How Few Remain

“You notice he does not do anything about it. The first amendment to the Constitution protects our right to speak freely.” He let out a chuckle the wind flung away. “The first amendment also protects his right to speak freely, however distasteful I find his opinion.”

A low murmur came from his audience, more frightening in its way than the fury they had shown before. Fury didn’t last. Now Lincoln was making them think. Thought was slower than anger to flower into action, but it was a hardy perennial. It did not bloom and die.

He’d turned fifty-seven earlier in the year, and the past had a way of looking better and the present worse the older he got.

We must deal with life as it is, not with life as we wish it were or as it may be ten years or fifty years from now.

“So this is the famous George Cannon of whom you telegraphed me, is it? He doesn’t look so much like a wild-eyed fanatic as some of the ones we snared before.”

“No, sir,” Custer agreed: close enough for his superiors to hear him, he made a point of agreeing with them. “But without their coldhearted, coolheaded comrades egging them on, the wild-eyed fanatics could not do so much damage.”

“Why do we have such a pack of confounded dunderheads running this country?”

“My theory used to be that we get the government we deserve,” Sam said. “Bad as we are, though, I don’t think we’re that bad. Right now, I’m taking a long look at the notion that God hates us.”

Courage and the goodness of one’s cause, unfortunately, do not always go hand in hand.

“Won’t it be fine, getting to spend Christmas somewhere near the edge of civilization?”

“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp agreed enthusiastically. “If El Paso isn’t civilization, at least it’s on the railroad line to it.”

Like South Carolina, Utah is too large to be an insane asylum and too small to make a nation, and, unlike South Carolina, lacks other nearby states full of zanies to join her in her madness.

Impasse. Stuart hated impasses. He hated ambiguity of any kind. The older he got, the more ambiguity he saw in the world. He hated that, too.

An army that was winning had little backbiting. When things went wrong, everyone was at pains to prove the misfortune could not possibly have been his fault.

“Oh, they are great ones for taking a high moral tone, the Confederate States,” Douglass said. “Taking a high moral tone costs them nothing. Living up to it is something else again.”

War was rapidly doing what war did—making ugly everything it touched.

Custer paused and sent Tom a quizzical look. “‘Scoops’? What’s a scoop?”

“A Mormon. Heard it the other day,” his brother answered. After removing his hat, Tom mimed removing the top of his skull in the same way and scooping out a large portion of its contents. “Have to have most of your brain missing to buy what they’re selling, don’t you think?”

“Mm, you’re likely right.”

Apart from the Volunteer companies, a lot of men in San Francisco carried guns for self-protection—not least, for protection from other men carrying guns.

“I see that this photograph shows me you have been imperfectly truthful here,” he told them, having been too well brought up to call a woman a liar to her face.

Longstreet, as far as Jackson was concerned, made a better politician than a soldier; he was full of the deviousness politics required.

“You done opened my eyes, and I reckon I can go and open some other folks’ eyes my own self. You got yourself a—what’s the Bible word?—A disciple, that’s what it is.”

“Good luck to you, Mr. Blackford,” Lincoln said. “Be the truth’s disciple, not mine. Follow the truth, wherever it may lead you.”

The worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change.

“So you’re one of the ones who still say ‘if there be,’ are you, Three-Card? I know the fancy grammarians like it better, but ‘if there are’ has always been good enough for me.”

“I’m an old man.” Jesperson ran a pudgy finger along the gray walrus mustache he wore. “The things the modern generation does to the English language are a shame and a disgrace, nothing less.”

Martyrdom was easier to contemplate in the abstract than to embrace in the flesh.

Radicals hire bomb-throwing maniacs. Rich men hire lawyers. They’re more expensive, but they ought to be, because they do more damage.

“You’re a Democrat, aren’t you general?” somebody asked.

“What sensible man isn’t?” Custer returned.

Then he laughed at himself. If Fort Benton counted for civilization, he’d been out in the wilderness too long.

He rode forward at the gallop, brave but stupid. A moment later, he was brave and stupid and dead.

He knew what he imagined and what was real were not one and the same. Knowing it and coming to terms with it were not one and the same, either.

No one argued with him, which was a pleasant novelty.

“Give me two synonyms for ‘idiots,’” Clemens said, and then gave them himself: “‘Fools’ and ‘Republicans.’”

When a politician, which was what the president of the CSA had long since become, said he was personally in sympathy with something, Jackson had learned, he meant the opposite.

Blaine hated the Confederate States because they were a rival, not because they were tyrants. Had they been exemplars of purest democracy, rivals they would have remained, and he would have hated them no less.

“You wouldn’t bring me fifty dollars. You’re too damn old and too damn uppity.”

“I can’t help being old, and I am proud to be uppity,” Douglass said.

But, at the moment, the urge to write was not upon him. He shook his head and grimaced wryly. As a veteran newspaper man, he knew you wrote when you had to write, not when the Muse sprinkled fairy dust in your hair and tapped you with a magic wand.

When was the last time you heard a Republican speak up for a fair shake for the working man or for justice and equality for all men? Those are the ideals we espoused when we were young. Have they changed from boons to evils as we grew old?

But, aside from that grumbling, without which they would hardly have been soldiers, they went where they were ordered.

“How many Mormons are polygamists, truly?” Lincoln asked. “They write all sorts of things in the eastern papers.”

“They say all sorts of things here, too,” Hamilton answered. “The truth is devilish hard to find, and they don’t keep any public records of marriages past the first, which makes it harder yet. I’d say it’s about one in ten, if that, but the polygamists have influence beyond their numbers. If you’re going to support more than one wife and family, you need more than the common run of money, you see.”

“Oh, yes,” Lincoln said. “A case similar to that of slaveholders in the Confederate States.”

Anxious, he asked, “My dear, how are you?”

“As the good Lord meant me to be,” she answered, to which he found no response. She went on, “Pretty soon I’ll see Him face-to-face, and I intend to have a good long talk with Him about the way things do go on in this here world.”

“Good,” Douglass said. “I’m sure He could have made a much better job of things had He had you to advise Him.”

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some, the word means for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and with the product of his labor. With others, the same word means for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. The fullness of time, I am convinced, will prove to the world which is the true definition of the word, and my earnest hope remains that the United States of America show yet lead the way in the proving.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Its glory is all moonshine.

He realized, belatedly, that he had been less than diplomatic. That did not bother him, either: he was less than diplomatic.

“What’s the war news?”

“They’re killing people,” Sam said, and let it go at that.

The Mormons habitually dissembled about their plural marriages.

Getting men to give officers the respect their rank deserved was a battle the army hadn’t won yet and wouldn’t anytime soon.

An idea may be a good one no matter who propounds it.

Every so often, though, the passing years up and ambushed him. They had more skill at it than any Yankees. One day, they would shoot him down from ambush, too.