How Few Remain (26 page)

It wasn’t what he’d planned to do with the day. It also wasn’t the first time his impetuosity had run away with him. He knew himself well enough to be sure it wouldn’t be the last time his
impetuosity ran away with him. The tide of cheers the men unleashed made breaking routine seem worthwhile.

Almost as fast as he would have liked, Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment was mounted and pounding north along the road in a long, sinewy column of fours. They thundered past wagons and buggies and lone horsemen who stared and stared at the power Roosevelt had assembled and now controlled. Those stares left him happier than the whiskey that flowed like water in the Montana mining towns. Anyone could get a drink of whiskey. Only a few men, special men,
great
men, attracted the awe the Regiment gained for him.

“Heavens above, this is bully!” he cried in a great voice. Just then, he would gladly have kept riding all the way to Canada. He would gladly have kept riding all the way through Canada. With the men he had at his back, he was sure he could do it.

Prudence prevailed, though. Montana Territory was as yet thinly settled; finding open land on which the Regiment could practice its evolutions was only a matter of riding out past the little farms and herds of livestock that clung close to running water. Once out on the prairie, the horsemen went through the tedious but vital business of shifting from column into line, of moving by the left flank and the right, and also, much to Roosevelt’s delight, of charging straight at an unfortunately imaginary enemy.

But, because Roosevelt had read the latest tactical manuals, the Unauthorized Regiment also practiced fighting as dragoons: mounted infantry. With some of their number left behind to hold horses, the rest tramped in skirmish lines through the grass and brush. The troops’ captains had to rotate the job of horse-holder through their units, because everyone wanted to go forward and no one was keen to be left behind.

As the afternoon wore along, Roosevelt came to another of his snap decisions. “We’ll sleep here in the open tonight, men,” he announced. “We need to be hardened, to ready ourselves against the rigors of the field.”

Some of the men—the lazy ones who hadn’t bothered packing hardtack and salt pork in their knapsacks, unless Roosevelt missed his guess—grumbled at that, but their comrades’ jeers squelched them. The soldiers (so Roosevelt insisted on thinking of them, though they remained Unauthorized despite telegrams to
the War Department in Philadelphia) were getting the idea that they had to be prepared when they took the field.

“You never know what may happen,” Roosevelt said. “You simply never know.” He was looking north, toward Canada.

VI

Anna Douglass shook her finger at her husband. “You ain’t never gonna ride on no steamboats no more,” she said severely, as if to an errant child. “Never, do you hear me?”

“Yes, dear, I do,” Frederick Douglass answered, his voice dutiful. “I am not traveling anywhere for the time being. I’ll stay here in Rochester with you.”

“That’s not what I mean,” his wife said in tones that brooked no argument. “Sooner or later, out you’ll go again—but not by steamboat. Promise me, Frederick, as one Christian to another.”

“I promise,” Douglass said. These days, he refused Anna nothing she asked. Her health was visibly failing, while he remained robust. He let out a small sigh. He’d never meant to eclipse her, to have her live her life in his shadow, but that was how things had happened. In the beginning, she’d been above him: when they first came to know each other, back in Baltimore almost half a century earlier, she had been free while he still toiled in bondage. After his escape, he’d sent for her, and she’d come. In all the years since then, she’d given him a comfortable home from which he was too much absent and a fine family he’d had too small a part in raising. And now she got feebler by the day. He sighed again. There was nothing he could say, nothing he could do. It was years—decades—too late to say or do anything.

“Don’t you worry about me,” she said, picking a thought from his mind as a cunning thief might pick a wallet from a pocket. “I’ll be fine. Whatever happens, the Lord will provide. But whatever happens, I don’t want you ridin’ on no steamboats.”

“I already promised once,” Douglass said. “The vow will not be made twice as strong by my repeating it.”

“You just remember, that’s all,” Anna said, and hobbled back
toward the kitchen, leaning heavily on her stick. Rheumatism made her joints ache.

Douglass knew he should have been writing, transmuting his few minutes of fear aboard the
Queen of the Ohio
into prose that would galvanize men both black and white to the effort needed to overthrow the Confederate States and thereby ameliorate the plight of the millions of Negroes still enslaved. His first pieces, which had talked of his own fear of reenslavement if the steamboat went aground on Confederate soil, had won wide notice and praise. The newspapers and magazines eagerly awaited more, and had made it plain they would pay well.

But, at the moment, the urge to write was not upon him. He shook his head and grimaced wryly. As a veteran newspaperman, 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. He also knew he didn’t
have
to write quite yet. Instead of going upstairs to his study, he walked outside.

Out on the street, the grandson of one of his neighbors was trying to stay upright on an ordinary. The huge front wheel of the bicycle was almost as tall as its rider. As he pedaled along on a wavering course, he waved proudly to Douglass.

Douglass waved back. He’d lived in Rochester for almost thirty-five years, long enough for most people to have come to take him for granted in spite of his color. These days, the city did not separate Negroes by race on trolleys or omnibuses or in places accommodating the public. It hadn’t been that way when Douglass first came to upstate New York. He knew no small pride in having had a lot to do with the changes over the years.

“Look out, Daniel!” he called, just too late. The ordinary went into a pothole and fell over, dashing its rider to the street from a considerable height. The boy picked himself up, picked up the bicycle, and sturdily clambered aboard once more.
You fall down till you do it right
, Douglass thought with an approving nod.
That’s the only way to learn
.

Aside from a couple of church steeples, the biggest buildings on the skyline were boxy flour mills. Grain came into Rochester from all the surrounding countryside—the Genesee Valley held some of the finest farmland in the United States—and went out again by way of the Erie Canal, the railroads, and the Great Lakes. From his home, which stood near the crest of a small hill, Douglass could look out across the city to the gray-blue waters of
Lake Ontario. But for those waters’ being fresh, he might have been looking out at the sea.

As always, barges and small steamers glided slowly across the lake. Pillars of smoke rose from their stacks, as they did from the stacks of Rochester’s factories. The air, though, was far better than that in St. Louis or other western towns, for the coal burned here was of higher grade than what they used along the Mississippi.

Several unusually large plumes of smoke out on the lake caught Douglass’ eye. The vessels from which those plumes sprang were also unusually large, and appeared to be moving together. They made Rochester seem more like a seaside town than ever; when he’d been in Boston and New York, he’d often watched flotillas of Navy ships steaming into port in tight formation like these.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than fresh clouds of smoke billowed from the ships. Douglass was seeing them from a long way off. For a moment, he wondered whether their boilers had burst. Then the roars, which took some little time to cross that distance, reached his ears. He froze in place, the ice of remembered terror shooting up his back. He’d heard explosions of that sort not long before, coming from the southern bank of the Ohio.

“Dear God,” he groaned, “those are naval ships, all right, but they don’t belong to the U.S. Navy.”

Like foxes in a henhouse, the British warships (or would they be Canadian? Douglass worried little about such niceties, and suspected no one else worried any more), having fired warning shots to let the numerous grain- and flour-haulers know what they were, sent motor launches off to those closest to them. One of those steamers, instead of receiving the boarding party, tried to flee into the harbor. The cannon boomed again, sounding angry this time. The steamer exploded, a thunderclap to dwarf the roar of the guns.

“What’s that?” Daniel exclaimed, awe on his face at the blast of noise.

Douglass wasn’t sure the boy was talking to him. He answered anyhow: “That,” he said in his most impressive and mournful tones, “that is war.”

A noise—a small noise—behind him made him turn. “Frederick, what the devil is going on?” his wife demanded sharply.

“The enemy”—that covered both England and Canada—”is attacking our shipping in the lake,” he replied. He hung his head, close to tears. “The British people once helped so much in the fight against slavery, and now they stand allied to it. There are times when I think my life’s struggle has been in vain.”

“You can only keep on,” Anna answered. That closely paralleled his own thought about Daniel’s effort to master the ordinary, so closely that he had to nod. But, while his intellect agreed, his heart misgave him.

Cannon boomed from the shore. From the War of 1812 to the War of Secession, the Great Lakes had seen half a century of peace. In the embittered aftermath of the latter war, though, both the USA and the British and Canadians had built up fleets on these waters and fortified their lakeshore towns, each side mistrusting the other. Few people in Rochester thought much of its shore defenses. The government had not had a lot of money to spend in the tight times after the war, and had had so many places to spend it …

In hardly more than the twinkling of an eye, the locals’ worries proved justified. The warships turned their fire against the guns that had presumed to engage them. Puffs of smoke rose along the shore as their shells smashed into the emplacements of those guns—and against whatever buildings happened to be close by.

One by one, the cannon defending Rochester fell silent. The guns from the ships kept pounding the waterfront anyhow, as if to punish the city for having the effrontery to resist.

“What are they doing?” Anna Douglass said, her voice not far from a moan.

“Beating us,” her husband answered. “Few here ever truly believed we should have to go to war against the British Empire. It would appear they took the possibility of war against us rather more seriously.”

“What right have they got to shoot at us like this here?” Anna asked. “We folk here in Rochester, we never done them any harm.”

The short answer was,
They’re strong enough to do it
. Trying to be judicious, Douglass steered clear of the short answer. “They declared a blockade against our ports,” he said. “When they did it, no one thought—no one here thought, certainly—that they meant anything beyond our ports on the Atlantic and the Pacific.
But this is a port, and so are Buffalo, and Cleveland, and Duluth. In a blockade, they may close our ports if they can close them.”

Here at Rochester, at least, the enemy could. The warships methodically pounded the waterfront to bits. Neither the quays nor the vessels tied up at them could withstand the shells. Smoke climbed into a sky now rapidly darkening from the great profusion of fumes rising to block the rays of the sun. Not all of the smoke, nor even the greatest part of it, came from the gunpowder that propelled the shells and burst inside them. Douglass could see the fierce yellow-orange of fire crawling along piers and over barges.

A few stubborn guns still fired at the enemy vessels. Contemptuously, the warships ignored them. After the first steamer out on Lake Ontario was blown to bits, none of the others tried to make a break for it. They sat very still in the water, waiting to be boarded. Then, one after another, they steamed off. A couple of the warships shepherded them on their way.