But he and the men with him had been sent only a little out of their way. Blue-coated officers were hurrying in and out of a brown brick building on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. Caudell fired a quick burst that sent them tumbling back inside. “Guard this place!” he told some of the other rebels on the avenue. He spent the next few minutes arguing them into it; they wanted the White House as much as he did. That afternoon, he learned he’d helped capture the headquarters of the Federal defenses for Washington.
That was later, though. As soon as he had men with repeaters posted all around the building, he hurried west along Pennsylvania Avenue to the big white mansion that had housed his Presidents until 1861 and now was home to the leader of another country.
The White House drew Confederates like a lodestone. Caudell’s delays had let General Kirkland, portly though he was, get there before him. Kirkland was shouting, “You men keep your order, do you hear me? Think about what General Lee will do to anyone who lets harm come to this building or anyone inside it.”
Lee’s name was a talisman to conjure with. It calmed men who, without it, might gleefully have rampaged with torches. Across the lawn, under the front colonnade, stood Federal sentries. They carried rifles, but made no move to raise them to the firing position. They just kept staring at the ever-growing numbers of ragged men in gray and homespun butternut who filled the broad cobblestoned street and now hesitantly advanced over the grass toward them. They did not seem to believe this hour could ever have come.
Remembering Gettysburg, remembering the botched fight at Bristoe Station, remembering the long, cold, hungry winter south of the Rapidan before the repeaters came, Caudell marveled at the hour, too. As he pressed toward the White House with his comrades, his feeling that the world had turned upside down deepened further, for out among the bluecoats came a tall, thin figure dressed in funereal black. Caudell looked around for the private who’d guessed the Federal President would run. By happy chance, the fellow was standing not ten feet from him. He pointed. “See? We’ve bagged Old Abe after an.”
Lincoln’s name ran through the rebels. A few cheers rang out, and a few jeers, but not many of either. The force of the moment seized most men with almost religious awe. Still slowly, they came forward across the White House lawn to the base of the steps. There they halted, staring in wonder at the edifice and Lincoln both. Caudell was in the fourth or fifth row of tight-packed troops.
As they hesitated, Lincoln came down the steps toward them. One of the Federal sentries tried to block his path. He said, “What does it matter now, son? What does anything matter now?” Beneath his frontier twang, he sounded tired past all endurance. The young sentry, beard still downy on his cheeks, stepped back in confusion.
Caudell frankly stared at the President of the United States. Southern papers and cartoonists made Lincoln out to be either a back country buffoon or a fiend in human shape. In the flesh, he did not seem either. He was just a tall, homely man whose deep-set eyes had already seen all the griefs in the world and now this crowning one piled atop the rest.
He coughed and turned his head to one side. When he somehow found the resolution to face the crowd of Confederate soldiers again, those eyes glistened with the tears he would not shed. Caudell thought they were tears of sorrow, not weakness; it was the expression a father would wear, watching his beloved son die of a sickness he could not cure.
Not all the rebels stayed solemn. A short, broad-shouldered corporal in front of Caudell and to his left spoke up brashly: “Well, Uncle Abe, you gonna try and take our niggers away from us now?” It was Billy Beddingfield; Caudell hadn’t realized he’d been promoted again. He was also certain Beddingfield, like most Southern soldiers, had not a single Negro to his name.
Beddingfield brayed laughter at his own wit. A good many men joined him. Lincoln stood on the White House steps, waiting to see whether the rebels would quiet down. When they did, he said, “I did not become President with the intention of interfering with the institutions of any state in the Union. I said that repeatedly, at every forum available; the great regret of my life is that you Southerners would not credit it.”
“What about the Emancipation Proclamation, then?” half a dozen soldiers shouted at once. Some of them profanely embellished the question.
Lincoln did not quail. “Everything I have done, I have done for the purpose of holding the Union together and of restoring it once it was torn asunder. Had I thought that meant freeing all the slaves, I should have freed them all; had I thought it meant leaving them in chains, in chains they would have stayed. As it chanced, I thought the wisest course was to free some and leave others alone—note that even now I have hesitated to touch the institution in those states which remained loyal. The proclamation was a weapon to hand in the war against your rebellion, and I seized it. Make what you will of that.”
“Damn little good it did you,” Billy Beddingfield said. Again, some of the rebels laughed. But Caudell gave his beard a thoughtful tug. He hadn’t known the Emancipation Proclamation was selective; the papers had painted it as a desperate effort to incite blacks to rise up against their masters. So it was, to some degree. But if it was a blow against the Confederate government rather than against slavery per se, that made it more or less what Lincoln claimed it was—an unpleasant ploy, but a ploy nonetheless.
The Federal President said, “Personally, I hate slavery and all it stands for.” That took courage, in front of the audience he faced. He let the rebels’ boos and hisses wash over him. When they slackened, he went on, “It is too late now, I think, to rescind the proclamation I issued. Too much has happened since. But if only the Southern states were to return to the Union, the Federal government would fully compensate former masters for their bondsmen’s liberty—”
The rebels laughed, loud and long. Lincoln hung his head. Caudell, strangely, found himself respecting the man. Anyone who clung to his principles strongly enough to refuse to abandon them even in complete defeat owned more sincerity than he had credited Lincoln with possessing.
Lincoln drew himself up to his full and impressive height. His black suit conformed perfectly to the motion; it was far from new and had been worn so often that it molded itself to its owner’s shape. “If my death would restore the seceded states, I would beg for your bullets,” he said. “If the Union fails, I have no wish to live.”
From most politicians, that would have been just talk. Looking at the sorrow that masked Lincoln’s rough-hewn features, Caudell was convinced he meant every word of it. But if he thought the Federal government had the right to tell states they had to stay in a Union they no longer desired, then he might be sincere, but to Caudell’s way of thinking he was sincerely wrong.
Some of the Confederates were willing to find him most literally sincere, too. Billy Beddingfield started to raise his AK-47. Caudell grabbed the repeater and pushed it back down. “No, Billy, damn it,” he said. “This isn’t like shooting a couple of nigger prisoners.” Nobody had ever assassinated a President of the United States. Caudell could imagine nothing surer to bring on lasting enmity between U.S.A. and C.S.A.
Beddingfield turned on him, scowling. “He don’t deserve no better, all the trouble he brung on us.” He started to swing the rifle back toward Lincoln. Caudell ground his teeth. Benny Lang had handled Beddingfield easily enough, but he knew he couldn’t match the Rivington man. And how strange to think of fighting. a man from his own regiment to save the President whose troops he’d been battling these past two and a half years!