Our One Common Country by James B. Conroy

black-hearted artillery man” on the Petersburg siege line dropped a pair of spherical case shells on some blue-coated pickets heading back to the lines of the 35th Massachusetts Infantry. Dozens of lethal balls burst over their Yankee heads. Corporal Charles W. Gilman, “an excellent man,” was killed on the spot. Henry Lenkorf died in a field hospital. Gilman was the luckier of the two. In fairness, their regimental historian would later say, the sportsmanship was arguable. The incident was reviewed on the picket line and “loudly condemned on both sides as a breach of the tacit agreement not to fire during the day,” but these were pickets talking, and “the author of the deed would probably reply that the understanding had reference only to the pickets, and not to the artillery and mortars, which opened whenever they saw game worth the powder.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    I Do Not Think I Would Get Back
    On December 28, Savannah having fallen, Preston Blair came back to Lincoln and told him he had an idea that he thought could lead to peace, and he wanted to take it to Richmond. Lincoln cut him off, as he had the first time. “If you choose to go, I will not stop you,” his collaborator said, but the President of the United States did not want to know what he would say or do when he got there. “You will have no authority to speak for me in any way whatsoever.” The president went to his pigeonhole desk, scribbled on a card no bigger than a laundry ticket, and handed it to his guest: “Allow the bearer, F. P. Blair, Sr., to pass our lines, go South, and return. December 28, 1864. A. Lincoln.” It was the bearer’s only credential. Whatever F. P. Blair Sr. might say or do in the South would not be attributable to A. Lincoln. The president expected little if any result from the old man’s trip, but the Sage of Silver Spring would surely bring to Richmond a thicker Kentucky accent than he left with, and return with what Lincoln coveted: a canny expert’s read on the mood in the Rebel capital.
    In the meantime, Lincoln kept it to himself. He may have informed Seward, but the rest of the Cabinet was not told. If Blair confided in anyone but his fellow Blairs, no record of it survives; but he claimed a few months later that the object of his trip, though conceived and undertaken on his own, was not without some “indefinite understanding with friends in power in Washington,” an allusion that surely included the most powerful friend of all.
    Whoever may have been in on it, it was too late for Private George Deutzer of the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers. He lost his life that night to a shell lobbed into Fort Hell.

    In his element on a mission of intrigue, the Old Gentleman must have crossed back over Pennsylvania Avenue with a spring in his step. He had been suffering from a toothache and a general sort of weakness, but the pass in his pocket revived him and dulled his pain. The house was full of holiday guests as his fretting wife and daughter packed cold Christmas leftovers for the two-day trip to Richmond, no easy thing in winter for a feeble old man with a bad tooth. He would steam down Chesapeake Bay to Fort Monroe—the massive stone-built citadel at Hampton Roads, Virginia, that had never left federal control—then on to Grant’s headquarters at City Point, then up the James River on the Union flag-of-truce boat, then overland by coach three miles north to Richmond through the enemy fortifications. The Blairs had struck a bargain. Their patriarch would go to the enemy capital, but he would not go alone. His black servant Henry would go with him. Montgomery would come along as far as City Point.
    They embarked the next morning on the paddle wheeler Baltimore, Preston and Montgomery in comfortable quarters, Henry and the baggage elsewhere. The trip down Chesapeake Bay took a day. Overnighting at Fort Monroe, they steamed past Jamestown in the morning.