FIASCO. THE WORD HUMMED THROUGH Henry Gentry’s head like a swarm of Confederate minié balls. Behind him, the beaten Army of Kentucky plodded through the heat. Half the wounded had died, mostly for want of water on the torturous descent from the mountains.
Just ahead on his big bay horse, Major General Stephen Burbridge slumped in his saddle down, a veritable condensation of gloom. Knowing how much he was hated by nine out of ten Kentuckians, he could easily imagine the derision that would be flung at him in the newspapers, the laughs that would be enjoyed behind his back for the disaster at Saltville.
In Louisville, they found Burbridge’s headquarters in turmoil. Confederate guerrillas had burned a steamboat at the docks. Guards had captured two men running away as the boat caught fire. In a valise were a half-dozen hand grenades that exploded and burned furiously, resisting all attempts to douse them. Burbridge ordered the two incendiaries shot immediately.
The general wondered if anyone could tell him what these flaming grenades contained. “It’s Greek fire,” Gentry said. “The Sons of Liberty have been talking about it as a secret weapon.”
“Why have you kept this a secret?” Burbridge asked.
“I sent a report on it to Washington,” Gentry said. “I thought they’d warn you about it.”
“They don’t give Kentucky ten seconds of thought in Washington,” Burbridge raged. “Lincoln doesn’t want
to know the kind of war we’re fighting here. Surrounded by traitors and guerrillas and secret agents.”
Gentry let General Burbridge stew in his self-pity for a few hours, then returned to his headquarters. Burbridge was at his desk, dictating a report on Saltville to one of his aides. He let Gentry wait until he finished a completely imaginary account of the battle, in which he estimated Adam Jameson’s force at eight thousand men, equipped with heavy cannon. He was practically daring Gentry to send Lincoln an accurate version.
“General,” Gentry said, when they were alone. “I know you don’t want to see or hear from me again. But there’s a favor I’d like to ask.”
“A favor?” Burbridge growled incredulously.
“I’d like you to put Adam Jameson’s brother, Robin, at the head of the list for the draft in Daviess County. If certain things transpire as I think they might, I’d like you to take him off the list when I send you a two-word telegram: ‘All’s well.’ Can you arrange that? I presume you have some influence with the draft commissioners.”
“There isn’t anyone or anything in this miserable state that I don’t have influence with,” Burbridge said. “What’s supposed to happen? Will your ‘all’s well’ mean anything? Or will it be a repetition of your brilliant idea for an attack on Saltville?”
“We can only hope for the best, General,” Gentry replied.
“And fear the worst, with fools like you around,” Burbridge said.
With those warm words, the director of federal intelligence for southern Indiana and the military commander of Kentucky parted. The next day Gentry was back in Keyport. He walked from the ferry to his house through the blazing noon heat. At the door the first person he saw was Dorothy Schreiber. “How is Lucy?” he asked.
“Come up and see for yourself,” Dorothy said.
Upstairs in Major Stapleton’s former bedroom, Lucy
was sitting in a chair, wearing a blue robe that Gentry thought he had last seen on Dorothy. The ex-slave girl seemed thin and sickly but her smile was bright. In her lap was a book. She was painfully moving her finger from word to word, trying to sound out each one.
“Lucy’s learning to read,” Dorothy said. “I’m having such fun teaching her. I never thought teaching could be so enjoyable. I’ve always hated school.”
“Have you gotten a letter from Moses Washington?” Gentry asked Lucy.
She held up three fingers.
“Three! That’s even better news,” Gentry said. He gave her an exaggerated report of Washington’s heroism in the battle. “He was at the head of the attack. He’s a brave man.”
Lucy glowed. “He says he loves me. That’s the best news I’ve heard in my whole miserable life.”
“Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” The stentorian voice drifted in the open bedroom window.
“What’s that?” Gentry asked.
“General Carrington heard about the casualties at Saltville,” Dorothy said. “He’s sent us a hundred Germans to replace the nig—I mean the colored troopers.”
“You heard about Captain Otis too?”
“Yes,” Dorothy said. “Did he run away again?”
“No. He died at the head of his men,” Gentry said.
“Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” roared the German voice.
“They’re goin’ to be the best soldiers in the world,” Dorothy said. “They drill all the time. Every day at least one of them falls over from sunstroke.”
“Have you heard from your father?” Gentry asked.
“Yes. He’s stayin’ in Tennessee, thank goodness. They’re not goin’ to join Sherman in Georgia. Maybe they think Lincoln’s Own has had enough hard fightin’.”
“I would certainly agree with that idea,” Gentry said.
“I wrote him a letter. I told him about Lucy. I told him I was glad he was fightin’ to free the slaves. It’s the first
time I’ve been able to say anything good about him bein’ in the army. Momma hated it so much. I hope she won’t feel bad if she hears about it in heaven.”
“I don’t think she will, Dorothy,” Gentry said. “That letter will mean a lot to your father.” Dorothy had matured amazingly in the ten days Gentry was away on the expedition to Saltville.
In the front parlor, he found his mother reading a copy of the Keyport Record. “This report of the battle of Saltville convinces me all over again that your friend Lincoln is an idiot,” she said.
Gentry glanced at the story. “COLORED TROOPS ROUTED” was the headline. There was not a word about the murder of the wounded blacks. His old friend Andy Conway was continuing the great tradition of the Democratic Party, lying to the American people at every opportunity.
“The Africans weren’t routed. They were slaughtered. Thanks to the stupidity of General Burbridge.”
“When are you going to get that little nigger out of Major Stapleton’s bedroom?”
Gentry chose to ignore the question. “Have you heard from Major Stapleton?”
“Not a word. How long was his leave?”
“I didn’t set a number. His mother was quite ill.”
Down in his cellar office, Gentry pondered the calendar. Today was August 5. Sometime between now and November, when the voters would go to the polls to decide Lincoln’s and the country’s fate, Adam Jameson and his cavalrymen would head for Kentucky and the Sons of Liberty would rise. Unless he knew the exact date, he would be helpless to prevent it.
Roads could not be patrolled indefinitely to challenge Jameson’s invasion. There were too many possible routes. They did not have the manpower to cover them all. If he arrested Gabriel Todd and the others before they struck, he would have no evidence of an act of treason
and they could only be held by ignoring habeus corpus à la General Carrington. Gentry had spent a good year damning Carrington in his letters to Lincoln. He could not change his mind at this late date and adopt the general’s deplorable tactics.
Gentry sat there, sipping bourbon, thinking of Amelia Conway Jameson in her bedroom at Rose Hill, fingering the notice that Robin Jameson was subject to an immediate draft into the Union Army. He imagined her pondering one more plea to her snarling husband and winced at what might happen during that interview, remembering the time he had seen Amelia in Keyport with bruises on her face. With his jaw wired shut Rogers Jameson would be even more likely to consider his fists the best available answer.
Could he bear the thought of another bruise on Amelia’s cheek? With the help of a steady supply of bourbon, he would try. Amelia was his one hope now. Gentry was sure Major Paul Stapleton was gone beyond recall. Ten days in hotels with Janet Todd would make him a confederate in every possible meaning of that word.
Gentry grieved for Paul. There were so many young men like him, torn between the atavistic pull of the Democratic Party and the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s switch from a war to save the Union to a crusade to abolish slavery would be debated by historians for generations. If the South won, it would be described as a cynical trick that failed. If the North won, it would become a brilliant stroke that drove the South from the moral high ground the Confederates possessed as defenders of their invaded country.
Neither would be true, of course. Only Gentry and a few others knew the real author of that transforming proclamation: God. Gentry tried to think about the word, the idea, and failed. Lincoln’s new theology bewildered him. God was in charge of this cataclysm?
What kind of a God slaughtered his followers on both sides of the battle line with such seeming indifference? Yet here was Abe Lincoln, the man whose soul exceeded in range and capacity any that Gentry had ever seen, testifying that God had guided him and America in this completely unexpected direction.
If, as Jesus said, God was love, it was a very terrible brand of that commodity. In the name of God’s war, Gentry was forcing the only woman he loved to choose between her sons, to betray one son and her husband—to covertly confess to a man she would henceforth loathe that she had been living a lie, she had made a stupid mistake when she left Henry Gentry keening laments into the Ohio River’s mists and married Rogers Jameson.
Amelia was southern, Democratic, to the core of her soul. She could only see her choice as something inflicted on her by Gentry’s arrogant possibly diabolical friend Lincoln, for whom her erstwhile lover Gentry was only too happy to play smirking surrogate.
Henry Gentry gulped his bourbon. He wished he could pray to someone for forgiveness. But he had no hope or faith in such a possibility. Since Harvard, he had never been a believer in much of anything beyond Ralph Waldo Emerson’s careless God, Brahma, the blind slayer of the evil and the good.
We’re doing it the hard way, Abe.