of loyalty Generals Burnside and Howard said yes. General Stapleton paused, then said in a deep deliberate voice: “I agree with General Burnside and Howard. Especially in the light of Senator Johnson’s stated readiness to take the oath. I would evince the same willingness, if I were in his place. But I think the record should show that the court in no way implies that requesting the oath impugns Senator Johnson’s loyalty to the government of the United States. May I have your agreement on that, gentlemen?”
Three generals promptly agreed. Only Burnside voted no. Reverdy Johnson again asked permission to address the court. “I welcome the opportunity to swear allegiance to the government of the United States as it now exists,” he said. “Free at last from the horrors of war and presumably soon to be returned to its traditional ways of justice and polity. I hope that Generals Butler and Holt will be ready to swear a similar oath.”
General Butler was on his feet, sputtering outrage. “Your arrogance, sir, is exceeded only by your presumption. How dare you ask a man who risked his life on a dozen battlefields to preserve this Union to swear allegiance to it? My actions speak for themselves—as do the actions of every officer on this commission!”
Senator Johnson took a step toward General Butler, a way of saying he was not in the least intimidated by his wrath—or his bulk. “Your actions, General, pledged your allegiance to a government that many of us—I daresay a majority of the people in the whole Union—didn’t consider the one created by our founding fathers. It was an extraconstitutional monstrosity. This commission—and the one meeting in Washington, D.C., to try President Lincoln’s supposed murderers—is, I fervently hope, the last gasp of that monster. I predict the Supreme Court of the United States will soon enunciate a judgment that converts this hope into prophecy.”
“These military commissions were created by the president of the United States under his lawful powers as commander in chief of the armed forces!” Butler roared. “They were and are as fully legal—and more responsive than a Supreme Court packed with traitors—to the desire of the citizens of the United States for a nation that refuses to condone treason in its midst in time of war.”
General Stapleton rapped for order. “Gentlemen, let’s all do our utmost to restrain our passions in discussing the issues of this case. Senator Johnson, I am of the opinion that your demand for Generals Butler and Holt to swear an oath of allegiance smacks of the tendentious. I would hate to suggest that a lawyer of your distinction is guilty of pettifogging but I fear you’re veering in that direction. I trust my fellow officers of the commission agree with me.”
It was clear that his fellow officers agreed. Senator Johnson lowered his head and tilted his shoulders in a brief bow. “You may have a point, General Stapleton. I will accept the court’s judgment, as every lawyer must. But this discussion leads us to another far more important matter—whether the judgment of this military commission on General Lee’s fate is final. We’re no longer at war. There are men in Indiana and Kentucky at this very moment appealing death sentences from military commissions to the U.S. Supreme Court. I request that this commission give General Lee the same privilege, in the unlikely event that its members find the prosecutors’ arguments convincing.”
“Out of the question!” roared Judge Advocate General Holt. He was on his feet, glaring at Reverdy Johnson. “Those men were convicted in connection with a plot to revolutionize the states of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Our secret agents penetrated the conspiracy and arrested everyone before any specific act of treason was performed. While I thoroughly believe they deserve to die, the constitutional requirement of an explicit act of treason, established by Chief Justice John Marshall in the trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr, inclined the government of the United States to allow the Supreme Court to take their pleas under its recognizance in the next judicial term.”
“How nice, how generous of you, General Holt,” Reverdy Johnson said. “You deign to allow the Supreme Court to perform its constitutional function. Your words are nothing less than an indictment of military justice run amok. I predict that the Supreme Court will strike down those convictions and make you and your uniformed judges look like the biggest idiots, not to mention the most power-hungry monsters, in the history of the United States.”
Senator Johnson whirled, all but turning his back on the fuming Holt and smiled broadly at the generals behind their judicial table. “I don’t in any way suggest that those negative designations apply to the gentlemen who are performing a judicial function here. I know you’re too aware of the symbolic power of this case to give it anything but the most serious scrutiny. At the same time, you must be aware that if General Lee meets death at your hands, a large portion of the country may one day call you to account for such a deplorable event. I strongly urge you, for the sake of your reputations, as well as your future peace of mind, to rule that the Supreme Court will have jurisdiction over your verdict.”
A calmer Holt listened to these words with a sarcastic smile on his face. “Senator Johnson has a tendency to overreach himself—as I’m sure we shall see more than once in these proceedings,” he said. “This is the first example of that character trait, which led him to convince Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney that Dred Scott had no rights under the U.S. Constitution, in a slave state or a free state. Here he’s trying to tell you, gentlemen of the court, that the Supreme Court has the power to intervene in a finding of guilty by a military court for acts of treason performed by an officer of the U.S. Army. There’s not a shred of precedent for such an opinion. You’re sitting both as a military commission and a court-martial board, fully empowered to judge Robert E. Lee as a derelict officer of the army in which you have all served with distinction. When I look at General Howard’s empty sleeve, the scars of a bullet wound on General Stapleton’s face, I know you’re qualified to make this judgment—and have the reputation to support it, no matter what hired scribblers may say about you in disloyal newspapers like the New York Herald and the Chicago Times. You’ll be defended by better reporters—and by historians in decades to come for having the courage to say to this man”—Holt pointed to Robert E. Lee—“You are guilty as charged and must pay the ultimate penalty!”
“I propose a resolution by this court, giving us full and final jurisdiction over General Lee’s fate,” Ambrose Burnside said.
“I must reluctantly concur,” General Meade said.
There was no disagreement from any of the other judges. Score one for our side, I thought, flexing my weary fingers. My shorthand skills were being put to the ultimate test. So, I began to think, was the fiber of the American republic.
Dana leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “He’s shot his bolt.”
I was half inclined to agree with him. At the very least I was dubious about Reverdy Johnson’s strategy—which had apparently just blown up in his face. He had tried to undermine the jurisdiction and even the legality of the court and instead found himself facing a more determined—and possibly more united—assemblage of judges. General Meade, for one, was clearly disappointed with Johnson’s performance.
Custis Lee leaned across the railing that separated the spectators’ benches from the well of the court and whispered something to Senator Johnson. I could only catch the word Scott. Johnson nodded and said: “Good, good.”
The court stenographer produced a Bible and Reverdy Johnson took an oath of allegiance to the government of the United States. The members of the military commission agreed on a statement, affirming their power to make a full and final judgment on Robert E. Lee’s fate. General Butler asked General Stapleton to summon Lee to the witness chair. He calmly took the usual truth-telling oath and faced his antagonist.
“General Lee,” Butler said. “I hope you won’t mind if we ask you to review your career in the United States Army.”
“Certainly,” Lee said in his soft Virginia accent. “I was graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1829—”
“How did you obtain this appointment?”
“I applied directly to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, with a letter of introduction from an old and close family friend. Some of my family also wrote letters and persuaded a few members of Congress to do likewise.”
“You’re too modest, General Lee. No less than eight senators and representatives urged your appointment. It suggests you were in no danger of being passed over.”
“You may say so, if you please. But I was by no means so confident at the time.”
“Are there any fees or charges for the education you received at West Point?”
“None. In fact, the cadets are paid a modest sum each month, most of which is deducted for uniforms and other expenses.”
“In short, you were educated at the government’s expense.”
“Yes.”
“Did you consider it a good education?”
“Excellent. Perhaps the best in the country at the time, for anyone interested in mathematics and engineering.”
“You were interested?”
Lee smiled wryly. “Not really. But I made myself interested. I was determined to do my very best.”
“You succeeded. You graduated second in your class. That entitled you to enter the most privileged group of officers in the army, the engineers.”
“Which I did.”
“What attracted you to a military career?”
Lee smiled wryly again. “I suppose the steady pay had something to do with it. My family was often pinched for money”
“You saw yourself as a mercenary, then? Someone hired by the government to do its bidding?”
“I don’t think such a word ever entered my mind, General Butler,” Lee said. “I had a lively sense of the greatness of America. At an early age I read my father’s memoir of his service in the American Revolution. It inspired me with a desire to serve my country and if possible emulate him in a modest way.”
“Now, remembering that youthful idealism, are you filled with regret for the way your life has turned out?”
Lee paused for a full minute. Was he struggling for self-control? It was hard to tell. “We all have regrets wandering through our past, General Butler,” he finally said. “But if you’re asking whether I regret my decision to draw my sword to defend Virginia against a Northern invasion—the answer is no. That was the only honorable choice a man in my situation could make. Honor, General Butler, is a wonderful antidote to regret.”
Score one for their side, I thought. There was a rustle of uneasiness among the judges. Obviously, they shared my puzzlement about Ben Butler’s line of questioning. Was he going out of his way to give Lee a chance to make himself sound like one of nature’s noblemen?
“Duty, honor, country—that’s West Point’s motto, am I correct?”
“It’s often referred to that way.”
“Is it honorable to accept a free education from your government—and then draw your sword against it? Is it honorable to support secession, which you admit was a revolutionary act, when a revolutionary situation didn’t exist?”
“I believe the North created the revolutionary situation by threatening to invade the South. By making good on that threat and actually invading it.”
“Not so, not so. All the North was trying to do was restore civil government as it was before the act of secession. What was revolutionary about that desire? If you’d submitted, the federal army would have returned to their homes and arsenals and the government of Virginia would have resumed its mundane everyday authority, with the Constitution’s Bill of Rights guaranteeing every man against excessive power.”
“A great many Southerners did not think that would be the case,” General Lee said. “They determined to resist the invasion, exactly as they would have resisted a foreign power, such as England or France.”
“General Lee—the more you talk, the more you demonstrate that the word honor has no meaning in the context of your decision to help subvert the best government on earth. If gratitude plays a part in honor—and I think it does—if political values play a part—and I think they do—your version of honor is a phantom, drained of every worthwhile meaning.”
“Save the meaning that tugs at the heart, General Butler. Loyalty to family, friends, native soil.”
Butler sighed wearily and gazed at the judges. “The man’s ignorance is invincible. I will allow you gentlemen to decide the merit of our argument.” He paced past Lee to glance at one of the open portfolios of documents on the prosecution table.
Turning, Butler leaned against the table and stared stonily at Lee. “Actions speak louder than words, General. It’s your actions we want to examine here.”
“I look forward to your doing so, sir,” Lee said.
“How long did you serve in the U.S. Army?”
“Thirty-five years.”
“Your ultimate rank?”
“I was lieutenant colonel of the Second Regiment of United States Cavalry, in command of the Military Department of Texas.”
“That was the rank you held when you were offered command of the United States Army in the great crisis of 1861, as the Southern states seceded?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You were in Washington, D.C., at the time?”
“I had been summoned from Texas to Washington. I was living here at Arlington, which at that time was my wife’s home.”
Butler picked up a document from the table. “I would like to read to the court—and to you, General Lee—a statement by Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, who was President Lincoln’s first secretary of war. The letter was solicited from Senator Cameron by his successor, our present secretary, Edwin Stanton.”
Dear Mr. Stanton:
You asked me to recall the circumstances of offering command of the U.S. Army to General Lee in early 1861. The offer was accepted by him verbally, with the promise that he would go into Virginia and settle his business and then come back to take command. Instead, he accepted an offer from Virginia to command her armed forces. He never gave us an opportunity to arrest him, which we would most certainly have done if we knew he was negotiating with Virginia at the very time that he was pretending to agree with us. In a word, Lee deserted under false pretenses, and is unquestionably guilty of treason.
Butler thrust the letter at Lee. “Would you care to read it, General?”
Lee’s hand trembled slightly as he took the paper and stared at it. “This is very far from the facts of the case,” he said, in a low intense voice.
“What’s that? I didn’t hear you, General,” Ambrose Burnside said in a tone that was more than a little mocking.
“I said this letter is very much in error.”
“In what way, General?” Butler asked sarcastically “Please enlighten us.”
“I never spoke to Senator—then Secretary—Cameron on the subject. The offer was made to me by Francis P. Blair, father of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, with whom I became friendly when I served in St. Louis. I met the elder gentleman at Montgomery Blair’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, at his request, on the morning of April 18, 1861. He said he had been authorized to speak to me by President Lincoln. He claimed to be a friend of the South, eager for reconciliation. He thought my acceptance of the command would have a considerable impact on many in the South. I told him on the spot that I doubted this and, at all events, could never in conscience participate in an invasion of the Southern states. There the matter ended, as far as I was concerned.”
“Yet within three days, you were a general in command of Virginia’s forces. Don’t you at least admit the hairbreadth timing of these two things is extraordinary?”
“It was an extraordinary time, General Butler.”
“You weren’t cold-bloodedly bidding up two competitors, to see who made the better offer?”
“Nothing could have been further from my mind,” Lee said, abruptly thrusting himself forward in the witness chair. For a moment he seemed angry enough to spring at Butler.
“Yet within three days, you went from loyal lieutenant colonel to secessionist general. Do you expect us to believe that you had heard nothing from Virginia before that three-day period? No one in authority or speaking for those in authority so much as hinted that you might win a general’s rank, after thirty-five years of waiting for the elevation that every soldier imagines as the summit of his career?”
“I had heard rumors, I admit.”
Butler strode back to the prosecution table and snatched another document from the portfolio. “This letter, from L. P. Walker, the first Confederate secretary of war, is dated March 15,1861, more than a month before you spoke to Mr. Blair. It offers you a commission as a brigadier general. That strikes me as much more substantial than a rumor.”
He thrust this letter at Lee, adding: “We found it in the files of the Confederate War Department in Richmond.”
Lee stared at this letter for a full minute. “I recall getting this letter. But I ignored it. I made it clear, when I left Texas, that my allegiance was not to the Confederate government, but to Virginia. At this point, Virginia had not yet seceded and joined the Confederacy I was often on my knees, praying that she would not do so.”
“How touching,” Butler said. “Was there any other evidence that Virginia might make you an offer, while you were still in Army blue?”
“Nothing explicit.”
“When did Virginia secede, General?”
“On April 19,1861.”
“When did you resign your commission?”
“On April 20,1861.”
Butler strode back to the prosecution table and seized another document. He held it aloft to the judges. “This is a copy of an article in the Alexandria Gazette, dated April 20.”
Clearing his throat, he read: “ ‘We have no right to speak for Colonel Robert E. Lee. But if he should resign his present position in the Army of the United States, there is no man who is more worthy to lead our forces, and command more of the confidence of the people of Virginia, than this distinguished officer.’”
Butler let these words sink into everyone’s mind for a long moment. “Do you recall this article, General Lee?”
“I recall reading it with a good deal of embarrassment.”
“So would I, if I had still been in army blue,” Butler said acidly. He picked up another document from the prosecution table and showed it to Lee. “Do you recognize this letter, General Lee?”
“It’s from Judge John Robertson.”
“What is its date?”
“April 20.”
“Fascinating, how coincidental all this is. What does this letter say?”
“He asked me for an interview the following day. I agreed to meet him in Alexandria after church.”
“And the next day, April 21, when you went into Alexandria to attend Christ Church, after the service did you encounter Judge Robertson?”
“No.”
“But you did encounter three other men, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“Who were they?”
“Friends of Judge Robertson’s.”
“Let’s be a bit more exact. Weren’t they commissioners sent from Richmond, along with Judge Robertson, to confirm his offer of command of Virginia’s forces?”
“I’m not sure if they had any legal standing worth the title of commissioner. But they did confirm Judge Robertson’s intention to ask me to come to Richmond and confer on defending Virginia from invasion.”
“How fascinating,” Butler said. “Instead of rumors, we now have two letters and what amounts to a small army of pursuers trying to offer you this traitorous command, on the very day you resigned.”
“Correct, up to a point.”
“Up to the point of treason, General,” Butler snarled. “That very night, you wrote Judge Robertson a note, saying you would join him the next day, April 22, on his trip back to Richmond—in effect accepting his offer, even before it was made. Would you say this account is substantially correct?”
“On the surface, yes. You have the dates of my sad little drama down pat.”
“Let’s propose an alternative scenario, General. What if you refused the moment you first heard of the possibility of an offer? Even made a public refusal. Do you think that might have influenced some people at the Virginia Convention? Francis and Montgomery Blair apparently thought so. The two of them, father and son, are among the most astute politicians in America.”
“I said more than once in letters to friends and family that I deplored secession. I said it was foolish to call it a legal right. It was a revolutionary act, which could only be justified by a revolutionary situation.”
“But you didn’t do anything, say anything, to prevent this revolutionary act from occurring in Virginia?”
“ I didn’t think then, nor do I now think, that my opinion would have carried any weight whatsoever. I hadn’t said a political word for thirty-five years, as befits an American soldier who believed emphatically in civilian control of the military.”
“But you were no longer a mere soldier, General Lee. You were the closest thing Virginia had to a national hero. Let’s go back to your army career for a moment. You served in the war with Mexico, did you not?”
“Yes. I was on General Winfield Scott’s staff.”
“You’re too modest again, General Lee. You were his chief of staff. You earned three brevet promotions in two years for daring reconnaissances behind the enemy lines and heroic leadership under fire. The newspapers and General Scott himself declared you the outstanding soldier of the war—excepting Old Fuss and Feathers himself, of course.”
“I don’t recall General Scott saying such a thing,” Lee snapped. “Nor did I ever refer to him in such a derogatory way. Old Fuss and Feathers was a title bestowed on him by his enemies.”
Marvelous, I thought. In that rebuke, Lee reduced Butler to the rank of foulmouthed private. But Butler was immune to rebukes and insults. He all but reveled in them.
“I’m not an admirer of General Scott,” he said. “If he’d had his way, the Southern states would have taken Forts Sumter and Pickens without firing a shot. He was like you, supposedly incapable of invading his beloved Virginia.”
“General Scott is quite simply the greatest soldier I have met in my lifetime,” Lee said. “That’s a hard saying for me, because I was brought up to believe my father would hold that title until I went to my grave.”
“You admired General Scott extravagantly, then?”
“I suppose you could say that.”
“How do you respond to this testimony which we’ve obtained from General Scott?”
He stalked back to the prosecutor’s table and took another piece of paper from the portfolio. “This is an affidavit signed by General Scott, in his quarters at the U.S. Military Academy, where he’s living in retirement.”
Butler read sonorously: “ ‘You ask me to recall my conversations with Robert E. Lee on the eve of the war. He reported to me the offer he had received to lead the American Army—and his refusal of it. I said to him: ”Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life. But I feared it would be so.“ He then told me he had received or would soon receive an offer from Virginia to take command of her forces. I told him if he was thinking of accepting such an offer, he should resign his commission immediately. His position was dangerously equivocal.’”
Butler triumphantly thrust this document at Lee. “Do you have any comment, General Lee?”
Again, Lee stared at the piece of paper as if he were seeing a specter. “I remember quite clearly General Scott urging me to resign,” Lee said. “Which I did as soon as I returned to Virginia.”
“You saw General Scott on April 18. You didn’t resign until April 20. What explains this hesitation—after being warned by your commander in chief that you were very close to committing treason?”
“I was in an agony of irresolution, hoping against hope—”
“You’re avoiding the main point, General Lee. Your hero, General Scott, confirms that you received an offer from Virginia while you were still in the uniform of the Army of the United States.”
“Wasn’t that more or less unavoidable?” Lee said. “As you yourself just pointed out, I’d been wearing the uniform for thirty-five years. I confided to General Scott my intention to resign immediately if Virginia seceded, because no matter what my rank, I couldn’t participate in an attack on my native state, where my wife, my family, my near relations and friends lived.”
“Other officers didn’t find the existence of Southern relatives a barrier to remaining loyal to the Union,” Butler said. “Perhaps our best example is General George H. Thomas, whose three sisters lived in Virginia when the war broke out. I could cite a dozen, a hundred other examples.”
“General Thomas was married to a Northern woman,” Lee said. “I pass no judgment on his decision. I can only hope he has passed no judgment on mine. To resign or stay in the federal ranks was a decision each Southern-born officer had to make in his interior heart—and in his soul, in solemn communion with his God.”
“Do you think Benedict Arnold did something similar—consulted his interior heart and prayed to his God—before betraying his country?”
“He may have. My father always maintained General Arnold was a much wronged man—that politicians in the Continental Congress hounded him into disloyalty. He was the finest infantry commander of the Revolution.”
Ben Butler grunted impatiently and lumbered closer to Lee, until he loomed over him. He thrust his big head toward the witness, his jowls working. It was a crude but effective display of exasperation. “My point, General, is not to elicit your sympathy for Benedict Arnold, but to point out the irrelevance of whether you consulted your heart or prayed to your God. Treason is a crime that is rooted in acts. The motive for these acts may vary from greed to deluded idealism. That doesn’t matter to the men who must judge you. The moment you accepted that offer from Virginia, you commenced making war upon the United States. You committed the act of treason!”
“You may be right about the law, General Butler,” Lee said. “But it matters greatly to me.”
Butler threw up his hands and turned to the judges. “Gentlemen, judges of this court, fellow soldiers—I submit that we have presented prima facie evidence that Robert E. Lee, whatever his motives, committed treason in the month of April, 1861, when he entertained offers from Southern rebels while pretending to accept a similar offer from the government of the United States. We have demonstrated that the game he was playing was condemned by the man who was at that time commander in chief of the American Army Major General Winfield Scott. A man who admired Colonel Lee as much as Colonel Lee admired him—and who warned him that he was making the greatest mistake of his life. On this charge, the prosecution rests.”
Agitated sounds from the seats behind me distracted the courtroom. I turned to find Sophia Carroll bending over a weeping Mary Custis Lee. “Please—may I go to my wife?” Lee asked.
“Of course, General,” Jonathan Stapleton said.
Lee hurried to Mary’s side, followed by his son Custis. For about five minutes they spoke to her in low tones. I could only hear her words, spoken decisively at the close of the conversation. “I wish to stay!”
Lee resumed his seat in the witness chair and turned to the judges. “Let me assure you, gentlemen, I didn’t wish Mrs. Lee to attend this affair,” he said. “Her health is delicate. But she was adamant in her insistence—”
Reverdy Johnson rose to his feet. “I’m sure no one in this room, even someone with moral sentiments as low as General Butler’s, would accuse you of seeking a spurious sympathy through Mrs. Lee’s suffering. For the moment, I would like to address only one of the points General Butler raised in his display of supposed proofs. General Lee, would you repeat to the court your statement that you never spoke to Simon Cameron in his capacity as secretary of war about the offer to command the federal army?”
“I’m ready to affirm that against all comers,” Lee said.
“I intend to invite Mr. Cameron to come to this courtroom as soon as possible for cross-examination. In the meantime we’ll send him a telegram, demanding to know from whom he received the information that you had accepted Mr. Lincoln’s offer. We’ll also send a telegram to General Scott at West Point, asking him certain questions which will, I think, considerably amplify his testimony about your conduct.”
Johnson strolled past Lee to face the judges. “If General Lee is telling the truth about never speaking to Mr. Cameron—and I have not the slightest doubt on that score—I believe we will soon discover that the former secretary of war is relying on the testimony of a third party. In the law, this is known as hearsay—and in no court in the world, so far as I know, is hearsay evidence granted any weight whatsoever.
“As for General Scott telling then Colonel Lee that his position was equivocal—what does this prove? Equivocal is at best a cautionary word. Scott didn’t say—which he well might have, if he was of the opinion—Lee, you scoundrel, you’re committing treason. You’re under arrest. On the contrary, General Scott was advising him, as a father might counsel a son, that he was in danger of compromising himself unless he did the honorable thing and resigned immediately. Which is what Colonel Lee did within twenty-four hours.”
“Equivocal is a word that goes in many directions,” General Jonathan Stapleton said. “It suggests a moral ambiguity, a lack of integrity—things no man of honor would want to hear said about himself.”
“Precisely why General Lee resigned immediately,” Johnson said.
“But was it immediate enough to void the charge of treason?” General Howard said, his voice fairly crackling with tension. “If in those twenty-four hours, Colonel Lee accepted an offer from the seceded state of Virginia, I fear he committed this crime.”
Lee gazed sadly at Howard. Was he seeing the fervent idealist who had come to West Point spouting abolitionist principles? “My intention, on resigning as promptly as possible, was to void such a charge, if it were ever made,” Lee said.
“The road to hell—with a pause at the gallows—is often paved with good intentions, General,” Ambrose Burnside said.
Lee seemed stunned by the malice Burnside emanated. His eyes drifted to Generals Smith and Meade. Their faces were expressionless masks. They were not inclined to speak on his behalf. It looked as if Ulysses Grant’s strategy was going to pieces.
“If this were a state or federal court, operating under the traditions of the Constitution and the common law, your remark would constitute a mistrial, General Burnside,” Reverdy Johnson said.
General Stapleton rapped his gavel. “I think we’ve been given more than enough to digest in one morning. Let’s adjourn for dinner.* The court will reconvene promptly at one P.M.” My aching hand was by this time matched by an aching head. Things were not going well for Robert E. Lee. I looked over my shoulder at Sophia Carroll. Her eyes were fastened on me with an almost metaphysical glare. I could only shudder inwardly and wonder if my devotion to Charles A. Dana was worth the price I might soon pay.
*This was the usual term for the midday meal in 1865.
I decided my only hope was a military principle I had seen applied relentlessly by Ulysses S. Grant: the best defense is a good offense. I fell in step with General Custis Lee and asked him if I could join them for dinner. His first reaction was almost as stark as Sophia’s glare. I quickly added that I wanted to convince him and his father of my neutrality in this affair.
I mentioned that Reverdy Johnson had evinced a readiness to meet with me. “In that case the senator will have to decide, sir,” Custis Lee said. “My own inclination is much too close to murder to tolerate any friend of Charles Dana’s at our table.”
Senator Johnson joined us at this point and Custis Lee repeated my proposal. “Why not?” Johnson said. He seemed remarkably cheerful for a man whose client had, as far as I could see, taken a fearful beating in the opening volleys of our battle. “I’ve investigated Mr. O’Brien with the help of several friends in Washington. They all confirmed a peculiar fact, considering his association with Mr. Dana. He’s an honest man.”
“Perhaps we’re all honest men, each according to his lights,” I said, as we walked down the center hall to the family dining room.
“That’s true up to a point,” Johnson said. “But the war has taught us to measure that point with a careful eye. When supposedly honest opinions lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, I think we have some basis for saying they’re wrong.”
Custis stalked ahead of us to the dining room, which was in the rear of the house on the first floor. The larger dining room, where Dana, the judges, and the prosecuting attorneys were eating, was on the opposite side of the drawing room, creating a distance between the two parties that I hoped would be conducive to civilized conversation.
The hostility on Mary Lee’s face made this hope seem febrile, at best. But General Lee did not seem in the least displeased by my presence. He nodded and readily acquiesced when Senator Johnson asked if I could join them.
“Is this your first visit to Arlington, Mr. O’Brien?” Lee asked.
“Yes. Though I’ve seen it from a distance countless times, on my way to the battlefronts.”
“You’re hardly seeing the old house at its best,” Lee said. “When my father-in-law, Mr. Custis, was alive, it literally teemed with relics of Washington. It was a shrine to the general, as he called him, far more than poor Mount Vernon, which had long since slid toward ruin.”
“You lived here, when you were not on duty at various posts?” I asked.
Lee nodded. “It’s the only home we’ve ever known. My wife loved it— and so did I.”
Colored waiters, recruited from Bigelow’s regiment, appeared with jugs of water and filled the glasses on the table. Lee stared hard at one of the waiters and exclaimed: “Is this who I think it is?”
The waiter, a short thick-bodied Negro with a creased forehead, nodded and half smiled, staring down at his well-shined shoes. “It’s me, General. Junius. After you freed me, I joined this regiment. Couldn’t find no work up North—”
Lee explained to me and Johnson. “Junius was freed in Mr. Custis’s will. He freed all his slaves. As the executor, I was in charge of carrying out the terms.”
“Did you see any action during the war?” Custis Lee asked. His tone was curt.
“No, sir. We was mostly guardin‘ forts here in Washington,” Junius said.
“Are you planning to stay in the army?” General Lee asked.
Junius shook his head. “They disbandin‘ this regiment next month. Wish I could stay. The pay’s pretty good.”
Junius withdrew. Mary Lee gazed after him and said: “I hope they’ve gotten more work out of him than we ever did.”
Lee smiled gently at her. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. Army made him quite energetic,” he said. “The army’s rather good at giving orders to privates.”
He turned to me. “Mrs. Lee’s father, Mr. Custis, was a very kind master. So kind, he got very little work from his slaves.”
“Were you born in this country, Mr. O’Brien?” Senator Johnson asked.
“No—in Ireland,” I said. I gave him a succinct summary of my trip to America, my parents’ deaths in the stinking hold of our immigrant ship, and my apprenticeship with Dana.
“You speak such excellent English,” Johnson said. “Not a trace of an accent.”
“Mr. Dana made the elimination of my brogue the first step in his education program. Then came American history and literature—and a daily diet of journalism at the Tribune.”
“Was it American history? Or New England’s history?” Johnson said, as the waiters served us a soup that had a thick layer of grease on its surface.
“A good deal of both, I suppose,” I said.
“Has this left you with an admiration for our country?”
“Yes, definitely,” I said.
“Really?” Johnson said. “I’m not sure I would have managed such a feat. You arrived here just as the country went mad. It may take another fifty years to recover its sanity.”
“A hundred,” Mary Custis Lee said.
Mrs. Lee gazed disdainfully at the soup. “How in the world do they expect us to put this slop in our stomachs? Are the judges dining on the same fare?”
“I’ll soon find out,” Senator Johnson said. He strode from the table, leaving me with the problem of making conversation with the Lees and Sophia Carroll, who gazed at me with such loathing, I wondered why I had bothered to make this foray.
“Sophia has told me of your considerate treatment of her in Washington, after she was captured,” General Lee said.
“Oh? Yes. Well-”
I frantically tried to assess whether General Lee knew why our treatment was considerate. He continued in the same genial tone. “We understood, of course, that you had converted her into a supposed double agent, preaching peace to our waverers.”
He smiled fondly at Sophia. “She didn’t preach it too fervently, thank goodness. Otherwise, I fear not many of us could have withstood those flashing eyes.”
Did my jaw drop? I hoped not, as I tried to grasp what Lee was telling me. Sophia had gulled me—and Dana—into believing she was a sincere convert to peace. While she had obviously told the Confederate government of her arrangement with us.
“She managed to bring out a fair amount of good information from Washington, along with the nonsense you gave her to confuse us,” Lee said.
“She was the best agent we had in Washington, up to the day the war ended,” Custis Lee said, with a quick, wry smile.
Custis was mocking me. He obviously knew all about the arrangement I thought we had with Sophia to be a double agent for our side. I suddenly saw them in Richmond, joking about how they were making fools of the gullible Yankee, Dana, and his simpleminded mick toady.
“I was rather amazed that you’d send someone so young on such a risky errand,” I said.
“After her brother was wounded at Antietam, she was determined to get into the war,” Custis said. “I decided it was far better to make her part of an already organized system, rather than allow her to do something melodramatic on her own, such as trying to shoot a Union general or two.”
He glanced at Sophia with a smile that was considerably warmer than I would have preferred it. Sophia said nothing. Her eyes were opaque. I sensed Custis was far more attracted to her than she to him. Was this reassuring? Or another proof of her duplicity?
“I don’t know why, but the Lees have often been drawn to headstrong women,” the general said. He smiled at his wife as he said this.
“I consider that a compliment,” Mrs. Lee said.
“It was intended to be,” the general replied.
“I hope Sophia feels the same way,” Custis said.
Sophia sipped her soup, made a disgusted face, and said, “This is slop.”
“You served as President Davis’s military advisor throughout the war?” I asked Custis.
“Advisor is certainly the wrong word. He never took any advice,” Custis snapped.
“Custis severely resisted the assignment. He wanted action in the field, like every man his age,” Lee said gently, almost sadly. “I had to strenuously insist he was playing a vital role—as a conduit to convey to Mr. Davis the problems of our army.”
Custis said nothing. But a nerve in his cheek began to twitch. His mouth compressed to an ominous line. I was glimpsing some of the inner tensions of the Lee family. Had Sophia been Custis’s consolation for being stranded in Richmond for the entire war? I found myself growing rather angry with my beloved spy.
Senator Johnson returned from his visit to the large dining room. “The other guests have been served the same slop—and are protesting mightily to Colonel Bigelow, whose army career is, I suspect, in danger of sudden termination. He vows to bring in a decent cook tomorrow and feed us like royalty. For the moment, we’re faced with the same fare the Twenty-third Regiment of Colored Volunteers are getting.”
“Poor fellows,” General Lee said.
The meal got worse. Some sort of stew, full of chunks of meat that no one could identify was accompanied by greens that looked at least six weeks old, along with grits that tasted like sand scraped from a seaside beach. Everyone except General Lee did little more than taste it. He shoveled down the stuff with something approaching gusto. “It’s not much worse than the field rations I ate for the last two years of the war,” he said.
“Will there be no further rebuttal to those atrocious charges against General Lee?” Mrs. Lee said.
“They’ll be rebutted in detail when we begin our defense, Mrs. Lee. Have no fear on that score,” Senator Johnson said.
“I’ll check the telegraph to see if we’ve had a reply from General Scott,” Custis said, pushing back his chair.
“We hope he’s willing to make an appearance in person,” Johnson said to me.
“I hate to ask him,” General Lee said as Custis hurried from the room. “Friends tell me he’s not at all well. I’m under such obligations to that man—”
“General Scott’s a soldier,” Reverdy Johnson said. “I think we should leave it up to him—whether to take the risk.”
Lee sat back in his chair, clearly distressed. “I begin to wish I had done what I thought of doing the morning of Appomattox. Mounted Traveler and rode along the lines until a sharpshooter picked me off.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Senator Johnson said. “For your wife’s sake—and the South’s sake.”
General Lee’s normally ruddy complexion underwent a sudden transformation to a deathly pallor. He rubbed his chest and murmured: “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.”
“Is it the heart pain again?” Mary Custis Lee asked.
“It’s something in that general region,” Lee said.
“He had an inflammation of the heart sac after a terrible sore throat in 1863. He hasn’t been a well man since,” Mrs. Lee said, anxiously studying her husband.
“It’s all right, Mary,” Lee said. “I think it’s passing.”
“We can easily postpone the afternoon session,” Senator Johnson said.
“No, no,” Lee said. “I want to get this over with, one way or the other.”
I gathered an intimation from those words that one of the ways might be a heart seizure in the witness chair. I wondered how the godlike Dana would explain that outcome to the American public.
Senator Johnson nonetheless determined to ask for a half hour’s postponement of the afternoon session, so General Lee could rest in his bedroom. Mrs. Lee labored up the stairs with him, helped by Custis. She seemed to think her presence would guard him against a fatal attack.
I asked Sophia Carroll if she would welcome a stroll around Arlington’s grounds. She sighed and acquiesced, as if she were subjecting herself to some new form of torture. We walked down the north side of the drive to the edge of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which paralleled the broad Potomac, flowing just beyond it. It was a beautiful June day, with a cool breeze blowing off the river. Sophia made no attempt to converse with me.
On our left, just off the road, was a slave cemetery, with dozens of wooden headboards on which names had been painted: “Caesar” “Brutus” “Hannibal” “Annabelle” “Lucy.” All first names. It was mute testimony to the way slavery deprived a Negro of half of his or her identity. I found myself despising the system all over again. I wondered if General Lee deserved his heart seizures. That dark thought reminded me that my beloved had not been the convert to the Union cause she had led me to believe.
“I begin to wish I never came to America,” I said. “Maybe Senator Johnson is right. The country’s gone insane. Or it was insane from the start. How could you tolerate this?”
I gestured to the cemetery. “No doubt you had one on your family’s plantation in Louisiana.”
“How can you tolerate those graves?” Sophia said.
She pointed to the rows of whitewashed grave markers of the Union dead on Arlington’s broad lawn. “Was it necessary to kill so many young men to solve this problem?”
Sophia stared at the slave cemetery for a long sad moment. “We recognized the wrong of it. But we had no idea how to right it.”
“What about just freeing them?”
“All at once? Have you stopped to think about what might have happened?”
“What?” I asked mockingly.
“In our part of Louisiana, Negroes outnumbered whites ten to one. Imagine yourself black and free after two hundred and fifty years of slavery. You have no money, no land, no education. What do you think you’d do?”
“I’d ask your father to give me a job. To pay me for what I’ve been doing. Picking cotton or planting rice.”
“And if the money my father could afford to pay barely kept you alive, then what?”
“I’d protest—I’d riot—”
“You’d go to war. And kill my father and my mother and my brother and me. And every other white you could lay your hands on. Remember, you’re angry. For two centuries the anger has been boiling in your family’s bellies.”
“I don’t believe you. The free Negroes in the North are the most peaceful people in the whole population. Not like our own kind—I mean the Irish— who almost burned down New York City in those draft riots two years ago.”
“Of course your Negroes are peaceful. They’re about two percent of the population,” Sophia said. “Many of them have been free for a half century or more. But what if they were ninety percent of the population in some places and they were freed only yesterday? You’d see a very different attitude.”
I trudged along the banks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, struggling against a growing uneasiness. “I didn’t like the way Custis Lee smiled at you.”
“Why?”
“I thought it was too proprietary.”
“I reported to him. He was often involved in clandestine operations.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“He proposed to me. I turned him down. Beneath his apparent calm, he’s one of the wild ones. I didn’t want to end up like poor Agnes Lee.”
“What happened to her?”
“She fell madly in love with Orton Williams, a hugely handsome swaggering cavalry colonel. His mother was Mrs. Lee’s first cousin. The war changed Orton. He drank too much and would explode with no warning. Once he shot one of his men dead for a minor disciplinary offense. His own soldiers vowed to murder him. General Lee tried to save him by transferring him to the western theater of war. In 1862, after Agnes turned him down, he volunteered for a horribly dangerous undercover mission. He was captured and hanged as a spy. I don’t think Agnes will ever get over it.”
We trudged in silence until we reached the first rows of Union graves. “You think Custis is liable to do something like that?”
“I told you—he’s vowed to shoot Dana. He’ll do it, too. I suppose you’ve warned him.”
“I haven’t said a word,” I snapped.
We walked past the rows of soldiers’ graves. First names and last names on each marker here. But did it matter? They and the slaves were both dead. My head started to spin. I was growing very confused.
“I’ve told you I loved you, Jeremiah,” Sophia said. “I meant it—even though I didn’t mean anything else I told you about the war. I also mean what I’ve said about this trial. If General Lee dies at the hands of these men, I could never look at you again without loathing.”
“What can I do to prevent it? I’m a mere spectator—a recording machine.”
“What if Senator Johnson called you to testify. Would you do it?”
“Testify about what? I only know what I saw.”
“You saw a lot.”
“When, where?”
“In the offices of the New York Tribune. You saw Charles Dana in action. You told me all about it one night, when you came to see me with a bellyful of bourbon.”
“I don’t remember a thing,” I said.
“Jeremiah—that night I saw an awful sadness in your soul. I’d want to know you faced the meaning of that sadness before I agreed to marry you.”
“Sadness about what?” I said, trying to sound flippant.
“The war—and being Dana’s creature.”
By this time we were within a few hundred feet of Arlington’s majestic eight-pillared portico. Sophia suddenly kissed me on the cheek and hurried away, disappearing around the corner of the house. I stood there, rubbing the kiss, breathing her perfume.
“Jeremiah! We’re about to resume!”
Charles Dana was standing in the shadowed portion of the portico. I rushed indoors and followed him down the center hall to the door of the drawing room. “What did you have to say to our delicious little ex-spy?” he asked.
“I found out she was never a spy for our side. She fed us pure moonshine,” I said. “While taking all sorts of information out of Washington under her skirts.”
“I suspected as much,” Dana said. “Did you get under those skirts occasionally?”
I shook my head. “I remained Mrs. Wolf’s best customer.”
The Wolf’s Den was one of the more elegant of Washington’s 450 registered bordellos. A man did not have to seduce respectable women to satisfy his sexual needs in the American capital during our noble war for Negro freedom.
“I’m surprised,” Dana said. “What about that New York expression, ‘None can love like an Irishman’?”
“That’s reserved for the wild Irish. You’ve made me one of the civilized ones, Dana,” I said.
I was seized by scarifying doubts about my beloved spy. While I was gulping bourbon at the Willard, was she nestled in the arms of Custis Lee, telling him what she had said to further confuse and demoralize Jeremiah O’Brien and his supposedly all-knowing mentor? How do you trust someone after you discover she has deceived you so completely?
More to the point, if deception was still her game, what was her object? What did they expect Jeremiah O’Brien to say about Charles A. Dana if the gullible mick consented to take the stand?
In our improvised courtroom, Secretary of War Stanton and Senator Sumner had departed. Only Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, looking more corpselike than ever, remained in the back row, his sunken dark eyes glinting in his haggard face. Another man in the spectators’ chairs attracted more of my attention. He was wearing a gray suit remarkably like General Lee’s—cut somewhat haphazardly from a Confederate uniform. His squarish face and fighter’s jaw emanated violence. But the rest of him was incongruously small, as if the creator had intended a Goliath and absentmindedly produced a David who was almost a shrimp. I asked Dana who he was.
“That’s General John Singleton Mosby. He’s been told to testify for the prosecution or face a charge of murdering prisoners of war. I think he got the message. We’ll soon see.”
In the summer of 1864, when the war was in a seeming stalemate, I had interviewed General Mosby. My fellow reporters had wondered if I was trying to commit suicide. Mosby was portrayed as a man who liked to hang Yankees for the fun of it. A reporter from the New York Tribune was almost certain to stir his sadism to new ingenuities. But I relied on my Irish name to protect me from such a misfortune. One look at my Celtic jib made it clear that I was not a Yankee. I mounted my old nag, Bucephalus, rode cheerfully past the ring of sentries around the Army of the Potomac, and soon found myself in the portion of eastern Virginia known as Mosby’s Confederacy
In taverns and farmhouses where I stopped for food and drink, I told everyone who I was and why I wanted to meet General Mosby. I claimed thousands of newspaper readers in the North wanted to know more about him. On the second night of my journey, I was awakened in a farmhouse bedroom by a thunderous knock on my door. I opened it to find my host, a wizened farmer whose only son had died at the Second Battle of Bull Run, holding a lantern beside a gray-clad cavalryman who looked about eight feet tall. The rebel pointed a pistol at my chest and said: “Who sent you to meet General Mosby?”
“I sent myself. I’m a reporter.”
“Come on,” he said, motioning me out the door with the barrel of his gun. Soon we were riding down dark tracks in a thick wood, shot through with streaks and spangles of golden light from a full moon. Finally we reached a clearing where horses were tethered, munching oats from feed-bags. At this point, my guide led my horse into the clearing and put a blindfold on me
“What’s the point of the blindfold?” I asked.
“We don’t want you to print a description of me that General Grant can distribute to every cavalryman in his army” said a resonant voice. “Help him off the horse.”
The order was obeyed. I was guided to a place on the grass in the vicinity of the voice and conducted a very satisfactory interview with General Mosby. His voice conveyed to me the image of a warrior at least six feet tall and built proportionately. He told me that he could and would continue to fight for the Confederacy until “the Yankees got sick of the whole thing and went home.” He was confident that no one, not even General Philip Sheridan, the commander of the Union cavalry, could catch him with twenty thousand men. As for the man who had pursued him in the recent past, General George Armstrong Custer, Mosby characterized him as close to an idiot.
The partisan chieftain talked at length about the way the ordinary people of Virginia supported him with food, horses, smuggled ammunition. He saw himself as the vanguard of a movement that would prolong the war for fifty years, even if General Lee’s army and the other Southern armies were defeated. He urged “Old Abe” to negotiate peace with the South, because they would never surrender.
Back at my farmhouse, I stayed up until dawn writing this story. When I returned to the Union Army’s perimeter, I found General Grant was fighting another tremendous battle with General Lee. By the time I got my Mosby story on the telegraph, it was overshadowed by a new casualty list and rumors that the Republican Party was going to dump Lincoln and run a radical for president in 1864. Instead of a commendation, I got a stiff rebuke from my managing editor for encouraging “defeatism” among our readers.
Now, face-to-face with the real General Mosby, I realized I had been gulled again by Southern duplicity. Would I have taken seriously a never-surrender declaration if I had seen this little man in the flesh?
Judge Advocate General Holt summoned General Mosby to the witness chair in our makeshift courtroom. He swaggered to the seat, looking remarkably unwearied and undefeated for a man who had supposedly been on the run since Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Terse questions elicited his name and rank in the Confederate Army and the story of his rise from captain to brigadier general.
“Did you know General Lee personally?” Holt asked.
“I first met him in the summer of 1862, toward the end of the federal drive on Richmond under the direction of General McClellan. In July I was captured while carrying a message to General Jeb Stuart but was soon exchanged. On my way back on the exchange ship, I saw numerous Union troopships in Hampton Roads, getting up steam. From a friendly ship captain I learned they were going north. I concluded this meant McClellan’s campaign was over and rushed to General Lee’s headquarters with this information.”
Mosby smiled ruefully in Lee’s direction. “I had quite a tussle getting past his officious aides. I was a mere captain at the time. But I finally succeeded and told him the news. He immediately sent a dispatch to General Jackson, who attacked the enemy at Cedar Mountain a few days later, before the reinforcements aboard the ships reached the Union Army there. The ensuing victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run considerably disconcerted federal plans, I think.”
“From that time, your relationship to General Lee was close?”
“As close as men in widely separated commands would permit. I never thought of it as a personal friendship. It was that of commander and subordinate commander.”
“Your mode of warfare, General, was extremely unorthodox, wouldn’t you say? You operated under something the Confederate Congress called the Partisan Ranger Act. Didn’t that give you a license to murder Union soldiers in isolated outposts and blow up trains full of civilians?”
“We never murdered nobody. We killed or got killed in fair fights,” Mosby growled, suddenly defensive.
“Let me suggest an alternative to that statement,” Holt said. From the prosecution table he picked up a newspaper story from the Chicago Tribune describing Mosby as a reckless, murderous outlaw. The reporter detailed the number of sentries, sutlers, paymasters, and other rear area federal soldiers he had killed in his raids. “I’m sure,” Holt added, speaking to the judges, “that this information is familiar to you gentlemen.”
The expressions on every face made it clear that Mosby was not one of their favorite Southerners. “All too familiar,” Ambrose Burnside said. “If I could have gotten my hands on General Mosby during the war, I would have hanged him without the courtesy of a trial.”
Mosby glared at Burnside. I got a glimpse of the ferocity that lurked inside this diminutive man. Holt returned his attention to the fuming witness. “In spite of this record, General Lee approved your operations as a partisan leader?”
“I believe he wrote several times to President Davis, urging higher rank for me. I received a number of commendatory letters from him, praising the boldness and overall effectiveness of me and my men.”
Holt’s smile was sardonic. “I would like to confirm General Mosby’s statement with letters we have obtained from captured papers of the Rebel government.”
The judge advocate general strode back to the prosecution table and snatched two documents from the open portfolio. One was a letter from Lee to Jefferson Davis, urging a promotion for Mosby. More telling was a letter from General Lee to General Jeb Stuart, commander of the Southern cavalry dated March 12,1863. “Hurrah for Mosby!” he had written. “I wish I had a hundred like him.”
Mosby’s eyes went to Lee. His face softened with gratitude. “That was not long after I captured General Stoughton at—”
“We’re not interested in a recital of your exploits, General,” Holt said. “We’ve now established your modus operandi and your status with General Lee. Which brings us to the reason you’re here.”
For a moment, I thought I saw fear in Mosby’s eyes. He shifted in his seat and again gazed across the room at Robert E. Lee, with a very different expression on his face. Was that a mute plea for forgiveness in his eyes?
Judge Advocate General Holt stepped between Mosby and his former commander. “You stand accused of having hanged three prisoners of war, captured from the brigade of General George Armstrong Custer, and shooting two others. Did you do this?”
“Yes,” Mosby said in a low voice. “I did it in retaliation—”
“We’re not interested in your excuses, General. Did you do it?”
“I issued such an order, yes.”
“Would you tell us the date?”
“November 6, 1863.”
“They were selected by lot from a group of twenty-seven prisoners. Is thatcorrect?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get General Lee’s approval for this judicial murder?”
“Yes. He and the secretary of war, Mr. Seddons, both approved it. We were retaliating—”
“I told you already, General. We’re not interested in your spurious motivations. They can be explored when you’re tried for this crime, which I trust will be soon.”
“Before that happens, I’ll make sure you’re six feet under the ground, you double-crossing son of a bitch!” Mosby roared.
“I’ve been threatened by your sort too often to lose any sleep over that remark,” Holt said. He turned to the judges. “I would like to state here and now that we never made any arrangement with this murderer that could justify the epithet double-crosser. We simply told him that if he testified truthfully, it might have some bearing on the sentence he will receive for his crimes, when his turn before the bar of justice comes—as it must for every one of these Rebel scum.”
I thought I saw disapproval—or perhaps merely shock—play across General Stapleton’s face at this ferocious remark and the unapologetic revelation of the covert deal with Mosby. Reverdy Johnson rose to address the court. “I would like to reserve the right to interrogate General Mosby as a defense witness.”
“Of course, Senator,” General Stapleton said.
“The court will now summon Private Jupiter Hemings.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Dana. I saw a small smile of satisfaction on his lips. It was a typical Dana performance. He loved to hold all the strings in an operation and share them selectively.
Jupiter was as large as John Mosby had been small. He overflowed the witness chair, a mountain of blue cloth and inky black skin. “Private Hemings,” said Judge Holt, “would you tell us about your military career.”
“I growed up a slave in Kentucky,” he said. “When the war started, I ‘cided to get into it and fight for my freedom. So I runned away to Indiana. Got myself into a cavalry regiment. We was stationed down on the Ohio River in the middle of 1864, when they ordered us to join a federal column invadin’ Virginia from that end of the map. Was mighty hard marchin‘. Water run out by the time we got to the mountains. The Rebels was in a fort on a hill. We ’tacked them and they put a lotta lead into us. They was about four colored regiments leadin‘ the attack. A good half of us went down. When the rest of the army fell back, the Rebels come out of the forts and shot every wounded colored soldier on the hill. Only one got away, my sergeant, name of Moses Washington, who jumped up and run ’spite of his wounds—”
“What was the name of the town near the fort?”
“Saltville. I guess I’ll never forget that name.”
“Thank you, Private Hemings. You may step down,” Holt said. “I would now like to summon Private George Bullitt.”
The other colored soldier who had been assigned to guard Dana took his seat in the witness chair. Dana whispered in my ear. “Don’t I have interesting bodyguards?”
I nodded and massaged my aching hand. Soon Private Bullitt revealed he had been in the ranks at Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi in Tennessee, when it was stormed by cavalry commanded by General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Private Bullitt described a grisly scene. After the fort was overrun, the Confederates started shooting everyone in the garrison, which was half white and half black.
“They was yellin‘ ’No quarter! No quarter. Kill the damn niggers! Shoot them down!‘” Private Bullitt said.
“How did you escape?”
“I runned to the river and jumped in. The sailors on a federal gunboat hauled me aboard.”
Judge Advocate General Holt read several paragraphs from House of Representatives Report Number 65, containing details of the Fort Pillow massacre. It described additional atrocities, such as burying colored soldiers alive and setting fire to tents containing federal wounded. “Did you see any of these awful deeds?” he asked Private Bullitt.
“No, sir. But I heard about ‘m from them that excaped,” Bullitt said.
“You may step down, Private,” Holt said. “General Lee, will you please take the stand?”
Lee settled into the witness chair. Holt paced for a moment. It was growing warm in the room. The judge advocate general mopped his perspiring forehead. “Did you hear the testimony of Privates Hemings and Bullitt, General?”
“I did.”
“Were you aware of these atrocities, committed by Confederate troops?”
“I had heard of the fight at Fort Pillow and the charges exchanged by the victors and the vanquished. But I never heard of the action at Saltville from anyone in the Confederate government. I read an account in a Northern newspaper, brought to Richmond by one of our secret service people,” Lee said.
“Did you ever take any action to investigate these vile deeds?”
“I considered them entirely outside my jurisdiction. I was commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Only in the last two months of the war did I become commander in chief of all the Confederacy’s armies.”
“You often conferred with President Jefferson Davis when you commanded the Army of Northern Virginia, did you not?”
“Fairly often.”
“Did you ever mention these crimes to him?”
“We had far more weighty matters to discuss, General Holt.”
“Can anything be more weighty than crimes like these? Crimes that disgraced your cause?”
“Men do terrible things in battle when their blood is up,” Lee said. “Things they would never do in their ordinary lives. It’s clear to me you’ve never seen action, General.”
“That is entirely irrelevant!” Holt roared.
My eyes went to the faces of the judges. Grim humor nickered on each taut mouth. War created its own exclusive camaraderie—and Lee had evoked it. Score one for their side, I thought.
Lee had touched an exposed nerve in the judge advocate general’s psyche. Holt ranted for another five minutes about his ability to distinguish between moral and immoral war. Ben Butler finally rose to interrupt him—pretending that it was part of their prearranged plan.
“General,” Butler said. “May I begin examining General Lee in regard to General Mosby’s testimony?”
“Of course,” Holt said, trudging back to his chair.
Butler smiled cordially at Lee as he approached him. “As a fellow participant in our recent blood-letting, General, I agree with your remark about men in battle. But I consider the testimony just given by General Mosby as a much more serious matter. Did you, as he avows, approve his decision to hang captured prisoners?”
“As General Mosby tried to explain to the court, the executions were in retaliation for a number of his men who had been hanged by General Custer in the preceding weeks. I thought it was more than justified.”
“Under the laws of war, isn’t it permissible to hang a man in civilian dress who attacks uniformed troops?”
“I believe that has been the custom.”
“Were you aware that many of Mosby’s men had no uniforms?”
“I don’t believe that was the case. I made it a point, when he volunteered to organize a partisan ranger corps, to insist that they be uniformed.”
“Did you inquire whether your order was obeyed?”
“I had, as I’ve already said, a great many weighty matters demanding my constant attention as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.”
“Did you inquire, before you gave Mosby permission to commit judicial murder?”
“I did not.”
“Should you have inquired, General?”
“In the abstract, perhaps I should have,” Lee said. “But in the real world of practical affairs, it never occurred to me.”
General Butler stalked back to the prosecution table and snatched another document from the portfolio. “I would like to submit in evidence a letter from General George Armstrong Custer.”
He proceeded to read a strident protest Custer had written to General Grant, denouncing Mosby’s executions. Custer insisted that Mosby’s men had been hanged because they were operating as lawless guerrillas in civilian dress, and deserved no quarter.
“What is your response to this, General Lee?” Butler asked.
“I can only rely on General Mosby to tell us that General Custer was mistaken—or was lying—when he wrote that letter.”
Butler wheeled and barked: “General Mosby. Will you take the stand again?”
Lee retreated to the defense table. Mosby took the stand. Butler asked him if all his men were in uniform. “They all wore some portion of a Confederate uniform,” Mosby said. “I insisted on that. But there were times when uniforms were not available. Many of my men were Marylanders who had few relatives or friends in Virginia.”
“Behind this palaver, you’re telling us that some of your men were not in uniform.”
“Most were. And every man had instructions to describe himself if captured as fighting under my command, which had been organized with the approval of the Confederate Congress.”
“Most were,” Butler said sarcastically “And anyway, that extralegal body, that collection of political traitors, the Confederate Congress, had given them their blessing.”
“That made them as legal as Custer’s boys, the way we saw it.”
“I will leave it to the judgment of this court, whether it made them legal in the eyes of military justice,” Butler said. “You may step down.”
He paced for a moment, while Mosby returned to his seat. “Gentlemen,” Butler said with a theatrical sigh. “You’ve heard the presentation of the evidence for the second charge. May I comment on General Lee’s utter indifference to the fate of the wounded Negro soldiers at Saltville, murdered in cold blood, after their fellows had retreated, and the atrocities committed at Fort Pillow, which occurred in the heat of battle or immediately after it. These crimes—and Mosby’s crime—could not be more different. But General Lee doesn’t really care. The victims were only Negroes—ex-slaves. These are not real people to him. They have no constitutional rights. After all, he spent three years killing three hundred thousand Northern boys to prevent colored men from getting these rights.”
My eyes went to the defense table. I saw Lee twist in his seat and rub his chest. To swallow these insults in silence was obviously very difficult for him. I wondered again what Dana and his friends would do or say if the general collapsed and died of a heart seizure.
Reverdy Johnson rose. “I object to the imputation that General Lee was aware of the particulars in either case. He just testified that he knew of these matters only as hearsay and considered them outside his jurisdiction.”
Holt rose at the prosecution table. “The objection is overruled,” he said. “These matters are extremely relevant to this charge—which seeks to prove that General Lee played a culpable role in the commission of Mosby’s murders—and in the Confederate government’s failure to punish the murderers at Fort Pillow and Saltville.”
“Thank you, Mr. Judge Advocate General,” Butler said, with a grave nod of his head.
Butler paced for a moment. “I simply wish to reiterate, gentlemen, that we have a man who pretends a grave serenity, a man who claims to look down on ordinary mortals as mere puppets on the strings of fate, about which he can do nothing. But the facts are starkly contrary to this performance. Here was a general who acquired immense power and prestige as the head of a victorious army—a man who could have forced the Confederate government to do anything—yes, even surrender—if he chose to make such a demand. Instead, he did nothing but fight his battles with ever-increasing desperation, piling up dead men on both sides.
“Why? That is a very pertinent question, gentlemen. Why did General Lee refuse to even consider urging the Confederate government to end the war? I think from the three matters we have just explored, he feared, with good reason, that the future held for him an encounter with justice such as the one he is experiencing. He knew all too well the crimes the Confederacy had committed in the conduct of the war—crimes more than consonant with the monstrous crime of slavery, which was their primary offense before God and man.”
Reverdy Johnson rose again. “I must object to the prosecution’s line of reasoning. There is no visible connection between General Lee and the supposed crime of slavery—nor between that supposed crime and battlefield murders and executions.”
Holt was on his feet instantly. “Mr. Johnson’s objection is baseless and overruled. Slavery is a crucial element in the derivation of General Lee’s criminal mind. General Butler’s remarks on it are certainly permissible, much as the obiter dicta of a judge in a similar situation.”
“When the judge and the prosecuting attorney are on the same side, where, may I ask, does justice sit?” Johnson said.
“Senator Johnson—if you do not show a decent respect for the procedures of this court, I will find you in contempt and remand you to Fortress Monroe, to share a jail cell with Jefferson Davis!” Holt roared.
“I would be honored to share such a cell with either Mr. Davis, who is a personal friend, or General Lee. I can foresee a handsome judgment in my name for slander and unlawful imprisonment,” Johnson said. “It would give me great pleasure to donate the money for the relief of soldiers’ widows and orphans—of both sides.”
General Jonathan Stapleton rapped his judicial gavel. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I consider these exchanges unnecessary and superfluous. I’m sure the fellow members of the commission agree.”
“I thoroughly agree with you, General Stapleton,” said General Meade. “It seems to me General Butler and Judge Advocate General Holt have a tendency to wander from the point into generalities that have nothing to do with General Lee’s guilt or innocence. Senator Johnson’s objections strike me as more than justified.”
“General,” said Oliver Howard, “I fear I must disagree in turn. If slavery were not a crime, we would not be sitting here.”
“I agree with General Howard,” said General Burnside, surprising nobody.
“For once, I think I’ll just keep my mouth shut,” Baldy Smith said.
“You may proceed, General Butler,” General Stapleton said.
“Thank you, General Stapleton,” Butler said. “We will now take up the fourth charge, General Lee’s guilt in regard to the deaths of twelve thousand Union soldiers in the prison camp set up by the Confederate government in Andersonville, Georgia. We have obtained permission to produce as a witness the commandant of this charnel house, Major Henry Wirz, already under arrest and charged with murder.”
Butler turned to the Negro sergeant guarding the door. “Bring in the prisoner!”
He opened the door and a small dark-haired, black-bearded man shuffled toward us, his wrists and ankles bound with chains and manacles. He clanked his way to the witness chair and sat down, gazing around him with a bewildered expression on his face.
Senator Johnson leaped to his feet. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen of the court! I’m afraid I must ask a postponement of this testimony until tomorrow. General Lee is feeling extremely unwell.”
Lee was slumped in his chair. Custis Lee rushed past me to his father’s side. On the other side of the room Mary Custis Lee began to sob. Sophia Carroll bent over her. General Stapleton looked less than pleased with this turn of events. Was he wondering—as I was—whether this was another prearranged performance, to soften the judges’ hearts? If so it was superbly timed. Wirz had guilt written all over him before he said a word. Those chains and manacles were mute testimony in their own right of the reality of federal punishment. If Robert E. Lee were found guilty, he would leave Arlington wearing similar raiment.
“By all means,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “I’m sorry to see the general so indisposed—”
Custis assisted his father from the room. Mrs. Lee and Sophia followed him. The rest of us were left staring at Wirz. “I’m innocent,” he said. “I did nothing but obey orders.”
General Stapleton rapped his gavel. “The court is adjourned until eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
As we walked into the center hall, Senator Johnson fell in step beside me. “If you’re of a mind to talk, Mr. O’Brien, I’d be delighted if you could join me for supper tonight at my house. Would six o’clock be agreeable?”
I nodded my assent, wondering if this too was part of their plan. As Johnson walked ahead of me, Dana took my arm. “I want a verbatim report of what he says to you, Jeremiah,” he said.
Again, that subterranean desire to find Dana finally, ultimately wrong blazed in my mind. “I’ll take voluminous notes,” I said.
Three carriages were waiting to carry us back to Washington, all two-horse affairs, with members of the twenty-third Colored Volunteers serving as coachmen. I found myself sitting next to Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, as the small caravan descended the curving drive from Arlington to the road to the Long Bridge over the Potomac. I introduced myself and asked him how he thought the trial was going thus far.
“Superbly,” he said. “Lee’s conduct reeks of guilt from every pore. The evidence is irrefutable.”
He gazed around him at Arlington. “As you know, we confiscated this estate from the Lees. Eleven hundred acres. But it’s only a small percentage of the land they own—or better, stole from the sweat of colored men. Do you have any idea of their property in Virginia, when the war began?”
I shook my head. “Thirteen thousand acres,” Stevens said. His pale lips worked, as if he were about to dine on some succulent dish. “At the end of this trial, I hope and pray the prosecutors will make a motion, not only to condemn the hypocrite general to death—but to confiscate every one of these blood-drenched acres, reducing his arrogant son Custis and his siblings to the poverty of the slaves from whose sweat they stole it.”
“An interesting idea,” I said.
“We’re only in the first stage of this war, Mr. O’Brien—the military victory. Now must come the political victories. We must confiscate the lands of every slaveholder in the South and distribute these criminal acres to the freedmen. Otherwise, the military victory will be hollow—and ultimately meaningless.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. They lost their bid for independence. But they’re planning to go back to their old game of seducing enough Northern fools to let them run the country. I’m from Pennsylvania, as you probably know. Our state bears the shame of creating the greatest apologist for the South the nation ever produced, President James Buchanan. That lily-livered bastard was more a woman than a man in the first place. He lived in open degeneracy with his lover, Senator William Rufus Devane King of Alabama, in Washington for twenty years, until God in his judgment sent the Southern sodomite to hell. When I came to Washington in 1848, Buchanan already emitted a stench. In 1853, I resigned my congressional seat and went home to build a new party—the Republican Party—that ran him and his fellow Democratic degenerates out of Pennsylania.”
Dana was sitting on the other side of the carriage, smoking one of his small cigars. It was hard to tell what he thought of Stevens. I did not know much about the congressman, though his name was familiar to me. I had concentrated on the military side of the war. But I knew from the Tribune‘s political reporters that Stevens had wielded immense power in Washington as head of the House Ways and Means Committee, which controlled the funding for the war. John Hay once told me Lincoln grew pale every time he heard Stevens’s name.
“Are you a Pennsylvanian by birth, Congressman?” I asked. Pennsylvanians of my acquaintance were untinged by the fanaticism that all but oozed from Stevens’s pores.
“I was born in Vermont,” he said.
“What brought you to Pennsylvania?”
“Opportunity. I soon decided God had intended me to work there. I became a lawyer and settled in the town of Gettysburg. Across the state line was the slave system in Maryland. I saw firsthand how it worked. I heard from the lips of fugitives the beastliness of the thing. I defended them in court without fee. That’s how I learned to despise the apologists of slavery. From gut experience, young man. Gut experience.”
We rode in silence for a quarter of a mile. “How do you envision the federal government’s policy toward the South?” I asked.
Stevens stared up at the thick neck of our Negro coachman. “The South should be treated as a captive province,” he said. “All distinctions of states should be obliterated, while we redistribute the slaveholders’ lands to the Negroes and poor whites. Then we can redraw state lines to our advantage. Our goal should be to turn the entire region into a bastion of the Republican Party. Nothing less than a total revolution will keep the slaveholders from returning to power.”
Hatred vibrated in Thaddeus Stevens’s rasping voice. Dana exhaled a cloud of bluish cigar smoke. “I agree completely,” he said.
For some reason these words shocked me. They should not have done so. I knew that Dana was in favor of showing the South little or no mercy. But to find him in agreement with a fanatic like Thad Stevens shocked me.
“This man,” Stevens said, pointing to Dana. “This man is our guiding star. I won’t be here much longer to see that justice is done. But he’ll preside over our enterprise, after I’m gone. We’re raising money to put him in charge of a newspaper that will guarantee his power and influence. Take his advice, young man, and you’ll never go astray, politically or morally.”
For a moment I wondered if I was looking at another man who thought Dana’s thoughts. But I concluded that Dana was not necessary to explain Thaddeus Stevens. He was a moral force in his own right. Why was I having trouble swallowing his morality? Why was it coalescing in my mind with my desire to find Dana finally, fatally wrong? Was the answer Sophia Carroll—or four years of confronting the staring eyes of the dead on so many battlefields?
By this time we were rolling over the Long Bridge across the muddy Potomac. The Capitol’s dome loomed in the distance. “I’m glad you and Jeremiah had this chance to chat, Congressman,” Dana said. “He’s having dinner tonight with Reverdy Johnson.”
Stevens looked at me as if I had suddenly become unclean. “Remember this,” he said. “You’re sitting down with one of Satan’s prime agents in America. His mission is to save not only Lee but the whole South from God’s justice. He’ll succeed, if good men permit him to get away with it. There’s no more subtle, more malevolent spirit alive on this continent.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Congressman,” I said.
The coachman asked for directions as we entered Washington. Stevens took charge and we soon reached an old-fashioned brick house on South B Street, not far from Capitol Hill. As the congressman climbed out of the carriage, I glimpsed at an open window an attractive middle-aged woman who I at first thought was white. But a second look detected the faint tan of the mulatto. Her face came aglow as Stevens limped up the path toward her, leaning on a cane. I had a sudden intuition that her enthusiasm extended beyond feelings of gratitude to a kind employer.
“He was crippled from birth,” Dana said. “It soured his spirit. Were it not for that blow of fate, he might have reached the White House. He has the eloquence of a Demosthenes. You should go to the House of Representatives one of these days and listen to him.”
As we pulled away the woman was greeting Stevens at the front door. “Lydia Smith is usually described as his housekeeper. They’re man and wife, as you’ve probably guessed,” Dana said. “But he can’t marry her. Her mother was Negro—and she’s a Roman Catholic in the bargain. Even the Republicans of Pennsylvania are not that enlightened.”
I suddenly saw Thaddeus Stevens’s whole life, with its bewildering mixture of hatred in the name of justice and love in the name of pity. Dana had a knack for injecting such images into my mind. Again I felt submission to him swell in my soul.
Dana debarked at the War Department and I gave the coachman instructions to my rooms on E Street. When I opened the door to my apartment, I found a muscular soldier in a blue uniform sitting at my desk, idly thumbing through a battlefield journal that I had kept sporadically during the war. “Don’t get excited, O’Brien,” he said. “I’m from General Grant’s office. We want the notes.”
He turned and I recognized my visitor. He was Lieutenant Colonel Ely Samuel Parker, a full-blooded Seneca Indian who had served on Grant’s staff during the war. It seemed somehow appropriate for him to use his native stealth to invade my rooms and coolly take possession of them.
I gave my shorthand notebook to him. He thrust it into a valise. “You’ll have it back tomorrow morning. I’ll leave it with your landlady.”
He opened the door and studied the hallway for a moment to make sure it was empty. “If your landlady asks why I visited, we’re working on a book together. About how the Indians really won the war.”
One night around a campflre Parker had told me how he had tried to join the army after Fort Sumter was fired on, and bring a regiment of Iroquois* warriors with him. Senator William Seward of New York (soon to become Lincoln’s secretary of state) had refused to give him a commission, declaring he wanted to win the war without any help from Indians.
*The Iroquois Confederation included the Senecas and five other tribes.
Was there a connection between Parker’s story and today’s testimony about Lee? Was it part of Anglo-Saxon America’s disdain for other races? If so, why had Grant put Parker on his staff? This thing was like a kaleidoscope, with constantly shifting images and shadows in which the truth dissolved.
At six o’clock I headed for dinner with Senator Reverdy Johnson, aka Satan Personified. He greeted me at the door of his Connecticut Avenue mansion with a broad smile and showed me around the splendid first-floor rooms. “A nice little home away from home, don’t you think?” he said. “I find it useful for political entertaining. That’s where you get things done in Washington.”
In a small room off the library, a butler served us good bourbon. Johnson gazed at me with a warmth that seemed genuine. “Along with declaring you an honest man, my friends tell me President Lincoln held you in rather high regard.”
“It was the other way around, Senator.”
He nodded mournfully “What do you think of his successor?”
“He seems to be a decent man, when’s he’s sober,” I said.
“I assure you that’s a canard. Andy Johnson is not a drunkard. I know the man well. His wife wouldn’t tolerate it, for one thing. He’s one of the most uxorious men I’ve ever met.”
“He was drunk as a proverbial skunk at his inauguration.”
“An accident,” Reverdy Johnson said. “He drank too much whiskey to help him cope with a terrible cold—”
He paused to eye the skepticism on my face. “It doesn’t sound plausible, does it,” he said, with a brief laugh. “But it’s the truth. At any rate, he’s not the man we’re here to discuss—”
We sat down at a table set with a white cloth and a full silver service. A colored butler and a colored waiter began serving supper. It was a feast. Prawns from the Chesapeake, followed by a lobster bisque that was laced with sherry. Senator Johnson said he was ready to answer any question that might occur to me.
“Are you taking a fee to defend General Lee? If so, who’s paying it?” I said.
“I’m not taking a fee. I wouldn’t take one if friends of the general tried to force one on me.”
“What would you ordinarily charge for such a case?”
“The question is irrelevant. I often take cases that interest me and charge no fee. A man my age can afford it.”
“I’d still like to know how much.”
“Perhaps ten thousand dollars. If General Lee were a railroad, it might be twenty thousand.”
“Were you ever a slave owner in your native Maryland?”
“I inherited some slaves from my father. I freed them. From my earliest youth I’ve considered slavery an abomination, an affliction—the curse of the South. I’ve never ceased urging a policy of gradual emancipation on men of influence, when we’ve met in private.”
“That’s rather difficult to swallow, Senator,” I said. “Didn’t you argue in Dred Scott that a slave has no inherent rights under the Constitution? That sounds to me like a recipe for perpetual slavery.”
“Dred Scott is the most misunderstood lawsuit in the history of the Union,” Johnson said. “The burden of my argument went in a very different direction. I maintained that Congress did not have the power to legislate on slavery in the states and territories of the United States. It had neither the power to inflict slavery on a territory—or exclude it. That was up to the citizens of the territory, when it became a state.”
The senator sighed heavily and gazed at the Negro butler in the doorway. He was a tall dignified man, with a mustache and goatee. “I was trying to jettison a law that I long considered a mistake. It was passed in 1820, to resolve the first clash between the so-called slave states and free states. Historians call it the Missouri Compromise because it permitted Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine to enter as a free state. It also excluded slavery north of the thirty-sixth degree of latitude. I thought that was an unwarranted exercise of congressional power.”
“Why?” I asked. The Missouri Compromise was only a name to me.
“Because the Constitution unquestionably tolerates slavery, Mr. O’Brien. It says nothing about excluding it from any state. Under that great charter, an American should have had the power to take a slave from one state or territory to another state or territory, without interference from federal authority.”
“And the Supreme Court agreed with your argument?” I said.
Johnson nodded. “They accepted the Constitution as the final arbiter, as well they should have. The Southern majority on the court also saw that confining slavery to a minority of the states was a recipe for eventual disunion.”
“Instead, the decision seemed to accelerate disunion.”
Johnson nodded again, in a much more mournful way. “The abolitionists in the Republican Party were enraged. They saw that I was striking at the heart of the appeal of the new party. That appeal was not abolitionism. That was never a majority creed. It was the Republican slogan about free soil for free men that won over most Northern voters. The abolitionists slandered Chief Justice Taney and the other Southerners on the court with unparalleled venom.”
I had read some of this venom and agreed with it at the time. The Dred Scott decision was portrayed by Dana and others as an example of the slave power’s ability to corrupt the Supreme Court. “But you did argue that slaves have—or had—no inherent rights,” I said, with an edge in my voice.
“I was speaking as a lawyer, Mr. O’Brien,” the senator said. “I never said—nor do I say now—that as human beings, Negroes had no moral rights. Every slaveholder with a decent education knew he was responsible for the health, the safety of these people. I remember once defending a South Carolina slaveholder who had been indicted for abusing his slaves. When I discovered the facts of the case, I was so appalled I withdrew and let a younger associate make the best argument in his power. We lost—the slave owner was publicly rebuked and fined. As a man with some claims to humanity, I took satisfaction in that verdict.”
The soup plates were removed and the butler began carving a suckling pig on a spit. The waiter poured a French burgundy. Senator Johnson understood the amenities of fine dining.
“Do you know General Lee personally?” I asked.
“I met him over twenty years ago, when he was stationed in Baltimore. His family is, of course, well known in Maryland. His unfortunate father lived in Baltimore for a while, trying to escape his creditors in Virginia. He eventually had to flee to the West Indies. We all knew the story, and felt the deepest sympathy for the whole family. We Marylanders, in particular our women, were drawn to Robert. He was uncommonly handsome, for one thing, and marvelously good company. He bore his poverty with such a manly air.”
“Poverty?” I said. “How can you call him poor when he’s married to a woman who owns thirteen thousand Virginia acres?”
The senator sipped his wine. “It’s my understanding that Robert E. Lee never took a cent from his father-in-law, who lived until 1857. It was a point of pride with him. He’d married an heiress—but he was determined to make it clear that her money had nothing to do with it. Rather remarkable, don’t you think? I doubt if I could have done it. Could you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never given it any thought. Since the chances of my marrying an heiress are nonexistent.”
Senator Johnson’s eyebrows elevated at least an inch. “Sophia Carroll, I’ve been told, will inherit seven thousand acres of the richest rice-growing lands in Louisiana.”
“My chances of marrying Miss Carroll are particularly nonexistent.”
“A woman’s heart is a very mysterious thing, Mr. O’Brien. You shouldn’t exclude yourself so totally. You really shouldn’t.”
He let the words sink into my flesh for a moment. Although the room was warm—a Washington heat wave was in the making—I felt a chill, a strange compound of sorrow and longing. “Did Sophia authorize you to say that?” I asked.
“Of course not. She’s deeply hurt and grieved by your association with Charles Dana in this trial—”
“I’m associated with Mr. Dana as a journalist. In no other way. I’m not Mr. Dana’s mouthpiece or puppet. I intend to write this book with an independent mind and eye!”
I sat there, momentarily astonished by my own vehemence. Reverdy Johnson sipped his wine. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “You may have a chance to demonstrate your independence before the trial is over.”
“How?”
“You might be asked to corroborate—or dispute—certain testimony I hope to elicit.”
“I can’t conceive what you’re talking about,” I said.
“It’s just as well. I trust you won’t mention this to Mr. Dana.”
I trust. The implication of the phrase was not lost on me. This man was subtly, adroitly, asking me to switch sides—with Sophia Carroll as my possible reward. I ate the tender, succulent slices of roast pork in silence. Johnson talked knowledgeably about the wine, which some ancestor began importing to Maryland back in the early 1700s.
“I was surprised to find you were friendly with Senator Sumner,” I said.
“The Senate of the United States is a wonderful place. Acrimony is frowned on there—Senator Sumner has learned that the hard way. When he was beaten over the head by that cane-wielding South Carolinian, I immediately wrote him a letter expressing my sympathy. Let me add I regard that attack as one of the worst of the many mistakes made by the Southern ultras. During the war I served on the Foreign Relations Committee with Sumner and was serviceable more than once in smoothing our troubled relationships with France and England. The English ambassador happened to be a special friend. I’ve had him to dinner here many times—”
“I’m frankly puzzled by your politics, Senator. You say you’re a Southerner, deeply sympathetic to the South. But you didn’t support the decision to secede.”
“On the contrary. I told them—Senators Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin and anyone else I could reach—that secession was revolution and President Lincoln would have no choice but to go to war to suppress it. I was in my thirties when South Carolina threatened to secede in 1833. I raised a militia regiment at my own expense to support President Jackson’s proclamation, announcing his determination to invade the state with seventy-five thousand men. The Union and the Constitution that maintains it is our greatest inheritance from the founders, Mr. O’Brien. Lose that and we’re on our way to becoming negligible in the world’s eyes.”
I gulped my wine—a bad habit. Was this my second or my third glass? No matter: in vino veritas. I suddenly blurted, “But was it worth so many dead? Six hundred thousand? I saw them on battlefield after battlefield. Men my age, dying before they’ve had a chance to meet a wife, see their children—”
“I know.”
“What about your children? Did any of them serve?”
“I told them it was an evil war. I wanted them to have nothing to do with it. But my youngest son, Edward, joined the Confederate Army. He saw hard service in the cavalry—and survived, thank God.”
I was bewildered all over again. “But you said—”
“I supported Lincoln, because he had no choice under the Constitution but to act. But I didn’t want any of the children of my blood to die in a war that was rooted in hate, Mr. O’Brien. That was the heart of the matter, as I saw it. People like Thad Stevens and, yes, my pseudofriend Charles Sumner and the rest of their New England tribe hated the South. They hated our tolerance of human foibles, our love of luxury and good living. Their hatred led them to create a mythical South, where every man could satisfy his lowest passions with submissive black women in a plethora of seraglios, from Baltimore to New Orleans. This South never existed, Mr. O’Brien. It’s the product of New England’s crabbed, repressive religion of denial and frozen disdain for everyone and everything outside its borders.”
“I disagree. I think many of the Yankees—perhaps most of them—were sincere in their detestation of slavery. I talked with the men in the ranks, ate with them, slept beside them in the field. It was a holy cause to many of them.”
“What you saw, Mr. O’Brien, was the final stages of what President James Buchanan called a disease of the public mind. Antislavery was a noble cause in its original impulse. But it festered and sweltered in the mire of human passions until it became a suppurating infection, a disease that inflamed men’s brains until they believed it was necessary to kill two hundred and fifty thousand Southerners, desolate a whole region of our country, in order to end the slave system.”
“Was there any other way?” My voice was shrill. I heard anxiety, even desperation in it.
Reverdy Johnson put down his wine glass and sat back in his chair. “Yes, Mr. O’Brien. There was another way. The way of patience and forbearance. Slavery was disappearing slowly, steadily. Slaves were acquiring rights under the laws of the Southern states. Rights to certain types of property—horses, wagons. Are you aware that before the U.S. federal courts at this moment, there are seven thousand claims from slaves for compensation for property destroyed or stolen by the Union armies? Here in Maryland, the progress toward gradual emancipation was gaining ground every day. At the beginning of the war, in my native Baltimore, there were twenty-five thousand free Negroes—and three thousand slaves. In 1860 the census recorded five hundred thousand free Negroes—a half million—in the nation! There were over fifty thousand in Virginia!”
“But it would have taken another century to free all the slaves!”
Johnson shook his head. “I think there would have come a point when free Negroes, by their orderly conduct and their enthusiasm for education and hard work, would have convinced Southerners that they had nothing to fear. I think we would have rid the country of slavery in forty—at the most fifty—years. The state of New York’s law could have become a model for the country. They freed at age twenty-one all Negroes born after a certain date. By 1820 or so, slavery had vanished. At one point slaves were twelve percent of their population.”
I began to see where we were going. I had to frequently remind myself I was not stupid. Had my association with Dana given me that debilitating suspicion? “But the deep South, with its huge numbers of Negroes—would they have dared to free them?”
“Only if the Congress permitted slave owners to take Negroes with them into the territories and even the free states. By dispersing Negroes across the country, the fear of a race war would have dwindled. In the country as a whole, they’re barely ten percent of the population. But the Radical Republicans’ hatred of the South—and, I personally believe, their secret dread of intimate contact with Negroes—would not permit that to happen. In their corrupted hearts, they insisted on immediate abolition within the confines of the slave states because they were hoping for a race war—a bloodbath.”
Dessert was being served: a delicious peach compote. Reverdy Johnson’s lined face grew mournful: “Now you see the reasoning behind my Dred Scott argument—it was an attempt to change the direction of our ship of state, to seize control of the vessel before it was too late. Alas, political passions were already too virulent. The Supreme Court, the most venerated institution in our land, was vilified by the abolitionists with the same abandon with which they slandered the South. The decision was brushed aside because seven of the justices were Southern. It was a revolution, Mr. O’Brien, a revolution led by newspapers like yours. No mainstream paper, except perhaps the Chicago Tribune, was more monomaniacal in the abolitionist cause.”
The senator stirred his coffee. “I’ve never been able to understand why that happened. Mr. Greeley your editor in chief, proceeded to spend the war years searching for a way to end the bloodshed. Didn’t he realize the part he played in starting it?”
“Mr. Greeley wasn’t the real editor of the Tribune while Dana was there. Dana ran the paper,” I said.
“How interesting,” Johnson said.
The senator suggested we move to more comfortable seats. We transferred to a couch and armchair on the other side of the room. “Did you ever meet Chief Justice Taney?” he asked.
I shook my head. Taney was a very old, remote man when I came to Washington. He died soon after the war began.
“His view of the war was profoundly historical. He saw it as a repetition of the clash between the American colonies and the crown. The insults, the threats, the tirades in Congress, above all the attempts to stir Negro insurrections, corresponded to Jefferson’s list of British abuses in the Declaration of Independence, justifying our course in 1776. I was in Taney’s house one night when a young relation came to say goodbye. He was going South to join the Confederate Army. The chief justice told him he was doing exactly the same thing his grandfather had done, when he joined George Washington’s Continental Army.”
“Did you agree with that comparison?”
“I was moved by it—but no, I didn’t agree. The South shares the responsibility for starting the war. The secessionists were a party within the Democrats of the South, almost exactly as the abolitionists festered within the Republicans of the North. The secessionists used John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry to stir revolutionary passions, instead of dismissing him as a deluded madman, living proof that abolition had become a disease of the public mind. Do you know how many fugitive slaves escaped to the North in an average year, Mr. O’Brien?”
I shook my head. I had thought at first this man was trying to seduce me. Now I began to wonder if he was merely trying to educate me.
“Two thousand. Two thousand runaways—from a slave population of four million! Almost all these fugitives came from Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Tennessee, Delaware—slave states with borders on free states. Few if any came from the deep South—hardly surprising, when you consider how many hundreds of hostile miles a runaway would have to traverse from Mississippi or Georgia.”
The senator sprang to his feet and paced the room. Our conversation was stirring deep emotions. “Two thousand. Even if the runaways were all prime Negroes, each worth two thousand dollars in the marketplace, we’re only talking about a loss of four hundred thousand dollars—in an economy of four hundred million!”
Senator Johnson sat down again, and stirred his coffee. “A disease of the public mind, Mr. O’Brien. Its virulence manifested itself in the South as a kind of passionate stupidity. I told Judah Benjamin and Jefferson Davis and a dozen other congressmen and senators I knew well that in this confrontation with Lincoln, we held all the cards. The Constitution was our bulwark, our ultimate defense. Let the abolitionists rant about a higher law than the Constitution. In practical terms, there was none. Slavery was legal in the Constitution and it would stay legal until doomsday, unless the South decided otherwise. I urged them to wait and see how Lincoln governed. Let him decide whether he was the enemy of slavery or its defender—as he must have been, by his inaugural oath. If he abandoned the Constitution—then we could declare the Union null and void with good reason. In that case I would have been among the first to call for Maryland’s secession.”
“Not one of these congressmen and senators listened?”
“They listened with only one ear. They were really helpless against the secessionists in their home states. The folly of it, Mr. O’Brien—the folly of it almost distracts me at times. I often wonder if I can endure it. I’m convinced, now, that Lincoln would have governed temperately, warily, knowing his hold on Congress was a matter of a handful of votes in both houses. As you recall, he won with only forty percent of the popular vote.”
“You think Lincoln would have avoided a war—and gotten rid of slavery?”
“It’s a possibility. He was a very ambitious man. He yearned to leave his mark on history. Once the war began, he was a deeply divided man. In his head he could be as ruthless as Thad Stevens. He was a lawyer, after all. That meant he could justify almost anything, short of outright murder.”
The senator’s smile was sardonic. “I’m proud of my profession, Mr. O’Brien. But I have no illusions about it. Ultimately, if you can manage it, it’s best to have no illusions about anything.”
“Did you know Lincoln well?”
“I worked with him. I went to New Orleans as his commissioner in 1862 to clean up the mess General Butler had created there with his corrupt, obnoxious ways. I found enough evidence to put Butler and his abolitionist friends in jail for a hundred years. While they prated about Negro equality they made millions in contraband cotton and other schemes. But the president chose to do nothing. He was afraid it would damage the war effort. Lincoln was an oddly passive man, for someone who hungered after power and fame. That made him vulnerable—very vulnerable—to the abolitionists, who had no hesitation about beating him over the head in private and in public.”
“If he were alive today would General Lee be on trial?”
“I suspect he might—and it might be a public trial. The abolitionists would have demanded it and Lincoln had developed a habit of compromising with them. Do you recall his amnesty proclamation of late 1863? He offered a full pardon to everyone in the Confederate Army except those above the rank of colonel—and then even more specifically exempted those who had resigned commissions in the army or navy of the United States and afterward aided the rebellion. I think he might have agreed to try Lee, Davis, Benjamin, and half a dozen others if the radicals agreed to call off their bloodhounds henceforth. This secret trial is an index of their weakness, as well as their power. They don’t know where and how the political dust is going to settle. They hope to blow it in the South’s face—which General Lee’s conviction would most certainly accomplish.”
“Senator,” I said. “Have I heard you correctly? The war was caused by a disease of the public mind that infected both sides? Then no one is at fault? It’s simply a tragedy? A gigantic tragedy on a scale unseen or unheard of in the history of civilization?”
“A tragedy in which innocent men such as Robert E. Lee have become mortally entangled.”
“I don’t buy it, Senator. I think someone is guilty. God doesn’t let six hundred thousand men die without someone being responsible!”
I was almost shouting. Reverdy Johnson had destroyed or at least badly damaged my role as the cool, uninvolved outsider, the objective reporter of American events.
“There are plenty of guilty parties, Mr. O’Brien. I hope to uncover one or two in the course of this trial. But Robert E. Lee is not one of them.”
I realized I was close to making a fool of myself. I took a deep breath and regained my self-control. “Thank you for a delicious dinner, Senator. And for your candor. I’ll see you at Arlington tomorrow.”
Reverdy Johnson shook my hand. “I look forward to it,” he said. “I honestly do. We’re going to win this case, Mr. O’Brien.”
I hope you do. For a moment I almost said it. But I managed to hold my fragmented reporter self together long enough to get out the door. In minutes I was striding through the dark streets of Washington, arguing violently with Reverdy Johnson and Charles A. Dana in my aching head—and with Sophia Carroll in my pounding heart.
In spite of a half-bottle of bourbon, sleep eluded me for the rest of the night. I kept seeing battlefields carpeted with the dead. Did General Lee see them, too, in his waking dreams? I gulped down enough porridge for breakfast to settle my stomach and waited outside my boardinghouse for the carriage that would take me to Arlington. Bleary Union soldiers staggered past. The Army of the Potomac—what was left of it—was still celebrating the end of the war.
As I feared, Dana was the carriage’s only occupant. He greeted me with his usual warmth and asked how my dinner with “the son of Satan”— Reverdy Johnson—had gone.
He was mocking Thad Stevens’s fanatic religiosity, telling me that Charles Dana was not one of these wild-eyed Bible thumpers. Dana made his moral judgments without reference to divinity. That was an essential part of his godlike aura.
“Senator Satan cast a spell on me. I’m now convinced General Lee is as innocent as Mary’s little lamb.”
“Good, good. I hope you get that idea into your narrative. The more twists and turns to our story the better. Suspense is what keeps them reading.”
“What do we do if the general dies of heart failure in the middle of the trial?”
“I would be the first to confess my amazement that his chest pains are authentic.”
“You think they’re a play for sympathy?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“I disagree,” I said matter-of-factly. “What I heard at the Lee family table yesterday was rather persuasive.”
I told him Mrs. Lee’s explanation of the origin of Lee’s heart problem. Dana dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “She’s in the game, too. A co-conspirator. I rather like Thad Stevens’s idea of depriving her of the rest of her thirteen thousand ill-gotten acres. That should be in the book. I think the idea should be expressed by you, Jeremiah, with just the right amount of moral indignation.”
Dana had obviously not quit the editing business. Was this the moment to reiterate my intention to write the book my way? I decided against it.
“What did Stevens mean about setting you up in a newspaper that will support the Republican Party? Do we need another Republican paper?”
“I rather think so. In Chicago, Medill of the Tribune is retiring. In New York, Greeley is totally undependable. Ditto Raymond of the Times, who undertakes to decide too much for himself. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Greeley end up in the arms of the Democrats. I’m told he has massive attacks of guilt for starting the war.”
And you of course don’t, I thought. Guilt was an emotion that was foreign to Charles Dana’s soul. He was totally convinced of his irrefutable righteousness.
We picked up Congressman Thaddeus Stevens at his humble residence. His mulatto housekeeper wife gazed fondly from the window as he limped down the path to our carriage. Dana expressed the hope that he had slept well.
“I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in forty years,” Stevens growled. “I was up until three A.M. working on a bill to confiscate slaveholders’ lands. I want to have it ready the moment the verdict on Lee is announced, with the recommendation that his lands should be among the first seized.”
“Ill do my utmost to persuade the judges of the court,” Dana said.
“Good,” Stevens said. He riveted me with his habitual glare and asked about my dinner with Senator Johnson.
“I was just telling Mr. Dana that he cast a satanic spell on me. I now think General Lee is innocent.”
“Is that supposed to be amusing?” Stevens snapped.
“As a matter of fact—yes,” I said.
“The humor escapes me completely. I happen to think it’s all too possible that you’ve become one of the senator’s acolytes,” he snarled.
“I have complete confidence in Jeremiah, even if his sense of humor leaves something to be desired,” Dana said soothingly.
“Let me make it clear I’m not a nativist who thinks our wonderful Anglo-Saxon America should remain unsullied by immigrants,” Stevens said. “I simply think an older man would be better prepared to cope with the appeal to pity nicely mixed with slander of me and my fellow foes of slavery that Reverdy Johnson is certain to make. But you’ve had far more experience in guiding the public mind—”
“The point is, Congressman, Jeremiah is a very good writer. I—if I’m permitted to praise myself—am a rather good editor. Together we’re a very strong combination.”
By now we were almost across the Long Bridge. We headed up the road to Arlington, with the broad shining Potomac and the narrow sliver of the Chesapeake Canal on our right. As we turned into Arlington’s curving drive, I saw Sophia Carroll and Custis Lee strolling the lawn together, their heads bowed in seemingly intense conversation. New longing swelled in my mind and heart—and a renewed suspicion that Custis was my not-so-secret rival.
“General Howard and Custis Lee were in the same class at West Point,” Dana said. “At dinner last night, Howard told me what a proslavery fanatic Custis was. He organized a cabal that ostracized Howard for his abolitionist views. Howard said its real purpose was to displace him as the highest-ranking cadet in the class.”
“Hardly surprising,” Stevens said. “We may hang Custis, too, if all goes well. He’ll regret his years of toadying to Jefferson Davis. He was given a major general’s rank toward the end of the war, which may prove fatal to him. My people favor hanging every Confederate of that rank and above it.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Did what work?” Stevens asked.
“Did Custis graduate first in his class?”
“I believe he did,” Stevens snapped.
“General Howard told me he had tender feelings for General Lee, because of the evenhanded way he conducted himself as superintendent at West Point,” I said.
“I find that hard to believe!” Stevens snarled.
“I’m only a reporter, Congressman. I just write down what people tell me.”
“Young man,” Stevens said. “I wasn’t born yesterday. I know how a reporter tilts a story, choosing one sentence out of the six you give him on a topic, no matter how badly it distorts your full meaning.”
“I guess I’m under some sort of evil spell, Congressman,” I said, dropping all pretense of concealing my dislike of this man. “Maybe I’ll ask Mr. Dana to exorcise me.”
We reached Arlington’s massive portico as I said this. I jumped out of the carriage and strode into the house, leaving Dana the task of reassuring the congressman that a callow youth could be depended upon to assassinate Robert E. Lee’s character with the same vigor one might expect from a man whose opinions had been thoroughly corrupted by maturity.
In the drawing room, I found General Lee conversing with Reverdy Johnson. I shook hands with both and asked the general how he was feeling. “A good night’s sleep has done wonders,” he said cheerfully. “That and a late-night session with my defense counsel.”
So Johnson had ridden out to Arlington after our supper. Why the late-night session? Was he reporting on what he hoped was progress in changing my mind in favor of acquittal? I could recall nothing so obvious emerging from our conversation. At best I had offered neutrality, which may have seemed like a change of heart to him.
“We’ve received some rather good news by telegram,” Senator Johnson said. “General Scott has agreed to come to Washington to testify in General Lee’s defense.”
“I’m still of two minds about accepting the offer,” Lee said. “I’d be mortified if the exertion proved fatal to the old man.”
“He’s coming, General, whether you like it or not,” Johnson said good-humoredly. “Consider him a volunteer.”
“Were you distressed by General Mosby’s testimony yesterday?” I asked.
“Mosby?” Lee said. “No. He told the truth as far as they let him. That’s how lawyers play the game.” He put his hand on Johnson’s arm. “No offense, Senator.”
“Have no fear, General. It is a game—rather like a battle. There are rules of engagement—and the winner inevitably claims victory is proof of his superior moral standing with the almighty.”
Lee smiled wanly. “How true, Senator, how true.”
The members of the military commission filed into the room and took their seats at the baize-covered table. Lee and Johnson sat down at the defense table. At the prosecution table, General Butler sat alone. Where was Judge Advocate General Holt? I turned and asked Dana. He whispered that the trial of the Lincoln assassins required Holt’s attention for the morning.
“Have no fear,” Dana added. “General Butler is more than ready to argue the prosecution case alone.”
That was no surprise. No one equaled Ben Butler’s appetite for public attention. A lot of people had told me he began running for president the moment he put on a uniform. His lack of military talent scuttled that nightmarish dream. Was he hoping to renew his quest by claiming credit for General Lee’s conviction? A disturbing thought.
We watched while bedraggled Major Henry Wirz made another entrance, again laden with manacles and chains, and took his place in the witness chair. The commander of the Andersonville prison camp seemed more composed today. He made no pleas for mercy. He sat down and stared stonily at Butler, who lumbered toward him until he was only a foot or two away.
“State your name and rank in the Confederate army,” Butler said.
“I’m Major Henry Wirz,” the prisoner said, with a rather heavy German accent.
“You were the commander of the Andersonville prison camp?”
“The correct name was Fort Sumter.”
“How many prisoners did you have in the camp?”
“In mid-1864, the number rose to thirty-three thousand.”
“Were there any Union officers in the camp?”
“No. They were all enlisted men.”
“Why weren’t the officers allowed to join their men?”
“I don’t know. It was the policy of the Confederate government.”
“Did you know General Lee?”
“I knew who he was.”
“Did you ever communicate with him?”
“No. My superior was General Winder, who was in charge of all our prisons east of the Mississippi.”
“What did you tell General Winder about Andersonville?”
“The prisoners were dying like cattle. There wasn’t enough food.”
“What did he say?”
“He was sarcastic. He told me he would inform General Lee that henceforth he should capture no more prisoners.”
“Are you inclined to think Winder informed General Lee of the situation in the prison camps—Andersonville in particular?”
“I had that impression,” Wirz said. “He knew General Lee well in the old army.”
“How many men died at Andersonville, Major?”
“I’m not sure. Our records were a mess. They reduced the camp staff to a skeleton force—fighting men were needed in the armies.”
“At least twelve thousand, according to our preliminary investigation.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you think General Lee was morally derelict, to keep sending men to your camp, knowing death was likely to be their fate?”
“I think they were all derelict—Winder, President Davis, General Lee. They all knew what was happening. I made reports. I wrote private letters.”
“Thank you, Major Wirz. You may step down.”
Wirz clanked to a seat in the rear of the room. Butler asked General Lee to take the stand. “You’ve heard Major Wirz’s testimony, General. Were you aware that prisoners were dying like cattle in Andersonville?”
“I was aware that prisoners were dying on both sides of the battle lines, General Butler,” Lee said. “But there was little or nothing I could do about it.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t in charge of exchanging prisoners. Only of capturing them,” Lee said. A small smile played across his mouth, which he quickly suppressed.
“Are you implying that Union troops were easily captured?”
“By no means.”
“What are you implying?”
“I’m saying prisoners were none of my business. General Winder was in charge of prisons. He reported to President Davis. I seem to recall there were many problems involved in the process that resisted solution.”
“It so happens I was the Union representative in negotiations to exchange prisoners in 1863,” Butler said. “The chief problem was the Confederacy’s refusal to exchange captured Negro soldiers for white soldiers. Were you in favor of that policy?”
“No. I urged General Davis to drop it, if it were politically possible. He told me it was not politically possible. Our congress was outraged by the federal decision to arm runaway slaves and use them as troops. So, I might add, was President Davis. He was determined to keep Negroes out of the prisoner process. He contended the slaves should be returned to their masters. Since most of them refused to name their masters, I saw little point to this argument. But I’m not a politician, General Butler.”
“So you simply went along with the status quo, knowing it meant death and humiliation to thousands of men.”
“What would you have done in my place, General Butler?”
For a moment Butler was nonplussed. But he quickly regained the initiative. “What a nice compliment. To assume I could ever arrive in your place, by revolting against the best government on the planet.”
“I thought the same thing when the war began, General. But by the time it ended, I had grave doubts about the virtue of the federal government. Their conduct of the war descended to sheer bestiality, more than once.”
“I challenge you to give me one example of bestiality,” Butler snarled.
“I seem to recall a man named Mumford, who in a moment of enthusiasm tore down the Union flag in New Orleans. The Union commander hanged him, in spite of the tearful pleas of his wife and three children.”
“HOW DARE YOU, SIR!” Butler roared. “HOW DARE YOU INSULT ME TO MY FACE, AND SIMULTANEOUSLY DISPLAY YOUR CONTEMPT FOR THE AUTHORITY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT! YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL I WAS THE COMMANDER IN NEW ORLEANS WHO HANGED THIS MAN FOR ATTEMPTING TO START AN INSURRECTION THAT WOULD HAVE TAKEN THE LIVES OF EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD IN THE CITY!”
Butler’s face had turned a lurid magenta. He was breathing like a steam engine. I wondered if he, instead of General Lee, would become a heart seizure casualty.
“It was widely considered to be an act of bestiality,” General Lee said in the same calm, measured voice. “I’m inclined to agree with that judgment.”
Butler whirled to the judges. “I ask you, gentlemen of the court, have you ever seen a man with a more arrogant view of this great rebellion? Even here, on trial for his life, he makes no attempt to hide his Rebel sympathies.”
Senator Reverdy Johnson rose at the defense table. “May I ask the court to stop General Butler’s gross blackguarding of General Lee? I thought we were here to discuss specific charges. I hope we haven’t reached the point in the jurisprudence of military commissions when a man can be condemned to death because the prosecutor takes offense at his opinions.”
General Stapleton exchanged uneasy glances with his fellow judges. “I think you’re wandering rather far from the point at issue, General Butler,” he said. “William Mumford’s fate has nothing to do with General Lee’s supposed responsibility for the deaths of prisoners of war in Andersonville.”
Still enraged, Butler declined to swallow this rebuke. “On the contrary, General Lee’s hostile attitude is extremely pertinent to the whole issue of prisoner exchange. His readiness to slander officers supporting the Union cause reveals an equal readiness to consign to starvation and death the men in the ranks who also supported it.”
A subtle hardening of General Stapleton’s expression suggested he was less than thrilled with General Butler’s prosecutorial style. “Proceed, General,” Stapleton said.
Butler returned to General Lee. “Were you aware that the situation at Andersonville was desperate by the summer of 1864?”
“I heard rumors to that effect. But there was nothing I could do about it. By that time, the prisoner-exchange negotiations had broken down. No one was being exchanged.”
“Why didn’t you use your influence with President Davis to persuade him to reopen the negotiations?”
“I believe he told me it was hopeless. The Union forces had simply ceased to parley on the matter.”
Butler wheeled to address the judges. “Gentlemen, I hereby assert that statement is a lie. We knew men were dying at Andersonville. We repeatedly tried to exchange prisoners on a one-to-one basis. We got nowhere.”
Now it was General Lee’s turn to flush. His complexion did not quite equal General Butler’s magenta—but it came close. “Sir—may I ask how that statement can possibly be a lie? I simply told you what I heard from President Davis.”
“Whether you were lying or you knew he was lying amounts to the same thing,” Butler said.
Reverdy Johnson was on his feet again. “May I assure the court that we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is General Butler who is lying— or at the very least, does not have adequate knowledge of the subject?”
“Thank you, Senator,” General Stapleton said. “General Butler, do you have any further statements to make on this charge?”
“Only to sum it up,” Butler said. “The conduct of General Lee on the witness stand, his sneering attitude toward the court and the Union cause, lend credence to Major Wirz’s claim that his pleas for help to save the starving men in his care went unheeded, if not through General Lee’s sole agency, at the very least with his overt and enthusiastic cooperation.”
“Thank you, General,” Stapleton said. “Are you ready to bring evidence in support of the next charge?”
“Of course,” General Butler said. He turned and gestured to the blue-uniformed doorkeeper. “Bring in the prisoner who calls himself Lewis Payne.”
Now we knew why Judge Advocate General Holt had visited the trial of Lincoln’s assassins. I looked over my shoulder at Dana. He greeted my inquiring glance with one of his blithe smiles. As if to say: O’Brien, when are you going to realize I’m never going to let you in on all the secrets?
Five minutes passed. Finally, Judge Advocate General Holt made his entrance, triumphant smile wreathing his jowly face. Behind him shuffled Lewis Payne, laden with enough manacles and chains to tame a giant. His face was splotched with black and blue bruises, suggesting interrogations by less than compassionate jailers. Holt directed the prisoner to the witness chair. General Butler greeted his fellow prosecutor with a cordial handshake, and yielded the floor to him.
Bewilderment oozed across Payne’s face as he gazed at the array of generals, including Robert E. Lee. He had evidently been told nothing about where he was going. Holt informed the court that the man’s real name was Lewis Powell. “Lewis Powell, alias Lewis Payne,” he said. “You’re here to tell us why and how you became involved in the plot to murder President Abraham Lincoln. Is that clear to you?”
“Yessir,” Powell (as I shall now call him) said in a thick-tongued mumble.
“Where were you born?”
“Alabama.”
“You joined the Confederate Army?”
“Yessir.”
“How did you become one of Mosby’s men?”
“Skedaddled from my regiment. We wasn’t doin‘ enough fightin’ to satisfy me. General Mosby didn’t ask no questions if you was willin‘ to shoot to kill.”
“You killed people as a Mosby rider?”
“Sure did. Plenty. We had all this captured ammo. Got to be dead shots. I was about the best in the regiment.”
“Then what happened?”
“General Mosby come to me. Said he had orders from General Lee to find a man who was a crack shot and wasn’t afraid of nothin‘. He thought I was the man. I was to go to Washington and help some fellows get rid of Old Abe. They told me I’d be rich if we managed it. I thought why not give it a try?”
“So you went to Washington?”
“Yeah. Found myself with the famous actor John Wilkes Booth. Fellow named Suratt, a secret agent, got us together. Booth was a big talker but not much on doin‘ anythin’. I sort of took charge and worked out the plan. Booth was to shoot Abe, I’d take care of Secretary Seward, and another fellow, Atzerodt, was assigned the vice president, old Andy Johnson. Booth and I did our jobs. But the other fellow’s feet got cold and old Andy got off without a scratch.”
“General Mosby told you to consider yourself acting under General Lee’s orders?”
“Yessir.”
Powell’s eyes darted back and forth in his haggard face like a pair of marbles in a child’s rattle. If this was all rehearsed, it was well rehearsed. The judges listened with rapt fascination. I found myself more than half convinced I had just heard some extraordinary truths.
Judge Advocate General Holt turned to the judges. “You gentlemen are undoubtedly aware of the facts from which this man’s statements are drawn. On the night of April 14, John Wilkes Booth shot and killed President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. Simultaneously, this man attacked Secretary of State Seward, stabbing him repeatedly. For a while Mr. Seward’s life was given up but he now seems to be recovering from his wounds. George Atzerodt, an admitted Confederate agent, was assigned the task of murdering then Vice President Johnson but his courage failed him. He has confessed and confirmed everything this man has just told us.”
General Meade contemplated Powell with visible suspicion. “Did you have any written orders, which would prove what you just said?” he asked.
“Nossir,” Powell said. “It was all secret. If I got caught, I was to pretend I was a deserter.”
“Which in fact you were,” General Smith said dryly.
“Yessir. But not from the war,” Powell said.
“Well said, well said,” Judge Advocate General Holt chortled, beaming at Powell as if he were his protégé.
“Does the defending counsel have any questions?” General Stapleton asked.
“I have a few,” Reverdy Johnson said. He strolled casually across the room to Powell’s chair and peered at the bruises on his face.
“Someone beat you up?”
“When I first got arrested,” Powell said.
“Why did they do that?”
“Wanted to know the names of the other fellows.”
“You told them?”
“Not at first. But pretty soon I saw there wasn’t no point. They got Atzerodt and that nancy told them everything.”
“You were arrested on April 15, the day after the president’s murder?”
Powell nodded.
“Those bruises don’t look six weeks old to me. Some of them look like you got them yesterday—or the day before.”
Powell’s eyes darted in all directions once more. “Some of the guards are mean bastards,” he said.
“Did they want you to do something... or say something...?”
Powell shook his head.
“Say something about General Lee that was a lie?”
Powell shook his head vigorously, violently.
“Did Judge Advocate General Holt tell you he’d commute your sentence to life imprisonment if you said this?”
Powell’s head shook so hard, I thought it was going to fly off his shoulders. General Holt was on his feet, roaring his objection to Johnson’s suggestion. “That question is tendentious and insulting to the dignity of the court!” he roared. “I want it struck from the record!”
General Stapleton, in his role as president of the court, called for an adjournment while the judges conferred with the judge advocate general. We all retired to Arlington’s main hall. I found myself standing next to Sophia Carroll. She gave me a smile that recalled our days when I thought we were coconspirators for an early peace—followed by a wedding. “Senator Johnson was here last night,” she said in a low voice. “He praised you extravagantly as someone who was ready to put honesty ahead of vengeance.”
“I’ve always been ready to do that,” I said.
“It would make all the difference in the world to me, Jeremiah.”
If her eyes were not aglow with affection, it was a marvelous imitation of it. The doorkeeper summoned us back to the courtroom, leaving me no time to understand exactly how I was supposed to demonstrate enough honesty to sustain that affection. Surely she did not expect me to abandon the book or write a piece of fiction that exculpated General Lee on all points.
In the courtroom, General Stapleton announced that the court had accepted Judge Advocate General Holt’s objection. Reverdy Johnson’s question was stricken from the record. Johnson seemed unbothered. He smiled and made another brief bow, signifying he accepted the authority of the judge advocate general. I wondered if he was betting each time Holt sustained his own objection, the judges lost another measure of confidence in justice under the military commission system.
Senator Johnson resumed his questioning of Powell. “Do you expect to be found guilty of plotting to murder President Lincoln and Secretary Seward?”
Powell nodded glumly. “We done it,” he muttered.
“Did General Lee—or General Mosby—give you any specific directions about how to conduct these assassinations?”
Powell shook his head. “Just to get’m,” he said.
“How did you expect to escape? Was there no plan?”
Powell shook his head. “Just skeedaddle,” he said.
“It sounds like it was almost a suicide mission,” Johnson said.
“I guess it was,” Powell muttered.
“You were ready to die for the Southern cause?”
Powell nodded. There was not an iota of enthusiasm or fervor in his demeanor. One sensed nothing but a desperate man, sticking to a prearranged story.
“Could you tell us why you felt this way? What was there about the South’s cause that made you ready to die for it.”
“Dunno ezactly,” Powell muttered.
“You have no idea?” Johnson said, a hint of mockery in his voice.
“I said I dunno!” Powell shouted, half springing to his feet. He collapsed back into his chair with a great rattle of his chains.
“No further questions,” Reverdy Johnson said, and stalked back to the defense table. Lewis Powell clanked out the door. I looked over my shoulder at Charles Dana. He was staring straight ahead, his mouth grim. Score one or their side, I thought.
General Butler rose to summon another witness, whose name was instantly familiar to me: Sandford Conover. Everyone at the Tribune knew his name, though he wrote anonymously, supposedly to avoid assassination. He had been a clerk in the Confederate War Department who switched sides late in 1863 and wrote a number of articles depicting life in the wartime South as a saga of growing despair and desperation. He also claimed to have overheard numerous discussions of plans to kill Lincoln.
A small snub-nosed man with hair carefully slicked back, Conover was obviously on friendly terms with the judge advocate general. He greeted Holt with a cheerful, “Good morning,” and listened to Holt’s description of his turncoat career with something close to smug satisfaction on his face.
“Mr. Conover went to Canada in the early months of this year to ingratiate himself with the so-called Confederate peace commissioners there,” General Holt said. “Using an assumed name, and pretending to be a Southern enthusiast, he was soon in their confidence. Tell us what you found, Mr. Conover, in regard to a plot to murder the president.”
“It was rather far along when I arrived,” Conover said in a chirpy voice that seemed unsuited to his topic. “By revealing how much I knew about the plan from my acquaintance with President Davis, General Lee, and others in Richmond, I soon had them telling me the most intimate details. I was in Montreal with Jacob Thompson, the leader of the peace commission, when he received letters from President Davis and Secretary of State Judah Benjamin on April 6, 1865. Thompson tapped the letters and said: ‘This makes the thing all right.” He was, of course, referring to the assassins’ plans. Davis had given them his official approval.“
“Was General Lee mentioned in these letters?” Holt asked.
“Most assuredly,” Conover said. “He was described as supplying the Washington conspirators with a soldier who had the courage to translate the affair from theory to act.”
“So there is no doubt in your mind that General Lee knew and approved of the plot?”
“None whatsoever. I was told, in fact, that he had repeatedly urged it as the South’s one hope of survival.”
“Did you try to alert federal authorities to the plot?”
“I wrote a dispatch that should have been published in the Tribune. But it never appeared. I don’t know what happened to it.”
This I found very hard to swallow. I looked over my shoulder to give Dana a skeptical look. Holt asked Conover why the Tribune did not use it. “I think Mr. Greeley was rather angry at Lincoln for outmaneuvering him in the matter of the peace commissioners in Canada.”
Conover went on to remind us that when the Confederate commissioners had appeared in Canada and declared they were ready to negotiate peace, Greeley had publicly urged Lincoln to deal with them. Lincoln suggested Greeley talk to them first. It soon became apparent that the commissioners had no substantial concessions to make and were insisting that Southern independence was a precondition for discussions. Greeley had ended up looking foolish. Whereupon he apparently sought revenge by suppressing information about the plot to kill Lincoln.
Dana whispered in my ear: “I believe every word of that.”
For a moment my brain reeled. Greeley as a coconspirator in Lincoln’s murder? That would wreck the Tribune. It would go out of business overnight. Leaving a large void for a paper financed by the Radical Republicans, edited by Charles A. Dana. The wheels within the wheels of this apparatus were beginning to assume logarithmic complexity.
General Stapleton asked Senator Johnson if he had any questions for the witness. “A few,” he said.
He strolled up and down in front of Conover’s chair for a while, then stuck his hand in his pants pocket, jangled some loose change, and stared at the turncoat for a moment. “What position did you hold in the Confederate government, before you defected, Mr. Conover?”
“I was a cipher clerk. I read much of the secret correspondence of the government. The information led directly to my loss of faith in the Confederacy. They were attempting to sign treaties with England and France which would have given these enemies of our country positions of power in Mexico and other parts of North America.”
“Interesting. You say you were friendly with President Davis, Secretary of State Benjamin, and other Confederate leaders. How did you manage this? A cipher clerk seems a rather lowly position.”
“I am a man of intelligence. When I brought dispatches to them, I had no hesitation in dispensing my opinions on the conduct of the war. They listened to me with respect and responded with the candor my observations deserved.”
The pomposity of this little man was shrinking my faith in his honesty. I reminded myself that pomposity was not a de facto proof of prevarication.
“You told us that you became an intimate friend of Peace Commissioner Jacob Thompson, under your alias, James Watson Wallace?” Reverdy Johnson asked.
“That is correct,” Conover said.
From his inside coat pocket, Reverdy Johnson drew a document. “Is this your handwriting?”
Conover studied the piece of paper for a moment. “Yes,” he said.
“Gentlemen,” Johnson said, turning to the five generals. “This is a letter that James Watson Wallace wrote to Jacob Thompson on March 20, 1865. It begins as follows: ‘Although I have not had the pleasure of your acquaintance.’ Yet in two weeks, give or take some days, Mr. Conover would have us believe Mr. Thompson was revealing to him the deepest secret the Confederate government supposedly had to hide. Does this seem likely?”
“How did you obtain this letter?” General Burnside asked in a truculent voice.
“Some friends of General Lee’s, learning of Mr. Conover’s probable appearance here, obtained it from Mr. Thompson.”
“Where is Mr. Thompson at present?” General Howard asked.
“I’m not free to say,” Johnson said. “He is not residing in this country.”
“I begin to think at the end of this trial I’ll recommend your arrest, Senator Johnson,” Burnside growled.
“I’ll be happy to dispute that attempt in any court you choose, General. As long as it isn’t a military commission.”
Burnside glowered. Idiocy, I thought. Why were they giving Johnson so many opportunities to shoot holes in the constitutionality of military commissions? General Stapleton apparently had the same thought. He tapped his gavel and again urged everyone to stick to the topic before the court.
Conover demanded to see the letter for a second look. He studied it ferociously and admitted he had written it. But it was misdated by someone out to ruin him. He went to Canada in January of 1865. That gave him more than enough time to become the gullible Thompson’s intimate friend.
Reverdy Johnson regained the letter and studied the date. He placed it on the table before General Stapleton. “I leave it to you gentlemen to determine whether the date of this letter shows any sign of being altered. I find no trace of such chicanery.”
With studied contempt, Johnson turned his back on Conover and strolled back to the defense table. “I have no more questions,” he said and sat down, tossing one leg nonchalantly over the other.
Judge Advocate General Holt now summoned Lafayette Baker to the stand. “Will you state your name and rank, please?”
“I became a brigadier general of U.S. Volunteers on April 26 of this year,” Baker said. “Previously, I was colonel of First District of Columbia Cavalry. Our mission was secret service work.”
“You had many agents inside the Confederate government?”
“A great many.”
“At one time the Confederate government considered you one of their spies. Am I correct in that recollection?”
Baker’s smile mixed craftiness and self-satisfaction. “Yes. That was in July of 1861. I spent over a month in Richmond, pretending I had changed sides.”
“Fascinating. Were you aware that there was a plot to assassinate the president?”
“We had reports of it being discussed, immediately after Mr. Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. We urged him to take precautions. But he was a hard man to persuade to be careful. He was afraid people would think he lacked courage.”
“Who was involved in these plots?”
“Jefferson Davis was the prime coadjutor. But he depended greatly for advice on General Lee, as to the timeliness and the necessity for the deed. He knew it would smack of desperation. So he awaited word from General Lee that there was no other alternative left to rescue their sinking cause.”
“Did you have any inkling of who was involved?”
“We had too many inklings. The Confederates had become rather good at spreading half a dozen versions of their plans in our path, leaving us short of manpower to track each one down.”
Surratt, I thought. Are you going to mention John Surratt? I was thinking of Sophia’s warning about the money she had given John Surratt to finance a plot to kidnap Lincoln, and my passing it on to Dana with no discernible effect.
“That means, I suppose, that the particular band who perpetrated the horrid deed was unknown to you?”
“Unknown as potential assassins, certainly,” Baker said mournfully.
“Would you tell us your opinion of the testimony we have presented from Lewis Powell and Sandford Conover?”
“It is eminently convincing—and fits perfectly into the reports I received of General Lee’s determination to utilize the most desperate, the most despicable, means to avoid defeat. As evidenced by his remark about the federal government’s bestiality, he had acquired a ferocious hatred of the president, because he was the man who had destroyed his dream of becoming America’s Napoleon.”
“You were in charge of hunting down Lincoln’s assassins?”
“Yes. It was very satisfying to capture or kill every one of them.”
Suratt, I thought. What about John Suratt?
“Thank you, General Baker,” Holt said and retired to the prosecutor’s table.
Reverdy Johnson rose at the defense table. He studied Baker from a distance for a long moment, then ambled toward him. “You’re an impressive man, General Baker.”
“Thank you.”
“Your opinions are delivered with an authoritative ring. Why were you promoted to a general’s rank only after the war was over?”
“I suppose you could say it was a reward for services to the Union.”
“Who gave you that reward? President Johnson?”
“I believe he signed my commission.”
“How would he know anything about your services? He spent the war in the U.S. Senate. So did I. I don’t recall any reports from the government praising the secret service or detailing their accomplishments.”
“That’s hardly surprising, Senator. We are, as the name suggests, an organization that is not supposed to attract public notice.”
“So someone else recommended you?”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Who would that be? Secretary of War Stanton? Or Assistant Secretary of War Dana?”
“I’m not sure. I never inquired,” Baker said insolently.
“Are you a close friend of Mr. Stanton’s?”
“Not really.”
“Who did you report to at the War Department?”
“Secretary Dana.”
“You consider him your friend? And vice versa?”
“Yes. Very much so.”
“So it was almost certainly Mr. Dana who recommended you.”
“I suppose so.”
“Have you discussed General Lee’s guilt with Mr. Dana?”
“Yes. Yes, I have,” Baker said. He was growing more and more uneasy. His eyes drifted to the prosecution table with a question in them. Why don’t you stop this man?
“Did Mr. Dana bring it up—or did you advance the idea first?”
“I believe he brought it up.”
“Mr. Dana believed General Lee was guilty of treason—as well as murder?”
“Yes, I think he did. I think he still does. So do I.”
“Did you send Mr. Dana written reports from your spies, stating that General Lee was involved in this conspiracy to murder President Lincoln?”
“No. I informed him verbally.”
“Did you receive written reports?”
“Yes. But I destroyed them.”
“Why?”
“To insure the safety of the spy.”
“That means you can’t tell us the identity of any of these spies?”
“That is correct. I would be risking their lives. The South is far from reconciled to defeat. They’d be quick to exact vengeance on anyone whom they considered a traitor.”
“You don’t think these distinguished judges, all wearing the uniform of the United States Army, would keep the man’s identity a secret?”
“I have no worries about them, Senator. But I have a great many about you—and your client and his family. Everything I’ve seen and heard thus far convinces me that you and they are inveterate foes of the Union.”
“So we’re reduced to taking your word for all these assertions about General Lee?”
“My word, Senator, is my bond.”
Senator Johnson gave Lafayette Baker one of his mock bows. “I’m sure it is, General,” he said.
Johnson paced for a moment, stroking his chin. “Weren’t you, in the prewar years, involved in purging San Francisco of supposed criminals?”
“There was nothing supposed about them, Senator. They were creating anarchy in the city. Something had to be done to restore order.”
“And that something, in your opinion, was hanging men without benefit of a trial? Vigilante justice, I believe you called it.”
“Yes. That was what we called it—vigilante justice. It restored order to San Francisco.”
“So—this court is being asked to rely on the word of a man who is predisposed to hang people he assumes are guilty. Would you consider that a fair statement of your position, General Baker?”
Johnson leaned on the word general just enough to suggest there was something tainted about Baker’s brigadiership.
“On the contrary,” Baker snarled, “I consider it a slanderous distortion.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, General,” Johnson said. “We’ll have to let these military commissioners, sitting here in solemn array as judges, decide which of us is right.”
Reverdy Johnson stalked back to the defense table. General Stapleton asked the prosecution if they had any additional witnesses to support the fifth charge. Judge Advocate General Holt said they were satisfied with the witnesses who had testified that General Lee was a prime mover in the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
Although it was only eleven o’clock, General Stapleton adjourned the court for our midday meal. He remarked that he did not want to tire General Lee. The general said he felt fine. Nevertheless, he appreciated General Stapleton’s thoughtfulness.
As we rose, Dana took my arm. “Let’s go for a horseback ride and get some clean air in our lungs. The polluted atmosphere of this courtroom is beginning to sicken me.”
I could not help wondering if he was talking about the recent witnesses for the prosecution. Was it an indication of the way my mind was changing? I quickly realized, of course, that he meant Reverdy Johnson and his talent for casting doubt on testimony that Dana had considered invulnerable.
“I know what you mean,” I said, simultaneously resolving to make sure Dana did not know what I really meant.
Dana borrowed horses from the white officers of the colored regiment. In a few minutes we were riding west along the dusty road beside the Potomac. Behind us on two more borrowed horses trotted Dana’s two bodyguards, Privates Jupiter Hemings and George Bullitt, with carbines slung over their shoulders. It was a very hot day and I soon found myself wishing I had worn a hat. The sun was baking my brain.
Dana said little or nothing for the first half hour of our ride. I struck up a conversation with George Bullitt. He too was a runaway slave from Kentucky. I asked him if he planned to return to his native state. “No, siree,” he said, with a smile. “Mr. Dana’s gonna get me some land here in Virginia. I done sent word to my wife and chillun to join me here. They comin‘ on the railroad in a month’s time.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Three boys,” he said. “Growin‘ fast. I got to get to work to put bread on the table.”
I soon realized we were heading for the battlefield at Bull Run. As we approached the site, I found myself remembering that chaotic day, the heat, the shock of seeing men bleeding and dying on the grass, the fright and consternation on the faces of the Northern congressmen who had ridden out to witness an easy victory I asked Dana the purpose of our little journey Was he going to give our escorts a history lesson?
“There are a number of farms around the battlefield that are for sale,” Dana said. “I see a good chance of founding a colony of free Negro farmers here. A rather nice symbolic touch, don’t you think?”
“Very nice,” I said. It was more than nice, it was brilliant. A typical Dana stroke. I saw why he had invited me on this excursion. He was trying to reinforce the ideal side of our enterprise, in a sort of defiance of the sordid ambiguities that were being revealed in Arlington’s improvised courtroom.
“I’ve promised Jupiter and George that their names will be at the head of the list. I’m calling on the men who backed John Brown to make good on their commitment to colored Americans.”
“I didn’t realize you knew them,” I said.
“We treated them rather objectively in the Tribune at the time,” Dana said with a reflective smile. “They were too unpopular to defend. Now they can come forward and reap their reward. I think the country is ready to regard them as heroes.”
“Heroes? Didn’t they all flee to Canada?” I said. I had only vague recollections of John Brown’s 1859 raid. At the time I was working in the Tribune newsroom as Dana’s assistant. I only knew what I read in the paper. The war years had blown most of the details from my mind.
“Moral heroes,” Dana said. “They weren’t the soldierly type. But their idealism was sublime.”
We cantered down a hill toward Blackburn’s Ford, where the first blood of the battle had been spilled. The scene was little changed by the years. Bull Run Creek gurgled placidly over the shallows. Old trees shaded the ground on both sides. Dana spurred his horse into the water, which was only a few feet deep.
A shot rang out. A bullet took off Dana’s wide-brimmed black hat. I stared as the hat spun into the creek and drifted downstream. For a moment I felt disoriented. Wasn’t the war over? Were we being shot at by ghosts?
“Get back, get back,” Jupiter Hemings shouted from the bank. He was off his horse, his carbine in hand. George Bullitt was prone on his face in the dust, clutching his gun. Both men fired as we wheeled our horses and rode back into the trees on the eastern side of the creek. I flattened myself on my horse’s neck to give the marksman a difficult target. Dana declined to display any fear. He rode straight up until we were far enough into the trees to be safe. Our bodyguards quickly emptied their seven-shot carbines and rolled on their sides to reload.
From the other side of the creek, there was only silence. Our bodyguards blasted another fourteen shots into the trees. Dana curtly ordered them to stop shooting until they saw a target. We waited another five minutes in silence. Then a voice called from the other side of the creek. “Hey, Dana. You think that was an accident, shootin‘ off your hat?”
Dana said nothing.
“We coulda put that bullet between your eyes. But we got orders not to do that, yet.”
“Who are you?” Dana shouted.
“Friends of Robert E. Lee.”
“I’ll come back here with a regiment. We’ll see how friendly you are then.”
“You ain’t gonna find us with a regiment. Or ten regiments. We spent the war makin‘ fools of Yankee regiments. Take some advice, Dana. Quit this trial, take your pet niggers and go back to Massachusetts.”
“Give them another volley,” Dana said to our bodyguards.
The Negroes blasted another fourteen rounds into the trees, to no apparent effect. There was about a minute of silence. Then a single gun fired on the other side of the creek. George Bullitt groaned. His head sagged over his gun. I crawled to his side. A bullet had struck him in the forehead. Blood oozed down his black face.
“He’s dead,” I reported to Dana.
“That nigger’s blood is on your hands, Dana,” called the voice from the other side of the creek.
Jupiter Hemings crawled over to us. “We got to get outta here,” he said. “They could be a hundred of ‘m over there.”
“We must get Bullitt’s body on his horse,” Dana said. “I want to bring him back to Arlington.”
It was a struggle to drape the dead man over his horse’s saddle. He weighed at least two hundred pounds. But we finally managed it. At a plodding gait, we retraced our course to Arlington. It was mid-afternoon by the time we arrived. The generals were all out on the portico, waiting for us. As we came up the drive, they rushed to the steps to stare in disbelief at our little procession.
George Bullitt’s dangling head dripped blood into the dust. “Where’s General Lee?” Dana said.
“Upstairs in his room,” General Holt said.
“Get him down here,” Dana said. “I want him to see what his friends have done. I want you all to hear why this trial is a necessity if we’re going to have a decent country!”
“What in the world did General Lee have to do with this?” Jonathan Stapleton asked.
“Private George Bullitt was gunned down as we crossed Bull Run Creek at Blackburn’s Ford. The perpetrators called to us from the other side to announce themselves as General Lee’s friends.”
“Is that true?” General Stapleton asked me.
I nodded. “It true, General,” Private Hemings added. “They shot him. Never gave us a chance to shoot back.”
This was so far from the truth, I found myself doubting Hemings’s testimony about Saltville—an irrelevant thought for the moment. The man was enraged. He was embroidering the truth from praiseworthy motives, at least.
“What took you in that direction?” Baldy Smith asked.
“There was farm property on and around the battlefield I’m planning to buy—to settle freed blacks on it,” Dana said.
“Did anyone know that?” General Stapleton asked.
“I’ve made inquiries through several agents,” Dana said.
“Perhaps that’s why they shot this fellow,” General Meade said.
“I disagree, General,” Dana said. “They said in the most explicit fashion that if we did not quit this trial, they’d kill us all, exactly as they killed this poor fellow.”
“That what they said, General,” Jupiter Hemings avowed.
“I think—in fact, I insist—that General Lee be invited to view this... this murder committed in his name,” Ben Butler bellowed.
General Stapleton looked through Butler as if he did not exist. “Let’s get this corpse out of here. Mrs. Lee and her young companion are downstairs.”
“I’m talking about General Lee. I want him to see the evidence of this crime,” Butler said in the same stentorian tone.
“I don’t think that’s necessary, General,” Stapleton said.
At this point, General Custis Lee came out on the porch and gazed in disbelief at George Bullitt’s corpse. He instantly grasped the situation and went back into the house without saying a word. General Stapleton ordered Hemings to lead Bullitt’s horse around the house to the barns in the rear.
“I think we need more protection,” Judge Advocate General Holt said, gazing anxiously into the distance. “I don’t have much confidence in our current bodyguards.”
“Are you implying they won’t fight because they’re colored?” Oliver Howard said, not a little anger in his voice.
“I’m only implying that there may be a thousand Rebels out there, ready to wipe us off the face of the earth,” Holt said.
“We’ll put some pickets on nearby roads,” General Stapleton said. “A half-dozen sentries may also be in order. I don’t think there’s much likelihood of an attack. If one materialized, we could certainly hold them off until reinforcements arrived from Washington.”
“I agree,” General Meade said. “Our telegraph line goes direct to the War Department. They could have two or three regiments out here in an hour.”
It was fascinating to see the way the men who had done the war’s fighting assumed command of the situation, more or less ignoring Holt and Dana as well as Butler, who was allied with them—and had compiled a dolorous record as a combat commander. I also wondered if Dana had made a miscalculation, by telling the generals-cum-judges that the guerrillas had threatened not merely him but everyone involved in the trial. Would it have been wiser to tell the truth—that he alone was their target?
Probably not, I decided. That would expose an aspect of the proceedings that Dana obviously preferred to keep secret. Masking his real role had long since become part of his modus operandi. He preferred to let others take the bows, knowing that his work was appreciated by a select few.
I think he was disappointed by the lack of indignation displayed by the generals when they heard that their lives had been threatened. Again, it was part of the psychology of the battlefield veteran. Having survived a few hundred thousand bullets, they had acquired a certain contempt for death as well as an ability to coolly estimate their chances for survival.
At this point, Thaddeus Stevens joined us on the portico. Dana told him what had happened. Stevens made no attempt to control his anger. “I think we should suspend this farce of a trial and hang the villain now—this afternoon. Hang him from the nearest tree.”
The look Jonathan Stapleton gave Stevens reminded me of how much the fighting generals disliked this man. He had been a power on the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War—a congressional entity that regularly interrogated witnesses in a style that could only be described as hostile. Stevens was prone to imputing the worst motives to an inadequate battlefield performance. He would accuse a man of being soft on slavery, a secret Southern sympathizer.
“Congressman,” General Stapleton said. “You have no authority here. As far as I’m concerned, you shouldn’t even be here.”
I saw agreement—and not a little delight—in the eyes of his fellow generals. The others, being regulars, were reluctant to defy Stevens to his face. But Stapleton, a volunteer and a millionaire in the bargain, had no reason to fear any future vengeance from Old Thad when his name came up on an army promotion list. He would be a civilian in a month or two.
Stevens had grown so used to seeing generals quake before him, at first he could not believe his ears. His mouth worked; his eyes went to Dana, asking an unspoken question I had no trouble translating: Why did you let this man into our beautiful conspiracy?
Dana had an answer, of course. Dana always had an answer. But he was unable to explain anything under the baleful eyes of the assembled generals. “Perhaps we should resume the trial,” he said. “I fear I’ve wasted precious time with my impulsive expedition.”
In the improvised courtroom, we found General Lee and Reverdy Johnson in earnest conversation with Custis Lee. As the generals sat down behind the baize-covered table, and the rest of us took our usual seats, Senator Johnson rose to ask permission to address the court. General Stapleton invited him to do so.
“We’ve just been apprised of a terrible crime committed in General Lee’s name,” he said. “Let me assure you, gentlemen, that he is as shocked and distressed by it as you are. He utterly and totally disavows all connection with this event. As does his son, General George Washington Custis Lee.”
“Your remarks are duly noted, Senator Johnson,” General Stapleton said. “In the meantime, well do our utmost to find the killers. We’ll ask the War Department to send a troop of cavalry in pursuit of them.”
He turned to the prosecution table and asked them if they had any witnesses to support the sixth charge, that Robert E. Lee had been aware that the war was lost long before he surrendered at Appomattox.
“We have, Mr. President,” Judge Advocate General Holt said. He turned to the doorkeeper and barked: “Bring in General Alexander.”
A stocky bearded man wearing a Confederate uniform entered, escorted by one of Baker’s secret service detectives. He seemed dazed—or amazed—to find himself the center of such formidable attention. He took the witness chair and Holt asked his name and rank.
“Major General Edward Porter Alexander,” he said.
“What was your role in the war?”
“I was an artilleryman. Eventually I became chief of artillery in General Longstreet’s corps.”
“Did you have a personal opinion about the probability of a Confederate victory or defeat?”
“After Gettysburg, where I thought General Lee made some grievous errors of generalship, I began to think a defeat was more than probable.”
“Did others share this opinion?”
“Not overtly. But one evening early in 1864, I happened to be in General Longstreet’s tent when General Lee joined us. We discussed the military situation. Our army was condemned to a defensive, henceforth, General Lee said. That meant, in his opinion, that the war was lost. We could only hope for some remarkable intervention—an alliance with a foreign power or the overthrow of the Republican Party in the North, to rescue us.”
“Did you ever hear General Lee alter this opinion?”
“No. I think he maintained it to the day of our surrender.”
“Were you shocked by this revelation?”
“I was at first. But I soon returned to hoping for the best. Young men have that tendency.” He added a wan smile to those last words.
“Did it ever occur to you that General Lee should have resigned his post, or made his pessimism clear to President Davis—perhaps persuading him to consider an early peace?”
“It did occur to me, especially in the latter part of eighteen sixty-four, when hopelessness engulfed the ranks and men began deserting in droves.”
“Yet you persevered in the slaughter?”
“I was not in command. I’d sworn an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.”
“Do you bear any animus toward General Lee for subjecting you and your fellow officers and men to this admittedly hopeless fight?”
“Animus? No. Not any personal animus. I think he did his best, militarily, with the means at his disposal. But if I had been in command, I think—”
He hesitated, then expelled the words from his throat with a conscious effort. “I think I would have said enough is enough. There was—there could have been—an end to the dying so much sooner—”
Tears poured down Alexander’s face. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, wiping his eyes.
“I have no further questions,” Holt said.
Reverdy Johnson slipped one hand in his coat pocket and strolled toward the tearful general. “Are you composed enough to answer a few more questions, General Alexander?” he asked in a gentle voice.
“I’ll try.”
“Was your appearance here voluntary?”
“More or less. I was told that my testimony might help subordinate officers in our army avoid future prosecution.”
“Including yourself?”
“Including myself.”
“Let us move forward to April of this year. Could you tell us what transpired when you and General Lee discussed surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia?”
“Ill never forget that moment. When I heard General Lee and General Longstreet agree the army must surrender, I begged General Lee not to do it. I was certain General Grant would insist on the humiliation of unconditional surrender. I urged General Lee to let us scatter into the woods and carry on the war to the last man.”
“How do you explain this drastic change of mind?”
“Despair, Senator. It creates a kind of frenzy in the soul. Perhaps I felt guilty that I was still alive after seeing so many brave men die. Perhaps I still do—”
“What did General Lee say to your proposal to launch a partisan war?”
“He said the men would be under no discipline. They’d have to rob food from their own people, the Southern people, to live. It would be impossible to maintain a standard of conduct, a code of honor.”
“What did you think when you heard those words?”
“I felt that General Lee was speaking from a spiritual plane so immensely above my own, I was reduced to a moral pygmy. He added that he was sure that General Grant would not insist on unconditional surrender. He would give our army the honorable terms it deserved.”
“Which turned out to be the case.”
“Yes. It turned out to be the case,” General Alexander said.
“I have no further questions,” Reverdy Johnson said.
Here was a young man—Alexander was barely thirty—who had not yet been able to absorb the events of the last two months: the collapse of the Confederacy, the murder of Lincoln, the arrest of President Davis and General Lee. His speech, his movements, were those of a sleepwalker. As he rose to depart, he looked across the courtroom at General Lee with a pathetic mixture of contrition and admiration. Was he about to say he was sorry? He must have realized the words would be meaningless; he rushed out of the room, head down, sobbing.
General Butler rose to summon another witness. This man was also still in his Confederate uniform. Also young, he was sparely built, with a gaunt face and haunted eyes.
Butler invited him to the witness chair. “What is your name and rank in the Confederate army?”
“Walter Taylor. I was a lieutenant colonel.”
“What were your duties?”
“I was aide-de-camp to General Lee.”
“Was this a demanding job?”
“It was very demanding. I was on duty twenty-four hours a day” He shot an uneasy look at General Lee. “So was the general, I might add.”
“Did General Lee ever express to you or say in your hearing that the war could not be won?”
“I heard him say something like that several times, especially after Gettysburg.”
“Did this affect your thinking about General Lee’s integrity?”
“No. I already had a low opinion of General Lee’s integrity”
“Why do you say that?”
“I had long since decided he was much too passive, too submissive to the political stupidity of the Confederate Congress and the military stupidity of President Davis. He knew these people were idiots. Yet he continued to obey their orders, which led inevitably to tens of thousands of needless deaths.”
“Why do you think General Lee did this?”
“I’m not sure. For a long time I attributed it to a sort of moral cowardice. He hid behind his code of honor, his reputation for integrity, knowing no blame would attach to him for carrying out orders, no matter how insane or inane. More recently, I’ve come to suspect a twisted egotism, a determination to see himself enshrined in the hearts of the Southern people, no matter what the cost in blood and suffering.”
He gazed across the room at General Lee, sitting erect at the prosecution table. “This man, I am grieved but compelled to say, is not the South’s hero, but its betrayer. He refused to risk ultimate responsibility for the war by taking on his shoulders the full burden of leadership—and the full consequences of failure, if that was the final result.”
“Thank you for your candid testimony, Colonel Taylor,” Ben Butler said. He turned to the court. “I feel no need to add any words of my own to this condemnation from the lips of a young man who knew General Lee far more intimately than anyone else, during the war.”
Reverdy Johnson rose to his feet but did not approach the witness stand, where Taylor sat, his haggard face still ablaze with antagonism.
“I hope you don’t mind if I interrogate you from a distance, Colonel Taylor,” he said. “The rank odor of your disloyalty makes it almost a necessity.”
“I object to this abuse of a witness,” Ben Butler roared.
“Sustained,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Confine yourself to facts, Senator Johnson.”
“Isn’t disloyalty a fact?” Johnson said. “I’ll do my best, nevertheless.”
He advanced a few feet closer to the middle of the room. “You’re telling us, Colonel Taylor, that you think General Lee should have banished the Confederate Congress and President Davis, and set himself up as dictator?”
“For the duration of the war, yes.”
“You think the Southern people would have accepted such a move?”
“After Gettysburg, yes.”
“But after Gettysburg, General Lee’s reputation as a leader was in tatters. He was attacked on the floor of the Confederate Congress.”
“Precisely the time when he should have banished that collection of pettifoggers to the swamps.”
“Was this opinion shared by many officers in the army?”
“A great many my age.”
“Why did you think your political- military wisdom was superior to men twice your age?”
“Don’t the results of their wisdom prove that proposition?”
“Aside from this profound difference with General Lee and the other leaders of the Confederacy, what was your personal opinion of the general, after four years of intimate contact?”
Taylor glared across the room at Lee. “I remember writing in my journal that I could serve him for a hundred years and never learn to love him. He was too difficult, too demanding, too critical of everything I did.”
“Could this excessive severity possibly be explained by the terrible pressures of the war, which weighed on General Lee more than anyone, except perhaps President Davis?”
“You can explain away anything, I suppose,” Walter Taylor said. “I’ve said my say. I have nothing more to add.”
“I can see that,” Senator Johnson said. “I can see that you too have been under terrible strain. I’m sure every man in this courtroom understands that.”
“I object to this attempt to portray the witness as a man suffering from a mental condition!” Ben Butler roared.
“I agree,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “The mental state of any witness is beyond the jurisdiction of this court.”
“I stand corrected,” Reverdy Johnson said, with his patented bow.
Senator Johnson abruptly turned his back on Walter Taylor and Ben Butler. There was more than a hint of contempt in the motion. He sat down at the defense table and spoke in a low tone to General Lee, who turned his head to listen, breaking off eye contact with Walter Taylor.
General Stapleton told the witness he was excused. Colonel Taylor gazed across the room at General Lee, an explosive mixture of rage and grief on his face. From inside his coat he drew a small pistol. For a terrific moment the inconceivable seemed about to happen. Walter Taylor was going to shoot Robert E. Lee before our appalled eyes.
Instead, with a sob, Taylor pressed the pistol against his chest and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked but did not fire. Ben Butler lunged from behind the prosecutor’s table and crashed into Taylor before he could pull the trigger again. The gun flew out of Taylor’s hand and landed on the other side of the judges’ table. General Stapleton picked it up while Butler struggled with Taylor, who shouted: “Let me die! I want to die! I want to join the dead! Only among them is there any honor left!”
The doorkeeper rushed to assist General Butler. They managed to pin Taylor’s arms and drag him from the courtroom, still shouting his desire to join the dead. With Taylor’s pistol in his left hand, a grim-faced General Stapleton seized his gavel. “Does the prosecution have any additional witnesses?” he asked.
A shaken Judge Advocate General Holt slumped in his chair. “The prosecution rests,” he said.
“This trial is adjourned until tomorrow morning,” Stapleton said.
I made a point of avoiding Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Dana on the ride back to Washington. Instead I climbed aboard the carriage in which Jonathan Stapleton, Baldy Smith, and George Gordon Meade were riding. Silence prevailed for the first ten minutes. Finally I said: “I’d love to know what you gentlemen are thinking.”
“I’m wondering why the hell I ever let Sam Grant talk me into this thing,” Baldy Smith said.
“I’m wondering if the real author of the mess is Charles A. Dana,” George Meade said. “I don’t buy his story of how that Negro soldier got shot. Was he telling the truth, O’Brien?”
“More or less,” I said. “It was a little like combat. You tend to improve the story as it recedes in memory.”
“I’ve never liked or trusted that man,” Meade said. “Not long after Grant came East, Dana walked into my headquarters and read aloud a letter from Sherman to Stanton, telling him he hoped Grant could get the Army of the Potomac to fight as well as western soldiers. I told Dana it was the foulest insult I’d ever received. I wasn’t referring to the letter. Sherman was entitled to his own opinion on the matter. But the way Dana made it public, in front of my staff—and General Grant—”
“Grant told me to watch what I say to him,” Baldy Smith said. “He called him a son of a bitch.”
“He was trying to humiliate us all, including Grant,” Meade snarled, still remembering that day in his headquarters. He pounded his fist on his thigh. I had a distinct feeling that he wished it were Dana’s face.
“I don’t know the fellow very well,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “My best friend, Ben Dall, thinks he walks on water. He convinced me this assignment was a duty.”
“Some duty!” Baldy Smith said.
Stapleton shook his head ruefully making it clear he agreed with Smith. “When it comes to politics, Ben’s judgment is a bit skewed. He also thinks Thad Stevens is a great man.”
“Jesus!” Baldy Smith said. “Find another best friend. I’ll volunteer for the job. For ten thousand a year I’ll give you advice on everything under the sun. You’ll pay me another ten to shut up.”
Smith pulled a flask from his inside coat pocket and swigged from it. He passed it to Meade and Stapleton, who each took quick slugs. Stapleton gave it to me—an encouraging gesture. I took a slug. It was very good bourbon.
“Do you gentlemen think it’s possible that Lee had a hand in staging the performances of those last two witnesses?” I asked.
“No,” Meade said. “I’ve known the man for thirty years. A more honest, honorable human being has never walked the planet. Honor is the essence of the man. I suppose you know why? The story of his father and older brother?”
“I know very little about the Lees,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Except that they were one of Virginia’s first families for a long time. His father was a cavalry hero of the Revolution, right? Light Horse Harry Lee. I remember my father talking about him. Isn’t that why Robert E. went into the army?”
“He went into the army because he had no other way to make a living,” Meade said. “He grew up penniless, living on the charity of relatives, after seeing his ancestral home, Stratford Hall, go under the hammer. Light Horse Harry was the world’s worst businessman. He speculated in land and stocks like a drunken sailor betting in a loaded dice game.”
“He got into some kind of political trouble, too, didn’t he?” Baldy Smith said.
Meade nodded. “He attacked President Madison for getting us into the War of 1812. A Baltimore mob beat him senseless and left him crippled for life.”
“Wasn’t there a brother who went wrong with women?” Baldy said.
“That was Black Horse Harry. He seduced his wife’s sister,” Meade said.
His harsh voice was perfectly suited to the story he was telling. “She had an illegitimate child that was born dead. Black Horse Harry fled to Europe and died there, as disgraced as his father.”
“I can see why honor would be important,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Still—he’s a desperate man.”
“He was a desperate man the day before Appomattox,” Meade said. “Not anymore. He has nothing to lose. Why do you think he accepted this auto-da-fé? He doesn’t care whether he lives or dies—as long as his honor remains unimpeached. That’s why he’s sitting in that repulsive courtroom, listening to scum like Ben Butler and windbags like Joe Holt abuse him. Why he’s letting them turn his wife’s beautiful house into a potential slaughter pit.”
Frantically taking notes, I simultaneously tried to absorb this new information. Did Sophia know about Robert E. Lee’s painful past? Was that the reason for her passionate sympathy? If he could melt a heart as encrusted in misanthropy as George Gordon Meade’s, it was easy to see his appeal to a young woman in search of a noble hero.
We were in Washington, D.C., by this time, clopping through streets full of pedestrians, many of them soldiers in Union blue. Not a few were being propositioned by some of the city’s estimated three thousand streetwalkers. The ladies were dressed in their gaudy best, their hair piled high, their faces painted beyond the ability of a Da Vinci. Desire gnawed in my belly and head but I forbade myself a visit to the Wolf’s Den, my usual answer to the age-old problem.
“I’d like to meet your friend Dall sometime,” I said to General Stapleton. “We could compare notes on Dana.”
“Why don’t you have dinner with us tonight?” Stapleton said. “He just mustered out his regiment. He’s trying to get into the business of rebuilding the South.”
I accepted with alacrity. At seven o’clock, I headed for the Willard Hotel. Another ascent in the hissing lift and I was shaking hands with General Stapleton. Rising from a chair was a slim man with blond hair and the face of an Adonis. Ben Dall was electrifyingly handsome; it gave him an instant distinction. He was beardless—unusual in the Union Army. His eyes were the most remarkable part of his physiognomy. They emanated a glow that approached—perhaps even exceeded—Dana’s in intensity.
Across his chest, Dall wore an empty right sleeve. He had paid a price for his participation in the war. Few had escaped some sort of scar. He did not try to shake hands. But his nod was cordial enough. We sat down with dark glasses of bourbon and water in our hands. “It’s a pleasure to meet Charles Dana’s favorite reporter,” Dall said.
“It’s a distinction I’m not aware of,” I said. “When he was managing editor, that would have meant I’d be in serious danger of dying from overwork.”
“He’s a remarkable man—in some ways the most remarkable I’ve ever met,” Dall said.
“Why do you say that?” Stapleton asked, his eyes on me.
“He’s mastered the art of influence without exciting envy. Because he doesn’t seek the first place. He’s more than content with a secondary title.”
“A very good analysis of our mutual friend,” I said.
Stapleton sipped his drink. “I’m not sure I particularly like that idea. If I’m going to be influenced, I’d prefer to have it come at me directly, as an order or a demand, so I can argue back if need be.”
“Then you’re a politician—a creature doomed to ineffectual vanity and a hunger for petty power,” Dall said.
“Ben,” Stapleton said. “You often seem to forget my father was a politician. He considered it an honorable profession. I’m inclined to agree with him. It’s like the army. You can’t get along without generals—even though a lot of them are incompetent and a few of them are miserable sons of bitches.”
“Tell me how the trial is going,” Dall said.
“What do you think, O’Brien?” Stapleton said.
“I’d say it’s proceeding according to plan,” I said.
“That’s more than I’d say. A lot more,” Stapleton said. He gave Dall a quick summary of the day’s events—the death of Private George Bullitt, the testimony of Generals Baker and Alexander and Lieutenant Colonel Taylor, climaxed by his suicide attempt.
Dall was shocked and dismayed by Bullitt’s death. “Jesus Christ, Jonathan. Did you do anything? Send a cavalry regiment after the killers?”
“You can’t catch a gnat with a sledgehammer,” Stapleton said.
“But there’s something to be said for trying. You can’t let them get away with that sort of thing without retaliating. I was over at the Freedman’s Bureau today. They’re getting some very disturbing reports from the Southland. They’re talking about legislating black codes that will be almost as bad as slavery. They’re determined to keep the Negroes in a state of subjection. If something isn’t done, the whole purpose of the war may be lost.”
“The whole purpose?” Stapleton said. “The original purpose was to save the Union. We’ve done that.”
“You always knew there was another, nobler purpose.”
“To be absolutely honest, Ben, I didn’t always know that. I’m not even sure Lincoln always knew it. Didn’t he say if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he’d do it?”
“He was playing politician when he said that, trying to soothe the doughfaces.”
Stapleton frowned; his scarred gaunt face became ominous. “Do you know what a doughface is, O’Brien?”
“I think he was a prewar Northern congressman who favored the South?”
“Correct. It was a name some people called my father. I don’t think Ben ever called him that, in my hearing—did you, Ben?”
“No,” Ben Dall said, rather lamely, I thought.
“You probably thought it.”
“Perhaps,” Dall admitted.
“Not all doughfaces were alike. Some of them were ready to favor the South for the wrong, probably venal, reasons. But some of them—men like my father, who had seen what war was like in Mexico—had a better reason. They foresaw what this war was going to be like. They foresaw it would be a holocaust. You didn’t see that, Ben, did you?”
“No, Jonathan,” Dall said, his voice seeming to dwindle into his chest.
“Neither did I. But my father saw it. That’s why Bull Run broke his heart, why it killed him. When I think of the way I sneered at him, all but mocked him for his timidity—which I now realize was compassion—I wonder why I’m still walking around. If anyone deserved to get a bullet in the head, it was me.”
“That’s not true, Jonathan,” Dall said.
“Yes it is. It is absolutely true!” General Stapleton snarled. “That’s why I don’t appreciate your letting Lincoln off the hook—saying he wasn’t really a politician—he was kidding us all along, his real goal was freeing the slaves. I think that’s absolute bullshit! Old Abe was as much of a politician as any man I ever met. In 1861, he had no more idea that the war was going to kill six hundred thousand men than you did or I did. He was a politician who wanted to be president and when he got there he didn’t know what the hell he was doing for the first two years. He thought the thing would be over in ninety days. After the second year he swallowed hard and realized he’d have to fight it out, no holds barred. Exactly what my father predicted.”
Those gray glaring eyes swung to me. “What do you think of all this, O’Brien?”
“I’m listening, more than thinking, General,” I said.
“Spoken like a politician,” Stapleton said. “That’s a compliment. I still think it’s an honorable term. But Ben here—and people like him—don’t agree. They think a noble goal justifies just about anything—including mass slaughter—and then they try to create martyrs like that maniac John Brown, or poor Lincoln who sure as hell didn’t want to be a martyr. He wanted to stay around and try to clean up the mess he’d made—”
By this time I was starting to feel sorry for Ben Dall. He was taking a lot of abuse from his supposed best friend. To my relief, General Stapleton seemed to realize he was talking—and revealing—too much. He got up and poured himself another drink and tried to regain his composure.
“I know you hoped this nobler purpose would emerge from the war, Ben—a crusade against slavery. It didn’t happen. You know that as well as I do. The men have gone home for the most part simply satisfied that they won. There aren’t many breathing apostrophes to John Brown’s soul or body. Neither is marching anywhere in New Jersey that I can see. Or in New York or Pennsylvania.”
“You’re right as usual,” Ben Dall said. He took a long swallow of his drink and smiled wryly in my direction. “Jonathan’s role in my life could be summed up as my deflator. I have a tendency to let soaring hopes become realities. He has an uncanny gift for bringing me back to earth.”
“I honor those hopes, Ben. You know that. I would have stayed home and turned into the world’s biggest momma’s boy if it weren’t for you.”
Ben Dall’s smile struck me as a bit too smug. He was accepting at face value what was surely an exaggeration. Jonathan Stapleton was the least likely candidate for a momma’s boy I had ever seen.
“To complete your portrait of General Stapleton for your book, Mr. O’Brien, you ought to pay a visit to the general’s mother. She is one of the most beautiful, most determined, most terrifying females God has ever put on this earth. In another incarnation, she would have made Lucretia Borgia look like a rank amateur in the fine art of female persuasion.”
“Now wait a minute, Ben. Caroline hasn’t poisoned anyone, as far as I know,” Stapleton said.
“As far as you know,” Ben Dall mocked. “But would you put it past her, if it advanced the fortunes of the Democratic Party?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got to admit I don’t know,” Stapleton said, draining his drink. “Let’s go downstairs for dinner.” I sensed he was not interested in any further dissection of his parents.
In the Willard’s dining room, we all ordered steaks and Stapleton added a bottle of French wine. “How did you get to know Dana?” I asked Ben Dall.
“My father worked with him at Brook Farm. He thought socialism was the wave of the future. Like Dana, he decided maybe this was a bit premature. Father went into textiles, where he lost his inheritance inside two years. After I graduated from Columbia, I launched the New York Advocate. Dana was immensely helpful behind the scenes.”
The Advocate was New York’s only abolitionist newspaper. A four-page sheet with cheap type and a shrill tone, its circulation remained minuscule. It expired not long after comparing John Brown’s execution for his raid on Harper’s Ferry to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. “So you’re a fellow newspaperman,” I said.
“Not really. I demonstrated that all too clearly at the Advocate. Words are not my forte. I’m more interested in deeds.”
“You’ve proved that point on more than one battlefield, Ben,” General Stapleton said.
For a moment I sensed a deep vein of unexpected emotion in this friendship. I decided it was pity. It was easy to see where it had come from. Stapleton, the son of a powerful senator and rich in the bargain. Dall, the son of a bankrupt businessman, who had inherited little but shining ideals— which had cost him his right arm.
So Dana had been the man behind The Advocate. How like him to manage this without telling anyone, including yours truly, with whom he seemed to share most of his waking thoughts. How like him, also, to let Dall undertake the thankless task. Dana knew an abolitionist newspaper would be as welcome in New York as an outbreak of the bubonic plague. As Dall eventually learned, after wasting four or five years of his life tilting against the insuperable windmill of cynical Gotham.
Dall began talking about the importance of finding General Lee guilty. It was exactly what Dana had said to me, almost word for word. The South was undefeated spiritually. Their proud defiance, their race-based arrogance, had to be crushed once and for all, in order for Lincoln’s new birth of freedom to occur. I listened wearily for a while, more interested in whether General Stapleton still agreed. He was nodding emphatically. But he added nothing to Dall’s discourse. I suspected this was an opinion he accepted but did not truly share.
“The Negroes deserve a chance, Jonathan. After two hundred and fifty years under the lash and the coffle. It’s the only thing that matters now.”
Suddenly I was ashamed of myself. Ashamed of my perpetually agile brain, and its egotistic pleasure in analyzing who was persuading whom, which way political power was flowing, who was up and who was on his way down. Ashamed! I believed what Dall was saying. As an Irishman, I knew what it meant for people to insult you to your face. I had seen it happen to my father in Ireland more than once. I sympathized with the oppressed of this world. That was why my father had come to America. He wanted to work in a country where oppression was not a God-given right, as it was in so much of Europe. Where a man could be accepted for his talents, his energy, his accomplishments. This was Dana’s dream for the blacks. And Ben Dall’s dream. How could I hesitate to join them?
We were interrupted by a raised voice at the entrance to the restaurant. Heads turned, including ours. It was a woman’s voice. A man was answering her in angry tones. The tumult approached us. The woman was saying: “I must see him!” The man was protesting: “Madam—”
Toward us rushed Sophia Carroll, her dark hair streaming around her beautiful face, her skirt streaked with mud and dust. The exasperated head-waiter tried one more time to restrain her. She eluded his grasp and reached our table. “General,” she said. “I’ve been riding around the city. I can’t find anyone else. The Negroes are drinking. They’re angry over that soldier’s death. Custis has a gun. Otherwise there’s nothing between them and—”
“The telegraph operator. Where is he?” Jonathan Stapleton said.
“There’s no one on duty at night.”
“Goddamn it!” Stapleton snarled. He flung down his napkin and glared at Ben Dall. “Do you have a gun?” he asked.
Dall shook his head.
“Do you?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“I’ve got two upstairs. Let’s go,” he said.
We ignored the stares of nearby diners and rushed from the restaurant.
In the lobby, General Stapleton ordered the night clerk to have three horses brought to the door. Up in his room, he strapped on a big Colt revolver, concealing it with a cape. He pulled a small derringer out of a drawer and handed it to me. “This won’t stop a puppy dog if he comes at you. But it may intimidate. Ben, I want you to head for the War Department. Tell them to get a white regiment on the road to Arlington without delay.”
“Is this necessary, Jonathan?” Dall said. “This young woman strikes me as more than a little hysterical.”
Sophia gave him a look that would have turned my bones to jelly. “Hysterical women don’t sneak past two hundred drunken Negroes and steal a horse from the barn under their noses,” she said. “They’re talking about burning Arlington!”
“She doesn’t sound hysterical to me,” Jonathan said.
“She was the best agent in the Confederate secret service,” I said, with not a little rue in my voice.
“Let’s go,” General Stapleton said.
The horses were waiting at the Willard’s front door. Ben Dall rode toward the War Department. Sophia located her horse tied to a nearby tree and joined us for the gallop to Arlington. It was a warm starry night, with only a sliver of a moon in the eastern sky. We rode in silence across the Long Bridge and down the road toward the mansion. Every moment, I expected to see a gush of flame in the distance, as Arlington went up in a blaze of Negro rage. What would that do to Dana’s ingenious plan to demoralize the South by hanging Robert E. Lee? Instead, we might start the guerrilla war that Grant feared, accompanied by a race war that would disgrace America before the whole world.
To my immense relief, Arlington burned only in my imagination. As we approached the majestic portico, we saw lights in the upstairs windows. The front door opened while we were dismounting and Custis Lee emerged. He had a pistol in his hand. “General,” he said. “I’m glad to see reinforcements, however few.”
“Is that loaded?” Stapleton said.
Custis shook his head. “Empty, by order of the commander in chief,” he said. “But I’ve already used it to tell a delegation who demanded to see him that they weren’t welcome in the house.”
“Where’s Colonel Bigelow and his officers? Aren’t they doing anything to keep order?”
“I believe they decided it was safer to stay in their tents,” Custis said.
General Stapleton leaped from the portico and strode down the road to the field where Bigelow had set up tents for himself and the other white officers of the regiment. He stood in the little yard and bellowed: “Colonel Bigelow!”
Bigelow stumbled out of a nearby tent, hastily pulling on his pants. “General Stapleton,” he gasped. “What brings you here?”
“A report that your men are drunk and threatening General Lee with mortal injury,” Stapleton roared. “What are you doing snoring in your tent?”
“General, that’s a gross exaggeration. They may have been drinking. They’re having a wake for the poor fellow who got bushwhacked this morning—”
“Come with me,” General Stapleton said. “Bring your gun. Rouse all your officers and tell them to do likewise.”
Stapleton did not wait for Bigelow to obey the order. He charged back up the hill to Arlington and around the house to the barns, beyond which the Twenty-third Colored Volunteers were camped. I followed him, telling myself it was no more dangerous than combat.
In Arlington’s barnyard, we found the volunteers listening to a speech from Jupiter Hemings, who was standing on a crate. One or two men on the fringes of the crowd were holding up torches. The firelight flickered on the excited black faces. Hemings was in the peroration of his speech.
“WE WON THE WAR, GODDAMN IT! WE ON TOP NOW. WE GOT THE RIGHT TO PURSUE OUR HAPPINESS, LIKE THE CONSTITUTION SAYS. WE GOT RIGHTS THAT NO ONE CAN TAKE AWAY FROM US. NO ONE’S GONNA SHOOT A BLACK MAN IN THE SOUTH AND GET AWAY WITH IT! I SAY WE GO TO THAT WHITE SON OF A BITCH ROBERT E. LEE AND ORDER HIM TO TELL US WHO KILLED GEORGE BULLITT OR WE GONNA KILL HIM AND HIS SON OF A BITCH OF A SON AND BURN THIS HOUSE AROUND HIS GODDAMN WIFE’S EARS!”
General Stapleton strode into the crowd, shoving men right and left until he got to Jupiter Hemings. “Get off that crate,” he said. “You’re under arrest for riot and disorder while on duty.”
“Duty? I ain’t on duty, General,” Hemings said. He was very drunk.
“As long as you’re wearing that uniform, you’re on duty,” Stapleton roared. He wheeled and shouted at the regiment: “That goes for all of you. Do you think you’re going to get respect from anyone if you get drunk and kill people? You’ve got to decide whether you’re niggers or citizens! Let’s start now!”
He grabbed a sergeant out of the crowd and pointed to Hemings. “Arrest that man. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir, General,” the sergeant said. He turned to the men nearest him. “Get him into d’barn. Tie him up. Don’t hurt him none.”
Hemings declined to go quietly. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO OBEY HIS GODDAMN ORDERS NO MORE! HE’S A GENERAL WITHOUT AN ARMY! WE GOT THE GUNS, AND IF HE GETS IN THE WAY WE’LL SHOOT HIM AND THROW HIM IN THE FIRE! AND HIS REPORTER FRIEND TOO SO NO ONE’LL BE ABLE TO SAY WHO DONE IT. THEY CAN’T HANG ALL OF US!”
For a terrifying moment, no one moved. I could see the Twenty-third Volunteers trying to decide whether Hemings knew what he was talking about. I feared we were only a millisecond from oblivion when a soft voice spoke from the outer edge of the crowd. “Wait a moment! Wait a moment! These men are only trying to protect me.”
It was Robert E. Lee. He was dressed in the clothes he wore to the courtroom, complete to a string tie. The soldiers opened a path for him and he walked calmly to the front of the crowd. “My son Custis told me you wanted to question me. I’m ready to answer anything you ask,” he said.
Jupiter Hemings jumped off his speaking platform. “We want to know who killed George Bullitt today, General. He’s just another nigger to you, but he was my friend!”
“I didn’t know George Bullitt,” Lee said. “If I did, he wouldn’t be just another nigger. I’ve never spoken that way about your race. I’ve got a friend in this regiment. He’s standing right there. He’ll vouch for that.”
The general pointed to Junius, the man who had served as the Lees’ waiter on the first day of the trial. Junius looked very scared—whether of Lee or his fellow soldiers it was hard to tell.
“Did you ever hear me or Mrs. Lee use the word nigger, Junius?” Lee asked.
“No, sir, General,” Junius said.
“Junius was born here at Arlington. I gave him his freedom in 1861. He was freed by my father-in-law, who used to own this place. He freed all his slaves, the way George Washington did, after he died. I was left in charge of carrying out his will. I was glad to free Junius. I’ve never been a friend of slavery.”
“The hell with all that!” Jupiter Hemings shouted. “Who killed George Bullitt?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “If I knew, I’d report him to the authorities. He wasn’t doing it to help me. I’m on trial for my life here. Does it help to make me look like a murderer? Maybe he was shot by someone who wants the war to start all over again. I don’t want that to happen, for the sake of the white people of the South—and the Negro people. We’ve got to learn to live together. It won’t be easy at first. But, I think we can do it.”
The colored sergeant took Hemings by the arm. “Okay. You got your answer from d’general. Let’s go nice and quiet to d’barn.”
Hemings glowered, pulled his arm free, and walked toward the barn of his own volition. I took a deep breath, perhaps trying to prove to myself I was still alive.
“I want to apologize for this disturbance, General Lee,” Jonathan Stapleton said.
“I appreciate your coming out to help, General Stapleton,” Lee said.
By this time, Bigelow and his officers had arrived in varying states of undress. Stapleton spotted them hesitating on the outskirts of the crowd. “Colonel Bigelow,” he called. “Order the rest of these men to return to their tents immediately.”
Colonel Bigelow ventured into the crowd and said: “You heard the general. Let’s not hear another word about burning down this house or harassing General Lee.”
It was the most weak-kneed command I had heard in four years of covering the war. As an officer, Colonel Bigelow was close to a joke. But General Lee’s performance had made his ineptitude superfluous. The men drifted away in clumps. In a few minutes they were in their tents and silence if not peace reigned at Arlington.
As we walked back to the portico with General Lee, we found Custis Lee and Sophia Carroll waiting on the path. To my dismay, Custis had a protective arm around Sophia’s waist. He relinquished her as we approached.
“Sophia,” General Lee said. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s bad enough that Custis wanted to accompany me with gun in hand—”
“I couldn’t stay in the house like a coward, General. If they hurt you, I was going to help Custis fight it out with them.”
She held up a long carving knife.
“General,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “If your army or our army were as reckless as this young lady it would have been a much shorter war.”
“I agree, General. She’s quite unmanageable,” Lee said, smiling fondly at Sophia.
“Let me ask you something,” Stapleton said. “Who do you think shot George Bullitt?”
“Someone who doesn’t want a Negro colony founded on the Bull Run battlefield, I suspect,” Lee said.
“You don’t think we should rub your faces in it, is that the idea?”
“That’s a good part of it, General.”
“I’m beginning to think you may have a point,” Stapleton said.
As we walked back toward Arlington’s portico, we encountered an unnerving sight. Mary Custis Lee tottered down the path toward us on her cane. She was wearing a nightdress and sky-blue robe. Her hair was unkempt, her eyes wild. “Are they coming?” she cried. “Is this the organizer of the massacre?” She glared at General Stapleton.
“On the contrary, Mary dear,” Lee said. “General Stapleton came out from Washington City to restore order. Which he’s done admirably.”
Mary Lee shook her head hysterically as if her husband were talking a foreign language. “I vowed we would die together. ”You’ve sacrificed so much for me. I want to die beside you, as proof of my love.“
“That’s something there’s no need for you to prove, my dearest,” Lee said. “For me your love is as real and true as it was the day of our wedding.”
“Please try to calm yourself, Mrs. Lee,” General Stapleton said. “You’re in no danger. Nor is General Lee.”
“A man on trial for his life before your so-called court of justice is in no danger?” Mary Lee snarled. “Do you think I’m a fool, sir? You came out here to quell those Negroes because it’s politically inconvenient for them to slaughter us at present. But your long-range plan, in which our slaughter will inevitably occur, remains intact.”
“Mrs. Lee,” General Stapleton said with almost fierce urgency. “I have no such plan, nor does any other man in the Union Army, as far as I know. If I knew of such a project, I would do everything in my power to prevent it.”
“Mary Mary,” Lee said, putting his arm around her. “Now is not the time to argue politics. Let’s try to get a few hours’ sleep.”
She gazed in bewilderment at him, as if he were a total stranger who had wandered into her vision. “Oh, Robert, Robert,” she said. “How could you let them humiliate us like this?”
“You know why, my dear,” Lee said. “We must somehow accept the dictates of the Lord of Hosts, in the name of his son, Jesus.”
She shook her head, as if the word, the name Jesus, were utterly foreign to her. But she let him lead her slowly down the path to Arlington’s portico. In a few minutes they had vanished into the mansion’s interior. Custis Lee and Sophia remained on the veranda for another moment. “Thank you, General,” Custis said.
“I deserve no thanks, General Lee,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “I was only doing my duty to—to our country.”
Custis Lee held the door and Sophia preceded him into Arlington. Would they separate at the head of the stairs and adjourn to separate bedrooms? Jesus! I thought, invoking a deity I was disinclined to worship, thanks to Dana. Are you trying to drive yourself crazy?
Colonel Bigelow appeared out of the night to inform General Stapleton that Hemings was under guard in the barn and the rest of the men were in their tents. “Good,” Stapleton said. “Get some rest yourself, Colonel.”
“I’m really sorry, General. I had no idea—”
“Don’t worry about it, Colonel. The war’s over. Get some sleep.”
Stapleton waited until Bigelow vanished into the darkness before he explained his obviously intimate knowledge of Colonel Bigelow. “He was a captain in my division in the first year of the war. A hopeless coward on the battlefield. When they organized the first colored regiments, I transferred him with alacrity. So did almost every other general who had similar misfits. That’s one reason some Negro regiments didn’t perform very well.”
“I’ve noticed wars aren’t fought by idealists,” I said.
“True. Deplorable but true.”
After five minutes of brooding silence, Stapleton asked me to tell him more about Jeremiah O’Brien. I gave him a summary of my brief life. He was touched by my parents’ death before they reached America. “You’ve come through a hard time,” he said. “Has this country lived up to your hopes?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“That’s about right, isn’t it. Sometimes it’s the world’s best country. Sometimes it isn’t. It’s hard to figure out how to change the isn’ts to the ises.”
The sound of hoofbeats on the drive absorbed our attention. In a few minutes, Ben Dall appeared followed by fifty or sixty mounted men. In the starlight I saw they were colored. Each had a cavalryman’s carbine strapped to his back and a saber in his saddle scabbard.
“Here we are, Ben. All’s quiet on the Potomac,” General Stapleton called from the portico steps.
Dall dismounted. “I found Dana at the War Department. He thought these men were the best and most available. They’re from the First Maryland Cavalry. I thought a troop would be enough.”
“More than enough,” Stapleton said.
I could not help noting that Dana and Dall had ignored General Stapleton’s order to bring white soldiers. Stapleton undoubtedly noticed it too but said nothing. He gave Dall a quick rundown of how the disturbance had been quelled, omitting any reference to Mary Custis Lee. “Let’s keep these fellows here for the rest of the night,” he said. “We’ll decide what else needs doing tomorrow.”
The white captain in command of the troop introduced himself as Charles Johnson. I asked him if he was related to Reverdy Johnson. “He’s my cousin,” he drawled. “I call him ‘Uncle Rev.’” His Southern accent added a final touch of incongruity to the evening.
General Stapleton told Captain Johnson to post sentries at Arlington’s front and rear doors. The rest of his men could unpack their blanket rolls and try to get some sleep on Arlington’s lawn. The orders were swiftly obeyed and we were soon riding back to Washington.
“Do you think they’ve kept those steaks hot for us at the Willard?” General Stapleton said.
“I fear they’ll be a bit overdone,” I said.
“That’s the way I’m feeling at the moment,” Stapleton said. “Overdone.”
“I gather General Lee came close to feeling that way literally,” Dall said.
“I don’t find that amusing, Ben,” Stapleton said.
I thought exactly the same thing but my role as neutral observer prevented me from saying it.
For a moment I could see nothing but Mary Lee’s frantic face, hear nothing but her hysterical voice crying: “I vowed we would die together.” What was happening to me?
At Arlington the next morning I found a chastened Major Bigelow drilling his regiment on the front lawn. “By the right flank, by the left flank,” he bellowed.
“I’m giving these fellows a taste of discipline,” he told me. I had ridden out early, hoping for a chance to talk to General Lee. I wanted to get his thoughts on who might have shot Private George Bullitt.
Custis Lee had told me rather abruptly that the general was sleeping a bit later than usual and was not available for an interview.
Bigelow greeted Jonathan Stapleton as the general got out of his carriage with the same comment about instilling discipline in his troops. “It’s about time,” Stapleton growled.
“If you were under my command,” snapped George Gordon Meade, “I’d have you court-martialed by sundown.”
Bigelow wilted like ice-cream before an open fire. “General,” he whined. “It’s not easy to deal with these people.”
“Balderdash,” Meade said. “There are plenty of first-class colored regiments. White or black, if a regiment misbehaves, it’s always the fault of its officers.”
Stapleton had obviously told Meade and his other carriage companion, Baldy Smith, about the near-mutiny last night and Bigelow’s attempt to ignore it. Meade hurried into Arlington to see how Lee and his family had survived the ordeal. When Reverdy Johnson arrived in another carriage,followed by Dana, the prosecutors, and Generals Howard and Burnside, Stapleton repeated the story to them.
Dana was more than a little disturbed to learn that Jupiter Hemings had been the chief troublemaker. “Where is he?”
“In the barn, in irons, I hope,” General Stapleton said.
“Perhaps we should give General Lee the option of a day’s delay,” Baldy Smith said. “He must have gotten very little sleep last night.”
“Let me consult with him,” Reverdy Johnson said, and hurried into the house.
While we waited, General Meade reappeared. “Lee’s in good spirits. He says he got about as much sleep last night as he usually gets. He asked me to reiterate his appreciation to you, General Stapleton.”
Stapleton nodded in his curt style. Reverdy Johnson came out and said he saw no reason why we should not proceed. For one thing, not a few defense witnesses were already on their way from Washington to testify, including General Winfield Scott. “I wouldn’t want to subject the old man to an additional trip out here in this weather.”
The June sun was climbing in the morning sky. It was going to be another hot humid day. Dana returned from his visit to the barn. “I ordered Hemings released,” he said. “He’s going back to Washington immediately. He promises not to return here under any circumstances.”
General Stapleton nodded his approval. It was amazing, how much authority he was acquiring. It was a combination of circumstances and personality. He was a natural leader—and Dana had made him the president of the military commission, officially reinforcing his tendency to do things his way. Was the general becoming a loose cannon from Dana’s point of view? I began to think so.
In Arlington’s center hall, Sophia Carroll gave me a warm smile. “General Stapleton is quite a man,” she said.
“Undoubtedly,” I said. “How is Mrs. Lee?”
“I think she’s almost disappointed she didn’t die in Arlington’s ruins,” Sophia said. “She thinks it would have galvanized the South.”
“I’m sure it would have,” I said.
“Was your friend Dana behind the scheme? In revenge for the death of his bodyguard?”
“I don’t think so. He seems as surprised by it as the rest of us.”
“You’re so gullible, Jeremiah. The man is a consummate liar. When are you going to pry yourself out of his grasp?”
“I’ve told you—”
“You’ve told me and told me. But what do you do?” Sophia said. “Defend him endlessly.”
In the courtroom/drawing room, Lee and Reverdy Johnson were at the defense table. Generals Butler and Holt were conferring at the prosecution table. Already seated were Mrs. Lee and Custis Lee, as well as the glowering Thaddeus Stevens, who must have arrived even earlier than I did, confirming his claim that he seldom slept more than a few hours a night. He was talking to Dana, making vigorous chopping motions with his right hand, glaring at me all the while.
Dana sat down beside me. “Stevens tells me that you accompanied General Stapleton out here last night.”
I explained that I was having dinner with Ben Dall and the general when Sophia Carroll interrupted us with cries of alarm. Dana gave me a suspicious look. “Why didn’t you send her to me?”
“I had no idea where you were.”
“Ben Dall found me easily enough.”
“That was mostly luck.”
Dana’s frown was unmistakable. I wanted to tell him he had nothing to worry about. Good old O’Brien would remain his faithful toady. But I managed to choke back the words of submission and sit down, my pencil poised over my notebook. Reverdy Johnson was on his feet, addressing the court.
“If you gentlemen don’t mind, I would like to approach these charges in reverse order. I think the later ones are by far the most fatuous, and can be disposed of quite easily, providing the judge advocate general doesn’t rule my witnesses out of order.”
Holt sprang to his feet to declare his “growing detestation” of Johnson’s attitude toward the military commission. “He’s not only insulting me, gentlemen, he’s impugning your intelligence and reliability.”
“I’m doing nothing of the sort,” Johnson said. “I’m only impugning the system to which we are married, without a chance to sue for divorce in a higher court, not to mention the court of public opinion.”
He shuffled some papers on the defense table, and asked the doorkeepers to produce General James Longstreet. In a few minutes, the large bearded man who answered to that name was in the witness chair. He quickly confirmed his rank and role in the Confederate Army.
“Would you say you knew General Lee well?”
“As well as any officer in the Confederate Army. I conferred with him dozens of times on matters of strategy, army administration—almost every topic that generals discuss at one time or another.”
“There has been evidence presented to this court that General Lee knew the war was lost, yet persisted in prolonging it, though he knew the cause was hopeless. Did you ever see anything to justify this opinion?”
General Butler rose. “May I remind the commission it is not an opinion—it is a fact, for which strong evidence has been placed before the judges. People who testify to the contrary may be subject to prosecution for perjury.”
General Longstreet studied Butler for a moment. “Is that General Butler?” he said. “I seem to recall him trying to intimidate me at Bermuda Hundred* and several other places.”
*A battlefield on the James River near Petersburg, where Butler performed ingloriously.
“He didn’t succeed?” Reverdy Johnson asked.
“He didn’t succeed,” Longstreet said. “To return to the question—I never once heard General Lee say the war was hopelessly lost. I heard him say it would be lost if the South did not persuade—or force—every man to do his duty. This our politicians signally failed to do. At the beginning of 1865, we had a hundred and twenty-five thousand men absent without leave—deserters. Yet General Lee fought on, with little more than a remnant. He was hoping for a miracle—as was I and everyone else in the ranks.”
“Then you would say the claim that General Lee prolonged the war for no good reason is spurious?”
“Totally spurious. General Lee is a Christian. I don’t think a Christian ever loses hope. He lives day by day praying he’s fulfilling God’s purpose to his best lights. That’s what General Lee did, to the day of Appomattox, when he realized surrender was the end of our military and political hopes. But I don’t think, even now, he’s surrendered all hope for the Southern people. In fact I know he hasn’t.”
“Thank you, General Longstreet.”
Ben Butler rose and lumbered toward the witness. “I’m touched almost beyond words by your piety, General. And by General Lee’s. But I must ask you this question. Can a man who sends tens of thousands of prisoners to starve in Andersonville and other hellholes be called a Christian? I think you’re as guilty as General Lee of this crime—and I hope to see you before a military commission like this one in a few weeks’ time, trying to explain that and your other treasonable acts.”
Senator Johnson rose to object to General Butler’s obvious attempt to intimidate the witness.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Senator. The sun will never come up on the day when Ben Butler can intimidate Pete Longstreet,” the general said. There was a flash of white teeth in the enveloping black beard. My eyes sought the generals at the judgment table. I saw wisps of smiles on the faces of everyone but Burnside.
“We have information that suggests your admiration for General Lee was not quite as extravagant as you’re claiming here,” Butler said.
He went back to the prosecution table and picked up a document. “This is a letter General Longstreet wrote to General A. P. Hill after Gettysburg. We found it in the late General Hill’s papers in Richmond.”
The letter was a vehement criticism of Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg. Longstreet told Hill how hard he had tried to talk Lee out of attacking the Union Army. He had wanted Lee to take up a defensive position somewhere to the east, between the Union Army and Washington, and force them to attack. “We have thrown away a chance to end the war. I wonder if we’ll ever have another one,” Longstreet wrote.
Butler handed the letter to Longstreet. “You did write this, General?”
“It’s my handwriting. I was in a passion after Gettysburg,” Longstreet said.
“Would it be fair to say the letter reveals to the court that you too thought there was no hope after Gettysburg—but you still fought on, causing the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides?”
“I think there’s a great difference between a diminished chance and no hope,” Longstreet said.
“We’ll see what this military commission thinks of that opinion, General.”
Senator Johnson rose. “General Longstreet—may I volunteer my services to defend you, in the unlikely chance that General Butler’s scenario comes to pass?”
“Thank you, Senator.”
It was hard to decide who had won this exchange. At the very least, Butler had taken not a little force out of Longstreet’s blithe denial that Lee—or “Old Pete” himself—ever lost hope after Gettysburg.
“May I suggest that this charge of prolonging the war should be thrown out, along with the threats of death and claims of sainthood attached to it?” Senator Johnson said. “I appeal to all of you gentlemen who are sitting in judgment on General Lee. You’ve all fought battles. You know how unpredictable war can be. I’m only a student of the business. You’re practitioners. I propose to poll the court here and now and see if they would agree to drop this charge as impossible of proof.”
Judge Advocate General Holt was on his feet, so angry he could only gesticulate at first. “The effrontery of Senator Johnson is almost beyond belief!” he thundered. “This preposterous motion is denied! The charge remains as further proof of the blood that is on the hands of Robert E. Lee.”
“Isn’t it marvelous that this intemperate man, who seems to have himself confused with Zeus or John the Baptist, has the power of life and death over General Lee—and I fear, many others?” Johnson said.
Holt turned an alarmingly dark magenta. “This man,” he said, almost strangling on his words. “I hereby find this man in contempt of this commission. In contempt of the authority of the government of the United States.”
“I find a problem with that,” Baldy Smith said. “Since Senator Johnson is part of the government of the United States. Can a part of the government be in contempt of another part? Can the hand or arm be in contempt of the head?”
Baldy grinned at Holt. It was Smith at his most fiendish. He loved to argue.
“I agree with General Smith. The judge advocate general’s finding is preposterous,” General Meade said.
“I would not go so far as that,” General Stapleton said soothingly. “Let’s simply suggest that General Holt set aside his finding for the present. Otherwise, we might have to arrest Senator Johnson and abandon this business. I can’t see how we can try General Lee without counsel. I would suggest, Senator, that you try to control your gift for courtroom repartee.”
“I’ll do my best, General Stapleton,” Senator Johnson drawled. He made no attempt to conceal his satisfaction at having drawn three judges into opposition to the overbearing Holt. His authority as combination judge and prosecutor was unquestionably eroding. I looked over my shoulder at Dana. His forehead was creased with deep furrows. He did not like the way things were going.
General Lee’s soft voice spoke from his side of the room. “Senator? May I confer with you for a moment?”
Reverdy Johnson hurried to the defense table. After a few minutes of murmured conversation, he returned to the center of the courtroom. “General Lee has asked me if it would be possible for him to reply to the charge that he unnecessarily prolonged the war. Is it agreeable to you gentlemen, judges and prosecutors?”
There was no objection. Lee took the stand with strides that suggested confidence and determination. “Would you like to begin by commenting on the statements of the earlier witnesses, General?”
“Those men are all close to my heart,” Lee said. “They served valiantly in our lost cause. I don’t find it in the least surprising that at times they were assailed by doubt and even anger, aimed at the men who were in higher command. There were times when I experienced similar feelings. But I always put aside such emotions and returned to my duty because of the example of the greatest American who ever lived, General Washington.”
“Even in the darkest months—in early 1865 for instance—did this memory sustain you?”
“It did, Senator. I remember my father reading me passages from Washington’s diary for the early months of 1781. After six years of war, the Continental Army was a pathetic remnant and enlistments had dwindled to the vanishing point. Our supposed ally, France, was telling England they would sacrifice America’s independence to make an early peace. Our paper currency had collapsed. America’s international credit was worthless. If ever a rational being might have surrendered to despair, General Washington was the man. But he stayed in the game, and a mere nine months later, the improbable victory at Yorktown was his reward. Was it unreasonable for me to hope for a similar miracle?”
“Thank you, General Lee, for this valuable testimony” Johnson said.
“Does the prosecution wish to question General Lee on this point?” Jonathan Stapleton asked.
“I have one or two questions,” Ben Butler said.
His approach to the witness stand was oddly—for him—deferential. “That is a moving statement of your devotion to Washington. A devotion I share,” he said. “But the reason I venerate him is for the way he repeatedly urged Americans to value their federal union above all other political possessions. Doesn’t it strike you as odd, General Lee, that you broke faith with the cardinal principle of Washington’s creed, and yet somehow claim him as your inspiration? It strikes me as totally illogical at best and totally hypocritical at worst.”
For a moment Robert E. Lee looked inutterably sad. I sensed that Butler’s question was something he had struggled to avoid more than once in the small hours of his often sleepless nights.
“My only purpose in taking the stand at this point was to explain the way my memories of Washington’s perseverance supported my military thinking. I make no claim to any political similarities.”
“No further questions,” Butler growled and clumped back to the prosecution table.
Johnson rose to call the next witness. “General Mosby, will you take the stand?”
Heads swiveled. We did not realize Mosby had returned to the courtroom. That was a minor shock compared to seeing the man with whom he was sitting: General Ulysses S. Grant. What was happening? Was John Singleton Mosby, the man who gave Grant more grief in the last year of the war than any other Confederate besides Lee, suddenly the victorious general’s friend? Or was this strange conjunction a mere coincidence?
Whatever the explanation, it left unanswered what General Grant was doing here in the first place. Was he showing his brand of the flag, as a sort of counterweight to Thaddeus Stevens? It seemed a likely explanation, from the way old Thad was glaring at him.
General Mosby strode to the witness chair. “I’m pleased that you’ve agreed to testify for the defense, General Mosby,” Reverdy Johnson said.
“I’m glad you asked me,” Mosby said.
“Did you—do you—feel you’re taking some risk in agreeing to testify on General Lee’s behalf?”
“I’ve received certain communications from persons who supposedly spoke to people high in the American government, telling me that if I did not appear as a prosecution witness, I could expect to be tried for murder, immediately after General Lee was convicted.”
“Do you have any idea who those high-placed people might be?”
“No. I’d rather not speculate.”
“Why did you decide to appear for the defense?”
“Because I want to tell the world—and the South especially—that I’m not afraid to share General Lee’s fate, if it comes to that. When I put on my uniform, I made a covenant with death. If death chooses to invoke his right to summon me in the grisly form of a hangman’s noose, so be it. What counts is not how a soldier dies, but the state of his soul when death presents his summons.”
“Noble sentiments, sir. Let me ask you some factual questions. Did you ever know a soldier named Lewis Powell, who also called himself Lewis Payne?”
“I never knew any such man by name. He might have been a face in my ranks. But I never spoke to him.”
Johnson went back to the defense table and returned with a photograph of Payne/Powell, which he held up to the judges, then showed to Mosby. “Here is a recent picture of the man.”
“I don’t recognize him,” Mosby said.
“Then you never detached him from your command, to go to Washington to murder President Lincoln?”
“Never. The mere thought appalls me.”
“General Lee never ordered you to give Powell such an assignment?”
“Never. The whole idea would border on the absurd, if it were not so vicious.”
“Would you say that these outrageous charges were what made you decide to testify for the defense?”
“Most emphatically. They slander me as well as General Lee.”
“Thank you, General Mosby.”
Ben Butler rose to lumber toward the witness. “But you do admit, General Mosby, that General Lee approved your decision to hang prisoners of war?”
“Yes. I’ve already said that.”
“You make no pretense of denying this indefensible act?”
“I explained it was in retaliation—”
“In retaliation for hanging your so-called guerrillas, who were out of uniform—an act approved by the laws of war, not only in this nation but in Europe.”
“My men were not completely out of uniform.”
“Balderdash. Can your appearance here, General, have something to do with calculation? You’ve decided that if General Lee is acquitted, you stand a very good chance of not being tried—or having him testify in your defense, if you are tried. You’ve made a kind of treaty or compact for joint prevarication, you might call it.”
“Such calculation never occurred to me, General Butler,” Mosby snapped. “Nor was there any agreement between me and General Lee. I haven’t spoken to him since the war ended.”
“The calculation—the very obvious calculation—has occurred to me, and I hope it will occur to the honorable judges of this commission,” Butler said. “How do you explain that the former Partisan Ranger Lewis Powell has testified under oath that you sent him to Washington to murder the president?”
“Perhaps the man was brutalized into saying it. Or frightened into it. He’s on trial for his life. A man will do or say a great many things to save his life.”
“Indeed,” Butler said with heavy sarcasm. He turned to the table where the judges were sitting. “I think we’re seeing a very good example of that appraisal of human nature at its weakest in the person now sitting in the witness chair.”
I studied the impassive faces of the judges. They were as impenetrable as stone. Clearly, no one had any warm thoughts for John Singletom Mosby. Butler turned his back on the diminutive general and stalked back to the prosecution table.
“Do you have any questions to ask this witness, Judge Holt?” Butler asked.
“I would consider it a waste of breath. He’s so obviously lying.”
“May we proceed to our next witness?” Johnson asked.
Reverdy Johnson rose at the defense table. “Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Will you take the chair?”
Suddenly there was total silence in the courtroom. Everyone had stopped breathing. The five judges found it difficult to conceal their astonishment. The two prosecutors did not even try. General Butler’s hand froze on some papers he was arranging. General Holt, in the midst of writing a memorandum, became a figure in a waxworks.
The stumpy Ohioan sat down in the witness chair. “General,” Reverdy Johnson said. “I think we can dispense with formal questions about your identity.”
“Whatever you say, Senator.”
“I asked you to come here to help us settle a vexing question—whether General Lee was guilty of sending prisoners to their deaths at the Confederate camps in Andersonville and several other places where food was minimal and crowded conditions caused rampant disease.”
“So I understand.”
“There has been an additional claim that General Lee declined to exchange ex-slave prisoners for whites on an equal basis and that was another reason for the failure of all attempts at prisoner exchange, particularly in the last year of the war, when Andersonville was in operation.”
“So I understand,” Grant said in the same matter-of-fact voice.
“What is your opinion of these two charges, General?”
“They’re untrue.”
“Why do you say that?”
“General Lee was not responsible for the failure of prisoner exchanges in the last fourteen months of the war.”
“Who was responsible, General?”
“I was.”
General Butler looked as if a seizure were likely to topple him to the floor at any moment. General Holt was turning the color of one of the Elgin Marbles. The eyes of the judges at their long table were as riveted as the rest of us on the imperturbable man in the witness chair.
“Why do you say that, General?” Reverdy Johnson asked.
“Because I recommended to President Lincoln—and he approved it— that a policy of no further prisoner exchanges be put in place. Our manpower resources were far greater than the Confederacy’s. We could afford to lose prisoners. They were easily replaced. The Confederates’ losses could not be replaced.”
All said in the same matter-of-fact voice, announcing a policy of ruthlessness that staggered everyone in the room. Reverdy Johnson paced for a moment. “You thought this was necessary, General, to win the war?”
“To win it swiftly—yes. As necessary as General Sherman’s march through Georgia—and as General Sheridan’s devastation of the Shenandoah Valley. We saw that it was necessary to overwhelm the Confederate armies with the sheer weight of our men and metal. And break the spirit of resistance in the Confederate people.”
Spoken in the same matter-of-fact voice. This was the man who had won the war without grandiloquence, without posturing, without showmanship. Ulysses S. Grant was a force of nature—and he was demonstrating it anew in this courtroom. Like nature, while the storm of war raged, he was merciless. Individual fates, hopes, pleas, were irrelevant. Necessity was the only voice to which he opened his mind and heart. Now he was telling us that Lincoln too had been ready to worship the same dark god, in the name of swift victory.
The silence in the courtroom was enormous. The essence of Grant’s words combined with the silence to seep out of Arlington and spread darkness over Washington and the whole South, from Bull Run to distant Shiloh and New Orleans. In nearby Mount Vernon, George Washington dwindled to a ghostly shadow. The awesome mercilessness of the war we had just fought and won, thanks to this soft-voiced matter-of-fact man, was like a hand at our throats. I had a sudden desire to seek air, sunshine. I think everyone did.
Reverdy Johnson thanked General Grant and sat down. Ben Butler rose, rounded the prosecution table, and stopped. He studied General Grant for a long moment. “Did you volunteer to come here, General?”
“Yes, General Butler. I volunteered,” Grant said.
“Why?”
“I was told that General Lee was being accused of something for which he was not guilty. As a man of honor, I felt my country would be shamed if he were convicted on a false charge.”
“Do you hold General Lee responsible for the well-being of the Union prisoners in Andersonville and other camps, who died like animals, bereft of food and medicine?”
“No more than I was responsible for the men who died in Union prisoner-of-war camps. Their death rate was rather high, too. Commanding a great army is a full-time job, General Butler.”
Though his tone remained matter-of-fact, Grant’s personal opinion of Butler somehow seeped into those words. Perhaps I only imagined it, because I knew his opinion. Butler seemed to sense it, too. His voice grew sharp. “I commanded armies, too, General Grant. I considered the well-being of my soldiers more important than anything else. I wonder what future historians will say about your conduct in this regard.”
“I hope they’ll treat me kindly, General Butler. You must hope for similar forbearance.”
“I don’t fear their judgment, General Grant. Perhaps you do. Perhaps that’s the best explanation of why you’re here. The Butcher Grant has come to the defense of the Butcher Lee.”
“Those are mighty hard words, General Butler.”
“I think they’re words that the American people need to hear, General Grant. Before they begin thinking of you as a man entitled to the kind of unqualified acclaim George Washington received.”
“I’m the last man in the world who thinks I deserve such acclaim, General Butler.”
“Perhaps you are. Perhaps you—and others—know things about your conduct that would shock the American people even more than the revelation of your role in the exchange—or nonexchange—of prisoners. I’m satisfied for the time being that my words are in the record of this trial, which I hope and pray the American people will read as a lesson in who deserves praise and who deserves blame in the great cataclysm we’ve just endured.”
Again, I may have imagined it—but I felt Ulysses Grant’s eyes rove the room until he found my face. Wordlessly, was he asking the question he had raised during our early-morning carriage ride a week ago? Would Jeremiah O’Brien support or deny the story that Charles A. Dana might now be disposed to circulate about the general’s collapse into drunkenness before Vicksburg? I felt sweat ooze from numerous pores. The stakes in this contest kept getting higher and higher.
Butler returned to the prosecution table. Judge Advocate General Holt rose and spoke from behind the table. “I have only one question for General Grant. Is your appearance here intended to suggest that General Lee is not guilty of the other charges lodged against him before this military commission?”
“By no means. I’m not qualified to comment on the other charges. I leave them entirely to the judgment of the commission,” Grant said.
“Thank you, General,” Holt said, and sat down.
“I think we might adjourn for refreshment,” General Stapleton said. He rapped his gavel and we all rose to seek relief from the confrontation with the past and future that Ulysses S. Grant’s appearance had created.
As a reporter, I should have been exultant. Grant’s revelation about the prisoners was a sensational newsbeat. Butler’s angry warning that Grant would not become president without an examination of his war record was yet another potential sensation. Either one would galvanize sales of my book. But I found no excitement dancing in my newshawk’s psyche. I was no longer a detached observer in this ugly business. I was part of it, heart and soul, mind and body. More and more I began to sense I was in a trap from which there was no happy escape.
On the way out of the courtroom, I found Sophia Carroll walking beside me, assisting Mrs. Lee. “Wasn’t General Grant remarkable,” she said, with a pleased smile.
“Amazing,” I said.
“Do you think General Lee’s as good as acquitted?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. I thought Butler’s counterattack was rather effective.”
Her smile vanished.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m hoping to catch General Grant on the portico.”
I hurried away and reached the portico to find Grant in conversation with Thaddeus Stevens. The congressman was obviously berating him in low intense tones. The familiar chopping movements of his hands suggested murderous weapons. His lined face was twisted with rage.
Grant looked past him and gave me a nod. “Thanks for the advice, Mr. Congressman,” he said loudly enough for me to hear him. “I won’t forget it.”
I followed Grant to his waiting chaise. His Iroquois aide, Colonel Ely Parker, was sitting in it. I noticed he had a revolver on his hip. I also noticed a carbine on the floor beneath his feet. Trust was not exactly rampant in the upper echelons of the American government.
Glancing over my shoulder to make sure Stevens had gone back into the house, I asked Grant what the congressman had been telling him with such emphasis. The general smiled wryly. “He wanted me to know that I would become president only over his dead body, thanks to my testimony today.”
“Are you concerned about that?”
“I told him I didn’t want to be president. I told him it’s the last job in the world I want.”
This man was either tremendously clever or so honest he was unbothered by the shadow world of intrigue through which we were groping. I found myself inclined to the latter opinion. The general lit a cigar and leaned from the chaise. “I didn’t like the gimlet eye Dana was giving me. I hope you haven’t forgotten that question I asked you—about our trip up the Yazoo.”
Amazing nerve. After giving me two—no, three stories, if I include his clash with Thad Stevens—that would make my reputation as a political reporter, he expects me to throw them all away by taking his side in this imbroglio? He had a far higher opinion of Jeremiah O’Brien’s conscience—or was it his courage?—than anyone else, including O’Brien.
I squinted into the June sunlight while Grant waited for a reply. “I — I’ve been giving it very serious thought, General. I’m still doing that.”
“There’s a lot at stake here, O’Brien. A lot more men may die if Dana and his friends pull this off.”
Antietam, South Mountain, Fredericksburg—the battlefields carpeted with young bodies swirled before my eyes. Was Grant right? Or was Dana the wise man in his ruthless insistence on a spiritual as well as a physical victory? Was Grant’s old friend Pete Longstreet part of the South’s bluff, with his grim prediction that the soldiers of the surrendered armies would fight rather than see its leaders—above all, Robert E. Lee—bleed? Had he convinced Grant? Or did Grant need convincing? No one, as far as I knew, gave him any advice about how to conduct himself at Appomattox, where he had tried to forge a peace of reconciliation.
Where did such a peace leave the Negroes? That was the question I knew Dana would ask me. I did not have an answer to it. I could only hear poor George Bullitt looking forward to being reunited with his wife and sons on a farm in Virginia, thanks to Charles A. Dana and his rich friends.
“Keep thinking, O’Brien,” Grant said, settling into his seat. “Meanwhile, thanks for making sure Parker gets your notes. They’ve been very helpful.”
Ely Parker gave me a hooded glance that suggested he had my number and then some. If necessary he would have gotten those notebooks and O’Brien’s scalp in the bargain. Parker said something in a foreign language to the horses and the chaise rattled down the curving drive in a swirl of dust.
Back in the house, I made my way to the table where Dana, Stevens, and the generals were dining. Not surprisingly, Grant was the topic of discussion. General Butler had the floor as I sat down. “He’s running for president, I’m certain of it,” Butler said. “I think it will be on the Democratic ticket. That explains this appearance as Lee’s defender. Can you imagine how many votes that will get him in the South?”
“If the Congress has anything to say about it, there won’t be any votes in the South for a long time to come,” Thaddeus Stevens snarled. “Have any of you gentlemen read the papers today?”
No one had taken the trouble, apparently. Stevens informed us that a delegation of colored men from Richmond had called on the president. They were protesting the inhumanity and humiliation they were suffering in the former Confederate capital. With the tacit cooperation of the Union Army, Negroes were barred from certain parts of the city, they were being confined to the most menial jobs, at abominable pay—and Southerners were grimly warning them that the Union troops would not stay much longer, and then a day of retribution would dawn.
I thought of the two colored men who told me they hoped to open a restaurant. Obviously that was never going to happen under the government the former rebels were planning to create. I watched while the generals ate steak and fried potatoes and said nothing in response to Stevens’s diatribe. They hated him too much for his wartime arrogance to give him the courtesy of a reply.
“I wonder if General Grant’s conduct today has a much more alarming end in view,” Dana said. “He may well be angling for the presidential nomination of both political parties. There are men around him who hate Congress and would rejoice to set up an executive branch with the power to browbeat the country into any policy they choose to pursue.”
“I disagree,” George Gordon Meade said. “I don’t think Grant wants to be president. He put an absolute ban on any mention of it at headquarters during the war.”
“With all due respect, General, I think you fail to grasp the extent and depth of Grant’s popularity. Tonight he and President Johnson are taking a train to New York for a reception tomorrow that bids fair to be an orgy of hero worship unseen since the victory parades of Caesar Augustus. The adulation will be entirely Grant’s. The president, a mere politician, will be tolerated by his association with the hero. That means he too will soon be completely under Grant’s control.”
“I begin to think the very future of our republic may be at stake,” Thaddeus Stevens said. “The man must be stopped. I can only hope you gentlemen will take this side of the situation seriously when you render your verdict on General Lee.”
“Mr. Congressman,” General Stapleton said. “May I suggest something impertinent? Shut up. We had to listen to you during the war because you had power over us. Now you have none over me—and much less over the rest of these gentlemen, even if they stay in the army. I think your vindictive spirit is wholly out of place in this trial. I would be extremely pleased if you took yourself back to Washington immediately after this meal and stayed there.”
“Pennsylvania is not far from New Jersey, General Stapleton,” Stevens snarled. “There’ll come a time when you need a political favor for your family’s railroad or your factories or your steamboat line. I’ll see you don’t get it.”
“I’m terrified,” Stapleton said. He turned to Judge Advocate General Holt. “Would you care to comment on whether Mr. Stevens’s presence at this trial is appropriate, General Holt?”
“I think it’s entirely appropriate,” Holt said in his best pompous manner. “He’s a high office holder in the federal government. Who else could be more appropriate?”
Stapleton slammed down his knife. “I would like to poll my fellow commissioners now, on their opinion of the congressman’s presence.”
“I think, at the very least, his presence is not appropriate in this dining room,” Baldy Smith said. “He gives me dyspepsia every time I look at his sour puss.”
“I agree with General Stapleton,” George Meade said. “The congressman should stay in Washington. His purpose here is to intimidate, as his words just made clear. I resent the imputation that we need watching.”
Stapleton turned to Ambrose Burnside and Oliver Howard. The latter was obviously torn. Stevens had played a crucial role in garnering him commendations from Congress. But he was a soldier first and an abolitionist second. In a low uncomfortable voice, he said: “I wish the congressman would absent himself, for reasons similar to General Meade’s.”
The eyes of four generals now impaled Ambrose Burnside. A man who throughout the war desperately sought the good opinion of his peers was confronted by a dilemma he was uniquely unqualified to endure. After an agonized moment, he muttered: “I agree with my fellow commissioners.”
Congressman Stevens sprang to his feet, trembling from head to foot. His chair clattered to the floor. “Never have I seen such incipient dereliction of duty!” he roared. “If you acquit this murderer, I shall engrave all your names on the tablets of infamy if it’s the last thing I do!”
The congressman limped from the room. Dana waited a strategic moment. “Does this mean our trial is as good as over? You gentlemen are bowing to the unexpressed but more or less evident will of Ulysses S. Grant?”
“By no means,” General Howard said. “General Grant has refuted only one part of the charges against General Lee. Unless the defense has similar replies to the other charges, I would have to consider with the greatest seriousness the possibility that the man is guilty of treason.”
“Second that motion,” said Burnside, with a grim finality that suggested he had no intention of changing his vote, no matter what the defense had to say.
“I resent Mr. Dana’s imputation that my vote can be obtained as a form of truckling to power,” George Gordon Meade said. “I never truckled to General Grant during the war. Why should I start now?”
“My mind is at least as open as Mr. Dana’s is closed,” Baldy Smith said. “I’ve never considered this rebellion as anything but despicable from beginning to end. I have no friendly feelings for General Lee. If I had been at Appomattox, I would have advised Grant to insist on unconditional surrender.”
This revelation of Baldy Smith’s opinion of Lee and the Confederacy was more than a little startling. It suggested that Baldy was up to his old game of disagreeing with everyone in sight, including Ulysses Grant. Was he nursing a secret grudge against Grant for failing to give him enough credit for the victory at Chattanooga? Something to do with a failed promotion or some other promised reward?
There was another long pause. I realized everyone was waiting to hear from General Stapleton. I decided to include myself in the audience, and looked expectantly in his direction. “I don’t think this is the time or the place to discuss our attitude toward General Lee, the Confederacy, or the remaining charges,” he said. “When the time comes, I hope we can debate these things without reservations or hesitations—and reach the right verdict, whether Charles A. Dana, Thaddeus Stevens, Edwin Stanton, or Andrew Johnson are for it or against it.”
I saw resentment flicker in Baldy Smith’s gray eyes. He did not take kindly to anyone who rebuked him, even here, in semiprivacy. If Stapleton was tilting in Lee’s direction, he was not trying to take anyone else with him.
“That’s a motion I will second, most heartily,” Dana said. “My presence at this trial, gentlemen, has nothing whatsoever to do with intimidation. I’m here at the request of Secretary of War Stanton, to make certain the proceedings are as scrupulously fair and objective as possible. He’ll have to approve the findings of this commission, and he wants to make certain they meet the highest standards of justice.”
With his usual skill, Dana mixed protestations with an unspoken threat. The invocation of Stanton’s name—and his appearance on the first day of the trial—left no doubt that the secretary of war, a Democrat before Fort Sumter, was in complete agreement with the Radical Republicans who were now in command of the House of Representatives and the Senate. To put it another way, subtracting the protestation, Dana was telling them that Stanton was his mouthpiece, not the other way around.
“May I say something else that smacks of partisanship, I admit?” Dana said. “But it is a partisanship on behalf of our country’s ideals, believe me.”
“Of course, Mr. Assistant Secretary,” General Stapleton said. Was there sarcasm in the sudden use of Dana’s title? I thought so.
“General Grant is not nearly as impregnable as he seems to be at the moment. In spite of the adulation he’s receiving from the public, he’s vulnerable to a determined counterattack, if he attempts to criticize or somehow overturn a guilty verdict against General Lee. The public is a fickle lover, easily changed from adoration to contempt. Especially if the information reveals a side of the hero that they never suspected.”
“What are you driving at, Dana?” Baldy Smith asked. “You’re going to tell the world that the general is a drunk? Those stories have been all over the country for years. No one’s ever proved them. I served with Grant for six months in the West, though you’d never know it from his dispatches, where he seldom mentioned my name, no matter how many ideas I gave him. He may be an ingrate but I never saw him drunk.”
“Sitting at this table is a reporter who saw him so drunk he barely knew his own name, in the middle of the Vicksburg campaign. Thanks to my intervention, Jeremiah O’Brien has never written this story. But he has everything needed to make it a part of this book—eyewitness accounts, besides his own, even a letter from John Rawlins, begging Grant to stop drinking. I need hardly add that this information would be used only if dire necessity required it. I’ve warned General Grant of its existence. He’s a sensible man. I don’t think he’ll go much beyond what he’s said and done here today, should your verdict displease him.”
All eyes at the table were suddenly focussed on Jeremiah O’Brien. What eyes they were. I saw in them the grim resolve that had sent three hundred thousand men to grisly deaths. But that was almost beside the point. Overwhelming that immediate past was a universal contempt for O’Brien, Dana’s toadying mick reporter.
I wondered which of these entities constituted the larger share of the contempt—the toadying, the mick, or the reporter. I decided reporter probably won the largest share in this three-way contest. These men saw reporters as their enemies. Any friendship we evinced for them was always undercut by our hunger for the story. Any friendship they displayed for us was rooted in fear of the story.
Didn’t that leave O’Brien where he had been marooned from the start, in spite of his spurts of resentment—wholly dependent on Charles A. Dana for his livelihood, and whatever shreds of moral respectability the godlike one chose to bestow on him? This knowledge combined with the overwhelming unanimity of the generals’ contempt to shrivel my soul to the verge of nothingness.
“I take it you’re prepared to confirm the information Mr. Dana just gave us?” General Stapleton said.
I stared numbly at him. What was I hearing in that harsh voice? Sadness. It was definitely sadness. Did that mean he was on Grant’s side? Or was he simply remembering the moment of camaraderie we had shared on Arlington’s portico while we waited for Ben Dall to arrive with the reinforcements to protect General Lee against the murderous tendencies of Colonel Bigelow’s Negro regiment.
Has America lived up to your boyish dreams? the general had asked.
Sometimes, I had said.
That’s about right, he had said, with the same sadness in his voice. Sometimes it’s the world’s best country. Sometimes it isn’t.
In which direction were we going here? Toward making America the world’s best country—or in the opposite direction, toward the world’s worst, or at least very far from the best country? That vein of sadness in General Stapleton’s voice bewildered me. I simply did not know what it meant. But it made me completely unable to answer my own question about the country’s direction.
Suddenly I was saying words that were totally incredible to my own ears. As if they were spoken by a stranger who had somehow taken possession of my body and soul. “I really don’t know what Mr. Dana is talking about,” I said. “I’ve heard rumors about General Grant’s drinking. But I’ve never seen him drunk. Maybe he has me confused with another reporter.”
An astounded silence permeated the room. On the faces of Ben Butler and Judge Advocate General Holt I saw unadulterated menace. The generals sitting as judges simply looked baffled—except for General Stapleton. Did he sense I was trying to tell him something so inchoate I could not put it into words—something about being American?
“That doesn’t mean I favor one verdict over the other in this trial,” I said. “I want to see justice done—not only to General Lee, but to everyone on both sides who died in this war. I don’t think the verdict should depend on anyone’s ability to impugn General Grant’s reputation.”
Dana lit one of his small black cigars. “I guess I’m getting old,” he said. “I could swear you told me that story, O’Brien. I’ll have to check my notebooks, and see if I can turn up the name of that other reporter.”
“Let’s hope that won’t be necessary, Mr. Dana,” General Stapleton said. “Let’s hope the evidence in this trial is so convincing, one way or the other, we won’t have to smear General Grant to convince him of its justice.”
“At the risk of repeating myself, General, I most heartily second that motion,” Dana said.
Judge Advocate General Holt rose to issue a verdict of his own on this rump debate. “The afternoon session should have begun a half hour ago,” he said.
Reverdy Johnson and General Lee were seated at the defense table as we entered the drawing room-courtroom. Mrs. Lee and Sophia Carroll were also on hand, as well as Custis Lee, who was whispering something to Sophia that made her smile. Again, I was swept by envy and suspicion. But my personal feelings were quickly diverted by the sight of another person sitting in the back row, where Thaddeus Stevens had previously cast an ominous shadow over the proceedings: Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Stevens must have telegraphed from here to bring the senator out from Washington, D.C., so quickly. The Radical Republicans were serving notice that they did not intend to let anyone banish them without a contest.
Sumner was a very different man from the acerbic Stevens. He was immensely more dignified and aristocratic. As on the first day, Reverdy Johnson hurried to shake his hand and Sumner greeted him with the same warmth. They chatted for a moment or two, and Johnson strolled back to the defense table as General Stapleton called the trial to order.
“The defense is pleased to summon General in Chief Winfield Scott,” Johnson said.
The doors opened and one of the largest men I have ever seen entered the room, hobbling on two canes. Winfield Scott was at least six feet five inches tall. Decades of good living had added dozens of pounds to his gigantic torso. His lined face was the color of rubbed mahogany, topped by a mane of white hair. He wore one of the most splendid uniforms I have ever seen, a veritable symphony in gold lace, from cuffs to collar to epaulets. He labored, gasping, to the witness chair and sat down with a mighty sigh.
“General Scott, what an honor to have you join us,” Reverdy Johnson said.
“I consider it a duty, sir,” General Scott said in a husky old man’s voice.
“I hope your journey from West Point was not unduly taxing.”
“The commandant of cadets was good enough to assign two young men to accompany me. They performed wonders, getting this ancient carcass in and out of trains and carriages.”
“I trust you understand the nature of this trial, and the need for your testimony.”
“I understand it most definitely” he said. A rumble of irritation in his voice suggested he resented Johnson’s imputation that he might be senile.
“Good, good. General Lee has been charged with accepting an offer from the Confederate government while still in the service of the United States Army. Would you rehearse for us your recollections of this subject, when you discussed it with General Lee—then Colonel Lee—five years ago?”
“I recollect it as if it were yesterday, sir,” Scott said. “I summoned Colonel Lee from Texas and arranged for Francis Blair to offer him command of the federal army then being formed to suppress the rebellion. I reiterated that we had President Lincoln’s approval. All I needed was his acceptance and I would order the papers drawn to commission him a major general.”
“What did General Lee say?”
“He said he feared Virginia was about to secede—and he could not bring himself to draw his sword against his native state.”
“Did he say anything about being offered an army command by the Confederate government?”
“No. But both he and I knew such an offer was inevitable. Other officers had already accepted such offers. I told him if that was his frame of mind, he should resign immediately. Because his position left him open to serious charges of disloyalty.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he would resign the moment Virginia seceded.”
“Which he did?”
“Which he did.”
“Did that satisfy you, General, that Colonel Lee, if I may again refer to his federal rank, was exculpated from a charge of treason?”
“Unquestionably. I was completely satisfied on that account. But not on any other.”
“What do you mean, General?”
“I considered Colonel Lee the most distinguished soldier of his generation. I think if he had accepted my offer, the war would have been mercifully brief. His decision would have given other Southern-born officers pause. His talents as a strategist and tactician would have executed my plan to crush the rebellion with a skill that the generals who commanded the Union armies sadly lacked.”
Johnson paused. I sensed General Scott was heading into waters that were not in the planned scope of his testimony. I also divined something else—Scott’s vanity; I had heard stories about it. I now had no doubt that this man considered himself a military genius of vast brilliance and enormous prestige.
“What was that plan, General?”
“I called it the Anaconda Plan. It was in fact the very plan that the federal government eventually adopted, after the sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives. To put pressure on the South from all points of the compass, and crush the life out of the rebellion. General Lee, having been privy to the plan, took steps—brilliant steps—to thwart it. His use of the South’s interior lines of communication, for instance, was masterful. When he sent General Longstreet’s corps to the West, and smashed the federal army at Chickamauga, for instance. His adoption of a strategic defensive and a tactical offensive in Virginia—another instance. But not even his skills could circumvent the final effects of the plan, as his manpower dwindled and the South’s morale tottered under the pressure.”
“An admirable summary of the war, General. And gratifying, to be reminded of your contribution to it,” Johnson said. “Let me ask you one more question. You knew Robert E. Lee well, did you not?”
“He was my constant companion in Mexico. The finest chief of staff any general ever had.”
“Do you consider General Lee capable of committing treason?”
“The mere idea is preposterous. The man’s sense of honor was the most delicate, the most vibrant part of his being.”
“Thank you, General.” Johnson turned to General Stapleton. “I have no further questions.”
General Butler rose from the prosecution bench and strolled toward General Scott. “What an honor to meet you, General,” he said. “May I shake your hand?”
“Of course,” Scott said. They exchanged a cordial handshake.
“Your comments on General Lee’s conduct are fascinating,” Butler said, retreating a few steps. “I can see that you were deeply disappointed when he refused your offer.”
“I was. I was intensely disappointed. I said to him, ‘Lee, you are making the greatest mistake of your life.’”
“Why did you say that?”
“Because I knew—and I suspect he knew—that the South could not win the war, if the North fought it with even a modicum of intelligence. My Anaconda Plan was a virtual guarantee of eventual success.”
“May I ask which is your native state, General?”
“Virginia.”
“How interesting. The same state as General Lee. But you remained loyal to the Union. Why did you choose a different course from Colonel Lee? Have you given any thought to that question?”
“It had been decades since I resided in Virginia. I had no family in the state. Whereas General Lee had a wife, relations, children, property there.”
“Nevertheless, here were two sons of Virginia, one staying loyal to the Union, the other to a state in rebellion to the Union. Was there an element of disapproval, as well as disappointment, in your words when you told General Lee he was making the greatest mistake of his life?”
“I suppose there was some disapproval. I really thought his country badly needed his services.”
“And he was saying no. In spite of his free West Point education, his thirty-five years of enjoying the pay of the federal government, the honors and promotions it had given him. Did it strike you, somewhere in your mind, that there was an element of ingratitude in Colonel Lee’s decision?”
“I suppose it might look that way to a stranger. But my feelings were too strongly engaged for me to find fault with him on that score. I was not only hiscommanding officer, I was his friend.”
“A friend indeed. You were ready to forgive him, seventy times seven, as Jesus exhorted us to do. But Jesus was talking about spiritual forgiveness. He was not discussing guilt and innocence in the eyes of the law.”
“I understand that,” Scott said complacently.
No you don’t, I thought. Can’t you see where General Butler is leading you? In his haze of vanity and old age, General Scott saw little or nothing. I began to think Reverdy Johnson was going to regret bringing him from West Point.
“Suppose you had been younger, healthier in 1861,” General Butler continued. “Suppose General Lee still rebuffed your offer. You found yourself facing him in battle. Knowing your plans, he might have been able to out-maneuver and embarrass you. Would that have changed your feelings toward him? Would you, struggling to save the Union, say to yourself, this man is not only a traitor, he’s a false friend. He let me unburden myself of state secrets and then used them against me.”
“Being human,” General Scott said, “I might have had such feelings. I’m glad I was never able to test your hypothesis, General Butler. It would have saddened me extremely to think such thoughts about Robert E. Lee.”
“As it saddens all of us, General Scott,” Butler said. “We haven’t undertaken this trial in a spirit of personal animosity. We see General Lee’s course as the tragedy of a man who yielded to false gods, false ideas, false dreams of glory—as did so many of his countrymen.”
“I must confess, I have had similar thoughts,” General Scott said.
“General Scott, I would like to thank you for your candor,” Ben Butler said.
Triumph all but gleaming on his face, Butler turned to the listening generals. “Do any of you gentlemen have questions for General Scott?”
“General,” said Ambrose Burnside. “Did you ever attempt to communicate with General Lee during the war? When the contest revealed its true nature, a virtual struggle to the death, did it ever occur to you to ask him to lay down his sword and seek some sort of peace?”
“I was superseded by younger men,” Scott said. “I lamented the carnage as much as anyone. But I never thought I could influence General Lee in that way.”
General Howard leaned forward, earnestness personified. “Did you make any appeal to General Lee’s sense of duty, his responsibility to his country?”
“I considered such things self-evident,” Scott said. “Such an appeal would have been almost insulting.”
“So you did feel he had a duty, a responsibility, to accept your offer?” Howard said.
“In theory, yes. But in the light of his feelings, I saw it was impossible.”
“Do you really think General Lee would have significantly shortened the war, if he had commanded the federal army?” General Stapleton said. “I fought in almost every battle in the East, from Bull Run to Appomattox, General. The ferocity of the contest seemed to transcend the talents of generals.”
“It’s only an opinion, sir, vulnerable like all opinions to argument. Perhaps my estimate of General Lee’s talents is too high. But I don’t think so.”
Judge Advocate General Holt rose and thanked General Scott for contributing a new dimension to their understanding of the war and General Lee’s role in it. He could barely conceal the pleasure he took in those words. He undoubtedly thought they sealed Robert E. Lee’s fate.
The old soldier accepted the compliment and struggled to his feet. General Lee rose with him. “General Stapleton,” he said. “May I say something to General Scott that has no connection to the matter at hand?”
“Of course.”
“Mrs. Lee and I would be enormously pleased, General, if you could stay at Arlington and have supper with us tonight.”
Scott beamed at his favorite soldier. “I accept that invitation with double delight.”
Amazing man. I was almost openmouthed at the courage—or was it the cunning?—with which Lee embraced the man who seemed to have done him mortal damage. Was Reverdy Johnson’s clever brain behind this invitation? Was the defense defiantly saying that they trusted the court not to place too much weight on the testimony of a very old man?* Or urging the judges to weigh the obvious fact that Winfield Scott still had the warmest feelings for Robert E. Lee?
*Scott was eighty years old at this time.
General Stapleton surveyed the scene for a moment. “Perhaps we should allow General Lee and General Scott to enjoy a reunion for the rest of the day. Does anyone object to an adjournment?”
No one objected and the gavel fell. As we stood up, I felt a hand on my arm. “I think it’s time we had a long frank talk, Jeremiah,” Charles Dana said in my ear.
“I was thinking of inviting myself to dinner here tonight. They may re-fight the Mexican War. It would add a wonderful dimension to the book.”
“There may not be a book, unless we have a long frank talk,” Dana said.
“I didn’t realize your powers were so extensive,” I said.
“You apparently don’t realize a great many things,” Dana said.
In the hall, Custis was helping Mrs. Lee up the stairs. Sophia Carroll turned to me. “Jeremiah,” she said in a low urgent voice. “I heard what you did at dinner—defying Dana. I was never so awed, so enthralled, by any act by any man in my life. I know what it took, what it may cost you. Did you do it for me, Jeremiah? Or for General Lee? I hope it was for both of us.”
“I’m not sure why I did it,” I said. “Dana is threatening to become Vlad the Impaler—”
“Tell me the truth, Jeremiah! Don’t talk historical gibberish.”
“Of course I did it for you,” I lied.
“I wish I could kiss you,” she said in the same intense voice. “I wish—I wish I could do so many things, Jeremiah. I want to make you happy forever. And I will. I will!”
“Where does this leave Custis Lee?” I all but hissed the words like a caricature of a stage villain.
“He’s in love with me,” she said. “But I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you since the first hour we met in the Willard Hotel. It hurt me to lie to you about the war, after that—that night, it hurt me deep in here.”
She pressed her hands to her breasts. I felt the familiar feeling of dissolution in my flesh. The woman had power over me. But was she telling me the truth—while confessing in the same breath that she was a consummate liar?
“How do you know what I said?” I asked dazedly. “There were no servants in the dining room—”
“Never mind how I know. In this house, the walls have ears.”
“Then you must know what else I said. I still wanted—or expected—the trial to be decided on its merits. Will you still love me if they find General Lee guilty? Didn’t you listen to General Scott just now? He gave the prosecution half a dozen new arguments to prove General Lee was a traitor.”
“Senator Johnson will answer them. I have faith in that man. I have faith in you, too, Jeremiah. Tomorrow or the next day there’ll be another test. Perhaps the ultimate test. I have faith that you’ll meet it, Jeremiah. Meet it in the name of love and forbearance and justice.”
“O’Brien!” Charles Dana called from the front door. “Our carriage is waiting.”
For a moment I wanted to kiss Sophia Carroll. Kiss her fiercely, wantonly, proudly. I wanted to let Dana know how far I was prepared to go in my defiance. But I told myself not to expose her to his vengeance. With the help of Thaddeus Stevens and his vindictive friends Dana might try to implicate Sophia in the plot to assassinate Lincoln. He knew she had helped launch the original plan to kidnap him, using the money she brought to John Surratt.
Stay calm, detached, objective, I told myself. Happiness will be all the sweeter when it finally arrives.
Waiting in the carriage were Charles Sumner and Lafayette Baker—a combination that encapsulated the bright and the dark side of Radical Republicanism. The ultradignified senator from Massachusetts seemed to be on cordial terms with the slimy ex-vigilante from San Francisco. I climbed into the facing seat and Dana joined me.
“I’m grateful for your attendance this afternoon, Senator,” Dana said. “I’m afraid these victorious generals need to be reminded that the war may have ended but the government’s power to reward loyalty and punish disobedience has increased rather than diminished.”
“I was glad to come out. I wish I could have joined you for the entire proceedings,” Sumner said. “But matters of high policy toward the South are being discussed at the White House. A great deal depends on what’s decided.”
“We hope to finish this business in two or three more days, at the most. Then you’ll have my complete cooperation.”
“Good. The president is showing unmistakable signs of incipient Democratix pestis major. Unless he’s inoculated swiftly, I fear the outbreak could become an epidemic.”
Translated, this meant that President Johnson was showing signs of relapsing to his original allegiance to the Democratic Party. To Sumner this was equivalent to an outbreak of pestis major—the plague.
“I’ll telegraph the New York Times and Tribune to begin applying the treatment as soon as possible,” Dana said.
He lit a cigar and smiled reflectively at Lafayette Baker. “Quite a day, wouldn’t you agree, General Baker?”
Baker nodded. “I think we have some work to do.”
“Most definitely,” Dana said. “General Stapleton is also showing signs of incipient Democratic fever. His attack on Congressman Stevens was simply unacceptable.”
“We have quite a lot on him in the files,” Baker said.
“I think you’ll be making a very grave mistake if you try to intimidate that man,” I said. “You’ll lose his support instanter.”
“Instanter,” Dana mocked. “O’Brien, your erudition is truly impressive.”
“Instanter,” I insisted. Maybe I was trying to show these Harvard graduates I could throw around a Latin word or two. Dana’s mockery only hardened my determination to defy him.
“My dear young man,” Senator Sumner said. “You’re the chief reason Assistant Secretary Dana asked me to come out here. He hoped I could reason with you about what’s at stake in this trial. Surely the atrocious murder of that colored soldier is evidence of what the Rebels are planning to do to the freed Negroes. We must crush this spirit of defiance to God’s laws and the nation’s laws—crush it now! Your friend and benefactor, who sits beside you, aggrieved and saddened by your conduct, has convinced not only me but every thinking man in the United States Senate and House of Representatives of the absolute necessity of destroying the residual spiritual pestilence of the crime of slavery. This pestilence is incarnate in the person of Robert E. Lee.”
I struggled to withstand this tidal wave of verbiage. Sumner talked to everyone as if he were addressing the United States Senate. I interviewed him once at Dana’s suggestion and came away with five thousand words in reply to a simple question: How long did he think the war would last? Yet within the current verbal tidal wave was a core of hard truths. I was dismayed by George Bullitt’s death. Dana was my benefactor. Robert E. Lee was the spiritual cynosure of the South. I only had to look into Sophia Carroll’s eyes to grasp that home truth.
“I deeply regret George Bullitt’s death, Senator Sumner. But I wonder whether he would have died if Mr. Dana hadn’t determined to settle him and other Negroes on a piece of land that was sure to anger and threaten the South.”
“You don’t understand,” Sumner said. “That is precisely what must be done, to break their centuries-old tradition of arrogance. They must be humbled, made penitents—and then reeducated before they can become citizens of the United States again and live in harmony with its free traditions.”
“Isn’t it possible, Senator, that you’ll only end up hardening their hearts? Enraging them unto perpetual defiance?”
“If that’s their choice, so be it. We have the money, we have the weapons, to plant an army in their midst until the end of time, if necessary. The longer they resist, the more likely will be the day when the freed Negroes, educated and supported by the men of the North, will rule the South and the former slave owners will be their servants. Won’t that be a day of jubilee? Surely you can imagine such a day for your own oppressed people in Ireland. It will set an example for the whole world to imitate!”
I gazed at Senator Sumner, all but mesmerized by his eloquence—and the glow in his blue eyes. It was a light from another world, spilling down his lined face, wreathing it in a veritable paroxysm of joy. In my head, a voice whispered: This man is insane.
Where did that voice come from? It seemed to emerge from the same inner darkness that spawned my wish to prove Dana finally, irrefutably wrong. I didn’t understand either irruption but I sensed it was vital to Jeremiah O’Brien’s future sanity not to shun them.
“What a wonderful vision, Senator,” Dana said. “You must say some of this in the Senate as soon as possible. The New York Times will put it on the front page. Medill will do likewise in the Chicago Tribune.”
Senator Sumner beamed at the prospect of this public praise. He might talk like a translation of Cicero, but he was a politician, after all. What to do? I saw it was a waste of time to argue with this man. He had no interest in commonsense objections to his fantastic vision of a white South in bondage to its former slaves. It was a long way from Lincoln’s postwar vision, as I understood it from the random remarks he had made about it.
But Lincoln died before the war ended and ex-slaves began coming to the White House with tales of oppression and abuse. There was the awful possibility that Sumner and Dana were right about the South’s determination to defy the military verdict Ulysses Grant had won. There was the even stronger possibility that Sumner’s hunger to punish and humiliate the South would poison relations between the races for centuries.
Where and how in this historical morass did Jeremiah O’Brien find his way? In my desperation I stumbled onto a useful device. Instead of gazing at Senator Sumner, wreathed in the light of the ideal, I studied Lafayette Baker’s crafty physiognomy, where deception, double-crosses, and venality were almost as visible as painted advertisements. This man represented the low and vicious tactics that had been necessary to win the war. But instead of jettisoning him, the Radical Republicans were clutching him even more fiercely to their triumphant bosoms. Didn’t that tell me something?
The answer was yes, and that reply swiftly became a way to survive the morass. “Senator Sumner,” I lied. “Your eloquence is truly amazing. May I say the same thing for your vision of a new South. It never occurred to me that such a solution might be possible.”
The senator smiled at me with the immense self-satisfaction of a man who was convinced history was under his control. Perhaps he thought he emanated the power to make his crazed dream come true. “I was sure all you needed was some elucidation,” Sumner said. “No one who has associated with Charles Dana for so long could drift too far from the truth.”
“May I say amen to that, Senator,” I replied.
By this time we were crossing the Long Bridge over the Potomac. The senator began orating on the need to confiscate the lands of every slave owner in the South. He had conferred with his House of Representatives counterpart, Thaddeus Stevens, and was hard at work on a confiscation bill for the U.S. Senate. By way of amusing us, he orated clauses and pronunciamentos and justifications by the yard.
Lafayette Baker suggested offering trustworthy Union officers such as Oliver O. Howard a chance to buy the slaveholders’ lands at bargain prices. They would bring with them ex-soldiers with the guns and expertise to protect themselves and the Negroes who would do the labor while they were learning to read and write and grasp the responsibilities of citizenship. In a burst of candor, General Baker hoped his name might be placed on the select list of first bidders.
“Consider it done,” Senator Sumner said.
Soon we were saying goodbye to the senator at his comfortable house on Connecticut Avenue. As the carriage pulled away, Dana lit another cigar. “I hope you didn’t think either General Baker or I was in the least convinced by your sudden conversion to Senator Sumner’s rhetoric,” he said.
A shriveling sensation engulfed me, from the skin to the intestines. I saw I was by no means out of the morass. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“I mean, quite simply, one thing. Do you intend to continue denying the story that Grant was drunk on the Yazoo in 1863?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
Lafayette Baker sighed. I could almost see him fashioning a vigilante’s noose around my neck, and selecting a likely tree for my hoisting. The carriage clopped through downtown streets and stopped at a rather rundown building several blocks from the War Department.
“Get out,” Dana said.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“This is the headquarters of the U.S. National Police,” Dana said.
One of Baker’s detectives, who looked even more like a fugitive from justice than his colleagues, greeted us at the door. We marched up a flight of stairs and down a corridor with a decrepit fake Turkish carpet on the floor and shreds of paint peeling from the walls. Baker’s office was no improvement on this decorative scheme. It had another fake carpet. The walls were obscured by row upon row of bulging files.
“I think it’s time we destroyed your illusions, Jeremiah,” Dana said. “We’re going to show you Sophia Carroll’s file.”
“I’m not interested,” I said.
“I am. Sit down. General Baker will read selected passages.”
I sat down. Baker dragged the file from its shelf and began reading reports from various agents on the espionage life of Sophia Carroll. “She is said to be the kept woman of Custis Lee, who pleasures her whenever she is in Richmond,” one wrote. “Her fame as a courtesan is only exceeded by her duplicity” another wrote. “ ‘Tis said the Louisiana bitch will spread her legs for anyone who offers,” a third spy averred. “I can testify to her willingness. She bedded me before we put more than a mild dent in our bourbon supply.”
On and on Baker droned in a bored voice that made it sound as if he were some sort of machine with an ability to read English. I heard how Sophia obtained diagrams of all the forts in Washington by spending several nights with the colonel who was supposed to be guarding such information. After he passed out from sexual or alcoholic excess, she made remarkably expert copies of them. I learned in sickening detail of her liaison with John Wilkes Booth. Apparently it was she who escorted Lewis Powell aka Payne to Booth’s door, after first enchanting the actor with her performance in his bedroom. I listened to intercepted letters in which she joked about gulling “the stupid little reporter,” Jeremiah O’Brien, who thought she was the incarnation of the Mona Lisa.
Crumbling. There was no other word for it. O’Brien was crumbling. By the time Baker stopped reading, the bedraggled mick was a heap of disconnected pieces of flesh and cartilage and bone on the floor. It was up to Dana to breathe life back into the dismembered corpse, like a diabolic miracle worker, a Jesus manque.
“I had hoped to spare you this, Jeremiah,” Dana said. “Lee’s conviction would have turned Sophia into a Lucrezia Borgia, more likely to stab you than embrace you. Now that the conviction is in doubt, thanks to you—”
“In doubt?” I croaked. “In spite of General Scott’s testimony?”
“In doubt, unless we can checkmate Grant. We can’t afford to take chances now. Reverdy Johnson is a fiendishly clever lawyer. Grant’s appearance more than offset Scott’s addled admissions.”
“I would have preferred not to know,” I said.
“I would have preferred you not to know, Jeremiah,” Dana said in a mournful voice that made me think for the first time he actually had some personal feelings for me. “But there isn’t much time. We have to go to Grant tomorrow, when he returns from his triumphant visit to New York, and tell him to order his toadies, Smith and Meade, to vote for conviction. Stapleton can’t be trusted, though we may change that, later tonight. I want you to come along for that visit, by the way.”
“I’m sick of this whole thing. Sick! Sick!”
“Think of the money you’ll make from the book, Jeremiah.”
“I don’t care about the money!”
“You will when you get it,” Dana said.
“A reporter who doesn’t care about money?” Lafayette Baker said. “I’ve yet to find one who wasn’t ready to do some faking for the right price.”
“Jeremiah is in love. That always inflicts wear and tear on a man’s judgment. But he’ll get over it,” Dana said.
I gazed at the godlike Dana and almost hated him. He was close to using up the last shreds of my gratitude for rescuing me from New York’s gutters. But my despair over Sophia Carroll left me indifferent to what happened now—to General Lee, General Grant, General Stapleton, or Jeremiah O’Brien. I was in the grasp of power. Why not let it take me wherever history’s current was rushing, and think about it later?
Baker ordered two of his detectives to track down General Stapleton. They had orders to report to him as soon as they determined the general was alone in his room at the Willard. I was still convinced that Dana’s attempt to subjugate this man was going to backfire. But I had lost all interest in warning him about dire consequences. I only wanted to escape Charles A. Dana as swiftly as possible. I would write this book, take my money, and disappear—to Paris or Rome or Vienna. I was thoroughly sick of this American world.
Baker and I and Dana went off to a restaurant, where they rehearsed me in what I would say to General Grant tomorrow. I was ordered to prepare a transcript of a story that we would show him, with the presumed threat that it would be sent to the Tribune if he remained defiant. “The timing couldn’t be better,” Dana said. “Tonight, he’s being lionized by the elite of New York. In the great tradition of American journalism, newspapers will be eager to reveal his feet of clay. It’s our way of toppling caesars before they can seize power.”
“You’re always in the right, aren’t you, Dana,” I said. “Was there ever a time when you were wrong?”
“I honestly can’t recall a single instance,” Dana said, with a mocking smile.
“What are we going to say to General Stapleton? If I have to come along, I’d like to look as all-knowing as you and General Baker.”
Dana’s smile was almost gleeful. “We’ve turned up a marvelous story about his mother. Before the war, she had an affair with Senator John Sladen of Louisiana. In the course of it she conspired to persuade New Jersey and other border states to declare their neutrality when the South seceded. She almost succeeded. Her candidate for governor of New Jersey in 1860 lost by only five thousand votes. If he had won, the state would have unquestionably gone South. During the war, she persuaded the legislature to pass a resolution declaring that Southerners and their slaves would be welcome in New Jersey after the war.”
“Fascinating,” I said, impressed in spite of my general revulsion. As usual, Dana played only with trump cards. “How did you get this information?”
“Sladen was sent to Europe early in the war, you’ll recall. He was grabbed off his British ship by an American steam frigate. It made for an international uproar. We finally let him go but not before we went through his papers. Among them were numerous love letters from Mrs. Stapleton.”
“Which eventually wound up in General Baker’s files?”
“Exactly,” Dana said. “If General Stapleton declares he’ll vote for Lee, you’ll tell him, in a voice choked with regret, that you’ll be forced to use this information in the book.”
“I hope Baker is going to bring two or three of his bullyboys as bodyguards. I wouldn’t put it past General Stapleton to wipe up the room with us.”
“I’ve got a gun,” Lafayette Baker said, pulling open his coat to reveal a pistol.
“So has he,” I said, remembering our midnight foray to Arlington. “Why don’t you just let his old friend Ben Dall use his powers of persuasion?”
“I’ve talked to Dall. He approves of our tactics. But he declines to be associated with them directly. He’s hoping to borrow a great deal of money from Stapleton to go South and set up a model farm community for the freedmen. That could be your next book.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said, not trying to disguise my disgust. As long as the goal was righteousness, these idealists seemed to feel any and all means were justified.
As we downed our coffee, one of Baker’s detectives materialized beside our table. He was sweaty with the exertion of hustling across town in Washington’s June humidity. “Stapleton’s in his rooms,” he said, wiping his neck with a red kerchief “All by hisself. No babe. What’s this caper about, anyway?
“We’ll explain later,” Dana said. “Let’s go.”
Our carriage was waiting. We rattled briskly across town, past the usual Union soldiers on the sidewalks, arm in arm with doxies who were leading them to Tincup Alley and similar dives. There they would be served poisonous tanglefoot whiskey and unceremoniously robbed when they passed out. “When are we going to send these fellows home?” I asked.
“Not for a good while. A lot of them will go South as garrison troops, if we have anything to say about it,” Dana said.
“Won’t that lead to a dramatic increase in the South’s illegitimate birth rate?” I said.
“Undoubtedly,” Dana said, with the complacency of a man who had long since accepted the degradation of the masses.
The Willard’s hissing elevator lifted us to General Stapleton’s floor. I mused over the irony of our ascent. The hiss harmonized better with a descent to the place evildoers supposedly go. I no longer doubted that Dana was in the business of evil, no matter how noble his patriotic goals.
Stapleton answered his door in his shirtsleeves. “General,” Dana said. “I hope you don’t mind an unannounced visit. The time is short and the matter at hand of the utmost seriousness.”
“Whether I mind or not is obviously beside the point,” Stapleton said, beckoning us into the room.
“Hello, O’Brien,” he said, when he saw me bringing up the rear.
His voice was friendly. I found it painful to hear. I nodded and forced a smile. Dana and Baker and I sat down on a couch. General Stapleton positioned himself in a wing chair a few feet away. His manner was grave but not hostile.
“I’ll get to the point without niceties, General,” Dana said. “Your conduct vis-à-vis Congressman Stevens alarmed me profoundly today. You were chosen to help us try General Lee for treason because your friend Ben Dall assured us that you were prepared to vote for his guilt, presuming the evidence warranted it. You were, in short, a man without political prejudices. That no longer seems to be the case.”
“I suppose I ought to apologize to the old bastard,” Stapleton said. “I’ve never forgiven him and his friends on the Committee on the Conduct of the War for hauling me in front of them after Chancellorsville. They suggested my division didn’t warn the army of Jackson’s flank attack because my father had been a Democrat and I was still one in secret. The stupid sons of bitches didn’t know we made a stand that saved the army from a total rout.”
Stapleton’s big fists knotted in his lap. He finally got his anger under control and gave Dana a grim smile. “I lost my temper. But I have no intention of retracting my opinion—which is obviously shared by the other members of the commission—that we don’t need a congressman staring down our throats. That goes for Senator Sumner, too. Will you tell him that? Or will I have to do it?” It was a masterful performance. A momentary retreat, followed by a counterattack. The general knew a lot about fighting battles. Dana hesitated; his mouth compressed and I knew he had decided to go to extremes with this man.
“General,” he said. “I think our mutual friend Ben Dall made clear to you the momentous nature of this trial.”
“He tried very hard to do that. I don’t think he entirely convinced me. But he persuaded me I had a duty to play a part in it, as a civilian turned soldier. He said my vote would mean more than the other votes because people would presume it was objective. That flattered me into saying yes.”
Stapleton added a wry smile to these last words.
“I wish it was as amusing to the rest of us,” Dana said. “I refer not only to Mr. O’Brien and General Baker, here, but to the very interested and powerful men in Congress and at the helm of national newspapers who believe General Lee’s conviction is imperative to the spiritual regeneration of the country.”
“That’s the part I find hard to swallow,” Stapleton said. “But I’m perfectly ready to find him guilty of treason on the charges before the court. Certainly General Scott did him no good today. General Grant removed only one charge from the docket—”
“General Grant has by his intrusion greatly unbalanced the political weight of the trial. We intend to see him tomorrow and make sure this thrust is reversed—unless he wishes to face the very unpleasant consequences we would be forced to deploy. Contrary to what Mr. O’Brien said earlier today, he now recalls the story of Grant’s Vicksburg binge and he’s prepared to use it, with the same regret I’d feel at the necessity”
Stapleton’s gray eyes transfixed me. “Is that true, O’Brien?” he said.
“I’m afraid it is, General.”
“That brings us to the question of whether similar tactics will have to be invoked to persuade you to vote guilty, General,” Dana said.
“I’m trembling from head to foot,” Stapleton said, mocking him as he had mocked Thaddeus Stevens.
Dana proceeded to tell him the information they had in Montgomery Baker’s files about his mother and Senator John Sladen. The mockery vanished from Stapleton’s face. He listened with visibly mounting rage. I began to entertain serious worries about my personal safety But they vanished into a welter of humiliation when those penetrating eyes transfixed me again and he asked: “You’d write this, O’Brien?”
“I’m a reporter, General. It would be news. If you voted the wrong way”
Why didn’t I say, I’m scum, General, can’t you see that? A whining little mick without the guts of a mosauito. That would have been closer to the truth. But I was dancing at the end of my puppetmaster’s strings once more. Dana was in control of my crumbled self, which he had remade in his image. He was more godlike than I ever imagined. I was helpless to fend off all and every humiliation in his name.
The silence in the room seemed to last for a half or even a full hour. Actually it was only a few minutes, at most. Stapleton rose to his feet. “Dana, now I know what Grant meant, when he told me you were a son of a bitch.”
“In a good cause, General. The very best of causes. Justice for those millions of pathetic freedmen. They’ll never get it as long as the South defies us in Robert E. Lee’s name.”
Stapleton shook his head. “You’re no different from Thad Stevens, Dana. Don’t you see that the best cause in the world can be polluted by foul methods? By subterfuge and lies and brute force, by personal insults and the deliberate ruin of decent men’s reputations?”
“History seldom records such regrettable necessities, General. I’ve now decided that the only thing that will satisfy the goal we seek is a unanimous vote of guilty. I intend to inform General Grant of that fact tomorrow. He will so inform Generals Smith and Meade. That will leave you painfully isolated, General.”
“Get out of here, Dana. You disgust me. You all disgust me. I begin to wish I never went near this insane war. I begin to think the whole thing was insanity from start to finish!”
“I prefer the word destiny, General.”
I followed Dana toward the door. As I approached it, I glanced at General Stapleton. I’m sorry, I said, speaking only with my eyes. I expected him to see nothing but craven cowardice there. That was all he seemed to see. I trudged down the hall after Dana, wondering how I could reconcile a tremendous need to get drunk with the requirement to write General Grant’s indictment in time for our meeting with him tomorrow.
For the time being, bourbon won. I abandoned my lonely rooms on E Street and wandered to the Willard bar to drink to the ruin of Jeremiah O’Brien’s pursuit of happiness. That mighty American slogan had turned out to be so much hot air, no different from England’s hollow boast about being a nation devoted to liberty, while enslaving everyone from Ireland to India. Why had I ever succumbed to such a ridiculous illusion? I was a hopeless romantic, a believer in love, loyalty, brotherhood.
Time passed. I got drunker and even more discouraged. Maybe the best solution was a stroll to the Long Bridge over the Potomac. A splash into that swirling stream would spell finis for O’Brien, God’s nonfavorite, like his father and mother before him.
A large hand suddenly grasped my shoulder and spun me around on the barstool. I stared at General Jonathan Stapleton. He was pretty drunk, too. “O’Brien,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you hard at work on your slanders?”
I shook my head and struggled to disentangle myself from his grip. “I thought I was a pretty good judge of men, O’Brien,” Stapleton said. “But you fooled me. I could have sworn you were a decent fellow.”
“I was,” I muttered. “I was, once upon a time.”
“Until Dana got his hooks into you?”
I shook my head again. “Sophia. Sophia Carroll,” I muttered.
“So? She’s quite a piece. Has she jilted you for Custis Lee? He looks at her like a starving wolf at Little Red Riding Hood.”
“Some Lil Red Riding Hood,” I mumbled.
I blurted out the story of Dana’s revelations via Baker’s reading from Sophia’s secret service file. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it was the sheer power of that sinewy hand on my shoulder. An American grip, dragging me back to this tormented country. Maybe it was a last despairing attempt to retain at least a shred of this man’s good opinion.
Stapleton swayed there, gazing at me in drunken astonishment. “Did you ask her if it’s true?” he said.
“Ask her?” I muttered dazedly. “It’s all there, in black and white.”
Stapleton shook me like an unruly child handles a rag doll. I thought my head would fly off my shoulders. “O’Brien! When were you born? Didn’t you hear Grant call Dana a son of a bitch? As for Baker, he’d compose slanderous reports about his own mother. What if it’s all a pack of lies, O’Brien?”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“The hell with believing it. Let’s go ask her. Both of us. Now!”
In five minutes I was semirecumbent in a hack, while General Stapleton fed the Negro driver a steady supply of greenbacks to produce greater speed from his spindle-shanked nag. The poor horse was practically legless by the time we reached Arlington. The first floor of the mansion was dark. But lights still glowed on the second floor.
I remained paralyzed in the carriage. “I can’t ask her. It’s too sickening. She’ll despise me for the mere suspicion—”
“Let me handle it, O’Brien,” General Stapleton said. “Just tell me what to say.”
“How did she obtain the drawings of Washington’s forts? Did she ever know in any degree of intimacy John Wilkes Booth? Or Lewis Powell? Did she ever write letters calling me ‘the stupid little mick reporter’?”
“I think we’ll skip the last one,” Stapleton said.
He got out of the carriage and knocked on the door. After a few minutes, Custis Lee appeared, carrying a candle. “Is Miss Carroll still awake?” Stapleton said. “It’s a matter of some importance. Mr. O’Brien and I have one or two questions to ask her. It won’t take more than five minutes.”
“I’ll see what she says,” Custis Lee replied, giving me a suspicious glance, for which I did not blame him. I was not looking particularly alert in my semirecumbent position.
A few minutes later, Sophia emerged, wearing a nightgown and wrapper. By the light of the candle in her hand, she acquired Sibyl-like dimensions. She held my future in her compressed lips and wondering eyes.
“Miss Carroll,” General Stapleton said. “I’m here on behalf of Jeremiah O’Brien. He’s been told certain things about you that I hope you can disprove. Could you tell us how you acquired the drawings of Washington’s fortifications?”
“Is this a trick to arraign me on charges of treason, along with General Lee?”
“Miss Carroll, would you trust a man who’s prepared to take a solemn oath that you have nothing to fear from us?”
“What about Mr. O’Brien?” she said. “He doesn’t look prepared to tell me his correct name, much less take an oath.”
“He’ll take it tomorrow, on my honor as a soldier and gentleman, when he sobers up,” Stapleton said.
“I obtained those drawings from a Southern sympathizer in the War Department. They were more numerous than most Yankees ever suspected.”
“Very good, very good,” General Stapleton said. “One more question: Did you ever have any acquaintance with John Wilkes Booth or Lewis
“How dare you, sir?” Sophia blazed. “Are you suggesting I had something to do with Mr. Lincoln’s murder?”
“Not for a moment,” General Stapleton said.
“I never met—nor would ever have wished to meet—either of those ... those scum. Neither was a gentleman. Mr. Booth was an actor. No respectable woman would ever associate with someone of that ilk. Powell was—is—a despicable piece of white trash, of the sort I would cross the street to avoid passing on the sidewalk. Do you have any other ridiculous questions to ask me?”
“No,” General Stapleton said. “In Mr. O’Brien’s name, as well as my own, I want to apologize for disturbing your rest. Good night, Miss Carroll.”
“Good night,” Sophia said, slamming the door to underscore her low opinion of our interview.
General Stapleton climbed into the carriage and sank back on the opposite seat. “O’Brien,” he said, pulling a flask from beneath his coat. “I think we both deserve another drink.”
“I agree,” I mumbled.
The general raised the flask. “To Charles A. Dana, a lying son of a bitch who almost got away with it.”
He belted down a hefty slug and handed me the flask. “Amen,” I said, and joined him in a gulp of bourbon I hardly needed, from the viewpoint of complete ossification. But in the matter of declaring my independence from Charles A. Dana once and for all—it was a veritable elixir.
Back to Washington, D.C., we rattled in our hired hack. As we crossed the Long Bridge, Stapleton roused me with another shake from his muscular arm. “What’s the conclusion, O’Brien? Any thoughts?”
“Only one, for the moment. I have no intention of menacing General Grant with any sort of revelation. Dana’s threat on that score is stillborn, as far as I’m concerned. Of course, he can always find another reporter who would leap at the story”
“But Dana would never be willing to reveal himself as the eyewitness. That would demolish his performance as the unbiased spectator in these revels,” Stapleton said. “I think without you the thing is dead.”
“Then General Meade, General Smith, and you constitute a majority. Lee is as good as acquitted.”
“I’m not so sure. Picking Baldy Smith was not one of Grant’s best decisions. Baldy hates the Radicals. He despises Butler. But he’s got almost as many grudges against Meade and Grant. He wrote a vicious letter to Grant about Meade’s generalship, after Cold Harbor. Grant’s answer was to relieve Baldy after he messed up our first attack on Petersburg. He’s never forgiven him for that. Baldy felt Grant owed him at least one free pass for his contribution to Chattanooga.”
We were deep in the politics of the Union Army now. “I thought it was more or less understood that Baldy was a sacrificial lamb to appease the Radicals and keep them off Grant’s back.”
“He was—and he seemed willing to accept it at the time. I had a long talk with him about it. But he’s had a year to stew in the juices of his numerous disappointments. He never got another assignment worthy of what he considers his preeminent talents.”
I was still so drunk I felt semidetached from my body and brain. I was standing or sitting outside the conversation. I heard myself say with malice aforethought in my voice: “Maybe the best answer is a direct attack on Dana. Flush him out of the bushes. Make him a witness for the defense.”
“I’m not sure how that would go.”
“I could tell you things about how he started this war. I could tell you a lot.”
“You mean you’d be willing to appear as a witness?”
“Absolutely.”
“Wouldn’t that put the quietus on your book?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t give a damn.”
“I still don’t see how that would work. But I’ll talk to Reverdy Johnson about it.”
“Another idea—call Greeley to testify. How Dana started the goddamn war behind his back.”
“Horace Greeley?” Stapleton said, really amazed now. “Do you think he’d come?”
“I think he would. He hates Dana more than I do.”
“That’s something I’ll definitely tell Johnson.”
At the Willard, General Stapleton insisted on a nightcap in the deserted bar. The bartenders were polishing glasses and two Negroes were mopping the floor. But we sipped another bourbon as if the night were young. “I begin to think your proposed book on this trial has interesting possibilities, O’Brien. If Lee is acquitted, you should write it anyway. Turn it into an all-out assault on Dana, Sumner, Stevens, and the rest of these Radical Republican bastards.”
“Are you returning to the Democratic Party on the strength of this experience, General?” I asked.
Stapleton’s face darkened. He shook his head. “They’re still the party of disunion. My brother Paul told me about the game they played in the Midwest. They tried to revolutionize Kentucky and Indiana and set up a separate Confederacy that would have opted out of the war. People can deplore military commissions but they threw the bastards in jail in wholesale lots and stopped the thing. Ambrose Burnside may be first cousin to a lamebrain as a general but he knew what he was doing when he set those things up.”
“The Radical Republicans are like a separate party, inside the bigger party. Will they end up controlling the whole Republican operation?” I asked.
“I hope not,” Stapleton said. “They’re all Yankees or Yankees transplanted to the Midwest. In New Jersey we don’t care much for Yankees. Ditto in New York and Pennsylvania. We’re what they called the Middle Colonies during the Revolution. We dislike people who go to extremes. My mother is the exception to that rule, I should add.”
I saw that I was not the only one who felt beleaguered by history. I remembered the anguish in Stapleton’s voice at our dinner with Ben Dall, when he recalled his clash with his family in 1861. “Are those—those accusations against her true?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. When my father refused to cooperate with her determination to make him president, she became a bitter, angry woman, in love with power and not much else. But I’m not changing my vote in this trial to protect her. She’s perfectly capable of protecting herself. Dana should think twice before he arouses that tigress.”
“He won’t do it personally, General. It will be in the newspapers, through third parties.”
Stapleton dismissed the idea with a wave of his big hand. “If you’re not in politics, you can ignore such things.” I sensed there was little or no love lost between mother and son.
We drained the last of our bourbon. “What would Lincoln do? That’s what I ask myself,” Stapleton said. “I don’t think he’d let this monstrosity happen.”
“I’m sure of that, General,” I said, dismissing Reverdy Johnson’s doubts about Father Abraham’s postwar course.
On this mutual reassurance that we were both doing the bidding of the martyred president, we parted until morning. By the time I reached my rooms, I was reeling with a nice combination of bourbon and exhaustion. Sleep, the sleep of the just—or of the champion of that murky principle—beckoned.
I was locking my door from the inside when a familiar voice spoke from the darkness of the parlor. “O’Brien, you’ve finally come home. I thought you might have skeedaddled.”
It was Dana. I lit an oil lamp and faced him. He looked as serene and fresh as if it were seven A.M. and he’d just finished his morning ablutions. I shoved my hand through my sweat-soaked hair. I was not ready for another contest. I wanted nothing but sleep. I was almost ready to order him to leave when he said: “That was a touching little drama you and General Stapleton enacted at Arlington, O’Brien.”
“You have agents everywhere. I’ve got to admire your thoroughness.”
“Your Louisiana Jezebel’s story was wonderfully convincing.”
“I thought so. So did General Stapleton.”
Dana nodded. “Baker put one of Bigelow’s officers on his payroll. He gave us a thorough report of General Stapleton’s conversation with your ladylove while you cowered in your carriage.”
Dana gestured to a chair. “Sit down. I think it’s time we had a talk about fundamentals. Your problem isn’t Sophia Carroll. We can debate her until next Christmas and get nowhere. What we have to talk about—really talk about—is Lincoln. He’s the reason for your absurd sentimentality about a woman whose soul has been so corrupted by slavery, she’ll say—or do—anything.”
“I can’t imagine what you’d say to change my mind about Lincoln,” I said.
“O’Brien,” Dana said, an almost metaphysical intensity in his voice. “Jeremiah. Listen to me. After you publish this book about General Lee’s trial and execution, there’s a second one that well write together. It’s title will be The Lincoln Nobody Knows.”
My head swam. Was I dreaming this nightmare? In the yellow light of the oil lamp, Dana’s eyes emanated something very different from his usual transcendental righteousness. Was it evil? “I thought—I thought I knew Father Abraham pretty well,” I said.
“You—and so many others—were gulled by one of the great actors of his time. A man whose ambition was so vast, he saw himself as nothing less than another Jesus, destined to lead the almost chosen American people out of the darkness of Democratic politics into the light of a new destiny. He wanted to be remembered as greater than Washington, Jefferson, Madison—the whole pack of Virginia aristocrats that muddled our future with their talk of limited government. To achieve that goal, Lincoln was ready to dissemble to true believers like you, prate about a new birth of freedom at Gettysburg to mesmerize the masses, and behind the scenes throw Democrats in jail in wholesale lots. Who do you think set up these military commissions, with a judge advocate general as a prosecutor and judge? He did. He approved every comma and semicolon in the original documents, which were drawn to his specifications. He let poor Ambrose Burnside take the blame for them. But they’re his creatures.”
“I would have to see very strong proof of these assertions,” I mumbled, sinking into a wing chair.
“O’Brien,” Dana said. “Will you admit one thing? I’ve never lied to you. I may have lied to other men. But I never lied to you. I wanted—perhaps needed—you at my side, O’Brien. Someone who came to this American scene with no presuppositions. As close to being a tabula rasa as nature and history could produce. I liked the thought that I was creating a unique sort of American son, O’Brien. Beyond everyone’s influence but mine.”
“I—I’m grateful for that, Dana,” I said. Perspiration oozed down my neck. Was it really so warm in this room? Or was I descending into my old psychological trap, this time with no hope of ever springing open the door again?
“I’ve been collecting evidence—documents, newspaper clippings, letters,” Dana continued. “I’ve talked with people who were at Lincoln’s side since he ran for Congress in 1846. His law partner, William Herndon, for instance.”
“Dana, all this is—is impressive. But I need some sleep,” I said.
“Sleep is for inferior minds, O’Brien. You need to train your body to live without it. The will, O’Brien, the will is an amazing instrument. Think of what we’ve done with it. Together we willed Grant, a man with no nerves and the strongest imaginable stomach, to become the army’s commander in chief and win our godforsaken war. To rescue our sinking cause. Without us Grant would have been driven into outer darkness by the squalid compromisers, the weak-kneed with their bleats about casualties.”
“Grant— Grant saw the same Lincoln I saw.”
“He saw the Lincoln that Father Abraham wanted him to see. The same or similar to the one you saw. It was a performance, O’Brien. A masterful, consummate performance. Remember that show I invited you to see at the White House, where he trounced Medill and those other lily-livered Chicagoans? He accused them of starting the war—and they believed it!”
Dana leaned toward me as if he wanted to thrust the words into the flesh of my body as well as my brain. “O’Brien—he was the president! No one could have started the war without his collaboration. He maneuvered the South into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter with a skill that left me and everyone else who were hoping for action openmouthed. I went to the White House and talked to him. I told him the kind of victory I wanted. He said he wanted the same thing. The absolute total extermination of slavery.”
The Tycoon. The nickname John Hay used when he was describing Lincoln the leader of the war. The man who had his fingers on every string, who remembered the warp and woof of every thread. Why hadn’t I seen the real meaning of that word? Why was I in love with an impersonation of a merciful god?
“But I gradually saw that Lincoln and the men of New England had very different ideas about how to achieve a just peace. Vast, even cosmic differences, O’Brien.”
An arctic chill had invaded Dana’s usually mellifluous voice. “Those differences can be summed up in a quotation from a speech Lincoln made in Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, when he was running for the U.S. Senate.”
Dana paused for a moment, as if he were opening a book in his mind, then recited: “‘I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races... I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people, and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality’”
Dana leaped to his feet, as if those words had ignited some sort of engine inside him. He paced the room once, twice, then whirled to transfix me with eyes that were full of darkness. “If John Wilkes Booth had missed, or his gun had jammed, do you know what we’d be seeing now?” he asked.
I shook my head. Exhaustion was reducing me to a submission that bordered on extermination. Charles A. Dana simply knew too much, saw too much. I was back eight years in my primal Irish ignorance again, a blank page absorbing truth from godlike American lips. “What?” I muttered.
“You’d be seeing Abraham Lincoln presiding over a new war. General Sheridan wouldn’t be sitting on the Rio Grande, waiting for the Mexicans to throw out that moronic French puppet, Maximilian. He’d be marching on Mexico City. By July 4, Father Abraham would have become an emperor, presiding over a captive Mexican nation. An American version of India, with the same potential for immense wealth for imperial favorites. Then you—and Grant—would have seen the real reason for this conquest.”
“What?” I mumbled again. I tried to make it sound mocking. This was becoming too fantastic for even O’Brien, Dana’s son/servant/true believer, to swallow. Dana picked up the feeble echo of resistance and slashed it away like a weed in an ideal garden.
“O’Brien—you don’t know, you weren’t here. In 1848, at the close of the Mexican War, a wing of the Democratic Party led a movement they called ”All Mexico.“ We’d won. Our army was in Mexico City. Mexico was prostrate. Why not keep it? This too was part of our manifest destiny. It was enormously popular with the voters. We managed to block it by intimidating President Polk. Warning him New England would secede. But Father Abraham remembered that popularity. The stupid French with their puppet emperor, Maximilian, gave him the perfect excuse to march. Sheridan was the perfect general to do the job. A smashing, slashing maniac, who’d turn Mexico into a desert if necessary—”
“What would be the point of that?”
“The point. Ah, yes, O’Brien. The point.”
Dana contemplated me, the savage darkness still dominant in his eyes. “There is one gigantic problem that winning the war has not solved. What is it, O’Brien?”
“The Negroes.”
“The Negroes. Especially the Negroes as Lincoln saw them. Forever inferior. Mexico was going to become the solution for the Negroes. The place where Father Abraham would ship them by the millions. He would remove them from the South. Those that Mexico could not absorb he would send to Jamaica and the other islands of the British Caribbean, where they would fester into impotent imitations of pathetic Haiti. It would have been absurdly easy to demand these islands in compensation for the way the British backed the South for the first three years of the war, building warships like the Alabama to wreck our merchant marine. Thus Father Abraham would have cleansed his beloved America of the stain of negritude. Wiped two hundred and fifty years of the lash and the coffle from the escutcheon of the republic. Then he would have turned to Canada.”
“Canada?” I said.
“Canada—and Russian Alaska. The great white father of our new country had given William Seward a vision of himself as secretary of state and eventually president of the United States of North America.”
I laughed. It made no sense. It was better than sitting numbly, a silent witness to my own annihilation.
“It was possible, O’Brien. You saw those two armies march by the White House. You think Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee wouldn’t have been delighted to invade Canada, on the promise of three-hundred-acre farms for every man in the ranks and estates for officers? You think Uncle Billy would have had any objection to marching from Toronto to the sea? But the real surprise, O’Brien, would be the South. They would be eternally grateful to Father Abraham for his merciful peace—and for ridding them of the blacks. The slaveholders might have been surly but they were a discredited minority The majority of the whites, those who perceived it had been a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, would have embraced him as a hero—even a savior.”
Dana took a deep, slow breath. “That was Father Abraham’s plan, O’Brien. To ship the freed slaves out of the country and rule over an America in which the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were both meaningless—where there was only one party, the party of Abraham Lincoln. That was why we chose to do nothing about Booth, to let Father Abraham take his chances. The same reasoning applied to Seward, who had become Lincoln’s creature. Ditto for Old Bourbonbrain, as you call our current president, who carries the virus of the Democratic Party in his veins.”
Dana sat down again and lit one of his cigars. “A pity Booth and his amateurs made such a botch of it. If they’d succeeded, Secretary of War Stanton would be president, the perfect man for the ugly work of executions and , crushing the slave owners once and for all. To be followed by Grant, the man who would persuade the masses to worship our just peace.”
“Our just peace.” There it was, the ideal that Dana had injected into my veins, like a drug that guaranteed submission until the end of time. How could I refuse to follow him now?
“The Lincoln Nobody Knows. Think of how that book will sell, O’Brien. On the heels of the sensational success of The Trial and Execution of Robert E. Lee. Think of Jeremiah O’Brien as the most famous writer in America.”
On the floor below, my landlady’s clock bonged four A.M. In spite of my exhaustion and the bourbon in my belly, my brain was still functioning. I saw what Dana wanted to do: destroy Lincoln, because he too threatened New England’s spiritual hegemony. What Lincoln said about the blacks in 1858 to get elected senator in Illinois proved nothing but his political shrewdness; it had no bearing on his policy as president at the end of a horrendous Civil War. I still believed in the man of sorrows I had seen in the White House.
A shadow fell across Dana’s face, a patina of sadness. Was the godlike one revealing that even he grew weary? Or did he sense my resistance. “Now you see why I need you, O’Brien. Why you can become my only true son.”
I was staggered beyond words. Dana, pleading for my allegiance? The godlike one admitting a need, an unfulfilled personal desire? “Why me?” I said. “Why haven’t you chosen one of your own children?” If it were not the middle of the night, I would have screamed the words.
“Because they’re too American, O’Brien. They’re polluted by my wife’s family. Hopeless Democrats, mewling trucklers for compromise. I married young, O’Brien. Before I understood the power, the beauty, of the ideal. My children will go through life as part of the herd. I saw a chance to give you a greater destiny—”
“Get out!” I said. “Get out! I didn’t ask for this—this sonship. I didn’t ask to become a witness to mass slaughter. I didn’t give you the right to tear my heart out of my chest and devour it!”
Tears scalded my cheeks. I was weeping and refusing to weep, defying and submitting and defying this man unto death or madness or both. Sophia Carroll’s beautiful face swam before my burning eyes. Head bowed, Dana walked slowly to the door. Turning as he opened it, he spoke in the softest, saddest voice I had ever heard: “The truth, Jeremiah. I’ve never told you anything but the truth.”
In the morning my head felt like a Signal Corps observation balloon. But I recollected the events of the previous night with torturous clarity. What should I do? I began to think the best solution was flight. Get a train to New York and the first steamship to Europe or South America or Australia. Anyplace where Charles A. Dana and Jonathan Stapleton could not wage war over my pathetic soul.
Before I could decide whether this was a realistic choice, a knock on my door revealed Dana, with his usual confident smile on his face. “Good morning, O’Brien,” he said. “I hope you slept well.”
“I slept quite well, to my surprise,” I said.
“Good. I’m here to collect the draft of the story on Grant. I want him to have something to read. It’s the best way of penetrating his thick skull. Don’t you agree?”
“I haven’t written it, Dana. I have no intention of writing it.”
I stood there, trembling, almost as surprised by the words as Dana clearly was. I was not sure I meant them. Maybe it was only a fragment of Jeremiah O’Brien that was speaking. Maybe another fragment would say the opposite in an hour or two.
Dana stepped back, as if I had struck him a blow. He clearly thought last night’s three A.M. conversation had recaptured me. How could I tell him he was probably right? “O’Brien, your naïveté is—or was—one of your gifts as a reporter. You took things at face value and got them into the paper the next day. But a man who writes a book must get to the next stage of literary composition. He must start to think, to analyze, to doubt, to confirm. In all these areas, you’re deplorably weak, O’Brien.”
“I may be weak but I don’t need you to help me write the truth!”
I shouted these words in Dana’s face. His smile remained intact, his aplomb unshaken. There was nothing anyone—or at least Jeremiah O’Brien—could say to this man that would alter his armored righteousness.
“I guess we’ll have to soldier on without you, O’Brien,” he said. “Would you like a ride to Arlington?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll pay my own way.”
“With General Stapleton’s money?”
“General Stapleton hasn’t offered me a cent.”
“But he will, if you play his game.”
“I’m not playing his game. I’m not playing your game, Dana. I’m not playing anyone’s game. I’m going to try to do nothing, say nothing, write nothing but the truth.”
A pleading, defensive tone had crept into my voice. I was about to apologize, to beg Dana’s forgiveness for this absurd naïveté. Hadn’t I suppressed the truth about Grant’s drinking at Vicksburg, written outright lies about Burnside’s generalship at Fredericksburg? All in the name of our ultimate goal, a just peace? For an agonizing moment, I was Dana’s creature again. But the sleepless night must have warped his judgment of my condition. His face hardened.
“I thought better of you, O’Brien. I thought I was on the way to making you at least two-thirds American. This book, properly done, under my direction, might have made you a hundred percent American. And rich in the bargain. Instead, you’ve allowed a Southern slut to scramble your brains back to their original Irish level. A pity.”
“Go to hell, Dana,” I shouted. “GO TO HELL!” I rushed to the window and repeated the invitation as Dana got into his carriage with Montgomery Baker. “GO TO HELL. BOTH OF YOU.” Baker stared up at me, astonished.
I spent five dollars I could ill afford to hire a hack for the trip to Arlington. En route, I read the morning papers, which had nothing on their front pages but the details of the sensational reception President Johnson and General Grant had received in New York. Grant, the reporters made clear, was the man of the hour, with the president little more than an appendage. The crowds were immense. People shouted Grant’s name whenever he appeared. Poor Johnson must have wondered why he had bothered to make the trip. It looked as if Dana were right as usual. The stumpy general was on his way to acquiring more power than the czar of Russia.
As I came up Arlington’s drive, Custis Lee emerged from a grove of trees to the right of the house. Beside him was Sophia Carroll in a sky-blue dress and matching bonnet. Suspicion swirled through my bowels. What if Dana were right? Had I made a complete fool of myself for this woman?
Sophia detached herself from Lee and greeted me with a bright smile. “I begin to think something important happened last night. I suppose you can’t tell me what it is.”
“Not yet,” I said.
A pause. She transfixed me with those mesmerizing eyes. “I told you the truth last night, Jeremiah.”
“I know you did,” I said, aching to ask one more question. Custis Lee stood on the portico watching us. I thought I saw melancholy on his face. Hardly surprising in the circumstances.
In our drawing room—courtroom, the judges were already assembled in their Union blue. General Lee and Reverdy Johnson were at the defense table, Lafayette Baker and Dana were sitting together behind the prosecutor’s table. Dana had abandoned his seat behind me, on the defense side of the room. Generals Butler and Holt looked tense. Had Dana told them about my defection?
Mrs. Lee and Sophia arrived, with Custis assisting his crippled mother as usual. Last to take a seat was a glowering Senator Charles Sumner, still determined to let everyone know how important the trial was to the Radical Republicans.
General Stapleton rapped the session into business. Reverdy Johnson rose and spoke with great solemnity to the generals behind the green baize table. For a half hour he reviewed the charges and maintained that the testimony of General Grant, General Mosby and the other defense witnesses had dissipated all but one. General Lee was clearly innocent of complicity in killing prisoners of war, of participating in President Lincoln’s murder, of prolonging a war he knew he could not win. In regard to the latter charge, General Alexander had made it clear that Lee’s decision to negotiate at Appomattox had prevented a far more terrible guerrilla war—and General Lee had convincingly explained why, thanks to General Washington’s example, he had persevered for so long against daunting odds.
General Mosby had also exculpated Lee from the charge of hanging prisoners of war in retaliation for the murder of his own men. Lee had merely approved Mosby’s decision, based on convincing evidence. It was also worth noting, Johnson pointed out, that the brutal solution had worked. No more prisoners were hanged by either side.
Baldy Smith took issue with Johnson’s claim that Lee had no responsibility for the hanged men. They argued politely over it for several minutes. Johnson asked the official stenographer to consult his record. He read General Mosby’s testimony aloud. General Stapleton pronounced himself satisfied. General Meade promptly agreed. Smith retreated to grumpy silence. I could see why Stapleton was worried about him.
Reverdy Johnson paced for a moment and resumed his discourse. “That brings us, gentlemen, to the one charge that requires more extensive investigation: whether Robert E. Lee committed treason when he refused President Lincoln’s offer to command the Union armies and instead accepted a commission from the seceded state of Virginia.”
Johnson pulled a telegram from his pocket. “First let me dispose of a piece of evidence that was presented as a letter from Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, President Lincoln’s first secretary of war. Senator Cameron is not well and pleaded an inability to travel here from Philadelphia. However, in an exchange of telegrams, I procured from him the following statement.”
Johnson handed the telegram to General Stapleton. “My eyesight is getting so poor, General, I hope you’ll save me from possible error by reading this aloud.”
Stapleton took the paper and read in a sonorous voice. “‘In regard to General Lee’s decision to resign from the Union Army and join the Confederacy—I never spoke to General Lee directly about the appointment he was offered by President Lincoln. My letter reflects what I heard from responsible people in the War Department, after Lee made his decision—which I incidentally still maintain was an act of treason.’”
Johnson thanked Stapleton and put the telegram back in his coat pocket. “There you have it, gentlemen. Senator Cameron is reporting hearsay evidence. As for his opinion that the general committed treason— we knew he thought so from his original letter.”
Stepping back a few paces, Johnson addressed all the judges. “Gentlemen, I am convinced that no one can explain General Lee’s decision better than the man himself.”
Turning, he made one of his small bows. Lee returned it with a nod of his head and walked to the witness chair. He looked worn and not at all happy about the topic they were about to explore. I wondered again if this trial would kill him, eliminating the need for a hangman’s noose. I found myself almost wishing it would end that way It would be my deliverance. It would enable me to win Sophia and my freedom from Dana without saying or writing a word.
Reverdy Johnson paced the floor, gathering his thoughts. “In his examination of General Lee on this point, our distinguished prosecutor. General Butler, attempted to brush the word motive aside. He said only acts, dates, deeds matter. I don’t think this argument can be sustained in the situation in which Robert E. Lee found himself. You’ve heard him mention the importance of his wife and family in his considerations. I believe these thoughts require some amplification.”
Johnson turned to the witness. “General Lee, I hope you can sustain some rather unpleasant questions that necessity prompts me to ask you.”
“I’ll do my best to endure them, Senator,” Lee said.
“There is, I believe, a very good reason why this house, Arlington, means a great deal to you.”
“In 1831 I married Miss Custis here. That day remains in memory the happiest of my life.”
“Let’s concentrate on that year, 1831. Shortly after your marriage I understand you were assigned to Fortress Monroe, not too many miles from here, on Chesapeake Bay?”
“Yes, about a month after our wedding. Mrs. Lee came with me. We had quarters in the fort.”
“What else happened that summer, that left an indelible impress on your mind?”
“That was the summer of Nat Turner’s rebellion. Within two weeks of our arrival at Fortress Monroe, he erupted in Southampton County, about forty miles away”
“These gentlemen are not Virginians. Would you rehearse for a moment Nat Turner’s identity?”
“He was a slave. A part-time preacher. Not uncommon. He could read and write. I believe he was much affected by reading the Bible. It gave him delusions that he was the savior of his afflicted people. An eclipse of the sun, which occurred that year, impelled him to launch a rebellion.”
“Do you recall any of the details you and your fellow officers heard of the event?”
“Turner and his band were armed with machetes, axes, and a few guns. They killed every white person they met in their path. Men, women, and children. They decapitated many of them. Some they dismembered. It was a horrendous scene. We were ordered to dispatch three companies of troops to the area. By the time they arrived, the rebels had been dispersed by local militia and most of the killers captured.”
Reverdy Johnson paced. There was not another sound in the courtroom but the thud of his boots on the wooden floor. “Did you accompany those troops?”
“No. I was a staff officer at that time.”
“What were your thoughts—newly married—and faced with the possibility that this nightmare could erupt elsewhere in Virginia?”
“I was very worried. The temper of the Negroes in the Tidewater was extremely alarming. Colonel Eustis, Fort Monroe’s commander, banned them from the interior of the fort. I remember it clearly because it complicated some additions to the fort that we were making. Without Negro labor, these improvements came to a stop. Everyone was relieved when five additional companies were sent to us toward the end of the summer.”
“Did the event stir thoughts of other slave revolts?”
“Of course. I had heard my father talk of Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion in 1800. Prosser too proclaimed a policy of total slaughter of whites. He was caught before he could act, thank God. And then there was Haiti. Every Virginian knew that story as the ultimate horror, a race war in which the Negroes exterminated the whites. Prosser was probably inspired by that example.”
Lee said all this in a low intense voice that suggested long-suppressed emotions. The courtroom remained utterly silent. The generals at the table of judgment were as motionless as statues.
“A slave revolt, in other words, was never far from a Virginian’s mind?” Reverdy Johnson asked.
“From the mind of any Southerner, I would say.”
“Let us leap forward a goodly number of years. It is now late in 1859. You are at Arlington. Your father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, has died. You are on extended leave, helping your wife reorganize his estate. Suddenly, on October seventeenth of that year, you receive orders from the capital. You are to take command of a mixed body of troops to disperse a band of mauraders who have seized control of Harper’s Ferry arsenal and were inciting the slaves of western Virginia to rise.”
“You’re talking about my encounter with John Brown,” General Lee said, with a melancholy smile.
“Exactly. Tell us what you found when you reached Harper’s Ferry.”
“The intruders had captured a sizable number of hostages and held them inside the armory’s fire engine house, while they exchanged desultory fire with surrounding state militiamen. One of the hostages was Colonel Lewis Washington, grandnephew of the late president. All of them were prominent men in the neighborhood. I determined that the best chance of saving them was to storm the engine house early the next morning, after offering the insurgents a chance to surrender. Accordingly, I ordered Lieutenant Jeb Stuart, who had volunteered to join me in the business, to deliver an ultimatum I had written during the night. If Brown and his followers refused to surrender peacefully, Lieutenant Stuart was to wave his hat. That was the signal for a picked party of U.S. Marines to assault the building. After more palaver with old Brown than I would have tolerated, Stuart saw he would never surrender and waved his hat. The marines stormed the building and in five minutes had subdued the insurgents and rescued the hostages unharmed. One marine was killed in the assault.”
“What did you think of Brown and his followers at the time?”
“I thought Brown was a madman and his followers deluded fools, drifters of the sort that easily succumb to grandiose talk, which was Brown’s specialty.”
“You talked to Brown? You got from his own lips his intent to arm the slaves and start an insurrection?”
“Yes. I heard him say as much.”
“What if Brown had succeeded, even in part? If he parceled out to slaves, say, five thousand of the twenty thousand rifles in the Harper’s Ferry armory?”
“A good deal of blood would have been shed—most of it African. The alacrity with which the Virginia and Maryland militia responded to the crisis made it clear that a large uprising would have met furious opposition.”
“Did you wonder where Brown found the money to purchase Sharps rifles and feed and otherwise equip his twenty-one men for a considerable time?”
“I did wonder about that, but it was outside my concern in the matter, and I didn’t dwell on it.”
“But you must have seen, from reading the newspapers, the way men in the North rushed to make a martyr out of John Brown.”
“I noticed it—with considerable revulsion. But I had little regard for the spoutings of politicians. We had a fair number of spouters in the South who were saying ridiculous things on the other side of the matter.”
“Did you follow in any detail the congressional investigation into the six wealthy men, five of them from Boston, who financed John Brown?”
“No. By that time I had returned to Texas and resumed command of the Second Cavalry. I was more concerned with problems created by wandering Comanche war parties.”
“But you must have heard at least a few comments by fellow officers—or picked them up in letters from friends.”
Lee paused, and spoke in a slow grudging way, as if he wished he could remain silent. “My wife followed the hearings in some detail. I learned a good deal about them from her letters. Frankly, Senator, I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. It was simply too appalling—that civilized, seemingly intelligent men, prominent citizens of the same country, would try to visit a race war on their fellow Americans.”
Reverdy Johnson paced for a moment while Lee’s response gathered weight. “Now we are in 1861. We have taken your judges on a brief tour of your military career, with a focus on the reality of slave uprisings such as Nat Turner’s and the desire to promote far larger ones, as attested to by John Brown and his secret supporters. You discover that Virginia has seceded— and faces a Northern invasion. The governor of Massachusetts, in particular, is rushing troops to Washington. He was one of the men involved in financing John Brown. Did you recall these events, did you fear the specter of armed Africans unleashed on Virginia, and the very real possibility that your wife, your sons and daughters, the wives and children of your near relations, would be the target of Nat Turner-like rage?”
“I can’t honestly say I feared it, Senator. Because I was confident that the men of Virginia would never allow such a thing to happen. But I suppose the idea—the monstrous idea—lurked on the border of my mind. It lurked thus in every Southern mind. It was one of the reasons why I deplored the slave system and repeatedly urged friends and relations with some political influence to begin a program of gradual emancipation and the return of these benighted people to their native Africa. My wife was extremely active in the American Colonization Society.* I was proud of the time she gave to it. I only wished more women—and men—could have been persuaded to join her.”
*This was an organization founded by James Madison and other prominent men, who purchased land in what eventually became Liberia and tried to persuade free blacks and manumitted slaves to go there.
“HE’S LEAVING OUT THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE STORY! TO SPARE ME. BUT I WON’T BE SPARED. I WISH TO TESTIFY IN MY OWN DEFENSE AND IN HIS DEFENSE. I INSIST UPON IT! I WON’T BE DENIED!”
It was Mary Custis Lee. She was standing in the aisle, leaning on her cane, looking like the incarnation of one of the ancient Greek Furies. Reverdy Johnson seemed to be as surprised as everyone else by her eruption. “Mrs. Lee. I decided not to ask you to testify. The general concurred. Your health is delicate—”
“My health has had no effect on my memory or on my brain,” Mary Lee said. She stumped to the front of the room and confronted the judges. “Will you gentlemen permit me to speak?”
General Stapleton exchanged an uneasy look with his fellow generals. “By all means, Mrs. Lee. General, will you yield?” Stapleton said.
Without a word, Lee returned to his seat at the defense table. Mrs. Lee sat down in the witness chair. “I take it you wish to address the point I was discussing with General Lee—the fear of a slave uprising,” Reverdy Johnson said.
“Precisely. I wish to address it as a Southern woman. On behalf of all the women of the South.”
“By all means, Mrs. Lee. Was this a concern on your part?”
“It was a concern in the mind and heart of every Southern woman. Nat Turner loomed like a monster in our nightly dreams. Of course the men of the South would rush to defend us if events incarnated another Nat Turner. But would they get there in time? Their courage and solicitude meant little to the sixty victims Turner butchered. That is why John Brown and the men who financed him ignited terror in our souls. They aroused the specter of a hundred, a thousand Nat Turners, armed with modern rifles. That is why I told my husband, Colonel Robert E. Lee, that if he did not defend Virginia in 1861, he would never be welcome in this house again. He would become an abomination in my sight!”
“Did you send him a letter to this effect, madam?” Reverdy Johnson said.
“I did.”
“Does the letter still exist?”
“No. He destroyed it. To protect me, I suppose.”
Tears streamed down Mary Custis Lee’s face. I glanced at Robert E. Lee. He was expressionless. I yearned to know what he was thinking. Was he angry, to be portrayed as a man dominated or at least influenced by his wife in the most crucial decision of his life? Or did he accept it, accept Mary Lee’s passionate Southern sympathy as part of his Christian fatalism? Or did he share it, behind his mask of resignation?
Reverdy Johnson turned to the judges. “Gentlemen of this court, you have just listened to a scrupulously honest man—and his loving wife—tell you another reason why they chose to side with Virginia in the secession crisis. In my opinion, it is a reason that overrides pettifogging questions about when Robert E. Lee made this decision. For any man with an ounce of humanity in his heart, it exculpates the possibility that the then Colonel Lee, in his inner agony, waited a day or two longer than he perhaps should have to resign his federal commission and join the army of Virginia. On the contrary, it testifies to his profound loyalty to the union created by George Washington and the other founders, not least of them the general’s father, Light Horse Harry Lee, the man who proclaimed Washington first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. That union was first in Robert E. Lee’s heart until a conspiracy of Boston fanatics invoked a higher law than the Constitution and dispatched John Brown to Harper’s Ferry to reveal their depraved intent—yes, their Satanic intent—to create a race war in the South.”
Mary Custis Lee allowed Senator Johnson to assist her from the witness chair and escort her to her seat. When he returned to the front of the court, Ben Butler was on his feet, looking as if he wished he could seize Reverdy Johnson and Robert E. Lee and Mary Custis Lee by some sort of collective throat and inflict mortal damage on them. “Gentlemen of the commission,” he said. “You have just witnessed what I believe was a carefully rehearsed scene in a play that lacks a title. May I suggest one? The Martyred Husband.”
Reverdy Johnson regarded his chief opponent with undisguised loathing. “Your manners are as abominable as your morals, General Butler.”
“I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks of my manners or my morals,” Butler roared. “As a Massachusetts man, as a Northern man who has studied the causes of this war with the eyes of an attorney as well as a soldier, I am prepared to say what you and Mr. and Mrs. Lee have just forced down our throats is the most noxious nonsense yet spoken on our national tragedy. John Brown was a solitary fanatic who gathered about him a band of similar madmen and descended on Harper’s Ferry He had no more chance of starting a race war than I would have of defeating the British fleet by challenging them in a rowboat! The secessionists of the South seized on the incident as the one shred of provocation to which they could point, when they decided to secede even before Mr. Lincoln took the oath of office as president.”
“Where did Brown get the money, General?” Johnson asked.
“I am utterly indifferent to where he got the money.”
“I’m not, nor do I think the judges in this trial should be indifferent. If I can show them that Robert E. Lee—and thousands of officers like him— were forced into an agonizing choice because there was clear evidence of a Northern conspiracy to foment a race war, I believe they can’t find any guilt in the choice General Lee and his friends made. Not if they have a shred of compassion in their hearts.”
“I challenge you to show us any evidence of such a conspiracy,” Butler shouted. “There was a congressional investigation. They found nothing!”
“I accept your challenge,” Reverdy Johnson said. He turned to Jonathan Stapleton. “May I call my next witness?”
“By all means,” General Stapleton said.
I saw where we were going. Down a path that might lead to my ultimate repudiation of Charles A. Dana. Did I have the courage? Was I being played for a fool by Stapleton (or Grant, his probable backer) or by the tantalizing woman who stole a glance at me as I sat there, wondering? Was Dana the only man who told me the truth, however terrible it ultimately became? I had a sudden hunger or wish to pray. But to whom or what? For so long, I had known no god but Dana.
Reverdy Johnson nodded to the Negro sergeant who served as doorkeeper. He stepped into the hall. In a moment the rattle of chains.The clank of manacles reached our ears. All eyes gazed on an incredible sight. Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, previously U.S. senator from Mississippi, tottered into view, weighed down by enough metal to grapple a Rocky Mountain grizzly bear into immobility. His hair was unkempt and lank, his beard ditto. Like Henry Wirz, the warden of Andersonville, he looked about him with a bewildered gaze, as if he were not quite able to believe where he was.
“President Davis,” Reverdy Johnson said.
“I object to the use of that title,” Chief Advocate General Holt shouted. “This man was never president of anything but a rabble of rebels.”
“Senator Davis, then. Surely you won’t deny him that title,” Johnson said.
“Ex-senator,” Holt roared.
“If Mr. Lee can be called general, I think Mr. Davis can be called president,” Jonathan Stapleton said.
Holt glared but hesitated to accept this challenge to his authority. His previous clashes with the generals had intimidated him. Davis sank into the witness chair. Robert E. Lee was transfixed by his appearance. He could not take his eyes off his former commander in chief He must have been thinking about the imperious man with whom he had dealt for almost four years in the Confederate White House in Richmond. After five weeks in one of Fortress Monroe’s dungeons, Davis was the veritable epitome of defeat. Why had Johnson brought him here? He was likely to do as much harm to Lee as General Scott.
“President Davis, it’s a very real pleasure to see you again. I wish it were in happier circumstances,” Reverdy Johnson said.
“A wish we share, Senator Johnson,” Davis said in a hoarse, choked voice. Confinement in Fortress Monroe’s dankness had obviously affected his throat and lungs.
“I hope your sea voyage was not too taxing.”
“It was a pleasant relief from the four walls of my dungeon,” Davis said.
“Mr. President, I’ve asked you to appear at this judicial proceeding for several reasons. I hope you’ll confirm testimony of several previous witnesses, about General Lee’s conduct during the war. You better than anyone would know if he had any responsibility for the deaths of federal prisoners, or for the investigation of regrettable atrocities inflicted on federal soldiers of African descent in several battles.”
“Such matters were entirely outside General Lee’s purview,” Davis said.
“What about the conduct of the Confederate secret service? Did you ever discuss any aspect of that with him?”
“Never.”
“That would exculpate him for any responsibility for President Lincoln’s murder—a fanciful idea on the face of it, I hasten to say.”
“A totally fantastical idea,” Davis said. “May I add that I was as shocked by it as every other American.”
“But my main purpose in inflicting this journey on you, sir, is to ask you to take us back to the year before the outbreak of the war, when you and other senators investigated the source of John Brown’s support.”
“We found indubitable evidence that Brown was financed by six wealthy men,” Davis said. A fit of coughing delayed him for a full minute. General Stapleton ordered the doorkeeper to give him a glass of water.
After a long swallow Davis continued in the same ragged voice: “Five were from Massachusetts, a sixth, Gerrit Smith, from Albany, New York. All were abolitionists. We never had a chance to question any of them, because they fled to Canada or, in Smith’s case, retreated to a mental hospital, feigning insanity.”
Another paroxysm of coughing interrupted Davis. Again water helped clear his throat. He resumed: “But the evidence of their monetary support was verified by several witnesses and by correspondence found in John Brown’s papers.”
“The secret six, we might call them,” Johnson said.
“The slimy six would be a better term,” Davis said.
Another spasm of coughing seized him. The rattle of his chains filled the courtroom. I glanced toward Mrs. Lee. She was averting her face. It was too painful for her to look steadily at the ruin of this once proud man.
Johnson waited until Davis had recovered a semblance of composure. “Were there others involved, besides the six?” he asked.
“The future governor of Massachusetts, Joseph Andrews, was in the conspiracy. As a thorough politician, he preferred to lend influence, not money. After Brown was captured, Andrews also offered the conspirators legal advice on how best to avoid prosecution.”
“Tell us, Senator, what you recall of the impact of these discoveries on the Southern people?”
“We were appalled to learn that these men—pillars of the Boston community—sought to arm our slaves and subject us to the horrors of a race war, from their conviction that slavery was immoral. It was almost beyond our imagination that fellow Americans could do such a thing. I fear it convinced tens of thousands of Southerners that secession was the only solution to such a threat.”
“Did it convince you?”
“It played a great part in my decision, yes.”
“How do you explain it—this readiness to spill innocent blood in the name of a supposedly good cause?”
Davis gulped more water. General Stapleton had signaled the doorkeeper to refill his glass. “It goes back far into our national past,” the ex-president said. “New England never recovered from the shock of Thomas Jefferson’s victory over John Adams in the election of 1800. They saw it as a repudiation of their leadership—and a settled hatred of the South took root in their minds.”
A wry smile played across Davis’s lips. “As you no doubt know, Senator, it was they who introduced the idea of secession into our national discourse. In 1815, in the midst of our war with England, their leaders met in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss withdrawal from the Union. They were discouraged by General Jackson’s great victory at New Orleans and thereafter contented themselves with blackguarding the South and Southerners.”
“Thank you, Senator Davis, for your candid and revealing testimony,” Reverdy Johnson said.
“I have some questions for the witness,” Ben Butler said. He sprang from his chair and lumbered toward the shackled Confederate leader. “Mr. Davis—do you mind if I call you that? You’re neither a senator nor a president, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I don’t mind what you call me, General Butler,” Davis said. “Several million Americans have called you far worse names and you seem none the worse for it.”
“Several million traitors, you mean? I pay no attention to them.”
“We understand each other perfectly, sir,” Davis said. A moment later he was seized by the most violent paroxysm yet. His breath came in shuddering gasps. Butler watched him without an iota of compassion.
“General Butler. I see no point in this exchange of insults,” General Stapleton said.
“Excuse me,” Butler said, with studied insolence. “I simply want to expose this man’s pretensions.” He turned to the witness. “Aren’t you here, Mr. Davis, because Reverdy Johnson advised you to show up or else? You’re trying to save your own skin by spouting prodigious lies about Robert E. Lee and John Brown?”
“I suggest you read the printed record of the Senate committee that investigated John Brown, before you become so condescending, General,” Davis said in a strangled whisper.
“If the record is so damning, why didn’t the American people react? Why didn’t they see the whole war was an abolitionist hoax, as you claim it to be? Why was something so momentous allowed to pass virtually unnoticed?”
“Because John Brown ignited a fever in the public mind, so virulent—”
Davis struggled for breath and gulped water.
“So virulent—nothing else was noticed on either side of the question.”
“Balderdash!” Butler shouted in Davis’s face. “Are you aware that Abraham Lincoln was among those who condemned John Brown? Do you know that the men who backed him were insulted and abused on the streets of Boston? As a Democrat, I was among the many who condemned them in Massachusetts.”
Reverdy Johnson rose to his feet. “May I remind the court that a few minutes ago General Butler denied the existence of these men?”
“After four years of war I’m entitled to a lapse of memory!” Butler roared. “The point to remember is, this man, Jefferson Davis and his confederates”—he dipped the latter word in acid—“such as Robert E. Lee were perfectly aware that millions of Northern men detested John Brown and had no desire for war. They seceded from the Union, violating the compact their ancestors had made in the Constitution, out of greed and irrational fear, using Brown as a pretext. If they valued and honored the Union as much as the senator from Maryland claims they did, why didn’t they give Abraham Lincoln a chance to govern it with due respect for the Constitution he was sworn to uphold—a Constitution that declared slavery legal in any state that chose to make it so!”
Butler paced and spun his bulk toward Davis. Head thrust forward, he snarled: “How many slaves did you own before the war, Mr. Davis?”
“Two thousand,”
“Two thousand! That’s a good round number. Did any of them ever run away?”
“Not a single one,” Davis said in the same strangled voice. “They were all as content as human kindness and—science—could make them.”
“How touching,” Butler sneered. “I’ve heard you even maintained a doctor on your plantation.”
“I did,” Davis said with dangerous complacency.
“The fact that they were six or nine hundred miles from the Ohio River didn’t have anything to do with their preference for your company?”
“I —I don’t know, General Butler. I never discussed it with them.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. Did you ever discuss anything with them? Weren’t they so many integers in an account book? Faces without names?”
“I can’t claim to have known every one of the field hands personally. But I certainly had cordial relations with my house servants. They raised my children, succored my wife in illness. I appreciated them as individuals as well as servants.”
“Did you ever free even one of them? Did your appreciation extend to that degree of benevolence?”
“A free Negro in Mississippi had to leave the state. Abandon his friends and relations. I doubted that sort of freedom was much of a blessing—”
More coughing. I was beginning to watch in mute horror. Butler was trumping Reverdy Johnson’s presentation of Lee’s attitude toward a slave uprising by reminding the judges just how remorseless and cruel the system was.
“So in effect you were saying to your slaves: ‘You’re all in prison for life. Your wives, your children, and their children’s children. Better to accept this system, which makes me rich and you little more than well-fed animals because I say it can’t be changed. Wasn’t that your rationale? Wasn’t that what you were defending when you seceded?”
“It’s a bit more complicated—”
“Complications aside, Mr. Davis, in distant Massachusetts, I accepted your arguments. I too was a dedicated member of the Democratic Party. I voted with you for James Buchanan and other Democratic candidates. But when I came to the Southland to prevent your treasonous secession, do you know what I felt when I saw your system and its effects on the black human beings who were its victims?”
“I have no idea,” Davis said. He seemed to shrink in his chair. Perhaps it was an illusion, produced by my certain knowledge of what Butler was about to say. Perhaps not. As a once skilled debater, Davis may well have anticipated the words.
“Nausea!” Butler shouted in Davis’s face. “Nausea! I venture to say every one of the gentlemen sitting on the other side of this table had the same experience. I know General Burnside, born a Democrat in Indiana, had it. He’s told me so. I can only conjecture about the others, though my respect and admiration for them leads me to near certainty that I’m right.”
“Sir,” Davis said. “This seems to me neither the time nor the place to debate the slave system, which was two hundred years old when I was born—”
“And what did you do to change it? To mitigate it, to gradually abolish it? Nothing!” Butler shouted. He wheeled to face the judges. “Do you know what I think? The immorality of this monstrous perversion of freedom has sunk so deep into the hearts and minds of Southerners, they don’t know where right ends and wrong begins. Their moral sense is so blunted, decayed, infinitesimal, nothing less than the shock of seeing men like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis dangling at the end of a hangman’s rope will awaken them to the truth of their abysmal crimes!”
He stamped back to the prosecution table, flinging over his shoulder a final snarl: “I see no point in asking the man any further questions.”
“President Davis,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “You’re excused.”
Davis struggled to rise. But the weight of the metal he was carrying sank him back into the chair. The black sergeant/doorkeeper had to come forward and hoist him erect. As he tottered toward the door, he saw Mary Lee.
A pathetic smile played across his face. She sprang up and embraced him. Sophia Carroll watched, tears streaming down her cheeks.
What a fiasco! Could Reverdy Johnson rescue the situation? He rose, seemingly untroubled by Butler’s counterattack. “I would like to call another witness who can provide us with information about John Brown’s incursion. Will the doorkeeper summon Mr. Edmund Ruffin?”
Striding down the aisle to the front of the room came a man wearing a long black sack coat. His lank gray hair fell to his collar. His face was gaunt and pale with a kind of weariness that suggested many sleepless nights. But his eyes smoldered with dark defiance. He carried a small valise in his left hand. Everyone recognized his name. He was the man who fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, starting the war.
“Mr. Ruffin, I appreciate your agreeing to appear in this rather unusual courtroom.”
“It doesn’t surprise me, Senator Johnson,” Ruffin said in a dry rasping voice. “It’s exactly the sort of thing I would expect the righteous Yankees of New England to do—try a man in his own home. It makes me almost grateful that my home has been so thoroughly wrecked by federal marauders, they’ll have to find some other site to hang me.”
“I’ll do everything in my power to avert such a fate for you,” Johnson said.
He paced for a moment. “If you don’t mind, I would first like to offer you to these gentlemen of the court as a refutation of the common Northern notion that the average Southern planter is a spoiled child of idleness, living on his acres in an orgy of self-indulgence supported by his slaves. Your career has been the very opposite of this fiction. Could you tell us a little about your agricultural achievements, Mr. Ruffin?”
“I was a pioneer in reviving the exhausted lands of Virginia and several neighboring states by the addition of certain chemicals to the soil. In a few years, farmers who followed my advice increased their yields by forty, fifty often sixty percent. I helped restore prosperity to Southern agriculture in the upper South.”
“From my limited knowledge, supplemented by the compliments of friends who work the land, I would say that is an apt summary of your achievement. You also for many years published a magazine that spread your enlightened practices far and wide.”
“I often received compliments from farmers north of the Mason-Dixon line,” Ruffin said, with a sardonic smile.
Johnson nodded. “I asked you to come here, Mr. Ruffin, to tell us your recollections of the John Brown raid. Did you go to Harper’s Ferry when it occurred?”
“I did. I wanted to see for myself exactly what Brown had in mind. My good friend Governor John Wise of Virginia gave me access to Brown’s weaponry. He had almost two hundred revolvers, about as many rifles, and over twelve hundred pikes.”
“Pikes?”
“Pikes, Senator Johnson. They were to be given to the rebel slaves. Brown’s opinion of black intelligence was so low, he didn’t think they could learn to fire a gun.”
“Pikes,” Reverdy Johnson said. “I must confess I thought they went out of use in medieval times. I’m not even sure what one looks like.”
“They were used as late as the seventeenth century, by Cromwell’s men. They’re a fearful weapon, Senator. I have the head of one here, in this valise.”
Edmund Ruffin opened the valise and extracted a black metal head, which had a sharp pointed center and two ugly flanking wings. Johnson took it from him and held it up to the generals at their judicial table. “At Mr. Ruffin’s suggestion, I’ve obtained a shaft to complete this instrument of death, as John Brown carried it to Harper’s Ferry,” he said.
Johnson walked over to the defense table and reached beneath it to seize a slim piece of wood, about the length of a broomstick. With a few deft twists, he fixed the metal head on it and held the whole thing up again to display to the generals. “Imagine twelve hundred of these in the hands of enraged slaves, urged by the madman John Brown to massacre every white person they encountered, in the style of Nat Turner,” he said. “Imagine this monstrous weapon plunged into the bodies of pleading women and innocent children.”
As he said this, Reverdy Johnson thrust the pike in the general direction of the prosecutor’s table. Rage played across his face. He stepped back and seemed to struggle for control. “Pardon me, gentlemen of the court. I had many relations—daughters, sons, grandchildren—within a few days’ march of John Brown’s pikemen, if he had succeeded in his monstrous scheme.”
He turned to the witness, who was hunched in the chair admiring his performance. “As did I, Senator Johnson,” Ruffm said.
“How did you obtain this pike head?” Johnson asked.
“I persuaded Governor Wise to give me several dozen,” Ruffin said. “I mailed them to influential men throughout the South, so they could show their friends and followers what the abolitionists had in store for us, if we stayed in the Union.”
“Your visit to Harper’s Ferry convinced you that the South could find safety only in secession?”
“Irrevocably. It convinced me irrevocably, Senator Johnson. Our defeat has not changed my opinion. No power on this earth will ever change it. When I meet my creator I will dare him to try to change it.”
“You dedicated yourself to spreading the gospel of secession, then?”
“I urged it day and night—on Virginia, on South Carolina, on Georgia. Wherever I had a modicum of influence.”
“That led you to join the forces surrounding Fort Sumter in April of 1861?”
“I went there to urge them to action. Not to hesitate, not to compromise. I believed—and still believe—there could be no compromise with men who countenanced the evil signified by that weapon in your hand, Senator.”
“It’s a widely known fact that your enthusiasm persuaded friends in South Carolina to allow you to pull the lanyard of the first cannon to fire on Fort Sumter.”
“That is correct. But there is another fact that the newspapers neglected to mention. In my left hand, when I pulled that lanyard, I held the head of one of John Brown’s pikes.”
Reverdy Johnson turned to the generals. “I have no further questions.” He walked back to the defense table and sat down, the pike still in his left hand.
“I have several,” said Judge Advocate General Holt. He took the floor with a grim anger on his face. “May I borrow this supposedly infamous weapon?” he said.
Johnson surrendered the pike. Holt held it aloft for a moment, examining it contemptuously. Turning to Ruffin, he said: “Have you ever been a soldier, Mr. Ruffin?”
“No,” Ruffin said.
“Then your opinion of the usefulness of this weapon is more or less worthless.”
“It’s no more worthless than yours,” Ruffin said.
“I’m going to take special pleasure in putting you on trial for treason in a few months,” Holt roared.
“Hanging me will be the greatest favor you could bestow on a man who has abandoned all hope,” Ruffin said.
Holt wheeled to the generals. “Gentlemen of the court, would you be knock-kneed with terror to confront men armed with this weapon? When your men had rifles and cannon? This thing proves that John Brown was a simpleminded fanatic without an iota of practical intelligence. The sensible men of the North rightly dismissed him as a fool. But the scheming men of the South—of which this man is a prime example—seized on him as the excuse they wanted to commit treason against the Constitution and the Union.”
Holt glared at Ruffin. “Weren’t you an advocate of secession long before John Brown’s attack?”
“I was,” Ruffin said. “I began to advocate it soon after the abolitionists began spewing their hatred of the South and Southerners into the public mind.”
“So Senator Johnson’s intimation that Brown made you a secessionist is utterly false?”
“I don’t think the senator said any such thing,” Ruffin said. “Brown confirmed my worst fears—that the abolitionists were moving from incendiary words of hate to incendiary acts of hate. He gave me the argument I needed to persuade other men of the South that the Union had become a death trap for our people.”
“The argument you needed,” Holt mocked. “The traitorous argument that would enable you to keep your slaves and your plantation for yourself and your children and your children’s children, to the utter infamy of our country.”
Ruffin slowly shook his head, a grim half-smile on his face. “How glad I’ll be to quit a world ruled by men like you, Judge Holt.”
“Well do our best to make your exit as disagreeable as possible,” Holt snarled.
The judge advocate general stalked back to the prosecutor’s table. Reverdy Johnson rose and cleared his throat. “Gentlemen of the court— may I ask General Lee to take the stand one more time? There are certain things I would like to place on the record which may clarify his part in the sad two-hundred-and-fifty-year drama of the South’s encounter with Negro slavery.”
“By all means, Senator,” Jonathan Stapleton said.
General Lee once more trudged to the witness chair. I studied him, wondering if he too would show signs of cracking under the strain of defending his role in the slave system. He seemed as calm and collected as usual.
“General Lee, you’ve watched General Butler try to indict every Southerner who ever owned a slave as a criminal worthy of capital punishment. Let me ask you how many slaves you personally owned in your lifetime.”
“None,” Lee said. “As an army officer, I occasionally borrowed or hired one as a personal servant from a relative or friend. There was a surplus of slaves in Virginia and it was not difficult to do. But I never personally owned or sold a slave.”
“What did you think of the system?”
“I think I’ve already made it clear I thought it was an unfortunate inheritance from the South’s early development. The first slaves came to Virginia sometime in the 1620s, I believe.”
“I believe the correct date is 1619.”
“The point is, when I was born slavery was almost two hundred years old. The numbers had multiplied tremendously, thanks to the care taken by their owners in providing them with decent food and shelter. It was not an easy matter to come up with a solution that would be commercially tolerable for the owners, who regarded slaves as part of their capital, and consonant with the safety of the entire population. I believe Thomas Jefferson put it best, when he said at the time of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, ‘We have the wolf by the ears.’”
“Your wife inherited a sizable number of slaves from her father, George Washington Park Custis?”
“Several hundred.”
“But he freed them? Am I right in that fact?”
Lee nodded. “Mr. Custis was imitating the example of General Washington, who freed all his slaves at his death.”
“You were the executor of your father-in-law’s estate?”
“That is what brought me to Washington at the time of John Brown’s foray.”
“Yes. We’ve mentioned that. Did you fulfill the terms of Mr. Custis’s will?”
“To the very best of my ability. Some slaves were freed immediately. Others were to be freed on a gradual basis, over the next several years, in order to make the transition to free laborers more tolerable to our finances.”
“So this process lasted into the war years?”
Lee nodded. “As late as 1863, I left the Army of Northern Virginia for several days to travel to the middle of the state and work out the details of freeing a dozen or so Negroes under the terms of the will. It was rather tedious business. Bonds had to be posted, lest they become indigent and an expense to the public. I had to testify to their probable good behavior.”
“General Lee, your modesty is excessive. What an example this is! A man fighting a war for the supposed preservation of slavery leaves his army to free some blacks, according to the law of his state! Without a moment’s thought to the financial consequences to him and his wife!”
“May I say, Senator, that I found it a troublesome but satisfying duty to perform.”
Reverdy Johnson turned to the listening judges. “Gentlemen, we are contending here over the guilt or innocence of an individual man, trapped in a vast historical cataclysm. Don’t let your detestation of the slave system—a detestation I personally share—warp your judgment. Don’t let the rhetoric of prosecutors thirsting for blood blind you to the human being on whom you must pass judgement—Robert E. Lee of Virginia.”
General Butler rose. “I have a question or two for General Lee.”
Once more he lumbered forward in his heavy-footed way. “How many acres of Virginia land did your wife own, exclusive of Arlington, which the federal government had seized?”
“Illegally, I may add, General Butler,” Lee said.
“It was for nonpayment of taxes,” Butler said. “What’s illegal about that?”
“Mrs. Lee offered to pay the taxes through a third party. The sum was trifling. Less than a hundred dollars. We had—and still have—many friends in nearby Alexandria. One of your bureaucrats or judges ruled that she had to come personally to pay them. If you will glance at my wife, General Butler, you’ll see the impossibility of a painfully crippled woman journeying through territory ravaged by contending armies for the previous two years.”
Reverdy Johnson rose: “May I suggest that the meanness of spirit displayed by this tactic is a good example of Northern legality disguising blatant immorality?”
Butler wheeled. “Judge Advocate General Holt—will you tell that man he has no right to interrupt me?”
“That remark is stricken from the record of this trial!” Holt thundered.
Butler returned to Lee. “Whatever the legality or illegality of the loss of Arlington, Mrs. Lee still had a goodly number of acres under her control, did she not?”
“About eleven thousand,” General Lee said.
“My tally suggests it was closer to thirteen thousand,” Butler snapped. “Let me ask you, General—did you give any of these freed slaves an acre or two or three of this vast domain?”
“No, I did not. There was nothing in Mr. Custis’s will suggesting I should.”
“Forget Mr. Custis’s will, General. What about the morality of the situation? These people, their parents and probably their grandparents and their great-grandparents before them, had worked the land for two centuries. Did it ever occur to you that they were entitled to something more than the cheap shirts and dresses with which you clothed them, the hog fat and hominy grits with which you fed them?”
“I was bound as executor to obey the dictates of Mr. Custis’s will. I didn’t feel I was entitled to do more,” Lee said.
“You couldn’t have consulted with your wife, their actual owner? It was beyond the bounds of possibility for you to suggest to her this act of kindness?”
“I’ll admit the virtue of the point you’re making, General Butler,” Lee said. “I was fighting a war and my mind was tremendously preoccupied. That’s the best and only excuse I can offer.”
Butler sidled away from Lee and gave the judges a triumphant smile. “Isn’t this touching? This solicitude General Lee feels for his wife’s freed slaves, deflected by a war that would have kept the rest of the South’s four million slaves in bondage to the end of time.”
He sidled back to Lee. “General, if you think I find this impressive, or moving, or persuasive in regard to your overall attitude toward slavery, I can only hope you don’t walk out of this courtroom a free man. If you think people are that stupid, I’m sure you’ll be trying to sell them the rights to farmland on the moon in a week’s time.”
“I’m telling you the exact truth, General Butler, as I recall it. If that is insufficient to satisfy the judgment of this court, so be it.”
Lee’s words were so direct and so simple, they would have stirred pity in most men. But Ben Butler had not won his reputation as the country’s best criminal lawyer by accident. He did not hesitate for a moment. He turned to the judges and said: “There you have it, gentlemen. Condemned out of his own mouth.”
General Stapleton seized his gavel. “I think it’s time we had dinner,” he said. His face was grim. I had an uneasy suspicion he thought Robert E. Lee was a dead man. I looked across the room at Sophia Carroll. There were tears on her cheeks again. She thought the same thing.
I decided to dine with the judges and the prosecutors. I found them eating at separate tables. General Stapleton explained that he had concluded there was no justification for allowing the prosecutors a chance to continue their arguments over the food and drink (which was only water, I hasten to add). Dana stayed behind to confer with Charles Sumner. They arrived as the food was being served. Sumner veered to our table, a pleased smile on his usually dour face. “Do you people need any further convincing, or may I depart for the White House now, to tell the president your verdict?”
“I think we’d like to discuss a verdict at some length, Senator,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “But believe me, no one of us will object to your departure.”
Sumner blinked and retreated a step. “General Stapleton, I don’t understand you.”
“I’m trying to be fair, Senator. Won’t an unbiased verdict count for far more than a report of one obtained by threats and promises?”
“I’ve threatened no one and promised nothing!” Sumner said.
“Your predecessor and friend, Congressman Stevens, did a lot of both,” Stapleton said. “I find it hard to doubt you’re not here for the same reason.”
Dana watched this exchange from a distance. He came over and invited Sumner to join the prosecutors. The senator did so, muttering something that sounded like an imprecation. Dana spoke soothingly to him in low tones. Sumner sat down with the prosecutors. Occasionally he stopped eating and gave General Stapleton an accusatory glare.
Stapleton’s determination to delay a verdict gave me one last chance to change my mind. If I went to Dana and capitulated now, we could beard Grant at the War Department before dark. The book and O’Brien would be restored to favor and the prospect of riches. Why was I hesitating?
That question soon resounded in my ears as the generals dined on pork chops and sauerkraut and discussed the evidence they had been hearing. Baldy Smith led the way with a furious denunciation of Davis and Lee. The Confederate president’s appearance had poisoned Lee’s case, as far as Smith was concerned. “If we let Lee walk out of this courtroom a free man, we might as well resign our commissions,” he said. “No one will ever give any one of us a command again. We’ve in effect said the war was a waste of time. Slavery was just this historical inconvenience the South inherited and we had no business trying to prevent them from seceding to preserve it.”
“An historical inconvenience that was also a terrible menace,” Ambrose Burnside said mockingly. “How can it be both?”
“It was hardly an inconvenience,” Stapleton said. “My father visited a lot of friends in the South, including John Calhoun and John Tyler. They were perfectly candid with him. They lived in constant fear of a slave insurrection.”
“I commanded a wing of General Sherman’s army in the march through Georgia,” General Howard said. “Tens of thousands of slaves flocked to our banners. I don’t recall a single instance of one of them harming their white masters or any other white person we encountered on the march. How does this jibe with people supposedly hungry for mutilation and revenge?”
“I think you’re confusing liberation by whites with a war for liberation, pitting blacks against whites,” Stapleton said. “That’s when race wars degenerate into no-quarter struggles.”
Howard made a skeptical face. George Gordon Meade thrust his bearded jaw into the conversation. “I think we’re losing sight of Lee’s individual case in this ranting about the rights and wrongs of slavery.”
“I agree,” Jonathan Stapleton said.
“I don’t,” Baldy Smith said. “Butler took Lee apart in that last cross-examination. Imagine freeing those slaves and not giving them so much as a yard of Mrs. Lee’s thirteen thousand acres? It’s disgusting.”
“It may be that and a lot of other things,” Senator Stapleton said. “But is it treason? Is it even illegal?”
“I think you’re losing sight of the symbolic importance of Robert E. Lee,” Baldy Smith said.
Dana had obviously been talking to Smith. I suddenly remembered Baldy had been born in Vermont. Dana had stirred memories of his Yankee roots.
“Symbolism is not a legal concept,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “It has nothing to do with justice. With the facts of a case.”
“This is not an ordinary case and there are many meanings of that large word, justice,” Baldy Smith said.
“Did any of you gentlemen read the papers today?” I asked. “The story of General Grant’s reception in New York is extraordinary.”
“I got up late,” Baldy Smith said.
“I just glanced at the leaders,” General Stapleton said.
I pulled the morning newspapers out of my valise and began reading selected paragraphs. The generals ate in silence. No one was more silent than Baldy Smith. He looked positively glum as he began to measure the possible difference between Grant’s power and Dana’s power. It was a dirty way to play the game. But no dirtier than the way Dana was playing it.
General Stapleton caught the drift of my ploy in ten seconds. “That makes me think Grant has the presidency for the asking in 1868,” he said.
“I always thought so,” Meade said, proving he too was no slouch at arm-twisting. “The man has an uncanny appeal to the average voter. I saw it in the Army of the Potomac. I wish I had the gift.”
“I’m sure we all do,” Jonathan Stapleton said.
The conversation for the rest of the meal was desultory. General Howard wondered if we were nearing the end of the trial. General Stapleton said he thought so. Reverdy Johnson had told him he planned to call only a few more witnesses. Everyone agreed that the sooner it ended the better for all concerned. Oliver Howard confessed he found it painful to face Mrs. Lee day after day in the role of her husband’s possible executioner. She had been very kind to him during his cadet days at West Point.
Outside on the portico after coffee, Dana beckoned me to join him for a private conversation. “I take it you’ve read the report of Grant’s reception in New York?”
“Every word,” I said.
“Don’t you agree that the man is in danger of turning into a dangerous demagogue? For the sake of our country, Jeremiah, aside from any recompense you owe me, won’t you reconsider your decision? Nothing would do more to take this man down to his proper level than the story of his escapade on the Yazoo.”
“I read quite a lot of the Tribune‘s front page to Baldy Smith,” I said. “It made quite an impression on him.”
Dana sighed. “I hate to do this. But you leave me no alternative. You see that man sitting on the box of the third carriage? He drove me and Montgomery Baker out here today. Go talk to him. He has some interesting information to tell you.”
I sauntered down to the third carriage. The man was a bony creature, with cheeks like hatchet planes. He wore a floppy hat that all but covered shrewd squinting eyes. I introduced myself and the fellow nodded. “Bacon’s my name,” he said. “Mr. Dana said you might come by. You want somethin‘ on Custis Lee and his piece, is that it? It’ll make quite a story.”
“Who’s his piece?” I said.
“Why the little bayou slut, Carroll her name is.”
He had a Southern accent. He began telling me how Lafayette Baker’s men had recruited him from his job in the patent office. He pretended to flee South in a spate of loyalty to the Confederacy. He soon had a job in Judah Benjamin’s office, where he met numerous secret service agents. As often as possible, he smuggled their names to Baker. Sophia was one. He was responsible for her capture, then, and her transfer to my safekeeping.
Bacon chuckled. “You shoulda seen General Custis Lee. Came down to the office practically wettin‘ his pants every day, wantin’ to know where she was. When she come back, he was there in the office to greet her. They headed straight for the boardin‘ house where he and a lot of other Confederate officers enjoyed their doxies—”
“You son of a bitch,” I said, in a low voice. “How much did Dana pay you to make this up?”
“Didn’t pay me nothin‘. I ain’t makin’ it up,” Bacon said. “I thought you wanted this for a newspaper story. Make good readin‘ for folks in the North. Them high-and-mighty sons of planters chasin’ the stuff just like us dirt farmers.”
I whirled and stalked back to Arlington. The portico was almost empty. The trial was about to resume. Dana stood there smoking the last of his cigar. “Well, O’Brien?” he said, with his indefatigable smile. Never did he look more godlike.
“Go to hell,” I said.
A carriage came clattering up the drive, with a single figure in the back seat. In the glaring sunlight, it was hard to make out a face. But when the coachman hauled to a stop, the man was more than familiar. Horace Greeley descended to the dusty drive and mounted the steps. He was in his usual state of dishabille; a worn white traveling coat drooped to his knees; the pink face was fringed by untamed throat whiskers; more hair sprouted from under all sides of his broad-brimmed hat; his cravat looked as if it had been tied by a blind man in convulsions; his pants had not seen a pressing machine in a decade.
“Well, well, well,” he said, when he saw us.
“Horace, my old friend,” Dana said, offering his hand. “What brings you here? The story of the century?”
Greeley ignored the hand. “I’m here to testify.”
“About what?” Dana said, unable to conceal his surprise.
“About how this cruel war started—and how it should end,” Greeley said and walked past us into Arlington.
“O’Brien,” Dana said. “This must have been your idea. You may yet drive me to extremities.”
“I can’t imagine what they’d be,” I said, and followed Greeley through the double doors. The thought instantly struck me that I was about to face Sophia Carroll again. The vile story I had just heard coruscated through my belly and brain. Was it true? Was that sneering smile on Bacon’s face the true barometer of this woman’s affection?
In the drawing-room-turned-courtroom, I noticed another new face. A plump, extremely pretty dark-haired woman was sitting beside Sophia Carroll and Mrs. Lee, talking animatedly to them. I was almost grateful for the distraction of wondering who she was. At the defense table, I bent down and whispered the question in Reverdy Johnson’s ear.
“That’s Julia Tyler, widow of President John Tyler,” he said.
General Stapleton gaveled the court into session once more. Reverdy Johnson rose to tell the judges he thought they had heard enough about such large topics as slave insurrections and the evils of the slave system. “Among the prosecution’s charges, while not stated formally is the notion that General Lee, by his decision to opt for the South, had much to do with starting the war—or persuading Virginia to secede—or both. I’ve tried to show—and General Lee has tried to explain—the chronology of events that seems to exculpate him from the specific act of soliciting a Southern command while wearing a federal uniform. But these wider charges obviously have considerable bearing on the case. It would be unfair to General Lee if we didn’t address them. I would therefore like to call to the witness stand Mrs. Julia Tyler.”
Mrs. Tyler rose and swept grandly to the chair. She was dressed in a fashion that was popular before the war: a white crinoline with blue ruchings of silk in horizontal lines from the waist down. Her dark hair was perfectly coiffed.
“I can’t sit down,” she said in a throaty sibilant voice, “without first greeting the son of my dear friend Caroline Stapleton. How is your mother, General?”
Stapleton gazed at her as if she were some sort of apparition. “She’s fine.”
“Give her my warmest regards.”
“I will.”
Mrs. Tyler took the witness chair. Reverdy Johnson approached her with a fond smile. “Mrs. Tyler, I was one of your admirers in my youth. I remain entranced in my old age. I wish we had a better setting in which to reminisce.”
“We must do the best we can in the ruins of our hopes, Senator Johnson.”
“Let me first explain to these crusty soldiers that it is possible for a woman, even one as beautiful as you, to be deeply interested in politics.”
Julia Tyler smiled and drew from beneath her dress a gold pen, attached to a chain which she wore around her neck. “This pen, Senator Johnson, was used by my husband on March the first, 1845, to sign the treaty annexing Texas to the United States. He gave it to me because he said—at the time and later—that the event would never have occurred without my help.”
“We have reason to be grateful for your sagacity, madam, as well as for your readiness to come here to discuss another crucial political moment in our history”
“Thank you, Senator,” Mrs. Tyler said.
“Your husband was elected president of the peace conference that was summoned during the crisis of 1860, was he not?”
“The conference was his idea. As an ex-president, he abhorred the idea of rupturing the Union.”
“Did you go to Washington, D.C., with him for that conference?”
“Yes. We took a suite of rooms at Brown’s Hotel. Mr. Lincoln was en route from Springfield to Washington. Mr. Buchanan was still president. He called on us at our suite—an unprecedented courtesy. He was trying to tell the world how much he hoped for a resolution of the conflict.”
“Do you recall anything pertinent from your conversation with President Buchanan at that time?”
“He was not optimistic. He said we were dealing with a disease of the public mind. In his opinion it had festered beyond any hope of cure, short of terrible bloodshed. But he applauded my husband’s determination to try to prevent that calamity.”
“What did he mean, madam, by that extraordinary phrase ‘a disease of the public mind’?”
“He meant the decades of hatred and insults that the abolitionists had heaped upon the South, for the supposed crime of slavery—and their repeated calls for a slave insurrection, climaxed by John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. This had produced a morbid reaction in the public mind of the South—a fear that John Brown was only the first of many attempts to put weapons in the hands of the blacks, to ignite a race war.”
“This was, in your opinion—and I presume your husband’s opinion—at the heart of the South’s decision to secede?”
“Unquestionably. I might add that President Buchanan voiced the same opinion in his message to Congress in December of 1860, after Mr. Lincoln’s victory.”
“We all know the peace conference eventually failed. Was there a moment when this became apparent?”
“Absolutely. My husband had persuaded the delegates to propose a constitutional amendment, permitting Southerners to take slaves into free states and territories. He saw this as the sine qua non for peace. In Charles County, Virginia, where we lived, Negroes outnumbered whites seven to one. In many parts of South Carolina and Louisiana, the ratio was ten to one. My husband foresaw a race war of awful proportions unless we were permitted to disperse our slaves across the Union, so that they were nowhere a majority. He was convinced that once this occurred, the South would vote to gradually emancipate the remaining Negroes in their midst.”
“A noble dream. Why wasn’t it fulfilled?”
“My husband went to see Mr. Lincoln. He flatly refused even to consider such an idea. No slavery in the territories was the linchpin of the Republican Party’s platform—and he himself was firmly convinced of its necessity. My husband was deeply discouraged. He told Mr. Lincoln there was only one other thing that would avert war. Mr. Lincoln must address the South’s fundamental fear in the business—the threat of a slave insurrection. He must make a statement, denouncing the abolitionists and declaring he would make it his first order of business as president to prosecute John Brown’s supporters and hunt down any and all future malefactors like them. Mr. Tyler begged Mr. Lincoln to telegraph Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune to find out if he would support such a statement. Mr. Tyler was convinced through mutual friends that he might favor such a proposal in his paper—which would change tens of thousands of minds overnight. Mr. Lincoln said if Mr. Greeley agreed to support such a statement, he would consider it.”
“You leave us breathless, madam. What was the result?”
“The next day, Mr. Lincoln reported that the editors of the Tribune refused even to consider the idea. Mr. Tyler asked if the term editors included Mr. Greeley. Mr. Lincoln said he had exchanged telegrams with the managing editor, Charles A. Dana, who said Mr. Greeley—as well as he—scorned the idea. The next day, my husband went back to Virginia and sent a message to the convention that was considering secession. It consisted of a single sentence: ‘Secede as soon as possible and make preparations to defend the state from invasion.’”
“Thank you, Mrs. Tyler,” Senator Johnson said. “Thank you for this revelatory account.”
General Stapleton leaned forward to thank Mrs. Tyler as well. “I think I speak for all my colleagues,” he added. The generals nodded in unison.
“Does the prosecution have any questions for Mrs. Tyler?” General Stapleton asked.
Ben Butler said nothing for a long moment, as he pondered the value of tangling with a woman, possibly reducing her to tears, thereby justifying all over again the nickname “Beast” Butler. “No questions,” he said.
“The defense would now like to call Horace Greeley.”
Within minutes, Uncle Horace sat in the witness chair, still looking like the original absentminded professor. “Mr. Greeley, let me thank you for coming to Washington on such short notice,” Johnson said.
“I’m happy to do it, Senator. Always happy to inconvenience myself for a good cause.”
I saw the same ethereal light in Greeley’s eyes that I often glimpsed in Dana’s. But it had a more erratic quality.
“You’ve heard Mrs. Tyler’s testimony?”
“Yes. I sat in the back row and heard it with fascination.”
“What do you conclude from it?”
“The country—and the New York Tribune—was betrayed by Mr. Dana’s answer. It was little less than a lie. He knew better than any man that I was horrified by the drift to war. I would have placed the Tribune behind that proposal in ten seconds, if I had heard about it.”
“That’s extraordinary, Mr. Greeley. Why didn’t you hear about it?”
“Mr. Dana was in the habit of taking charge of the Tribune and running it as if it were his own newspaper when I was away—as I frequently was for weeks at a time on speaking tours or to recover from bouts of nervous exhaustion. He began this nefarious habit around the time that the dispute about making Kansas a slave or free state erupted in 1856. I saw a civil war in the making and strove for moderation. I wanted moderate men in Congress to have their speeches on the Tribune’s front page. They seldom got there. Dana backed the radical abolitionists. He virtually called for war in every edition.”
“Could you not dismiss him?”
“He had acquired great power and influence with the Tribune’s board of directors. He was also a shareholder. It was not easy to get rid of him. Only after the catastrophe of the war engulfed us, and I saw the evil effects of his reign, did I go to the board and tell them it was me or Dana. They finally kicked him out and he headed for Washington, where from all reports he has become an even more malign influence.”
“Your opinion of Mr. Dana is not high?”
“It is as low as my opinion of any man I know.”
“I’ve explained to you the purpose of this trial and Mr. Dana’s role in it. Would you care to comment on it?”
“It fits perfectly the kind of vicious scheme he would be ready to endorse. When it comes to politics, the man has no heart. He is a walking, talking chunk of ice. I can’t imagine a better way to sow enmity between North and South for a century than by hanging Robert E. Lee. That, apparently, is exactly what Mr. Dana wants. I can only add: I’m not surprised.”
All the generals had been listening to Greeley with wide-eyed astonishment. Oliver O. Howard’s astonishment exceeded that of the others. Like most abolitionists, he had considered the New York Tribune the one dependable paper in the nation. “Mr. Greeley,” Howard said. “Are you claiming that Mr. Dana’s goal, justice and equality for the colored man, is wrong?”
“I’m saying the means he took to reach that goal—helping to start a war that has left the country desolated—was wrong. It was deplorably wrong. He should have seen that once it started, once young men started to die, it would sow an enmity between white Americans that was worse than the curse of slavery. I have learned that much at least. But he has apparently learned nothing from the catastrophe. This trial is prima facie evidence.”
“But what’s to become of the freed Negroes?” Howard cried. It rang through the room, a mixture of bafflement and pain.
“We must do our best for them, but mostly they’ll have to make their own way The country is too desolated, too staggered, to launch a program of vengeance against their former owners in the name of some sort of perfect justice. My God, General, if you received the letters I’ve gotten—from widows, grieving parents, orphaned children—I’ve gotten them by the thousands!”
Tears streamed down Horace Greeley’s sunken cheeks. “Thousands,” he sobbed. “Should we hang Robert E. Lee for them? Far better, from the viewpoint of justice, to hang Charles A. Dana, and Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune and Henry Raymond of the New York Times. Yes, and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. We started this war. Lincoln said it to me once. I’ve heard that he said it to Medill. He was right. Why hang a poor soldier, a man whose only business is war, who knows its horror and yet goes forward, clutching his honor like a child’s frayed toy? I’d as soon hang that beautiful innocent young woman beside Mrs. Lee. Or an infant at a mother’s breast. This project upon which you gentlemen have been set by Dana is monstrous. Monstrous!”
Greeley slumped in the witness chair, sobbing convulsively “Thank you, Mr. Greeley,” Johnson said in a sad, gentle voice. “Thank you for your courage and your candor.”
“Thank him?” roared a voice from the back of the room. “Thank him? I say hang him. Hang him with Lee and Davis as a traitor to the noblest cause ever conceived by the mind of man!”
Senator Charles Sumner was on his feet in full rhetorical cry. His words had a startling effect on Horace Greeley. He was transformed from a crumpled, sobbing parody of a man to a veritable pillar of fire. He leaped to his feet and pointed a trembling finger at Sumner. “There’s another one who deserves hanging!” he shouted. “He gave a speech only weeks after John Brown committed his atrocity at Harper’s Ferry. A speech that justified Brown and disgorged such a load of hatred on the men of the South, it made secession instantly glorious! They could tell themselves as men of honor it was their only choice, rather than send their representatives to endure such insults in Washington, D.C.”
“You’re a weakling, sir. A disgraced, contemptible weakling who doesn’t deserve the title American!” Sumner bellowed.
“I deserve that title and will deserve it as long as the name Lincoln lives in the nation’s heart,” Greeley shouted.
General Stapleton was rapping for order. “Senator Sumner,” he said. “Your conduct convinces me all over again that you don’t belong in this courtroom. Get out, now, or I’ll have you forcibly removed.”
“I’ll see you in hell, General, before I die,” Sumner bellowed.
“Sergeant,” Stapleton said. “Escort Senator Sumner out of this building.”
Before the colored sergeant-doorkeeper could undertake this task, Sumner seized his hat and rushed out the door. Everyone sat there trying to steady their reeling brains.
“Do you have any further questions for Mr. Greeley?” General Stapleton asked Senator Johnson.
“I do not.”
“Does the prosecution wish to question him?”
“I would like to ask him several things,” Ben Butler said.
He rose, knowing his cause was in deep trouble. His face was grim. “Mr. Greeley, are you saying you didn’t welcome the war? I don’t recall any such statement in your newspaper, and I read it pretty steadily in the early days of the struggle.”
“I felt once the issue was joined, the only patriotic thing to do was support the president whose election I’d advocated.”
“So you let the young men march to war.”
“I did, General Butler. I confess my guilt.”
“Where was any guilt in the thing? You say you felt duty bound to support Mr. Lincoln and his call for volunteers.”
“Perhaps my guilt is retrospective. But it is no less keen for that.”
Butler had been speaking from the prosecution table, borrowing Reverdy Johnson’s trick of putting distance between himself and the witness, implying he was too odious for closer contact. Now he clumped forward, his eyes bulging angrily. “Mr. Greeley, is it possible that you’re the sort of fellow who, when he gets into a fight, and takes a couple of punches, runs whining to his corner and throws in the towel?”
“I don’t think of myself that way. I’ve never shrunk from controversy.”
“A war of words,” Butler scoffed. “That’s your idea of a war. But a real war is something more than words. It’s bullets, it’s blood and death. It’s blows and counterblows. You shrank from it, didn’t you?”
“I shrank from the pain, the suffering it was inflicting on tens of thousands of innocents.”
“That’s another part of the price of war. Adult men know that, Mr. Greeley. Men who never grow up, who would be better equipped if they wore skirts, are the only ones who are shocked to discover this.”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” Greeley said mournfully. “Life is a series of discoveries, General. Surely you know that. Did you ever dream, when you were prosecuting and defending criminals in Massachusetts, that you would do such a monstrous thing as hang that poor fellow in New Orleans, ignoring the pleadings of his weeping wife and children?”
“THAT MAN WAS ATTEMPTING TO START AN INSURRECTION. HE WAS A TRAITOR EXECUTED UNDER THE LAWS OF WAR!” Butler bellowed.
“You may shout at me until you’re blue in the face,” Greeley said. “You’ll never convince me or the readers of the Tribune. You have blood on your hands, General. Just as I do. Just as we all do. I include General Lee in that dark benediction. He too must wish in his deepest heart that there had been some way to avoid this war.”
“Mr. Greeley,” Butler said. “You sicken me. You sicken every right-thinking man in this country, every man who vowed to fight the war to the finish, once it began. I hope the members of this court will pay no attention to your pathetic whimperings.”
“Perhaps they shouldn’t,” Greeley said. “But I’m glad nonetheless that I whimpered them.”
Judge Advocate General Holt rose to his feet. “Mr. President,” he said, addressing General Stapleton. “I think it is time to put on the witness stand a man who has been shamefully traduced by today’s testimony. Justice demands Charles A. Dana be given a chance to defend himself against the outrageous charges that have been flung at his good name.”
“If Mr. Dana is willing to appear, I have no objection,” Stapleton said. “Does he have anything to say that’s pertinent to the charges we’re considering?”
“I believe he does.”
Reverdy Johnson rose. “I hope that we’ll have time for another witness I have in mind.”
“We’ll stay until midnight if necessary,” General Stapleton said.
With an inward shudder, I realized that the witness Johnson had in mind was Jeremiah O’Brien. I gazed across the courtroom at Sophia Carroll. Horace Greeley thought she was the personification of innocence. Once more I was seized by thunderous doubts. Meanwhile, Charles A. Dana was striding to the witness chair.
Judge Advocate General Holt approached with an anxious solicitude on his face. “Mr. Assistant Secretary,” he said. “You’ve been subjected to a shocking amount of abuse in today’s proceedings.”
“It’s perhaps inevitable in a situation so charged with emotion, Mr. Judge Advocate General,” Dana said.
“That’s a noble stance for you to take. It’s in accord with the highest teachings of the Christian faith. But I don’t think forgiving one’s enemies should include permitting slanders to go unanswered. Would you give us the courtesy of a reply to Horace Greeley’s diatribe against you?”
“I do so with regret,” Dana said. “No one has greater reason to be grateful to Mr. Greeley. He gave me my start in the newspaper business. For many years he was my mentor and guide. But my affection for him did not blind me to his many flaws. He was never capable of holding a strong opinion very long. Contrary arguments invariably disconcerted him and he almost instantly began to waver, to think of some way to conciliate his opponents. This I resolutely opposed, within the confines of my role as a subordinate editor.”
“You say subordinate. What was your title on the New York Tribune, Mr. Dana?”
“I was the managing editor.”
“The man in charge of bringing the paper to press every day?”
“Exactly. It was my task to decide which stories were newsworthy, which were not. I had to balance what would appeal to our readers among many other considerations, such as their political or moral importance to the public at large.”
“A fascinating and tremendously demanding job.”
“I enjoyed it, Judge Holt,” Dana said. “But I was aware that it brought me into conflict with Mr. Greeley from time to time. I deeply regretted this circumstance, but could think of no way out of the dilemma.”
“So relations between you and Mr. Greeley gradually deteriorated?”
“That is a very apt description, Mr. Judge Advocate General,” Dana said,
“Thus we come to the point at issue here. Mr. Greeley’s contention that you had a part in starting the war between the North and South. That you welcomed it.”
“Let me say first that no one was more vigorous than Mr. Greeley in his criticism of the slave power. In editorials and speeches he denounced their undue influence in the halls of Congress and the executive department. He noted how many Southern men held high rank in the army and the navy, thanks to their ability to supplement their incomes with the proceeds of the work done by the slaves on their family plantations.”
“One of the more repulsive examples of the dangerous tendencies of the slave system,” Holt said.
“I could say without exaggeration, that it was Mr. Greeley who first awakened me to the danger the slave power represented to the future of the republic.”
“Extraordinary! Now he has the temerity—or should we better call it ‘hysterical instability’—to come here and accuse you of spilling innocent blood!”
“I think the latter term would be more accurate, and perhaps more kind,” Dana said.
“When the slave power launched a bloody civil war in Kansas and spoke of secession—he began to recoil?”
“Precisely. By that time, we had tens of thousands of readers who expected us to stand fast, to hold firm to our opinion of the need for swift abolition of this blot on America’s escutcheon—the continuing enslavement of four million black men and women, almost every one born on American soil.”
“This you attempted to do?”
“I was not alone. Virtually the entire staff of the Tribune was of the same opinion. We were motivated by a moral imperative above all—but also by a sense of responsibility to our readers and our country.”
“But Greeley began to see this—this steadfastness as some sort of betrayal?”
“Some sort of dereliction, of disloyalty to his leadership. But what sort of leader stakes his reputation and the future of his enterprise on holding a certain position—be it an army or a business—and then talks of retreating the moment the enemy reveals his menaces? I was heartbroken over the disagreement, believe me. But I thought it was my duty to remain firm in the face of the South’s threats and blusters. I never believed until the moment they fired on the flag at Fort Sumter that it would come to bloodshed. I thought moral firmness, moral suasion, would shame them into freeing the slaves.”
“Needless to say, you like the rest of us have been heartbroken and spiritually wounded by the desolation the war has inflicted on both sides?”
“I couldn’t put it better, Mr. Judge Advocate General.”
“But you haven’t abandoned your firmness?”
“For a very good reason. It’s my perception, based on extensive recent travels in the South, that they haven’t abandoned their allegiance to the slave power, to the doctrine that white men are destined to rule black men to the end of time. That’s why I think we must seek out and punish the men who represent the head of this evil hydra. General Lee is the first of many I hope our government will be resolute enough to prosecute for the crime of treason against the laws of God and man.”
“Thank you, Mr. Assistant Secretary. I can’t think of a better summation of the reason for this trial.”
Senator Reverdy Johnson rose from the defense table and approached Dana in a strange, oddly hurried manner. I saw he was pretending to be a courtier. Before the witness chair, he bowed low, stepped back and bowed low again. “I humbly beseech the Great Moral Emperor of the American Republic for permission to ask him a few questions,” he said.
“You may ask me anything you wish, Senator Johnson,” Dana said.
“Your performance—and that of your courtier, Judge Advocate General Holt—can only be described as awesome. It should be engraved on stone in some temple to the moral imperialism of New England. Never has there been a better presentation of fanaticism disguised as rectitude.”
“We disagree, of course,” Dana said, casually flipping one leg over the other to emphasize his continuing savoir faire.
“You say Horace Greeley first revealed to you that slavery was a moral crime. As I understand your career, you came to Mr. Greeley in 1847. The previous twenty years you spent in New England, matriculating at Harvard and then serving as a managing director of the social enterprise known as Brook Farm. Is it possible, associating with New England men of intellect and perpetually expanding moral awareness, you never read a copy of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator”?
“Now that you mention it, I read Garrison’s paper occasionally.”
“You appeared in a lecture series with him in Boston in 1847.”
“We scarcely knew each other.”
“But you were acquainted with his ideas. With his call for abolition of slavery in one swift stroke.”
“Of course.”
“Did you agree with it?”
“On the whole, yes. My study of the slave power had convinced me that there was no hope of gradual manumission.”
“Since you had no magical power, what would produce this instant abolition?”
“That was the problem Garrison never solved. At the Tribune, the best we could do was argue against allowing the slave power to expand into the free states and territories, where they could compete with and probably destroy free labor.”
“It never occurred to you that the simplest and swiftest way to destroy slavery was a war—an invasion of the South by Northern armies?”
“Only when the reality of such an event became apparent. But like Mr. Greeley I shuddered at the cost. I never advocated war in any editorial I ever wrote for the Tribune.”
“Admirable. Yet now you recommend hanging General Lee and President Davis and dozens of other Confederate leaders.”
“As I’ve already said, Senator, the war has revealed the depth and obstinacy of the South’s commitment to the crime of slavery. I never believed for a moment—nor did Mr. Lincoln—that the bloodshed would last four years. Like everyone else I thought ninety days would settle the business. The war itself has become a crime that cries out for the punishment of its perpetrators.”
“A man of peace. Is that how you see yourself, Mr. Dana?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m awed by this chance to sample your wisdom, to wonder at the depth and breadth of your moral purity.”
Reverdy Johnson turned his back on Dana with a studied contempt and returned to the defense table. “Do you have any further questions?” General Stapleton asked.
Johnson shook his head. Stapleton told Dana he could step down. Johnson conferred for a moment with General Lee, then rose to say he had one more witness to present. Turning, he gazed at me with an unnerving mixture of sadness and resolution. “Jeremiah O’Brien,” he said, “will you please take the chair?”
The moment had arrived. I looked across the room at Dana. He was sitting beside Lafayette Baker, several rows behind Mrs. Lee and Sophia Carroll. I could see no reaction on his face. I also could see nothing on Sophia’s face. It was an expressionless although still beautiful mask. Mrs. Lee’s face was tight with torment and rage.
I walked to the witness chair like a man in a dream and took the vow to tell the truth, like the witnesses who had preceded me, including Charles A. Dana. Senator Johnson began by asking me to describe my relationship to Dana and my work on the Tribune.
“I was in constant association with Mr. Dana, from the start of each day’s work to the close, when the paper went to press. I was his factotum, you might say. His alter ego to some extent.”
“You discussed stories, policies?”
“I heard them discussed. Sometimes he discussed them with me, in a moment of relaxation. He was very fond of me.”
“And you of him?”
“I regarded him as the greatest man I had ever met or hoped to meet.”
My throat constricted as the memory of my days as the worshiper of the godlike Dana cascaded through my brain.
“You no longer hold that opinion?”
“No,” I said. “I am sorry to say I do not.”
“Why?”
“Mr. Dana slowly revealed to me a capacity for subterfuge, evasion, that I found very upsetting. His testimony just now could be considered a sort of climax of this tendency.”
“It was not the truth?”
“It was a pack of lies.”
Judge Advocate General Holt sprang to his feet. “I hereby rule this man’s testimony out of order and possibly perjurious. I order him removed from the building and placed under arrest!”
“If that order is obeyed,” Reverdy Johnson said, “I will resign this case immediately and seek out the president of the United States to ask him to overturn this kangaroo court!”
“Clear the room,” General Stapleton said.
The spectators and the sergeant-doorkeeper withdrew to the hall. I started to follow them. General Stapleton ordered me to stay
“General Holt,” Stapleton said. “You can’t be serious.”
“I have never been more serious, sir,” Holt roared. “I have the power to arrest you, too, for contempt of my authority as vested in me by the president of the United States.”
“The president who invested you is dead,” Reverdy Johnson said. “I think my friend Andrew Johnson will take the greatest pleasure in kicking you and the entire military commission system into the Potomac.”
“Your friend Johnson will think twice if he doesn’t want to be accused of siding with Lincoln’s murderers,” Holt roared. “You can’t destroy my authority without fatally damaging the trial of the assassins, which is on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”
“Senator Johnson, let me handle this matter,” General Stapleton said. “General Holt, I don’t give a good goddamn what the rules of military commissions are as originally established. If we have the authority to decide whether General Lee is to live or die, we also have the authority to decide what evidence is relevant. You can threaten me till doomsday. I’m speaking for this entire panel when I say that if we can’t hear this evidence, we will walk out of this house this instant and refuse to give a verdict.”
Not a single voice of dissent was heard from the other generals. Holt struggled for breath; he looked close to apoplexy. “You’ll all be guilty of disobeying the orders of the secretary of war. Liable to fines and dismissal from the service!”
“Go to hell,” Stapleton said. “In my opinion you’re a thorough gasbag who couldn’t get the secretary of war or anyone else to back you up. The war is over. Your day has come and gone.”
Holt turned frantically to Ben Butler. “Can he do this? Are you going to tolerate it?”
“I think we have no choice,” Butler said. “May I only make one request, General? I will have the opportunity to cross-examine Mr. O’Brien?”
“Of course,” General Stapleton said.
Never have I seen more malice on a human countenance than I saw on Ben Butler’s face when he made this request. General Lee and Custis Lee and the other spectators returned to the courtroom. I was still in the witness chair. Senator Johnson resumed his examination.
“You say Mr. Dana was lying. In what respect, Mr. O’Brien?”
“In regard to starting the war. He began talking about the need for a war in the winter of 1855 and 1856, when relations between the North and South started to deteriorate over Kansas. Mr. Greeley was spending most of his time in Washington, trying to support moderation. He wrote Dana a letter, urging him not to let anything into the paper that suggested hatred of the South. Dana ignored it. He attacked Southern congressmen with whom Mr. Greeley was on friendly terms. Mr. Greeley became so exasperated, he asked Mr. Dana to convene a meeting of the board and, if necessary, discharge him—I mean Mr. Greeley—as editor in chief. Instead, Dana ignored him. He made numerous jokes about ‘Uncle Horace’ before me and other members of the staff”
“Let us remind the judges,” Reverdy Johnson said. “Mr. Dana was hired by Mr. Greeley. He gave him his chance in the newspaper business.”
“That was my understanding. I believe Mr. Dana just said as much.”
“Tell us more about Mr. Dana’s insubordination.”
“When the trouble in Kansas began, he ran story after story about atrocities that never happened, that were refuted by other papers. He persuaded the Tribune board to contribute $2,500 for Sharps rifles and Colt revolvers. He barely said a word about the people John Brown murdered on Potawattomie Creek. He was so one-sided, I once asked him if we were a newspaper or an organ of the Republican Party. He said both.”
“Let us move forward now, to the secession crisis.”
“That led to terrific disagreement between Mr. Greeley and Mr. Dana. Mr. Greeley was convinced that there was still a chance for peace, even after South Carolina and other states seceded. Mr. Dana said the only alternative was war. When Mr. Greeley left on his annual lecture tour in January, Dana put a banner at the top of the front page that read: ‘NO COMPROMISE! NO CONCESSIONS TO TRAITORS. THE UNION AS IT IS.’”
“Mr. Greeley did not approve of that?”
“He was very disturbed. But Mr. Dana rallied the entire Tribune staff behind him and convinced Mr. Greeley to leave it there. It was still there when the Southern artillery fired on Fort Sumter on April 12.”
“That was followed by a sort of interregnum, as both sides marshaled troops but no one made any move toward active war?”
“Yes. Mr. Greeley again began to hope against hope that war could be avoided. He rushed to Washington once more. While he was gone, Mr. Dana put another banner on the Tribune’s front page. It read: ‘THE NATION’S WAR CRY. FORWARD TO RICHMOND! FORWARD TO RICHMOND!’”
“He was calling for all-out war?”
“He left no doubt of it in anyone’s mind. He wrote editorials that declared: ‘On to Richmond is the voice of the people.’ He said Lincoln was a pusillanimous fool and Mr. Greeley was an even worse one. He insisted the ‘rebel congress’ should not be permitted to meet in Richmond on July 20. Instead, by that time, the city must be held by our national army.”
“Did other papers take up this cry?”
“A great many. Mr. Dana boasted to me about it. I recall him saying there were over a hundred.”
“This led, with all but inexorable certainty, to the first Battle of Bull Run, on July 9,1861?”
“Mr. Dana thought it did at the time. He was considerably flustered when the Southern army routed our national army and it became apparent that his assumption of an easy conquest and a short war was a chimera.”
“But he did not show any sign of remorse?”
“I’ve never seen Mr. Dana show remorse for anything. One of his most remarkable traits is a refusal to admit he could ever make a mistake.”
“Shortly after this, Mr. Greeley fired him.”
“It took another nine months. During that time, Mr. Greeley frequently lost his temper at Mr. Dana. Finally one day he exploded and told the stockholders they had to decide between him and Dana. They chose to stay with Mr. Greeley.”
Senator Johnson turned to the judges. “If Mr. O’Brien is telling the truth—and I think that is his only motivation—there are good grounds for indicting Mr. Dana for perjury. At the very least he’s been as loose with the truth as Satan or his first lieutenant, Machiavelli, in his prime. Let me ask you, gentlemen, whether we have to deliberate to any great extent about the worth of charges fomented by such a charlatan against a man—Robert E. Lee—to whom truth and honor are synonymous?”
“You have no more questions for Mr. O’Brien?” General Stapleton said.
“I have two,” Johnson said. “Did Mr. Dana know or in anyway participate in the funding of John Brown by the group known as the secret six?”
“I didn’t think so at the time. But he’s since told me that he was very well informed about the entire plot. He protected them as well as he could in the Tribune. Now he hopes to resurrect them as heroes. They’ve promised to fund the Negro community Mr. Dana hopes to create on the Bull Run battlefield.”
“So you would say he bears a good deal of responsibility for the death of the black soldier George Bullitt?”
“I think so,” I said. “Though I think the men who killed him bear a much larger share.”
“I agree, of course,” Johnson said.
Johnson paced for a moment. “I also understand that you have information that connects Mr. Dana to President Lincoln’s death.”
“Through an informant in the Confederate secret service, I learned that there was a plan to kidnap Mr. Lincoln and demand Southern independence as the price of his release. I passed on to Mr. Dana the name of the agent involved, John Surratt. He and his friend General Baker did nothing about it. He all but admitted to me that he was pleased when the plot evolved into the assassination. He no longer had any confidence that Mr. Lincoln would join him and his fellow Radical Republicans in crushing the South’s spirit of resistance.”
The senator told the judges he had no more questions and retreated to the defense table.
“General Butler—your witness,” General Stapleton said.
Ben Butler advanced on me with the solemn tread of an executioner. He had death in his eyes and on his jowled rubicund face. Or so I thought. At the very least I saw detestation, not only of me but of the whole Irish race. I had proved his prejudice beyond the expectations of any mick-hater on earth.
“So your motivation, Mr. O’Brien, is pure.”
“I think so, General,” I said.
“You’ve been promised no reward for this sudden change of heart?”
“I don’t think of it as a sudden change. I haven’t changed my opinion of Mr. Dana. I held those opinions of him before the trial began. But I hoped, in the name of our previous friendship, I wouldn’t have to mention them.”
“O’Brien, your delicate conscience is truly impressive,” Butler sneered. “You’re the first Irishman I’ve ever met that has a conscience. You’re a truly remarkable specimen. No reward whatsoever. Is that right?”
“That is right.”
“You don’t plan to publish your book, portraying me and Mr. Dana and Judge Holt as a pack of scoundrels and General Lee as the noblest Roman of them all?”
“I don’t intend to publish anything, General. I think this whole unsavory story should be consigned to eternal silence.”
“You’re going to pass up a chance to make money?” Butler said, his eyes bulging. “You truly are a unique mick. The first one in history to ignore the scent of a dollar. Maybe you’re like most of your tribe, and prefer cash in the form of government largesse, better known as graft. There’s no effort involved in that route. But there are rewards and rewards. Maybe land is more to your taste than money. Has General Lee promised you a slice of those thirteen thousand acres he owns jointly with his wife?”
“Of course not, General.”
“Then what can it be? What else can constitute a reward for a man without any prepossessing physical attributes? A squirt like you would have trouble charming a woman of even ordinary attractiveness. But what if you were offered—no, guaranteed—a real beauty? Would that change your mind, alter your allegiance to morality and the Union and the cause for which you saw three hundred thousand brave men die?”
“I told you, General, I haven’t changed. I’ve just been forced to speak out.”
“You’re a liar, O’Brien. Sitting in this room is one of the most beautiful women in the Southland. Hasn’t she promised you a lifetime enjoyment of her charms, if you testified in General Lee’s behalf?”
He whirled and pointed toward Sophia Carroll. “Isn’t she sitting right there, O’Brien? Isn’t that your reward?”
I clutched the arms of the chair, unable to believe the depth, the darkness, of the malice that was engulfing us. “If you’re asking me, am I in love with Miss Carroll, General, the answer is yes. But I have never conceived of her as a reward for anything but a wish to make her happy.”
“Come on, O’Brien,” Butler said. “She’s a beautiful woman. The happiness goes in the other direction. Why would she waste herself on a nonentity like you, if there wasn’t an ulterior reason?”
“I can’t imagine what it would be!”
“I can, O’Brien. She worships Robert E. Lee. She’s a symbol of the blind worship the women of the South have bestowed on this faker. We have in our files, seized in Richmond in a moment of prescience by our secret service, dozens of letters he exchanged with Miss Carroll, in which he natters her and she breathes adoration of him as the ultimate hero. We will gladly deposit them with the judges to peruse as they debate the verdict.”
“I’ve seen those letters, General,” I said. “Miss Carroll gave them to me. There’s not a single word in them that offends her honor—or General Lee’s honor.”
“Her honor,” Butler sneered. “General Lee’s honor.”
He stamped up and down, like a monster out of an ancient saga. “Honor,” he said again.
“Gentlemen,” he said to the judges. “We’re all at an age when we know that women are unlike us. They’re special beings, infinitely more complex than a man’s simple makeup. A woman can worship honor—and in the name of this worship willingly sacrifice what others think is her most precious possession. This is what we have here. This is what explains Jeremiah O’Brien’s testimony today. Why Sophia Carroll is ready to bestow her beauty on this ugly little mick.”
He stalked back to the prosecution table and picked up a folder. I knew what was in it: Lafayette Baker’s secret service papers, describing Sophia Carroll as a slut.
“No!” I said. “No! I won’t let you read that.”
“How can you stop me, O’Brien? How?”
I knew in that terrible moment exactly how I could stop him. I could say my testimony against Dana was a lie. My recantation would restore him to the status of a moral hero. General Lee, suspected of traducing me with the promise of Sophia’s love, would inevitably be found guilty by the disgusted judges. But if that happened, I would lose Sophia forever, anyway. With horrendous clarity, I saw my love was doomed. What could I extricate from this wreck?
The truth, whispered a forlorn voice in my soul. The truth. That desolating abstraction that Charles A. Dana claimed he had always spoken to me. The idea he had taught me to worship.
“General, you’re about to read a pack of lies,” I said. “But I can’t stop you.”
I saw from Butler’s tightened jaw that he had been hoping hard for my collapse. He turned to the judges again. “These reports are from the files of General Baker’s National Police. He’ll vouch for their authenticity, if need be. They’re extraordinary documents, which I almost hesitate to read aloud, in Mrs. Lee’s hearing. May I suggest you ask her to leave the room.”
“Mrs. Lee, would you consider leaving the room?” General Stapleton said.
“I will do no such thing!” Mrs. Lee said.
“Nor will I,” Sophia Carroll said.
Slowly, savagely Ben Butler began to read the reports. Exclamations of shock and dismay came from the judges. Mrs. Lee began to weep. Senator Johnson was on his feet, shouting that the tactics of the prosecution had passed all bounds of decency. Butler read on, insinuating Sophia’s long-running affair with Custis Lee.
Custis leaped to his feet, shouting: “You’re a despicable scoundrel, sir. I demand the right to meet you on the field of honor!”
General Stapleton gaveled him back into his seat. “I think you’ve made your point, General Butler. Whether it is a pertinent point is hard to say.”
“They’re all lies,” I shouted. “Miss Carroll will deny them! Ask her!”
“Of course she’ll deny them,” Ben Butler said. “It’s generally agreed she was the most consummate female spy in the Confederate service. That testifies to an almost boundless gift for clever lying. The testimony in these reports, on the other hand, was written by Northern patriots, risking their lives for our sacred cause.”
I gazed down the room at Sophia Carroll. Her face remained expressionless. But tears glistened in her unblinking eyes. Was she weeping for her ruined love for me—or for Custis Lee? Did it matter now? Did anything matter, even the salvation of Robert E. Lee?
“Enough!” The voice sent shock waves through the room, like a bursting shell. “Enough!”
Robert E. Lee was on his feet, shaking off Reverdy Johnson’s restraining arm. The general’s face was consumed with a rage that was nothing less than terrible. He advanced across the room toward Ben Butler. The judges sat transfixed. General Stapleton’s hand was frozen on his gavel.
“If I had a weapon,” Lee shouted. “I would shoot you down as I would a mad dog with slime drooling from its jaws! I would shoot you again and again and again until your repulsive carcass was on its way to joining the offal of which it is an unmistakable part. You are the most despicable thing I have ever witnessed in my already too long life. A man without a shred of honor. Without even an idea of what those words mean!”
Lee was in the center of the courtroom now, only half a dozen feet from Butler. “Honor!” Lee shouted. “That is why I chose to fight for the South. To protect its women from pigs like you, who would sell anything, do anything, say anything for money. That young woman whom you have just defamed— that young woman has revealed her deepest heart searchings to me in dozens of letters. Her dream of an ideal love in a world where justice and truth reigned, where our tragic tormented cause had somehow triumphed!
“HONOR! That’s why I chose to draw my sword for Virginia. After I looked that monster John Brown in the face, and learned how he’d been financed by Northern millionaires, how could I ask my sons to trust such swine? In John Brown’s wake came Ben Butler’s commercial and legalistic greed, plundering where he could get away with it, hanging innocents, while their wives and children wept before his foul throne. Every day that the war lasted, I became more and more convinced that I had made the right choice. Whether it ended in victory or defeat, my honor, my sons’ honor, the honor of my friends and comrades in the Army of Northern Virginia, would be vindicated by blood, by death if need be. What are such trifles compared to HONOR?”
He whirled to face the generals. “Gentlemen of the court, the jury, whatever you choose to call yourselves, do with me what you will. I stand before you, unrepentant, without apology, a rebel against a government that sought to drench the land of my birth in blood, to defile its women, defame its men with rants about the curse of slavery. As if we didn’t know it was a curse! As if we didn’t hope and pray in God’s good time we could rid our land of it!
“Gentlemen, this trial has made me sick of my country, sick of life itself. Perhaps the greatest favor you can do me is to find me guilty and consign me to a hangman’s noose. My honor—and the honor of those I love—will survive it. You can destroy a man but you cannot destroy what lives in his soul and in the souls of his family and friends!”
General Lee’s throat became clotted with rasping, choking sounds. He trembled from head to foot. Reverdy Johnson put his arm around him and led him slowly, silently back to the defense table. Lee slumped in his chair, his pallor almost corpselike. Still no one spoke. What was there to say? The prisoner had confessed his crime.
In an almost sepulchral voice, General Stapleton said he thought it was time for summations by the prosecution and the defense.
“I assume we’ll adjourn until tomorrow, to give us time to prepare,” General Butler said.
“I think not,” Stapleton said. “I see no reason why all three of you gentlemen can’t say your say in a reasonable length of time. It wouldn’t surprise me if we reach a verdict before supper.”
“I’m in complete agreement with that schedule, General,” Reverdy Johnson said. “I know I speak for General Lee, as well.”
He glanced at his client, who was slumped in his chair, still struggling for breath. Johnson was obviously concerned about the possibility of a heart seizure.
“I’ll give you a half hour to collect your thoughts,” Stapleton said.
Out in the hall, Sophia gazed mournfully at me and at Custis Lee. When she approached him, he turned away. Was it anger at my revelation that she had betrayed the plot to kidnap Lincoln? The expression on Mary Lee’s face was even more unpromising. Sophia Carroll would never enter the Lee family as long as Mary was alive. To my relief, General Lee and Reverdy Johnson retreated upstairs and Mary Lee followed them.
I went out on the portico. Dana was talking to Lafayette Baker. I wanted to call them both vile names. But what was the point? My interest in the outcome was in ruins. More than ever, I felt like the ultimate outsider, a being without a future in this alien country.
Back in the courtroom a half hour later, General Lee seemed his composed, stoic self. I could read nothing in the generals’ faces as Jonathan Stapleton asked Joseph Holt who would sum up for the prosecution. “I will undertake the task,” the judge advocate said in his pompous way.
I thought it was significant that Ben Butler did not offer his own summation. Had General Lee humiliated him unto silence? I did not think such a thing was possible. Perhaps Butler simply felt that Holt was more of an orator than he was. Or that it was good strategy to let someone else reply to Lee’s insults.
Holt led off with a sonorous assertion that he would pay no attention to Lee’s “ungentlemanly” outburst, even though it included an admission of guilt. He was prepared to prove the general’s guilt on the charges brought against him. That was what the American people would want to see and hear. Admissions of guilt can too easily be denied or retracted.
On the first charge, Holt argued Lee was guilty in both literal terms— on the specifics of not resigning soon enough—and on the larger charge of his responsibility for encouraging Virginia to secede and the South to fight the war. The judge advocate general scoffed at the defense contention that fear of a slave uprising might have influenced Lee’s decision, quoting the general’s own words—that he was sure the men of Virginia could have handled such an event with the weapons at their disposal.
No, it was greed, the hunger to preserve his wife’s thirteen thousand Virginia acres, that motivated Lee. Holt argued the only just punishment was to deprive his heirs of those lands, which he hoped would be a first step to the confiscation of all slave owners’ lands, and their redistribution to the freed Negroes. He also mocked Lee’s pretensions to abhor slavery, laying sarcastic stress on his failure to give any of Mrs. Lee’s freed slaves so much as an acre of the vast Custis estate. Finally he dwelt on the blood Lee had helped to spill at Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Second Bull Run, Chancel-lorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor. He envisioned a mountain of Union corpses, with Lee standing beside them, his hands drenched in their gore.
“ I ask you, gentlemen,” Holt intoned in his peroration. “How can you not find this man guilty of treason? His guilt is so evident, I will call it barefaced.
“It is made more monstrous by Mr. Lee’s decision to hire as his defender a lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court that the black man had no rights, either legal or moral. The perfidy of this entire transaction is summed up by their attempt to blacken the name of Charles A. Dana, a man who unstintingly served the government of his country, after he was maliciously discharged by his erratic employer, Horace Greeley, ignoring offers from a dozen newspapers that could have made him rich.”
Holt retreated to the defense table to take a sip of water. He walked around the table and put his hand on Benjamin Butler’s shoulder, in a gesture that signaled solidarity and approval. “With deep reluctance, my colleague, General Butler, has revealed to you the moral ugliness of the transaction that led to Jeremiah O’Brien’s collusion in this repulsive business. If this last fling of the dice is not the desperate gamble of a heart and mind steeped in degraded guilt, what is? I think the world will condemn both O’Brien and the man who stands behind him, playing his strings— Robert E. Lee.”
The sinking sun flooded the windows with rosy light as Holt finished his litany of condemnations. Reverdy Johnson rose like a ghost in the shadows around the defense table and took center stage. He rehearsed the evidence of Lee’s innocence, noting the distinguished people who had come to his defense: Winfield Scott, Ulysses S. Grant, Julia Tyler. He emphasized the general’s reiteration that he was telling the simple truth at all times and sarcastically contrasted it with the stammering evasions of General Alexander and the hysterical accusations of Lieutenant Colonel Walter Taylor. He exalted the appearance of General Mosby for the defense, and his defiance of the threats that had brought him to the chair as a prosecution witness. He maintained that this coercion proved there was a conspiracy to hang General Lee, no matter how contrary the facts presented by witnesses trying to tell the truth.
Finally, the senator turned to Dana and his two friends, Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. He disposed of the politicians first, telling anecdotes of their rage against the South and their hunger for vengeance, which he had witnessed personally in Congress. He predicted that their irrational rampage would continue to disturb the peace of the nation. But there was a chance, here, to check it—to prevent it from becoming a new effusion of bloodshed and hatred.
Charles A. Dana, on the other hand, was a very different case. What was the link between this seemingly serene, reasonable man and Stevens and Sumner and the rest of the brimstone-breathing Radical Republicans? “The link can be identified in a single word, gentlemen: fanaticism. It was fanaticism that brought on this war. It began with the abolitionists’ fanatic demand that all the slaves in the South be freed overnight, a demand that sent tremors of alarm into every Southern man’s bosom and shivers of terror into the fragile physiques of their women.”
Senator Johnson’s voice, his expression, hardened. His whole body seemed to grow suddenly rigid as he experienced an emotion he undoubtedly had known from experience. “When the South resisted this impossible proposal, fanaticism fanned the flames of hatred. Absurd stories of every Southern man despoiling his female slaves were put abroad, making an entire region of our country resemble a gigantic bordello. Ignored was the fact that only one Southerner in ten owned slaves. Fanaticism brushed aside facts, fanaticism invented ugly fantasies in place of them, fanaticism put into newspapers and books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin stories that desecrated and inflamed.”
With consummate dramatic skill, the senator abruptly turned his back on the generals behind their green baize table and stalked to the edge of the spectators’ seats to gaze with loathing at Dana.
“While some apostles of this strange creed fulminated and pontificated in veritable seizures of righteousness, others, seeing that the mass of mankind abhorred a fanatic, decided to acquire the demeanor of sweet reasonableness. This was Charles A. Dana’s modus operandi. Behind that benevolent smile and ingratiating manner lurked a fanaticism more coldblooded and terrifying than the volcanic eruptions of the rest of the abolitionist tribe. Dana was the insidious fanatic, who burrowed into the company of moderate, warmhearted men, such as Horace Greeley and Ulysses S. Grant, and ingratiated himself to the point where they sought his company and offered him their trust. While the smiling fanatic was savoring his supposed moral superiority in his secret mind, waiting for the moment that gave him the power to betray them.”
The senator turned his back on Dana, as if the movement blotted him not merely from his sight but from existence. His voice grew gentler but no less resonant. “The fanatic reckons not with the courage of ordinary men. The fulminating fanatic of the Stevens and Sumner ilk arouse our indignation and courage. We defy them to their faces. The conniving fanatic of the Charles A. Dana type arouses our detestation. We resolve, when we penetrate his maze of lies and evasions and slanders, to denounce him as well as defy him. To tell him, at last, that he is not worthy of the company of honest men.”
Senator Johnson paced to within a few feet of my seat behind the defense table. He gazed at me with a mixture of sadness and admiration, a half-smile momentarily playing across his expressive mouth. “This is what that honorable young man Jeremiah O’Brien has done and I follow in his courageous footsteps. I hope you will do likewise, gentlemen, and declare Robert E. Lee innocent of the spurious charges Dana and his hirelings have brought into this house once sacred to the name of Washington, and sanctified by the loving marriage of General Lee to a lady who is that great man’s descendant. In some ways, Dana’s decision to hold the trial here is the final proof of his sadistic fanaticism, his readiness to inflict every possible humiliation on a brave fallen foe.”
With a grave sigh, the senator returned to the center of the courtroom and faced the generals in Union blue once more. “This year, gentlemen, I reached three score and ten. I have spoken on behalf of many causes and many men in the course of a long legal career. But never have I served a cause that moved me more to my heart’s core, that convinced me that the future of our country depended on its outcome. I hope you will bring the utmost seriousness to your deliberations. No, I do more than hope for that. I pray for it, as an American, a lawyer, a Southerner, but above all as a believer in God’s justice!”
In the abstract world of my mind, I wanted to leap up and shout hurrah! But my personal desolation was like a pack of cannonballs on my shoulders. I gazed mutely across the room at Sophia Carroll. She avoided my eyes. I was sure it was an avoidance that would persist unto eternity. Custis Lee, sitting a few feet away, was probably loading his pistol in some dark corner of his mind, preparatory to taking revenge on Ben Butler and Dana and me.
General Stapleton invited his fellow generals to adjourn to the smaller dining room. If they did not reach agreement in an hour, he said they would send word for us to disperse to our respective abodes, and the verdict would be announced in the morning.
We relapsed into an assortment of random individuals. Reverdy Johnson sat down beside me. “Mr. O’Brien,” he said. “I want to say now, no matter what the verdict, you were the bravest witness who took that chair. I know what you’ve sacrificed. I hope it doesn’t exceed your strength.”
“I fear I’ve lost more than a book, Senator,” I said.
“I know exactly what you mean. How I wish there was some way to wipe those vile words about Miss Carroll from the record.”
More time passed. Horace Greeley sat down beside me. “O’Brien,” he said. “No matter what happens, I want you back on the Tribune.”
“Thank you, Mr. Greeley.”
“We must build a paper that carries us beyond Dana. Beyond fanaticism.”
I was not at all sure I wanted to have anything more to do with crusading for any cause—including an attempt to transcend fanaticism. Maybe I simply was sick of the newspaper business. But a man had to keep eating. I tacitly accepted Greeley’s offer.
The thump of boots in the hall turned everyone’s eyes toward the door. General Stapleton led his fellow generals back into the courtroom. Every face was a grim expressionless mask. At the prosecution desk Judge Advocate General Holt rose to assume his role as the trial’s chief judicial authority. “Gentlemen of the commission, have you reached a verdict?”
“We have,” General Stapleton said. “It’s unanimous.”
He paused to savor the suspense. I suppose it was his only payment for this ordeal. His fellow generals remained expressionless. It was another glimpse of their ability to control their emotions. How else could they have sent thousands of men to die in battle after battle? The trial of Robert E. Lee undoubtedly had been a battle.
General Stapleton leaned forward in his chair as if he wanted to somehow impress his words on the minds and hearts of every person in the room. “This military commission finds General Robert E. Lee innocent of all the charges lodged against him and recommends his immediate discharge from custody and his freedom to resume an ordinary life as an American citizen.”
I sat there, not quite able to believe it, while my pencil wrote down the words in shorthand. Even Ambrose Burnside, the order taker personified, had changed sides. Oliver Howard, abolitionist to the bone, had done likewise. Baldy Smith had swallowed his wandering resentments to follow Stapleton’s lead. George Gordon Meade, whose loyalty to Lee had, I am sure, never wavered, permitted himself a frosty smile. He rounded the corner of the judgment table and walked across the room to shake his old friend’s hand.
Horace Greeley was shaking hands with everyone from General Lee to the judges. I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to look up at Custis Lee. Was I about to get a fist in the face? “My father sends you his thanks,” he said, without an iota of warmth in his voice. “He doesn’t think it’s appropriate for him to say it in person, for the moment.”
General Stapleton offered me a ride back to Washington with Generals Meade and Smith. I accepted. Out on the portico, Dana was standing with Lafayette Baker. The godlike one lit a cigar and strolled over to me. “If you try to make a book out of this, O’Brien, I’ll have one of Baker’s fellows kill you. Do I make myself clear?”
“I don’t intend to make a book out of it.”
“At least there’s still a glimmer of sense in your besotted brain.”
Dana—you’re wrong. Wrong with your insane belief that you can change the world by changing ideas in people’s heads. And then slaughtering them if they refuse to change. The real world doesn’t work that way. You have to change hearts as well as minds. That takes generations.
For a moment I almost screamed those words in Dana’s face. Simultaneously I wanted to say: Dana, I’m sorry. Sorry and grateful to you for giving me life, hope, a chance for happiness. The two desires left me strangling, breathless with a mad mix of anger and grief.
“O’Brien—we’re ready to go,” General Stapleton called.
I boarded the carriage and sat beside Stapleton. Generals Meade and Smith sat opposite us in the gathering twilight. No one said a word as we swung down the drive past the white headboards of the Union dead. On the river road, Stapleton gave a great mournful sigh. “So we’re all guilty and we’re all innocent. Is that what this means, O’Brien?”
“I don’t know what it means, General,” I said.
“But some of us are more guilty than others and some are more innocent,” he said. I saw that he would continue to blame himself for defying his family and joining the war—and fighting it to the brutal finish.
“It’s a hell of a mess,” Baldy Smith said. “Are you going to write anything about it, O’Brien?”
“No.”
“That’s the right decision—for all concerned,” George Gordon Meade said in his nastiest snapping-turtle mode.
We rode in silence for another five minutes, staring at the dark waters of the Potomac. “I have one more question to ask—not as a reporter, but as a participant,” I said. “How did you reach a unanimous verdict?”
“General Stapleton gave a speech,” Baldy Smith said in his wryest tone. “He said it would be a crime to condemn Lee, after his confession of guilt. He said his own father had gone through a similar torment—and eventually died of heartbreak. He said agonizers like Senator George Stapleton—and General Lee—were the only honest men in America. The rest of us were all frauds in one way or another, wrapping our ideals around secret dreams of fame and power. He said he wanted a unanimous verdict—it had to be unanimous, one way or the other. It was the only way we could face the rest of our lives.”
Baldy tugged at his mustache. “Would you say that’s a fair summary, General Meade?”
“Fair enough,” Meade growled.
We rode in silence for another half mile. I glanced covertly at General Stapleton. He was staring at the broad dark Potomac, as if its blankness were the only sight he could endure.
“We’ve killed six hundred thousand men to free four million slaves— and no one has a clue about what to do with them! Or for them!” Stapleton said.
“Except Dana and his fanatical friends,” Baldy Smith said.
“Old Buchanan was right,” Stapleton said. “It was a disease of the public mind.”
“You think the war was a mistake? A sham?” I asked.
“I’ll never call it that publicly,” Stapleton said. “The people couldn’t bear it. Think of the hundreds of thousands of grieving fathers, mothers, sisters, wives. We have to tell them their loved ones died for a noble cause. I’m not sure the men in the ranks could stand the truth, though they have far fewer illusions. We all saw too many men do too many brave things. It will take a hundred years before the country can face the truth.”
“Try two hundred,” Baldy Smith said. ‘’
“I started facing it the day after Bull Run,” Meade said.
“I guess I did, too,” Stapleton said. “But I couldn’t—or wouldn’t— admit it.”
We rode in silence for another five minutes. Baldy Smith hauled a flask from under his coat and passed it around. I sensed a kind of despair circulating through the carriage, along with the scent of bourbon. Was history unendurable when you saw it from too many sides?
“What are you going to do with those notes, O’Brien?” Stapleton asked.
“Burn them,” I said.
“Ill buy them from you. Name your price,” Stapleton said.
“You can have them for nothing, General.”
“I think they should be preserved, in case someone tries to publish a bastardized version of this affair, based on hearsay.”
“A good point, General. They won’t get any information from me, I assure you,” I said.
Meade asked me what I was going to do now. I told him Horace Greeley had offered to keep me on the Tribune. “I own a newspaper in New Jersey,” Stapleton said. “If Uncle Horace drives you crazy and you ever need a job, let me know.”
“Thanks, General.”
General Smith asked me if I really thought those stories about Sophia Carroll were lies.
“Take it easy, Baldy. The fellow’s in love with the girl,” Stapleton said.
“As a matter of fact,” I said. “I believe them.”
I didn’t know where that voice, those words, came from. They seemed to be spoken by someone else, inside my body. Someone who had taken possession of me.
I could see that Generals Stapleton and Smith and Meade thought the stories were true. They had seen too much unlicensed sex in Washington throughout the war. It was all too plausible that a beautiful spy would resort to it. But I knew they were true in a different way. I had seen them enacted in the theater of my mind.
What was happening? Who was this alien voice that had taken possession of my soul? I realized it was O’Brien-the-truthteller. The believer in the importance of the truth. The man Dana had created. He would be Jeremiah O’Brien’s companion for the rest of his American journey. With his help, O’Brien would try to survive his loneliness.
HOURS LATER, AFTER A SUPPER OF SOME COLD MEAT AND POTATOES and the inevitable bourbon, I toppled into my solitary bed, telling myself to get used to it.
A knock on the door. I stumbled through the dark rooms to answer it. A figure stood in the pitch-black hall. A wave of delicious perfume swept over me. A familiar voice said: “This time, it’s not an emergency.”
“Sophia?” I said.
She stepped into the room and flung her arms around me. “Oh, Jeremiah, Jeremiah, hold me, please,” she said.
It was a superfluous invitation. We swayed, there in a mutual embrace. “I need you, Jeremiah. I need your innocence,” she murmured. “That’s what I’ve always loved about you. You’ve stayed outside the whole nightmare, grieving for both sides. Give me some of that innocence, Jeremiah. Save my soul from years of lies and disgrace and defeat.”
“My love—I only wanted to give you my love forever,” I said.
“Your loving innocence, that’s what it will be for me. My forgiveness. My salvation.”
“No,” I said. “No, Sophia. I can’t help you that way.”
It was O’Brien-the-truthteller, once more in charge of my soul. I saw why Sophia was here. To make sure that Jeremiah O’Brien never changed his mind, never consulted his notes and decided to write a book about the trial—a book that would tarnish everyone’s reputation, including the fame of her transcendent hero, Robert E. Lee. She had already given so much of herself to this god—what did the rest of her life matter? She would gladly spend it in O’Brien’s arms to guarantee his perpetual silence.
“Jeremiah! Please! I need you!”
For a moment O’Brien, Dana’s former toady, O’Brien-the-submissive, O’Brien-the-eternally-grateful, wavered in the blazing anguish of those words. Was she telling the truth? Was this a chance to adopt a different, more rewarding master?
Sadly, O’Brien saw that if he submitted, if he yielded to the desire pulsing in his flesh, he would give Charles A. Dana and Ben Butler and Joseph Holt and Lafayette Baker and Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens a chance to say they were right. Lee had been rescued by his beautiful courtesan, who gave O’Brien his ultimate reward. That truth trumped the possible truth in Sophia Carroll’s anguish.
“I need you, too, Sophia. We’ll both have to learn to live with that need—unfulfilled.”
Fiercely, frantically, her lips found my aching mouth. I did not respond. She stepped back and became a shadow, a voice, in the darkness. “You’re a fool,” she said. “A wonderful, courageous, sacrificial fool. I’ll always love you.”
“I’ll always love you.”
She was gone. I sat in the darkness for a long time, tasting the loneliness of knowing—and telling—the truth. Was I a hero or a fool? Maybe a little of both. But something else sustained me—the knowledge that I had irrevocably become an American. I would spend the rest of my life trying, in concert with men like Jonathan Stapleton, to decide when the United States was the great country envisioned by its founders and when it wasn’t—and doing my utmost to tell the difference to the American people.
AFTERWORD
Jonathan Stapleton became a Republican power broker and prominent Wall Street investor. His troubled marriage to a beautiful, willful Southern woman reflected the ambivalence about the Civil War inflicted on him by the trial of Robert E. Lee. He devoted much money and time to a reconciliation between the North and South. He also sought equality for the freed slaves. The Republican Party and Southern intransigence repeatedly disappointed him. This part of his story is told in another novel in the Stapleton series, The Spoils of War.
Reverdy Johnson played a backstairs role in frustrating the Radical Republicans when they tried to impeach President Andrew Johnson in 1868 to implement their program of vengeance on the defeated South. Johnson’s talent for friendship persuaded some Republican senators to listen to his lectures on the dangers of fanaticism. The impeachment attempt, in which Congressman Ben Butler was the chief prosecutor, fell a single vote short of getting a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
Before that judicial crisis, Johnson won a signal victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1866, several Democrats convicted of treason and sentenced to death by a military commission in Indiana for plotting a rebellion in 1864 appealed to the Supreme Court. (Jonathan Stapleton’s younger brother, Major Paul Stapleton, played a key role in defeating the conspiracy. The story is told in the novel When This Cruel War Is Over?) Johnson represented the condemned men. The Supreme Court ruled that military commissions were unlawful in any area of the United States where civil courts were still functioning.
Charles A. Dana resigned as assistant secretary of war soon after the failure of his attempt to hang Robert E. Lee. Dana accepted the editorship of a new newspaper in Chicago, backed by wealthy Republicans. Within a year, he resigned. No one knows exactly why. Next, Dana asked Andrew Johnson to appoint him the collector of the port of New York, the most lucrative political plum at the president’s disposal. Johnson ignored the request. In 1867 with another set of backers, Dana bought the New York Sun. This was an odd move for a reigning insider in the Republican Party. The Sun’s readers were almost all Democrats. When Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Andrew Johnson as president, Dana again angled for the New York collectorship. Grant too turned him down, and for Grant’s eight years as president, Dana relentlessly abused the general as a moron, a clown, a crook, and a dictator, to name only a few of the insults flung at him in the Sun‘s editorials. There would seem to be only one explanation for this puzzling behavior. Dana had abandoned the idealism that had driven his youth and middle age. Making money became his prime objective for the rest of his life. The Sun was noted for its brilliant reporting—and its corrosive cynicism. Dana died in 1897, rich and locally famous, with no political heirs.
Robert E. Lee was temporarily denied the peaceful civilian life that his acquittal seemed to promise him. He was indicted for treason on June 9, 1865, by a federal grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia. It was the next-to-last gasp of the Radical Republican attempt to prosecute Lee and other members of the Confederate hierarchy. General Grant issued a statement declaring that in his opinion Lee was immune from such prosecutions under the terms of the parole Grant had given him at Appomattox Courthouse. The indictment expired without further litigation. (An attempt to try Jefferson Davis for treason took another year to lapse.) Lee accepted the presidency of Washington College at Lexington in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The general’s death of heart disease in 1870 triggered an outburst of national mourning. One outraged abolitionist Republican wrote: “We can scarcely take up a newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of Lee.” Two years later the general was apotheosized by one of his Southern admirers as a figure on a lofty column, “simple, pure, divine.”
Ulysses Grant became president in 1868 on a platform summed up by his typically laconic remark: “Let us have peace.” He made sporadic attempts to provide the South’s freedmen with protection and support, striking hard at the midnight terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout his two terms, he remained immensely popular, in spite of sensationally publicized outbreaks of corruption in his administration. With characteristic candor, Grant apologized for his political performance, admitting he had little or no training for the presidency. He might have been elected for a third term but chose to step aside in 1876. After a triumphant world tour, he sought the nomination again in 1880 on a platform calling, among other things, for racial justice in the South. Jonathan Stapleton was among his most ardent backers. But the ex-president lost the nomination to James Garfield, a man Grant said “lacked the backbone of an angleworm.” White supremacy became the order of the day in the South, with the tacit blessing of the Republican Party and the enthusiastic approval of the Democrats.
Thaddeus Stevens failed to achieve the cornerstone of his radical program for the conquered South—the annihilation of state governments and the confiscation of millions of acres of slaveholders’ land for redistribution to the freed blacks. Moderate Republicans and Democrats balked at such an economic and political revolution. Stevens died in 1868, bitterly denouncing Congress’s failure to follow his leadership.
Ben Butler had a long career in Congress, in which he angled in vain for a presidential nomination. He never got it until 1884, when in desperation he accepted the backing of the Workingman’s Party, an offshoot of the Democrats. He won only a tiny minority of the popular vote. But he continued to prosper as a lawyer, retaining his reputation as a brilliant courtroom tactician.
Joseph Holt returned to the trial of Lincoln’s assassins as soon as the Lee trial ended. There he displayed the same intemperate hatred of Confederates that was his signature as a public figure. He spent endless hours trying to prove that the Lincoln conspirators acted on the orders of Jefferson Davis, relying largely on the increasingly dubious testimony of Sanford Conover. Holt failed to establish Davis’s guilt but the eight indicted associates of John Wilkes Booth were convicted of Lincoln’s murder. However, five of the army officer judges recommended clemency for Mary Surratt, who was among those condemned to hang. Holt brought the proceedings of the trial to President Andrew Johnson, who supposedly refused to grant clemency, and Mrs. Surratt died on the gallows. Two years later, Johnson, by now thoroughly disgusted with Holt and the Radical Republican campaign to exact maximum vengeance on the defeated South, claimed that Holt had concealed the clemency petition from him. The ensuing political uproar badly damaged Holt’s reputation. He spent years trying in vain to prove the president had seen the petition.
John Singleton Moshy became an outspoken supporter of reconciliation between North and South. When Ulysses Grant won the presidency, Mosby was a frequent guest in the White House. Eventually, Grant appointed him American consul in Hong Kong, a lucrative post given only to the most favored members of the administration in power.
William Farrar “Baldy” Smith stayed in the much reduced postwar U.S. Army but his reputation as a foe of the Radical Republicans haunted him. He went from his wartime rank of major general of volunteers to mere major and resigned in disgust in 1867. Thereafter he became president of the International Ocean Telegraph Company, which operated an undersea cable to Cuba. He later served as president of the board of police commissioners in New York City and then spent twenty years working as a government engineer on river and harbor improvements. He eventually rejoined the army with the rank of major to get a pension. He wielded a wicked pen in his reminiscences of the Civil War. Few escaped his censures.
Oliver O. Howard became a commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, the federal agency created to aid the freed slaves. The bureau soon became corrupt and Howard was bombarded with accusations of dishonesty. In 1874, he was forced to demand an army court of inquiry, which exonerated him from personal peculation. He helped found Howard University in Washington, D.C., to give blacks an opportunity for higher education and served as its president for five years. He was later superintendent of West Point. Howard retired as a much respected major general in 1894.
George Gordon Meade stayed in the U.S. Army, at first commanding a Southern military district that included the states of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. His disposition did not improve with age. He deeply resented Grant’s decision to promote Philip Sheridan to lieutenant general in 1868, a rank Meade felt he deserved. The Old Snapping Turtle died of pneumonia in 1872 at the comparatively early age of fifty-seven, only two years after his friend Robert E. Lee.
Ambrose Burnside may not have had much brains, but his abundant charm enabled him to win three terms as Republican governor of Rhode Island. From there he went to the U.S. Senate, where he served until his death in 1881. He also accumulated wealth as an investor and railroad executive. His asperity toward Southerners diminished markedly in the postwar years. When his West Point classmate Confederate Major General Henry Heth needed money to open his family’s Virginia coal mines, Burnside met him secretly in New York and told him he could borrow almost any amount and he would back the loans.
George Washington Custis Lee inherited Arlington and sued in federal court for its return. After years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the estate had been seized illegally from Mary Custis Lee. The federal government offered Custis $150,000 for the property, the equivalent of perhaps $2 million today, which he accepted. Custis never married. He succeeded his father as president of Washington College (soon renamed Washington and Lee) and dwindled into a crabbed old age, in which an English manservant was his only companion.
James Longstreet became an outspoken supporter of Ulysses Grant and the Republican Party. For these and other supposed flaws, he was mercilessly attacked by other former Confederate generals, who blamed him for losing the battle of Gettysburg. He had to depend on political appointments, such as the ambassadorship to Turkey, to make a living.
Edmund Ruffin killed himself on June 17, 1865, only a few weeks after the close of Lee’s trial. Ruffin breakfasted with his family at his son Edmund’s plantation, then retired to an upstairs bedroom, placed the barrel of a loaded rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He obviously meant what he said about being unable to live in a world ruled by Yankees.
Sophia Carroll returned to Louisiana, where her father, released from prison thanks to Senator Reverdy Johnson’s intercession with President Andrew Johnson, reestablished himself on their seven-thousand-acre sugar planation, Belle Riviere, on the Mississippi below New Orleans. Numerous beaus pursued Sophia but she rejected all their offers. When Robert E. Lee died in 1870, she sank into a depression. The deaths of her mother and father in the next few years only deepened her melancholy. She sought consolation—and perhaps forgetfulness—in laudanum. One moonless night, she wandered out on the levee while the Mississippi was in flood. The rushing river had torn a gap in the dike, which was invisible in the darkness. Sophia stepped into it and was swept into the swirling current. Her body was found several days later, miles downstream. A grieving Agnes Lee, the general’s daughter, said she was “the last casualty of our terrible war.”
Jeremiah O’Brien gave his shorthand notes of the Lee trial as well as voluminous entries in his private journal to Jonathan Stapleton, obviously hoping to banish the trauma from his memory. Stapleton had them transcribed but never tried to publish them in his lifetime. O’Brien returned to the New York Tribune as a reporter. But the erratic policies of the paper in Horace Greeley’s last years dismayed him. He was especially appalled by Greeley’s decision to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in the 1872 race against Ulysses Grant. Disgusted with the politics of both parties, O’Brien emigrated to California. There, he became a reporter and later an editor on several newspapers. Plunging into the strife between labor and capital in that turbulent state, he became a spokesman for the progressive movement that led the attack on corporate arrogance at the turn of the nineteenth century. Throughout his life, O’Brien remained an advocate of black emigration from the white-supremacist South and a vigorous opponent of racism in all forms. In the mid-188os, he married Elizabeth Fitzmaurice, a pioneer feminist and fellow reporter. (Her story, which includes an encounter with Jonathan Stapleton, is told in another novel, A Passionate Girl.) From all accounts, the marriage was a happy one.
The Principia Foundation, established by Paul Stapleton, the family’s leader in the twentieth century, asked historian and novelist Thomas Fleming to construct this narrative from Jeremiah O’Brien’s shorthand notes and journal entries.