“The United States have business in Kentucky and Missouri till June, and have handsomely kept their agreements with us. You, sir, do not belong here, not if you are running guns. Now get your horses and go, and count yourselves lucky to have that opportunity.” Lee turned to Grant. “Perhaps your lieutenants will ride with them a ways, to ensure that they do cross the border.” Then, to de Buys, in tones of palpable warning: “You personally and your colleagues shall be held responsible for the safety of the two Federals.”
Grant chuckled: “It seems you needn’t fret over that, General, not when my lads captured these fellows in the first place.”
“They never would have, if they hadn’t come on us when I was in the bushes with my pants around my ankles,” Konrad de Buys growled. Grant’s chuckle turned into a laugh.
Lee laughed, too, but was inclined to believe the Rivington man. With or without their marvelous repeaters, his kind were uncommonly dangerous, and de Buys himself more so than most. “Remember what I told you,” Lee said sternly, and was relieved to see both Rivington men give grudging nods.
They and the Federals rode south from Tompkinsville that afternoon. Grant stayed in town to await the lieutenants’ return, so he and they could start the repeaters on their journey northwards. Lee and Marshall set off for Bowling Green. As they rode out of Tompkinsville, Marshall said,” Are you sure it is expedient, sir, just to give some dozens of repeaters to the Yankees like that?”
“Did I believe they had none, Major, I assure you I should never have done so,” Lee answered. “But they surely possess samples a-plenty, whether seized from prisoners or taken from beside corpses, as our men used to take Springfields to replace the smoothbore muskets they’d been issued. And by ceding the guns, I kept the Rivington men out of Northern hands. As they know about a good many things besides AK-47s, I count them as more important than the rifles.”
“Ah. Put that way, I see your point.” Marshall ran a hand through his wavy blond hair. “They do sometimes seem all but omniscient, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Lee said shortly. That was what worried him about the men of America Will Break. After a moment, he added, “Omniscient they are not, however, for I can think of one thing they surely do not know.”
“What’s that, sir?” Marshall sounded genuinely curious.
“Not to meddle in our politics.” Lee booted his hired horse into a trot. Marshall matched him to keep up. They rode some time in silence.
People argued even as they filed into the Louisville park. It was Good Friday. Under other circumstances, many of them would have been in church. But church would be there Easter Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and the year after that. They might never hear a President—or rather, a recent ex-President—of the United States again.
U.S. flags flew at all four comers of the speakers’ platform. They still displayed thirty-six stars, though eleven states had left the Union for good and two more were wavering. Some of the people in the crowd waved the old banner, too. But others carried one of the several versions of the Confederate flag. Already the rival factionalists were beginning to push and shove each other.
Charles Marshall’s spectacles lent him a supercilious air as he stood at the edge of the swelling throng. Perhaps that was no accident, for his voice held a definite sniff: “Considering where he took his country, Lincoln has considerable nerve to show his face in Kentucky and urge it to follow his lead.”
“Lincoln has considerable nerve,” Lee said, “and this is, after all, his birth state. But I question his political wisdom in coming here—Seymour and McClellan both outpolled him in this state, Seymour by an enormous margin, so how can he hope to sway any substantial number of voters?”
A year before, he would never have thought to make such political calculations. His life had been simpler then, his only problem the straightforward one of beating back the Army of the Potomac when it began to move. With all his soul, he longed for those simpler days, but he knew it would take another war to bring them back, and that was too high a price to pay.
Marshall started to say something, but his words were lost in the peculiar roar, half cheer and half hiss, that went up from the crowd. It reminded Lee of a locomotive with a bad boiler. The man who produced that frightening mixture of hate and adulation stood on the platform, unmistakably tall and unmistakably lean, and waited for the tumult to ebb. At last, it did.
“Americans!” Lincoln said, and with a single word drew all attention to himself, for no one, whether staunch Union man or backer of the Confederacy, denied himself that proud title. Lincoln used it again: “Americans, surely you know I should rather have given up an my life’s blood sooner than see my beloved nation tom in two.”
“We can fix that for you, by God!” a heckler yelled, and a savage chorus of jeers arose.
Lincoln spoke through them: “Both sides in the late conflict spoke the same tongue, prayed to the same God. That He chose to grant victory to the South is a fact I can but strive to accept, understand it though I do not, for the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. I bear no animus against the men I still believe my brethren, nor have I ever.”
“It don’t work both ways!” the leather-lunged heckler shouted. Lee thought the fellow wrong, though during the simpler days of the war he would have agreed with him. Lincoln truly saw one nation rather than a federation of sovereign states, and acted on that belief, misguided and mistaken though Lee believed he was.
Now he continued, “You have rejected me, as well you might have, seeing how I failed to preserve the Union I swore to protect and defend. But I am only one small man. Do with me as you see fit; it will be no less than I deserve. But I pray you, men of Kentucky, with an my heart and an my soul and all my mind—do not reject the United States of America.”
More catcalls rang out, along with scattered cheers. Lincoln ignored both; Lee had the odd feeling that he was talking to himself up there on the platform, talking to himself yet at the same time desperately hoping others would hear: “Important principles may—and must—be inflexible. We all declare for liberty, but we do not always mean the same thing by it. In the United States, liberty means each man may do as he pleases with himself and his labor; in the South, the same word means some would do as they please with other men and that which they produce. To the fox, stealing chickens from the farmer looks like liberty, but do you think the fowl agree?”
“Just like honest, backwoods Abe to talk about foxes and hencoops,” Charles Marshall said, a sneer in his voice. Lee started to nod, but thought better of it. Yes, the image was not one he could imagine hearing from Jefferson Davis’s lips, but it illuminated the point Lincoln had made just before more vividly than might many a polished phrase. And that point was far from a bad one. Lee had the uncomfortable feeling of being more in sympathy with his country’s foes than with such friends as the men of America Will Break.
Lincoln said, “Men of Kentucky, men of America, if you vote to go South, you vote to forget Washington and Patrick Henry, Jefferson and Nathan Hale, Jackson and John Paul Jones. Remember the nation your fathers joined, remember the nation so many of you fought so bravely to defend. God bless the United States of America!”
Some cheered; more, Lee thought, booed. He found no small irony in the fact that three of Lincoln’s “American” heroes, Washington, Patrick Henry, and Jefferson, had been slaveholding Virginians; Martha Washington’s blood ran in the veins of his own wife. And the South revered the Founding Fathers no less than the North; he remembered coming into Richmond on Washington’s birthday and finding the War Department closed. And for that matter, Washington on horseback appeared on the Great Seal of the Confederate States. This time, he had no sympathy for Lincoln’s claims.