The Bride of Texas (78 page)

He simply abandoned the clumsy wagons, which were the standard means of transporting supplies but a terrible hindrance on the steep hills, and ordered his soldiers to live on what they could pillage during their march across the picturesque mountain ranges. As a result, the advance of the Twenty-third Corps was so rapid that it took Rebel General Buckner completely by surprise in Knoxville. Two and a half thousand bewildered prisoners fell into Ambrose’s hands, along with eleven field-guns. Before leaving Knoxville, he developed a strategic plan for a march from eastern Tennessee across Georgia to the sea and wrote to Halleck, “It is proposed to take no trains but to live upon the country and the supplies at the enemy’s depots, destroying such as we do not use.… from the celerity of our movement and the destruction of
bridges, etc. in our rear, the chances of escaping material injury from pursuit are in our favour. Our chief loss would probably be from stragglers.”

Halleck’s reply back then was terse and negative: “Distant expeditions into Georgia are not now contemplated.” The letter travelled the labyrinths of Washington corridors and eventually came into Sherman’s hands, and exactly a year later it was he who marched his great army swiftly across Georgia to Savannah and the sea. Later on, he was heard to say that he had had Ambrose’s plan “in his mind’s eye”.

It’s just as Maggie said: it’s not what a person wants in life, it’s what he accomplishes.

Ambrose wanted a lot — above all, to help the Union win the war. But what he accomplished were trivial things, or rather, the kind of things they don’t write ballads about: the orderly retreat at Bull Run, the first, though minor, Union army victory at Roanoke Island, the picturesque if undramatic march across the Cumberland Hills, and the defence of Knoxville, organizing all sorts of troop transfers, often in large numbers, which were always successfully (that is to say, professionally) executed. There was nothing in them to inspire the bards.

And then he caught Vallandigham.

Whenever I think of that man, I see in my mind a stretcher and on it a dying old man being carried to the gallows. The final court case of Vallandigham’s life also took place in the shadow of that inhuman apparatus. By then, in 1871, Vallandigham’s political career was only a memory. He’d finally realized that he was washed up and had returned to his law practice, which he conducted on the same principle as he had politics: nothing
mattered but winning. He saw the presumption of innocence not as a challenge to the court to prove guilt, but as a challenge to himself to prove his skill as a lawyer. So he sent a dying old man to Golgotha on a stretcher.

Thomas McGehan was not a dying old man. The face in the drawing that stared out at me from the
Dayton Evening Herald
was that of a brute from a dark back alley, who hires out his fists for dirty work and who therefore has friends among politicians. Those friends asked Vallandigham to defend him, and Vallandigham accepted.

When Vallandigham was escorted to General Rosecrans’s headquarters to be shipped across the lines to the Rebels the following day, they say that Rosecrans, who saw the Copperhead hero as a traitor, said his farewell to him over a dinner that lasted until well past midnight, like a maudlin Pilate with freshly washed hands. I believe it, because in the courtroom in Warren District, when Vallandigham described the fist-fight between two scoundrels that put an end to the earthly sojourn of a blackguard named Tom Myers, he brought tears to the eyes of eight of the twelve jurors. That was why, at three in the afternoon, the judge adjourned the court until the following morning.

It was a sunny afternoon, and Vallandigham and the young lawyer Snopes went for a stroll in the woods. There, in the green shade of the elm trees, Vallandigham told Snopes his hypothesis about the encounter between McGehan and Myers.

The two men had got into a fight — all the witnesses agreed on that — and McGehan had knocked Myers to his knees. The furious Myers had reached into his breast pocket for a pistol and, as he tried to get up and pull out the gun at the same time, the trigger had caught on the edge of the pocket, the pistol had gone off, and the bullet had penetrated the left ventricle of Myers’s heart, with fatal results.

“And do you believe that’s what happened, sir?” asked
young Snopes.

“I think it could have.”

“It sounds improbable,” said Snopes.

“It must be presented to the jury so as to sound probable.”

“But do you really think that’s what happened? After all, McGehan fired a shot too —”

“I think it could have happened. That’s why it’s my duty as attorney for the defence to convince the jury that it did.”

The young lawyer looked at the sun-drenched landscape, the butterflies, the beauties of life. “What if the prosecution brings in evidence that it wasn’t like that at all?”

Vallandigham smiled at the innocent youth. “There is very little evidence a good lawyer can’t discredit.”

“Even if he believes it’s true?”

“All the more reason to discredit it. He could be wrong in that belief, and defending a client is a matter of professional honour.”

After that, Snopes said nothing. When the trial was over he wrote an article about it, which was in fact Vallandigham’s obituary. During their stroll in the woods, Vallandigham had fired several shots at a piece of tweed fabric that he had Snopes hold at various distances from the gun barrel, to find out how close the fabric had to be to show powder burns. Then they returned to the hotel, where Vallandigham invited Snopes up to his room for a drink of whisky. He placed the pistol on the mantelpiece and poured Snopes a drink from a bottle that stood beside it.

Snopes noticed another gun on the mantel, identical to the one Vallandigham had been experimenting with. He didn’t mention it, though.

The next day the courtroom was crowded. Some of those present had faces like McGehan, others like Myers, and their rumpled clothes indicated that they had had to fight their way
into the courtroom. Vallandigham entered, and the jury — or most of the jury — softened even before Comely Clem could open his mouth and start to demonstrate his hypothesis about the unfortunate accident. He stood with his feet apart, pulled a pistol out of his pocket, cocked it, and addressed the jury: “This is about how Myers was holding his weapon. Of course, he wasn’t standing, he was rising from his knees.” As a mouse’s eyes follow a snake, the jury watched the barrel of Vallandigham’s pistol as he turned it towards his chest.

“Something like this,” said Comely Clem.

Witnesses differ on what exactly Vallandigham said when the bullet entered his chest from the loaded pistol, the one that had lain on the mantel beside the whisky bottle. According to some he said, “God, I’ve shot myself!” According to the
Dayton Journal
he cried out, “Oh, murder! Oh, what a blunder!”

I think the latter version fits him better.

He fought for his life until the morning of the second day. He fought hard, the way people fight for their lives when they are convinced there’s nothing beyond this life. They even brought McGehan to see him, and McGehan shed tears as well — probably genuine tears, since his chance to escape the gallows lay on that hotel-room bed.

In the end, though, McGehan did escape the gallows. Vallandigham’s death affected the jury like a final unspoken oration for the defence, and not even the insipid performance of his successor, young Snopes, was of any help to the prosecutor. McGehan, who would not have needed a stretcher, eluded the gallows. Several years later, he died by another man’s bullet, and that event did not end with a hanging either, because the
gun had clearly been fired in self-defence.

Such was the end of Vallandigham. He defended freedom beautifully, but what was he really after? He wasted his extraordinary ability playing gallows games.

Perhaps I have not been unfair to him.

I never saw my dear friend Ambrose again after the war. He too went into politics. For a while he was Governor of Rhode Island, the state where he had once tried to become a manufacturer. Then he represented Rhode Island in the Senate, and then, unexpectedly, he lost his wife, Mary. I never did meet her. She was young, just forty-nine years old, and Ambrose survived her by only five years.

It was said, as it often is, that his wife’s premature death killed him. I believe that. Ambrose had never lived primarily for himself.

The last time I saw him was in Chicago in the spring of 1864, when the war was still dragging on. Ambrose was preparing the campaigns that would lead him through the nightmare of the battles of The Wilderness to the disastrous Crater at Petersburg and his discharge from the army. He had come to Chicago from Virginia, where he was reassembling his old Ninth Corps, which would soon join the Army of the Potomac to plunge into The Wilderness. On March 20, the Chicago Republicans held a banquet. Ambrose had been invited to make the formal speech. I went with Humphrey, who had so neglected his professorial duties during the recent election campaign that I began to fear that he would soon have to bid adieu to the academic life I found so comfortable, since it demanded so much less of a wife than the life of a political candidate. All
the same, I found time during the campaign to write a novel about clever Maud and her skilful manoeuvring to bring the handsome Jonathan — who had fallen victim to the recurrent madness of politics — to his senses and, eventually, to the altar.

Many Republicans in Chicago had not forgotten the unpleasant situation Lincoln had inflicted on them by rescinding Ambrose’s order to suppress the
Times
. Storey took malicious advantage of that, too, though only briefly; Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the overall reversal of the fortunes of war had taken the wind out of the sails of those who, like the publisher of the
Times
, were wrapping themselves in the Constitution. The Chicago Republicans read this shift in fortune in part as evidence that Ambrose had been right about the
Times
, and even contended that his vigorous action against Vallandigham, and the slap in the face he had given Storey, had broken the Copperhead conspiracy almost as effectively as Grant and Meade had defeated the Rebel forces on the battlefield. The hope was that, now that the president was riding on a wave of battlefield victories and criticism could no longer do him any damage, Ambrose would remind him that, less than a year ago, in Chicago, he had miscalculated.

Ambrose disappointed them. “I entirely acquiesce in all the president has done,” he declared in his powerful yet quiet voice, standing tall behind the lectern draped in a colourful Union flag, “and I feel now, tonight, just as I felt the moment I issued that order that was later rescinded.” In his beautiful blue uniform, his ruddy face framed by his incredible chestnut whiskers, he stood there and said, “I am as much an advocate for the liberty of speech and of the press as any man on the face of the globe can be, but when I am sent into a department to command soldiers who are to be strengthened in all possible ways by giving them encouragement, and by giving them clothes to wear and food to eat, and recruits to fill up their
ranks; when I find men in the department opposing all these means of strengthening the soldiers in the Army, I will strike these men in precisely the same way that I would strike an enemy in arms against them.” Ambrose’s eyes gleamed in the light of the chandeliers, the gold tassel on his sword glimmered against the fine fabric of his trousers, the kind that Jasmine had once spilled cognac on and that soldiers deserve because they so often die. I had tears in my eyes, I who was perfectly capable of evoking them in my gentle readers but rarely shed them myself, and at that moment, at that pretentious banquet in the Republican Club of Chicago, surrounded by gentlemen in tails and ladies in elegant gowns from Worth’s, I loved that grand, childlike man. Tomorrow he would gallop off along muddy roads towards a winter of savage combat in order that those here might live as they did, but also in order that Jasmine and her shiftless Hasdrubal might live at all. “I would fail in my duty if I did not risk all I have in the world in the way of reputation or position, or even of life itself, to defend and strengthen those poor soldiers who are in the field risking their lives in defence of their country. That is all I have to say with reference to this order which I issued and which was rescinded.”

Applause, ovations, the dear, masculine, somewhat comical countenance — its whiskers already a synonym for dandyism. I never saw him again in my life. It is with this demeanour and with those words that he has remained alive in my mind.

T
HE LANTERNS
rattled like little tin drums in the rain. They were brass, polished and new, and they bordered the entranceway. Raindrops glinted coldly in the light of the lamps. A beige carriage drove up; a Negro pulled down the step and raised a large beige umbrella. The rain poured down. A lady’s foot in a patent-leather laced shoe emerged from the darkness inside the carriage into the golden light and placed itself on the step. The Negro footman took the lady delicately by the elbow and helped her down. She lifted her pretty face to look at the sign illumined by the glow of lamplight. In gold and red letters on a black background it read THE WITCHES’ KITCHEN, and beneath it, on a banner hanging down like a flag, were the words GALA OPENING. The lady walked under the umbrella to the door, and her red locks swung above the iridescent taffeta that covered her shoulders. The rain drummed down.