Читать книгу The Other Side of Lincoln - Welby Thomas Cox Jr. - Страница 3

"The passive defense is a form of deferred suicide" Old military maxim

The early spring morning weather had not come up as Leck Lenahan had hoped. Driving a herd of cattle from Bardstown to Raywick, some thirty-five miles was ornery enough without having to contend with the weather. But it could have been worse, it could be sleeting or snowing or raining bullets and arrows, Lenahan thought as he made his way to the barn to saddle his horse for the trip to Gabe Russell’s farm to pick up his neighbor and former Calvary unit buddy, the man who had been his best friend since childhood.

Lenahan and Russell had originally signed on with the army to earn a living, get three squares a day, uniforms and a place to sleep even if it meant, at times, doing so out of doors. Best of all you could do it on horseback. What more do you need when you’re fifteen, Lenahan remembered his friend saying. They were prepared to shoot a few injuns but Lenahan remembered his friend saying... you know what they say about injuns. That always puzzled Lenahan...he didn’t know what they said about injuns...except they couldn’t hold their liquor! But what the heck Lenahan thought neither could he or Gabe Russell for that matter. Hell half of the federals, except for most of the brass... couldn’t hold its liquor, so what do we have on the injuns. Lenahan meant to ask Russell that question; he hoped that he would remember to do so, on the trip to pick up the hides at Bardstown.

There would be lots of time for other inquiries as well. Major among those would be the issue of Russell’s marriage to the widow Ima Longing. A woman nearly twenty years Russell’s senior. What was going on there...but unlike the rest of the community gossip and saloon talk, Lenahan only had to look at his friends eyes to know the real truth. This was a happy man, and that was all that mattered.

Lenahan knew Russell better than he knew anyone. Leck was the youngest of fourteen children born to James and Bartheney McNair in 1840, an after thought, Ma had told him. The last of the children, she had thought at unlucky thirteen, were twin boys born in 1834. Christian and Thomas had very nearly killed her at age twenty-seven. But she had survived the delivery and six years later...surprise of surprises there was baby Leck for all the family to raise.

Unless you have grown up in a huge Catholic family with a large work ethic, and you are the youngest by six years...you just can’t imagine the horror of it. At once you have five mothers and nine fathers. The mothers are always primping, squeezing, pinching, combing, primping, loving and kissing while the fathers are rolling, pushing, pulling, biting and teasing until you just have to withdraw in order to survive the torture.

That made for a wonderful childhood relationship between Leck and his neighbor Gabriel Caldwell Russell, born in the same year. They had been raised only a field apart, and one or the other of the boys were beating a path across it...on foot or horseback, beginning at age five. Spending most days with each other playing Injuns; hunting, fishing, swimming and trapping the illusive hunter’s mist. They had spoken of all things known and unknown, touched on the spiritual and most of all dreamed of the day they could join the Calvary and go off to war. They recreated those scenes in the trees, on the rocks, in the creeks and while running through the plush green meadows...the gallant lads of war, these sons of Irish immigrants who fought their way from the Green Isle in search of freedom and found it in the Happy Hunting Grounds of Kentucky. That plush bountiful place where all the Indian tribes came to wash away the winter in crystal clear lakes; streams and rivers, taking from it fish to fill and beaver to warm hearts that would always remember the canvas paintable by the master...never to be reproduced.

But soldiering had not gone well for Russell, the Minnie’ ball fired by an ambushing Cheyenne Indian took his leg at the knee stripping away the romanticism of war, exaggerated by the imaginations of boys running through a Kentucky meadow brought to the reality by men who anguished over lives and political decisions of infamy as those made by the generals like Fremont’s western campaign and later, Grant, Lee and Abe Lincoln.

Searching for the right choices to ease the gnawing hunger for peace and prosperity as the nation expanded and the end of fear in once proud cities besieged and bombarded by weapons spewing neglect of morale duty and leadership failing to enforce the laws against man’s inhumanity to man.

That great Civil War among families who had come to this country...some willingly seeking freedom in life choices and the opportunity to honest labor to raise families... casting an ironic shadow on a country that practiced the institution of bondage for others, cutting deep, and increasingly bitter divisions between the Slave and the Free States. A country seemingly destined to perpetual conflict from within and without, on vital issues affecting them from the birth of a nation, born to struggle for freedom, born to die for it.

Men and women for and against slavery, states’ rights and the question of secession were the issues driving a growing and restless new country causing them to put forth their best, and often least prepared to settle the matters of conscious and pride or those of greed and power. Twenty three percent (23%) of southern families according to the census of 1860 owned 1,500,000 slave families. The statisticians in 1860 did not bother to point out that there were 3,200,000 slaves in the country, which meant that another 1,700,000 slaves were owned, by those in other parts of the country. But, that 23% would be labeled, throughout history, as being responsible for the 620,000 deaths attributed to the war.

The war itself was filled with incongruities; at the siege of Vicksburg... Missouri supplied the Union with 22 units and the South with 17, in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee pro-Union men held firm throughout the war, a Calvary company of all white men from Alabama rode with Union General Sherman in his march to the sea. Virginia’s western counties which had long waged old grudges on the iniquities of slavery and the economic advantages held by the pseudo-aristocratic Tidewater Planters, seceded from the rest of the state, and in 1863 joined the Union as a part of West Virginia.

Several of Abraham Lincoln’s family served with the south. Lincoln himself was known to have developed his attitude against slavery at the heel of his father. A nare do well tenant farmer whose failure was attributed, by Lincoln, to the disadvantages of growing field crops without the so-called free hands of the slaves. Robert E. Lee, the south’s magnificent fighting leader, thought slavery was evil and secession unjustified. The north’s indomitable Ulysses S. Grant owned a slave before the war; hard up for money he reportedly sold William Jones for 1,000 but before the transaction took place, Grant had a reversal of heart and set Jones free. It seems that Grant had discovered what most Northerners had known since before the Revolution...slavery wasn’t profitable, at least not in the north.

And last but certainly not least, the famous “Little Giant”, Senator Steven A. Douglas. A physically short, dapper, political powerhouse from Illinois who more than any other person may have been responsible for the political state and divisions which developed from legislation which Douglas carved from The Dred Scott to the Compromise of 1850. Then, he blatantly forces the Kansas-Nebraska Act to insure the extension of the railroads for which Douglas served in the conflicting role, as a member of the railroads Board of Directors and as a Senator regulating the industry.

Slavery failed to flourish in the north due to a variety of reasons: the climate, one man farms, growing industrialism, urbanization, immigration, the small number of resident Negroes, competition and conscious all militated against it. Legal measures, statutes, constitutions, court decisions- provided for gradual emancipation and abolition. In 1775 Rhode Island, the cradle of liberalism gave freedom to any child born of a slave mother. Vermont took action in 1777. In 1787 the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from the lands north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. New York provided for gradual abolition in 1799; in 1817 she passed a law to end all slavery within her borders by July 4, 1827. The federal government had forbidden importation of Negroes after January 1, 1808.

Former President John Tyler, A Virginian, won a seat in the Confederate House of Representatives...and the anomalies ran on and on for a conflict with so many names. For the south it was the War Between the States, the U.S. official record called it the War of the Rebellion, there was the War Against Northern Aggression, the War For States Rights, the War For Constitutional Liberty, the War For the Preservation of the Union, the Brothers’ War, Mr. Lincoln’s War but most Southerners preferred to speak of it as the “Second War of Independence”

Gabe Russell referred to it bitterly as the war I was born to fight... with a stub leg!

Lenahan had watched the growing divide in the nation from a special vantage of Missouri border conflicts and a blood bath in Kansas over the ability of one man to own another... that few in the north could imagine. Although he worked daily among northern members of his unit, after rather intense sessions in bouts with boredom, he often found them disingenuous; insensitive with a misplaced sense of superiority as they spoke of liberty for all but pushed the Indians further and further into restrictive camps and reservation with limited travel privilege. Spaces, despite treaties hammered out in blood, which clearly defined the rights of the tribes over those passing through their land on their way to take possession of land belonging to other tribes and the Mexicans in California.

What was it about the northern willingness to ignore the atrocities to the Native Americans, taking the blood of the Native Americans while delivering a willingness to shed their own for the African? Lenahan had listened carefully to all sides of the issue in this melting pot at Fort Laramie and was deeply confused by the seemingly constricting northern viewpoint. Perhaps it was because the Indians owned black slaves themselves.

Personally, he felt slavery was innately wrong from the moment he had seen it. Though there were few slaves in his community, his father knew a wealthy Planter, Oscar Matterly who had more than one hundred slaves, which he owned. Pap was very much opposed to it. Although he was a Planter as well, except for tobacco, most of what Joseph Lenahan grew was utilized by the family, either consumed, put on their backs, burned to stay warm or used to run the farm. Though Pap felt it was evil, he was unable to satisfy the curiosity of his young son on the issue, and Leck’s seemingly greater concern for the Native American. Leck never felt his father was a man given to deep philosophical convictions...he had a good heart but he was a man of the earth...slow to grow...slow to nurture and willing to watch as it happened.

Ma, on the other hand, was of a more fiery nature. She was quick to anger, strident to maintain a viewpoint...vigilant to win at any game, even if it meant to take an edge. Ask Ma a question and you got an answer, direct and to the point. She would not gloss over the issue, color the facts or be unwilling to admit that she could be wrong. She was basic, honest, hardworking and most definitely the lioness of the Lenahan family.

Perhaps the most salient answer to Leck’s consternation on the issue of slavery versus the north’s seeming tolerance of the brutality of the native Americans and its centuries old lifestyle came in a remark from his earnest while friend and neighbor, Gabe Russell who very often waxed eloquently on issues of morale character. It was Gabe’s theory that the Northerners were more consolatory toward the position of the African for two basic reasons: first and foremost, the northerner had accepted the widely discussed concept that the white man had evolved from the monkey as a genetic malfunction, the mutating offspring manifesting itself over millions of years as an African.

“In short, Leck.” Russell intoned in the most scholarly manner possible, “The European believes that he is a descendant of the ape through the African.”

“Does that mean that the Indian is a descendant of the African?” Leck asked “Or is the African a descendant of the Indian who got hold of that monkey and used it to relief?” Leck laughed.

“Or, testing the God theory...we must all be descended from the Jew...because they are the chosen people...so a Jew got hold of the monkey and performed the old dirty bogey, who begat the Indian, the African, the Chinese, the European and every mother’s son and daughter!” Gabe laughed and punched at Leck.

“Come on Gabe...where were you when Sister Mary Iona explained that God created all the creatures of the earth...and then he created man in his own image?” Leck asked.

“Your brain is dead Leck if you believe that bit of hogwash...just as you still believe that it is a mortal sin to wiggle yourself or look up the petticoat of Sally Rodgers...it’s ok to accept the goodness of religion but this whole thing of one God in being with the spirit is nauseous.” Russell had said.

“I don’t have to look up the petticoat of Sally Rodgers...you know it all, I see my sisters bathing every Saturday...and that reminds me, the knothole you have used to watch has been discovered and repaired.” Leck laughed.

“I believe the second reason that the north favors the African is the fact that the northern families came to this country, seeking freedom from oppression in their homeland. They were willing to provide the major source of men, money and equipment to defeat King George and win the independence for the Colonials. The victory over the world’s greatest power at the time has contributed to the belief that they in effect won the rights to all the marbles...including the land occupied by the Indians for hunting, fishing or erection...of Tepees.” Russell said.

“As the story goes the Colonials came here landing at Plymouth...they had very little...they knew nothing...were dismal failures at farming and had it not been for the Indian teaching them how to plant, grow and harvest they would have perished.” In gratitude...they see to the needless killing of millions of buffalo essential to the lifestyle of the Indian family, they change the natural habitat of various other species from which they feed their families in the winter and they send their war machines against rocks killing several hundred thousand men, women and children all over this country.” Leck said in a tone that was approaching anger.

“Leck, that is the nature of man since the beginning of time...they have always been warring and to the victor goes the spoils...like it or not.” Russell said.

“Maybe so...but I don’t want to hear any pious and contrite breast pounding about the abuse of the African by the Southerners. Leck injected.

“Well, let’s not leave them out of the picture...who do you think the Southerner stepped on to carve out those plantations and holdings of five thousand acres...in our neighborhood Leck?” Russell said.

“It is true...but the Southerner lets you know up front they are coming for you, not some coy backstabbing double talk.” Leck said.

But even as Leck pondered these issues with his family in Kentucky, his best friend Gabe Russell and his Calvary comrades, no one knew the twist of fate, which had placed the young Kentuckian in the eye of conflict and history as it was happening.

After Russell’s ill-fated wound and release from the military, Lenahan continued his tour of duty serving in the west at Fort Laramie at the junction of the Laramie and the North Platte Rivers under the commands of General Stephen Kearney and special assignment to General John C. Fremont, a candidate for President in the elections of 1856. Fremont was handsome... with an aristocratic air, demanding a personal guard and escort of thirty Kentuckians no less than six feet tall or older than twenty.

This guard was specifically trained in the more gentile methods by lesser European nobility surrounding the General with the pomp of a king or president, befitting Fremont, born in 1818 at Savannah, Georgia...educated and refined... considered himself a gentleman of destination and certain to assume the Presidency of the Union or other fanciful post in the future. He wanted no one with access to him to be less desirable. Lenahan was selected because of his size, youth and because the Generals special secretary knew of Lenahan does Kentucky heritage...know as well, that he would be trainable in the mode of Fremont’s choice.

Lenahan excelled and became a close confident of Fremont’s western campaign and under the tutelage of the Fremont operatives, Lenahan was groomed for special service involving inside covert activities providing communication expertise to keep the military informed of political and social discord of any kind from sources he knew to be unimpeachable.