“We have tacitly recognized this change, in that many blacks who escaped from bondage during the upheavals of the Second American Revolution remain at liberty, not least, perhaps, because, once having tasted freedom, they can no longer safely be returned to servitude. Further, during the war several states relaxed restrictions on what the Negro might be taught, the better to benefit from his intelligent exertions. Once having taught him, one may no longer demand that he subsequently forget.
“Yet if the Negro may learn, if he will take up arms in his own defense; if in our hour of peril we contemplated his taking up arms in our defense, where is the justice in leaving him in chains? To do so but exacerbates the risk of servile rebellion and gives our enemies a dagger pointed straight at our hearts. I submit to you, my friends, that emancipation, however distasteful it may appear, exists de facto in large stretches of our territory; gradually acknowledging it de jure will allow us to control its impact upon our nation and will shield us against the excesses we all fear.
“Gentlemen of the Congress, rest assured I do not lightly urge upon you the provisions of the legislation whose introduction I have proposed. I truly believe these provisions shall prove to be in the best interest of the Confederate States of America in the long run, and request of you their passage. The world will little note nor long remember what I say here, but it can never forget what you do here. Let our descendants say that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and let them say that it began here today. I thank you.”
He stepped away from the podium. The applause that followed was more than polite, less than warm. He wondered how much of it he would have kept had the Confederate Congress known he was borrowing words from one of Abraham Lincoln’s memorial addresses. By all accounts, Lincoln’s little speech at Gettysburg had become famous in the world wherein the South’s independence had been crushed. Here in the real world, Lincoln and all he stood for were discredited, his words, no doubt, doomed to obscurity forever. Lee had read through that Gettysburg speech at least a dozen times. He thought it deserved to live.
Louis T. Wigfall got to his feet. “Mr. Speaker!” he boomed.
“Senator Wigfall?” Thomas Bocock responded as he resumed his customary place of honor.
“Mr. Speaker, I desire to say a few words in respectful opposition to—”
Bocock’s gavel came down on the rostrum with three sharp cracks, cutting through the building spate. “The honorable gentleman is not recognized. He will please recall that we are met in special joint session for the specific purpose of hearing President Lee’s address. He will, I am certain, have adequate opportunity to express his opinion of the measures proposed in that address when in deliberation within the confines of the senate chamber.”
Wigfall tried to go on with his speech anyhow; the Speaker of the House gaveled him down. At last, red-faced and sullen, he sat. Lee stared stonily at him. He might not have made his speech, but he had made his point.
Lee’s shoulders shifted slightly as he stifled a sigh. If not even the acknowledged voice of the future convinced some people of the folly of their chosen course, what could? Nothing was the answer that immediately sprang to mind. He hoped with all his heart such stubborn souls made up only a minority of the Congress.
A deep-toned whistle in the air, not a bird—”Mortar!” Nate Caudell yelled, along with twenty others. He dove into a deep bombproof, a timber-reinforced hole dug into the front wall of the trench. He landed on top of someone. Two more men jumped in on top of him.
The mortar shell burst less than a hundred yards behind him, hl the second line of trenches. Dirt fountained skyward; a clod found the bombproof opening and hit him in the back of the neck. Half a minute later, another round whistled past overhead, this one, by the sound, destined for some far more distant target.
The four men who’d taken shelter in the bombproof crawled out—no one could stand inside—made foredoomed efforts to brush themselves clean. Caudell also rubbed bruised ribs. Be glared about a quarter seriously at Dempsey Eure. “That’s the second time you landed on me the past two days. I’m starting to think you’re more dangerous than any damned mortar bomb.”
“Long as the Rivington men think the same way,” Eure answered with a chuckle.
“How many of them have you landed on?” Caudell asked darkly.
His friend said, “Reckon I’ll have my chance soon enough—if Henry ever gets that tunnel of his finished. He diggin’ under them guns up there, or is he headin’ all the way to China?”
The three weeks to a month Pleasants had promised to Nathan Bedford Forrest had already stretched into a month and a half. Proper tools and experienced diggers were in shorter supply in North Carolina than he’d imagined. Caudell had crawled down the tunnel himself a couple of times, carrying boards through blackness toward a flickering candle flame that gave a man with a pick a tiny dollop of light by which to work. He wanted to kiss the dry wash when he emerged, and marveled that some men endured a lifetime down in the mines.
Another mortar bomb went sailing off into the Confederates’ rear…Good thing they don’t seem to have a whole lot of shells for that beast,” he said. “It reaches almost all the way back to Nashville.”
Dempsey Eure nodded. “I was listenin’ to some artillerymen talkin’, and they say it’s got more range’n one of our hundred-pounder coast defense guns. Be switched if I know how the Rivington men do it.”
“Same way they do the AK-47s, I reckon.”
“Whatever that is.”
Caudell shrugged. Same way they get books full of photographs—and colored ones at that, he thought. Same way they get books printed in…was it 1996? He’d never spoken to anyone but Mollie about the Picture History of the Civil War she’d stolen. Who would believe him? He wasn’t always sure he believed himself. But getting back in the trenches against the endless repeater and the long-range mortar had undermined his doubts as surely as Henry Pleasants was undermining the bastion up ahead. He’d come to take the AK-47 for granted, but those other weapons reminded him afresh that they did not belong to 1868. They were also one more reason the tunnel was running late.
Captain Lewis walked down the wash. He dipped his head to Caudell and Eure. “Much to my surprise, it’s done at last,” he said. He sounded annoyed whenever he mentioned the tunnel; seeing Pleasants promoted from private to colonel in one fell swoop still rankled.
“We’ve been ready awhile now, sir,” Caudell said. He waved to the sets of packed-earth steps that led up from the bottom of the wash to the parapet. Excavating a hundred-yard shaft produced a lot of dirt. It had to go somewhere inconspicuous to keep the Rivington men from spotting it and figuring out its source. The steps served that purpose and, when the moment came, would also let the Confederate soldiers quickly go over to the attack.
“Pleasants will touch off the charge at sunrise tomorrow, or is supposed to, at any rate,” Lewis said. “Assuming it goes off, you know your orders?”
“Yes, sir,” Caudell and Dempsey Eure said together. Eure amplified: “Soon as it blows, we go over. We head straight for Rivington, and we don’t stop for nothin’.” The orders had come straight from Forrest and were imbued with his driving energy.
“That’s it,” Lewis agreed. “If it turns out to be that simple, we can get down on our knees and thank God the next time we go to church, But the general’s right—the first strike has to be right for the heart. The troops behind us can fan out and take whatever strongpoints are left from the flank and rear.”