The Bride of Texas (48 page)

When I finished reading Leavitt’s verdict, something drew me to Humphrey’s library, and I was just about to reach for the shelf where he kept his favourite philosophers when my two youngsters burst into the room screaming. Jimmy was holding his hand over his nose and blood was streaming between his fingers and down onto his brand-new clothes. Still the tomboy despite Lieutenant Pettiford’s influence, Loretta defended herself with a classic phrase: “Mama, he started it!”

So I didn’t reach for the book among Humphrey’s philosophers until years later, when I heard how Comely Clem had met his end. The end sets the tone.

Ambrose had wanted to put Vallandigham away in Fort
Warren, a bleak prison in Boston Harbour, but Lincoln, fearing that prison would make him a martyr, amended the sentence and ordered the King of the Copperheads exiled to the Confederacy. Such justice, however appropriate, was too complex for Ambrose’s political sensibilities, and he balked. The tribunal, made up of “fine officers” (before they were exposed), had considered deportation and decided against it. If he was obliged to change the decision now, his prestige would suffer — prestige he would need in the coming weeks, when a number of similar trials were expected for which the Vallandigham affair was a precedent. Lincoln held his ground, and Ambrose, as usual, obeyed his president’s wishes. On May 22 the prisoner boarded the gunship
Exchange
in the Cincinnati River, and was conveyed to St. Louis, where he was transported by a special train to Murfreesboro and turned over to General Rosecrans. From there he was driven to the nearest front line. Following complications with grudging Southern officers, who found Vallandigham a somewhat distasteful ally, Rosecrans’s Major Wiles fobbed him off on Colonel Webb, who hadn’t had time to get proper instructions from his commanding officer, General Braxton Bragg. Comely Clem had become a hot potato, and when he left for Canada they were probably glad to see him go.

It was
Dayton’s Weekly
that pronounced the last word on the Vallandigham trial, when it wrote that through his oratory Vallandigham had been quickly digging his own political grave, and that Burnside had resurrected him. But as the future showed, Ambrose was not such a miracle-maker. The resurrected Clem was far from the old barn-burner of the wild days
of May 1863, when the little snake raised its coppery head and Vallandigham gambled on martyrdom. He lost. In the October elections of that year, he ran
in absentia
from Canada. His stay in the South had been brief; he was on to Lincoln’s game, and had no intention of compromising his peace-loving followers in the North by fighting for the cause while safe under the wings of Confederate President Jeff Davis, who in turn wasn’t stupid enough to try to keep him there. But despite the martyr’s halo and the juicy anti-Negro slogans that marked his campaign, he was defeated. So he returned to Illinois — Georgie Morton “lost his way” en route from Indianapolis to Columbus so he wouldn’t have to arrest him — but he failed again at the Democratic Convention in 1864.

When the war was over, Vallandigham decided to bet on what my learned husband called
panta rhei
. Though he used to appeal to the past as though it were holy, a source of divine inspiration, he now said, “The past must be forgotten. What has been, has been. We need to stop taking it into account.” But there was a less philosophical term for Vallandigham’s transformation, and it was applied not only by the Republicans but also — perhaps because they didn’t know Greek — by members of his own party: turncoat. There was no need to explain that Clem himself stood to gain the most from his “new tasks”. His idealism should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, for the martyr of the Constitution was — and had probably always been — an opportunist.

In that, perhaps his critics were being unfair. Be that as it may, things went downhill for him from then on. At the first post-war Democratic Convention, in 1866, he was accused by his long-time colleagues Jewett and Campbell of having “flirted with high treason”, thus confirming, after the fact, Judge Leavitt’s common sense and Ambrose’s instincts. Then he tried to win the Democratic nomination, first for Congress
and later for governor, but he lost both bids and returned to the practice of law.

And there he won everything.

In 1871 he defended a violent murderer, Thomas McGehan, and saved him from the gallows. But for himself —

I read a detailed account of his death in the
Dayton Journal
in the college library in Cincinnati. They quoted Vallandigham’s last words before he lost consciousness: “Oh, Murder! O what a blunder!”

There were only a few students in the library at the time. I got up, walked over to the shelves, and pulled out the book I had wanted to get long ago. I took it over to a window that overlooked the college garden. It was dark already, and the July stars were high in the sky — the same stars the general had once looked up at from my balcony.

Everyone gazes at them, because they shine so brightly. Only a few of us try to look deeper, to look inside ourselves as well, because, as a rule, the darkness there is profound. And in that darkness lies something more important than the stars.

“There wasn’t a lot of time, and Leonidas was having nightmares about what I would do to embarrass him,” said Maggie. “He came twice to implore me to change my mind, and the third time I told him I wanted nothing, only to be left alone. You could tell how relieved he was. ‘Don’t worry, Maggie, I’ll take care of the child.’ ‘How?’ I said. ‘Will you marry me?’ He was startled. ‘But you said — ’ ‘Don’t worry, I won’t force you to the altar with a shotgun.’ He looked at me as though he had something to say but couldn’t, then at last he blurted out, ‘I inherited a little something from my Uncle Bart. If you’re going to need money — ’ ‘Of
course I’m going to need money,’ I said. In the end, he reluctantly gave me three hundred. I was so sick of the whole thing that I took it. That was my worst mistake.” Maggie sighed. “Because in the meantime, Clara was matchmaking again.”

It was like this: Lieutenant Burnside was Brumble’s immediate superior, and Clara had him in the palm of her hand. She stepped into a play that was on its way to becoming the drama of a courageous and independent young woman, and introduced some traditional gentlemanly elements into it — so successfully that the whole play became a melodrama, complete with a so-called happy ending. What followed the happy ending was a tragedy, but melodramas never go that far.

A young woman from St. Louis arrived unannounced at the Jefferson barracks. The black footman jumped down from her carriage and exchanged a few quiet words with the officer on duty, who stepped over to the vehicle, opened the door, and escorted the lady to Lieutenant Burnside’s office. The lady spent some time with him behind closed doors, then Lieutenant Burnside escorted her back to her carriage. Lieutenant Burnside’s face was red. He locked himself in his office, and word spread through the garrison that the womanizer Burnside had gotten a society lady from St. Louis in trouble. The next morning, Second Lieutenant Brumble returned from a two-day furlough to find that Lieutenant Burnside urgently requested his presence. The office door was closed again, for a long time; then came a sound that an inquisitive sergeant identified as a slap. Voices were raised. The gossip was modified. Next day, two officers in dress uniform were shown into the parlour of Clara’s parents, and Lieutenant Brumble asked Maggie for her hand in marriage. She fainted dead away.

“Really?” I wondered. “Did you actually faint?”

“Don’t be silly, Lorraine. I had to gain time to think it over. In the end, I finally did say the momentous ‘Yes’.”

Maggie’s gaze fell on Humphrey’s humidor. She opened it and took out a slender Virginia cigar. I held a candle for her to light it.

“I simply fell into the gentlemen’s trap. Had I insisted on doing what I wanted to — and perhaps that’s what I should have done — a lot of people would have been hurt. Mother, Father, in the end even Clara too. She was convinced that she’d done me a tremendous favour. And I wish you could have seen Ambrose. He was an outraged guardian angel, side-whiskers bristling. After all he’d done, I couldn’t bring myself to embarrass him. That’s probably why I said yes.” Maggie exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked me straight in the eye. “What you did to him was bad enough, but it still fit into his picture of the world. He had no room in his brain to understand what I wanted to do. And to be entirely honest,” said my friend, “the prospect of matrimony still seemed to me more acceptable than the alternative. Because at the time I still had no idea what matrimony could entail.”

“So it was in fact a lady’s trap,” I said.

“If you insist,” said Maggie. “But the trap was set by gentlemen. Was it ever a disgrace to be an illegitimate father?”

The dilemma of those stormy days in May 1864, like so many other things, was described best by Lincoln. After the war, we all read his words from his widely quoted letter to Corning: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier who deserts while I must not touch a hair on the head of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? This is nonetheless injurious when effected by getting a father or brother or friend into a public meeting and there working upon his feelings till he is persuaded
to write the soldier boy that he is fighting in a bad cause, for the wicked Administration of a contemptible Government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional but withal a great mercy.”

Of course, lawyers and historians after them argued that there was no evidence that the peace orators had any direct influence on the morale of the army. I don’t know what kind of evidence they meant, but a simple-minded person like Ambrose had no doubts about the adverse effect that the anti-war campaign had on the war effort.

Even less did his subordinate, General Hascall: “As well I might establish a number of smallpox hospitals in the heart of this city, and then punish the people for becoming infected with that loathsome disease, as to allow newspapers and public speakers to belch forth their disloyal and treasonable doctrines, and blame the people for becoming contaminated therewith.” Hascall was a tough and forthright fellow. Within a week of Ambrose’s blood-thirsty order, which my husband commented on with the word “Ouch”, Hascall arrested D.E.Volkenburgh, editor of the
Weekly Democrat
, who had made fun of the edict but soon changed his tune. He gave other papers in his district a choice: stop criticizing the war, or stop publishing. The big dailies in the bigger cities entered the game, particularly Storey’s Chicago
Times
. Hascall jumped into printed debates with editors, which he had no experience at, and Vallandigham decided to go for broke.

Direct evidence was still lacking; in fact, there were increasing indications that the rank-and-file soldiers were not reacting as the generals had feared, and the peace-mongers began increasingly to feel the wrath of both individuals and whole units.

The Democratic Party called a convention in Indianapolis for May 20, and Storey couldn’t resist editorializing that the
Democrats would defend their constitutional rights “peaceably if possible, and forcibly if necessary.” It’s entirely possible that Storey had let himself get carried away with rhetoric, but that can’t be proved. In any case, someone reported to Hascall that the convention was just a cloak to disguise the real purpose of the assembly: seizing the Indianapolis armoury and arming Copperheads with stolen rifles. Ambrose warned Hascall against any use of force, but Hascall’s Pythian response was that he was “taking all precautions necessary for the preservation of the peace.” Accordingly, on May 20 the centre of the city was swarming with people wearing the familiar Copperhead insignia, but also with troops. Infantry with mounted bayonets occupied the city square; the arsenal was surrounded by artillery reinforced by infantry, and cavalry units cantered back and forth across the city. In addition, individual soldiers stationed in the crowd saw to it that nothing from the rostrum could be interpreted as a call to treason — and the interpretation was up to them. Constantly interrupted and out-shouted by armed, uniformed men in the audience, the speakers were never able to unleash their anti-war rhetoric, and one of them, wearing a big, shiny badge on his lapel, was driven off the stage by a soldier with a bayonet.

It was hard to tell what led to what. At four o’clock Senator Thomas A. Hendricks stood on the main rostrum but then ducked out without saying anything. A unit of scowling infantrymen was approaching the rostrum with bayonets poised, and the senator’s flight was the spark that ignited general confusion. A squadron on horseback rode into the crowd and scattered it and, soon afterwards, gunshots echoed from the railroad station. Civilian passengers on a train expressed their anger by shooting out the windows and firing in the air. Hascall ordered the train stopped, and people along the tracks watched in amazement as the men on the train tossed their pistols into
Pogue’s Run Creek. In his report to Burnside, Hascall described this rain of pistols most vividly of all the events of that day, and he conferred upon it the high-flown title “The Battle of Pogue’s Run Creek”.

The event could be construed as an attempted coup against the government, or as an encroachment on the people’s freedom, and it was seen both ways. But at the time Ambrose had other concerns that he considered more important. He had received orders to establish the Twenty-third Army Corps, take command of it, and join General Rosecrans in western Tennessee as a prelude to driving the Rebels from the eastern part of the state. On June 3 the preparations were complicated by additional orders instructing Ambrose himself to go to Hickman’s Bridge, Kentucky, and organize the transfer of units to Vicksburg, where Grant and Sherman were preparing for a decisive battle. Burdened with such complex problems, all within his proper field, Ambrose could hardly be expected to pay much attention to the nuances of constitutional law.