The former U.S. President descended from the platform. Here and there, instead of dispersing, men held their ground and argued with one another, standing nose to nose while they shouted and waved their arms. But no riot followed Lincoln’s speech. Given the volatility of Louisville—of all Kentucky, and Missouri, too—Lee knew only relief over that.
Marshall in his wake, he strode through the thinning crowd toward Lincoln. He was a tall man himself, and Lincoln, especially after resuming the stovepipe hat he had shed while speaking, possibly the tallest man in the park. The ex-President was easy to keep in sight.
Lincoln soon spotted Lee. He waited for him to come up. “Mr. President,” Lee said, inclining his head.
“Not anymore,” Lincoln said. “And we both know whose fault that is, don’t we?”
The Rivington men’s, Lee thought. Without them, from what they’d said, Lincoln would still be President, and President of a nation intent on taking vengeance on the unsuccessfully seceded Southern states. Yet he did not sound bitter; he seemed wryly amused, as if talking of the world’s vagaries with a friend. Try as he would, Lee could not see in this elongated, homely man the ogre Andries Rhoodie had described.
But all that was by the way. Lincoln dwelt in the White House no more, and the nightmare future would not come to pass. Lee asked, “What do you plan to do now, sir?”
“Till the election, I aim to go through Kentucky and Missouri like Satan going up and down in the world, and do everything I can to hold ‘em in the Union,” Lincoln said, and poked more fun at himself by adding, “Not that some of the people in both states don’t already figure me for the devil, I expect. After that…” His voice trailed away.” After that, I suppose I’ll go home to Springfield, practice law, and get old. When I was younger, I never thought I’d escape obscurity, so going back to it should be easy enough. Maybe one day, when all this fuss has died down, I’ll write a book about how everything would have turned out for the best if it hadn’t been for Bobbie Lee.”
“You will, I hope, forgive me, sir, for holding the opinion that these matters have turned out for the best,” Lee said.
“You don’t need my forgiveness, General, though you’re polite to ask for it. Even under your Southern constitution, every man may hold what opinions he likes, eh? Candide believed to the end that this was the best of all possible worlds.” Lincoln let out a wry laugh. “What does what I think matter, anyhow? I’m going back into the shadows. But you, General, your future stretches out ahead lit with torches and paved with gold.”
“Hardly that, sir,” Lee said.
“No? Where else for the noblest Virginian of them all but at the head of—of his country?” Lincoln’s mouth twisted. Even now, going on a year after the South had won its independence, acknowledging the Confederacy pained him.
Lee also wondered whether he meant the crib from Shakespeare as compliment or sarcasm. He answered, “I am proud to serve my state and my nation in whatever capacity they choose for me.”
Lincoln looked down at him. As always; he found that disconcerting; he was used to holding the high ground in conversation. “Serving a country is all very well, General, but when the time comes, will you be able to lead it in the direction you know it must go?” He did not wait for a reply, but touched a finger to the brim of his hat and departed.
Charles Marshall stared after him. “How could the North have been so misguided as to elect that man its President?” He mimed a couple of steps’ worth of Lincoln’s loose-jointed gait.
“He is peculiar-looking, to himself, I understand, not least. But he knows the proper questions to ask.” Lee also watched Lincoln until he disappeared behind some willows with their full skirts of new spring leaves. The proper question indeed: if he said slavery might possibly have to end one day, who in the South would listen to him?
“Sorry to disturb your supper, General Lee, sir,” a messenger boy said, dumping a tall pile of telegrams onto Lee’s table in the Galt House dining room.
“It’s all right, son.” Lee raised an eyebrow in humorous resignation. Already telegrams leaned in drunken profusion against a platter of stuffed duck, against a bowl of peas, a gravy boat, wineglasses; already they covered the bread and hid the relish trays from sight. Lee went on, “It’s plain I’ll be reading more than eating for yet another night.”
The messenger boy probably did not hear that last sentence; he was hurrying back to the telegraph office for a new load of messages. General Grant said, “When you’re done with those, sir, if you’d be kind enough to pass them my way—”
“Certainly.” Lee went through the sheaf one by one, occasionally pausing to cut another bite from the slice of saddle of mutton in front of him. Behind him, a small colored boy with a large peacock fan stirred the still, muggy air that went with June evenings in Louisville. “Not too hard, there,” Lee warned him as the papers on the table shifted. “You don’t want to blow them into the soup, now do you?” The little slave giggled and shook his head.
Lee finished the pile. “No great irregularities here,” he told Grant.
The Federal general was also going through a stack. “Nor in mine, it seems.” He reached bottom just after Lee did. “Shall we exchange prisoners?”
In return for the reports the Federal election inspectors had sent to Grant, Lee gave him the latest set of messages he himself had received from the Confederate inspectors. As Grant said, the vote had on the whole proceeded smoothly. Some precincts from the south and west of Missouri had yet to report. Lee suspected no one in those parts had voted; regardless of armistices, regardless of Federal occupation troops, the civil war there went on. But the area was thinly populated anyhow. Even had all its votes gone for the Confederacy, the state as a whole would have remained in the Union.
Kentucky was another matter. Grant acknowledged as much when he said, “In the coming week, General Lee, I shall shift my headquarters to St. Louis, so as to maintain them within the territory of the United States.”
“You may even find it more congenial than Louisville, from your previous acquaintance with the city,” Lee said.
“I doubt it.” Grant’s face never gave away much, but his voice turned bleak. “I was out of the army—on the beach, you might say—while I was there, so my memories are not entirely happy ones. And, as you may understand, sir, I cannot rejoice at Kentucky’s having voted itself out of the Union to which I owe everything I have in this world.”
“I respect the sincerity of your sentiments; no, further—I admire it. I hope you will understand that the people of Kentucky are equally sincere in theirs.” By close to four to three, Kentucky’s voters had chosen to cast their lot with the South.
Grant said, “I recognize it, but I own to having a great deal of difficulty admiring it. To speak frankly, I believe the Southern cause one of the worst for which people ever took up arms, and one for which there was not the least excuse. That you fought so long and valiantly for such a patently bad cause has always been a wonder to me.”
“We in turn were perpetually amazed at the United States’ determination to expend so much in treasure and lives to try to restore by force the allegiance the people of the South were no longer willing to give voluntarily.”
“That’s over now, it appears, for better or for worse. If you visit me in St. Louis under flag of truce, General, be sure I shall gladly receive you.” Grant rose. “Now I hope you will excuse me. I find I haven’t the stomach for supper, not when I am forced to watch yet another state wrenched away from the Union.”