The Lost Gettysburg Address (14 page)

Anderson’s friends in San Antonio knew that he would rather die
than be away from his family for the course of the war, however long
that might be, so they began conducting secret meetings to affect his
liberation. It was a dangerous business. The escape plan they settled
on involved three unlikely accomplices:
Ann S. Ludlum,
Jean-Charles
Houzeau de Lehaie, and
William Bayard.

Ludlum was a forty-nine-year-old widow of humble means.
Born Ann Manson in Baltimore, she married her first husband, a
man named Barry, sometime before 1836. After his death, she wed
Cincinnati house painter Wesley Ludlum and lived for many years in
the Buckeye State. She moved to New Orleans with her husband and
family around 1850, where he died a few years later. By 1860, Ann
Ludlum had divorced her third husband, Joseph Coker, and was
running a small boardinghouse on the Goliad Road just north of
downtown San Antonio. Ludlum barely knew the Andersons. In fact, she
had made her first visit to their home just weeks before the family’s
hasty departure. She was unhappy that her eldest son, Thomas H.
Barry, had ignored her wishes and had run off to Houston to enlist
in the Confederate Army. Ludlum knew that she ran a terrible risk
in even talking about springing Charles Anderson from the military
camp, but she was a dedicated Union woman and had to do something.
She devised the plan.
³

One of the renters at the Ludlum boardinghouse was an eccentric,
brilliant Belgian astronomer named
Jean-Charles Houzeau de Lehaie.
The forty-one-year-old Houzeau, as he preferred to be called, was
born in the small city of Havre, near Mons. His distinguished career
as the director of the Brussels observatory was cut short after he aired
his strong political views once too often and was dismissed from his
job. His interest in geology led him to Texas, where he settled in
Uvalde and organized scientific expeditions to the borders of Indian
country. Indian attacks forced Houzeau to abandon his fossils and
cherished books and flee to Austin, just as Texas was seceding. Local
leaders needed intelligent recruits and offered Houzeau a commission
in the Confederate Army. He refused, saying that he “would sooner
cut off [his] right hand than serve that cause.” Houzeau was a radical
abolitionist and decided that San Antonio, with its large contingent
of Union supporters, might afford him a safer haven. Naturally, this
Renaissance man had become a fast friend of Anderson, whose interests
in all things scientific knew no bounds.
⁴

The third conspirator in the planning of Anderson’s escape was a
little-known visitor with important family connections. Twenty-year-old
William Bayard was born in New York to a wealthy family with a
rich military pedigree. He had been living with his uncle, Dr. J. Yellot
Dashiell, since the summer of 1860. Dashiell was not only a wealthy
stock raiser but an important town leader who had been mayor of San
Antonio. He became adjutant general of Texas during the rebellion.
Dashiell’s daughter was married to Confederate Captain William T.
Mechling, the Confederate officer holding Anderson at Camp Van
Dorn. When the war broke out, Bayard declared his Union sympathies
and was placed under a sort of house arrest by his cousins. Later
he was transferred to the same camp that held Anderson. The two
became friends. One day over backgammon, Anderson proposed that
Bayard join him in an escape. He readily agreed. With Anderson’s
young friend on board, the three schemers then resolved to put an
escape plan into action.
⁵

The first step was communicating the plan details to Anderson.
Ludlum decided to trust her neighbor, twenty-six-year-old German
saloon keeper
Charles Kreische, with this mission. Kreische and
many of his German friends were in sympathy with the Union cause.
Although not privy to the specifics of the plan, he agreed to pass
a coded letter to the prisoner in camp. Kreische and Anderson discussed
the philosophy of Kant for a time before the two settled into a
game of backgammon. While the guard was busy polishing his saber,
Kreische passed the note to Anderson and left at the conclusion of
the game. Anderson read the letter, memorized the details, and
destroyed it. The plot was simple but dangerous.
⁶
Anderson was
instructed to leave on the first cloudy night of that week and make his
way to Ludlum’s house, where horses and supplies would be waiting
for him. He intended to stay secreted at the boardinghouse for two
or three weeks. When the excitement surrounding his escape died
down, Anderson would depart to meet Bayard down the road in their
mutual escape to Mexico.

If Anderson assented to this plan, he was to exit the tent and bow
three times. He waited several minutes after Kreische left his tent,
then walked out into the yard. He looked at the sky as if examining
the weather, stroked his beard and lowered his head. He paced and
bowed inconspicuously, repeating this slow and seemingly innocent
behavior two more times. Then he walked back inside the tent, taking
care not to look away at any time. Bayard observed the signal and
the game was on.

One clear night followed another. The conspirators grew anxious.
Kitty Anderson’s fiancé,
Will Jones, passed the tent one morning and,
when the guard was not looking, tossed a satchel into Anderson’s
study. The purse contained several hundred dollars. The money was
collected by Jones from his fellow officer prisoners. Anderson stashed
the money and a pair of shoes in a hole under his bed and awaited
a change in the weather. His asthma had returned, though not in as
serious a form as he had led his captors to believe. The illness gave
Anderson the excuse to opt out of the nightly games he had been
playing with some of his guards and focus on planning his escape. He sent
money to Dr. Ferdinand Herff one day to secure some stramonium,
more popularly known as “Jamestown weed.” He often smoked the
plant to relieve his symptoms and help him sleep. A strong narcotic,
stramonium is lethal in large doses.

On the first cloudy afternoon of that week, Anderson approached
Captain Mechling with a request. He told the captain that he was
supposed to take only small puffs of the intense weed, but that he
had smoked an entire pipe full in his desire to get a good night’s rest.
He asked Mechling to let him sleep undisturbed if he was not up
by breakfast. The captain honored the request. Anderson placed his
boots outside to be blackened as he had done every night during his
confinement, and he retired for the evening.

Anderson waited until everyone in camp was asleep except the
guards. He slipped unseen into his study tent with his shoes, money,
and little else. When the sentry passed to the side of Anderson’s
bedroom, Charles crept out under the tent wall of the study. Clouds and
rain blotted out the stars and most of the light from the half moon.
Anderson was thankful for the darkness but afraid of losing his
bearings. As he sneaked away from the Confederate soldiers, he paused
each time the lightning flashed, hoping to catch a brief view of his
surroundings. Soon he was completely lost. After wandering for a
few hours, Anderson saw some lights and decided to approach them
so as to determine his position. As he walked toward the illumination,
a sentinel challenged him. Anderson remembered that the only
other brigade encamped nearby was that of
General Henry B. Sibley.
Sibley’s troops were stationed on the Salado River, preparing for a
campaign into New Mexico territory. Some of these troops would
ultimately clash with forces commanded by Anderson’s son Latham
at the Battle of Val Verde.

Maintaining his composure, Anderson answered the sentry, stating
that he had important business with Sibley and asking for directions
to his tent. The ruse worked, and Anderson walked calmly in that
direction. As soon as he was out of the guard’s sight, Anderson
quickened his pace and headed for the river. After struggling for countless
minutes while wading away from Sibley’s camp in water up to his
neck, Anderson heard the drums beat a general alarm. Since he had
failed to show up at Sibley’s tent, he was now being hunted. On and
on Anderson walked through the driving rain, his cheap, borrowed
shoes disintegrating in the process. His feet and hands were bleeding
from encounters with the briars and brambles of his trackless flight.
The featureless landscape and poor visibility led him to crawl on his
hands and knees at various points, trying to feel for a road or a way
marker of some kind.

Anderson had been stumbling along until well after midnight when
he found himself at the old powder house on the outskirts of town.
This was good news. He was in widow
Ludlum’s neighborhood.
Unfortunately he had never been to the house, so he was unsure
precisely which of the nearby dwellings was hers. Finding a small abode
that seemed to match the description, he took a chance and crept
into the courtyard. He saw two horses that appeared out of place in
such a small enclosure. He suspected that he was at the right address.
Houzeau and Ludlum had been ready for several nights to receive
their secret guest. The scientist placed a large book on his bedroom
windowsill each evening. Anderson pushed the window open as instructed,
and the book fell to the floor. Houzeau sprung from his bed
and was dressed in sixty seconds. He went into the courtyard and felt
for Anderson’s hand in the gloaming predawn darkness.

“He is here, he is here,” Houzeau whispered to awaken Ludlum,
“and he wants to leave.” The escapee was in no condition to travel,
however. Ludlum disposed of Anderson’s wet clothes and put him to
bed. When he woke in a few hours, the widow explained that there
had been a change of plans. Some of the bread and meat that Ludlum
had hidden away for Anderson’s journey was missing. She suspected
that her servant, a Frenchman named Esau, had taken it. She went to
the servant’s room while Anderson was sleeping and found the goods
in his possession. Ludlum was convinced that Esau would surely
betray them if a substantial reward were offered. Rather than stay a
few weeks as planned, Anderson had to leave at once. The widow
gave him some of her son’s clothes and a revolver. She trimmed the
fugitive’s red beard close, cut his hair, and dyed both with lamp
black. Houzeau assembled the necessary supplies: a pencil and paper,
compass, candle, matches, powder, bullets, map, a gourd of fresh
water, and a six-day supply of biscuits. He fitted Anderson with a belt
containing twelve-hundred dollars, including the money from Jones.
Anderson gave
Houzeau a few business papers he had somehow hidden
from his captors and the October 4 letter from McCulloch. The
pair mounted their horses before dawn and vanished.

On the morning of October 23, Anderson failed to show up for
breakfast.
Captain Mechling thought little of it. Around ten o’clock, the
captain stopped by the prisoner’s tent and spoke to him. Anderson
did not reply, so the officer let him sleep. Finally, fearing that his
prisoner had overdosed on stramonium and might be dead, Mechling
attempted to jostle a life-sized dummy of Anderson awake. Infuriated
by what he discovered, Mechling and a couple of other soldiers on
horseback galloped into town.

Mechling spied
Zenas Bliss and shouted at him. “Where is Charley
Anderson?” he bellowed. “I am sure I do not know,” replied Bliss,
who figured that Anderson must be back in Mechling’s camp as the
captain had charge of him. Bliss was not privy to details of the escape
plan. Mechling continued in a heated voice, “Well he isn’t in
my camp, but has violated his parole and escaped. My whole company
is out after him, damn him. If they catch him,” he added, “they
will hang him to the first tree.” Bliss calmly replied that the whole
town knew that Anderson had never been on parole, having steadfastly
refused it when it was offered to him. This appeared to stymie
Mechling’s aggressive approach, so he tried another angle. He may
not have escaped, the captain claimed, but was probably intoxicated
by the stramonium he has smoked the previous night. He probably
had drowned, Mechling speculated. He ordered his troops to drag
the river. They did and found nothing.

While Mechling and his rebel followers scurried around searching
for Anderson, the escaped prisoner and his friend Houzeau had
made considerable progress. The pair traveled a pre-planned, circuitous
route north before turning due west. They made no fires, slept
in concealed areas during the day, and rode close to the river bottoms
most nights. Houzeau had no saddle. He rode clothed in a ranchero-style
disguise with a rope tied around his horse’s nostrils. A gentle
rain fell most of the time and the first few evenings were favorably
dark. The now black-haired Anderson sported buckskin trousers, the
jacket of Ludlum’s absent son, and a broad-brimmed vaquero’s hat.
They were emerging from a riverbed very early the morning after
he had taken flight, when they were greeted by a young Mexican
boy. Frank Chavez recognized Anderson despite the disguise. The
boy knew nothing of the escape. If he knew of it later, he never told
anyone about his encounter with the fugitive.

San Antonio was alive with rumors concerning Anderson’s
departure. A reward of one thousand dollars was posted for the return of
the prisoner, dead or alive. Captain Mechling was placed in irons,
accused of being bribed by the conspirators. Known Union families in
town were nervous. Many received menacing visits from Mechling’s
soldiers, who arrived with guns drawn, hurling threatening epithets.
KGC members who had not enlisted in the Confederate Army formed
a posse and visited Lorenzo Castro, a prominent resident and
suspected Union sympathizer. Castro visibly trembled at the prospect of
dying by the rope, but as he knew nothing, he could not betray the
runaway and his accomplices.