How Few Remain (43 page)

“No, Colonel,” Creel answered. “Only person who’d know that for certain is Stonewall Jackson.” He checked himself. “No,
probably not him, either, for he’d know their losses, but not ours.”

“Yes.” Schlieffen hid his amusement. Second Lieutenant Creel was naive. U.S. papers reported the casualty figures in Willcox’s army. Schlieffen would have bet papers in the CSA did the same for those of Jackson’s army. Hard-headed officers in Philadelphia and Richmond—and, no doubt, in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg—would know both sides of the story. So would Willcox and Jackson themselves. If the Army of the Ohio was holding the numbers tight, that suggested they were not in its favor.

The grimy soldier echoed his thoughts, saying, “Whoever goes forward in a fight like this gets hurt worse, seems like. That’s why I’m hoping the Rebs took a licking there over yonder.”

Schlieffen nodded. He had seen in Europe that soldiers at the front often developed a keen instinct for how things were going and for which tactics worked and which didn’t. That looked to be the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Let us go back,” he said to Lieutenant Creel. “I have seen what is here worth seeing.”

“Stay low and watch out for Rebel sharpshooters,” said the soldier who’d been talking with them. “Them bastards know their business.”

Heading north toward the river, Creel dove for cover whenever artillery came near. Bullets, however, he ignored, striding along with his head held high. Schlieffen wondered whether to call that courage or bravado. He recognized the difference between facing danger and courting it. A lot of officers, especially young officers, didn’t.

For his part, Schlieffen was not in the least ashamed to duck and hide behind rubble when the Rebels started taking potshots at him. With the indulgent tolerance of youth, Creel smiled. “You don’t really need to worry, Colonel, not now,” he said. “We’re almost back to the Ohio. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

Less than a minute later, a wet, smacking sound announced that a bullet had struck home. Second Lieutenant Archibald Creel crumpled to the ground, blood gushing from a head wound. Schlieffen knelt beside him. He saw at once he could do nothing. Creel gave three or four hitching breaths, made a noise halfway between a cough and a groan, and simply … stopped.

“God, judge his courage, not his sense,” Schlieffen murmured. He stayed by the fallen lieutenant until a couple of litter bearers carried the body away.

    Abraham Lincoln came out of the general store with a cake of shaving soap wrapped in brown paper and string. Having stayed in Salt Lake City so much longer than he’d planned, he kept needing to replenish such small day-to-day items. With the telegraph back in service, he’d been able to wire for money, and had started staying with the Hamiltons as a paying boarder.

As Lincoln started down the sidewalk, a closed carriage stopped in the street alongside him. The curtains were drawn; he could see nothing within. The driver spoke to him in a low, urgent voice: “Please get in, Mr. Lincoln.”

“Who …?” Lincoln paused, then stiffened as he recognized the bright young man who’d escorted him to John Taylor’s home. That home stood no more; soldiers had wrecked it, giving as their reason the suppression of polygamy.

“Where do you propose to take me?” Lincoln asked. He supposed he might be worth something as a hostage for radical Mormons. Given his own economic radicalism, and the embarrassment he’d become to the Republican Party, he had the idea he’d be worth less than the Mormons thought. That might lead to unpleasant personal consequences for him.

“I can’t tell you that,” the driver answered. “No harm will come to you, though: by God I swear it.” He bit his lip. “If you aim to come, sir, come now. I cannot let soldiers spy me loitering here.”

Lincoln got aboard the carriage. Not since his ignominious passage through Baltimore on his way to his inauguration in Washington had he let concern for his safety change how he behaved. Maybe he could do some good here, if the Mormons hadn’t simply snatched him.

“Thank you, sir,” the bright young man said as the carriage started to roll. Lincoln did not think he was the sort who made a habit of wearing false oaths. He realized he was betting his life on that.

The carriage made several turns, now right, now left. The Mormon driver had the two-horse team up into a trot; their hoofbeats and the jolts and rattles Lincoln felt said they were going at a fine clip. Nothing at all prevented him from opening the curtains
and seeing where they were going. He sat quiet. Sooner or later, General Pope or one of his inquisitors would be interrogating him about this ride. He was as sure of that as of his own name. Truthfully being able to claim ignorance looked useful.

After about three-quarters of an hour, the carriage pulled into a building of some sort and stopped. Lincoln thought he was outside Salt Lake City; it had been quiet outside the carriage for some time, and the driver had stopped making turns to throw off pursuit or to confuse his passenger. In the latter, at least, he had succeeded; Lincoln did not know whether he was north or south or east or west of the Mormon metropolis.

“You may get out now, Mr. Lincoln,” the driver said, climbing down from his own high seat. Outside, someone was closing a door. A bar thudded down.

Barn
, was Lincoln’s first thought on emerging from the carriage. He revised it a moment later:
no, livery stable
. His nose filled with the good odors of horse and hay and leather. But for the carriage, the stable was deserted. With the door closed, it was also twilight-gloomy.

The man who had shut the door was coming toward Lincoln. Though he had expected to meet John Taylor, he needed a moment to recognize him. The fugitive Mormon president was dressed like a stablehand, in canvas trousers, collarless four-button work shirt, and straw hat. He had shaved his beard and was growing a mustache on his formerly bare upper lip.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” he said after shaking hands. “To come with Orem here took considerable moral and physical courage.”

“I will do what I can for you, Mr. Taylor,” Lincoln said, “for that strikes me as a likely way to bring peace to this Territory. But I must warn you, I do not think I can do much. Bearing a grudge against me as he does, General Pope will not be inclined to act favorably upon any request I make.”

“You are the former president of the United States!” Taylor exclaimed.

“I told you at our last meeting, you exaggerate the influence that gives me. I told you also, you exaggerated your ability to coerce the government of the United States into doing as you desired. Events have proved me right in the second instance. Will you not credit me for knowing whereof I speak in the first, also? In both, you would have done better to leave well enough alone.”

Taylor slowly shook his head. It was not so much disagreement as disbelief. “All we wish—all we ever wished—is to live our own lives as our conscience dictates. We harm no one, and what has been our reward? Treatment that would not be meted out to redskins or Negroes. Do the people condemn the outrages we have suffered? No. They applaud, and pile on more.”

“Mr. Taylor, from all I have seen in my extended stay in Salt Lake City, the only way you Mormons differ in the general run of your behavior from the mass of the American people is that you excel over them,” Lincoln said. “But—”

“Of course we do,” Taylor said, while the driver—Orem—nodded vigorously.

Lincoln held up a hand. “I had not finished. However fine you may be in the general run of your behavior, you have not the slightest chance, so long as you condone and practice polygamy, of ever gaining the acceptance of the vast majority of your fellow citizens.”

“This is most unjust,” Taylor said. “We cast no aspersions on anyone else’s usages; in principle, none should be cast on ours.”

Lincoln sighed. “If you wish to speak of principle, maybe you are right. Do you not see, however, that by insisting on principle in this regard, you have caused the overthrow of the principle of representative government and the principle of rule under the Constitution throughout Utah Territory? Is that what you intended when you led your people into rebellion?”

“Of course not,” Taylor snapped.

“Well, then—” Lincoln spread his hands. “The simplest way for your church to make its peace with the rest of the United States would be for it to renounce the doctrines unacceptable to the nation as a whole, and to do so in all sincerity.”

“That would require a divine revelation,” the Mormon president replied. “None has been forthcoming, nor do I reckon one likely.”

“Pity.” Lincoln raised one eyebrow. “A convenient revelation now would save your people enormous heartache, enormous grief, later on.”

“Revelations are not born of convenience,” John Taylor said. “They spring from the will of God.”

He thrust his head forward like a stubborn snapping turtle. Lincoln realized he meant what he said from the bottom of his heart. Lawyer and politician, Lincoln reckoned almost everything negotiable.

When he had stood foursquare for the principle of the indissolubility of the Union, rifle musket and cannon had refuted him.

“If you will not change your views in any particular,” he said, “what point to asking me to meet with you? You give me nothing to take to General Pope, even assuming the military governor were inclined to accept anything I might take him.”

“We have yielded peacefully to the military power of the United States,” Taylor said. “We might have done otherwise. If we continue to be oppressed, to be treated as a conquered province, we are liable to do otherwise. We are men. We can act as men. General Pope and his Cossacks should remember as much.”

“Mr. Taylor, if you value your faith, if you value the lives of your followers, I implore you, sir, do not take this course.” Lincoln had never spoken more earnestly. “If you rise in arms against the United States, they will slaughter you and sow your cities with salt, as the Romans did to Carthage long ago. Do you not understand that many in the Army, many in the government, and many among the citizenry at large would be delighted to have an excuse to do exactly that?”

“We fled here to Utah to escape persecution,” Taylor said. “Persecution pursued us. Should we welcome it with open arms? Should we bow to it, as the Israelites bowed to the Golden Calf?”

“You will have to judge the right for yourself, as every man must,” Lincoln answered. “But I tell you that open resistance will bathe Utah in blood in a way never before seen upon this continent. We left religious war behind in Europe. We should be well advised not to let it emigrate from that place to our shores.”

“What would you do, Mr. Lincoln, were your faith under attack instead of mine?” John Taylor did not try to hide his bitterness.

He framed sharp questions. He would have been dangerous in a court of law. But none of that mattered. Taylor’s failing was his inability to see that it did not matter. Lincoln said, “I believe I should have only two choices. One would be to pay the martyr’s price, the other to accommodate myself to my neighbors’ usages to the degree I could do so without tearing the living heart from what I believed in.”

“No accommodation we can make and still keep to our principles would satisfy our foes,” Taylor said.

“That is why I hoped God in His wisdom might reveal to you a
course that would let you do so,” Lincoln said delicately. He remained of the opinion that John Taylor and the other leaders of the Mormon Church could produce a revelation if they put their minds to it. “The promise of peace and reconciliation might—and I can say no more than
might
, hardly being in the confidence of General Pope or President Blaine—might, I say, persuade the authorities to rescind the harsh sentences passed against you and your colleagues.”

“If I must die on the gallows or in hunted exile, I am prepared,” Taylor said.

Lincoln believed him, having seen the same implacable purpose on the faces of abolitionists and Confederate leaders alike. With another sigh, he said, “Then I fear this meeting had little point. I shall take your warning back to General Pope, but I warn you in the strongest terms not to act upon it. Do with your own life what you will, but spare your people the horrors of a war of extermination harsher than any we ever waged against the Sioux.” He turned to Orem. “You may as well take me back to town. My friends will be wondering why I needed so long to buy a cake of shaving soap.”

The bright young Mormon held the carriage door open so Lincoln could get in, then closed it after him. He did not ask Lincoln not to open the curtains, but the former president again left them alone. From inside the dark, cramped box of the carriage, he heard John Taylor undo the bar and push the livery-stable door open. Orem clucked to the horses. They leaned into their work.

After the trip back into Salt Lake City, the driver halted the carriage and said, “If you get out here, sir, you’ll have no trouble finding your way to the home where you are staying.”

Sure enough, Lincoln saw he was only a couple of blocks from the Hamiltons’. “Obliged,” he said to Orem, and tipped his tall hat. The bright young man returned the courtesy and drove away. Lincoln supposed he had some secure place where he could go to earth. He needed one.

Juliette Hamilton looked up from the chicken she was plucking when Lincoln came into the kitchen. “Well, I never,” she said in arch mock annoyance. “I was beginning to think you’d come down with a case of Valley Tan.” Her eyes twinkled.

“My dear lady, although I have passed my Biblical threescore and ten, I am not suddenly taken with the urge to shuffle off this mortal coil,” Lincoln said. He and Mrs. Hamilton both laughed,
and he went on, “In my view, Valley Tan bears the same relation to proper whiskey as a slap in the face does to a kiss on the cheek. Both will get your attention, but I know which I prefer.”

“If you’re trying to sweet-talk me out of a kiss on the cheek—” Juliette walked over and gave him one. Then she wagged a finger at him. “But Valley Tan is cooked up complete with added sanctity, or so the Mormons say.”