The Guns of the South

* XIV *

Raeford Liles bustled about inside his general store, straightening a bolt of cloth here, scratching out a price and writing in a new one there. He muttered under his breath as he worked. Some of the mutters were sulfurous; since Israel went off to work for Henry Pleasants, he hadn’t found anyone who suited him as an employee.

Nate Caudell slapped a wooden pocket comb on the counter. He glanced at the low stack of three-day-old Raleigh Constitutions there. “Looks as though you were right, Mr. Liles,” he said.

Liles’s head poked up between a couple of woven straw fans. “Right about what?” he asked. When he saw Caudell looking down at the newspapers, he scowled. “This ain’t a library, you know. You want to read that, you can buy it.”

“All right, I will.” Caudell lifted the top paper, set it by the comb. “You were right about having General Forrest to vote for—it says here he is going to run for President.”

“Good for him,” Liles said. “He’ll keep the niggers in line if anybody can. Way things seem sometimes nowadays, the North might as well have won the war.”

“I don’t know.” Caudell read further. “Anybody who calls Robert E. Lee ‘a traitor to the ideals that form the basis of our republic’ is crazy and nothing else but. Without Robert E. Lee, the North would have won the war, and we wouldn’t be here arguing now.”

“You know I never had a bad thing to say about Robert E. Lee,” Liles answered, and Caudell had to nod, for that was true. The storekeeper continued, “But from what I hear, Lee is makin’ noises about lettin’ all the niggers go free, an’ if the war wasn’t about slavery, then just what the hell was it about?”

“Slavery was a big part of it, sure enough,” Caudell admitted, “but it wasn’t the whole reason for the war. Besides, from all I’ve read, Lee’s not talking about freeing all the slaves at once. I agree with you, anybody who did that would be out of his mind. But the Yankees turned too many niggers loose for us ever to get ‘em all back. You’ve said as much yourself. It makes me think we can’t keep ‘em all in bonds forever.”

Raeford Liles grunted. “You been listenin’ to that damnfool Yankee friend o’ yours too much. Might could be you ought to go North your own self.”

“Don’t you call me a Yankee,” Caudell said hotly. “You’d better not call Henry a damnfool, either, not when you look at the crop his farm brought in.” What with too little water and then too much, 1866 had been a hard year all through the South. But Pleasants, with his engineering knowledge, got his crops enough water in the dry times and not too much in the wet, and sent enough tobacco and corn to market to make himself the envy of his neighbors.

Liles grunted again. “Well, all right, maybe he ain’t a damnfool. But I ain’t fond o’ no smart Yankees, neither—what business does he have down here, anyways?”

“Making a living, same as you or me.” Caudell could not quite keep from remembering that Henry Pleasants was making a much better living than he was, and a better living than Raeford Liles, too. But Pleasants was his friend, so he went on stoutly, “He could have gone back to Pennsylvania after the war was over, but he chose to stay down here and become part of our new country instead.”

“If he was as fine as you make him out to be, Nate, he’d walk across Stony Creek outen gettin’ his feet wet.”

“Oh, horseshit. He’s no more the Second Coming than he is a devil with a pointy tail, the way you paint him.” Caudell tossed coins, some Federal, some Confederate, down on the counter, stuck the comb in his pocket, and walked out of the general store with the newspaper. The closing door cut off Liles’s reply in midword.

He suspected Henry Pleasants would remain a Yankee in the eyes of Nash County until the sexton shoveled dirt down onto his coffin; if he ever married again, whatever offspring he had would likely be labeled “the Yankee’s brats.” Their children might escape the taint of Northern origin,—or might not. Nash County was a clannish place.

One column of the Raleigh Constitution was labeled “events of interest from foreign parts.” He read a report from Montevideo dated October 29 (six weeks old now, he thought) on the South American war between Paraguay and all its neighbors. Closer to home, the Mexican forces of the Emperor Maximilian, stiffened by a couple of brigades of French troops, had inflicted another defeat on the republican army led by Juarez. Caudell nodded in some satisfaction at that—Maximilian’s government remained friendly to the Confederacy.

The next foreign item came from Washington. That still sometimes struck him as odd. He half expected it to be a protest from President Seymour against the aid the French were giving Maximilian, but it was just the opposite: the report said that most of the U.S. troops in the New Mexico and Arizona territories were being withdrawn. Seymour had in fact issued a protest, but to the government of Great Britain for increasing its garrisons in the Canadas. Adding those two items together, Caudell smelled war brewing. He wondered when it would boil over. From his own experience against the Yankees, he thought England was about to get a nasty surprise.

A drop of rain smacked the dirt street in front of him, then another one. Still another hit the brim of his black felt hat. He hurried back toward the widow Bissett’s, glad the rain wasn’t snow. His head turned at a colorful broadside, freshly pasted—it hadn’t been there when he went to the general store—on a fence along Alston Street. SAVE THE CONFEDERACY—VOTE FOR FORREST! the poster exclaimed in big letters. Below that legend was a picture of the stalwart cavalry leader.

Rain or no, he paused to stare at the broadside. The election was eleven months away. He’d never heard of starting a campaign so early. He trotted on, scratching his head. A couple of houses farther down the street, he discovered another political poster. This one, besides Forrest’s picture, bore a four-word slogan: FORREST—HIT ‘EM AGAIN!

He passed several more such sheets by the time he got to his room. He wondered how many he had not seen, how many had been stuck up all over town to make sure everybody saw at least one. He wondered how many towns like Nashville the Confederacy held, and how many of those had been similarly broadsided. He wondered how much all that had cost. Nathan Bedford Forrest was supposed to be rich. If he campaigned on this scale till November, he would need to be richer than Caudell thought he was.

When he passed a broadside partly protected by an overhanging roof, he paused for a closer look. Under Forrest’s hard but handsome features appeared a line of small type: Prepared by van Pelt Printers, Rivington, North Carolina. Caudell studied that for a couple of minutes before he went on. If the Rivington men were working with Forrest, he would have all the money he needed.

From an upstairs window in Arlington, Lee looked across the Potomac toward Washington, D.C. Smoke curled up from hundreds, from thousands of chimneys, rising to the true clouds and also turning to a dirty gray the smoke that blanketed the city.

Lee’s mood was a dirty gray, too. “Bedford Forrest is a very devil,” he said, throwing a copy of the Richmond Examiner down onto a tabletop. “He makes political hay merely by noting where this place is.” He picked up the paper again, read, “No wonder General Lee chooses to reside only a stone’s throw from the heart of Yankeedom. His ideas show him to be a Yankee himself, in gray clothing.”

“Let him say whatever he wants,” Mary Custis Lee answered. “Now that my dear home has been made habitable once more, I would live nowhere else. I always felt myself an uprooted plant in Richmond,”

“I know that, my dear, nor did I protest when you wanted to remove here,” Lee answered. For one thing, he knew such protest would have done no good; with her mind once made up, his wife was harder to drive from a position than any Federal general. For another, he had not imagined Nathan Bedford Forrest could turn his choice of residence against him.

Union commanders had underestimated Forrest throughout the war, and paid for it again and again. Lee was beginning to wonder if he and all of official Richmond had not made the same mistake. Who would have thought a rough-and-ready planter, with no education to speak of, would prove so effective on the stump? And who would have imagined he would prove as energetic in political campaigning as in military? He fairly flew from town to town, made his speeches, and was. gone on the next train to make another one seventy-five miles down the track. Lee thought of the shock Andrew Jackson had created in Washington after almost half a century of well-bred Presidents from Virginia and Massachusetts. The frontier might seize the Confederate capital much sooner.

Mary Lee said, “Help me up, please, Robert.” He got her to her feet. On his arm, she went over to the window, too. She, however, looked not across the Potomac toward Washington but down at the grounds of Arlington. She nodded, as if pleased with herself. “The snow hides them, and it is not all.”

“Them?” Lee asked.

“The graves of the Yankees who died here. Grass and flowers in the summertime, snow in the winter, and I can begin to forget those cursed Northerners who lie on our grounds. That is not easy, not after they did everything in their power to debase and desecrate Arlington.”

“The ones who lie here were not those who hurt this place,” Lee said. “The thieves, the mutilators, are most of them safe in the United States.” He still did not feel easy about letting her replant the sloping lawns and the gardens around Arlington to erase all remembrance of the Union graves, but in the end had let her have her way. She cherished the mansion as if it were part of her family, which in a way it was;

She said, “I wish they could be made to answer for their crimes. The garden my father laid out all ruined and changed; the splendid little forest leveled to the ground; the graves—The graves, at least, I have attended to.”

“Many crimes committed in time of war go unanswered,” Lee said. “And as for their perpetrators, they now live in another country, which was, after all, the point of the war. Nor are we guiltless of crimes of our own.” Thinking of Forrest made the affair at Fort Pillow spring to mind. He shook his head. That had been a bad business, with soldiers black and white (mostly black) shot down as they tried to surrender and after they had surrendered. The only thing Forrest had to say about it now was his familiar dictum: War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

Mary Lee’s comment was, “I think it is shameful for you to speak of our gallant men and the thieving Yankees in the same breath.”

“Through a good part of the war, our gallant men kept themselves supplied by thieving from the Yankees,” he said.

She waved that aside, as if it were of no account. She, of course, had never been in the field, never known firsthand the desperate want under which the Southern fighting man had suffered till the last days of the war. She went on, “I think it is shameful, too, for General Forrest to try to tar you with the Yankee brush. You did so much more than he to make our nation free, and now he calls you abolitionist.”

“To be just, it is what I seem to have become.” He felt Mary take a deep breath, decided to forestall her: “Oh, not in the sense he means, surely, the sense of imposing emancipation by force if necessary, and without compensation, as those people did in the lands they occupied. But we must find a means through which the Negro may be gradually brought toward freedom, or face trouble unbounded in the future.”

His wife sniffed. “How do you propose to gradually free the Negroes? Either they are slaves, as they have been, or they are not. I see no middle ground.”

“I shall have to define one,” Lee said. Normally, the middle ground was as dangerous politically as in war, for it left one vulnerable to fire from both sides. Here, though, he would at least be safe from that. Out-and-out abolitionists, in the Northern, radical, sense of the word, were so thin on the ground in the Confederacy that he could probably count them on his fingers and toes. All the fire his way would come from a single direction, from those who thought owning blacks only right and proper. But fire from a single direction could be deadly, too. He’d seen that in defeat and victory, at Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Bealeton…

“I wish we could have simply lived out our days here, without worry about either war or politics,” Mary said. “You have given so much, Robert; can there never be an end to it?”

“I wish there could.” He meant it; he’d never known how much he truly missed his family until, for the first time in his life, he saw them every day. The life of a gentleman farmer at Arlington would have suited him very well. But—”I fear I cannot so easily abandon my duty,”

“That word.” Mary Lee made a sour face. “Help me back to my chair now, if you please. I would not want you to try your strength too long by the necessity of supporting me and your duty both.”

He did as she asked, then returned to the window. A moving black dot in the snow became a horseman and, a moment later, a horseman he recognized. “Here’s Custis, up from Richmond,” he said, deliberately trying to sound cheerful and hoping the arrival of their eldest son would help lift Mary out of her bitter mood.

She was at least willing to change the subject. “Take me downstairs,” she said.

He pushed the chair to the stairs, then helped her down them. Another chair waited at the bottom on the stairway: procuring a second had proved easier and more convenient than manhandling a single one up and down several times a day, and Mary was almost helpless by herself now. The offer Andries Rhoodie had given Lee was seldom far from his thoughts. If only it had come from somewhere, anywhere other than America Will Break…

Custis’s three sisters were already greeting him by the time Lee and Mary came to the front hall. Between hugs, Custis stamped snow onto the rug. “Sisterly embraces aren’t Warm enough to thaw me out,” he said, whereupon Mildred poked him in the ribs and made him jump. “Let me sit by the fire and warm up; then I’ll tell my news.”

“And what is that news, dear boy?” Lee asked a few minutes later, after Custis was comfortably ensconced in a cane-back chair in front of the crackling fireplace.

His son waited to reply until he took a cup of coffee from the tray Julia brought in. “That’s the real bean,” he said once he’d sipped. “I’d grown so used to chicory during the war and afterwards that sometimes I find myself missing it.” He drank again, set the cup down on a small, square table ornamented around the edges with polished brass tack heads. At last he said, “General Forrest has settled on a running-mate.”

“Has he?” Lee leaned forward in his own chair. “Who is the individual so honored?”

“Another western man—Senator Wigfall of Texas.”

“I see.” After a few seconds’ consideration, Lee said musingly, “It is as well, then, that the election is not to be settled by pistols at ten paces. Both Forrest and Wigfall are accomplished duelists. While I would not hesitate to face either gentleman. my skill in such matters has never been tested, and I would not lightly hazard a Vice-Presidential candidate in such an affair.”

Custis chuckled, but quickly sobered. “You ought to get about the business of choosing a Vice-Presidential candidate, Father. When Forrest announced his candidacy against you, I took it for little more than a joke. But the man is in deadly earnest, sir, and is campaigning as hard as he drove his own troops, which is to say, very hard indeed.”

“From everything I have ever heard and from everything I have ever seen, anyone who underestimates General Forrest’s energy or resolve is but preparing himself to be dreadfully surprised,” Lee said. “Had he the education to accompany them, he might well have been the greatest of us all. That is by the way, however. I do now admit to regretting the absence of political parties among us; having such structures in place would have facilitated my selection of a colleague. I intend to deal with the matter soon, dear boy, and your telling me that Forrest had done so but fortifies my resolve.”

“He has a party as well,” Custis answered. “He and his henchmen are styling themselves Patriots and working to enlist other office seekers to run under their banner. You will also no doubt have learned by now that he has the monetary support of America Will Break for his campaign; the building across the street from the War Department doubles as his Richmond headquarters.”

“Were I a man to shoot a messenger for the news he brought, son, you would do well to run for your life,” Lee said. “I have always shunned politics; soldiers in a republic can properly pursue no other course. When I agreed—reluctantly—to run for the Presidency, I expected the election to be a matter of form. But I never undertook a campaign in which I did not expect to prevail, nor do I aim to make this one the exception.”

His son nodded approvingly. That pleased him, but only in an abstracted way; his mind was full of what he would have to do to win. Up until a few minutes before, he had been doing his best to think like a politician. As that was not his forte, no wonder he’d had little luck. Now he resolved to do what he did best: think like a soldier, and treat Forrest as an adversary like McClellan or Grant.

His hand went up to the collar of his jacket. It was a plain civilian coat of black wool, but he imagined he felt the familiar wreathed stars of a general once more. He got up from his chair. “Back to Richmond,” he said. “I have work to do.”

Early fireflies winked on and off, like shooting stars brought down to earth. Nate Caudell tried to recapture his childhood glee at seeing them. He did his best, but could not quite manage it. The little bugs reminded him too much of muzzle flashes in the dark.

In any case, the fireflies were not the only beacons in the night. Caudell stood on Washington Street, watching the torchlight parade stream into the Nashville town square. Decked out in gray hoods, the paraders sang the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep” as loud as they could: “He chased the niggers and they did run; He chased the niggers and he gave ‘em the gun! Hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again—Forrest!”

Henry Pleasants stood beside Caudell. He said, “You know what these Trees of Forrest remind me of Nate?”

“What’s that?”

“You won’t like it,” Pleasants warned. Caudell gestured impatiently. Pleasants said, “They remind me of Lincoln’s Wide-Awakes in 1860: all dressed up in what’s almost a uniform, all full of piss and vinegar for their man, and all ready to stomp on anyone who doesn’t like him. And because they’re excited, they make other people excited, too.”

“We didn’t have any of those Wide-Awakes down here,” Caudell said. “Come to that, Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot down here.”

“Maybe not, but somebody in the Patriot camp must have been paying attention to the way he ran his campaign. Remember, he won that race, too, even if he wasn’t on the ballot anywhere in the South.”

“Are you saying that means Forrest will win, too? It’d take more than a fancy parade to get me to vote for anybody but Robert E. Lee, and that goes for anybody who served in the Army of Northern Virginia.”

“But not everybody in the country did serve in the Army of Northern Virginia. Me, I’d sooner vote for Lee than Forrest any day, but what do I know? I’m just a damnyankee—ask my neighbors.”

At the tail end of the parade marched a big man thumping a bigger drum. The watching crowd spilled into the street and followed him into the square. In front of the courthouse, the same platform that had served for the slave auction was up again. Three or four of Forrest’s Trees stood atop it, torches held on high. More crowded close, so the platform was far and away the brightest place in the square.

One of the hooded Trees shouted, “Here’s his honor the mayor!” The rest of the group hollered and clapped as Isaac Cockrell clambered to the top of the platform. He was not an old man; he was, in fact, several years younger than Caudell. But he was short and fat and rather wheezy. Among the stalwart Trees, he cut an unprepossessing figure.

“My friends,” he said, and then again, louder: “My friends!” The crowd kept right on chattering.

Caudell cupped hands to his mouth, yelled, “Hire a substitute, Cockrell!” The mayor had bought his way out of the 47th North Carolina a couple of months before Gettysburg. and stayed prosperously at home while the regiment did its desperate work. Caudell was not the only man who remembered. Several other veterans whooped in gleeful derision at his cry.

Isaac Cockrell flinched but quickly gathered himself. “My friends,” he said yet again, and this time was able to go on from there: “My friends, we’re here tonight to show we all want Nathan Bedford Forrest to be the next President of our Confederate States of America.”

Forrest’s Trees raised a cheer. So did a good many men and women in the crowd; the women, of course, could not vote, but they enjoyed a rousing political spectacle no less than their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons. But Caudell’s was not the only voice that shouted “No!”—far from it. To drown out their opponents, the Trees started singing the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep” again.

Henry Pleasants knew the answer to that. “Lee!” he boomed, making his voice as deep as he could. “Lee! Lee! Lee!” Caudell joined the one-word chant. So did the other Lee men—most of them veterans like him. Their cry rose to rival the bawled out “Quickstep.”

Raeford Liles was singing Forrest’s anthem at the top of his lungs. He saw that Caudell belonged to the other camp. “You look like nothin’ but a stupid damn tree frog, Nate, hunchin’ up your shoulders every time you chirp out ‘Lee!’”

“I’d sooner look like a tree frog than have the brains of one,” Caudell retorted. Liles stuck out his tongue. Caudell said, “Who looks froggy now?”

Having launched into his speech, Mayor Cockrell kept on with it through the hubbub, though for some time no one except perhaps the Trees up on the platform with him could hear a word he was saying. Just as well, Caudell thought. But gradually, backers of Forrest and Lee both quieted down enough to get bits of the mayor’s speech: “Do you want your niggers taken away from you? If you do, vote for Lee, sure enough. Vote for Forrest, though, and your children’ll still keep ‘em, and your grandchildren, too.”

“What niggers?” a heckler yelled from the back of the crowd. “I ain’t got no niggers. Most of us ain’t got no niggers—ain’t got the money for it. How many niggers you got, Cockrell?”

That hit home hard enough to make the mayor draw back a pace. He owned about half a dozen Negroes, which, while it did not make him a planter, certainly established him as well-to-do. He rallied gamely, though: “Even if you don’t own any niggers, do you want them free to work for low wages, lower than a white man would take?”

The heckler—Caudell suddenly grinned, recognizing Dempsey Eure’s voice—would not be stilled: “Can’t hardly work for less’n I make, farmin’ —the place I farm.”

Cockrell’s argument might have carried more force in a bigger town, a place where more people did in fact work for wages. But Nash County was overwhelmingly rural, even by the standards of North Carolina. Tied to the soil as they were, its people had scant experience with wages of any sort, high or low.

Seeing their speaker falter, Forrest’s Trees started singing again. By then their torches were guttering out, letting the square return to night. Caudell and the other Lee backers answered the “Quickstep” with their own call. Both groups, though, were running out of steam. By ones and twos, people began drifting away. Sometimes, in low voices, they carried on their arguments. Sometimes, away from the heat of the rally, they found themselves able to laugh at how stirred they’d gotten.

Caudell said, “It’s still early spring. We’ll all be done to a turn if this kind of thing keeps up till November.”

“Keeps life from getting dull, doesn’t it?” Pleasants answered as he walked back toward the stable to get his horse.

“I suppose so.” Caudell walked on another few steps with his friend, then added wistfully, “I remember when life was dull, or I thought it was, anyway. You know what? Looking back, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

Lee had been waiting for the knock on the door of the suite at the Powhatan House. He got up and opened the door. “Senator Brown!” he said, extending his hand. “Thank you for doing me the honor of coming here.”

“The honor is mine, sir.” Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi was a strikingly handsome man in his early fifties, with dark wavy hair worn rather long, and bushy side-whiskers that reached down to the line of his jaw. His suit was of the most stylish cut (a good deal more so than Lee’s); his patent leather shoes gleamed in the gaslight.

“Do please sit down,” Lee said, waving him to a chair. Brown sank back into the soft cushions, crossed his legs, lay one arm on the velvet arm of the seat. He seemed the picture of ease; Lee envied him his ability to relax so completely. “You are perhaps curious as to why I asked if you would see me today.”

“Call me—intrigued.” Brown’s dark eyes, shadowed in their sockets, revealed very little. He was a veteran politician, having served in the Mississippi state legislature, in the U.S. Congress, and as a U.S. senator alongside Jefferson Davis until his state left the Union. He’d also fought as a Confederate captain before he was chosen for the new nation’s Senate.

Lee said, “My purpose is not to keep you in suspense, sir. I want to ask if you will serve as my Vice-Presidential candidate for the forthcoming elections.”

Brown’s relaxation dropped from him like a cloak. He leaned forward in his seat, said softly, “I thought it might be so. Even to be considered as your running mate does me more credit than I deserve—”

“Not at all, sir.”

But Brown had not finished. “—Yet before I say yea or nay, there are certain matters concerning which I must satisfy myself.” He waited to see how Lee would take that.

Lee was delighted. “If my views are in any way unclear to you, I would not have you blindly embrace them. Ask what you will.”

“Thank you, sir.” Brown dipped his head. “In one way, your invitation to me is surprising, for I perceived you as being President Davis’s chosen successor and, as you may know, the President and I have not always been in complete accord.” That was an understatement. While willing to do whatever proved necessary to win the war, Brown had consistently maintained war powers resided with the Confederate Congress, not with the President. He obviously remembered the angry exchanges he’d had with Davis.

“Had it not been for the President’s urging, I should not have sought the Presidency; that I admit,” Lee said. “I could hardly deny it—I was never struck with political ambition, nor do I feel it now to any great degree. But if you doubt I am my own man, then I thank you for your time here today and apologize for having inconvenienced you. I will discuss the position with someone else.”

“No need,” Brown said quickly, holding up a hand; he had political ambition. “You are quite clear; indeed, the fact that you have asked me says a great deal for your independence from Davis in and of itself. But the next question cuts to the bone: what precisely is your stand on the Negro and his place in our society?”

“I do not believe we can successfully keep him in bonds forever, and so I feel we must begin the process of lifting those bonds as quickly as is practicable, lest he tear them off himself and, in so doing, work far more harm upon us. If you find that position untenable, sir, the door is but a few steps away.”

Brown did not get up and leave. But he did not sing hosannas in praise of Lee’s generosity, either. He said, “Let me quote for you article one, section nine, clause four of the Constitution of the Confederate States: ‘No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed.’”

“I am familiar with the clause,” Lee said. “That it is an impediment to what I propose, I cannot deny. Let me ask you a question in return, if I may.” He waited for Brown to nod before continuing: “Suppose the war, instead of turning in our favor in 1864, had taken a downhill course, as it might well have done without our troops’ being newly armed with repeaters. Would you then have favored giving weapons to and emancipating certain of our slaves in order to preserve our republic, the Constitution notwithstanding?”

“In such a crisis, I would,” Brown said after only a brief pause for thought. “Saving the nation is to me more important than any temporary damage to the Constitution, which can be made good later if the nation survives.”

“Fair enough. I submit to you, then, that the Negro as slave presents us with a continuing crisis, even if one less imminent than the prospect of forfeiting the Second American Revolution. The time to deal with it is before it becomes imminent, lest we be forced to act in haste and perhaps desperation.”

Brown pondered that, then startled Lee by throwing back his head and laughing. At Lee’s quizzical look, he explained rather sheepishly, “I marvel that I am sitting here listening to you at all, let alone carefully considering your ideas, when in the U.S. Congress I called for opening California to slavery, by force of arms if necessary, and for the annexation to the United States of Cuba and the Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Potosí to serve for the planting and spreading of slavery.”

“Yet here you sit,” Lee said. From Brown’s words and votes in the Confederate Senate, he had gathered that the man was moderate on the question of the Negro. He had not thought to go back and learn what Brown had said as a U.S. congressman and senator. That, evidently, had been an oversight on his part. He wondered why the man did not rise up on his hind legs and storm out, as Nathan Bedford Forrest and Andries Rhoodie had before him in like circumstances.

“Here I sit,” Brown agreed. He laughed again. “Circumstances alter cases. When we were part of the United States, we had to seek to extend slavery wherever we might to balance the corresponding expansion of the Northern States and our consequent loss of power within the U.S. But now we are no longer within the U.S. and may act as we deem best, without fear it will weaken us before our political foes.”

“That is most sensibly spoken, sir,” Lee said with admiration. “Then you are with me?”

“I have not said so,” Brown answered sharply. “I concede there may be circumstances under which some form of emancipation is justified. We must, however, offer the voters a program they can stomach, or all this fine talk is so much moonshine. How do you propose to go about setting the niggers free?”

“In a word, gradually,” Lee said. “I have, I hope you will believe, given this a good deal of thought. I do not and shall not propose confiscatory legislation. I understand that would be politically impracticable.”

“I hope you do,” Brown said. “If you don’t get elected, nothing else matters.”

Again Lee longed for the clean, well-defined world of the soldier, where compromise had to be made only with weather and terrain and what the enemy would allow, not with one’s own principles. But the politician who could bring home half a loaf counted himself ahead of the game.

“I do not wish slavery to become the sole issue in this campaign,” Lee said. “Many others are of no small urgency: our relations with the United States, the still deplorable state of our finances, and our posture relative to Maximilian and the Mexican insurgents, to name just a few. We have yet even to establish a Supreme Court. On none of these matters has Forrest expressed a position; he owns but one drum to beat.”

“A good point, and one we can tax him with. But none of those, save maybe what we do about the United States, will make people sweat. They’ll get up in arms over the nigger question. You still need to answer me about that.”

“So I do,” Lee said. “As I see it, as a beginning we need to encourage emancipation in every way possible and to prepare freedmen to learn useful trades. During the war, several of our states relaxed their laws against slaves’ learning to read and write. I would extend that relaxation throughout the Confederacy. For the next step, I would propose a law allowing a slave, or anyone else on behalf of that slave, to pay for his release at the price for which he had been sold or was valued by a competent appraiser, the owner not having the privilege of refusing said price.”

Albert Gallatin Brown pursed his lips. “You might get by with that, not least because it is so much less radical than what hotheads on the other side say you want.”

“I have not finished,” Lee warned. Brown sat back and composed himself to listen further. “If a slave or someone who wished to buy his freedom could not pay the whole price at once, I would let them pay one sixth, the master again being compelled to accept, to give the slave one day to work for himself each week, another free day being added for each sixth paid, until the slave’s labor is entirely his own.”

“That goes farther, but is again reasonable, and certainly not confiscatory,” Brown said.

“The plan is modeled after one proposed but unfortunately not accepted some years ago in the Empire of Brazil,” Lee said. “Since I became convinced of the necessity of this change, I have sought intently for ways to facilitate it. My former aide Charles Marshall, whose training is in the law, recently brought the Brazilian proposal to my notice. To it I would add a couple of additional features.”

“Which are?” Brown asked.

“First, I would take a small percentage of the property tax paid into the Treasury on slaves each year and use it to establish an emancipation fund to free or begin freeing as many Negroes as this revenue would permit. And second, I would propose a law to the effect that all Negroes born after a certain date should be reckoned freeborn, though owing service to their mothers, masters for the first twenty-one years of their lives, in which time they should also be prepared to live free. I have in mind, you see, not to murder slavery, but to let it peacefully die of old age.”

“Ten years ago, in Charleston or Mobile or Vicksburg, they’d have hanged you from a lamp post for putting forward a scheme like that,” Brown remarked. He ran a finger along the bottom edge of a side-whisker as he thought. Finally he said, “We’ve all seen a great many surprising things these past ten years, haven’t we? All right, General Lee, I’m with you.”

“Splendid!” Lee stuck out his hand. “Sir, we are confederates.”

Brown’s gaze suddenly turned inward. “Not just confederates,” he said quietly, “but Confederates.” Lee could hear the capital letter falling into place. Brown went on, “I think you’ve just named our party.”

“Confederates.” Lee tasted the word on his tongue. He said it again, firmly, and nodded. “Confederates we are.”

The fiddler and banjo player swung from “Ye Cavaliers of Dixie” to “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” to “Mister, Here’s Your Mule.” Hearing the old war songs again took Nate Caudell back to campfires and sore feet and the smell of powder. Nothing made a man feel so intensely alive as knowing he might not be alive much longer.

When the musicians played “Dixie,” that remembered intensity—cherished all the more now that it was gone—filled him too full to let him keep on singing as he had been doing. From somewhere deep inside him, a rebel yell clawed its way up his throat and out between his teeth. It was not a sound that properly belonged in the sleepy, peaceful Nashville town square, but he did not care, He had to let it loose or burst.

Nor was his the only yell that ripped through the afternoon. Most of the men in the crowd—almost an the men under forty-five in the crowd—were veterans of the Second American Revolution, and most of them, by their faces, by their shouts, were as caught up in their memories as he was. A hat sailed through the air, then another.

The last sweet notes of “Dixie” died away. The banjo man and fiddler got down from the flag-draped platform. George Lewis climbed up onto it. Caudell found himself coming to attention and had to fight back a sudden, sharp order to the people around him to straighten their ranks. Then he saw a good many other men, especially those who had fought in the Castalia Invincibles under Captain Lewis, were also squaring their shoulders and bringing their feet together.

But Lewis was not wearing a captain’s three bars these days, only the wing collar and cravat that befit a prosperous civilian and legislator. The collar fit snugly, too; he had to have gained twenty or thirty pounds in his time down in Raleigh. Noticing that made Caudell smile; anyone who hadn’t put on weight since his army days wasn’t half trying.

Lewis said, “My friends, I don’t even know that we needed to get together here today. So many of us marched under Marse Robert, fought under Marse Robert—we an know what he’s like. Is there anybody here from the Army of Northern Virginia who’s such a big fool that he doesn’t aim to vote for Robert E. Lee come November?”

“No!” Caudell shouted. So did most of the men around him. Carried away by the moment, several women called “No!” too.

But most was not all. Just as Caudell had heckled Isaac Cockrell at the Forrest rally, so now someone bellowed, “I ain’t gonna vote for nobody who wants to take my niggers away!”

Cockrell had tried to go on as if no one were harassing him. George Lewis met his challenger head-on. Peering into the crowd to see who had shouted at him, he said, “Jonas Perry, you are a big fool.” That raised a laugh. Lewis went on, “For one thing, everybody here knows those three niggers of yours don’t do a lick of work anyway, so they’d be no great loss to you.” The laugh got louder; whenever he was in town, Perry spent most of his time complaining about how lazy his slaves were. Lewis grew serious: “Anyhow, Lee doesn’t aim to take away anybody’s niggers. That’s a damned lie.”

“He don’t want us to keep ‘em no more, neither,” Jonas Perry yelled back. “How we gonna get our crops in without ‘em? You, Mr. Big Assemblyman George Lewis, sir, you got a lot more niggers’n me. How you aim to get your crops in without ‘em?”

Lewis hesitated. The crowd muttered. Caudell started to worry. If a rally went wrong, a lot of votes could go wrong, too. He looked around. Like him, a lot of people stood tensely, waiting to hear what George Lewis would say. Along with the whites, he also saw several colored men and women in the square. They were not part of the rally; they had work to do. But whatever they were doing, they had their heads turned toward the platform OR which some of them had been sold. All at once, Caudell realized the election in which they could not take part mattered more to them than to him or George Lewis or any white man. He would merely be dissatisfied with the results if Lee lost, while they would have any hope of liberty dashed for at least six years.

Almost too late, Lewis answered Jonas Perry: “Jonas, if I said I liked the whole of Lee’s plan, I’d be a liar. But the way I look at it is this: Sometimes holding on to a thing just for the sake of holding on to it gets to be more trouble than it’s worth. Bedford Forrest did everything he could to whip the niggers in arms and make them Stop fighting, but you still read about bush. whackings and murders in Louisiana and Arkansas and Mississippi in the papers all the time. And Tennessee—the Yankees sat on Tennessee for two years and turned every nigger in the state loose, near enough. There’s not a prayer of getting them all back with their proper masters there. Hell’s bells, man, you know half the free niggers, and then some right here in North Carolina were slaves before the Yankees came down on the coast. I’m not asking you to like it. I’m asking you if it’s true. Is it?”

“Yes, but—” Perry said. This time, Lewis interrupted him. “But me no buts. The niggers who are uppity can’t run North anymore, either; now that we’re free of the United States, they don’t want our riffraff. We always said we hated niggers running off, but it was a kind of safety valve for us. Now we’re stuck with all of ‘em, and the valve’s tied down. Do you want it to blow? Do you want to see Santo Domingos all through the South?”

“You think I’m crazy?” Perry said hoarsely. Caudell understood the catch in his voice; to a Southerner, Santo Domingo carried the same frisson of horror as violation did to a delicately reared woman. Slave uprisings, slave massacres, had always been rare and tiny in the South. But all whites knew, admit it or no, that a great rebellion could always happen…and tens of thousands of black men had learned to handle firearms in the course of the Second American Revolution.

“No, I don’t think you’re crazy, Jonas; I just think you haven’t thought the thing through, and I think Marse Robert has,” Lewis said. “Lee’s plan doesn’t hurt anybody in the pocketbook, and it gives us back our safety valve again. It gives us lots of years to figure out what the hell to do with the niggers. Vote for Forrest, and things stay just the way they are now—till they blow sky high.”

Perry didn’t answer, though the crowd had grown so quiet a whisper could have been heard. Caudell had his doubts that Lewis had convinced the burly farmer, but he’d made him thoughtful.

Into that silence, Lewis said, “Here’s one more thing: This is Lee we’re talking about. If somebody else had put this notion forward, I’d fret about it a lot more than I do. If I trust the judgment of any man on the face of the earth, it’s Robert E. Lee.”

Heads bobbed solemnly up and down, Caudell’s among them. Lee was human; he could make mistakes. Any man who’d charged up toward Cemetery Ridge wearing gray knew that—for too many, it was the last thing they ever knew. But Lee had held off the Federals in Virginia, though constantly outnumbered, and beat them and taken Washington City when the repeaters gave him a chance, had helped arrange the peace with the U.S.A. and presided over Kentucky’s joining the confederacy. If all that was not enough to deserve support, what was?

“I had a whole big speech all ready to roll out, but I don’t think I’m going to bother with it now,” Lewis said. “The only reason I can see that anyone would want to vote for Forrest instead of Lee is over slavery, and I’ve covered that as well as I know how, talking with Jonas here. When we’re talking about anything else—dealing with the United States and other foreign countries, making paper money worth what it says it is, all that sort of thing—Lee has it over him, and I think everybody knows it. A vote for Lee and Brown moves the Confederacy forward. A vote for Forrest and Wigfall holds us back. Thank you for listening to me, my friends. I’m through.”

The crowd cheered lustily, and began the chant of “Lee! Lee! Lee!” that Henry Pleasants had begun at the Forrest rally. The banjo picker and fiddler struck up “Dixie” again. Voices lifted in song. Caudell raised his with the rest. Only when he was walking back to his room did he think to wonder how fitting the tune was at a rally for a man who wanted to move, however gradually, on slavery.

Chattering like magpies, Caudell’s students hurried out of the run-down schoolhouse and scattered for their homes. It had been a long day for them; summer was almost here, and the sun rose early and set late. The only thing that helped them—and their teacher—endure was knowing that with summer came an end to lessons.

When Caudell, slower and tireder than the children, went outside, he found a black man waiting for him. “Hello, Israel,” he said. “Can I do something for you?”

“Yes, suh, you can. I wants you to help me with my ‘rithmetic, suh. I pays you to do it.” He reached into his pocket, took out a tan-and-brown Confederate five-dollar bill.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Caudell put his hands in the air. “You don’t need me, not when you work for Henry Pleasants. He’s a real engineer—he knows more about mathematics than I’ll ever learn.”

“Yes, suh, he knows it. But he knows it so good, he cain’t teach it to me: seem like he done forgot how he ever learn in the fust place, if you know what I mean,” Israel said. Caudell had to nod; he’d known people like that. The Negro went on, “But you, suh, you a schoolteacher. You used to showin’ folk what don’t know nothin’ how to do things jus’ a step at a time, like them Yankee teachers they had at the Hayti ‘cross the Trent from New Berne. An’ these here fractions, they drivin’ me to distraction. I gots to know ‘em, if I’s ever goin’ to keep Marse Henry’s books for him. Please teach me, suh.” Israel displayed the banknote again.

Nothing—not even poor dead Josephine, with her promises of sensual delights—could have been better calculated to tempt Caudell than someone standing in front of him and begging to be taught. That Israel was black worried him less than it would have before the war. For one thing, Israel was free; for another, he was already literate and had not gotten into any trouble on account of it.

That did not mean Caudell had no qualms. “If I do agree to teach you, Israel, when will you be able to come into town? Will Henry let you take time off from your work?”

Sadly, Israel shook his head. “No, suh, he sho’ won’t. I gots to work fo’ my keep. I finish all my cho’s early today so as I can get here an’ ask you. But if you wants to help me learn, I come in soon as I’m done, an’ walk back in the dark. That don’t matter none to me.”

“How many days a week would you want to do that?” Caudell asked.

“Many as you want,” Israel answered at once.

Caudell studied him. If he meant what he said, he had more hunger for knowledge than any of the regular students in the school. A full day’s work, five miles on foot into Nashville, a lesson, another five miles back to the farm, with one of those hikes, at least, and maybe both, made in the night and cutting into his sleep…

“If you really want to try, I guess we could manage three evenings a week and see how that goes,” Caudell said. His own curiosity was piqued. He wondered just how much the Negro could do.

“Thank you, suh, thank you!” Israel’s big happy grin seemed almost to split his face in two. Then he sobered. “How much you want me to pay you?”

Could he have afforded to, Caudell would have done it for nothing. He could not afford to, and he knew it, especially with the lean months of summer staring him in the face. “How does five dollars every other week sound?”

“Like a lot o’ money,” Israel said mournfully. “Reckon I gots to pay, though, if I wants to learn.”

“How much would that work out to per week?” Caudell asked, wanting to see what his new pupil already knew.

“‘Two dollars an’ fifty cents,” Israel answered without hesitation. “You ask me about cash money. I can cipher just fine. But when it’s two an’ a half barrels o’ this an’ three an’ a quarter pounds o’ that, I goes all to pieces.”

“It won’t be so bad.” Caudell did his best to sound reassuring. “Come on back to the widow Bissett’s with me. As long as you’re here, you might as well start your lessons—soonest begun, soonest done.” And, the resolutely practical part of him added, the sooner I start getting paid.

He did not take Israel up to his room. They worked on the front porch till it got too dark to see, and then for a while after that by candlelight, their heads close together. But the candles also lured bugs, until they were doing more slapping than studying. Finally Israel got up. “I better get on back, ‘fore I’s eaten up altogether.”

“All right, Israel. I’ll see you Wednesday, then. You’ve made a fair start, I think.” Actually, Caudell was more than a little impressed. By his own account, Israel had had no schooling at all until he ran off to Federally held territory during the war. But he learned readily enough, and his mere presence here was proof of his willingness—even his eagerness—to work.

Caudell blew out the candles. Night closed down on the porch, hot and close and sticky and completely dark except for the faint glow of a single lamp in the parlor inside. Israel stumbled going down the stairs, and again on the short path that led out to Joyner Street. “See you Wednesday, suh,” he called. Then, but for the sound of his footsteps, he might have vanished from the face of the earth.

Barbara Bissett sat waiting for Caudell to come in, her plump face set in disapproving lines. Without preamble, she snapped, “I don’t want that nigger coming round here again, do you understand me?”

“What? Why not?” Caudell said, taken by surprise.

“On account of he’s a nigger, of course.” His landlady sounded surprised, too, but for a different reason. “What will the neighbors say if they see a nigger coming round my house all the time? I ain’t white trash that’s sunk so low as to have to make friends with slaves.”

“He’s free,” Caudell said. That had no effect on the widow Bissett; she took one of the deep breaths she used to inflate before she went on her crying jags. Anxious to head that off, Caudell added, “He’s just studying arithmetic with me.”

“I don’t care what he’s doing, do you hear me?” Barbara Bissett could write her own name, read a little, and handle money. Past that, her knowledge stopped, nor had she ever shown any inclination to learn more. But she held the whip hand now: “He comes round here again, Mr. Nate Caudell, you can just go and find yourself another place to live, do you understand me? You better understand me.”

“I understand you,” Caudell said resignedly. Though he did not own much in the way of worldly goods, he had had to pack up everything and move out on a moment’s notice so often during his time in the army that he’d developed a permanent aversion to the very idea. “We’ll find somewhere else.”

Wednesday, he met Israel well away from the widow Bissett’s house, took him back to the school, and drilled him there. That was where the lessons continued. Adding and subtracting fractions went well enough, so long as they had the same denominator. But when he showed Israel that a half times a half was a quarter, the Negro shook his head in bewilderment. “It was always a two under the line befo’. How come it be a fo’ now?”

“Because you multiplied it,” Caudell said patiently. “How much is two times two if they’re not under the line?”

“Fo’,” Israel admitted. But no light went on in his eyes; he couldn’t make the stretch from whole numbers to those peculiar-looking entities called fractions.

“Let’s try it another way,” Caudell said. “You know money. Suppose you have fifty cents. What’s another name for that?”

“Half a dollar,” Israel said.

“All right, what’s half of half a dollar?”

“A quarter.” Israel did know money. Suddenly, he stared at the slate where Caudell had chalked the problem. “Half times a half is—a quarter,” he said slowly. Now his face lit up; though he was about fifteen years older than Caudell, he looked like a little boy discovering that, if you put the sounds c and a and t together, they turned into a word. “Halftimes a half is a quarter, an’ it don’ matter whether it’s money or not.”

“That’s right,” Caudell said, grinning his own grin: moments like these were what made his low salary worthwhile. “So what would half times a quarter be?” He tensed as he waited for the black man’s reply. Did Israel truly grasp the principle, or had he just figured out one special case?

Israel frowned in fierce concentration, but not for long. “Half times a quarter—that’d be an eighth, wouldn’t it, Marse Nate?”

“Yup!” Caudell all but shouted it. Now both men grinned, the one in relief, the other in excitement. “You have it, Israel.”

“I got it,” Israel said. “I sho ‘nough do, an’ ain’t nobody can take it away from me, neither. What else you goin’ to learn me ‘bout this multiplyin’ fractions?”

He raced through the rest of that topic, doing his drills as fast as Caudell could give them to him. But he ran headlong into another wall when, a couple of days later, the time came for him to divide fractions instead of multiplying them. Caudell taught him the same technique he used with his regular students: invert the divisor and then multiply.

“We already done multiplyin’,” Israel protested. “This here’s supposed to be dividin’.”

“It is,” Caudell said. “Dividing and multiplying are the inverse—the opposite—of each other, the same way adding and subtracting are. Dividing by a fraction, or by any number, is the same as multiplying by its inverse. They’re just separate parts of the whole thing that makes up arithmetic, you know.”

To his amazement, he found that Israel knew no such thing. He’d learned the rules for each operation without thinking about whether it was related to any other. His jaw fell and his eyes went wide as he took in the concept and made it part of himself. “Ain’t that somethin’ grand?” he said at last. “Five times two is ten, so of course ten divided by five is two. It ain’t no accident. It all fits together.”

“Yup, it sure does,” Caudell said.

“You say ‘sho’,’ Marse Nate, but you the first person ever show that to me. Nobody else ever bother showin’ me it fit together. It’s like a puzzle, ain’t it, where all the pieces go just so an’ make up a whole big picture you couldn’t never guess from lookin’ at ‘em apart. I had the pieces, but I never seen the whole picture till now. Show me this trick o’ yours again, will you? I bet I understands it this time aroun’.”

He did, too. At the next session, Caudell showed him how to find common denominators for fractions. He was slow to see the point of that until Caudell said, “It’s what you do when you get twenty-five and a half bushels of corn from this field and thirty-seven and a third from that one and you need to know how much you have in all.”

Israel’s face took on the intent look with which Caudell had become familiar.” I got you, suh.” He proved himself right in short order. As he started back toward Henry Pleasants’s farm, he asked, “What’s the next lesson?”

Caudell spread his hands. “There is no next lesson, Israel. Far as I can see, you’ve learned everything you need—you should do fine from here on out.” And, as far as he could see, Israel had learned as well and as fast as a pretty bright white man. He was less surprised at that than he thought he ought to be, and a lot less surprised than he would have been before the war.

“Thank you, suh. Thank you from the bottom of this heart o’ mine.” Israel knew better than to shake hands uninvited with a white. He dipped his head and headed north toward the farm.

“It was my pleasure,” Caudell called after him.

Israel didn’t answer. Caudell started back to the widow Bissett’s house. He knew she couldn’t have done as well as the black man had, not if her life depended on it. But she would not have Israel in her house. Before he got free, she could have bought him, assuming she scraped up the money—an unlikely assumption. Caudell tugged on his beard, then kicked at a rock. “If there’s any justice in that, damned if I can see it,” he said out loud. Nashville was already sleeping. No one heard him.

The buggy clattered down the road. Raeford Liles spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the dust. Then he scowled at his horse’s hindquarters. “Git up,” he snapped, flicking the reins. The horse twitched one ear. Other than that, it ignored him.

Nate Caudell laughed. “Just another old soldier.”

“Miserable, lazy, good-for-nothing creature.” Liles flicked the reins again, harder this time. Maybe the horse moved a little faster, but Caudell wouldn’t have bet more than a dime on it.

He said, “Thanks for giving me the ride into Rocky Mount.”

“That’s all right, Nate. I was going to hear Bedford Forrest give his speech come hell or high water. Since you wanted to listen to him, too, I’m pleased to bring you along.”

“He’s giving a lot of speeches, isn’t he?” Caudell said.

“Goin’ all round the country. If your precious Mr. Robert E. Lee wants to sit up in Virginia and let his people do his work for him, he’s liable to lose this here election.” As if to emphasize his words, the storekeeper spat again, then wiped his chin with his sleeve.

“I don’t know,” Caudell said, frowning. “It doesn’t seem dignified, somehow, for a man to do his own campaigning for President. Only one I can remember, back in the U.S. days, was Douglas in 1860, and look what it got him.”

“Douglas!” Liles spat again, to show what he thought of Stephen A. Douglas. “All he was good for was split tin’ his party. But Forrest now, Forrest is different. He don’t say ‘Go on up there’—he says ‘Follow me.’ If something needs doin’, he does it his own self.”

Caudell didn’t feel like yet another argument with Liles, so he let the conversation lag. Fields and forests flowed slowly past. He’d come up this road three years before, after seeing the wonders of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington City. Since then, he hadn’t been as far from Nashville as Rocky Mount. Away from the railroads, travel stayed as slow as it had always been. Listening to a speech a dozen miles distant meant a whole day away.

Rocky Mount had spread itself to welcome the Presidential candidate. Confederate flags flew everywhere; bunting decorated the buildings in the center of town—most of them new since the war. A platoon of Forrest’s Trees in their Confederate-gray capes ushered spectators toward the platform from which their man would speak. Beside the platform, a band thumped away on the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep,” over and over and over again. In front stood a platform loaded with food and drink. “Y’all help yourselves,” a Tree said expansively.

As Liles poured himself a drink of whiskey, he said, “All this must cost a pretty penny, if Forrest does it every stop he makes.”

“Look around,” Caudell suggested.

Liles did. The whiskey glass stopped halfway to his lips. “Rivington men,” he said in disgust.

Several of them, wearing their usual muddy green, prowled the edges of the Rocky Mount town square, AK-47s in their hands and serious expressions on their faces. Caudell couldn’t figure out what they were up to until he remembered the Federal sentries at the White House after the rebel army broke into Washington. Bodyguards, that’s what they are, he thought.

“If they’re for Forrest, that’s the best reason I can think of to vote for Lee,” Liles said.

“They are.” Caudell pointed to the flagpoles that sprouted from the comers of the platform. “Look, those are their flags flying under the Stainless Banner.” He’d seen the AWB’s three-spiked insignia on Benny Lang’s jacket and again in Richmond across from Mechanic’s Hall.

“They got their own flag? What the hell business they got, havin’ their own flag?” Liles demanded, “They ain’t a country, nor a state neither. I just figured them things was there for. decoration.” And indeed, the red and white banners with their black central emblems fit in well enough in the sea of red, white, and blue that had washed over Rocky Mount.

“No,” Caudell said. The storekeeper answered him, but he didn’t hear what Liles said. He’d just recognized one of the Rivington men—Piet Hardie. He wanted to go up to him, grab him by the front of the shirt, and snarl, What did you do to the mulatto wench that made her hang herself? What did you do to frighten Mollie Bean, who wasn’t frightened at Gettysburg ? That seemed unwise; not only was Hardie half again his size, he was also carrying a repeater. But if Piet Hardie backed Nathan Bedford Forrest, it was, as Liles had said, another reason to favor Robert E. Lee.

The town square filled rapidly. Most of the people there took no special notice of the Rivington men; some, mostly men of an age to be veterans, came up and talked with them in a friendly way about the AK-47s. Caudell knew the South might have lost the war without them. He couldn’t make himself like the Rivington men even so.

To the bang of a drum, the Trees called out, “Hit ‘em again! Hit’ em again! Forrest! Forrest!” A couple of men went up to the platform and sat down on the front edge, rifles across their knees. A plump man whose name had escaped Caudell went up there too, and launched into a speech of his own. Finally one of the Rivington men turned around and glared at him. After a few seconds, the glare got through. The plump man said,” And now, my friends, without further ado, the man you’ve been waiting for”—”And waiting for,” Liles put in sourly—”the next President of the Confederate States of America, Nathan Bedford Forrest!”

The Trees redoubled their chant, but the shouts of the crowd all but drowned them out. Forrest bounded up onto the platform. He stood there for a moment, letting the cheers wash over him. He was a bigger man than Caudell had expected, and had more presence. Like Lee, he was impossible to ignore, or to take lightly.

He raised both hands, lowered them again. The noise in the square went down with them. Into the quiet he had caused, Forrest said, “Thank you all, for coming here to listen to me today.” His accent was unpolished, but his voice was smoother than Caudell would have guessed. Smooth or not, though, it carried.

He went on: “In Richmond, they think they can pass on the Presidency like it was a farm going from father to son. In Richmond, they think it’s a matter betwixt gentlemen.” He loaded the word with scorn. “Are they right, the gentlemen up in Richmond?”

“No!” people shouted back. Caudell kept silent. So did Raeford Liles, but they were in the minority.

Forrest stalked back and forth across the platform. He was by no means a classic speaker, but he was effective all the same. The farther into his speech he went, the louder and more booming his voice became. Soon it was easy to imagine him roaring out orders through the din of battle, and easy to imagine men jumping to obey.

“Up in Richmond,” Forrest cried, “Mr. Robert E. Lee says he knows better’n you what to do with your property. Hear me now, people, it’s not for me to say freein’ slaves is always a bad thing. I freed plenty o’ my own, and they went through the war with me as my teamsters.”

His bodyguards from Rivington did not care to hear that. Rivington men, Caudell knew, generally didn’t care to hear anything about easing restrictions on blacks. The one who had glared down the plump functionary turned his stare on Forrest. But the former cavalry general was made of sterner stuff and ignored that warning gaze.

In any case, he did not keep the Rivington men worrying long: “If you want to free your niggers, that your business. But if the government goes an’ tells you you’ve got to free your niggers—hell’s bells, gentlemen, am I right or am I wrong, but didn’t we fight a war with a government that wanted to tell us that?”

This time, the roar from the crowd was “Yes!” and this time, Raeford Liles roared along with the rest. Caudell did not roar “Yes!” He was not inclined to heckle, though, either, as he’d heckled Isaac Cockrell. That had nothing to do with the men with rifles who sat on the platform; the thought that rifles might be turned on a heckler simply never entered his mind. But Forrest, unlike Cockrell, had to be taken seriously.

As seemed to be his way no matter what he did, he returned to the relentless attack: “My friends, I give you that Robert E. Lee helped the Confederate States get free of the Yankees, and I tip my hat to him on account of it. But before Robert E. Lee ever fit for the Confederacy, the Yankees wanted to make him their commander—and he almost took on the job. When he did decide to stick with his state, Virginia made him a general straight off. That’s a rugged way to fight a war, by God, isn’t it?”

The men in the crowd laughed appreciatively. Warming to his subject, Forrest went on, “Me, I started the fight as a private. I wanted to get right in—couldn’t wait to get right in. My friend Senator Wigfall, our next Vice President”—he paused for applause—”helped fix up the surrender of Fort Sumter back when Robert E. Lee, that gentleman up in Richmond, was still a colonel in the army of the U.S. of A. If you all Want some Bobbie-come-lately, I reckon you can vote for Lee. But if you want men who were with the Confederate States of America from the git-go, you’ll stick with Wigfall and me. I thank you kindly for listening to me today.” He bowed and got down from the platform.

The drum began to beat again. Forrest’s Trees chanted, “Hit ‘em again! Hit ‘em again!” One of the Rivington men raised his AK-47 to his shoulder and fired a short burst into the air. Caudell saw the muzzle flash, but hardly heard the report through the thunderous cheers of the people around him.

The band struck up the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep,” and then a minstrel tune, one Caudell didn’t know. He turned to Raeford Liles, asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s called, ‘I’m Coming to My Dixie Home.’ It’s a nigger talkin’ about life up North,” Liles answered. He sang a few bars: “I’d rather work de cotton patch, And die on corn and bacon, Dan lib up Norf on good white bread, Ob Abolition makin ‘.’ I got the sheet music back at the store, if you ever want to take a look at it.”

“That’s all right,” Caudell said quickly: trust Liles not to miss a chance to try to sell him something. Just then, the noise around them redoubled. Nathan Bedford Forrest was plunging into the crowd, shaking men’s hands and bowing over those that belonged to ladies. People surged toward him from allover the square. Caudell didn’t particularly care to meet him, but was swept along by the tide.

Forrest’s big hand almost swallowed up his. “Will you vote for me, sir?”

Looking up at that strong, determined face, Caudell had to work to make himself shake his head. “No, sir, don’t reckon so now. I fought under General Lee, and I’ll stick by him.”

Behind Forrest, a bodyguard who had plunged after him—and whom he was ignoring—scowled at Caudell. Caudell waited for the famous Forrest temper to explode. But the ex-general only nodded and said, “Good to find a man who’s loyal and not ashamed to say so. You might”—as a rustic would, he pronounced it mought—”change your mind. I hope you do.” He turned to Raeford Liles. “What about you, sir?”

“I might could vote your way,” the storekeeper allowed. “I was leanin’ that way, but I’d care for you more if the Rivington men cared for you less.”

Now Forrest showed anger. “Any man who wants to keep the right of property in niggers is a Patriot, by God. If that’s you, you’re with me, same as they are. And if it ain’t, be damned to you.” He spun away as if Liles had ceased to exist.

“He doesn’t leave much room for doubt, does he?” Caudell said after they had finally got free of the crowd and headed back toward the buggy.

“No.” Liles still looked like a man who’d bitten into something sour. “That’ll hurt him, too.”

“Good,” Caudell said. He waited for the storekeeper to argue with him, but Liles just kept walking.