DOWN KEYPORT'S MAIN STREET PAST a dozen dark storefronts Major Paul Stapleton led his troopers at a brisk canter, in a column of twos. Riding beside him, Colonel Henry Gentry found himself admiring the major's military judgment. A gallop might have triggered panicky gunfire. A canter exhibited exactly the right amount of determination. Riding two-men-abreast converted them into a column a half-block long, making them look formidable.
They could see the mob now. At least a dozen of them were carrying torches that cast a fluctuating glare over their enraged faces. From their mouths came a guttural chant: “Give us the nigger! Give us the nigger!” The implications of that refrain made Gentry's brain congeal. Was this all Lincoln had to show for three years of war and a half-million dead?
About a hundred men swirled before the darkened courthouse. The sheriff of Hunter County, gaunt Monroe Cantwell, stood in the doorway with two deputies, horsefaced Lew Mason and graybearded Pete Grumbach. They had shotguns leveled on their hips, but their faces revealed little enthusiasm for the task of defending Sergeant Moses Washington, downstairs in the basement jail.
“Give us the nigger,” the mob chanted. “Give us the nigger
now!
”
Sheriff Cantwell had sent a messenger racing to Gentry's door urging him to call out the troopers. As the ranking Union officer in Hunter County, Gentry was the
ultimate authority. The state was divided into military districts because the Republican governor, Oliver Morton, had no confidence in Democratic officials. They in turn were inclined to abandon all attempts at law enforcement and let the army take the heat when the populace grew restless.
“Sound platoons right oblique,” Major Stapleton told the bugler.
As the brisk notes resounded against the storefronts, the column split into two files. One took up a position on the south side of the courthouse, facing Main Street, the other on the east, facing Court Street.
“Sabers!” called Major Stapleton. With a simultaneous shiver of steel, ninety-six gleaming sabers slid from their scabbards and were hefted erect in the torchlight. The display of weapons evoked a howl of fury from the mob. Most of the rage was directed at Gentry.
“Now we know the whole truth about you, Henry. You're nothin' but a goddamn nigger lover!” one man bellowed.
“What're you gonna do, Henry? Sit there with these niggers for the rest of the year? The minute they go away, we're comin' back!” roared another man.
“Give us the nigger, Henry!” about half of them shrieked in unison.
The whole mob quickly adopted it: “GiveâusâtheâniggerâHenry!”
“Give'm to us or you better get asbestos shingles for your house!” shouted another man.
Several men in the rear of the mob fired pistols in the air. Some of the cavalry horses reared and almost bolted. It occurred to Gentry that cavalry was not the best answer to this situation. A company of infantry with fixed bayonets could disperse these bullies in five minutes. “GiveâusâtheâniggerâHenry!” roared the
entire mob. A half-dozen more guns went off. Horses reared and backed and whinnied.
At the edge of the torchlight, in the shadow of the shuttered Canaday Saloon, Rogers Jameson sat in a chaise beside his brother-in-law, newspaper editor Andrew Conway, giving a semi-legitimacy to the mob. Walter Yancey had wired Rogers' fractured jaw, making it difficult for him to give one of his patented rabble-rousing speeches. But Jameson was demonstrating that no one, above all a black man under Henry Gentry's command, could humiliate him with impunity.
“Tell them if another gun goes off, I'll order my men to charge them,” Major Stapleton said.
Gentry dismounted and walked up on the courthouse steps beside Sheriff Cantwell and his deputies. “Listen to me!” he shouted. “I know why you're angry. I was angry myself when Sergeant Washington punched Rogers Jameson. The sergeant committed a serious breach of the peace and he's going to pay for it. I'm going to report him to headquarters in Indianapolis. The army will punish him. The code of military justice doesn't permit any soldier to attack a civilian.”
“Give us the nigger, Henry! Shut your stupid mouth and give us the nigger!” the mob howled.
At least a dozen more guns went off. One of the horses at the end of the line facing Main Street bolted, carrying his trooper into the night at a wild gallop. The mob roared with laughter. “These niggers are findin' out there's more to ridin' a horse than sittin' in the saddle!” one man bellowed.
“You've got two minutes to clear out of here!” Major Stapleton shouted. He took out his watch and began counting. “Thirty secondsâsixty seconds,” he said.
The bugler sounded another burst of notes. The line of troopers facing Court Street wheeled and rode into Main Street. The mob now faced two arrays of drawn
sabers. “You're a nigger-lovin' bastard!” howled one Democrat.
“One minute and thirty seconds,” Major Stapleton said.
At a wave of his hand, the Court Street line began moving toward the mob. The rioters backed away, several tripping over their own feet and scrambling up to continue the retreat down Main Street. In another sixty seconds, they were a block away, their shouts and insults feeble echoes.
“I'm glad someone in your army knows what he's doin', Henry,” Sheriff Cantwell said.
“I thought they might listen to reason,” Gentry said.
“Reason?” Cantwell said. “No one's listened to reason since your friend Abe Lincoln decided he knew more than God and started this miserable war.”
“I think those fellows who fired on the flag at Fort Sumter had something to do with starting the war, Monroe,” Gentry said.
“Nobody buys that line of shit anymore, Henry,” Cantwell said. “I don't believe even Republicans buy it. Only ass kissers of Abe like you are still spoutin' it.”
Major Stapleton joined them on the courthouse steps. “I'm sorry, Colonel. I had to take charge before half our horses ran away.”
“I understand, Major.”
There was simply no end to the humiliation that God seemed determined to inflict on his not very faithful servant Henry Gentry. First the Almighty had lopped off his arm and now He was amputating whatever shreds of manhood Gentry could claim for staying in uniform. Major Stapleton obviously despised him as much as Sheriff Monroe Cantwell and most of the other citizens of Hunter County.
Gentry nodded his agreement as Major Stapleton announced he was going to station ten troopers with carbines in the courthouse until they heard what
Indianapolis wanted to do about Sergeant Washington. At the major's insistence, Gentry went downstairs with him and assured Washington that they would do everything in their power to guarantee his safety.
“I'm real sorry I lost my temper, Colonel,” Sergeant Washington said.
“Personally, I'm glad you slugged the bastard, Moses,” Major Stapleton said. “But I'm worried about how the army will react.”
“I understands, Major,” Washington said. “I understands.”
They left him hunched on his cot in the corner of his cell. A few cells away, someone called, “Colonel Gentry!” It was Robert Garner, the deserter they had captured at the Fitzsimmons farm. “Have you written to my momma?”
“I sent her a telegram but it was returned. She's not at that address.”
“Oh. She was sick. Maybe she moved in with friends.”
“I don't know what else I can do,” Gentry said.
Garner began to blubber. “Don't let them shoot me, Colonel. I didn't mean that Confederate oathâ”
Gentry rode back to his house through the sunrise with Major Stapleton and the black troopers. They arrived as Millicent Todd Gentry came out on the porch to say good-bye to Janet Todd and Lucy, who looked longingly at Gentry. Did she have something else to tell him? Maybe it did not matter. Gentry felt battered, almost physically beaten, by the hatred the mob had flung at him.
Down in his cellar office, Gentry picked up a letter he had been writing when the messenger from Sheriff Cantwell arrived:
Dear Abe:
The state of Indiana is on the brink of sliding
across the Ohio into the Confederacy. This is a hell of a message to send you on Independence Day. From the start of this thing, we agreed I would tell you the truth as I saw it no matter how much it hurt. An awful lot of chickens are coming home to roost, Abe, looking more and more like vultures. There isn't a Democrat I know who isn't either a secret Southern sympathizer or an outspoken peace at any price man. The number who are ready to reach for their guns and join an armed uprising grows by the day.
Abe, I told you last year the Emancipation Proclamation was your biggest blunder yet. Maybe it won you support in New Englandâbut why did you have to appease those self righteous bastards? The Yankees aren't going to quit the war. They know they have to win or face the vengeance of the Southâand maybe the West. I'm told there isn't a man in Sherman's army or any other army where westerners are fighting who wouldn't rather shoot an abolitionist than a rebel, if he was given half a chance.
It seems to me you have to say somethingâdo somethingâto show the people of the North that you have no intention of inflicting two or three million freed ex-slaves on them as the price of victory. You've got to announce a program to give them land in the westâset them up like the Indian tribes on reservations. Or lay out the details of the plan you mentioned to me last yearâsend them back to Africa or to some Caribbean island like Santo Domingo, which is half black already.
If you made that part of your reelection campaign, I think we would be able to reduce the disaffection among the Democrats by 50 percent.
If you pursue the course that the ultras put in the platform at the Republican Convention last
month
â
total
abolition and the unconditional surrender of the
South
â
I
can't answer for the consequences here in Indiana.
With statesmanship, Abe, this thing can be defused short of the brutal application of force. These are my neighbors,
my friends
â
and
your old neighbors and
friends
â
the
Bradys, the Cantwells, the Conways. Some of them have lost sons in the war. The nightmare has driven them a little crazy.
I
know you never dreamt the thing would last three
yearsâand no end in sight. Neither did I, old friend. What I'm urging you to do is avoid the worst consequences of that blunderâthe sowing of perpetual hatred between Democrats and Republicans in Indiana, Kentucky and the rest of the Midwest.
There may be no hope of changing the hatred between the Old North and the Old South. But we can, we must do something to prevent that hatred from penetrating our country's heartland.
As ever,
Henry
Colonel Gentry took his bulky Colt pistol out of the desk drawer and checked the chamber. It was loaded. Maybe tonight he would do it. Maybe there was no other way to convince his friend the president that Gentry took his predictions of doom seriously, that the letter was not what Abe used to call a Gentry effusionâa mere exercise of the forebrain. Maybe his corpse would convince Abe that this lamentation came from the heart, the belly, the bowels.
Clumping steps on the cellar stairs. A man in cavalry boots. Through the dimness loomed Major Paul Stapleton, a solemn expression on his handsome face. “I've thought over your proposition, Colonel. I'm prepared to work with you to infiltrate the Sons of Liberty. But you must understand one thing. I'm in love with Janet Todd.
Under no circumstances can she be prosecuted for her part in the conspiracy. She must be protected at all costsâeven if that involves lying, subterfuge, the destruction of incriminating evidence.”
“Agreed,” Colonel Gentry said. What difference did any of that make to a man who had consigned his ruined soul to eternity?
Major Stapleton held out his hand. Colonel Gentry stared into his young face. He could see the line of scar tissue beneath his blond hair, where the doctors had trepanned him to extract the Gettysburg bullet. Love, an emotion that had caused Gentry nothing but pain and indignity, was animating the major's face. He was prepared to continue fighting this baffling, tormented struggle in its name.
What could Gentry say? He was doomed to failure and humiliation? No, he would sound like a madman. He shook Major Stapleton's hand.
“I liked your performance down there at the courthouse,” Stapleton said.
“You did?” Gentry said.
“I was afraid one of those fellows would put a bullet through you. Didn't the thought occur to you?”