The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln Part 80

"No--you had to do it."

"Grant then," the persuasive voice went on, "that I have treated you unfairly, that I had personal feelings. Surely you should in this hour of my reckoning, this hour of my Golgotha, when I climb the hill alone and ask the man I have wronged to take my place--surely you should be content with my humiliation? I shall not hesitate to proclaim it from the housetop when I ask for your election. If I have wronged you, my anguish could not be more pitifully complete! Will you do as I ask, and a.s.sure the safety of our country?"

"I'll do my best to save my country," was the slow, firm answer, "but in my own way."

The General rose, bowed stiffly and left the President standing in sorrowful silence, his deep eyes staring into s.p.a.ce and seeing nothing.

On the morning of July 1st the two armies were rapidly approaching each other, marching in parallel lines stretched over a vast distance--the extreme wings more than forty miles apart.

Buford, commanding the advance guard of the Union army, struck Hill's division of the Confederates before the town of Gettysburg and the first gun of the great battle echoed over the green hills and valleys of Pennsylvania.

The President caught the flash of the shock from the telegraph wires with a sense of sickening dread. The rear guard of his army was yet forty miles away. What might happen before they were in line G.o.d alone could tell. He could not know, of course, that but twenty-two thousand Confederates had reached the field and stood confronting twenty-four thousand under John F. Reynolds, one of the ablest and bravest generals of the Union army.

Through every hour of this awful day he sat in the telegraph office of the War Department and read with bated breath the news.

The brief reports were not rea.s.suring. The battle was raging with unparalleled fury. At ten o'clock General Reynolds fell dead from his horse in front of his men, and when the news was flashed to Meade he sent Hanc.o.c.k forward riding at full speed to take command.

The President read the message announcing Reynolds' death with quivering lip. He put his big hand blindly over his heart as if about to faint.

At three o'clock the smoke which had enveloped the battle line was lifted by a breeze as Hanc.o.c.k dashed on the field. He had not arrived a moment too soon. His superb bearing on his magnificent horse, his shouts of confidence, his promise of heavy reinforcements, stayed the tide of retreat and brought order out of chaos.

The day had been won again by Lee's apparently invincible men. They had driven the Union army from their line a mile in front of Gettysburg back through the town and beyond it, captured the town, taken five thousand men in blue prisoners with two generals, besides inflicting a loss of three thousand killed and wounded, including among the dead the gallant and popular commander, John F. Reynolds.

When this message reached the President late at night he had eaten nothing since breakfast. He rose from his seat in the telegraph office and walked from the building alone in silence. His step was slow, trance-like, and uncertain as if he were only half awake or had risen walking in his sleep.

He went to his bedroom, locked the door and fell on his knees in prayer.

Hour after hour he wrestled alone with G.o.d in the darkness, while his tired army rushed through the night to plant themselves on the Heights beyond Gettysburg, before Lee's men could be concentrated to forestall them.

Over and over again, through sombre eyes that streamed with tears, the pa.s.sionate cry was wrung from his heart:

"Lord G.o.d of our fathers, have mercy on us! I have tried to make this war yours--our cause yours--if I have sinned and come short, forgive! We cannot endure another Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville. Into thy hands, O Lord, I give our men and our country this night--save them!"

CHAPTER x.x.x

SUNSHINE AND STORM

When the sun rose over Gettysburg on the second day of July, the Union army, rushing breathlessly through the night to the rescue of its defeated advance corps, had reached the heights beyond the town. Before Longstreet had attempted to obey Lee's command to take these hills, General Meade's blue host had reached them and were entrenching themselves.

The Confederate Commander discovered that in the death of Jackson, he had lost his right arm.

It was one o'clock before Longstreet moved to the attack, hurling his columns in reckless daring against these bristling heights. When darkness drew its kindly veil over the scene, Lee's army had driven General Sickles from his chosen position to his second line of defense on the hill behind, gained a foothold in the famous Devil's Den at the base of the Round Tops, broken the lines of the Union right and held their fortifications on Culp's Hill.

The day had been one of frightful slaughter.

The Union losses in the two days had reached the appalling total of more than twenty thousand men. Lee had lost fifteen thousand.

The brilliant July moon rose and flooded this field of blood and death with silent glory. From every nook and corner, from every shadow and across every open s.p.a.ce, through the hot breath of the night, came the moans of thousands, and louder than all the long agonizing cries for water. Many a man in grey crawled over the ragged rocks to press his canteen to the lips of his dying enemy in blue, and many a boy in blue did as much for the man in grey.

Fifteen thousand wounded men lay there through the long black hours.

At ten o'clock a wounded Christian soldier began to sing one of the old, sweet hymns of faith, whose words have come ringing down the ages wet with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices of blue and grey, some of them quivering with the agony of death, had joined. For two hours the woods and hills rang with the songs of these wounded men.

All through this pitiful music the Confederates were ma.s.sing their artillery on Seminary Ridge, replacing their wounded horses and refilling their ammunition chests.

The Union army were burrowing like moles and planting their terrible batteries on the brows of the hills beyond the town.

At Lee's council of war that night Longstreet advised his withdrawal from Gettysburg into a more favorable position in the mountains. But the Confederate Commander, reinforced now by the arrival of Pickett's division of fifteen thousand men and Stuart's cavalry, determined to renew the battle.

At the first grey streak of dawn on the 3rd the Federal guns roared their challenge to the Confederate forces which had captured their entrenchments on Culp's Hill. Seven terrible hours of bombardment, charge and counter charge followed until every foot of s.p.a.ce had claimed its toll of dead, before the Confederates yielded the Hill.

At noon there was an ominous lull in the battle. At one o'clock a puff of smoke from Seminary Ridge was followed by a dull roar. The signal gun had pealed its call of death to thousands. For two miles along the crest of this Ridge the Confederates had planted one hundred and fifty guns.

Two miles of smoke-wreathed flame suddenly leaped from those hills in a single fiery breath.

The longer line of big Federal guns on Seminary Ridge were silent for a few minutes and then answered gun for gun until the heavens were transformed into a roaring h.e.l.l of bursting, screaming, flaming sh.e.l.ls.

For two hours the earth trembled beneath the shock of these volcanoes, and then the two storms died slowly away and the smoke began to lift.

An ominous sign. The grey infantry were deploying in line under Pickett to charge the heights of Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand gallant men against an impregnable hill held by seventy thousand intrenched soldiers, backed by the deadliest and most powerful artillery.

They swept now into the field before the Heights, their bands playing as if on parade--their grey ranks dressed on their colors. Down the slope across the plain and up the hill the waves rolled, their thinning ranks closing the wide gaps torn each moment by the fiery sleet of iron and lead.

A handful of them lived to reach the Union lines on those heights.

Armistead, with a hundred men, broke through and lifted his battle flag for a moment over a Federal battery, and fell mortally wounded.

And then the shattered grey wave broke into a spray of blood and slowly ebbed down the hill. The battle of Gettysburg had ended.

For the first time the blue Army of the Potomac had won a genuine victory. It had been gained at a frightful cost, but no price was too high to pay for such a victory. It had saved the Capital of the Nation.

The Union army had lost twenty-three thousand men, the Confederate twenty thousand. Meade had lost seventeen of his generals, and Lee, fourteen.

When the thrilling news from the front reached Washington on July 4th, the President lifted his big hands above his head and cried to the crowd of excited men who thronged the Executive office:

"Unto G.o.d we give all the praise!"

None of those present knew the soul significance of that sentence as it fell from his trembling lips. He seated himself at his desk and quickly wrote a brief proclamation of thanks to Almighty G.o.d, which he telegraphed to the Governor of each Union State, requesting them to repeat it to their people.

While the North was still quivering with joy over the turn of the tide at Gettysburg, Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, hurried into the President's office and handed him a dispatch from the gunboat under Admiral Porter cooperating with General Grant announcing the fall of Vicksburg, the surrender of thirty-five thousand Confederate soldiers of its garrison, and the opening of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

The President seized his hat, his dark face shining with joy:

"I will telegraph the news to General Meade myself!"

He stopped suddenly and threw his long arms around Welles:

"What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!"