"You would deliberately split the party?" It was half a gasp from Hannibal Hamlin, half a wheeze.
"No, I would not," Lincoln answered. "But I will."
"If you try, we shall read you out and pretend you were never in," Butler said. "The way the Democrats have campaigned against you ever since the War of Secession, we might be better off reading you out."
"An ostrich may bury its head in the sand and pretend the lion is not there," Lincoln said. "Will that keep the lion from enjoying a supper of ostrich?"
Butler got to his feet. Since he was short and squat, drawing himself up to his full height was less impressive than it might have been otherwise, but he did his best. "I think we have heard enough," he said. "Thank you for inviting us here, Mr. Lincoln. I expect each of us can find his own way out, his own way back to his hotel, and his own way home."
One by one, the Republican leaders filed past Lincoln and toward the door. As John Hay went by, the ex-president softly asked, "Et tu, John?"
"Et ego, Mr. Lincoln." Hay's voice was sad, but it was firm. Like the others, even Frederick Douglass, he left without a backwards glance.
Lincoln stood all alone in the room poor men had built so rich men might confer in it. "Labour first," he said, as he had so many times. "Labour first, then capital. If they cannot remember that on their own, I shall make certain they are reminded of it." And he left, too, his back straight, his stride determined. He had been a Whig. He was-no, he had been-a Republican. Now…
"They have lost the war," General Thomas Jackson told Major General E. Porter Alexander. "If they cannot realize that on their own, I shall make certain they are reminded of it."
"Yes, sir." Alexander was not a young man, but retained a large measure of boyish enthusiasm. "President Longstreet's tried to make 'em take their medicine. If they won't open their mouth, we'll just have to yank it open and shove the pill down their throats whether they like it or not."
"Well put." Jackson studied the dispositions on the map. "Everything appears to be in readiness."
"Everything on my end is, sir," his chief artillerist answered. "The guns await only your order to begin."
"Tomorrow morning at half past five," Jackson said. "The end of the day, if God grant victory on our arms, should see the removal from our soil of more than half the Yankees now infesting it."
"Here's hoping you're right, sir," General Alexander said. "And if you are, I'm damned if I can see how they'll be able to go on fighting after that."
"Do not speak so lightly of damnation." Jackson put a rumble of reproof in his voice. "To tell the truth, though, I cannot see how they have gone on fighting so long when so little has gone right for them. Much as I hate to say it, they are braver than I reckoned."
"Hasn't done 'em much good, and that's what counts," Alexander answered.
Absently, Jackson nodded. "Courage and the goodness of one's cause, unfortunately, do not always go hand in hand."
"Yes, sir, that's a fact." His artillery chief nodded, too. "If Douglass taught us anything, he taught us that." Alexander's chuckle had a slight nervous edge. "And, looking out of the other side of the mirror, he learned the same thing from us, I reckon."
"Goodness does not depend on the position from which one observes it," Jackson said sternly. "Goodness is." He sounded very certain. He was very certain. Even so, he did his best not to think about Frederick Douglass. He also noticed that E. Porter Alexander didn't reply, which might well have meant Alexander, too, carefully wasn't thinking about the Negro.
He went to bed that night with the rattle and bang of rifle fire from the trenches in Louisville and to the east of the city and the occasional rumble of artillery in his ears. Everything sounded as it had since the U.S. flank attack bogged down. Thus lulled, he fell asleep almost as soon as he finished his prayers. Neither too much noise nor too little would give the Yankees anything out of the ordinary with which to concern themselves.
An orderly shook him awake with the words, "Half past three, sir, like you ordered."
Yawning, Jackson got into his boots and stuck his hat on his head. The orderly gave him a big tin cup full of coffee strong enough to try to climb over the rim. The handle burned his fingers. The coffee burned his mouth when he gulped it down. "Ahh," he said-a gasp of approval. "I'm ready. Now off to meet up with General Alexander."
He reached the artillerist, at batteries east of Louisville that had come to Kentucky gun by gun from all over the CSA, about half an hour before the show was scheduled to begin. "Good to see you, sir," Alexander said, saluting. In the dim gray of early dawn, he seemed as much a ghost as a man. "Everything is ready. We await only the hour."
"As it should be," Jackson said. Every so often, he would hold his watch next to a lantern. Time moved more slowly than it had any business doing. He'd seen that before. It always bemused him. At last, a little after he could see the time without putting the watch up to the light, he said, "The hour is come."
As if his words had been a signal, a great bellow of artillery rose west of him: all the guns that had defended Louisville against the flanking attack now sent their full fury against the line upon which they had halted the U.S. forces. The flashes from their muzzles lit up the horizon, as if the sun were rising from the wrong direction.
E. Porter Alexander beamed. "Isn't it bully, sir?"
In searching for a description, Jackson would sooner have found one in the Book of Revelations. Even so, he did not reprove his gayer subordinate. "It will do, General. It will do."
U.S. artillery, both in the salient east of Louisville and on the far side of the Ohio, was quick to respond. All through the fight for Louisville, the U.S. cannon had given Jackson more worry than anything else. The United States had brought a lot of guns into the fight, and handled them well. Their artillerymen might lack Porter's imagination, but they were solid professionals. Their shells would punish the Confederate entrenchments.
In spite of that countcrfire, the C.S. soldiers in those entrenchments opened up on the Yankees in front of them with their Trede-gars: a hailstone-on-tin-roof accompaniment to the big guns' thunder. Jackson was sure Rebel yells rang out all along the line as the Confederates there went over to the attack, but the roar of the guns drowned them.
"I pity those poor fellows," Alexander said. "They can't possibly break through, and they'll pay a stiff price for trying."
"It is the price of victory," Jackson said in a voice like iron. His chief artillerist grimaced, but finally nodded.
The sun rose. Jackson waited, still as a statue, while messengers brought word of the fighting to the west. As General Alexander had predicted, the U.S. position facing Louisville was more than strong enough to keep the attacking Confederates from doing much past getting into the first couple of lines of trenches. Jackson had hoped for more, but he had not really expected it.
An hour passed. Turning to Alexander, he asked, "Do you think they are fully engaged, reserves coming up, all their eyes turned on the fight right in front of them?"
"Sir, if they're not, they never will be," Alexander replied. With a faint hint of scorn, he added, "They have so much trouble seeing what's right in front of their noses, they sure as the devil aren't going to look any further."
Jackson considered. From the outset, he had held this moment in his hands and his hands alone. He stared eastward. His nostrils flared, like a wolf's when it takes a scent. He nodded, a sharp, almost involuntary motion. "Let it begin," he said.