How Few Remain (47 page)

No feeling among the soldiery for the plight of the Negro in
Confederate bondage
, Douglass scrawled. The plight of the Negro, in fact, was not what had engendered the war. He reminded himself of that, grimly. Not even Lincoln had sent men off to battle for the express purpose of freeing the bondsman. Blaine hated the Confederate States because they were a rival, not because they were tyrants. Had they been exemplars of purest democracy, rivals they would have remained, and he would have hated them no less.

Presently, Captain Oliver Richardson came out of the tent. He was puffing on a cigar and looked mightily contented with the world. When he saw Douglass, he stared right through him. Douglass would have bet he knew the terms the major in butternut had brought. The Negro did not waste his time asking Richardson about them. General Willcox’s adjutant cared for him no more than did the Confederate emissary.

A couple of minutes later, a corporal with the crossed semaphore flags of the Signal Corps on his sleeve hurried from Willcox’s tent to that of the telegraphers nearby. Slowly, as if without the slightest need to hurry, Frederick Douglass strolled in the same direction. He positioned himself not far from the entrance, looked busy (in fact, he was jotting down unflattering observations about Captain Richardson, of which he had a never-failing supply), and waited.

In due course, the corporal came out once more. Douglass intercepted him in a way that, like any great art, looked effortless even when it wasn’t. In confidential tones, he asked, “What sort of impossible terms are the Rebs proposing?”

“They don’t sound so impossible to me,” the soldier answered.

When he said no more than that, Douglass was tempted to grab him by the front of his blouse and shake the news out of him. Restraining himself with an effort, he said, “What are they, then?” The soldier hesitated, visibly considering whether to reply. “It doesn’t matter if you tell me,” Douglass assured him. “Whatever the terms may be, I can neither accept nor refuse them.”

“That’s true enough,” the Signal Corps corporal said, half to himself. “All right, I’ll tell you: the offer is to end the war and pretend it never happened, near enough. Both sides to pull back over the border. No reparations, nothing of the sort. We just go on about our business.”

Douglass sucked in a long breath of air. Those were generous terms, far more generous than he’d expected the Confederate
States to offer. Some—maybe many—in the United States would want to accept them, especially as word of the horrors of the battle of Louisville spread through the land. Douglass had done some spreading of that word himself, and now all at once bitterly regretted it.

“What of Chihuahua and Sonora?” he asked.

“Huh? Oh, them. Right.” The corporal needed to be reminded of the immediate cause of the war. “The Rebs’d keep ’em.”

“I see,” Douglass said slowly.

“General Willcox said that, far as he was concerned, the Confederates were welcome to ’em, that they weren’t worth owning in the first place, and that the only things in ’em was cactuses and redskins and greasers.”

Rather than keeping too quiet, the soldier was suddenly talking more than Douglass had expected. “Did he?” the Negro journalist murmured. If an important U.S. commander didn’t think the Mexican provinces were worth the cost the country was paying to try to make the Confederate States disgorge them, how would President Blaine feel?

“He did, sure as I’m standing here next to you,” the Signal Corps corporal answered. “And I’m not going to stand next to you any more, though, on account of somebody’s gonna spot me and figure I’ve been bangin’ my gums too much.” He sidled off, doing his best to look as if he’d never been there at all.

Frederick Douglass wrote down the details the soldier had given him while they were still fresh in his mind. Then he shoved the notebook back into his pocket and walked over to his tent. He’d been under canvas long enough to have grown used to the stark simplicity of a stool, a kerosene lamp, and an iron-framed military cot. They made his home in Rochester, which before leaving it he’d thought of as having all the modern conveniences, instead seem overcrowded and overstuffed.

He sat down on the stool and covered his face with his hands. He was not quite so appalled as he had been after shooting the disemboweled Massachusetts artilleryman. The physical shock of that deed would stay with him till his dying day. The grief flowing through him now, though, ran deeper and stronger than that which had followed the mercy killing.

“I was right then,” he said. “Now …”

Now, instead of watching a man die before his eyes, he was seeing a lifetime’s effort and hope take their last breaths.
James G. Blaine had started this war, basically, to punish the Confederate States for winning the War of Secession. Now that he had discovered he was punishing the United States even more severely, how could he continue after getting an honorable—no, an honorable-sounding—peace proposal from the CSA?

In Blaine’s place, Douglass would have been hard pressed to keep from accepting such a peace. But if it was made, the USA and CSA would live side by side for another generation, maybe two or even three, and the vast white majority in the United States would go right on despising the handful of Negroes in their midst and doing their best to forget the millions of Negroes in the Confederate States even existed.

Douglass looked up and scowled at the canvas wall of the tent as if it were Oliver Richardson’s smoothly handsome face. “I shall oppose this peace with every fiber of my being,” he said aloud, as if someone had doubted him. “No matter what the cost, I shall urge that the war go forward, for the sake of my people.”

The guns did not resume their deadly work immediately the peace expired. Both sides held back, awaiting President Blaine’s decision. Douglass did not realize how constant a companion the roar of battle had been until he discovered the long stretch of silence was making him jumpy.

When he messed with the staff officers in the seemingly unnatural quiet that evening, he found he did not have to pretend ignorance of the proposed peace terms. Everyone was talking about them, and everyone assumed someone else had let Douglass know what they were. Almost to a man, the officers thought President Blaine would accept President Longstreet’s offer.

“We’ll be going home soon,” Captain Richardson predicted. “I’d have liked to lick the damn Rebs, I’ll say that, but it doesn’t look like it’s in the cards here.”

Alfred von Schlieffen spoke up: “Did I not hear from the far-writer—no, the telegraph, you say; I am sorry—did I not hear that the Confederate States have in New Mexico a victory won?”

“I heard that,” several people said around mouthfuls of fried chicken. Douglass had not heard it, but he’d been moping in his tent since getting word of the Confederate peace proposal. Somebody said, “The Rebs used the goddamn Apaches to lure our boys into a trap, that’s what happened.”

“We should have given the Apaches what we gave the Sioux,” Richardson said. He slammed his fist down on the table, making
silverware and tin plates jump. “We would have done it, too, I reckon, if they hadn’t run down into Mexico every time we got on their tail.”

“Yes, and now, instead of running into the Empire of Mexico, which was weak enough to allow our pursuit, they shall, if President Blaine accepts this peace, run down into Confederate territory, where we can no more pursue them than we can the Kiowas of the Indian Territory,” Douglass said.

As always, the power of his voice let him command attention. Somebody a long way down the table—he didn’t see who—said, “Damned if the nigger isn’t right.” For once in his life, he felt happier about the agreement than angry at the insulting title.

Thoughtfully, someone else said, “Maybe we’ve been looking too hard at all the blood we’ve spilled here in Louisville and not enough at the whole war.”

“I don’t know what’s to look at,” Oliver Richardson said. “We aren’t doing any better anywhere else.”

“But you are not invaded,” Colonel Schlieffen said, “but only in this one far-off Territory. Your armed forces are not beaten. If the United States have the will, you can go on with this war.”

“You’re right, sir,” Frederick Douglass exclaimed. “We
can
beat the Confederate States. We are larger and stronger than they. Do you soldiers want them laughing at us for another twenty years, as they’ve done ever since the War of Secession? If we give up the fight without being defeated, we shall make ourselves a laughingstock before the eyes of the whole world.”

“If we go on and keep getting our ass kicked, the rest of the world is going to think that’s pretty damn funny, too,” Richardson said.

“But if we win,” Douglass replied, “if we win, what glory! And what a triumph for the holy cause of freedom.”

“Oh, Christ,” Richardson muttered to the officer next to him, “now he’s going to start going on about the slaves again.” The other soldier nodded. Douglass almost threw a bowl full of boiled beets at them. With so many in the USA feeling as Oliver Richardson did, would even victory over the Confederate States bring liberation? And if it did not, what in God’s name would?

    Colonel Theodore Roosevelt raised the Winchester to his shoulder, squinted down the sights, and pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder. “Take that, you damned Englishman!” he shouted, working the lever. A brass cartridge case leaped
into the air, then fell to the ground with a small clink. He aimed the rifle again, ready for another shot.

He didn’t fire. A couple of hundred yards away, the pronghorn, after its first frantic bound, was already staggering. As its herd-mates raced off over the plains of northern Montana Territory, it took three or four more wobbly steps, then fell. Roosevelt shouted again, this time in triumph. He ran toward the mortally wounded antelope. His boots kicked up dust at every stride.

“Good shot, Colonel!” First Lieutenant Karl Jobst exclaimed. Jobst, only a few years older than his superior, was a Regular Army officer, not an original member of Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment. Colonel Henry Welton had detailed him to the Volunteers as Roosevelt’s adjutant and, Roosevelt suspected, as his watchdog, too. He’d stopped resenting it. Jobst had already made himself very useful.

“Right in the lung, by jingo! That’s bully,” Roosevelt said, seeing the bloody froth on the antelope’s nose and mouth. The animal tried to rise when he came up to it, but could not. Its large, dark eyes reproached him. He stooped, pulled out a knife, and cut its throat to put it out of its misery. After watching its blood spill over the dirt, he rose, a broad grin on his face. “Good eating tonight!”

“Yes, sir,” Jobst said with a grin of his own. “If there’s anything better than antelope liver fried up with salt pork, I’m switched if I know what it is.” He drew his knife, too. “Let’s butcher it and take it back to camp.”

They opened the body cavity and dumped the guts out onto the ground. Flies buzzed around them. Roosevelt plunged his knife into the soil again and again to clean it. “I wish this had been an Englishman, by Godfrey,” he said. “I chafe at the defensive.”

“Sir, our orders are to patrol the border but not to cross it,” Lieutenant Jobst said. “If the enemy should invade us, we are expected to resist him. But we are not to provoke him, not when the United States have enough on their plate fighting the Confederates.”

He spoke politely, deferentially: Roosevelt outranked him. He also spoke firmly: he was there not only to give the colonel of Volunteers a hand but to make sure he didn’t go haring off on his own. Roosevelt knew how tempted he was to do just that, and gave Colonel Welton a certain amount of grudging respect for having anticipated his impulses.

He grabbed the carcass’ hind legs, Jobst the forelegs. They carried the dead antelope back to the horses. The pack animal to whose back they tied the antelope snorted and rolled its eyes, not liking the smell of blood. Jobst, who was very good with horses, gave the beast a lump of sugar and calmed it down.

Camp lay close by the bank of the Willow River, which at this season of the year was little more than a creek. Roosevelt had patrols scattered from the Cut Bank River in the west all the way to the Lodge in the east, covering better than a hundred miles of border country with his regiment. Placing his headquarters roughly in the middle of that broad stretch of rolling prairie did not leave him reassured. “How are we supposed to fight the British if they do cross the border?” he demanded of Lieutenant Jobst, not for the first time. “They’ll brush aside the handful who discover them the way I brushed off those deerflies back where we made the kill.”

“Sir, we aren’t supposed to fight them singlehanded,” his adjutant replied. “We’ll fall back, we’ll harass them, we’ll concentrate, we’ll send word of their whereabouts down to Fort Benton so Colonel Welton can bring up the infantry, and then we’ll lick ’em.”

“I suppose so,” Roosevelt said, not quite graciously. He admitted to himself—but to no one else—that he had trouble with the idea of not fighting the foe singlehanded. In all his visions of battle with the British, he saw himself. Sometimes he alone was enough to defeat the foe, sometimes he had help from the Unauthorized Regiment. In none of them did the rest of the U.S. Army play any role. He knew what he imagined and what was real were not one and the same. Knowing it and coming to terms with it were not one and the same, either.

The rest of the small regimental staff greeted him with enthusiasm and the antelope with even more. The cook, an enormous Irishman named Rafferty, had an equally enormous pot of beans going, but he was among the loudest of the men cheering the kill. “Beans’ll keep you from starving, that they will,” he said, “but after a while you don’t care. This here, now—” He ran his tongue over his lips in anticipation.

Roosevelt was gnawing on an antelope rib and getting grease in his mustache when a rider came trotting up from the south. “What’s the news?” Roosevelt called to him. “Have some meat, have some coffee, and tell us what you know.”

“Thank you, sir,” the soldier from Fort Benton said. He loaded a tin plate with food—not only a chunk of roast antelope haunch but also a big dollop of Rafferty’s beans—and then sat down by the fire. “News could be better.”