How Few Remain (17 page)

Captain Berryman and Secretary Hamlin introduced themselves. Hamlin said, “Say what you will, Colonel. The United States do not and shall not condemn unheard any such proposal.” Hamlin’s accent was different from Elliott’s, almost as different as a Bavarian’s from a Berliner’s: like President Blaine, the secretary of state came from Maine, as far from the border of the Confederacy as any place in the eastern USA.

“Thank you, sir,” Elliott said. “Believing it obvious, then, that
the United States cannot hope to defend Washington, D.C., against the sanguinary bombardment the Confederate States have it within their power to unleash at any time, the president and the general-in-chief ask in the name of humanity that you declare Washington an open city and permit its peaceable occupation by Confederate forces. Otherwise, they cannot answer for what will ensue.”

“I can speak to that,” Captain Berryman said quickly, almost treading on the heels of Elliott’s last words. “General Rosecrans has ordered me to reject categorically any such proposal. If you want Washington, Colonel, you are going to have to fight for it, and that’s flat.”

“I am sorry to hear you say that, Captain,” Colonel Elliott said. “I had hoped to be able to avoid visiting destruction on this lovely city.”

“You’d hoped to get it for nothing,” Berryman replied. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not going to happen.”

“Colonel,” the British captain said, “do please remember that legations of powers friendly to your nation are located within this city.” With his upper-class accent, he swallowed more syllables than the U.S. secretary of state and the Confederate colonel put together.

“We shall make every effort to strike only military targets,” Elliott said.

Hannibal Hamlin said, “in any case, this is irrelevant. Due to the outrageous and unacceptable nature of the notes President Blaine received this morning from the ministers of Great Britain and France, the government of the United States is declaring all diplomatic personnel of those two nations to be
personae non gratae
in this country; arrangements to return the lot of you to your own nations are already under way.”

“As a neutral power, the German Empire may be well suited to arrange those transfers in both directions,” Schlieffen said.

“Thank you, sir,” Hamlin answered. “I believe one of my assistants has an appointment with the German minister to discuss that very arrangement.” Schlieffen inclined his head. He had exceeded his authority by making the suggestion, but you never could tell what the Americans might overlook.

“This is your final reply, Captain?” William Elliott asked. When Berryman nodded, the Confederate artillery officer rode back toward his own country. As soon as he was off the Long Bridge,
Berryman walked over to a telegraph clicker Schlieffen hadn’t noticed and rapidly tapped out a message.

A couple of minutes later, an explosion smote the air. Flame and a great cloud of black smoke sprang from the U.S. half of the Long Bridge, which crashed down into the Potomac. Moments after that, other explosions rang out to the east and west, no doubt severing the rest of the bridges linking the USA and CSA.

“We’ve already burned our bridges behind us,” Captain Berryman said with a jaunty smile. “Now we’re blowing them up in front of us. Captain, Major”—he spoke to the British and French officers—”I request and require you to return to your ministries at once, that you may be evacuated with your fellow nationals. My men will accompany you to see that this is done. Colonel Schlieffen, I impose no such order on you, but you might be wise to return to the German ministry anyhow. Surely the Confederates will not make it a target.”

“No doubt you are right,” Schlieffen said. He clambered up onto his horse and rode back toward the red brick building on Massachusetts Avenue. The Prussian Army had shelled and starved Paris into submission. Then he had been on the giving end of the bombardment. Now he might learn what he had given out.

A column of wagons heading east along G Street held him up. U.S. cavalrymen guarding them made sure they had the right of way. General Rosecrans rode in a buggy near the head of the column: heading for the train station, no doubt. Had the Confederate gunners chosen that moment to open up, they could have beheaded the U.S. Army. Whether or not that would have made it stupider than it was already, Schlieffen was not prepared to say.

A couple of blocks after that, as he was about to urge his horse up into a canter, a little girl of six or seven darted into the street in front of him. He brought the horse to a halt before any harm was done. The girl’s mother hauled her back and spanked her, saying, “Be careful, Nellie! Watch where you’re going!”

“I’m sorry, Ma,” the girl blubbered. Schlieffen sympathized with her—she reminded him of his own daughters back in Germany—but only to a point. She had to learn discipline.

As soon as he did get back to the ministry, he asked to see Kurd von Schlözer. The minister had served in Washington since Germany united under Wilhelm I, and understood the United States far better than Schlieffen did. “Very unfortunate,” Schlözer
said now, running a hand over his glistening bald pate. “The Americans have a gift for antagonizing all their neighbors, and they have chosen this moment to exercise it. I urged restraint on them, but they would not listen. They never listen.”

“I have seen the same thing,” Schlieffen answered. “As you say, unfortunate. Not the slightest notion of forethought.”

“And because they are so stubborn, they find themselves encircled,” the German minister said. “They do not have a Bismarck, who has kept French jealousy from wrapping Germany in similar cords.”

“Captain Berryman this morning spoke of notes from England and France to the government of the United States,” Schlieffen said. “Have they declared war?”

“Not in so many words,” Schlözer told him. “They demanded the United States cease all military action against the Confederate States within twelve hours, on pain of war.”

Schlieffen weighed in his mind the forces on either side. “The United States might be wiser to accede to this demand.”

“They will not.” Sadly, Schlözer shook his head. “President Blaine sees that the United States are larger and richer than the Confederate States, and that is all he sees. No European powers have fought in North America since England and the United States had a brush during the Napoleonic Wars. Blaine, I fear, does not fully understand what he is getting into.”

“I think you are right, Your Excellency,” Schlieffen said. “General Rosecrans called the notes outrageous. And Rosecrans himself, when I spoke with him before, had made no preparations for war against Britain and France, even knowing such was not only possible but likely.”

“Americans insist on improvising, as if the spur of the moment will itself impel them to find the right answer.” Kurd von Schlözer sighed, like a judge about to pronounce sentence, and a harsh sentence at that, on a likable rogue. “Until they learn to think before they act, they will not be taken seriously on the stage of the world. Please furnish me by tonight with a written report on what you saw and heard at the Long Bridge, so that I may cable it to Berlin.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.” Schlieffen went up to his stuffy office and drafted the report. After giving it to the minister’s secretary, he went back up and studied for a while the Confederate General Lee’s move up into Pennsylvania, the stroke that had won the
War of Secession for the CSA. Lee had faced inferior opposition, no doubt of that, but the move, an indirect rather than a direct threat to Washington, showed considerable strategic insight. The North Americans were raw, but not all of them were stupid.

Schlieffen expected the Confederate guns to open up on Washington at any moment, but they stayed quiet.
Inefficient
, he thought, but then checked himself. Maybe the Confederate States were waiting for their allies formally to join the war before commencing offensive action of their own: again, not the worst strategic notion. He went to bed still wondering, and did so with a perfectly clear conscience. If anything happened, he would know about it.

Dawn was breaking when the bombardment began. Schlieffen sprang out of bed, threw on his uniform, and hurried up to the roof of the ministry. Other buildings around it were of similar height, impeding his view, but he saw more there than he could have anywhere else—and his ears told him some of what he could not see.

Great clouds of smoke rose from the south and the southwest, from the Confederate batteries on the Arlington Heights and elsewhere along the Potomac. U.S. guns were answering, too: not only the big cannon in the fortresses that had surrounded Washington since the War of Secession but also field guns in the city itself and down by the river. Shells made freight-train noises through the air.

He judged the weight of fire to be about equal. If anything, the USA might have held a slight edge: so his ears said, at any rate. But what did it matter? The U.S. guns could chew up Confederate emplacements in Virginia, but nothing more. Meanwhile, though, the Confederate cannon still in the fight were wrecking the capital of the United States.

He heard only artillery—no rifle fire. That meant the Confederate States weren’t trying to throw infantry across the Potomac. Had he been in charge in Richmond, he would have held back, too: with the small professional army that was all the Confederates had in the field at the moment, they would have taken casualties they could not afford. Shelling Washington was in any case a largely symbolic act, for which artillery more than sufficed.

It was also a destructive act. Schlieffen watched Confederate shells exploding around some of the fortresses in the hills back of
the city. He also heard them landing to the south and the southeast, around the White House, with the War Department next door to it, and the U.S. Capitol. Smoke rose from both directions. Schlieffen went downstairs for a moment, returning with a pair of field glasses. Peering southeast through them, he nodded to himself. Not all of those shells over there were coming down near the Capitol. Others, farther away, pounded the Navy Yard by the eastern branch of the Potomac.

In the streets, panic reigned. People who hadn’t fled the city were all trying to leave at once now. Schlieffen hoped the little girl his horse had almost run over was safe. A fire engine, bell clanging, did its valiant best to force its way through the crush. Its valiant best wasn’t nearly good enough.

An errant Confederate shell landed less than a block away from the German ministry. It started a fire. The fire engine could not get to that one, either. The firemen cursed as their big horses went forward by inches. Schlieffen breathed in gunpowder smoke like a man gauging the bouquet of a new bottle of wine. After a moment, he shrugged. Too soon to judge the quality of the vintage yet, but it was a war.

The
Queen of the Ohio
steamed up the river for which she had been named. Frederick Douglass impatiently paced her deck. She’d had a disgracefully long layover in Evansville taking on wood, and she’d been bucking the current ever since Cairo. He didn’t want to be late for his speaking engagement in Cincinnati.

“I should have taken the train,” he muttered. But he shook his massive head. Whenever he traveled to a city on the northern bank of the Ohio, he went by steamboat. That way, standing by the port or starboard rail—depending on whether he was going downstream or up—he could look into Confederate Kentucky.

The green, gently rolling land looked no different from that on the Ohio side of the river. The shadow lying over it, unlike the one over smoky St. Louis, was not real. To Douglass, that made the shadow no less palpable, no less oppressive. On the southern bank of the river, millions of his brethren suffered in bondage—and most of his own countrymen did their best to pretend those suffering millions did not exist.

Not far away from Douglass, a white man and his wife were staring into Kentucky, too. He warmed to the worried expressions on their faces. Not all U.S. whites ignored the plight of the Negro
in the Confederate States. Then the woman said, “Jack, are you sure it’s safe to travel on the Ohio with the war on?”

“Safe as houses, sweetheart,” Jack said reassuringly, and patted the woman’s hand. He was wearing a flashy brown-and-white checked suit and a derby with a feather in the hatband: someone who wanted to impress the ignorant with an importance he didn’t really possess, Douglass guessed. He was certainly doing his best to impress his wife. In a loud, pompous voice, he went on, “If the Rebs were going to make a real fight, they’d have done it by now. You ask me, they don’t have the stomach for it. Last night, we got past Louisville all right, didn’t we? And look how that Custer chewed them up out west. Was it Texas or the Indian Territory? I misremember.”

They had got past Louisville and the Falls of the Ohio without trouble, true enough. One reason they’d got past without trouble was that they’d used the canal on the Indiana side of the river, the one painfully excavated through solid rock after the war, not the Louisville and Portland Canal in Confederate Kentucky. Douglass understood that, even if Jack didn’t.

The
Queen of the Ohio
rounded a bend in the river just past Madison, Indiana. Jack’s wife pointed to the riverbank on the Kentucky side. “Those are guns,” she said.

Guns they were indeed. Douglass recognized them: four twelve-pounder Napoleons, leftovers from the war. As guns went these days, they weren’t anything special. Neither were the troops who manned them. By their ill-fitting gray uniforms, they were Kentucky militiamen, not Confederate regulars at all.

Antique cannon, amateur soldiers—an armored gunboat would have slaughtered the men and wrecked the guns in a matter of minutes. The
Queen of the Ohio
was anything but a gunboat.

“You! Yankee boat! Surrender!” one of the Kentuckians shouted across the water—the sidewheeler flew a large U.S. flag. “Come aground on this here bank. We got to search you to make sure you ain’t carrying troops, and then you’re a prize of war.”

Frederick Douglass quickly went down to the main deck and toward the steamboat’s bow. If he had to swim for it, he didn’t want to have to swim around the boat before striking out for the northern bank of the Ohio. Nothing could have induced him to stay aboard if the boat grounded itself in Confederate territory. If those militiamen caught him, they would sell him into slavery.
He’d been free for more than forty years, all his adult life. He was ready to die trying to stay free before going back into bondage.