Captain Meagher groaned as consciousness brought fierce pain to his bruised head. He rubbed the blood away so he could see, sat up and looked around at the carnage, the dead Irish soldiers. Very few had survived. There were no wounded among them — for they had all been killed as they lay. There were tears in his eyes as he looked at the destruction.
“You fought like men and died like men,” he said. “This day will not be forgotten.”
In the ordinary course of events President Lincoln would write his address to Congress, then have one of his secretaries carry it over to the Capitol, where a clerk would read it out for him. He considered this, then realized that this time it must be different. This time he wanted the Congress to understand the depths of his feeling; he wanted to gauge as well the quality of their response. At no time during his short term as President had he felt that a speech of his was of such great importance. He knew that Mill had opened their minds, pointed the way toward a bright future. President Davis was in complete agreement and they had laid their plans accordingly. Now the speech was done.
“Seward has had his say,” the President said, slowly going through the sheets of foolscap one last time. “Even Welles and Stanton have read this. All the lawyers in the cabinet are worried because what I propose to do flies in the face of the Supreme Court decision in the Dredd Scott case. I told them that these little legalistic quibbles would have to wait until after the war. But I have considered and made emendations when they were needed and now the work is complete.”
Lincoln put the speech into his stovepipe hat, clapped it onto his head and stood.
“Come Nicolay, walk with me to the Congress.”
“Sir. Would it not be wiser to go by carriage? Less tiring and, surely, the gravitas of the situation warrants a more formal entry.”
“I always get worried when someone uses one of those foreign words, as though simple old English, as spoken by a simple old rail-splitter, was not good enough. Now what is this gravy-tas I’m supposed to have more of?”
“I mean, Mr. President, that you are the most important man in Washington City and your deportment should echo that fact.”
Lincoln sighed. “I’ll take your carriage, Nicolay, mainly because I’ve been tired of late. I’ve had little rest.”
And little food, his secretary thought. Plagued by constipation the President took more of his blue mass medicine than he did of vittles. Sometimes he had only a single egg for dinner that he just pushed around and around the plate. His dark skin was sallow now, and his always-rumpled suit even more rumpled as it hung from his skeletal frame. Nicolay went ahead to get the carriage.
The platoon of cavalry accompanied them so it was indeed an arrival at the Congress that was appropriately impressive. The doorway of the building was charred and reeked of smoke where the British had attempted to fire it before their retreat. Lincoln walked among the Congressmen, having a few words with old friends, even stopping for a talk with bitter enemies. Walls must be mended; he must have the firm and committed backing of Congress. And the people.
He spread the notes before him and, in a high voice, began to speak. As he talked his voice steadied and lowered and became convincing in its integrity.
“As I speak to you now Americans are fighting and dying to preserve the freedom of this country. A foreign power has invaded our sovereign shores and the goal we must seek, through force of arms, is to repel that invader. To do this the two warring sides have agreed on an armistice in the war between the states. I now ask you to aid in formalizing that armistice, and to go beyond it, to seek a way to avoid any continuance of the terrible internecine warfare that we have passed through. To do this we must consider that aspect of our history, the existence of slavery, that was somehow the cause of this war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Yet both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that men should ask God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. But — let us judge not lest we be judged.
“It is time now for us to remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and that our greatest ambition must be to dwell together under the bonds of fraternal feeling. We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and of this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. We know how to save the Union. The world knows that we do know how to save it. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom for the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of Earth. Therefore I urge the Congress to adopt a joint resolution declaring that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to each state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences public and private, produced by such a change of system. Furthermore it shall be held that any state that agrees to this will be deemed a State of this Union and thusly eligible to send representatives to this Congress.
“Each and all of the States will be left in complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at perfect liberty to choose and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order as they have been under any administration.
“In addition there will be no increase in the number of slaves in this country. No more slaves will be imported from abroad. And no more slaves will be born here. From this date forward any children born of slaves will be free. Within one generation slavery shall be banished from our land.
“With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish work we are engaged in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to do all that we may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and then with all nations.
“I am loath to close. I mind you of the more than twenty thousand American dead at the Battle of Shiloh. American must not kill American ever again. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies any more. The mystic chords of memories, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
“The Union must again be one.”
As the President concluded the hushed silence with which the Congressmen had listened to him was broken by a mighty roar of approval. Even the most ardent abolitionists, long seeking punishment of the slave-masters and the rebellious, were carried away by the spirit of the audience.
The motion to prepare a bill was carried unanimously.
DEFEAT — AND A NEW FUTURE
The Battle of the Hudson Valley was drawing to a close. And there was disaster in the making for the exhausted British troops. English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish soldiers were mixed together now. They had cohesion of a sort, they obeyed their officers because they knew they were all determined on one thing. Escape. But this was not an easy thing to do because the American forces were growing as theirs were reduced in number. With the armies of Grant and Lee pushing close behind them, the British had no choice but to flee north. But there was still no escape. The American cavalry harassed their flanks and cut up their supply trains. By the time they had reached Glens Falls their numbers had been halved by wounds, death and surrender. The last became the only option for the ordinary soldier when all the officers and non-commissioned officers were dead, all the ammunition used up. There was no dishonor for an exhausted man to drop his weapon and raise his hands to the sky. Rest, surely, food and water possibly. Road’s end, definitely.
Some of the reinforcements fought on. The 62nd Foot had come late to this war, had actually returned from India to be refitted and sent across another ocean to do battle. They were tough, professional soldiers, who had fought in Afghanistan and other embattled countries at the extreme edges of the British Empire. They were accustomed to attacks by irregular horsemen so stood up well to cavalry harassment. They fought in retreat as they did in advance. Since they had never contacted the main bodies of the pursuing armies they were relatively unscathed.
Their commanding officer, Colonel Oliver Phipps-Hornby, was proud of his men and wished he had done better by them. Lake Champlain had promised succor. The boats that had brought them here from Canada would return them the same way. But the scouting patrol he had sent ahead returned with the most depressing news possible.
“Gone, sir,” Lieutenant Harding reported. “Not a boat in sight at the landings or along the shore.”
“You are sure?”
“Positive, Colonel. There were some wounded at the landing, with a surgeon, they had been evacuated to the rear some days ago. One of the wounded, a sergeant, told me that the boats had been there, waiting for us, but they were driven away by enemy artillery. They must have approached under cover of darkness because he said that the firing began at dawn. Some of the boats were sunk, all the rest fled north. The sergeant said that the enemy artillery then limbered up and went north after the boats. There was also some infantry with them, maybe just a regiment.”
“I don’t understand — how could this happen? The enemy is south of us, flanking us as well. How could they also be to our rear?” The colonel was baffled, wiping at his long mustachios as he tried to digest this dire news. The lieutenant opened a folded and dusty map and pointed.