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 cannons 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.
'Northwest,' Frederick Douglass said. 'Toward Toronto, I suppose. Prizes of war.'
He sighed again. Back before the War of Secession, as Rochester stationmaster for the Underground Railroad, he'd sent plenty of escaped Negroes to Toronto, to put them forever beyond the reach of recapture. He'd even sent on a few after the war, though the Underground Railroad had withered and died in the bitterness following the U.S. defeat. And now Britain and Canada stood against the USA and with the land from which those Negroes had escaped, and from which so many millions more still longed to escape.
But only a couple of the warships were departing. The rest cruised back and forth, either out of range of the few surviving shore guns or still not thinking their fire worth noticing. With them out there, Rochester 's harbor was effectually closed. They proved that bare minutes later, halting an inbound steamer. It soon headed off in the direction of Toronto, likely with a prize crew on board to make sure it got there.
'Blockade, without a doubt,' Frederick Douglass said. 'Now we pay the price for not having paid the price since the War of Secession.'
'Terrible thing,' his wife said. 'Now I see for my own self what those Rebels did when they shot up your steamboat. You are never going to set foot in one of those contraptions again, not while I live and breathe you won't. You done gave me your promise, Frederick, and I expect you to keep it.'
The gunners who'd set the Queen of the Ohio ablaze were amateurs with obsolete guns. Real artillerymen with modern breech-loading field guns would never have let the sidewheeler escape. 'You know I keep my promises,' Douglass said. 'I'll keep this one, the same as any other.'
All that day and into the night, the Rochester wharves burned.
Superficially, everything in Salt Lake City was normal. So far as Abraham Lincoln could divine, everything from Provo in the south to Ogden in the north was superficially normal. The Mormons went on about their business as they always did, pretending to the best of their ability that the world beyond the fertile ground between the Wasatch Mountains on the one hand and the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake on the other did not exist. The Gentile minority also tried to pretend it was not cut off from the outside world, a pretense that grew more nervous as day followed day with no trains going into or out of Utah, with no telegrams connecting the Territory to the rest of the nation of which it was a part.
As if to emphasize that Utah had not followed the Confederate States into secession from the USA, the Stars and Stripes still flew from the Council House: the ugly little building near Temple Square wherein the Territorial Legislature and governor did their jobs. But the legislature, though in session, had no quorum. The Mormons who made up a majority of its membership were staying home.
The flag still flew above Fort Douglas, too. But the only soldiers in the fort were Utah volunteers: Mormons, in other words. In the Mexican War, the Mormon Legion had fought on the American side. In what was being called the Second Mexican War, the Mormons were playing their cards closer to the vest.
Lincoln, these days, was a guest in Gabriel Hamilton's home, the bill he was running up at the Walker House having grown too steep for Hamilton and the other activists who'd invited him to Salt Lake City to go on paying it. Had he been able to send a wire out of Utah, he could have drawn on his own funds. As things were, he depended on the charity of others.
That galled him. At breakfast one morning, he said, 'I hope you're keeping a tab for all this, Gabe, because I intend paying you back every penny of it when I get the chance.'
Both Hamilton and his wife, a plump, pretty blonde named Juliette, shook their heads. 'Don't you worry about a thing, Mr. Lincoln,' Hamilton said. 'None of this here is your fault, and you aren't liable for it.'
Lincoln gave him a severe look. 'I've been paying my own way in the world since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and since I haven't been knee-high to anything excepting possibly a giraffe for upwards of sixty years'-to show what he meant, he rose from his chair and extended himself up to his full angular height, towering over Gabe and Juliette-'it's not a habit I feel easy about breaking.'
'Think of it as visiting with friends who are glad to have you, then,' Hamilton said.
'That's right.' Juliette nodded emphatically. 'Have some more griddle cakes. We'll put some meat on those bones of yours yet, see if we don't.'
'No one's done that my whole life through, either,' Lincoln said, 'and 1 expect that means it can't be done. But I will have some more, because they're very fine, and I'll thank you to pass the molasses, too.'
'My guess is, you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Lincoln, you haven't had a holiday since you once started in to work,' Gabriel Hamilton said, 'and you're all at sixes and sevens on account of you don't know what to do with
