The Guns of the South

* X *

When Lee returned to the rented house on Franklin Street that evening, he was in a dark and thoughtful mood. The sight of the black serving woman, Julia, who opened the door for him did nothing to ease his mind. “Evenin’, Marse Robert.’ she said, “Yo’ wife and daughters, they already eat—they don’ expec’ you be so late. Plenty o’ chicken ‘n’ dumplings left over, though.”

“Thank you, Julia.” He stepped into the front hall, took off his hat, hung it on the hat rack. Then, after taking a couple of steps toward the dining room, he paused and turned back.

“Somethin’ wrong, Marse Robert?” Julia asked. The candle she held highlighted the frown lines on her face. She said quickly, “Hope I ain’t done nothin’ to displease you.”

He hastened to reassure her: “No, Julia, not at all.” But he still did not go in to have supper. When he spoke again, he was as cautious as he had been while addressing President Davis: “Julia, have you ever thought you would like to be free?”

The candlelight, with its exaggerated shadows, played up her shift of expression, or rather her shift to the lack of expression slaves used to conceal themselves from their masters. “Reckon everybody—everybody colored, I mean—think about that now and again, suh.” Her voice likewise yielded him nothing.

He persisted: “What would you do if you were free?”

“Don’t rightly know what I could do, Marse Robert. Don’t have much book learnin’. Much? Don’t have none.” Julia kept studying Lee from behind the cautious mask her face wore. She must have decided he meant what he said, for after a moment she went on, “Wouldn’t mind findin’ out what free was like, I tell you that, suh.”

“I thought as much.” It was the answer Lee would have given, were he in Julia’s shoes; it was, he thought, the answer anyone with spirit, black or white, man or woman, would give. “If you were free, would you be willing to stay on here with my family and work for wages?”

“That’s what I got to do to be free, that’s what I do,” Julia answered at once.

Lee saw he had made a mistake. “No, no, Julia, you misunderstand. I aim to free you, and will whether you say yes or no. But as you have no other situation, I wanted you to know you could continue to find employment in this house.”

“God bless you, Marse Robert.” The candle flame reflected from the tears in Julia’s eyes. Then, as the reality of what he’d promised sank in, she began to think aloud: “If I be free soon, maybe I learn to read. Who knows what I do, if I be free?”

Learning their letters was against the law for blacks in Virginia, as it was in most of the Confederate States. Lee forbore to mention that. For one thing, the law was observed less rigidly for free Negroes than for slaves. For another, Julia’s desire to learn bespoke the sort of drive she would need as a freedwoman. What he did say was a commonplace: “I gather my ladies are still in the dining room?”

“Yes, suh, Marse Robert. I go tell them you here.” Julia turned and fairly raced toward the back part of the house, her shoes clattering against the oak floorboards. Lee followed more slowly.

His wife and daughters were chatting around the dining room table when he came in. Julia had already hurried in and then out past him once more. Mischief in her voice, his youngest daughter Mildred said, “Good heavens, Father, what did you tell her: that you’d sell her South if she didn’t move quicker?” His daughter Mary and his wife smiled. Agnes did not, but then Agnes seldom smiled.

Normally, Lee would also have smiled; he had trouble imagining the enormity Julia would have to commit to make him even imagine selling her South. Good servants who worked for good masters—which, without false modesty, he knew himself to be—did not have to worry about such things. But that the joke could be made at all spoke volumes about the institution of slavery.

Now he answered seriously, “Precious life, I told her I intended to free her.”

Like her daughters, Mary Custis Lee stared at him. “Did you?” she said. Her voice was sharp, and with some reason. The money to buy Julia had been hers, income from the estates currently in such disarray. Before the war, that income had been vastly more than his own. Moreover, in her invalid state she required near constant care.

“Why on earth did you decide to do that, Father?” Mary Lee echoed her mother.

“What shall I do without her?” Mary Custis Lee added.

Lee chose to respond to his daughter’s question first: “Because, my dear, I have seen that, try as we may, we cannot escape the conclusion that the day for slavery is past. We fought our great war for independence just completed so that our states could govern themselves as they thought best. And we have won it, and so brook no interference in our institutions from the North or Washington City. Well enough. But the world beyond our borders has not ceased to be, nor to despise us, despite that independence.” He mentioned Lord Russell’s remark to James Mason.

His eldest daughter bristled. “If Washington has no business meddling in our affairs, still less does England.”

“That may be so. Yet when virtually all the world abhors one’s practices, one has to wonder at the propriety of those practices. And the bravery the Northern colored troops displayed made me wonder at the justice of continuing to hold their race in bondage. But the final straw for me is the struggle the former Yankee Negro regiments of Louisiana and the other states of the Mississippi valley continue to wage against General Forrest.”

“But Father, so many people think Forrest a hero for putting those black men down,” Agnes said.

“Let them think so who will. But the Negroes still under arms in Mississippi and Louisiana must surely know their cause is doomed: General Forrest is a most able commander and has behind him the full weight of the Confederacy. Yet the Negroes continue to fight—as would I, in their place. To show such spirit, they must be men like any others, from which it can only follow that enslaving whites were as proper as doing so to blacks.”

“No one would uphold that proposition,” Mary Lee said.

“This is all very pretty and all very logical, Robert, but who shall care for me if Julia is set at liberty?” Mary Custis Lee said.

“I expect she will, but for wages,” he answered. “Perry has served me so for years.”

His wife sniffed, but said, “If your mind is quite made up—”

“It is,” he said firmly. “I do not presume to judge others, but I find I cannot in good conscience continue to own human beings who, I am become convinced, are inferior to me by circumstance alone, rather than by birth.”

“Very well.” Mary Custis Lee surprised him with a smile. “My father would have approved.”

“I suppose he would.” Lee reflected that his father-in-law had enjoyed the services of a couple of hundred slaves while alive and emancipated them only in his will, when he could make use of them no more. It was magnanimity of a sort, but to Lee’s mind not enough.

He also thought of Jefferson Davis’s remark that he would have pursued Southern independence even if that meant going into the hills and fighting for years, and of his own reply that he was too old to make a bushwhacker. Plenty of desperate ex-Union Negroes were of a proper age to learn that trade, and plenty more blacks who might not themselves fight would quietly support those who did. Before the war, slave revolts in the South had been few and small and soon stamped out. Those days were gone. The Confederate States had won one civil war. No matter how fiercely Forrest fought, another was just beginning.

He laughed at himself. He had never imagined taking up arms against the United States of America. And now, having done so, he saw no better way to serve the new country he had helped create than to become an abolitionist.

Talks with the Federal commissioners dragged on. The smaller issues resolved themselves: in exchange for the Confederates’ abandoning claims to New Mexico, the United States yielded the Indian Territory. Judah Benjamin had predicted as much after the first meeting. Lee wondered why what seemed so obvious took so long to decide.

“You will never make a diplomat, General Lee, despite your many accomplishments and virtues,” Benjamin said; his constant smile widened slightly to show real amusement. “Had the United States quickly conceded the Indian Territory to us, we should have been emboldened to press harder on the issue of Missouri. By the same token, had we given up New Mexico without a struggle, the Federals might well have perceived that as weakness, and so been less inclined to see reason over the Indian Territory.”

Put that way, the negotiations reminded Lee of a campaign of attrition, the sort Grant seemed to have had in mind against him in the spring of 1864. Attrition was not his style. whether he faced an enemy in the field or a difficulty in his life, he always aimed to overcome it with one bold stroke.

Though it had failed Grant, attrition worked, at least to a point, for Seward, Stanton, and Butler. By making it clear that the United States were willing to fight over Maryland and West Virginia, they convinced Jefferson Davis to yield them. Lee concurred in that decision; having fought in both states, he’d seen that their people favored the Union.

Kentucky and Missouri were something else again. The United States were willing to fight to keep them, but the Confederacy was equally willing to fight to acquire them. Tempers on both sides ran high. Lee looked for the bold stroke that might cut through the knotty problem. At length, the idea for such a stroke came to him. He set it before President Davis. Davis generally preferred directness himself and, after some initial hesitation, gave his assent. Then Lee waited for the proper moment to let it loose.

That moment came in late September, after a series of fiery speeches by Fremont seemed to put Lincoln on the defensive, even among Republicans. All three of the Federal commissioners came to a negotiating session looking worn. Butler, who had begun the war as a Democrat, these days had one foot and a couple of toes of the other in Fremont’s camp. Stanton, a Lincoln loyalist, was gloomy to find so hard a road ahead of his patron. And Seward, who had first sought the Presidency himself and then tried to dominate Lincoln while Secretary of State, had the appearance of a man who wondered yet again how fate could have allowed that gangling bumpkin to overcome him.

Seeing the men across the table from him in the Cabinet room thus distracted, Lee said, “My friends, I think I have found a way to simply settle our difficulties concerning the disputed states of Kentucky and Missouri. Surely you will agree that our two great republics ought to be able to resolve our problems in a spirit that accords with the principles we both espouse.”

“Which principles are those?” Stanton asked. “The ones which proclaim that one man ought to be able to buy and sell another? We do not espouse such principles, General Lee.”

Lee did not show the frown he felt. That he privately agreed with Stanton only made more difficult the public position he was required to maintain. He answered, “The principle that government is based upon the consent of the governed.”

“And so?” Ben Butler’s voice was filled with a lawyer’s professional scorn.” I presume the Negroes of your dominions have consented to your domination of them?”

“They have the same franchise among us as in most of the Northern states,” Judah P. Benjamin replied. He gave Lee a courteous nod. “Pray continue, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Secretary.” Lee looked across the table at the commissioners from the United States. “Gentlemen, here is what I propose: Let the citizens of the two states in question decide the matter for themselves in a fair vote, not to be influenced by force or the presence of troops of either the United or Confederate states. President Davis will pledge the Confederate States to abide by the result of such an election. It is his sincere hope that President Lincoln will also concur with what is, after all, the most equitable solution possible to the dilemma confronting us.”

“Equitable?” William H. Seward accomplished more with a slightly raised eyebrow than Butler had with ostentatious scorn. “How do you presume to speak of equity, sir, when you call for the withdrawal only of Federal forces and of none of your own?”

“How do you presume to speak of equity when, by holding down these states through force of arms, you prevent them from exercising their sovereign rights?” Lee returned.

Ben Butler sniffed,” Just another of the worthless schemes you Confederates keep inventing and advancing.”

“No, sir,” Judah Benjamin said. “My predecessor as Secretary of State, Mr. R. M. T. Hunter, set forth a similar proposal in letters of February 1862 to Messrs. Mason and Slidell in London and Paris respectively. We have been willing—indeed, eager—to put our faith in the will of the people most directly affected by the choice involved. The United States continually proclaim their adherence to democracy. Have they less affection for it when it might bring a result contrary to their desires?”

“Certainly we do,” Stanton said. “So do you, or you’d not have bolted the Union when the last election went against you.”

That shot had some truth to it. Vice President Stephens showed as much by ignoring it in his reply: “Gentlemen of the United States, in simple justice’s name, we request that you transmit to President Lincoln the proposal General Lee advanced, and at your earliest convenience return to us his response.”

“As you are aware, he has empowered us to act as his plenipotentiaries in this matter,” Seward said.

Lee sensed that the Federal Secretary of State was unwilling to do as Stephens had asked. Throughout the war, Lincoln had, despite his determination to return the South to the United States, occasionally shown flexibility as to how that return might come about. He had also continued to believe, against all evidence, that considerable pro-Union sentiment remained in the seceded states. If he also exaggerated the two border states’ affection for rule from Washington, Lee’s was a notion to which he might be inclined to listen. Lee had counted on that when he put it forward.

Prodding, he said, “Surely you gentlemen cannot fear your President would overrule you?”

That earned him a glare from Stanton, a basilisklike gaze from Butler, and Seward’s usual imperturbability. Seward said, “Since this appears to be a condition upon which you insist, we shall do as you require.” He got to his feet. “Accordingly, there seems little point in continuing today’s discussions. Would you be so kind as to prepare your formulation in writing, in order to eliminate the risk of misapprehension on our part of what you have in mind?”

Lee drew from an inside coat pocket a folded sheet of paper which he presented to Seward. “I have taken the liberty of doing so in advance of your gracious acceptance.”

“Er—yes. Of course.” Seeming faintly nonplused, Seward skimmed the paper to make sure it was what Lee had said it was, then nodded and leaned sideways to store it in the carpetbag that sat to the left of his chair.

As he did so, Alexander Stephens put in, “General Lee is too courteous a gentleman to ask you to consider whether you find this proposition of his preferable to the prospect of renewed conflict against repeating rifles, but I would have you remember that possibility and the, from your perspective, unfortunate results of the last such series of meetings.”

“Those results are seldom far from our thoughts, I assure you,” Seward said icily. Stanton ground his teeth. The sound was quite audible. Lee had heard of such a thing, but never before actually heard the thing itself: yet another surprise, if but a tiny one, in a year filled with marvels.

But Ben Butler said, “If you Southerners were so hot to return to the fray, Mr. Vice President, you would have dispensed with these polite conversations and fired your terms at us from the barrel of a gun. As you choose to do otherwise, I will thank you to follow the example of your courteous general and refrain from such threats henceforward.”

Butler was so distinctly homely as to be a caricaturist’s dream; so, in an utterly different way, was his master, Abraham Lincoln. Lee found him thoroughly repulsive. To say he was corrupt weakened the word, though somehow he’d kept anyone from proving he had sticky palms. He made a laughable soldier. But in a battle of wits, he was far from unarmed. And he visibly heartened his fellow commissioners as they took their leave of Benjamin, Stephens, and Lee.

“Now we wait,” Lee said. Having waited for the precise instant so often in the field, having waited for the right day on which to present his proposal, he remained prepared once more to quench his iron will in the tempering bath of patience.

Judah Benjamin said, “With the Federals all factions, Lincoln may find himself too distracted to give us a sensible reply any time soon. Last I heard, McClellan was calling for an invasion of the Canadas, presumably to acquire for the United States territory to recompense them for that which they lost on our achieving independence.”

“The invasion might well succeed, too, with any general save McClellan at its head,” Stephens said.

The three Confederate commissioners laughed, none too kindly. Benjamin said, “Better than any soldier since Quintus Fabius Maximus, he deserves the title Cunctator, but Fabius’ delaying tactics served his own state, while those of McClellan aided only us.”

Lee was by nature charitable. Here his charity stretched no farther than silence, for Benjamin spoke manifest truth. A vigorously conducted campaign up the Peninsula might well have resulted in the fall of Richmond two years before the Rivington men arrived with their AK-47s. For that matter, a vigorously conducted Union assault at Sharpsburg later in 1862 almost surely would have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia. But in matters military, the words vigorous and McClellan did not belong in the same sentence.

“Curious how he’s still a hero to so many Northern soldiers,” Stephens remarked.

“Well, why not?” Benjamin said. “Their war failed to give them a true hero. We were more fortunate.” He was looking straight at Lee.

For his part, Lee looked down at the elaborate floral pattern of the carpet. He had always known respect from within the military community and in the late war had done his best to continue to earn that respect. He had never anticipated the wider admiration that had come his way, admiration which led Jefferson Davis to urge him to run for President, admiration which made a worldly sophisticate like Judah P. Benjamin call him hero without apparent irony. He still did not know what to make of such admiration. The mention of Fabius reminded him of the practice, during a Roman triumph, of having a man stand beside the officer being honored and whisper, “Remember, you are mortal.” The Romans had been a solidly practical people.

He needed no outside reminders of his own mortality. The pain in his chest that sometimes came when he exerted himself too strenuously told him all he needed to know. The white pills from the Rivington men helped keep him in the field, but against the years everyone campaigned in vain.

He rose, bade his colleagues farewell, went downstairs and out into the street. To his relief, the constant steambath heat of summer was beginning to ease. A colored attendant, seeing him emerge, dashed away to the nearby stables and soon returned with Traveller. “Here you is, Marse Robert.”

“Thank you, Lysander,” Lee said. The slave grinned widely at having his name recalled; he, of course, had no way to know such recall was but one of the thousand small tricks by which an officer won his men to him. It was, Lee had heard, also a politician’s trick. The thought vaguely disturbed him. He did not care to become a politician. Yet if that became his duty… Swinging up onto Traveller swept away such profitless musing. He rode west, toward the rented house in which he was living.

Traffic remained busy, but without its wartime urgency. Fewer soldiers, fewer rumbling supply wagons crowded the streets. Ladies had room to stroll without putting their hoop skirts in danger of being crumpled. Gentlemen had the leisure to stop and admire the ladies and to tip hats to them as they passed. Lee smiled, both at the byplay he watched and at the way of life a Confederate victory had preserved. Something precious would have gone out of the world had the South lost.

Angry shouts, the pound of running feet, a yell with words to it: “Get the filthy nigger!” A shabbily dressed black man dashed across Franklin from Eighth Street, almost in front of Traveller’s nose. The horse snorted and reared. Lee had hardly begun to fight him back under control when at least a dozen whites, many waving clubs, came pounding after the Negro.

Nothing will anger a professional soldier faster than the sight of a mob, raw force turned loose on the world without discipline. “Halt!” Lee shouted, tossing his head in a perfect fury of rage. Two of the white men at the head of the baying pack wore pieces of Confederate uniform. The abrupt command and the tone in which it was given brought them up short. Others tumbled into them. But at the very front, a fellow in the overalls and leather apron of a blacksmith brought down the Negro with a flying tackle. Even he, though, did not hit the black man with the hammer he carried in his right hand.

“What-in-God’s-name-is-going-on-here?” Lee demanded, biting off the words one by one. He glared at the men before him. Now they looked sheepish rather than vicious. Several, like the one who had tackled the Negro, were smiths; others, by their clothes, day laborers who hadn’t labored many days lately. But one was a policeman and another, Lee saw with a touch of disquiet, wore the mottled tunic and trousers of the Rivington men. That fellow set hands on hips and insolently stared back at Lee.

Ignoring him for the moment, Lee asked the policeman, “You, sir, were you seeking to quell this unseemly disturbance?”

From the ground, the Negro answered before the policeman could: “He weren’t doin’ no such thing, suh! He leadin’ ‘em on.”

“You deserve everything you’ll get, you—” The white man sitting on the black raised his hammer, as if to strike. Then he met Lee’s eyes. The sword Lee carried was a purely ceremonial side arm, part of his dress uniform; one blow from that hammer would have snapped it in two. In any case, the sword stayed in its sheath. But Lee’s presence was a stronger weapon than any sword. The smith lowered the hammer as carefully as if it were a fused shell.

“Perhaps you will do me the honor of explaining why you have chosen to run wild through the streets of Richmond,” Lee said with ironic courtesy.

The smith flushed, but answered readily enough: “To teach this here nigger a lesson, that’s why. He works so cheap, he takes my customers away. How’s a white man supposed to make a living if he has to work alongside niggers?”

Two or three other blacksmiths growled agreement. So did the day laborers, the policeman, and several members of the crowd that was rapidly gathering to watch the proceedings. The only black face to be seen was that of the fellow the smith was sitting on. “Let him up,” Lee said impatiently. When the smith did, Lee asked the Negro, “What have you to say for yourself?”

“I’se a free man, suh. I done bought myself out jus’ befo’ the war start, spend all my time since down to the Tredegar Iron Works, doin’ what smifs do. Since the shootin’ stop, things get right slow there, an’ they don’ give me ‘nough work to keep busy, so I set up fo’ my own self. Jus’ tryin’ to git along, suh, that’s all I do.”

“Are you willing to work for less than these men here?” Lee asked.

The Negro smith shrugged. “Don’ need much—jus’ tryin’ to git along, like I said.” He showed a flash of spirit: “’Sides, if’n I charge as much as they do, they call me an uppity nigger, say I’s actin’ like I’s as good as they is. That’s how things be, suh.”

Lee knew that was how things were. He turned to the smiths who had tackled the Negro. “Is what this man says true? He’s done you no harm, he aided his country—and yours—all through the war, and you seek to take the law into your own hands against him?”

“Reckon what he says is true enough.” The white man looked down at his feet so he would not have to face Lee’s wrath. But he stubbornly went on, “Who says he’s done me no harm? He’s stealing my livelihood, goddam it. I got my own family to feed. Am I supposed to drop down to nigger wages myself to stay even with this black bastard? Don’t seem right nor fair to me.”

“When has General Lee ever had to worry about what’s fair or right for ordinary whites?” The Rivington man’s half-British, half-harsh accent was as out of place on the Richmond street as his mottled clothes, but he seemed to speak for many in the crowd: “He has more houses, has more land, than he knows what to do with. Not for the likes of him to worry about a kaff—nigger—taking his work away. So where does he get the right to stand up on the mountaintop and tell us we can do nothing about it?”

“That’s the truth, by God,” someone said. “So it is,” somebody else echoed.

What Lee had were more debts and obligations than he knew what to do with. Nobody here would care to listen to that, though, or believe it if he heard it. The Rivington man knew how to swing folk his way, and went about it ruthlessly—no one native to Richmond would have attacked Lee head-on as he did.

Lee knew he had to reply at once, or lose the authority his position brought him: this would be closer to the rough and tumble of the battlefield than to his polite if sometimes savage exchanges with the Federal commissioners. He said, “Poor men have more to fear when the laws go down than the rich, for they are less able to protect themselves without law. You had all better shiver when you see a policeman rioting rather than putting down a riot, for he may well come after you next, or stand aside when someone else does.”

The policeman, a great many eyes suddenly upon him, did his best to sink into the dirt of Franklin Street. Lee continued, “No one, not even the men pursuing him, claims this Negro broke any law or, in fact, did anything wrong. Will they come after you next, sir, if they don’t care for your prices?” He startled a man in the crowd by pointing at him. “Or you? Or you?” He pointed twice more, got no reply.

The Rivington man started to say something. Lee interrupted him, glaring at the men in Confederate gray: “Your comrades gave their lives, and gave them gladly, so we could live under laws of our own choosing. Do you choose now to live without law altogether? I should sooner have surrendered to Abraham Lincoln and lived under Washington City’s rule than subject myself to no rule at all. You make me ashamed to call myself a Virginian and a Southerner.”

His troops had always feared his displeasure more than any Minié ball. One of the former soldiers choked out, “Sorry, Marse Robert.” Another simply turned on his heel and walked away, which seemed to be a signal for the whole crowd to start dispersing.

The Rivington man, still uncowed, said, “I never thought anyone who called himself a Virginian and a Southerner would take the black man’s part over the white’s. People will hear of this, General Lee.”

I shall make sure people hear of this, was what he meant. “Say what you will, sir,” Lee answered. “Being without ambition for any post other than the one I presently hold” —which was true and more than true, no matter what Jefferson Davis had in mind for him—”I fear no lies, while the truth will only do me credit.”

The Rivington man stamped away without replying. The soles of his heavy boots left chevroned patterns in the street. Lee had noticed that before. Absently, he wondered how such gripping soles were made; they were plainly superior to smooth leather or wood. One more trick from the future, he thought. He rather wished the future had been content to take care of itself and leave his own time alone. Wishing did no good. He flicked Traveller’s reins and rode on.

Custis Lee tossed a copy of the Richmond Sentinel on his father’s desk. “What’s all this in aid of?” he asked, pointing to a story most of the way down the right-hand column of the front page. “By the way it reads, you rode with John Brown instead of bringing him to justice.”

“Let me see, my dearboy.” Lee bent close to read the small, sometimes smeared type. When he was finished, he broke out laughing. “From this alone, any man would think me worse than a radical Republican, wouldn’t he? But since people know perfectly well that I am no such creature, I trust they shall not judge me by this alone.”

“I would hope not,” Custis agreed. “But what gave rise to such a—curiosity, shall I say?—in the first place? Something must have, I suppose, besides a reporter’s malice.”

“Malice there was, but not a reporter’s.” Lee briefly explained the germ of truth behind the Sentinel story.

“I didn’t think you’d say Lincoln would have made the Southern Confederacy a better president than Jeff Davis,” his son remarked. “It doesn’t sound like you, somehow.” He laughed too, at the size of his own understatement.

“It doesn’t much, does it? The Rivington man who gave the Sentinel the story laid things on far too thick for anyone of sense to take the piece seriously.” But Lee’s laughter soon dried up. “Had the Rivington man not been present, the affair would have gone unreported, as indeed it should have. For that matter, I wonder if he did not instigate the whole affair. He tried his utmost, to incite the crowd against the free nigger, and against me for taking the poor wretch’s part. It is not the first disagreement on the subject I have had with the men of America Will Break.”

Custis Lee also grew serious. His features, fleshier than his father’s, were well suited to sober consideration. He said, “They are dangerous enemies to have. I’ve watched them ever more closely since you set me the task this past February. For one thing, they spend gold freely, and in a nation as strapped for specie as is ours, that alone grants them influence disproportionate to their numbers.”

“So I have heard,” Lee said. “ ‘For one thing’ implies ‘for another.’ What else have you heard?”

“As will not surprise you, they line up behind those hardest on the Negro question.” Custis shook his head. “Try as we will to escape it, it remains with us, doesn’t it, Father? A bill was recently introduced in the House of Representatives calling for the reenslavement or expulsion of all free Negroes in the Confederate States. Congressman Oldham of Texas, who wrote the bill, bought a fine house hereabouts—not far from yours, as a matter of fact—and paid gold for it. And Senator Walker of Alabama, who was thought certain to oppose the legislation, has been unwontedly quiet about it. I had to undertake some little digging to find out why, but I managed.”

“Enlighten me, please,” Lee said when Custis fell silent.

“It seems,” Custis said, raising one eyebrow, “the Rivington men somehow obtained a daguerreotype of Senator Walker enjoying the, ah, intimate embraces of a woman not his wife. Their threat to reproduce the photograph and spread it broadside through Montgomery was plenty to gain his silence.”

“Not what one would call a gentlemanly tactic,” Lee observed.

“No, but damned effective.” Custis chuckled. “It must have been a damned languorous embrace, too, for them to have held still long enough for the camera to capture them. And how could they have failed to notice that camera and the man behind it?”

“The Rivington men brought us something new in the line of rifles. Why should they not also have cameras better than ours?”

Lee spoke casually, but the words seemed to hang in the air after they left his lips. The repeaters, the desiccated foods, the medicines the Rivington men brought from 2014 were marvels here and now, for he and his fellows saw them apart from their proper context. But in 2014, they had to be ordinary. Of what else might that be true? Of almost anything, was the only answer that came to Lee. The thought worried him. If the Rivington men could pull wonders out from under their hats whenever they needed one, how could anybody keep them from doing whatever they wanted? He came up with no good answer to the question.

“You see, Father, they can be dangerous,” Custis persisted.

“I never doubted it, my dear boy.” Lee wondered if some man in mottled clothing had followed him around with an impossibly small camera. He’d always had an eye for pretty women, and with his wife both ill and no longer young, he might well have been thought likely to commit an indiscretion. But duty ruled his personal life as sternly as his public one. His hypothetical photographic spy would have gone home disappointed.

“What now, Father?” Custis asked.

“Pass on what you’ve learned about Congressman Oldham and Senator Walker to the President,” Lee said. “That is something he needs to know, and you may not have uncovered all of it”

“I shall inform him directly,” Custis promised. He reached across the desk, set a hand on his father’s arm. A little surprised and more than a little touched, the elder Lee looked into his son’s eyes. Concern in his voice, Custis said, “You take thought for yourself as well. The Rivington men are unkind to those who choose to stand against them. They may choose means more direct than this.” He tapped the copy of the Richmond Sentinel.

“In any case, they are but a handful among us, and not worth my worry,” Lee said. “If I allow them to turn me aside from my own purpose, they shall have beaten me.”

Custis nodded, reassured. Lee, however, found himself less easy of mind, not more, after his bold words. The Rivington men might be a handful, but they were a handful with powers the more dangerous for being so largely unknown. He would not walk soft on their account, but he would not close his eyes to them, either.

“Sit down, my friends,” Judah Benjamin said as the Federal peace commissioners came into the Cabinet chamber. He, Vice President Stephens, and General Lee waited for Lincoln’s representatives to take chairs before they seated themselves. Then Benjamin went on,” Am I to understand you have at last a reply to our proposal for elections in Kentucky and Missouri?”

“We do,” William H. Seward said.

“Took you, or rather Mr. Lincoln, long enough,” Alexander Stephens observed acidly.” Your election is less than three weeks away.”

“You and Mr. Benjamin both served as U.S. Senators,” Seward said. “You understand that reaching a decision of such importance cannot be hurried.” Lee—and no doubt his colleagues with him—also understood the decision, whatever it was, had been timed to furnish Lincoln the greatest possible political advantage. No one, however, was crass enough to say so straight out.

“And what conclusion has your principal reached, sir?” Benjamin asked when Seward showed no sign of announcing that conclusion without being urged to do so.

The U.S. Secretary of State said, “Regretfully, I must inform you that the President declines your suggestion. He still maintains the position that the Federal Union is indivisible, and cannot in good conscience acquiesce to any plan which involves its further disruption. That is his final word on the subject.”

Lee sat very still to keep from showing how disappointed he was. He saw war clouds rising over the two states still in dispute. He saw trains setting out from Rivington, trains full of AK-47s and metal cartridges. He saw the men of America Will Break further cementing their influence over the Confederate States: in battle, their aid would be a sine qua non against the richer North.

“I wish Mr. Lincoln would reconsider,” he said.

Seward shook his head. “As I told you, General, I have given you his final word. Have you any further propositions to set before him?” When none of the Confederate commissioners replied, he got to his feet. “A very good day to you, then, gentlemen.” With Stanton and Butler in his train, he swept out of the chamber.

“How can our nation bear another war so soon?” Lee groaned.

“It may not come to that, General Lee.” Judah Benjamin’s perennial smile grew broader. “Having lost the war, Lincoln must show as much strength now as he can. His ‘final’ word may seem much less so after the eighth proximo. If he wins the election, he will no longer need to posture before the voters, and so may be more inclined to see reason. And if he loses, he may consent for fear the Democrats will offer us greater concessions come March.”

Lee stroked his beard as he considered that. After a few seconds. he bowed in his seat to the Confederate Secretary of State. “Were my hat on, sir, I would take it off to you. I see yet again that in matters political, I am but a babe in the woods. Deception is an essential element of the art of war, yes, but in your sphere it seems not only essential but predominant.”

“You manage nicely, General, despite your disturbing tincture of honesty,” Benjamin assured him. “The proposition the Federals are considering came from you, after all.”

“Honesty is not always a fatal defect in a politician,” Alexander Stephens added. “Sometimes it even becomes attractive, no doubt by virtue of its novelty.”

The two veterans of the political arena chuckled together, Benjamin deeply from his comfortable belly, Stephens with a few thin, dry rasps. The Vice President’s eyes flicked over Lee, who wondered if Stephens knew of Jefferson Davis’s plans for him and, if so, what he thought. Stephens might well have wanted the Presidency for himself and resented Lee as a rival.

If he did, he gave no sign. All he said was,” As no further progress seems likely before the United States hold their elections, we may as well recess until those results are known. Unless one of you gentlemen objects, I shall so communicate to the Federal commissioners.”

Judah Benjamin nodded. So did Lee, saying, “By all means. Nor will I be sorry to gain a further respite. After so long in the field, I find being in the bosom of my family exceedingly pleasant. Indeed, if you will be kind enough to excuse me, I shall head for my house this very moment.”

Again, no one objected.

Nate Caudell hurried into the Nashville general store. Raeford Liles looked up at the tinkle of the doorbell. “Oh, mornin’, Nate. What can I do for you today?”

“You can sell me a hat, by God.” Caudell ran his hands through his hair and beard. Already wet, they came away wetter. Rain drummed on the roof, the door, the windows. “I lost my last one up in the Wilderness and I’ve been without ever since.”

“What d’you have in mind?” Liles pointed to a row of hats on hooks up near the ceiling. “A straw, maybe? Or a silk stovepipe, to get duded up in?”

“No thanks to both of those, Mr. Liles. All I want is a plain black felt, same as the one I lost. Say that one here, if it fits me, and you don’t want half my next year’s pay for it.”

They haggled amiably for a while. Caudell ended up buying the hat for thirteen dollars in banknotes. Confederate paper had gone up now that the South was no longer at war. He knew he could have had the hat for a silver dollar and a little change, but like most people he spent specie only when he had to.

He jammed the hat down low on his head, braced himself to brave the rain again. “Don’t go yet,” Liles said. “Almost forgot—I got a couple of letters for you here.” He reached under the counter, handed Caudell two envelopes. Then he cocked his head and grinned. “This here Mollie Bean up in Rivington, you courtin’ her? Pretty gal, I bet.”

“She’s a friend, Mr. Liles. How many times do I have to tell you?” Caudell’s cheeks heated. His flush must have been visible even in the dim store, for Raeford Liles laughed at him. That only made him blush harder. To give himself a moment in which to recover, he looked at the other envelope.

It was from Henry Pleasants, down in Wilmington. Caudell grinned when he saw the engineer’s name. Pleasants had indeed been snapped up by the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, at a salary a good many times the one Caudell made for teaching school. He opened the letter, quickly read through it. Sure enough, everything was still going well for Henry: “I expect to escape my rented room here before long, and buy myself a proper house.” Caudell could not evade a pang of jealousy at that. He was living in a rented room on Joyner Street, and had no prospect of escaping it.

Pleasants went on: “I do wonder that you Carolinians ever built a railroad at all, or kept it running once built, with your dearth of men trained not only in the mechanic arts but also in any sort of skilled labor. I have written to several miners in Pennsylvania, some of whom I knew before the war, others who served in my regiment, urging them to come hither. I hope they take me up on this soon, while travel arrangements between U.S.A. and C.S.A. remain pleasantly informal.”

Caudell hoped so, too. As Pleasants said, the South needed every sort of skilled workman. The engineer’s last phrase brought him up short. Proud as he was of belonging to an independent nation, he kept encountering implications of that independence which hadn’t occurred to him. One of these days, and probably one day soon, he would need a passport if he wanted to visit Pennsylvania. The last time he’d gone into that state, his only passport had been a rifle.

He folded Pleasants’s letter, returned it to its envelope, and put that envelope and the one with Mollie Bean’s letter in a trouser pocket. Raeford Liles chuckled knowingly. “You ain’t gonna read that there one where anybody else’s eyes might light on it, is you? Must be from your sweetheart, I says.”

“Oh, shut up, Mr. Liles,” Caudell said, which only made the storekeeper laugh harder. Giving up, Caudell went out onto muddy Washington Street. He ran a block to Collins Street, almost fell as he turned right, ran two more blocks and turned left onto Virginia, then right onto Joyner. The widow Bissett’s house was the third one on the left.

Barbara Bissett’s husband, Jackson, had died in camp the winter before. Now she rented out a room to bring in some money. Her brother and his family shared the house with her and her boarder, so everything was perfectly proper and above reproach, but Caudell would have had no interest in her even had the two of them been alone there together. She was large and plump and inclined to burst into crying fits for any reason or none. He would have sympathized if he thought she was mourning her lost Jackson; but she’d been like that before the war, too.

Once inside his own upstairs room, he took both letters from his pocket. The rainwater had blurred Henry Pleasants’s fine round script on the envelope, but the paper inside remained dry. And Pleasants’s letter had shielded Mollie’s from the wet. Her hand was anything but fine and round, but this was the fifth or sixth letter she’d sent, and with each her writing grew more legible.

He opened the envelope and drew out the single sheet of the letter; Pleasants had gone on for three pages. “Dear Nate,” he read, “I hope you is wel sinse I last rote. Got this hear paper at the Notahilton, wich sels like it was a ginral stor. But Rivington is a cawshun al ways, as you seen for your ownself. I bin out to Benny Langs hous wich is one of the ones out in the woods like we saw when you was there. He dident reckonize me on a count of I was warin a dres in sted of my old youniform.”

Caudell clicked his tongue between his teeth and made a sour face. Mollie didn’t say why she’d gone out to Benny Lang’s place, but he could paint his own mental pictures. He didn’t care for them. Scowling still, he read on:

“The hous is poorly”—after a moment, he realized Mollie meant purely—”remarkabul. Benny Lang he dont us lanterns or even gas lights. He has a thing ware you pres a nob on the side of the wal and a light corns on up top. I ast him how do you do that and he laffs and tels me eleksity or som thing like that wat ever it may be. Wat ever it may be it is the best light for night time you cood think of ever in yor born dayes. Its more remarkabul than the AK47 if you ask me.”

Caudell whistled softly. After those repeaters, desiccated meals, and gold paid, dollar for dollar, for Confederate paper, he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by anything that came from Rivington, but a fine light that went on here if you pushed a knob there? He wondered how electricity—if that was what Mollie was trying to write—could do that; so far as he knew, it had no use past the telegraph.

Her letter continued: “May be on a count of this light making night into day wich sounds like Good Book tauk and giving him time to read Benny Lang he has hole cases ful of books. May be one of them tauks about eleksity. If I get the chans I wil try to find out on a count of it sounds like a thing worth noing. Yor true frend al ways, M. Bean, 47NC.”

A reliable light by which to read at night…The notion roused pure, sea-green envy in Caudell. Even on a gloomy, rainy day like today, reading in front of a window was Jess than comfortable. Reading at night, with one’s head jammed down close to both book and a dim, flickering, smoky candle, brought on eyestrain and headaches in short order. Though he had scant use for Abraham Lincoln, the stories of how the U.S. President studied law by firelight raised nothing but admiration in him. To sit down with a law book in front of a fire night after night after night, after a hard day’s work each day, took special dedication—and perhaps special eyes as well. He wondered how Lincoln could see at all these days.

He also wondered whether Lincoln could possibly be reelected after leading the United States into a losing war. With both Democrats and Republicans split, the North was growing more parties than it knew what to do with. Caudell read newspaper reports of their bickering with detached amusement, as if they were accounts of the unsavory doings of an ex-wife’s kin. Not for the first time, he thought the Confederacy well free of such chaos. Where the North had too many parties, the South had none. The war had been too all-consumingly important to let such organized factions develop. He hoped they would not emerge now that peace had taken the strain off his country.

Writing in bad light was no easier than reading, but he sat down on his bed to compose replies to Pleasants and to Mollie Bean. He knew no better way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and also knew that if he did not answer now, he probably would not get another chance until next Saturday. He would be at church tomorrow and teaching school from sunup to sundown the rest of the week.

“I hope you are well,” he wrote to Mollie. “I hope you are happy in Rivington with all its wonders.” In his mind’s eye, he saw her on a bed with Benny Lang, maybe under the sunlike glare of one of the lights she’d described. He shook his head; even imagining anything so shameless embarrassed him… and left him wishing he were there instead of the Rivington man.

Thinking about the light helped him pull his pen back toward the impersonal: “If you learn more about eleksity and how it burns in the lamps there, let me know. If the Rivington men will sell it outside their town, it sounds better than whale oil or even gas. And tell me more about these books you mentioned. Are they just print on paper like our own, or are they filled with colored plates to go along with the words?” If even the lights in a Rivington man’s house were something special, what would his books be like? Caudell chose the fanciest thing he could think of, and smiled at the power of his own imagination.

He went on, “Your letters keep getting longer and more interesting. I hope to have many more of them, and hope that you now and then remember the wide world outside Rivington.” He hesitated, then added, “I also hope to see you again one day. Your friend always, Nathaniel N. Caudell.” He looked down at that last line, wondering whether he ought to strike it out. Mollie might think he meant only that he wanted to have her again. Or she might show up on the doorstep of the widow Bissett’s house, either in tart’s finery or in her old Confederate uniform. He wondered which would stir up the greater scandal.

But in the end, he decided to leave the sentence alone. It was true, and Mollie had sense enough not to read too much or too little into it. He waited until the ink dried, then folded the letter and put it in an envelope. He thought about going back to Raeford Liles’s store to post that letter and the one to Henry Pleasants, but only for a moment. Monday would do well enough, if the rain had let up by then.

Lightning cracked. While it lasted, it lit his room with a hot, purple glare and turned every shadow black as pitch. He blinked, afterimages dancing inside his eyes, and wondered if the eleksity lights were that bright. He hoped not. Too much light could be as bad as too little. Thunder boomed overhead.

He Set the letters on top of the chest of drawers by the wall opposite the bed, then went back and lay down. The rain kept coming. Another bolt of lightning lit up everything in harsh relief, then died. Thunder growled again. Children—not a few grown men and women, too—were afraid of it. He’d had his own anxieties, until Gettysburg and the wilderness and the ring of forts around Washington. After a few cannonadings, thunder was nothing to worry about.

He pulled his new hat down over his eyes so the lightning would not bother him anymore. Inside of five minutes, he was snoring.

Boys and a few girls, their ages ranging from five up toward full adulthood, crowded the benches of the Nashville, North Carolina schoolhouse. The building, on Alston Street several blocks south of Washington, was near the edge of town and hardly deserved to be called a schoolhouse at all—schoolshed would have been a better word for it. The walls were timber, the roof leaked—though the rain was done, wet, muddy spots remained on the floor as reminders of its recent appearance. “Get away from there, Rufus!” Caudell shouted at a small boy who was about to jump in one of the wet places.

Rufus sulkily sat back on his bench. Sighing, Caudell stood between two of his older students, who had a geometry problem chalked on their slates. “If these two angles are equal, the triangles have to be congruent,” one said.

“Are the angles equal?” Caudell asked. The youth nodded. “How do you know?”

“Because they’re—what’s the name for them? Vertical angles, that’s what they are.”

“That’s right,” Caudell said approvingly. “So you see that—”

Before he could point out what the budding Euclid was supposed to see, a girl gave a piercing shriek. Bored with sitting on his bench, Rufus had yanked her braids. Caudell hurried over. He habitually carried a long, thin stick; he’d been using it to point to the figures in the geometry lesson. Now he whacked Rufus on the wrist with it. Rufus howled. He probably made more noise than the girl whose hair he’d pulled, but it was noise of a sort the students were used to ignoring.

Without breaking stride, Caudell went back and finished the interrupted lesson: Then he walked over to three or four nine-year-olds. “You have your spelling words all written down?” he asked. “Take out your Old Blue Backs and we’ll find out how you did.” The children opened their Webster’s Elementary Spellers, checked the scrawls on their slates against the right answers. “Write the proper spelling of each word you missed ten times,” Caudell said; that would keep the nine-year-olds busy while he taught arithmetic to their older brothers and sisters. He also thought fleetingly that Mollie Bean could have done with some more work in the Elementary Speller.

From arithmetic, he went on to geography and history, both of which came from the North Carolina Reader of Calvin H. Wiley, a former state school superintendent. Had everyone in the state been as heroic and virtuous as Wiley made its people out to be, North Carolina would have been the earthly paradise. The discrepancy between text and real world did not bother Caudell; school books were supposed to inculcate virtue in their readers.

He went over to his youngest students, said, “Let me hear the alphabet again.”

The familiar chant rang out: “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,—”

“Mr. Caudell, I got to pee,” Rufus interrupted.

“Go on outside,” Caudell said, sighing again. “You come back quick now, mind, or I’ll give you another taste of the switch.” Rufus left hastily. Caudell knew the odds of his return were less than even money. And by tomorrow morning, he would have forgotten all about being told to come back. Well, that was what the switch was for: to exercise his memory until it could carry the load for itself.

For a wonder, Rufus did return. For a bigger wonder, he recited the whole alphabet without a miss. Knowing he wasn’t likely to get a bigger surprise that day, Caudell announced a dinner break. Some children ate where they sat; others—though not as many as in spring—went out to sit on the grass. The youths to whom he’d taught geometry came up to him while he was eating his sowbelly and hoecakes. “Tell us more about how you all got into Washington City, Mr. Caudell,” one of them said.

The down was beginning to darken on their cheeks and upper lips. They wondered what they’d missed by staying home from the war. Had it gone on another year or two, they would have found out. Having seen the elephant, Caudell would willingly have traded what he knew for ignorance.

“Jesse, William, it was dark and it was dirty and everybody was firing as fast as he could, us and the Yankees both,” he said. “Finally we fought our way through their works and then into the city. I tell you, pieces of it I don’t remember to this day. You’re just doing things in a fight; you don’t have time to think about them.”

The two boys stared at him in admiration. The smaller children listened too, some of them trying not very well to pretend they weren’t doing any such thing. “But you weren’t afraid, were you, Mr. Caudell?” Jesse asked, obviously confident of the answer. “They made you first sergeant, so they must’ve known you’d never be afraid,”

One of the reasons Caudell had been made first sergeant was that the man in that position did much of his company’s record-keeping and so needed to have neat handwriting. He wondered what Jesse and William would say to that. Their idea of war did not include such mundane details. He answered,” Anybody who isn’t scared when people shoot at him, well, he’s a fool, if you ask me.”

The youths laughed, as if he’d said something funny. They thought he was being modest. He knew he wasn’t. As with Raeford Liles, he faced a chasm of incomprehension he could not bridge. He finished his last hoecake, wiped his hands on his pants, went out behind a tree himself, then walked back into the schoolroom and resumed lessons.

He sometimes thought that, if he ever quit teaching, he could join a circus as a juggler. With a roomful of children of all different ages, he needed to keep busy the ones he wasn’t actually instructing at any given moment. When the eight-year-olds were doing addition in Davies’ Primary Arithmetic, the twelve-year-olds were parsing sentences from Bullion’s English Grammar. Meanwhile, Jesse and William practiced their elocution, William putting fire into Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” Jesse giving William Yancey’s tribute to Jefferson Davis on Davis’s becoming provisional president at Montgomery less than four years before: “The man and the hour have met,” William declared loudly. Some of the younger children clapped.

Caudell dismissed his clutch of scholars about half an hour before sunset, to let the ones who did not live in town—the vast majority—find their way home to their farms before it got dark. A few local children—Colonel Faribault’s sons, the daughter of the justice of the peace—did not attend his school because they were off at fancy expensive private academies. Far more stayed away because they worked in the fields all day long, all year long.

That saddened him. Many of those children would still be living when the twentieth century rolled around, and would have not a letter to their names. Of course, if they came to school instead of working in the fields, they might be less likely to be living still in that distant day, for small farms needed every hand they could get, just to make ends meet.

After his students were gone, he straightened up benches and cleared away trash. He shut the door behind him, a door whose lock had long since rusted into uselessness. Little inside was worth stealing, anyhow. The school boasted neither blackboard, globe, charts, nor much of anything else in the way of equipment.

Caudell looked back over his shoulder as he walked up Alston Street. “Yup, I’m about it,” he said to no one in particular. He kept on walking.

The bell jingled as Caudell went into the general store. “Today, Mr. Liles?” he demanded.” Are we ever going to find out who won up North?” A week and a half after the election, its results remained in doubt.

Finally, though, finally, Raeford Liles grinned at him. “Got me a couple copies of Thursday’s Raleigh North Carolina Evening Standard, one o’ the Raleigh Constitution, an’ even one o’ the Wilmington Journal. You jus’ go ahead an’ take your pick—they all tell what you want to know.”

“About time,” Caudell said. “Give me an Evening Standard, then.” He slapped seven cents down on the counter. The storekeeper gave him his paper. The headline leaped out at him:

In slightly smaller letters, a subhead proclaimed,

Caudell took a deep breath. “So they turned him out, did they?”

“Looks that way,” Liles agreed cheerfully.

The more of the story Caudell read, the more misleading that subhead looked. He’d already known the election was very tight; with most of the results in at last, it looked close as a Minié ball cracking by one’s head. Lincoln, in fact, had taken twelve states to Seymour’s ten; McClellan won tiny, conservative Delaware and his home state of New Jersey, while Fremont prevailed only in radical Kansas. But Seymour won the states that counted: among them, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania gave him 80 of his 138 electoral votes, while Lincoln garnered 83, McClellan 10, and Fremont but 3. Out of more than four million votes cast, Seymour led Lincoln by only thirty-three thousand.

Liles had been reading the papers, too. He remarked, “Can’t see how even the damnfool Yankees came so close to electing that stinking Republican twice. Wasn’t oncet enough for ‘em? He’d just go an’ start a war with somebody else.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Liles.” Caudell thought back to that mad morning when he’d ended up on the White House lawn. Like almost all North Carolina, he’d despised Lincoln, who’d won not a single vote in the state in 1860. But the man who came out to talk to the army that had defeated his own deserved more respect than the South had given him. “I don’t know,” Caudell repeated. “There was something about him—”

“Bosh,” the storekeeper said positively. “Now this here Seymour, might could be he’ll keep the niggers in line, much as a Yankee can, anyways. If’n he manages that, reckon we’ll get on with him all right. Hope so, I truly do.”

“So do I, Mr. Liles.” Caudell looked down to the newspaper again. Accounts of the Northern elections took up most of the front page. In the lower right-hand corner, though, was a story about Nathan Bedford Forrest’s continuing war against the remnants of the colored Union regiments in the Mississippi valley. Of late, they’d been reduced to guerrilla raids rather than standup battles, but Forrest had bagged a whole band near Catahoula, Louisiana, and hanged all thirty-one men. Caudell showed Raeford Liles the article. “We’re having enough trouble keeping our own niggers in line.”

“I seen that story.” Liles took off his glasses, polished them on his apron, set them back in place. “You ask me, that’s just what niggers in arms is askin’ for, an’ I ain’t sorry to see ‘em get it. An’ if Hit-’em-Again Forrest hits ‘em a few more licks like that one there, God damn me if’n I wouldn’t be right pleased to see him President oncet Jefferson Davis steps down.”

“I hadn’t even thought about that,” Caudell said slowly. The Confederate Presidential elections were still almost three years away. That seemed like a very long time, but really wasn’t, not when Caudell had been thinking only a few weeks before about the onset of the twentieth century. After a pause, he went on, “First man I’d care to see in Richmond, if he wants the job, is General Lee.”

“He wouldn’t be bad either, I suppose,” Liles admitted.

“Not bad?” To any man who had served in the Army of Northern Virginia, faint praise for Robert E. Lee was not nearly praise enough. “There’s not a man in the Confederate States who’d be better, and that’s counting Hit-’em-Again Forrest, too.”

“Mmm…might could be you’re right, Nate. But I do hear tell he’s too soft on niggers.”

“I don’t think so,” Caudell said. Though he’d settled back as best he could into his prewar way of life, some of the things he’d seen while on active duty refused to go away: Georgie Ballentine, running off because the Rivington men wouldn’t trust him with a rifle; the colored troops at Bealeton, holding their ground under murderous fire until flesh would stand no more… “This whole business of niggers isn’t as simple as it looks.”

“Bosh!” Raeford Liles said. “Only thing wrong with niggers, aside from they’s lazy, is they costs too much. I was thinkin’ maybe I’d buy me a buck one o’ these days, help around this place some. But Lord Jesus, the money it takes! Now that cotton’s movin’ again, the cost of prime hands done went through the roof-planters is biddin’ against each other so as they can harvest the most crops. Poor storekeeper like me can’t stay with ‘em.”

“Everything is dear these days.” Caudell’s smile went from sympathetic to wicked. “That goes for things in this store, too, you know.”

“Will you listen to the whippersnapper!” Liles raised aggrieved eyes to heaven. “Do I look like a man doin’ any more’n just scrapin‘ by?”

“Now that you mention it, yes. You want to talk about just scraping by, you try living on a schoolteacher’s salary for a while.”

“No, thank you,” the storekeeper said at once. “My pa, he learned me to read and write and cipher back before you were born. I got nothin’ against you in particular, Nate, you know that, but that’s the way it ought to be, you ask me. I’m not nearly sure it’s the state’s business to go schoolin’ folks. It’s liable to set all sort o’ silly ideas loose.”

“Times are more complicated than they used to be,” Caudell said, “and more ideas are running around loose than there used to be: what with the telegraph and the railroad and the steamship, it sort of has to be that way. People ought to know enough to be able to deal with them.”

“Maybe so, maybe so.” Raeford Liles sighed. “Things were sure enough simpler when I was a boy, and that’s a fact.”

Caudell suspected every generation ever born had said that, and also suspected that, when he was old and gray, he would look back fondly on the days before the Confederate States gained their freedom. But Raeford Liles’s lifetime had seen an uncommon amount of change, and the next years would see more. And one in four adult white men in North Carolina could not read or write. “Not everybody has a father willing to work as hard as yours, Mr. Liles. We ought to give some of the others a hand.”

“The hand’s in my pocket, takin’ out taxes,” Liles complained. Then he brightened. “Could be worse, I reckon. If them damn Yankees had won, likely they’d try taxin’ me to school niggers.” He laughed at the very idea. So did Nate Caudell.