Lincoln's Dreams

“I still think the drugs you took are somehow connected to all this, but I haven’t figured out how yet,” I said. “You said your family doctor put you on phenobarbital. Did you notice any change in the dreams while you were on it?”

“No,” Annie said, looking in the direction of the inn two blocks away. The black cat was coming out to meet us, highstepping its way along the wet sidewalk.

“How long were you on the phenobarbital?” I asked.

The cat meowed a greeting that sounded like a complaint. Annie knelt to pick it up. “Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia he kept calling for the boy across the street?” she said. “His name was Bud Taft. He came and held Willie’s hand and sat with him the whole time, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“One night while Bud was with Willie, Lincoln came in and said, ‘Better go to bed. Bud,’ and Bud said, ‘If I go, he will call for me.’”

The cat struggled to be let down. Annie put it back on the sidewalk, and it stalked off, offended. Half a block away, it sat down on the sidewalk and began to lick its white paws.

“You didn’t happen to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, did you?” I said.

“I thought he was buried at Arlington.”

“Nope. And I don’t know where he was buried.”

Annie looked at the cat. “Maybe nobody knows,” she said.

When we came up even with the cat, it stood up and walked alongside us all the way back to the inn.

CHAPTER NINE

Lee’s affection for Traveller was obvious. “If I were an artist like you,” he wrote his cousin Markie Williams, “I would draw a true picture of Traveller…. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he has passed. He could dilate on his sagacity and affection, and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night marches and days of battle through which he has passed. But I am no artist.”

When Michael Miley took Lee’s photograph, Lee insisted that he be mounted on Traveller, “just as we went through the four years of war together.”

We went back to the inn after dinner and waited for Lee’s aides to deliver some last message so that he could take off his boots and settle onto his camp cot and go to sleep.

Annie rechecked the galleys that I had read the night before, and I got out my trusty Freeman and started in on Gettysburg. It was impossible for me to believe that Lee wouldn’t dream about this, the worst battle of the war, the end of the war really for the Confederacy, though Broun would fight me on that.

He claimed that Antietam was the decisive battle, that with the failure of Lee’s push into Maryland the war was effectively over for the Confederacy, even though there were three more years of killing left and Lee knew it.

Whether it was or not, and, more important, whether Lee was aware of it, he certainly knew it at Gettysburg a year later, and if anything would have given him bad dreams, it was that misbegotten battle. The high-water mark of the Confederacy. Lee made it all the way into Pennsylvania before the Union army stopped him, and then for three days he unleashed one assault after another that made it look like he could win after all.

On the morning of the third day, Lee met with Longstreet outside a schoolhouse. Longstreet didn’t like Lee’s plan of attack. Later Longstreet claimed he had said, “It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position,” and had considered the matter settled. Lee never blamed anybody but himself for the failure of Pickett’s Charge, but when his aide Colonel Venable said bitterly that he’d distinctly heard Lee direct Longstreet to send up Hood’s division in support, Lee had said, “I know! I know!”

Lee’s plan was to send Pickett’s men directly on a frontal assault at the Union center, and it almost worked. Pickett’s men made it up to the famous bloody angle of a stone wall and held it for almost twenty minutes, without any support at all, in spite of the fact that this time it was Fredericksburg in reverse, Lee’s men in an open field marching toward a defended ridge. But Longstreet didn’t send up the supporting divisions, and they couldn’t hold the wall. When the soldiers began to fall back, Lee rode down to meet them and send them back to Seminary Ridge, speaking encouragingly to nearly every man who passed.

“Try to reform your division in the rear of this hill,” he had told Pickett, and Pickett had said, “General Lee, I have no division.”

Annie went to sleep around ten, the covers pulled up over her shoulders as if she were cold. I called the answering machine, and Richard gave me his new theory, this one about sexual guilt and repressed Oedipal attachments.