“There are undoubtedly a goodly number of Northern men who have little cause to love me,” Lee replied. As he pulled on his boots, he reflected that some men from the South also failed to look on him with affection. But no. An assassin from the Rivington men would have used an AK-47 at close range, not a Springfield—and with the automatic fire from an AK-47 would have been far more likely to accomplish what he’d set out to do.
Charles Marshall put his head out the window. He whistled softly. “At that range, you were very lucky, sir.” He paused, looked out toward where the rifle lay. His tone turned musing. “Or perhaps, from the position this murderer took, the reflection of the sun against the glass here helped throw off his aim.”
“Let me see.” Lee also gauged the angle. “Yes, it could well be so—but that is also luck of a sort, is it not?” Shouts came from the direction in which his assailant had fled. He turned his head that way. Of themselves, his eyebrows shot up. “Good heavens, Major, they seem to have caught him. Quick work there.” He drew back so his aide could have a look.
Behind his spectacles, Marshall’s eyebrows also rose. “It’s a nigger, by God!” he exclaimed.
“Is it?” Lee displaced Marshall again. Sure enough, the man being dragged along in the middle of the crowd was black. He saw Lee looking at him, started to shout something. One of his captors hit him just then, so his words were lost.
Lee left the window and went out into the hall, which was still crowded with people but not the mad crush it had been a few minutes before. General Grant caught his eye. “I hear you were shot at,” Grant said. Lee nodded. Grant’s mouth shaped a thin smile. “Not how I’d care to be awakened for breakfast. As long as you’re up, though, shall we go have some?”
“An excellent suggestion,” Lee said, liking the way the Federal general made no undue fuss about the incident—but then, Grant had earned a reputation for coolness under fire.
Breakfast, however, proved next to impossible. Lacking Grant’s sangfroid, a stream of local dignitaries—mayor, sheriff, lieutenant governor of Kentucky, along with a couple of others whose names and titles Lee failed to catch—came up to him and expostulated over the horror of what had just happened, how he should not deem it in any way an expression of how true and honest Kentuckians felt about him or the Confederacy, and on and on. The excited locals all but rent their garments. Lee answered as patiently as he could. Meanwhile, his ham and eggs sat on the plate in front of him, untouched and getting colder by the minute.
The officials ignored Grant, who drank cup after cup of black coffee, sliced up a cucumber, dipped the slices into vinegar, and ate them one after another, methodically, until they were all gone. It was not the sort of breakfast for which Lee would have cared, but at least Grant got to eat it.
When what seemed like the seven-hundredth uninvited guest approached the table, even Lee’s glacial patience started to slip. His hand tightened on the fork he had finally managed to pick up, as if he intended to stick it into this importunate fellow instead of his ham. But the man proved to have news worth hearing: “Found out why that crazy nigger took a shot at you, General.”
“Ah?” Lee’s grip on the fork relaxed. “Tell me, sir.” Interest also sparked in Grant’s eyes.
“He was yellin’ an’ cussin’ and carryin’ on about how if you hadn’t gone and took Washington City, the Federals would’ve won the war and set all the niggers down South free.”
“I suspect there may be some truth in that,” Lee said. “No doubt General Grant will concur.”
“No doubt at all,” Grant said promptly, and Lee remembered first how much the Federal commander had wanted to go on fighting and then what the outcome of that fight would have been without the intervention of the Rivington men. Grant continued, “That does not give that Negro or anyone else the right to go shooting at General Lee now, though. For better or worse, the war is over.”
“What will they do with him?” Lee asked.
“Try him and hang him, I expect,” the Kentuckian answered with a shrug. “Oh, he said one other thing, General Lee: he said you must own a rabbit’s foot off a rabbit caught in a graveyard at midnight, or else he never would have missed you.”
“Morning sun is a likelier reason than anything from the black of night,” said Lee, who had no such charm. He explained how the would-be assassin had picked a poor spot from which to fire.
The Kentuckian laughed. “Ain’t that just like a fool nigger’?” He made as if to clap Lee on the back for his escape, but thought better of it; Lee was not a man to inspire casual familiarity from strangers. Leaving his gesture awkwardly half-completed, the fellow departed. Lee’s breakfast was ruined, but he ate it anyhow. A bad breakfast was far preferable to the prospect of no breakfast at all, ever again.
During the next few months, Lee traveled all through Kentucky and Missouri. He ran up more miles, faster, than he ever had on campaign, but then, but for that one Negro, no one was shooting at him now.
Grant traveled even farther, especially in Missouri. Missouri had no direct train connections with Kentucky, Tennessee, or Arkansas—Lee had to travel by coach from Columbus, Kentucky, to Ironton, Missouri, where the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad reconnected him with the rail network. Grant, on the other hand, could reach St. Louis—where he had once lived—quickly and easily by way of the Ohio and Mississippi across Indiana and Illinois, and made several trips there.
Lee was pleased at how well both sides held to their pledges of keeping soldiers out of the disputed states. That did not mean no one invaded Kentucky and Missouri, however. Every politician, Northern and Southern, who could stand on a stump and put one word after another, or ten thousand after another ten, flooded into the two states to tell their people just why they should choose the United States or the Confederacy.
Listening to a pro-Confederate orator thunder abuse at the North at a torchlight rally one night in Frankfort, Charles Marshall made a sour face and said,” Anyone can tell he spent the war safely far away from the firing lines. Had he ever faced the Yankees in battle, he would own far more respect for their manhood than he currently displays.”
“How right you are,” Lee replied, as appalled as his aide at the oratory: the speaker had just called the Northerners cold-blooded, fat-faced, nigger-loving moneygrubbers. Lee went on, “I confess to a certain amount of embarrassment at representing the same nation as does this eloquent fellow.” To emphasize his distaste, he turned half away from the shouting, gesticulating man up on the platform.
“I know what you mean, sir…, But Marshall, as if drawn by some horrid fascination, kept watching the orator. Red light from the torches flickered off his spectacle lenses. “Even if he wins votes, he also sows hatred.”
“Just so,” Lee said. “For example, have you seen this?” He took out a pamphlet and handed it to Marshall.
His aide held it close to his face so he could read it in the torchlight. “ ‘What Miscegenation Is! And What You May Expect if Kentucky Votes Union,”, he quoted. He gave the pamphlet a bemused look. “The cover is—striking.”
“That is one word which may truthfully apply to it,” Lee admitted. The pamphlet showed a black man, his nose and lips grotesquely exaggerated, embracing a white woman and tilting her face up for a kiss. “We are, fortunately, not responsible for this document: you will note the learned lawyer Mr. Seaman had it printed in New York.”
“By the look of the thing, the learned Mr. Seaman, merely by existing, besmirches the legal profession.” Marshall held the pamphlet between thumb and forefinger, as if to minimize his contact with it.” Are the contents as lurid as the cover?”