How Few Remain (14 page)
Authors: Harry Turtledove
Fifteen minutes after kissing his wife good-bye, Clemens walked into the office. When he got there, Clay Herndon leaped at him with almost as much terrifying enthusiasm as Orion had shown. Herndon, though, had an excuse any newspaperman would have forgiven: the telegram he waved in Clemens’ face. “You’ve got to see this!” he shouted.
“How can I argue with logic like that?” Sam took the thin sheet of paper and rapidly read through it. When he was done, he nodded a couple of times, then said, “A lot of people must be surprised today: everybody who didn’t think Blaine knew a four-syllable word, for instance.”
“If he only knows one, he picked the right one to know,” retorted Herndon, a resolute Republican. “I’d say it gives us the headline for the next edition, wouldn’t you?”
“‘Ultimatum’?” Clemens said. “Now that you mention it, yes. If ever a word screamed for seventy-two-point type, that’s the one.” He took off his derby and hung it on the hat tree just inside the door. As soon as he got to his desk, he slid off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. Then he removed the studs from his cuffs, put them in a vest pocket, and rolled up his sleeves.
“Ready to give it a go, are you?” Herndon said.
His tone was mildly mocking, but Sam ignored that. “You bet I am,” he said. “Give me that wire again, will you? I want to make sure I have everything right.” He paused to light a cigar, then reread the telegram. “Always a good day when the editorial comes up and whimpers in your face, begging to be set at liberty.”
“If you say so, Sam,” Herndon replied. “Makes me glad I’m nothing but a humble scribe.”
“Get over to City Hall, scribe,” Clemens said. “Get the mayor’s reaction. In other words, give me the statement that goes with
this.” He donned an expression somewhere between dumbfoundment and congenital idiocy. The
San Francisco Morning Call
did not love Mayor Adolph Sutro. It was mutual.
Herndon struck a pose that might have been a politician on the stump or a man waiting with concentrated urgency to use the privy. “‘I am opposed with every fiber of my being to the war that may come, and I expect us to gain great and glorious triumph in it,’ “he declaimed. “There. Now I don’t need to make the trip.”
Sam blew cigar smoke at him. “Go on, get out of here. His Honor might have got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and if he did he’ll say he’s all for the war but calculates we’ll take a licking. God forbid we should misquote him. He wouldn’t notice, since he can’t remember on Tuesday what he said the Friday before—figures that’s the papers’ job—but some of his friends—well, cronies; a creature like that’s not likely to have friends—just might.”
Snickering, Herndon grabbed his hat, slung his jacket over his shoulder—it was another of those seasonless San Francisco days, not quite warm, not quite cool—and departed. Clemens drew on the cigar again, absentmindedly tapped its ash into a brass tray, and set it back in the corner of his mouth. He knew he was liable to forget about it once he started writing.
Pen scraped across paper.
President Blaine has told the nation and the world that, if the Confederate States do not withdraw their soldiers—soldiers they deployed without the consent of the United States, and against the express wishes of the same—from the provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora within ten days, he will ask Congress to declare a state of war in existence between the United States and the Confederate States.
He fails to include the Empire of Mexico in his ultimatum, which is no doubt only an oversight on his part. After all, leaving the disputed provinces out of the bargain, the United States do still abut Maximilian’s dominions where our Upper California touches his Lower, whose cactuses are every bit as dire a threat to the United States as any now sprouted in Sonora.
As noted before in this space, acquiring Sonora and Chihuahua represents—or, at least, may represent in the future—a new access of strength for the Confederate Sates, as did their purchase of Cuba a few years ago, a purchase to which the United States
consented without a murmur. But we were then under a Democratic administration, and a Congress likewise Democratic: a party whose attitude toward the Confederacy has always been that the blamed thing would not be there if anybody had listened to them in the beginning and patted the then-Southern states on the head and told them what good boys they were until they eventually believed it and went to sleep in place of seceding, and has dealt with them since the War of Secession as if they were so many percussion caps filled with fulminate, and liable to explode if stepped on or dropped.
By contrast, the Confederate States are to the Republican Party—the phrase “a nigger in the woodpile” is tempting, but no; we shall refrain—an illegitimate child in the family of nations, and so to be deprived of plum pudding every Christmas Eve. Well, the illegitimate child is now above eighteen years of age, and a d—d big b—d, now suddenly the bigger by two provinces gulped down in lieu of the plums once denied it. No wonder, then, that President Blaine is in the way of seeing things red.
The question before the house, however, is—or rather, ought to be, the failure to understand the difference between the two being one of the chief causes of boiler explosions, marital discord, and drawing in the hope of filling an inside straight—not whether the United States have the right to be displeased at the transaction just concluded between the Confederacy and Mexico, but whether the transaction presents them with a legitimate
casus belli
. This we beg leave to doubt. The suspicion lingers that, had the United States offered a brass spittoon and a couple of candles’ value above the price the Confederacy agreed to pay him, the Stars and Stripes would now be flying above Chihuahua and Sonora—and maybe even above the dangerous cacti of Lower California as well—and there would be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth from Richmond, with every politician in Washington sitting back as sleek and contented as the dog that stole the leg of lamb out of the roasting pan.
For better or worse—more like, for better
and
worse—Maximilian’s sale of Sonora and Chihuahua strikes us as having been peaceful and voluntary enough to keep anyone sniffing around the deal from gagging at the smell, which in today’s diplomacy marks it as something of a prodigy. We find it dashed uncomfortable to share a continent with a people who did not care to share a country with us, but we had best get used to it, because the Confederate States show no signs of packing up and moving to the mountains of Thibet. While we may regret the sale, we
have not the right to seek to reverse it by force of arms. We may have been outsmarted, but we were not insulted, and being outsmarted is not reason enough to go to war—if it were, the poor suffering world should never have known its few brief—too brief!—moments when the bullets were not flying somewhere.
He had hardly laid down his pen before Clay Herndon came back into the office, slamming the door behind him. “Sam, have you got whatever you’re going to say ready to set in type?” he demanded. “News of the ultimatum is already on the street. If we don’t get into print in a hurry, it’ll outstrip us. The
Alta Californian
is beating the war drum, loud as it can.” He threw himself into his chair and began to write furiously.
“Yes, I’m ready.” Clemens exhibited the sheets he’d just finished. “What did the mayor say?”
“Sutro?” Herndon didn’t look up from his scribbles. “The way he talks, we’ll be in Richmond tomorrow, Atlanta the day after, and New Orleans the day after that. Huzzah for our side!” He sounded imperfectly delighted with the mayor’s view of the world.
“You were a Blaine man last November, Clay,” Sam reminded him. “Why aren’t you over at the
Californian
, banging the war drum yourself?”
“Me? I’d love to take the Rebs down a peg,” Herndon said, “but Blaine’s going at it like a bull in a china shop, trying to make up for eighteen years in a couple of months. There.” He threw down the pen and thrust paper at Clemens. “Here’s mine. Let’s see what you wrote.”
Sam scrawled a few changes on Herndon’s copy; Herndon used adverbs the way a bad cook used spices—on the theory that, if a few were good, more were better. In spite of that, he said, “Good story.” It convicted Sutro of being a pompous fool with his own words, the best way to do it.
“Thanks. You could have said ‘a plague on both your houses’ and let it go at that,” Herndon said. “I’m glad you didn’t, though. This is more fun.”
The door flew open. Edgar Leary rushed in. Somebody had knocked a big dent in his hat, which he hadn’t noticed yet. “They’re hanging Longstreet in effigy at the corner of Market and Geary,” the youngster said breathlessly. Then he took off the
derby, and exclaimed in dismay. “The whole town’s going crazy.” He held out the hat as if it were evidence.
“Write the piece. Write it fast,” Sam said. He took the pages of his editorial back from Herndon. “Sounds like they’re not going to listen to me again.” He sighed. “Why am I not surprised?”
Outside, somebody emptied a six-shooter, the cartridges going off in quick succession. Sam hoped whoever it was, was shooting in the air.
Newsboys on Richmond street corners waved copies of the
Whig
and the
Examiner
, the
Dispatch
and the
Enquirer
and the
Sentinel
, in the air. They were doing a roaring trade; lawyers and mechanics, ministers and farmers, drummers and teamsters and even the occasional colored man who had his letters crowded round them and shoved pennies at them.
Whichever paper the boy on any one corner touted, the main headline was the same: “Ultimatum runs out today!” After that, imagination ran riot: “President Longstreet to answer latest Yankee outrage!” “Navy said ready to put to sea!” “Navy said to be already at sea!” “Troop movements in Kentucky!” “Yankees said to be concentrating in Missouri!” And one word, like a drumbeat: “War!” “War!” “War!”
General Thomas Jackson, whose business was war, rode through the clamor as if through rain or snow or shellfire or any other minor distraction. “We’ll whip ’em, won’t we, Stonewall?” a fat man in a butcher’s bloodstained apron shouted to him.
“We are not at war with the United States, nor have the United States declared war against us,” Jackson answered. He’d said the same thing any number of times since leaving the War Department for yet another journey to the presidential residence. “I hope they do not. Peace is too precious to be casually discarded like an outgrown suit of clothes.”
That wasn’t what the butcher wanted to hear. “We’ll whip ’em!”
Jackson guided his horse past the fat man without saying anything more. He got asked the same question, or a variant upon it, three more times in the next half block. He gave the same answer each time, and began to wish he hadn’t started answering at all.
The crush of people thinned as he rode up Shockoe Hill, away from Capitol Square and the center of town. Jackson let out a small, involuntary sigh of relief: he did not care for being trapped
in crowds, and was often happiest when most solitary. Duty, however, came above happiness. Duty came above everything.
One of the sentries who saluted him said, “Reckon we’ll lick them damnyankees good—ain’t that right, sir?”
To a soldier, Jackson spoke a bit more openly than to a civilian on the street who might, for all he knew, have been a U.S. spy: “If we have to fight them, Corporal, rest assured we shall beat them.”
U.S. Minister John Hay’s landau was tied up in front of the residence. Hay, these days, visited Longstreet as often as Jackson did, and on related business: if the minister’s talks with the Confederate president succeeded, Longstreet and Jackson would no longer need to confer so much. Hay’s driver sat waiting patiently for his principal, reading a copy of the
Richmond Whig
. He nodded to Jackson, then went back to the paper.
Moxley Sorrel escorted Jackson to the waiting room outside Longstreet’s office. “Mr. Hay has come to obtain the president’s reply to the ultimatum,” the chief of staff said in a near whisper.
“There can be only one response to that piece of impertinence,” Jackson growled. Sorrel nodded. The two men did not love each other, but both saw the interests of the Confederate States in the same light.
Jackson started to say something more, but the door to President Longstreet’s office came open. Out stalked John Hay, his handsome face set and hard. Jackson rose politely to greet him. Hay gave a cold half bow. “Sir, I am forced to the conclusion that your president is more inclined to hear your counsel than mine.” Moxley Sorrel came over to lead him out to the door. He shook off the chief of staff. “No thank you, sir. I can find my own way.” Off he went. Had he owned a tail, it would have bristled.
“Come in, General,” President Longstreet called through the open door.
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” Jackson said. He closed the door after himself, then sat down, stiff as usual, in the chair to which Longstreet waved him. “By that, sir, am I to gather that you have told the United States they have no business meddling in our internal affairs?”
James Longstreet nodded. He looked pleased with himself. “You are to gather precisely that, General. Had I told him anything else, I have no doubt I should be impeached, convicted, and removed from office by this time next week—and I would vote
for my own conviction, too. And I in turn gather that we are in full readiness to meet any emergency that may arise?”
He asked the same question every time he saw Jackson. As always, the general-in-chief of the Confederate Army nodded. “Yes, Mr. President, all regular units are deployed close to the U.S. frontier save those engaged in occupying our new provinces, and General Stuart has done more than anticipate along those lines himself.” He briefly summarized Stuart’s deployment for Longstreet, who nodded, and then continued, “And we are ready to accept, clothe, arm, train, and deploy volunteers as that may become necessary.”
“I fear it will come to that,” Longstreet said. “I do not fear the result, you understand, only its being required of us.”
