Stars and Stripes Forever

WORDS TO CHANGE THE WORLD

The blue-clad soldiers had fought hard this day. No longer satisfied with holding their lines, they had eagerly surged in attack when the bugle call sent them forward. Out of the shattered remains of the defenses at Saratoga they came, to fall upon the retreating British, already battered by the attacking Confederate Army. But it had not been an easy battle to win, because the invading soldiers were professionals and did not panic or run. They held their positions and kept up their fire. Only when their lines were threatened with being overrun did they make a fighting retreat. Nor could the attackers afford to make any mistakes. Any weaknesses in their own defenses would be instantly taken advantage of; the British troops were capable of turning and lashing out like wounded animals.

Though the outcome of the day’s battles should have been certain, the contest was still fierce and deadly. Through the fields and forests of New York State the fighting had raged, large conflicts and smaller, even more deadly ones. It was now late afternoon and the Union soldiers of the New York 60th lay in the shade of the stone wall and took what rest they could. A fresh regiment of Maine riflemen had passed through them and for the moment they were out of the battle. This did not mean they could afford to be unwary, since the front was now very fluid. There were bypassed British units still about, and new regiments arriving.

Private P.J. O’Mahony was one of the men placed outside the perimeter on guard duty. He cocked his gun when he heard the sound of horse hooves from the road on the other side of the wall; the jingle of harness as men dismounted. He rose up slowly and looked through a chink in the wall, then carefully uncocked his rifle before he stood and waved his hat at the gray-uniformed horsemen there.

“Hello, Reb,” he called out to the nearest trooper. The man reined up and smiled a gap-toothed grin.

“Hello yourself, Yank.” He dismounted and stretched wearily. “Got my canteen tore off riding through the scrub. I’ll be mighty grateful for a swaller or two of water if you can spare it.”

“Spare it I can, and have it you shall. Sure and you’ve come to the right place. In the spirit of generosity I must tell you that it is two canteens that I carry.”

“You never!”

“I do. One filled with water — the other with poitheen.”

“I can’t rightly say that I ever heard of no poy-cheen.”

“It is the national drink of all Irishmen across the ocean in that green and distant land. Though I do believe it is far superior to your normal beverage, you’ll have to judge for yourself. I’ve heard it compared to a drink you may know, name of moonshine…”

“Tarnation, but you are sure a nice feller! Furget what I said about the water and pass me the other one like a good soldier.”

The cavalryman drank deep, sighed and belched happily. “Now that is the sweetest shine that I have ever tasted, that’s for sure. And my daddy had one of the best stills in Tennessee.”

Private O’Mahony smiled proudly. “That’s because it’s Irish, boyo, none other. The secret of its making brought to this new world from the ould sod. And we should know. For this proud regiment that you see before you is the 69th New York — and every mother’s son of us Irish.”

“Irish you say? I heard of it. Never been there. Hell, I never been out of Tennessee until this war started. But as I do recollect it was my grand-pappy, on my mother’s side, they said that he come from Ireland. Guess that kind of makes us like kin.”

“As indeed I am sure that it does.”

“You-all eat ramrod bread?” the cavalryman asked, taking a darkish chunk from his saddlebag and holding it out. “It’s just plain old cornmeal plastered on a ramrod and cooked over the fire.”

O’Mahony munched happily and smiled. “Jaysus — if you lived on nothing but boiled potatoes and salt water for half of your lifetime you wouldn’t be asking questions like that. It’s a poor country, old Ireland, made ever poorer by the bastard English who occupy her. It is with the greatest pleasure that we have the chance to fight them now.”

“I shore do agree with that. Another little swaller OK? Thank you kindly. Guess you know more about the British than I do, being from over there and everything. But Willie Joe, he can read real good, he read to us from the newspaper. About what them British did down in Mississippi. Makes the blood right boil it does. I shore am glad we caught up with them today. Got ’em in the flank, hit them hard.”

“It’s a fine body of men, you are, with some good horseflesh as well…”

“Saddle up.” The order sounded down the road.

“That was mighty good likker,” the cavalryman called out as he mounted his horse, “and I’ll never forget it. And you want to pass the word to your sergeant that we been running into some companies of riflemen down the valley apiece. They was on the way south, reinforcement looks like. They fresh and they mean as rattlesnakes. Take care, you hear.”

Private O’Mahony duly passed this information on to the sergeant who in turn told it to Captain Meagher.

“More redbellies — a blessing from the Lord. Let us find the bastards and kill them all.”

Meagher meant it. He had been a revolutionary in Ireland, a Fenian, the underground movement that was fighting for Ireland’s freedom. He had been battling the English for most of his adult life. On the run all of the time and watch out for informers. In the end he had been caught because of the price on his head that was so large it became irresistible in that poverty-stricken country. Once in jail the charges against him mounted up, so much so that the sentencing judge felt no qualms about giving him the most severe sentence on the books. In Anno Domini 1842, early in the reign of Queen Victoria, he had been sentenced to be hanged. But more than that. Before the noose had killed him, he was to have been taken down from the gallows to be drawn and quartered while still alive. But a more lenient review court had taken offense at his medieval sentence and had commuted it to banishment for life in Tasmania. For nearly twenty years he had labored in chains in that distant land, before making good his escape and fleeing to America. It was understandable that no man had greeted war with the English with more exuberance than he had.

“Get the lads moving, Sergeant,” he ordered. “This neck of the woods is clean of the English for the moment. Let’s see if we can join up with the rest of the division before dark…”

A sudden burst of fire sounded down the line. There was shouting and more firing as a picket ran through the trees.

“Sir, redcoats, a fecking mob of them.”

“Over the wall, me boys. Take cover behind these stones and show them how Irishmen can fight.”

The enemy were appearing from among the trees now, more and more of them. Private O’Mahony took aim with his brand new Spencer rifle and put a bullet through the nearest one.

“That’s the way,” Captain Meagher shouted happily, firing again and again. “Come on you English bastards, come and meet your maker.”

An English officer heard the shout and smiled grimly at the Irish accent. Up until this moment it had been a good war for Lieutenant Saxby Athelstane. His attachment to the irregular Canadian cavalry, which he had so loathed, had turned out to be a godsend. His report of the treacherous and deadly night attack by the Americans had gone right to the top of the chain of command, to the Duke of Cambridge; the Commander-in-Chief himself. He had been called back to headquarters and queried for details of the invasion, and had been more than happy to supply them. His gallantry against great odds had been noted, and the general himself had ordered his promotion to captain.

With the promotion came a new regiment, to replace an officer carried away by fever. The 56th West Essex Regiment, which had been transferred from Bermuda to reinforce the invading army. Although nicknamed The Pompadours, they were a tough and seasoned lot and Captain Athelstane found it a pleasure to lead them into battle.

He cupped his hands and shouted back. “I say, is that Fenians that I hear? You should have stayed in the old sod, Paddy, instead of coming to the New World to be killed.”

Dark figures slipped forward as the firing intensified.

It was an unfair and uneven battle with the Irish outnumbered over three to one. But they had their rifles and their spirit — and their hatred. They brought down more than their own number of the enemy as they died. Not one of the Irish tried to escape, not one surrendered. Out of ammunition in the end they fought with bayonets. Meagher laughed with pleasure as an English captain pushed through the struggling soldiers and attacked him with his sword. With practiced skill he stepped forward with his left foot and, with a single thrust under his attacker’s sword, he ran the startled officer through the heart.

Meagher twisted the bayonet as the officer fell, pulled it from his body and turned to the attack. In time to see the muzzle of a musket leveled at him — to flare fire into his face. The flame blackened and burned his skin, the bullet struck his skull, threw him to the ground blinded by blood, unconscious. An English soldier clubbed to death P.J. O’Mahony, who had just killed his sergeant.

Only a handful of Irishmen still remained alive when the gray-clad cavalry swept down the road, firing as they came. The surviving English troops sought safety in the forest.

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.