The Guns of the South

* VII *

The spyglass showed Lee a small, bright circle in the middle of blackness. It made the heart of Washington City seem close enough to reach out and touch. There was the White House, flanked on the right by the three-story brick building with columned entranceway that housed the Federal War Department, on the left by the Greek Revival columns of the huge Treasury Department building, with the smaller State Department headquarters in front of it. South of the White House, across a lot empty but for temporary barracks, he could make out the tall but unfinished obelisk intended to honor George Washington, to the east the Capitol, its great dome done at last.

Lee admired Lincoln for continuing work on the dome in the midst of war; it showed the Northern President thought about more than the immediate present. Lee frowned a little. How to reconcile such thoughtfulness with the vicious tyrant Andries Rhoodie had described?

He dismissed the irrelevant problem as he lowered the glass, sweeping in an instant across the city to the works that held him away from it. Those works were formidable. The Federals had cut down all the trees within two miles in front of them, to rob advancing rebels of cover from the big guns in their forts. A network of trenches in front of the forts protected them and the field artillery positions between them.

“If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly,” Lee murmured.

“Macbeth,” Charles Venable said beside him.

“In this instance, Major, we would be wise to heed the Bard’s tactical advice.” Lee passed the long brass tube to his aide. “Examine the trenches carefully, if you would. They are not yet full, and the men in them, I hear, are garrison troops, not the veterans of the Army of the Potomac. We may break through tonight; tomorrow will be far more difficult, and the day after surely impossible.”

“Tonight?” Venable echoed.

Lee glanced at him with amusement. “Are you so careful of your words that you expend them only as single shots? Yes, tonight. The worst mistake I Ye made in all this war, and the one that cost us dearest, was the assault on Cemetery Ridge that third day at Gettysburg. The position ahead is stronger, and the cannon in it bigger. Were we to make a daylight attack, they would slaughter us before we drew close enough for our repeaters to rescue us. In the darkness, they will have more difficulty finding proper targets.”

“But a night battle?” Venable had more than one word at a time in him after all. “How do you propose to control a night battle, Sit?”

“I don’t propose to,” Lee answered. He almost laughed at the shocked look on Venable’s face. “Can we but come to close quarters with the enemy, I think we shall break through somewhere along the line. Once we do, the advantage will be ours—and with it, I hope, Washington City.”

“Yes, sir.” Venable did not sound convinced. Lee was not altogether convinced himself. He was convinced, however, that the Army of Northern Virginia would never have a better chance to take Washington. And if the Federal capital fell into Southern hands, how could Britain and France and the rest of the world continue to deny the Confederate States of America were as true and genuine a nation as the United States? The stakes made the risk worthwhile.

He dictated orders, sent them to his corps commanders. The army began to shift into a line that centered on the Seventh Street Road, from the earthworks of Fort Slocum in the east past Fort Stevens to Fort de Russy in the southwest. The sun slipped down the western sky. Lee watched the Federal lines and waited. He did his best to appear impassive, but his heart thudded in his chest, and with the thudding came pain. Absently, he slid one of the little white pills from Andries Rhoodie under his tongue. The pain went away.

Twilight was deepening when Walter Taylor came up and said, “Sir, Rhoodie requests permission to speak to you.”

The Rivington man had not been so formal before Lee defied him. At first Lee intended to say he was too busy. Then, remembering the nitroglycerine tablet, he softened. “Tell him he may, but to be quick.”

Taylor led Rhoodie up to Lee. “General,” Rhoodie said, politely dipping his head. Lee returned the gesture. Taking Lee’s warning literally, Rhoodie plunged ahead: “General Lee, if you intend to attack the Federal forts tomorrow, my men and I can help.”

“I intend to attack tonight, sir,” Lee answered, and had the somber satisfaction of watching Rhoodie’s jaw drop. The Rivington man muttered something in his own guttural language.

But he quickly recovered. “You’re as bold as you are said to be, that’s certain. We can still help you, maybe even more. Whatever the differences you and I have had, America: Will Break aims for the South to win this war.”

That was the gamble Lee had made when he defied the big man from the future. Now he said, “Thank you, Mr. Rhoodie, but you’ve already furnished us plenty of repeaters.” He pointed to the AK-47 slung on Rhoodie’s back. “The handful you and your comrades might add will make scant difference in the outcome of the fight.”

“But we have something you do not.” The Rivington man took from his knapsack a green—painted spheroid a little bigger than a baseball. A metal shaft stuck out from it. “This is a rifle grenade, General. The AK-47 can shoot one about three hundred yards. They should do nicely for spreading confusion in the Federal trenches and forts, wouldn’t you say?”

“A rifle grenade?” The Federals sometimes used hand grenades fused with percussion caps. They were, however, limited by the strength of a man’s arm. Shot from rifles…”It would almost be as if we were shelling them without employing artillery, wouldn’t it?”

“Exactly,” Rhoodie said.

“Any surprise we can effect will surely accrue to our advantage. Very well, Mr. Rhoodie, you and your men may proceed. I aim to move forward at ten tonight. You will, I presume, wish to obtain your firing positions somewhat before that time.”

“Yes, General. Let us move out a bit ahead of your forces so we can soften the way for them.”

“I sincerely appreciate your joining in our fight, sir.” Though he did not say so, Lee was also curious to see how the Rivington men would fare in combat. Konrad de Buys fought well enough on horseback to satisfy as exacting a critic of courage as Jeb Stuart. So far as Lee knew, though, none of the other men from America Will Break had gone into action. He thought of them more as military engineers than frontline troops. Of course, his own career had also begun in the engineers…”Good luck to you, Mr. Rhoodie.”

“Thank you, General. May we meet again tomorrow, inside Washington.” Rhoodie touched a finger to the brim of his mottled cap and hurried away. Lee watched till he was out of sight. However brutal some of the principles he espoused, he knew the right wish to make.

“Pin that on there good for me, Nate,” Alsie Hopkins said. Caudell made sure the scrap of paper was securely attached to the back of Hopkins’s shirt. As he stepped away, the private went on, “Thanks for writin’ it for me, too.”

“I hope you don’t need it, that’s all, Alsie,” Caudell said. He’d written names and home towns or counties for several soldies already tonight. If they died assaulting the fortifications ahead—which seemed only too likely—their loved ones might eventually learn they had fallen. For that matter, he’d had Edwin Powell pin his own name on the back of his shirt.

He saw Mollie Bean checking her rifle by firelight. He knew she had trouble with her letters; he’d taught her a little out of a primer every so often. But when he asked her if she wanted him to write her name for her, she shook her head. “Only people who care a damn whether I live or die are right here in the company with me.”

Captain Lewis strode from fire to fire. “Into formation,” he said quietly. “It’s time.” No drums or bugles announced the rebels’ assembly, the better to keep the Federals from learning what Lee intended.

The sky was gray and overcast as Caudell came to the edge of the strip the Yankees had denuded of standing trees. The Federal forts and trenches that lay on the high ground ahead were deeper darknesses against the night. Caudell was grateful no moonlight betrayed his comrades to the bluecoats with field glasses and telescopes who were surely peering out at their foes.

“We advance in skirmisher order,” Captain Lewis said. “They’ll hurt us less with their artillery that way, and the repeaters should let us fight through their trenches once we get up to them. God bless every one of you, and may you all come through safe.”

“You too, Cap’n,” several soldiers called to him. Caudell said nothing aloud, but the thought was in his mind.

Lewis held his watch close to his face, waited, swung his arm forward. Caudell and the company’s other proper skirmishers moved out ahead of the rest of the men. He felt horribly exposed to the Yankee guns, as if he were going into battle naked. He quivered every time he stepped on a dry leaf or broke a twig with his foot.

Like flowing shadows, the Confederates moved forward all along the line. It seemed impossible the Federals could not see them, could not hear the beat of their feet against the soil, the jingle of cartridges in their pockets. But stride after cautious stride brought Caudell closer to the enemy works without the slightest sign the men inside them guessed he and his fellows were coming.

The ground was so bad a tight battle line could not have held together in any case, not even in daylight. The Federals had left on the ground most of the trees they’d felled. Caudell was constantly on the dodge and fell several times when branches he hadn’t seen tripped him.

He’d advanced perhaps a third of the way when the Federals woke up. Drums began to pound within their lines, beating out the same long roll that called the Confederates to action. A flash of light from an opening in the embrasure of Fort Stevens, a boom—a louder, deeper boom than any he’d heard from a cannon before—and a shell screamed through the night to crash down somewhere behind Caudell. Men screamed back there. Another blast came, and another, and another, as all the fort’s eight-inch howitzers and thirty-pounder Parrott rifles opened up.

Sparks of light blinked on and off in the rifle pits in front of the main Federal trench. They reminded Caudell of the fireflies he’d always loved. He would not think of fireflies in the same way again. Still, pickets shooting into the night at the range of a mile could hit someone only by luck.

More explosions came from Fort Stevens. Not all of them, though, seemed to accompany shots from the big siege guns—some sounded more like shells landing than cannon going off. But Lee’s field artillery was only now starting to go into action. It had had to move up with the infantry so its guns could reach the forts.

Whatever the explosions were, they disrupted the smooth firing Caudell had seen from the Federal artillerymen outside Bealeton. That was a blessing—every Northern shell not fired meant Southern men not dead.

Some of the flashes from the Yankee rifle pits were not aimed at the oncoming Confederates, but at each other, or perhaps at a space between two of them. No sooner had Caudell made that guess than a chatter of AK-47 fire confirmed it. Somehow, Lee had snuck somebody up close to the Federal line before the main attack got rolling. Caudell wondered if those advance scouts were somehow responsible for the troubles the Federal cannoneers were having. He hoped so.

He tramped on toward the waiting Federals. Here and there, soldiers in the rebels’ leading ranks began to shoot. He knew those bullets were probably wasted, but sometimes a man had to answer the enemies who were trying to lay him low.

He was within a couple of hundred yards of the abatis of downed trees that protected the trenches ahead when one of the guns from Fort Stevens let go with a blast of canister. He threw himself flat when he heard the deadly hiss of the lead balls. Canister fire from a Napoleon was dreadful enough. Canister fire from an eight-inch gun…When he turned his head, he saw that a gap had been blown in the line to his right, as neatly and thoroughly as if the men had been swept away by a broom.

By then the Yankees were shooting from their main line. Caudell stayed low, trying to find a swell of ground behind which to shelter before he scuttled forward again. The abatis loomed ahead. Already rebels were pulling saplings out of the way to make paths for their comrades to reach the trenches. The bluecoats shot them down as they worked. More men took their places.

Others answered the Federal fire. Had they had only rifle muskets, their task would have been hopeless, for they were exposed while their enemies enjoyed good shelter. But the AK-47s fired enough faster than Springfields to redress the balance. As more and more Confederates got up to and through the abatis, they began to beat down the defenders’ fire.

Sharp branches tore at Caudell’s clothes as he pushed toward the trench line. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Wilderness; some of the undergrowth there had been about as thick as this deliberately made obstruction. The Federal fire was worse here, though. He saw the glint of a rifle barrel as it swung to point straight at him. He fired first, then ducked low—the muzzle flash would have drawn Yankees’ notice to him. Sure enough, two bullets cracked through the space where he had been standing a moment before.

He crawled forward. There was already fighting in the trenches, Confederates and Federals shooting and shouting and cursing as hard and fast as they could. He recognized Springfields by their reports. and by the clouds of smoke that rose like swirling fog when they were fired. He shot into the fogbank once, twice, heard a man cry out. He thought the cry carried a Northern accent. He hoped it did. He slid down into the trench on his backside.

“Keep moving!” a Southern voice cried, authority behind it. “We don’t want to stay stuck in these damned trenches. It’s the city we want, Washington City. Keep moving!”

That was easier said than done. The Federals fought desperately. Their numbers made their single-shot muzzle-loaders almost a match for the rebels’ repeaters. Every new corner in the earthworks brought deadly danger. In hand-to-hand combat, the bayonets that tipped Yankee Springfields were actually of use.

A shell landed in a Federal-held section of trench. Caudell yowled like a catamount. Then another shell exploded, and another, and another, the blasts spaced much too close together to come from even the quickest-firing gun. “What the hell is that?” somebody shouted.

“I don’t rightly know, but I think it’s on our side,” Caudell shouted back. Anything less than a shout went unnoticed in the din. He howled out a rebel yell, as much to tell himself he was still alive and fighting as for any other reason.

Yet another of those mysterious shells crashed down among the Yankees. Behind Caudell, somebody yelled, “Go on, you lazy buggers. I’ve put the fear of God in them for you.” The shouter did not sound like a Southern man, but Caudell recognized his voice all the same: it was Benny Lang.

He turned around. For a moment, he thought the Rivington man had the trick of invisibility. Not only were his clothes splotchy, but he’d also painted his face in dark, jagged stripes. Only his fierce grin told where he was. Instead of his usual cap, he wore on his head what looked like a mottled pot. “What the devil’s that?” Caudell asked, pointing.

“A helmet,” Lang answered. “You bloody bastards can do just as you please, but I don’t fancy getting shot in the head—or anywhere else, come to that.” He had an AK-47 in his hands and another on his back. He stuffed something fair-sized and roundish into the muzzle of the rifle he was holding. When he fired, the report sounded strange, almost metallic. An instant later, another crash went up from the trenches. Lang must have seen Caudell’s flabbergasted expression. His voice was smug: “Rifle grenade.”

“Whatever you say.” Without thinking, Caudell grabbed the Rivington man by the arm and yanked him toward the fighting. “Come on. Let’s take ‘em out.” Only later did he remember that Lang could have thrown him through the air if he didn’t care to come along. But Lang just shrugged and followed.

The grenade bombardment cleared a long stretch of trench; Caudell stepped on and over bodies, some still, others thrashing in torment. Not only that, the rain of explosives seemingly from nowhere had set a good many unhurt Yankees running. Not all, though. A bluecoat raised himself up on one knee, fired from the hip. The bullet caught Benny Lang in the belly. “Oof!” he said.

Caudell cut the Federal down with a short burst of fire. Then he turned to see how Lang was. Actually, he was already sure. Belly wounds always killed, if not from loss of blood, then from fever.

But Lang was not down and screaming, was not, in fact, down at all. He hurried past Caudell, calling back over his shoulder, “Come on, damn it. They’re wavering. We can break them.”

“Wait a minute.” Caudell reached out and took Lang’s shoulder, this time to hold him back. “I saw you shot,” he shouted in the Rivington man’s face. “Why aren’t you dead?” Put that way, the question sounded stupid, but Caudell didn’t care. He didn’t think he believed in ghosts, either, but he would hardly have been surprised to feel his fingers sink straight through what should have been Benny Lang’s flesh.

But Lang remained solid. Under the brim of his helmet, his thin face bore a smirk. “Yes, I was shot. My belly’ll have a bruise tomorrow, too, I should expect. As for why I’m not dead—” He took Caudell’s hand, set it where the Minié ball had struck. Under his tunic, he wore something with flat, hard scales. “Flak jacket.”

“What’s a flapjack?” Caudell asked, wondering if he’d heard straight.

“It’s body armor. Now get moving, damn you. We’ve wasted too bloody much time here already.”

Caudell got moving, his mind awhirl. No one wore armor—armor thick enough to stop a rifle bullet would have put enough steel on a soldier to double his weight. But there went Benny Lang, moving lightly down the length of trench he’d cleared, the trench where his guts and his life hadn’t spilled into the dirt. Caudell wanted to shake the Rivington man like a terrier shaking a rat, to shake from him the secret of where he’d found that impossible armor.

The same place he found his rifle grenades, the first sergeant thought, and then, a moment later, the same place the Rivington men found these AK-47s. The only trouble was, Caudell could not imagine where in the world that place might be.

He did not dwell on it for long. The Federals tried to counterattack, but by then enough rebels had come forward to chew their assault to bloody rags. And then, without warning, a blast like the end of the world came from Fort Stevens. Caudell staggered. He dropped his rifle to clap both hands to his ears. Bursting shells filled the sky, a thousand Fourths of July an boiled down into an instant. Night turned to noon.

He saw Benny Lang’s lips move as that unnatural light faded, but his hearing was still stunned. He shook his head. As he stooped to recover his repeater, Lang put his mouth against his ear and screamed, “The magazine’s gone up!”

He heard the Rivington man as if from many miles away, but he heard him. Maybe he wouldn’t be deaf forever after an. And certainly, he thought as the ability to think slowly returned, Fort Stevens wouldn’t work any more murder against the men in gray.

A little later another magazine, this one from a fort farther away, also blew up. “Fort de Russy,” Lang shouted—he didn’t quite have to scream anymore for Caudell to hear him. “Or maybe that was Battery Sill, between Stevens and de Russy.” Caudell didn’t care which magazine it was. He was just glad it was gone.

He heard a roar ahead. That he heard it meant it was loud. Wondering what had gone wrong, he hurried toward the noise, his AK-47 at the ready. By the fickle light of explosions behind him, he scrambled up onto high ground. A good many Confederates were already there, all of them yelling like madmen. He stared, wondering what had taken possession of them. Then he started yelling himself. He and his comrades had fought their way through the Federal trenches. Now no set defenses remained between them and Washington City.

Which did not mean the untaken Yankee forts had quit fighting. He threw himself flat when a big shell came down far too close for comfort. “Keep moving!” an officer cried—a sensible command which Caudell had grown thoroughly tired of tonight. The officer went on, “The farther inside their lines we get, the fewer of those cannon will bear on us.” Suddenly given a good, sensible reason to move, Caudell scrambled to his feet and ran south as fast as he could go.

More shells shrieked by, these from the field guns of a battery east of the junction of the Seventh Street Road and the Milkhouse Front Road. The officer told off a detachment to take that battery in the rear. Most of the soldiers, Caudell among them, he sent south down the Seventh Street Road toward Washington. “Form by regiments if you can, by brigade if that’s the best you can do,” he said. “This won’t be just a parade—we’ll have more fighting to do.”

“Forty-Seventh North Carolina,” Caudell called obediently. “Kirkland’s brigade. Forty-Seventh North Carolina…”

Before long, he found himself with a solid band of North Carolinians, close to half of them from his own regiment. Benny Lang stayed with them. That pleased Caudell: you never could tell when more of those rifle grenades might come in handy, or, for that matter, what other tricks the Rivington man had up his. sleeve. Caudell still wondered why he called his wonderful armor a flapjack.

Then from ahead came the roar of a volley of Minié balls and, hard on their heels, shouts and oaths. Word came back quickly: the Federals had thrown a makeshift barricade of logs across the road and were firing from behind it. “Flank ‘em out!” someone a few feet ahead of Caudell said. “Two squads to the left of the roadway, two to the right.”

“Who are you, to be giving orders?” Caudell demanded.

The man turned. Even in the darkness, his plump features, neat chin beard, and sweeping mustaches were unmistakable. So were the wreathed stars on his collar. “I’m General Kirkland, by God! Who are you, sir?”

“First Sergeant Nate Caudell, sir—47th North Carolina,” Caudell said, gulping.

“Well, First Sergeant, get up there and take one of those flanking squads,” Kirkland thundered.

Cursing his own big mouth, Caudell hurried forward toward the fighting. He passed Benny Lang. “You come, too,” he said. “One of those grenades of yours ought to startle the Yankees enough to make our job easier.” Lang nodded and came.

The Federals had not, had time to extend the barricade far off the roadway itself. They had a few men posted in the bushes, but, thanks to their repeaters, the rebels pushed past them and circled around behind the improvised breastwork.

Benny Lang loaded and fired a rifle grenade. Several Federals started to turn at the odd report. The grenade landed among them. They all shouted in alarm when it went off, and a couple of men its fragments had wounded went on crying from pain. The others, though, fired out into the night in the direction from which the little shell had come; one Millie ball snarled past Caudell’s head.

By then, though, he and his comrades were shooting at the muzzle flashes from the Federals’ Springfields. A Northerner started screaming and would not stop. Others shouted for their lives: “You got us surrounded, rebs! Don’t shoot no more! We give up!”

General Kirkland’s booming, authoritative voice came out of the night: “You Yanks put that barricade up there. You can get to work and help tear it down.” Caudell heard timbers shift, heard men swear mildly, as they often did when a physical task went slightly wrong. Northern and Southern accents mingled as Lee’s troops and their prisoners worked side by side. Even before the logs were all removed, Kirkland said, “Forward, boys, forward. You won’t let ‘em stop us now, will you?”

The sky began to grow light in the east not long after Caudell marched past the junction of the Seventh Street Road and another dirt track that was marked Taylor’s Lane Road to the southwest and Rock Creek Church Road to the northeast. Now Washington City was less than two miles away. Caudell had trouble believing he’d fought all night; only a couple of hours seemed to have gone by. The Yankees still kept up a sullen fire to the front and flanks of the advancing Confederate column, but nowhere sharp enough to do more than harass it.

As dawn progressed, Caudell could see farther and farther. Washington lay spread out before him like a painted panorama. He was surprised at the mixed feelings the Federal capital evoked in him. Excitement, anticipation, the almost hectic flush of triumph—he had expected all those.

But seeing the White House for the first time in his life, seeing the Capitol…up until three years before, those had been national shrines for him as much as for any Northern man. He found they still had the power to raise a lump in his throat. Nor was he the only one for whom that held true. The Confederate advance slowed as men gaped at what they’d come to capture.

“Go on, God damn you all,” General Kirkland shouted. “D’you want to wait until Grant brings the rest of his army over the Potomac on the Long Bridge and makes you fight for the city house by house?”

That got the rebels moving again. Then someone said, “They ain’t comin’ over no Long Bridge, if that’s it straight ahead there. It’s burnin’.” Sure enough, a column of smoke rose from the middle of the Potomac.

Kirkland must have had a telescope, for a moment later he said, “Not only is it burning, by God, but it’s broken as well. The artilleryman who did that deserves a general’s wreath, and I don’t care a jot whether he’s but a private soldier. He’s sealed the victory for us.”

“He’s sealed all the ants in the nest, too, and they don’t much fancy it,” Caudell said to a soldier nearby. He pointed toward the city ahead. At this distance, the people in the streets did seem small as ants. But ants did not drive carriages, and ants generally moved with greater purpose than the throngs who jammed the avenues ahead. All they knew was that they wanted to flee the oncoming Confederates. Any person who got in their way was as much an obstacle as a tree or a post.

The soldier by Caudell spat in the dusty road. “What you want to bet we don’t catch us one single congressman at the Capitol?”

“I don’t care about Yankee congressmen,” Caudell said. “What I’d like to do is catch Abe Lincoln. That’d be about the only way my name would ever go down in history.”

By the look of him, the ragged soldier had never worried about going down in history. But his eyes lit up at the prospect of capturing Lincoln. “Let’s try it, by God! Somebody’s got to be first to the White House.” Then he shook his head. “Naah—even if we are, reckon he’ll’ve run off too, along with everybody else.”

“Worth a shot at it.” Caudell hurried over to General Kirkland; he thought well of commanders who stayed up with their troops. He wondered where Colonel Faribault and Captain Lewis were—maybe dead back in the trenches, maybe just a few hundred yards away in the confused aftermath of victory. Gaining the brigadier’s ear might be worth more now anyway. “Sir, may we head for the White House?”

The ear Caudell had gained was a keen one. “You’re that mouthy sergeant from the fight in the dark, aren’t you?” Kirkland fixed Caudell with an icy blue stare. But his expression warmed as he thought about the suggestion—what Southerner could resist going after the man for fear of whom his state had seceded?

Kirkland looked around, gauging how far other Confederate units had come. “I have no orders to the contrary, and we might get there first, mightn’t we? Let’s see if we can—why the hell not?” He waved his sword, pointed southwest, and shouted new orders. The soldiers cheered.

Into Washington City! The rebels tramped down Vermont Avenue in loose skirmish order, repeaters at the ready. Civilians peered from houses. Some came outside to gape at the spectacle they had never imagined. A few people cheered—Washington had its share of Southern sympathizers.

Caudell coughed loudly as he passed a pretty girl. So did a good many other men; the soldiers sounded as if they’d all caught cold at once. Overwhelmed by such vigorous public praise, the girl flushed and fled indoors.

About a hundred yards farther on, a company of Federal soldiers turned onto Vermont Avenue. They must not have realized Lee’s men were already in the city. The first couple of ranks never knew it; the Confederates cut them down as soon as they came into sight. A few men returned fire. Others dashed for cover. Shrieking noncombatants ran every which way, including right between the rival forces.

“Get out of there, you damned fools!” Caudell shouted, appalled at the idea of having to fight a battle in a crowd of civilians. When the Federals kept shooting, he found himself without any choice. He dove behind a hedge and looked for targets.

Benny Lang did not seem to care who got stuck in the middle of a fight. He sent a grenade through the window of a house from which Yankees were shooting. A moment later, the blast blew out every pane in that window and the one next to it. Three bluecoats dashed out of the house, as terrified as any ordinary Washingtonian. They would have done better to stay where they were. The Confederates stretched them lifeless before they’d run ten paces.

Rebels darted down side streets to get’ around the Federals. The fight did not last long. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Northern men died or fled. “Keep going!” Kirkland shouted. “Don’t let ‘em stop you now!”

Caudell and his comrades kept going. Neither he nor any of them had slept for a full day; neither he nor any of them cared. He could see the White House ahead. With that for a target, rest could wait.

He felt like crying when a lieutenant waved him onto Fifteenth Street instead of letting him keep on going straight down Vermont Avenue. The lieutenant saw his disappointment. Grinning, he said, “Don’t feel too bad, soldier. Once upon a time, General McClellan lived down this way. His house ought to be worth seeing.”

Caudell thought the house, near the corner of Fifteenth and H streets, a mean hovel, though it was three stories high, with shuttered windows and a railed porch under them from which to receive well-wishers. Who cared where a discredited Federal general had lived when the President’s house was so close?

But he and the men with him had been sent only a little out of their way. Blue-coated officers were hurrying in and out of a brown brick building on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. Caudell fired a quick burst that sent them tumbling back inside. “Guard this place!” he told some of the other rebels on the avenue. He spent the next few minutes arguing them into it; they wanted the White House as much as he did. That afternoon, he learned he’d helped capture the headquarters of the Federal defenses for Washington.

That was later, though. As soon as he had men with repeaters posted all around the building, he hurried west along Pennsylvania Avenue to the big white mansion that had housed his Presidents until 1861 and now was home to the leader of another country.

The White House drew Confederates like a lodestone. Caudell’s delays had let General Kirkland, portly though he was, get there before him. Kirkland was shouting, “You men keep your order, do you hear me? Think about what General Lee will do to anyone who lets harm come to this building or anyone inside it.”

Lee’s name was a talisman to conjure with. It calmed men who, without it, might gleefully have rampaged with torches. Across the lawn, under the front colonnade, stood Federal sentries. They carried rifles, but made no move to raise them to the firing position. They just kept staring at the ever-growing numbers of ragged men in gray and homespun butternut who filled the broad cobblestoned street and now hesitantly advanced over the grass toward them. They did not seem to believe this hour could ever have come.

Remembering Gettysburg, remembering the botched fight at Bristoe Station, remembering the long, cold, hungry winter south of the Rapidan before the repeaters came, Caudell marveled at the hour, too. As he pressed toward the White House with his comrades, his feeling that the world had turned upside down deepened further, for out among the bluecoats came a tall, thin figure dressed in funereal black. Caudell looked around for the private who’d guessed the Federal President would run. By happy chance, the fellow was standing not ten feet from him. He pointed. “See? We’ve bagged Old Abe after an.”

Lincoln’s name ran through the rebels. A few cheers rang out, and a few jeers, but not many of either. The force of the moment seized most men with almost religious awe. Still slowly, they came forward across the White House lawn to the base of the steps. There they halted, staring in wonder at the edifice and Lincoln both. Caudell was in the fourth or fifth row of tight-packed troops.

As they hesitated, Lincoln came down the steps toward them. One of the Federal sentries tried to block his path. He said, “What does it matter now, son? What does anything matter now?” Beneath his frontier twang, he sounded tired past all endurance. The young sentry, beard still downy on his cheeks, stepped back in confusion.

Caudell frankly stared at the President of the United States. Southern papers and cartoonists made Lincoln out to be either a back country buffoon or a fiend in human shape. In the flesh, he did not seem either. He was just a tall, homely man whose deep-set eyes had already seen all the griefs in the world and now this crowning one piled atop the rest.

He coughed and turned his head to one side. When he somehow found the resolution to face the crowd of Confederate soldiers again, those eyes glistened with the tears he would not shed. Caudell thought they were tears of sorrow, not weakness; it was the expression a father would wear, watching his beloved son die of a sickness he could not cure.

Not all the rebels stayed solemn. A short, broad-shouldered corporal in front of Caudell and to his left spoke up brashly: “Well, Uncle Abe, you gonna try and take our niggers away from us now?” It was Billy Beddingfield; Caudell hadn’t realized he’d been promoted again. He was also certain Beddingfield, like most Southern soldiers, had not a single Negro to his name.

Beddingfield brayed laughter at his own wit. A good many men joined him. Lincoln stood on the White House steps, waiting to see whether the rebels would quiet down. When they did, he said, “I did not become President with the intention of interfering with the institutions of any state in the Union. I said that repeatedly, at every forum available; the great regret of my life is that you Southerners would not credit it.”

“What about the Emancipation Proclamation, then?” half a dozen soldiers shouted at once. Some of them profanely embellished the question.

Lincoln did not quail. “Everything I have done, I have done for the purpose of holding the Union together and of restoring it once it was torn asunder. Had I thought that meant freeing all the slaves, I should have freed them all; had I thought it meant leaving them in chains, in chains they would have stayed. As it chanced, I thought the wisest course was to free some and leave others alone—note that even now I have hesitated to touch the institution in those states which remained loyal. The proclamation was a weapon to hand in the war against your rebellion, and I seized it. Make what you will of that.”

“Damn little good it did you,” Billy Beddingfield said. Again, some of the rebels laughed. But Caudell gave his beard a thoughtful tug. He hadn’t known the Emancipation Proclamation was selective; the papers had painted it as a desperate effort to incite blacks to rise up against their masters. So it was, to some degree. But if it was a blow against the Confederate government rather than against slavery per se, that made it more or less what Lincoln claimed it was—an unpleasant ploy, but a ploy nonetheless.

The Federal President said, “Personally, I hate slavery and all it stands for.” That took courage, in front of the audience he faced. He let the rebels’ boos and hisses wash over him. When they slackened, he went on, “It is too late now, I think, to rescind the proclamation I issued. Too much has happened since. But if only the Southern states were to return to the Union, the Federal government would fully compensate former masters for their bondsmen’s liberty—”

The rebels laughed, loud and long. Lincoln hung his head. Caudell, strangely, found himself respecting the man. Anyone who clung to his principles strongly enough to refuse to abandon them even in complete defeat owned more sincerity than he had credited Lincoln with possessing.

Lincoln drew himself up to his full and impressive height. His black suit conformed perfectly to the motion; it was far from new and had been worn so often that it molded itself to its owner’s shape. “If my death would restore the seceded states, I would beg for your bullets,” he said. “If the Union fails, I have no wish to live.”

From most politicians, that would have been just talk. Looking at the sorrow that masked Lincoln’s rough-hewn features, Caudell was convinced he meant every word of it. But if he thought the Federal government had the right to tell states they had to stay in a Union they no longer desired, then he might be sincere, but to Caudell’s way of thinking he was sincerely wrong.

Some of the Confederates were willing to find him most literally sincere, too. Billy Beddingfield started to raise his AK-47. Caudell grabbed the repeater and pushed it back down. “No, Billy, damn it,” he said. “This isn’t like shooting a couple of nigger prisoners.” Nobody had ever assassinated a President of the United States. Caudell could imagine nothing surer to bring on lasting enmity between U.S.A. and C.S.A.

Beddingfield turned on him, scowling. “He don’t deserve no better, all the trouble he brung on us.” He started to swing the rifle back toward Lincoln. Caudell ground his teeth. Benny Lang had handled Beddingfield easily enough, but he knew he couldn’t match the Rivington man. And how strange to think of fighting. a man from his own regiment to save the President whose troops he’d been battling these past two and a half years!

Before Beddingfield could shoot, before the fight could start, a murmur ran from back to front through the crowd of soldiers in gray: “Marse Robert! Marse Robert’s here!” Caudell looked around. Sure enough, Lee sat aboard Traveller. The crowd parted before him like the waters of the Red Sea. He rode up to the base of the White House steps.

Lincoln waited for him, infinitely alone. One of the Federal sentries began to lift his Springfield. Another man slapped it down, as Caudell had with Beddingfield.

Lee took off his broad-brimmed gray felt, bowed in the saddle to Lincoln. “Mr. President,” he said, as respectfully as if Lincoln were his own chosen leader.

“See?” Caudell whispered to Billy Beddingfield.

“Shut up,” Beddingfield hissed back.

“General Lee,” Lincoln said with a stiff nod. He looked from the Confederate commander to the men of the Army of Northern Virginia, back again: His lips quirked in what Caudell first thought a grimace of pain. Then he saw it was a grin, however wry. Lincoln half-turned, waved toward the imposing bulk of the White House behind him. “General, do you want to step into my parlor with me? Seems we have a bit of talking to do.”

He’d been eloquent when talking to the soldiers. With Lee, he sounded like a storekeeper inviting a customer in to haggle over the price of potatoes. Caudell was instantly suspicious of such a chameleonlike shift of style. But Lee said, “Of course, Mr. President. I’m sure one of my men will hold Traveller’s head.” As he dismounted, three dozen men sprang forward for the privilege.

A colored servant brought in a pot of coffee and two cups on a silver tray. “Sit down, General, do sit down,” Lincoln said.

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Robert E. Lee took the chair to which Lincoln had waved him. Lincoln poured the coffee with his own hands. “Thank you, sir,” Lee said again.

Lincoln’s chuckle held a bitter edge. “A fair number of generals have sat in that chair, General Lee, but I’ll be switched if you’re not the politest one of the lot.” Still standing himself, he peered down at Lee. “I think this country would be a good deal better off if you’d sat down in it some years sooner.”

“You honored me by offering me that command,” Lee said. “Having to decline it tore my heart in two.”

“When you declined it, I think you tore the United States in two,” Lincoln answered. “Set against that, your heart’s a small thing.”

“I am in the end a Virginian first, Mr. President,” Lee said.

“You come out with that so coolly, as if it explained everything,” Lincoln said. Lee looked at him in some surprise; he thought it did. Lincoln went on, “I take the view—I have always taken the view—that the interest of the several states should count for more than the interest of anyone of them.”

“There we disagree, sir,” Lee said quietly.

“So we do.” Rather to Lee’s relief, Lincoln sat down. A good-sized man himself, Lee did not care to be towered over, and Lincoln was as tall as any of Andries Rhoodie’s friends. He reached out a long arm to tap Lee on the knee. “Something I want you to think on, General: You’ve taken Washington for the moment, but can you keep it? There are many more Union soldiers around the city than Confederates in it. Can you stand siege here?”

Lee smiled, admiring Lincoln’s audacity. “I’ll take the chance, Mr. President. The beef depot and slaughterhouse by the Washington Monument could alone subsist my army for some time, and it is far from the only such source of supply in the city. To us, sir, having come here, we feel we are entered into the land flowing with milk and honey. We’ve made do with very little in the past.”

“Yes, you can find milk and honey here, I expect, though you’d better watch out that the sutlers and commissary officers don’t adulterate’ em before they ever get to your men.” Lincoln studied Lee. “But where will you get more cartridges for those newfangled repeaters your men carry?”

“We have a sufficiency,” Lee said, more calmly than he felt. That one sharp question was plenty to dispel any lingering doubts about Lincoln’s ability. The man understood what war required. Lee wondered if the Army of Northern Virginia did have enough ammunition for another big fight. The men had spent it like a drunken sailor throwing away money after six months at sea.

Lincoln’s eyes bored into him. He remembered that the Federal President had been a lawyer before he took up politics. He was practiced at sniffing out falsehood hiding behind a mask of rectitude.

Lee said, “Let me ask you something in turn, Mr. President, if I may: Are you prepared to destroy Washington City to drive us out of it? That is what you would have to do, you know; already we are looking to our own defense here. Would your countrymen support you in such an action, especially at a time when Confederate arms are gaining successes against other Federal forces besides the Army of the Potomac?”

“My countrymen elected me to hold the Union together, General Lee, and that I shall undertake to do by whatever means necessary so long as there is any hope of this war’s success,” Lincoln said. Lee felt a slight chill as he gauged the big man in the velvet-upholstered chair. Here, even more than with General Grant, he at last encountered a Northern man with strength of purpose to match his own and President Davis’s. Lincoln continued, “If the only hope of saving the Union is to make this city into a funeral pyre and then immolate myself upon it, that I shall do, and let the voters judge come November whether I did right or wrong.”

If he was bluffing, Lee was glad never to have met him at a poker table. And yet the game they were playing now was poker on a grander scale, with the fate of two nations pushed onto the table for stakes. This time, though, Lee knew he was holding aces. He turned a new one face up, drawing a telegram from his pocket and handing it to Lincoln. “Mr. President, you say you will carry on so long as you feel you can win the war. Here is a dispatch I received this morning which may shed some light on your chances of doing so.”

To read the telegram, Lincoln slipped on a pair of gold-framed spectacles much like Lee’s own. That was hardly surprising; the two leaders were only two years apart in age, and a man’s sight grew long in the middle years, regardless of whether he was born in mansion or log cabin.

The Federal president peered over the rims of his glasses at Lee. “This paper is genuine”—he pronounced it genuwine—”General?”

“You have my oath on it, Mr. President.” Lee had not thought of offering Lincoln a false telegram. Had it occurred to him, the stratagem would have been a good one. But Lincoln was more ready to counter deception than he was to offer it.

“Your oath I will accept, General, though those of few others—in gray or blue—under these circumstances,” Lincoln said heavily. “So Bedford Forrest with thirty-five hundred men has beaten our General Sturgis with over eight thousand north of Corinth, Mississippi, has he?”

“Not only beaten him but wrecked him, Mr. President. His men are in full flight toward Memphis, with Forrest in pursuit. From his report, he has captured two hundred fifty wagons and ambulances and five thousand stands of small arms, not that those latter are of much concern to us. Do you suppose you can keep his cavalry off General Sherman’s supply line much longer? Do you suppose Sherman can long survive with the railroads wrecked as Forrest’s men are in the habit of wrecking them?”

Lincoln bent his head, covered his face with his large, bony hands. “It is the end,” he said, his voice muffled. “I wish one of your rebels had shot me out there, so I should never have to live past this black day.”

“Don’t think of it so, Mr. President. Call it rather a new beginning,” Lee said. “The Confederate States never wanted more than to go their own way in peace and to live in peace with the United States.”

“No right cause impelled you to dissolve the Union, only fear—misguided fear, I might add—that I would act precipitately against slavery. I was willing to let it remain in place where it was and slowly to wither there.”

“Mr. President, I hold no brief for slavery, as you may know. But I do believe the rights of a state to be of higher importance than those of the Federal—or Confederate—government.”

“This war has undermined the powers of the separate states, North and South alike,” Lincoln said. “Both Washington and Richmond levy direct taxes and directly conscript men, no matter how the governors moan and bellow like branded calves. Can any separate state hope to resist their power? You know the answer as well as I.”

Lee stroked his beard. Lincoln had a point. Even his precious Virginia, by far the greatest of the Confederate states, followed first the will of the national government, then its own. He said, “I am but a soldier; let those wiser in such matters settle them as seems best.”

“If you were ‘but a soldier,’ General Lee, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking with each other right now.” Lincoln’s mouth twisted in that melancholy grin of his.” And I wish to thunder that we weren’t!” His gaze sharpened again. “Weren’t for those repeaters you’ve broken out with like a dog’s new spring fleas, I don’t think we would be, either. If I knew where you were getting ‘em, I’d buy a batch for my own side, I tell you that.”

“I believe you, Mr. President.” Lee meant it. Lincoln was an inventor of sorts; he’d once patented a device for getting riverboats across stretches of low water. Anyone in the North who came up with a new rifle or cartridge made a beeline for the White House, hoping to impress him with it. Lee went on carefully,” As for our new rifles, we do not import them from overseas. They come from within the Confederacy.”

“So say the rebels we’ve captured,” Lincoln answered. “I own I find it hard to credit. The rifles are better than any we make, and you Southerners haven’t a tithe of our factories. So how did you turn out so many so fast?”

“The how of it is not important, Mr. President.” Lee could not discuss the Rivington men and their secret with his nation’s chiefest enemy—with the man, indeed, who was his nation’s chiefest reason for existing. Oddly, though, he found he wanted to. Of all the men he’d met, Lincoln seemed least likely to call him a lunatic; the Federal President had a breadth of vision that might be wide enough to take in the notion of men corning back from 2014. Lee’s brows came together. Again, how could the man before him be capable of the outrages Andries Rhoodie ascribed to him? Lee shrugged. That how was not important, either. “What is important is that my men and I are here. As I said before, I believe we can stay here, and that other Confederate armies are likely to continue to win victories. Your war to subjugate the South has failed.”

“I will not give it up,” Lincoln said, stubborn still.

“Then the United States will give up on you,” Lee predicted. “But the choice is not altogether in your hands, sir. When I leave the White House, my next call will be at the British ministry, to pay my respects to Lord Lyons. Since I shall be in the position to do that, how can he fail to recognize the Confederate States as a nation which has succeeded in winning its independence?”

He did not say—he did not need to say—that if Great Britain recognized the Confederacy, France and the other European powers would surely follow her lead…and not even the stubbornest U.S. President could continue war on the Southern states in the face of that recognition.

Lincoln’s long, sad face grew longer and sadder. Even now, though, he refused to yield, saying, “Lord Lyons hates slavery. So do the British people.”

“Britain recognizes the Empire of Brazil, does she not, despite its being a slaveholding land? For that matter, Britain recognized the United States before the start of our unfortunate war, and does still, in spite of your continuing to hold slaves—last year’s Emancipation Proclamation was remarkably silent on the subject of Northern Negroes in bondage.”

Always sallow, Lincoln turned a couple of shades darker. “They are being attended to. Come victory, all in the United States would have been free.” He cocked his head at Lee. “And you have just claimed to be no great friend of slavery yourself, General.”

Lee lowered his eyes, acknowledging the hit. “The most I will say for it is that, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment, it may be the most practicable means for blacks and whites harmoniously to live together in this land.”

“It is an evil, sir, an unmitigated evil,” Lincoln said. “I shall never forget the group of chained Negroes I saw going down the river to be sold close to a quarter of a century ago. Never was there so much misery, all in one place. If your secession triumphs, the South will be a pariah among nations.”

“We shall be recognized as what we are, a nation among nations,” Lee returned.” And, let me repeat, my being here is a sign secession has triumphed. What I would seek to do now, subject to the ratification of my superiors, is suggest terms to halt the war between the United States and Confederate States.” Lincoln refused to call Lee’s country by its proper name. As a small measure of revenge, Lee put extra weight on that name.

Lincoln sighed. This was the moment he had tried to evade, but there was no evading it, not with the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia in his parlor. “Name your terms, General,” he said in a voice full of ashes.

“They are very simple, Mr. President: that Federal troops withdraw from such parts of the territory of the Confederate States as they now occupy. As soon as that is done—perhaps even while it is being done—we shall depart from Washington City, and U.S.A. and C.S.A. will be at peace.”

“Simple, eh?” Lincoln leaned forward in his chair, the picture of a man determined not to be cheated in a horse trade. “What about West Virginia?”

“That is a delicate area,” Lee admitted. When Virginia left the Union, its northern and western counties refused to go along; Federal guns had protected them in their secession from secession. Now the area was one of the United States in its own right. Lee could not doubt that was what the bulk of its people wanted, even if Virginia still claimed the territory. He countered, “What of Missouri and Kentucky?”

Both states sent representatives to the Confederate Congress as well as to Washington. Kentucky was the birth state of Lincoln and of Jefferson Davis, too, while Missouri’s civil war was as much neighbor against neighbor as North against South. Lincoln was right. Deciding borders wouldn’t be simple.

“Well, what about Missouri and Kentucky?” the Federal President said.” Asking me to leave the valley of the Mississippi, where we as yet remain supreme, is hard enough. But if you expect us to pull off our own soil so you can walk in, you can think again, sir. Emancipation is already far along there as well—you may not want those states, for you will have to fight a new war to restore their colored folk to servitude.”

It was Lee’s turn to sigh. That might be true wherever the Federal armies had gone. But it was a worry for politicians, and for the future. Now—”This sort of talk gets us nowhere, Mr. President, save to the spilling of more blood, which is what I now seek to prevent. Will you undertake to remove your soldiers from all disputed territory but those two states and what you people call West Virginia, with the status of those areas to be settled by negotiation at a later date?”

“Have you the authority to offer such terms?” Lincoln asked.

“No, sir,” Lee admitted at once. “As I said before, I shall have to submit them to Richmond for my President’s approval. I was speaking informally, in an effort to bring the fighting to a close as quickly as possible. If you could arrange to reconnect the telegraph lines between here and Richmond, you would be able to treat directly with President Davis, without my serving as intermediary.”

Lincoln waved a hand. “Reconnecting the telegraph’d be simple enough.” Lee knew that was so only for a nation with the abundant resources the United States enjoyed, but held his peace. Lincoln continued, “Still and all, I think I’d sooner talk with you. You have sense enough for a whole raft of Presidents, seems to me.” If he noticed he’d included himself there, he gave no sign of it.

“As you wish, Mr. President,” Lee said. “My feeling is, if the bloodshed once stops, we can then sit down across from one another at a table and settle these remaining issues. They may bulk large in your vision now, but they are of small importance when set beside the main question of the war, which is whether the South should be free and independent.”

“They look plenty big from over here, but then, what you rightly call the main question has been answered the wrong way.” Lincoln shook his head. “And now I have to make the best of it for my country. Very well, General Lee, if we cannot bring you back—and it seems we can’t—we shall have to learn to live alongside you. I’d sooner do that talking than shooting.”

“So would I, sir,” Lee said eagerly. “So would every soldier in the Confederate army, and, if I might make so bold as to speak for them, very likely the soldiers in your army as well.”

“You’re very likely right, General. How is it that soldiers are always so much more willing to pack in a war than civilians?”

“Because only soldiers actually fight,” Lee answered. “They understand how much of what is afterwards called glory is but memory trying to put a good face on terror and torment.”

“General Lee, I wish to heaven you’d chosen the Northern side,” Lincoln burst out. “You see clear enough to have won this war for us before the South ever started turning out these cursed repeating rifles that have sent so many of our lads to their graves too young.”

“Too many on both sides have gone to their graves too young,” Lee said. Lincoln nodded; at last the two men had found a point upon which they agreed without reservation. Lee stood to go. Lincoln rose from his chair in sections, like a carpenter’s fancy ruler unfolding. Looking up at him, Lee added, “It is decided, then? You will order an armistice and withdrawal on the terms I outlined?”

“I will.” Lincoln’s mouth twisted on the: words as if they were pickled in vinegar. “Would you be so kind as to put them in writing, to prevent any misunderstanding?”

Lee reached into his waistcoat pocket. “I have pen and paper, at least an order pad. May I trouble you for ink?” Lincoln waved him to a desk against the wall. He bent to use the inkwell, wrote rapidly. When he was done, he handed the pad to the President of the United States.

Lincoln read rapidly through the couple of paragraphs. “They are as you said, General. Will you be kind enough to lend me your pen?” He set his signature beside Lee’s. “Now let me have that second copy, if you please.”

Lee tore off the original, gave Lincoln the sheet below it. The Federal president folded it and put it away without looking at it, as if he had already seen more of the words on it than he cared to. Lee dipped his head to Lincoln. “If you will excuse me—?”

“You don’t need to wait on my leave,” Lincoln said with more than a little bitterness. “Conquerors, after all, do as they please.”

“History has never recorded any man less anxious to be noted as a conqueror than I.”

“Maybe so, but history will also note you are one.” Lee and Lincoln walked together to the door of the reception room. Lincoln opened it, gestured for Lee to precede him through. In the antechamber outside, Lee’s staff officers stood chatting amicably enough with a couple of bright-looking young men in civilian clothes. All heads turned toward the general and the President. No one spoke, but a single question was visible in the eyes of all. Lee answered it: “We shall have peace, gentlemen.”

His aides shouted and clapped their hands. The two men in civilian suits also smiled, but more hesitantly. Their gaze swung to Lincoln. “I see no good prospects remaining for the continuation of this war,” he said. Where to Lee that was a matter for rejoicing, Lincoln sounded funereal. Lee imagined what he would have felt, presenting his sword to General Grant in a conquered Richmond. In deliberately lighter tones, Lincoln continued, “General Lee, let me present my secretaries, Mr. John Hay and Mr. John Nicolay: They’re good lads; they should enjoy the privilege of meeting the latest hero.”

“Hardly that,” Lee protested. He shook each secretary’s hand. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, gentlemen.”

“Pleased to meet you, too, General Lee, but I’d sooner have done it under different circumstances,” Hay said boldly.

“Now see here, sir—” Walter Taylor began.

Lee held up a hand to head off his aide’s anger. “Let him speak as he will, Major. Would you wish otherwise, were your cause overthrown?”

“I suppose not,” Taylor said grudgingly.

“There you are, then.” Lee turned back to Lincoln. “Mr. President, if you will excuse me, I should like to give the good news of our”—he searched for the least wounding way to put it—”our agreement that there should be an armistice to the brave men who have borne so much these past three years.”

“I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” Lincoln said. “If this thing must be, we ought to put the best face we can on it and let them see us in accord.” Surprised but pleased, Lee nodded.

The crowd of ragged Confederates on the White House lawn had doubled and more since he went in to confer with Lincoln. The trees were full of men who had climbed up so they could see over their comrades. Off in the distance, cannon still occasionally thundered; rifles popped like firecrackers. Lee quietly said to Lincoln, “Will you send out your sentries under flag of truce to bring word of the armistice to those Federal positions still firing upon my men?”

“I’ll see to it,” Lincoln promised. He pointed to the soldiers in gray, who had quieted expectantly when Lee came out. “Looks like you’ve given me sentries enough, even if their coats are the wrong color.”

Few men could have joked so with their cause in ruins around them. Respecting the Federal President for his composure, Lee raised his voice: “Soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, after three years of arduous service, we have achieved that for which we took up arms—”

He got no farther. With one voice, the men before him screamed out their joy and relief. The unending waves of noise beat at him like surf from a stormy sea. Battered forage caps and slouch hats flew through the air. Soldiers jumped up and down, pounded on one another’s shoulders, danced in clumsy rings, kissed each other’s bearded, filthy faces. Lee felt his own eyes grow moist. At last the magnitude of what he had won began to sink in.

Abraham Lincoln turned away from the celebrating rebels. Lee saw that his hollow cheeks were also wet. He set a hand on Lincoln’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. Perhaps you should not have come out after all.”

“You don’t suppose I’d’ve heard them in there?” Lincoln asked.

Lee sought a reply, found none. He looked to the bottom of the steps, where Traveller remained calm in the midst of chaos. With a last nod to Lincoln, he went down the stairway to his horse. As he’d told the U.S. President, he had another call to make in Washington.

Neither the Stars and Stripes nor the Confederacy’s Stainless Banner flew over the building up to which Lee rode. No soldiers crowded in front of it to gape and point save the few who had followed him through the streets of the city, and they were gaping and pointing at him rather than his destination. Nevertheless, after the White House, this nondescript, two-story structure with the Union Jack on the roof was the most important place in the city for the South.

He walked up the slate pathway to the front door, rapped once on the polished brass knocker, and waited. Over the British ministry, he had not even the rights of a conqueror. His staff officers dismounted from their horses but did not presume to follow him, not here.

The door opened. An elderly, very bald man in formal attire peered out at him. “You would be General Lee?” he asked. His accent was soft in a way different from Lee’s Virginia speech.

“I am he,” Lee said, bowing. “I should like to pay my respects to Lord Lyons, if I may.”

“He has been expecting you, sir,” the elderly man said. “If you will come with me—?”

He led Lee down a long hall, past several chambers where clerks’ heads came up from their papers so they could stare at him, then into a sitting room. “Your excellency, the famous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. General, Lord Richard Lyons.”

“Thank you, Hignett. You may go.” The British Minister to the United States got up from his overstuffed armchair.

Lee already had his hand out. “I am delighted to meet you at last, your excellency,” he said sincerely. The South had been struggling to win British recognition since before the war with the Union began.

“General Lee,” Lord Lyons murmured. He was in his late forties, with a round, very red face, dark hair and side whiskers, and almost equally dark circles under his eyes. An elegantly tailored suit came close to disguising his plumpness. “Please make yourself comfortable, General. You are indeed the man of the moment.”

“Thank you, your excellency.” Lee sat in a chair not far from the one from which Lord Lyons had risen. “As I have, ah, come to Washington City, I thought it fitting that I pay my respects to you, since your government has no present minister in Richmond.”

Lord Lyons steepled his fingertips.” A state of affairs you hope will change.”

“I do, your excellency. Either the Confederate States of America are an independent nation, or they are but a dependency of the United States. No other earthly power claims the right to govern us, and my presence here argues against the second interpretation of our status that I mentioned.”

“Argues powerfully, you are too discreet to say. Am I correctly informed that you visited President Lincoln before you came here?”

“Yes, your excellency.” Lee concealed his surprise, and after a moment realized surprise was foolish. It was the business of the British minister to be well informed.

“May I enquire as to the results of that meeting?” Lord Lyons said. Lee briefly sketched the terms of the armistice agreement with Lincoln. Lord Lyons listened intently. When Lee was done, the minister gave a slow nod. “He has in effect, then, conceded the independence of the Confederacy.”

“In effect, yes. What choice had he, sir? Our armies have in the current campaigning season been uniformly victorious”

“This due in no small measure to the new repeaters with which you have equipped yourselves,” Lord Lyons interrupted. He could not hide the keen interest in his voice. Behind a calm exterior, Lee smiled. Everyone was keen to find out where those repeaters came from. He wondered what Lord Lyons would have made of the true answer. He remained unsure just what to make of it himself.

But that was by the way. “Yes, your excellency, with the aid of our new rifles, we have halted or driven back the Federals on all fronts—else I should not be here conversing with you. President Lincoln rightly recognized”—he chose the word with deliberation—”that it would be only a matter of time before we freed our territory and wisely chose to spare his soldiers the suffering they would have to undergo in struggles bound to be futile.”

“With these victories to which you refer, the Confederate States do seem to have retrieved their falling fortunes,” Lord Lyons said. “I have no reason to doubt that Her Majesty’s government will before long recognize that fact.”

“Thank you, your excellency,” Lee said quietly. Even had Lincoln refused to give up the war—not impossible, with the Mississippi valley and many coastal pockets held by virtue of Northern naval power and hence relatively secure from rebel AK-47s—recognition by the greatest empire on earth would have assured Confederate independence.

Lord Lyons held up a hand. “Many among our upper classes will be glad enough to welcome you to the family of nations, both as a result of your successful fight for self-government and because you have given a black eye to the often vulgar democracy of the United States. Others, however, will judge your republic a sham, with its freedom for white men based upon Negro slavery, a notion loathsome to the civilized world. I should be less than candid if I failed to number myself among the latter group.”

“Slavery was not the reason the Southern states chose to leave the Union,” Lee said. He was aware he sounded uncomfortable, but went on, “We sought only to enjoy the sovereignty guaranteed us under the Constitution, a right the North wrongly denied us. Our watchword all along has been, we wish but to be left alone.”

“And what sort of country shall you build upon that watchword, General?” Lord Lyons asked. “You cannot be left entirely alone; you are become, as I said, a member of the family ‘of nations. Further, this war has been hard on you. Much of your land has been ravaged or overrun, and, in those places where the Federal army has been, slavery lies dying. Shall you restore it there at the point of a bayonet? Gladstone said October before last, perhaps a bit prematurely, that your Jefferson Davis had made an army, the beginnings of a navy, and, more important than either, a nation. You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?”

Lee did not answer for most of a minute. This pudgy little man in his comfortable chair had put into a nutshell all of his own worries and fears. He’d had scant time to dwell on them, not with the war always uppermost in his thoughts. But the war had not invalidated any of the British minister’s questions—some of which Lincoln had also asked—only put off the time at which they would have to be answered. Now that time drew near. Now that the Confederacy was a nation, what sort of nation would it be?

At last he said, “Your excellency, at this precise instant I cannot fully answer you, save to say that, whatever sort of nation we become, it shall be one of our own choosing.”

It was a good answer. Lord Lyons nodded, as if in thoughtful approval. Then Lee remembered the Rivington men. They too had their ideas on what the Confederate States of America should become.