The Guns of the South

* XIII *

Robert E. Lee glanced over at a map of Kentucky, then noted a last couple of corrections to an order changing the size of the garrisons in the new Confederate fortifications along the Ohio River. With a satisfied nod, he fixed his signature to the bottom of the paper. Then he got up, stretched, and set his hat on his head. The sky was beginning to go more purple than blue—enough for one day. In peacetime, he could think that and keep his conscience clear.

The lobby of Mechanic’s Hall was all but deserted when he went downstairs. Even John Beauchamp Jones’s proud brass nameplate presided over a bare desk and an empty chair. A sentry came to attention as Lee walked past him into the gathering twilight.

Another man in Confederate gray was coming down the steps of the building across the street from the War Department, the building that was the Richmond headquarters of America Will Break. Lee’s mouth tightened, ever so slightly; he wished soldiers would stay away from the Rivington men, especially since the war was more than a year and a half over. He had contemplated a general order to that effect, but set the notion aside as being unjust and without foundation in fact: the Rivington men troubled him, but on balance had done his country far more good than harm.

As he and the other man approached each other, he noticed the fellow’s tunic buttons were grouped in three groups of three. His frown deepened. What was a general doing, consorting with the Rivington men? He peered through the gathering darkness, but did not recognize the officer.

The other man appeared to have no such doubts about him, but then his face was arguably the most widely known in the Confederacy. The man saluted, then held out a hand and said, “General Lee, sir, I’m delighted to meet you at last. I am Nathan Bedford Forrest.”

“The pleasure is mine, General Forrest. Forgive me, I beg, for not knowing you at once.” As he spoke, Lee studied the famous cavalry commander. Forrest was a big man, a couple of inches taller than he, with wide shoulders but otherwise Whipcord lean. He bore himself almost as erectly as Jefferson Davis. His hair receded at the temples; gray streaked it and his chin beard. Deep shadows dwelt in the hollows of his cheeks.

His eyes—as soon as Lee saw those gray-blue eyes, he understood how Forrest had earned his reputation, for good and ill. They were the hooded eyes of a bird of prey, utterly intent on whatever lay before them. Of all the officers Lee had known, he could think of only two whose visages bore the stamp of implacable purpose that marked Nathan Bedford Forrest: Jackson, whom he would mourn forever, and John Bell Hood. What this man set out to do, he would do, or die trying.

Lee said, “I was just heading home, sir. Will you take supper with me?”

“I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble, General,” Forrest said doubtfully. His voice was soft and pleasant, with a strong flavor of backwoods Tennessee.

“Nonsense,” Lee declared. “There will be plenty. In any case, I may keep you too busy to eat, as I intend to talk your ears off.”

Forrest’s smile enlivened his brooding features remarkably. “I am at your service, then, General Lee, and I will make sure I keep my hands on my ears at all times.”

“My house is only a few blocks away,” Lee said. “Do come along. I’ve wanted to meet you for some time, to discuss with you your extraordinary campaigns in the west, but circumstances have kept you in the field even while the rest of us enjoyed the fruits of peace.”

“Blame the Yankees, for trifling with our niggers,” Forrest said.

“I am sick to death of blame, General Forrest, and of endless recriminations on both sides, let me say,” Lee added hastily. “The United States are here, as are we; our two nations have a common border which stretches for two thousand miles, more or less. Either we learn not to be distracted by our differences or we fight a war every generation, as the nations of Europe are in the habit of doing. I would not care to see such folly come to our shores.”

“Spoken like the true Christian you are, sir,” Forrest said. “Still and all, knowing I can lick the Yankees whenever I need to will make me sleep better of nights. As for the nigger soldiers they left behind, we’ll be years getting’ ‘em all to remember who their masters are. And for that, I wish God would send all the Yankees straight to hell.”

“Do you think it can be done, even given years?” Lee asked.

“Kill enough of ‘em, General Lee, sir, and the rest of ‘em will get the notion,” Forrest said with brutal pragmatism.

The cavalry general and Negro fighter seemed very sure of himself, but Lee still wondered if simple savagery could produce even a Tacitean peace. The promise of force had always had its place in maintaining slavery and keeping revolts from breaking out, yet that promise rarely had to be kept in the days before the war. He wondered how—and whether—the Confederacy could withstand a constantly simmering rebellion.

Hoping to change the subject, he asked Forrest, “What brings you to Richmond at last?”

“I think I wrecked the last nigger robber band that halfway deserved to be called a regiment, so I had the leisure to present my report in person,” Forrest answered. “I gave it to a clerk this afternoon, so I daresay you’ll see it tomorrow. I thought I’d look at the slave markets, too; plenty of prime niggers here, since this is the capital.”

“I see.” Lee could not keep a certain chill from his voice. He knew Forrest had made his fortune trading slaves, but he had not expected him to refer to it so openly. No Virginia gentleman would have done so, that was certain.

Forrest might have picked the thought from his mind. “I hope I’ve not offended you, sir. My father was a blacksmith who neither read nor wrote. He died when I was sixteen, leaving me the oldest of eight brothers and three sisters, so I’ve had to come up as I can. My son will be a gentleman, but I’ve not had the leisure to learn that way of life myself.” He drew himself up straighter than ever in touchy pride.

“You’ve done well for yourself, General Forrest, and for your family, and for the Confederate States,” Lee said, which had the virtue of being both true and polite—gentlemanly, as a matter of fact. Nevertheless, he could not quite suppress a touch of pique at Forrest’s implied criticism of his own upbringing and social class.

By then the two men had reached Lee’s house. Lee knocked on the front door, took off his coat as he waited for Julia to open it. Forrest followed his example; now that spring was here, an uncovered moment at night was no longer uncomfortable. Crickets chirped here and there in the grass.

The door swung open. Julia’s smile of greeting for Lee turned to a questioning look when she saw he had a companion. As he handed her his coat, he said, “I’ve brought a guest home, as you see. This is Lieutenant General Forrest, of the Confederate cavalry.”

Julia had been reaching out to take Forrest’s coat and hang it on the tree by Lee’s. The motion froze. So did Julia’s face. For the first time since Lee had manumitted her, he saw her features go blank in the special way Negroes used to hide all feelings from their masters. After a long pause, she did hang up Forrest’s coat. Then she turned and hurried away, long skirts rustling about her.

“You’re too easy on your staff, sir,” Forrest remarked with a tone of professional expertise. “Slaves need to have in mind who the masters are.”

“She’s a freedwoman,” Lee said. “I no longer own any slaves.”

“Oh.” Now Forrest hid whatever his true feelings were behind a mask as impenetrable as Julia’s. Lee remembered he had been a gambler as well as a slave dealer.

Julia returned, followed closely by Lee’s wife and daughters. In an instant, Forrest became, if not a gentleman, then at least a polished simulacrum of one, bowing over the younger women’s hands and bowing even lower over and kissing that of Mary Custis Lee. “We are delighted to welcome such a famous commander… Lee’s wife said.

“Thinking on the commander who lives here, you are much too kind to my own poor self,” Forrest said, bowing yet again. Then he grinned an impish grin. “I’ll take all the flattery I can get; though.”

He proved a lively guest at the supper table, using silverware, a gravy boat, and a heel of bread to show how he had won his victory north of Corinth, Mississippi. “You use your horses, then, merely to transport your troopers, but have them fight dismounted?” Lee said.

“That is my rule,” Forrest agreed. “A horse has use in getting a man from here to there faster than he can march, but what good is it in a fight but to give a choicer target than a man on foot? That was true before; what with the coming of the repeater, it’s doubly so these days.”

“Many others did likewise, both among the enemy and our own horse soldiers,” Lee said, thinking of Jeb Stuart. “How do you account for your greater success with the tactic?”

“From what I’ve seen, sir, most of ‘em did it because circumstances forced it on ‘em. Me, I aimed to fight my men so from the start. I drove ‘em hard, too, and always stayed up at the very front of the pack. With all the guns my own escort party carried, I used it to plug any holes or to break through when I saw the chance.” Forrest grinned again. “Worked right well, too.”

“There I cannot disagree,” Lee said thoughtfully. “Should we style your men dragoons, then?”

“General Lee, I don’t care what you call them, and they don’t care what you call them. But when you do call them, they fight like wildcats with rattlesnake fangs, and that I do care about. Will you pass me the sweet potatoes, sir?”

Lee watched ‘the way Julia acted around Forrest. She was a good enough servant not to ignore him altogether, but she plainly wanted to. Yet even when she was busy at the opposite end of the table, her eyes, big and fearful, kept sliding toward him. He must have seemed the bogeyman incarnate to her; Negroes had been using his name to frighten their children ever since the Fort Pillow massacre, and his campaigns against the black soldiers left behind in the Mississippi valley when Union forces abandoned Confederate soil only made his reputation the more fearsome.

He knew it, too. Every so often, when he spied Julia watching him, he would raise an eyebrow or bare his teeth for a moment. He never did anything overt enough for Lee to call him on it, but Julia finally dropped a silver ladle, picked it up, and fled as ignominiously as the luckless Federal general Sturgis, whom Forrest had smashed though outnumbered better than two to one. Chuckling, Forrest said, “Sturgis moaned to one of his colonels, ‘For God’s sake, if Mr. Forrest will let me alone, I will let him alone.’ But I wouldn’t let him alone; I aimed to whip him out of his boots, and I did it.”

Mildred Lee rose from her chair. “If you men are going to fight your battles across the tablecloth, I will leave you to your sport.”

“If you stay, we won’t fight them,” Forrest said quickly. Hard-bitten as he was, he could also be charming, especially to women.

But Mildred shook her head. “No, I should only spoil your fun, for you know you’d still wish to, and Father did not bring you home so he could listen to me. He can do that any night, after all.”

“He can do that any night, after all, when he is in Richmond,” Mary Custis Lee said, an edge to her voice. Lee sighed silently. Even after nine months without straying from the capital, his wife had not forgiven him his long trip to Kentucky and Missouri. Mildred turned and left the room, followed by Agnes and Mary; Lee’s eldest daughter wheeled Mary Custis Lee ahead of her.

“Well.” Lee rose, took a cigar case off a cabinet shelf, offered Forrest a smoke.

Forrest shook his head. “I never got the habit, but you go on yourself.”

“I don’t use them, either; I keep them for guests.” Lee put the case away, then asked, “Did you also come” to Richmond to see the men from America Will Break?”

“What if I did?” Forrest said. “Those repeaters of theirs made my men five times the fighters they would have been without them.” He gave Lee a measuring stare. “By all accounts, we’d have lost the war without their aid.”

“By all accounts indeed.” Lee studied Nathan Bedford Forrest in return. Cautiously, he said,” Am I to infer that the accounts you mentioned include the one given by the Rivington men themselves?”

“Just so. I gather you’ve also heard this account?” Forrest waited for Lee to nod, then said softly, almost to himself, “I wondered if I was the only one they’d told. Well, no matter.” He gathered himself. “Do you believe what they say, sir?”

“Or do I find it fantastic, you mean? I can imagine nothing more fantastic than men traveling in time as if by railroad.” Forrest started to say something; Lee held up a hand. “But I believe nonetheless. Any madman may claim to come from the future, but madmen do not commonly carry proof for their assertions. Their artifacts convince more strongly than their words.”

“My thought exactly, General Lee.” Forrest drew in along, relieved breath. “But with the artifacts comes the tale, and the tale they tell of the history ahead makes me believe more what I already thought: that the South is the last and brightest hope of the white race, and if we ever turn loose of the niggers here, they’ll ruin everything everywhere.”

“If all the Rivington men say is true, that may be a justifiable conclusion,” Lee said. Maybe that belief explained some of Forrest’s savage conduct in his war against the blacks, although, as he’d said himself, he’d had no use for Negroes—save as a source of income—even before the Rivington men came to help the Confederacy win its independence. Lee went on, “Yet all the trend of the nineteenth century makes me wonder. The nations of Europe almost unanimously find chattel slavery abhorrent, and us on account of it; most of the South American republics have abandoned it; even brutal Russia has freed its serfs. The trend in history seems to be ever toward more liberty, not less.”

“Are you saying you believe the Negroes ought to be freed, sir, after the war we fit to keep them slaves?” Forrest’s voice remained low and polite, but took on an unmistakable note of warning; his rather sallow complexion turned a shade redder.

“We fought the war, as you say, to ensure we would be the only ones with the right to either preserve our institutions or change them, and we have won that right,” Lee answered. “Not only the opinions of the outside world but also the course of the war and of your own gallant efforts after our armistice with the United States have compelled me to alter somewhat my view of the black man.”

“Not me mine, by God,” Forrest growled. “At Fort Pillow, we killed five hundred niggers for a loss of twenty of our own; the Mississippi ran red for two hundred yards with their blood. That ought to show Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners—in other words, that they deserve to be just what and where they are.”

“They fought well enough at Bealeton, and elsewhere against the Army of Northern Virginia in our advance on Washington City,” Lee said: “no worse than their equally inexperienced white counterparts, at any rate. And in your campaigns in the lands formerly under Federal occupation, have you found them such easy prey as you did at Fort Pillow?”

He purposely did not mention the stories that said most of the Negroes at Fort Pillow had been slain after they surrendered. Forrest bristled even so. “Even a rat will fight, if you push him into a corner,” he said contemptuously.

“But if you don’t, he will not,” Lee replied. “The Negroes could quietly have returned to their bonds, at no danger to themselves. That they chose what most of them must have known to be a futile fight—all the more so, as your men were armed with repeaters—must, I believe, provoke the contemplation of any thoughtful man.”

“Their grandfathers fit when they were in Africa; too, I expect,” Forrest said with a shrug: “fit and lost, or they’d not have been caught and shipped over here. The ones I fit after the armistice? They were better than those worthless, hapless niggers at Fort Pillow, that I grant you. But that they fit ‘well enough’? I deny it, sir, or I’d not have licked them over and over again.”

“There our opinions differ,” Lee said. Forrest inclined his head to show he agreed with that much, if with nothing else Lee had said. Lee persisted, “I do not feel the views of the rest of the world may be ignored with safety for our state, nor do I think we can take the Negro’s lack of manliness as much for granted as before. Sooner than see the Confederacy eternally plagued with revolt and insurrection, should we not begin a program of—”

“Just one damned minute, sir,” Forrest broke in. Lee blinked; he was not used to being interrupted, let alone so rudely. Forrest sprang up from his chair and thrust his face, now quite red, up against Lee’s. “General Lee, you’re high-born, you’re high-minded, you might as well be a saint carved out of marble, and everybody says you ‘II be President as soon as Jeff Davis steps down. But if you are talking in any way, shape, or size about making people free Diggers, sir, I will fight you with every ounce of strength in my body. And I won’t be alone, sir, I promise you that. I won’t be alone.”

Lee rose, too. He wondered if Forrest would lay hands on him. The cavalry officer was some years his junior, but Lee promised him a nasty surprise if he struck first. He also wondered if Forrest would challenge him. He did not consider Forrest a gentleman, but the Tennesseean no doubt thought of himself as one…and was no doubt very quick with a pistol. But he had offered Forrest no personal insult: if anything, the reverse was true.

The two men glared at each other at closer than arm’s length for some little while. Lee battled down his own rage, said tightly, “General Forrest, I no longer find you an agreeable guest here, nor will you be welcome at my home again.”

Forrest snapped his fingers—left-handed; he had also eaten that way.” See how much I’d care to come back. I’d just as soon eat at Thaddeus Stevens’s house. The men of America Will Break may have saved the South from his tender mercies, but I see we can grow our own crop of Judases.” He spun on his heel and stomped away, his boots crashing on the wood floor, then slammed the door so violently that the flame in every lamp and candle in the dining room jumped. Lee listened to his furious footsteps receding down the walk. He slammed the iron gate that gave onto the street with a loud metallic clang.

Several women exclaimed upstairs. Lee walked to the bottom of the stairway and called, “It’s perfectly all right, my dears. General Forrest chose to leave a bit sooner than he thought he might, that’s all.”

But it wasn’t all right, and he knew it. Till now, his only enemies had been men his professional duty called him to oppose: Mexicans, western Indians, John Brown, soldiers and officers of the United States. Now he had a personal foe, and a dangerous one. He blew a long breath out through his mustache. He could feel the difference. He did not care for it.

Nate Caudell wiped sweat from his forehead, paused to rest a moment in the shade of a willow tree. His chuckle was half amused, half chagrined. Henry Pleasants’s new farm was only five miles or so up the road from Nashville toward Castalia, and here he’d started breathing hard before it came into sight. In the army, a five-mile march wouldn’t have been worth complaining about. “I’m getting lazy and soft,” he said out loud.

He pushed on. Before long, he came to a split-rail fence. As soon as he turned into the lane that led to the farmhouse, a white man who was hoeing a vegetable garden enclosed by another fence turned and let out a loud halloo to announce his arrival. The fellow’s voice had an Irish lilt to it; when he turned back toward Caudell, his pale, freckled face looked vaguely familiar.

“Good day,” Caudell said, lifting his hat. “Have I seen you somewhere before?”

“Faith, sir, I don’t think so. John Moring I am, and I’ve spent most of me time till now down by Raleigh—saving a spell in the army, that is.”

“That’s where—” Caudell began, and then stopped. Moring hadn’t been in his company, and had disappeared from the Forty Seventh North Carolina not long after Gettysburg. But that was almost three years ago now, and no one these days was making any effort to track down deserters. Caudell shrugged. “Never mind. Is Mr. Pleasants at home?”

“You’re Nate Caudell, are ye not? Aye, he’s here: sir. Where else would he be?”

Caudell lifted his hat again, walked on down the lane. He passed a stable with a cattle pen beside it, jumped over a tiny stream, then went by a corncrib and a woodpile. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the pigpen by the corncrib, but beyond it stood the farmhouse, in the middle of a large, irregular yard where chickens and turkeys scratched.

Henry Pleasants came out onto the house’s covered porch just as Caudell got to the end of the yard. He waved to his friend and hurried over to greet him. Barnyard fowl scattered, clucking and gobbling indignantly. “Hello, Nate,” he said, pumping Caudell’s hand. He waved out to the fields that stretched back from the house. “Crop should be ail right, God willing, though we’ve had less rain than I’d hoped for.”

“Good.” Caudell looked at the fields, too, and back at the cow barn and pigpen, then at the farmhouse itself, a two-story whitewashed clapboard building with a timbered roof and a tall brick chimney—no planter’s mansion this, but no hovel, either. “It all looks very fine, Henry. I’m happy for you.”

“I still need a man with a good head for figures, Nate, to keep me from having to do my own bookkeeping,” Pleasants said. “You know I’d pay you better than your schoolteaching does.”

He’d made that offer the last time Caudell came to the farm, too. As he had then, Caudell shook his head. “I like teaching school, Henry. It’s not a line of work you get into for the money. And besides, I’d sooner be your friend than your hired man.”

“The one wouldn’t leave out the other, Nate. You know that.

“All right, but no thank you all the same.” Caudell knew nothing of the sort. As a teacher, he worked for wages but was largely free in what he did and how he did it. That suited his independent nature far better than sitting at a ledger with Henry Pleasants looking over his shoulder ever could.

A black man carrying a jar of whiskey and two glasses came out of the farmhouse. “Thank you, Israel,” Pleasants said.

“I knew I hadn’t seen you around the general store lately, Israel,” Caudell said. “When did you start working for Henry here?”

“Two—three weeks ago, suh,” The Negro answered. “Mistuh Pleasants, he pay as good as Mistuh Liles, an’ he got mo’ books to read, too. Now I learned how, I surely do love to read, suh, that I do. Mistuh Liles, he fuss some when I go, but it weren’t like he own me.”

“Only trouble I have with Israel is getting his nose out of a book when I need him for something,” Pleasants said. “If I can teach him ciphering, maybe I ‘II make him my bookkeeper, Nate, since you don’t want the job.” He spoke jocularly, but then turned and gave Israel a careful once-over. “Maybe I will at that, by God. I wonder if he could learn? Israel, do you want to try to learn arithmetic? If you can do it, it would mean more money for you.”

“I likes to learn, suh, an’ I likes money might well. You want to show me, reckon I try.”

“You’re a hard worker, Israel. Maybe you will learn. If you do, you can keep books for a lot of people in town, too, you know, not just for me,” Pleasants said. “Keep at it and you’ll end up with a fine house of your own one day.”

Caudell almost smiled at that, but at the last minute kept his face straight. It could happen. Thanks to the war, things were looser these days than they ever had been. A free Negro sensible enough to stay out of trouble might come a long way without a lot of people noticing.

“You want to show me, suh, reckon I try,” Israel repeated. “I got no place better to go than here, looks like. I’s jus’ glad I didn’t head No’th when the bluecoats sail away. By what the papers say, it’s rougher bein’ a nigger up there than down here—they hangs you to a lamp post jus’ fo’ walkin’ down the street.”

“You might be right, Israel, though I’m embarrassed to admit it,” Pleasants said.

Caudell nodded. “White men up North blame Negroes for the war, seems like.” Savage antiblack riots had convulsed New York and Philadelphia within days of each other, as if word of one triggered the next. In Washington, Confederate pickets across the Potomac watched Federal troops battle arsonists intent on burning down the colored part of town. And along the Ohio River, white men with guns turned away slaves fleeing across from Kentucky, saying, “This ain’t your country”—and opened fire if the Negroes would not go back. Southern papers reported every atrocity, every upheaval in the United States in loving detail, as if to warn blacks they could expect no warm reception if they ran away.

Israel heaved a long sigh. “Ain’t easy bein’ a nigger, no matter where you is.”

That, Caudell thought, was no doubt true. Israel set down the whiskey jar and went back into the house. Caudell swigged from his glass. He coughed, got it down. The fire in his throat fumed to warmth in his belly, warmth that spread through him. Pleasants raised his glass. “Here’s to a free-labor farm.”

“A free-labor farm,” Caudell echoed. He drank again; the warmth intensified. He looked around. The impression he’d had as he walked up to the farmhouse persisted.” A free-labor farm that’s doing right well for itself.”

“If the weather stays close to decent and prices hold up, I’ll get by,” Pleasants answered. He was new to farming, but seemed to have already picked up the man of the land’s ingrained aversion to sounding too optimistic. He went on, “By what the papers say, weather’s even worse farther south and west. I hate to see anyone else hurt, but it may help me.”

“How many hands do you have working for you?”

“Seven men—three free blacks, two Irishmen—”

“I saw one of them in your vegetable patch.” Caudel, lowered his voice.” Maybe you ought to know he ran off from my regiment.”

“Who, John? Did he?” Pleasants frowned. “I’ll keep a close eye on him, then, though he’s given me no trouble so far. Anyway, I also have a couple of local white men here, and Tom—he’s one of the blacks—bought his wife Hattie free a couple of ‘years ago, and she does the cooking for us.” As if the words were a cue, a long, unmelodious horn blast sounded from the back of the house. Pleasants grinned. “There’s dinner now. Come on, Nate.”

Dinner—fried ham, sweet potatoes, and corn bread—was served outdoors, in back of the house behind the kitchen. Hattie, a very large, very brown woman, seemed personally offended unless everyone who ate from her table stuffed himself until incapable of moving. Caudell was more than willing to oblige her. Happily replete, he leaned back on his bench and joined in the byplay between Pleasants and the farm hands.

Besides John Moring, Caudell also knew Bill Wells, who had joined his company not long before the last year’s campaign started. Wells had been only eighteen then; twenty now, he still looked years younger. “You better not send me out to fill canteens, Mr. First Sergeant, sir,” he said with a grin.

“I’ll let Henry here give you your fatigues now,” Caudell retorted, which made Wells duck as if a bullet had cracked past him.

Hattie’s husband Tom, Israel, and the other “colored man, whose name was Joseph, sat together. They were quieter than the whites, and took little part in the banter that flew around the rest of the table—though at liberty, free Negroes had to be leery about taking liberties. But when Israel started boasting about how he was going to learn arithmetic, Tom raised an eyebrow and said, “If you de man who do my pay, Israel, I gwine count it twice when I gits it, an’ that a fac’.”

“You couldn’t even count it oncet, nigger,” Israel said loftily.

“Marse Henry, I know he pay me right,” Tom said. “You—”

His pause carried a world of meaning. After a while, Henry Pleasants looked at his pocket watch and said, “Time to get back to it.” The workers got up and headed past the old overseer’s cabin toward the fields. Joseph reached out and snagged a sweet potato so he would have something to munch on if—unlikely as the notion seemed to Caudell—he got hungry in the middle of the afternoon.

“This is very fine, Henry,” Caudell said as Hattie cleared away the plates. “You’ve done well for yourself, as usual.”

Instead of cheering Pleasants, the praise made him melancholy. He sighed, looked down at the planks of the table, ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair. In a low voice, he said, “If only Sallie could see this farm.”

“Sallie?” Caudell peered at his friend. In all the time he’d known Pleasants, he’d never heard him mention a woman’s name. He tried to figure out why, picked the most likely reason he could think of: “Didn’t she want to come South with you, Henry?”

Pleasants turned to stare at him; the pain in his eyes told Caudell at once that he’d made a mistake. “She would have come anywhere with me. But—oh, hell.” Pleasants shook his head. “Even now, how hard this is! We were married, Sallie and I, just at the start of 1860; I would take oath we were the happiest couple in Pottsville. Around Christmas, she would have borne my child.”

“Would have?” Caudell knew a sinking sensation. Gently, he asked, “Did you lose her in childbed, Henry?”

“I didn’t even have her so long.” Unshed tears glistened in Pleasants’s eyes. “She started to moan—God, such dreadful moans may I never hear again!—before dawn one October morning. She blazed with fever. The doctor lived only a couple of blocks away. I ran through the darkness to his house, fetched him back still in his nightshirt. He did all he could, I know that, but Sallie…Sallie died the ‘Same day.”

“May she have gone to a better world, as I’m sure she has.” The words felt flat and empty to Caudell, but he had none better to offer. Doctors could do so little—but he wondered, just for a futile moment, if a Rivington man could have saved her.”

Pleasants said, “She was a finer Christian than I can ever hope to be, so I am sure of it as well. But it took four big strong miners to keep me from leaping into the grave after her. Without her, the world was cold and empty and not worth living in. After Fort Sumter, my aunt Emily asked if I’d ever thought of enlisting in the army. I took her up on it: she must have thought it would help me forget. That was partly my reason, I suppose.”

Caudell knew he had not finished. “What was the rest?”

“If you must know, Nate, I hoped I would be killed. What better way to be set free from my sorrow and pain and uselessness? I lived, as you see, but you seemed a gift from God that day in Rocky Mount. I seized on any excuse not to go back to Pottsville, as you may imagine.”

“Whatever your reasons were for staying here in North Carolina, I’m glad you did. Life goes on. It’s the oldest thing in the world to say, but it’s true. If nothing else can, going through a war the size of ours will teach you that. At camp the last night after Gettysburg—” It was Caudell’s turn to have trouble continuing. So many friends had fallen in that futile charge, but he and his fellow survivors had to carry on as best they could.

Henry Pleasants nodded. “I do know that, but I know also that the words are easier to speak than to live. Moving on toward six years now that Sallie’s gone, yet the memory of her pierces me still. I would have spoken of her to you before, but—” He tightened his lips, blew air out through them. “It still hurts. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t blame you.” As pleasants had before, Caudell waved to the fields and the fine farmhouse. “She’d be proud of what you have here.” Caudell hesitated, wondering if he should say what had sprung into his mind. He decided to: “And if she was like a lot of Northern women, I reckon she’d be proud of the way you’re running this farm with free labor, too.”

“I thank you for that, truly I do. It can’t have come easy, not from a North Carolina man. But you’re right—Sallie was strong for abolition, likely stronger than I was then. I don’t think I could have hoped to meet her in the world to come if I’d bought Negroes to work this place.”

Caudell only grunted. He reached for the whiskey jug. More and more these days, he leaned against slavery himself. But he would not say that out loud, not yet, not even to a close friend who sprang from the North. If word he had such notions ever got around, he might be lucky to lose only his job. He finished his drink, then said, “Show me the inside of the house, why don’t you?”

“I’d be glad to.” Pleasants also emptied his glass, then led Caudell in through the open kitchen door. Hattie looked over her shoulder at him from the little tin tub in which she was washing the dishes. The furniture in the big sitting room was country-made, and therefore cheap, but looked comfortable: low chairs and a sofa, all with the seats of undressed calfskin. Hand-hewn shelves full of books lined one wall.

A washroom with a tin tub on feet and several storage rooms took up the rest of the ground floor. “Bedrooms are upstairs,” Pleasants said: “one for me; one for Israel, who works more around the house than in the fields; one for my Irishmen; and one for the two local boys. Hattie and Tom and Joshua sleep in the overseer’s cabin out back. I think they find that very funny and very satisfying; I know I would, in their shoes. There used to be a row of slave huts out there, too. I’ve knocked down every one of them.”

“It’s your farm, Henry. Do you get the work out of your people that an overseer could with a slave gang?”

“I certainly believe so, given what some of my neighbors tell me they expect from their Negroes. The two Irishmen are capital workers and the free blacks good enough. The ones with whom I’ve had the greatest difficulty are the local white men, if I may tell you that without causing offense. I’ve had to let several of them go; they will not work steadily for hire, and think the very idea smacks of turning them into niggers, as one of them said.”

“A lot of white folks in the South are like that,” Caudell said. “If they have to work at tasks slaves normally do, they feel as if they are slaves themselves,”

“But that’s wrong, don’t you see?” Pleasants said earnestly. “Keeping slaves degrades all labor, free and slave alike, and there’s nothing wrong with labor in itself. But when even a good many of your artisans are slaves, where’s the prod for a white man to learn a skill? Your rich planters here are very rich indeed; I’ll not deny that for a moment. But your poor are poorer than they are in the United States, and have fewer choices open to them to improve their lot. Where is this country of yours—country of mine now, too—going?”

“I don’t think we worry so much about going somewhere as folks do up North,” Caudell said. “Most of us are just content to stay where we are.” Throughout the war, All we want is to be left alone had served as a Confederate rallying cry.

“But the world keeps changing, whether you do or not,” Pleasants pointed out. “You can’t keep walls up forever—look at Admiral Perry’s trip to Japan.”

Caudell made a wry face and held up his hand. He suspected—he was virtually certain—his friend was right. That didn’t mean he wanted to admit it, or even to talk about it very much. “Let us finish getting back on our feet after the war and we’ll do pretty well for ourselves,” he insisted.

“All right,” Pleasants said pacifically, seeing he had irked his friend. Still, he did not abandon the argument: “The war’s been over for a couple of years now, Nate, and the world’s not in the habit of waiting.”

Josiah Gorgas’s round face beamed like the sun. “I am truly delighted you could visit the armory on: such short notice, General Lee.”

“When you sent word yesterday that you had something worthy of my consideration, Colonel, I naturally made it a point to come investigate at once,” Lee answered. “Your performance, both in the war and since, gives me every confidence in your judgment. Your note, however, I found mysterious. What precisely am I here to consider?”

The Confederate ordnance chief walked out of his office, returned a moment later with a pair of repeating rifles. “These,” he said proudly.

He held one of them out to Lee, who took it and said, “I have become moderately familiar with the AK-47 over the past couple of years, and this—” His voice trailed away as he examined the weapon more closely. When he spoke again, it was without sarcasm. “This rifle appears different in certain small ways from those to which I have become accustomed. What have we here, Colonel?”

“A copy of the AK-47 manufactured here at the armory, sir. Two copies, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, how excellent,” Lee said softly. He worked the charging handle of the rifle Gorgas had given him. The smooth, well-oiled sniick! took him back to the tents northwest of Orange Court House and to the day he first heard that sound. He looked along the barrel. The Confederate gunsmiths had substituted a simpler sight for the calibrated one which normally graced an AK-47. “Have you tested these weapons as yet, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir,” Gorgas said. “We have successfully duplicated the repeating action of their models. When fired with cartridges furnished by the Rivington men, they also shoot about as accurately and with recoil similar to those models. Though trials have as yet been limited, they appear sturdy enough.” His eyes flicked away from Lee as he said that. He remembered the cavalry carbines which had proven as dangerous to their users as to the enemy, then—

“Have you tried firing them with the loads prepared down in Augusta?” Lee asked.

Gorgas nodded.” Again, they served. The flight path of the bullet is considerably higher with those loads, and the recoil considerably increased.” The ordnance chief winced reminiscently and rubbed his right shoulder.” As a matter of fact, when loaded with ordinary gunpowder, the rifle kicks like a mule.”

“A minor defect,” Lee said. “You’ve done marvelously well, Colonel Gorgas.”

“Not as well as I’d like to,” Gorgas answered, displaying the resolute perfectionism that suited him so well to his position. “For one thing, try as I might, I’ve not come close to matching the metal that goes into the barrel of the originals. So far as I can tell, it is as nearly indestructible as makes no difference. The ones we turn out both foul mote and are more difficult to clean than’ their prototypes. For another, both the rifles you see here are almost entirely handmade. Not only is production very slow on account of that, but parts from one weapon are not interchangeable with those of the other.”

“I presume you are working toward remedying this difficulty?”

“Working toward it is the appropriate phrase, sir. I am endeavoring to tool up to produce AK-47s as we did Springfields, but the going is slow. We were aided immeasurably in turning out Springfields by capturing the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and the tools it contained. Here I can gain no such advantage. Much as I love our country, sir, we have not been a manufacturing nation. Much of our industry, such as it is; was called into being by the exigencies of the late war.” Gorgas’s face assumed the mournful expression of a bloodhound on a difficult track. “Moreover, the AK-47 is a considerably more complex weapon, requiring many more steps in its production, than the rifles we are used to making. By this time next year, I expect to be producing it in some quantity. How much earlier than that I can hope to turn it out remains to be seen.”

Lee considered what the ordnance chief had said. It was not all he might have wished to hear. The United States emphatically was a manufacturing nation, second in the world after only Great Britain. He had visions of huge factories in Massachusetts or New York—or Massachusetts and New York—making repeaters in carload lots. But as Gorgas said, the South had been proudly agricultural until war and Federal blockade forced it to try to make some of the things it could no longer buy with cotton and tobacco. He supposed he should have been pleased with its progress, not worried about how backward it remained. He willed himself to be pleased, since he had no other choice.

“You’ve done splendidly, Colonel,” he said, as enthusiastically as he could. “By all means convey my congratulations to your clever artisans. I am glad to know we may one day be able to declare our independence from the men of America Will Break, just as we have from the United States.” He wished that day would come at once, but even seeing it ahead gave him no small relief.

Given the reported deployment of the Federal troops who have entered New Mexico from Colorado, Mr. President, I am convinced those troops are intended to lend moral support to the rebels in conflict with the Mexican Emperor Maximilian, as President Seymour has publicly declared. Nevertheless, I hope I might take the liberty of urging upon you the westward extension of railroads in Texas so that we become more readily able to meet dangers which may arise from that quarter. Now that the Tredegar Iron Works are producing track once more, the prospect of such a line appears to me to be deserving of your most serious consideration. You may perhaps recall Secretary Stanton’s contemptuous reference to our lack of any such means of transportation throughout the vast expanse of west Texas. I—

He looked up from the passage to gather his thoughts… and discovered Andries Rhoodie standing across the desk from him. The big Rivington man had come into his office so quietly that he’d failed to notice him. “Do please be seated, Mr. Rhoodie,” he said, embarrassed. “I hope I’ve not ignored you long?”

“No, not long,” Rhoodie said as he sat. A man of lighter spirit might have eased the moment with a joke, but Rhoodie, serious to the core, made no such effort. He paused only to rub at his reddish mustache for a moment before bulling ahead: “We of the AWB are not pleased with you, General Lee.”

“This is not the first time such a misfortune has occurred, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee observed. He watched Rhoodie frown, as if unsure whether he was being made sport of. Like General Grant, the Rivington man had trouble going in any direction but straight on. “What have I done to raise your hackles this time?”

“You favor freeing the blacks here,” Rhoodie said, blunt still.

“I was not aware my private opinions were your concern, sir, nor do I believe them to be so,” Lee replied. As against Grant, he essayed a flanking maneuver. “In any case, how have you become privy to my opinions on the subject? I have kept them private, and certainly have not communicated them to you.”

“You have spoken of these opinions to patriotic officers who disagree with them as strongly as we do.”

To Nathan Bedford Forrest, he meant: Lee worked that out with hardly a pause for thought. The rough Tennesseean had as much as said he was hand in glove with the Rivington men. Lee wondered if he’d said too much to Forrest. He decided he had not: keeping his thoughts secret would have implied he was ashamed of them, which he was not. He said, “I repeat, sir, that my private opinions are not your concern.”

“If they stayed private, I might agree with you,” Rhoodie answered. “But everyone says you will be the one to succeed Jeff Davis, and then your private opinions will be all too public. They go square against everything we stand for. My opinion—my private opinion, General Lee—is that they go square against everything the Confederacy stands for.”

“There, obviously, we disagree. In a republic like the Confederate States, the people and their representatives will eventually be responsible for choosing between us.”

Rhoodie breathed hard through his nose. “So you do aim to run for President, do you?”

As he’d told Jefferson Davis, Lee had no knowledge of politics, no interest in politics. But he also had no intention of permitting Andries Rhoodie to dictate to him. He thought he’d taught that to the Rivington man in the aftermath of Bealeton. Rhoodie, though, seemed hard to convince. Lee said,” And what if I do?”

“If you do, General Lee, you will certainly never see another vial of nitroglycerine tablets as long as you live—I promise you that,” Rhoodie said.

This man would sooner see me dead than President, Lee thought with a slow surge of wonder. He truly would. But more even than that, he wants to bend me to his will. He looked steadily at Andries Rhoodie. “I have known for some years now that I am no longer a young man. I am also a soldier. No doubt I should be lying if I said death held no terror for me, but I assure you most earnestly that whatever terrors it does hold are insufficient to make me deviate from my chosen course for the sake of your white pills.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Rhoodie said, and startled Lee by sounding completely sincere. He went on, “Of course I do not question your courage. I took altogether the wrong tack to persuade you that your views are mistaken, and I apologize for it.”

“Very well.” Lee still eyed Rhoodie with suspicion, but no more handsome apology could have been demanded on pain of meeting with pistols.

“Let me suggest something else,” the Rivington man said after a short pause for thought. Now he made his blunt-featured face as affable as he could, and sweetened his voice: “Your charming wife has long suffered from ailments beyond the power of the medicine of these times to cure. That does not mean, though, that those ailments will stay incurable forever…”

He was a good fisherman. Having dangled the bait in front of Lee, he fell silent and let him paint his own mental pictures: Mary free of pain; Mary hurrying toward him, upright and happy and out of the prison of her wheeled chair; Mary whirling with him as an orchestra played a sprightly waltz. Had Rhoodie spoken of Mary before he crassly threatened with the nitroglycerine pills, Lee knew he would have been tempted as, perhaps, never before in his life. He was more vulnerable through his family than through any danger aimed at himself, for their well-being was more important to him than his own.

Now he waited until his words were properly deployed before he committed them to battle: “You had better go, Mr. Rhoodie.”

He felt fury like a fire inside him. Most men quailed from him when he let that anger show. Andries Rhoodie, however, was an ironclad himself. He scowled back at Lee. “You think America Will Break will let you get by with your insolence forever, because we tolerated you more than we should have, back when the Confederate States still had the North to beat. We needed you then. But now the Confederacy is well established. If you try to twist it out of its proper course, America Will Break will break you.”

“And what, in your doubtlessly omniscient opinion, is our proper course, pray tell?”

The Rivington man ignored the heavy sarcasm. He answered as if the question were seriously meant: “The one for which you left the useless Union, of course: to preserve the South as a place where the white man can enjoy his natural superiority over the nigger, to show the world the truth of that superiority, and, at need, to act in the future in concert with other nations to preserve it.”

“Ah, now we come down to it,” Lee said. “You are saying that unless we serve as your obedient cat’s-paws in some time to come, we fail of our purpose—our purpose to you, that is. Mr. Rhoodie, our reasons for leaving the United States were more complex than those you name, and if we fought to gain our independence from them, we shall do likewise as necessary against you and yours. And I warn you, sir, that if you speak to me of this matter again, I shall not be responsible for my actions. Now get out of my sight.”

Andries Rhoodie stood up, dug in his pocket, and tossed an old, worn half cent on the desk in front of Lee. “This is how much I care for whether you’ll be responsible for your actions.” He tramped out of the office, slammed the door behind him.

Lee glared in shocked outrage. Had he been Bedford Forrest, Rhoodie never would have got out of Mechanic’s Hall alive. But Forrest and Rhoodie were allies. Lee’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. As had become his habit, he reached for his pills. He had the vial in his hand before he consciously noticed from whom it had come. With an angry growl, he put it back in his waistcoat pocket. His first thought was Better to die without the Rivington men than live with their cures.

He wondered if that also held true for the Confederacy as a whole. He thought about it seriously, then shook his head. His nation deserved to be free. For that matter, how could a good and effective medicine be morally wrong, no matter where it came from? He took out the pills again, let one melt under his tongue. While he had them, he would use them. When they were gone, he would do without, as he had until the Rivington men found their way into his life.

There, that was one decision made, he thought with some satisfaction as he replaced the nitroglycerine tablets once more. “One?” he said aloud. Then he realized that, as in the heat of battle, he had made up his mind without understanding how or even when he’d done so.

He would seek the Presidency next year. That the men of America Will Break did not want him to have it was reason enough, and more.

“How are you tonight, dear Mary?” he asked in the quiet of their bedroom after he’d helped her upstairs that evening. Down below, Mildred was playing the piano and singing with her sisters. Most nights, he would have stayed down there and sung with them, but his mind remained full of Andries Rhoodie.

“I am as I am—none too well, but very much here. And how are you, Robert?” Few people could have followed Lee’s thoughts, but after more than a third of a century, his wife was one of them. She went on, “Something new is troubling you, or I miss my guess, while I have only my usual collection of aches and pains.”

“Troubling me indeed.” As exactly as he could, Lee recounted the confrontation with Rhoodie.

Mary Custis Lee bristled indignantly when he told how the Rivington man had promised to cut off his supply of pills. Lee could almost see her hair rise under her ruffled nightcap. Then he had to tell her Rhoodie had offered to restore her health. Candlelight filled the lines of her face with deep shadows as she cocked her head to one side to study him. Slowly, she asked, “Could he have—cured me, Robert?”

“I do not know,” he answered. After a moment, he reluctantly added, “I confess I have not known the Rivington men to make false claims. However big their brags, they have a way of backing them up.”

“What…what did you tell him?”

“I told him to get out of my office and never come back,” Lee said. “Can you find it in your heart to forgive me for that?”

His wife did not reply, not right away. Instead, she looked down at herself, at the shrunken, twisted legs that had once been so lively, at the pain-filled flesh that had imprisoned her spirit for so many years. At last she said, “I am not surprised at it. I’ve known all our lives together that you place your country ahead of everything else. I understand that; I am used it it; I have taken it as an article of faith since the day you set the ring on my finger, and I dare say before that.”

“Then you do forgive me?” he said in glad relief.

“I do not,” she answered sharply. “I understand. I can even accept; you would not be the man you are, had you said yes to Rhoodie. I would no more have expected you to say yes than that the sun would shine green tomorrow. But sometimes I wish you had even an ounce of bend in you.”

“Do you want me to visit Rhoodie in his headquarters? He would receive me, I think, despite the harsh words that lie between us.”

“You say now that you would go to him.” Her hands brushed the notion aside with a quick, scornful gesture. “Surely your precious duty would find. some way of coming between the words and the deed.”

He wanted to be angry at her for that cynical gibe, but could not: she was too likely right. Already he regretted his rash offer: how could he sell the Confederacy for the sake of one person’s comfort, even if that person was his wife? He knew he could not, and knew she would pay the price for his not doing so, Sighing, he said, “I unfortunately belong to a profession that debars all hope of domestic enjoyment.”

“You have been wed to that profession, and to your country, longer and more deeply than ever to me,” Mary Custis Lee said, which was also true.

He said, “I am not necessarily wed to that profession forever.” His wife, taking a wifely privilege, laughed at him.

Richmond, Virginia

June 27, 1866

Sir:

I have the honour to tender the resignation of my commission as general in the army of the Confederate States of America.

Very resply your obt servt,

R. E. Lee

General, C.S.A.

Lee sanded the letter dry, looked down at the words he had written. Even in black ink on creamy white paper, they did not yet seem real to him, just as there was a moment of quiet shock before the pain of a wound struck home. Yet this resignation came easier than the one he had made six years before, from the colonelcy of the 1st U.S. Cavalry. Then he had been cruelly divided in his own spirit, wishing he could remain with the United States but knowing Virginia in the end meant more to him. Now the Confederacy was at peace; its armies could carry on without him. His course lay elsewhere.

He wished he could show the letter to his wife first, to see her expression once she’d read it. After their go-round of the night before, her expression ought to be worth seeing. But that was a diversion he would have to forgo. He picked up the paper, carried it down the hall.

Secretary of War Seddon looked up from the papers that crowded his own desk. Despite those papers, he looked stronger and healthier than he had during the war, when his labors all but consumed him. Even his smile was less cadaverous these days” A good morning to you, General. What can I do for you?”

“I have here a letter which requires your attention, sir. “

“Give it to me, then.” James Seddon read the two-line note, then raised his large head to stare at Lee. “What has occasioned this?”

“If I am to meet my full responsibility to the Confederate States of America, Mr. Secretary, I must necessarily do so in and from a civilian capacity. Proceeding directly from the ranks of the military to any civil office strikes me as more appropriate to ancient Rome than to our present republic.”

“Civil office, you say?” Seddon studied Lee, then slowly nodded. “You will understand, General, that rumors pertaining to your possible plans for the future have been in wide circulation for some time now.”

“As with paper money, so with rumors: the wider the circulation, the less value they retain,” Lee said.

The Secretary of War smiled his rather unnerving smile.” No doubt, no doubt. I certainly did not care to presume on our acquaintance to enquire of you your plans, the more so as they may well have been unclear even to you. I hope you will permit me to say, however, that I should be confident of our nation’s future in your hands.”

“You are gracious, sir, and place more trust in me than I deserve,” Lee said. Seddon shook his head, no doubt taking Lee’s words for a commonplace of polite speech. Lee wished it were so. The—disorderly—quality of civilian life, and especially of civilian administration, worried him. The Rivington men worried him more. In war and peace, he had tested himself against the ablest of his own time, and had prevailed. But how could he know all the resources the men from a distant time held in reserve?

He could not know…and he had made the men of America Will Break his enemies, past hope of reconciliation. As best he could tell, he had earned the right to worry.

Jefferson Davis held a fortnightly levee at the Confederate White House. As Lee rode Traveller up Twelfth Street toward the Presidential mansion, he reflected that one day the place would need a name not derived from one in Washington City. The Confederacy could not go on forever as a mere copy of the United States and its institutions; the South would develop institutions of its own.

His lip quirked. The South had one institution all its own, and he hoped to begin the job of laying that one to rest.

Lamps and candles blazed bright through the broad windows and open door of the Presidential residence, casting a warm golden glow on the walkway outside. Lee dismounted from Traveller, tied the horse to the iron fence outside the mansion, gave him a nose bag full of hay. Traveller snorted appreciatively and began to eat. “I wish some people were so easily pleased,” Lee murmured and went up the stairs and into the house.

Varina Davis met him near the door. “How good of you to join us this evening,” she said with a smile. “You are quite as handsome as ever in your dark civilian suit.”

He bowed over her hand. “You are too kind” to me, Mrs. Davis.” She was a pretty, dark-haired woman, some years younger than her husband—and also a good deal more outgoing. Without her, the President’s levees would have been too austere to be worth visiting. As it was, the gatherings, if not the most intellectual in the city—that distinction surely belonged to Mrs. Stanard’s salon—were the most variegated, with congressmen, judges, soldiers, and officials of the administration mingled promiscuously with merchants, preachers, and simple citizens anxious to conduct business with Jefferson Davis or simply to see him, and with ladies corresponding to all those types.

Lee ran a hand down the sleeve of his black wool formal coat. Being out of military gray still seemed strange and unnatural, as if he were parading through Richmond in his underclothes. He added, “I am also most pleased at how lovely you look out of black.”

Varina Davis’s eyes were shadowed for a moment.” As you will know, what with the sad loss of your Annie, the passing of a child is hard to bear.” A little more than two years before, her little son Joe had fallen from some scaffolding and died the same day. She and Lee shared a few seconds of sad remembrance. Then she went on, “But life also calls to us, and we must continue as best we can. Do come in; I know my husband will be glad to see you.”

The President stood by a table crowded with punch bowls and plates of fried chicken and ham, baked potatoes, and tall cakes with yellow icing. Standing with him, a chicken leg in one hand and a glass in the other, was Stephen R. Mallory, the Secretary of the Navy, a tall, heavily built man who resembled nothing so much as an Anglo-Saxon version of Judah P. Benjamin, save that his jowly, beard-fringed face more usually bore frown than smile.

Jefferson Davis beckoned Lee to him. As Lee approached, the President said loudly, “I am confident that when my term expires, sir, I shall leave the nation in your capable hands.”

Silence spread outward as everyone present turned to stare at Lee. After his resignation, Richmond had buzzed with political rumors. Now, all at once, the gossip acquired solid flesh—a figure of speech almost inevitable when looking toward the rotund frame of Secretary Mallory. Lee knew his answer would gain similar weight. He said, “If that be the will of the people, I shall humbly accept it, though conscious as always of my own shortcomings.”

Still in that public voice, Davis replied, “I am equally confident that the people, observing your manifold virtues, will think as highly of them as do I, and as they assuredly merit.” By then Lee was close by. As he dipped out a glass of lemonade, Davis, reverting to normal tones, said to Mallory, “You see how it is done, Mr. Secretary—no vulgar party politics, such as first forced us to abandon the United States and then left that unhappy nation divided against itself, will mar our republic’s smooth transition from one chief magistrate to the next.”

“Our states do seem more united in purpose than those which claim that title.” Mallory had a big bass voice; Lee, in a moment of irrelevant irreverence, wondered if it was because he was shaped like a big bass fiddle. The Secretary of the Navy went on, “I can see no issue which would divide our happy confederation.” He tossed aside the gnawed chicken bone, piled ham and potatoes onto a plate, and poured gravy over both.

“I see one,” Lee said.

Jefferson Davis’s features, always thin and dyspeptic, pinched further, as if at some sudden new gastric pang. “It will not be an issue if you do not choose to make it one,” he said.

“It will,” Lee answered. “Sooner or later, it will return to haunt us; how could it do otherwise? I would sooner engage the problem at a time of my own choosing than let it grow to crisis strength and overwhelm us.”

“You may wear a simple suit, sir, but you still speak like a soldier,” Mallory said. Though pompous, he was also keen: “You have grown dissatisfied with our treatment of our Negroes, have you not? I recall it was at your urging that we sent the Alabama to join the antislavery patrol off the west African coast.”

“Many of the South’s best men have long been dissatisfied with slavery; too many have chosen to keep that dissatisfaction to themselves,” Lee said. “I do not believe we can afford to do so any longer. As for the Alabama, I am glad we had it to send.”

“So, no doubt, is Captain Semmes,” Mallory replied. The Alabama had been in Cherbourg harbor with the U.S.S. Kearsarge, a much more formidable vessel, waiting just outside French territorial waters for it to emerge when word came of the fall of Washington and the armistice.

“They might well disagree with you about slavery even in the United States, General Lee,” Jefferson Davis said. “Their constitutional amendment to abolish it just went down to defeat in the Illinois legislature, despite the vociferous protests of Mr. Lincoln.” His voice took on a certain satisfaction at his wartime rival’s discomfiture. “Only two U.S. states outside New England have ratified that amendment, and only one since Seymour became President.”

“But slavery is now legal in only two of their states, Maryland and Delaware, and is moribund in the latter,” Lee said…Further, the Negro constitutes but a tiny fraction of their population, which is emphatically not the case with us. Thus he presents them a smaller problem and allows them to confront it more nearly at their leisure.”

“You know we disagree on this question. Still, I shall not lose sleep over it,” Davis said. “For one thing, I may be wrong; the Negroes in the Union army and the guerrillas who remained on our soil after the Federal withdrawal proved themselves capable of deeds more manly than I would have expected from their race.” For Davis to admit he might be wrong was very nearly a prodigy. His mouth thinned as he weakened that admission by continuing, “For another, believe as you may, you will have your hands full in getting Congress to accede to your wishes. You will have your hands full in getting Congress to do anything at all.” His own battles with the legislative branch, though milder now than during the crises of the Second American Revolution, left him with a permanently jaundiced perspective on its utility.

Lee frowned as he contemplated that aspect of government in action—or perhaps of government inaction. As a commanding General, he could give orders and feel sure they would be obeyed—and if they were not, he had the power to punish those who failed in their duty. But the President of a republic like the Confederate States of America could not rule by fiat. If Congress refused to go along with him, he was stymied.

As if reading his thoughts, Jefferson Davis reached up to put a hand on his shoulder. “Take heart, sir, take heart. While we have as yet no political parties in the Confederacy, our Congress was and is most definitely divided into factions favoring and in opposition to myself; but, so far as I know, no faction opposed to Robert E. Lee exists within the bounds of our nation, not after the extraordinary services he has rendered to it.”

“If he speaks in any way against the continued servitude of the black man, such a faction will spring to life soon enough—he is right about that,” Stephen Mallory said.

“True,” Lee said, thinking that an anti-Lee faction, in the persons of Nathan Bedford Forrest and the men of America Will Break, was already very much alive. “Well, if I fail of election on that account, I shall return to the bosom of my family without any great anguish. I wasted too large a part of my life away from them. I shall not dissemble for the sake of votes—I leave such ploys, as you said, Mr. President, to politicians in the North.”

Davis raised his glass in salute. “Long may those ploys remain there.” Lee and Mallory drank with him.

Julia came up to Lee in the study. “ ‘Scuse me, Marse Robert, but there’s a soldier here to see you.”

“A soldier?” Lee said. Julia nodded. Lee gave a whimsical shrug. “Having resigned from the army, I thought I would henceforth be free of soldiers.” The black freedwoman looked back in incomprehension. Lee got up from his chair. “Thank you, Julia. Of course I shall see him.”

The “soldier” proved to be a pink-cheeked second lieutenant who looked so young that Lee wondered if he could possibly have seen service in the late war. When he saw Lee, he went into a brace so stiff that Lee feared for the integrity of his back bone. “General Lee, sir, I have a letter here, sir, which the Secretary of War directed me to deliver into your hands. Sir.”

“Thank you very much, Lieutenant,” Lee said, accepting the envelope the youngster in gray proffered. After extending his hand to give it to Lee, the lieutenant returned to attention. “You may go,” Lee told him.

“No, sir. I am directed to wait and bring your reply, if any, to the Secretary.”

“I see. Very well.” Lee broke the seal on the envelope. It held not one but two letters, the first folded around the second. ‘The outer sheet was in James Seddon’s copperplate script: “My dear General Lee: In view of the political developments centering on your name which have of late occasioned so much gossip and so many wildly speculative stories in the Richmond papers, and in view of the rumored estrangement between yourself and General Forrest on the one hand and between yourself and America Will Break on the other, I send you the enclosed so you may act upon it as you see fit and as the times demand. I have the honor to remain, your most ob’t c., James A. Seddon.”

Lee opened the inner sheet. The handwriting and spelling on that one both left something to be desired; Nathan Bedford Forrest’s formal schooling had lasted only a few months. But the import of the letter was clear enough: Forrest was resigning his commission in the Confederate army. His last sentence explained why: “If Genl Lee thinks he will be come the Presadent with the job handed him on a silver platter,” he wrote, “Genl Lee can think again.”

Lee read Forrest’s letter several times, shook his head. As far as he could see, the South had just acquired political parties. Jefferson Davis would not be pleased. He was not pleased himself.

The young lieutenant asked,” Shall I take any message back to the Secretary of War, sir?”

“Eh? Lieutenant, you may convey to Mr. Seddon my gratitude, but past that, no, I have no message.”