Love and War

by John Jakes

  Their breathing quickened. Yet there were warnings in his head on this night of shocks and changes.

  “Are you sure we should go on? I’m a soldier—I can’t get here for months at a time—”

  “I know what you are,” she said, caressing gently in the dark.

  “Do you? I could ride away and never get back.”

  “Don’t say such things.”

  “Have to, Gus. I’ll get out of this bed this minute if you think I should.”

  “Do you want that?”

  “God, no.”

  “I don’t either.” Kissing him. Touching him. Rousing him to such rigidity he hurt. “I know the times are fearful and dangerous. We must accept Pope’s advice—” Her mouth slipped across his bearded face, found his lips, opened. Tongues wet and loving touched a moment.

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Whatever is—is right.’” Another deep, long kiss. “Love me, Charles.”

  He did, and toward the end, she hung her head back and breathed, “I want you always. Always, always.”

  “I love you, Gus.”

  “I love you, Charles.”

  “—love you—”

  “—love you—”

  “—love—”

  The word cycled up the scale like human music as he pushed to the center of her, and she rose and cried her joy in a voice that shook the room.

  Still later, deep in the night, she slept against his shoulder, making occasional small sounds. They had shared themselves a third time, and she had closed her eyes afterward. He couldn’t seem to doze or even calm down. What he had done tonight, learned tonight, kept his eyes open and his heart beating much too fast for a man in the soft aftermath of love.

  He was fearful because his feelings were no longer hidden. He knew he loved her when he stood by the house unable to force himself to action for a few moments because he cared so much.

  Then his emotions rendered him mistake-prone. In the kitchen he looked at Gus first, instead of at the young Yank. In the army he had seen men rendered impotent as soldiers by worry over loved ones. The worst cases deserted. He held them in contempt. But after his own near-fatal error, how could he? How was he different?

  Finally, and perhaps worst, he had been prepared to kill the coward’s way, with a ruthless joy, and to do it in a place supposedly safe from violence and all of the other spreading poisons of the war.

  You oughtn’t to be here. But how could he be anywhere else? He had been falling in love since he first saw her.

  How was it possible to be so fulfilled and so torn? He saw the conflict in a homely little mind picture: two liquids from an apothecary’s shelf poured into a mortar and swirled with a pestle.

  He loved Gus. She was passion, peace, merriment, contemplation, companionship. He admired her nature, he wanted her physically, she was everything he had ever desired in a woman without expecting to find it.

  But there was Hampton, and the Yankees.

  The pestle swirled. The hours went by. The apothecary’s hopes counted for nothing. The liquids would not mix.

  Problem was, he couldn’t give up as easily as an apothecary could. Couldn’t give up Gus and couldn’t give up his duty. Love and war were opposite states, and he was inescapably caught in both. He had no choice except to go forward, wherever the disparate forces might carry him—and her.

  Full of foreboding he slipped his arm under her warm shoulders and held her close.

  Book Four

  “Let Us Die To Make Men Free”

  I would like to see the North win, but as to any interest in … supporting the Emancipation Proclamation I in common with every other officer and soldier in the army wash my hands of it. I came out to fight for the restoration of the Union … and not to free the niggers.

  A UNION SOLDIER, 1863

  64

  “SOCIAL SUICIDE,” HE SAID when she proposed the idea. “Even for an abolitionist like you.”

  “Do you think I care about that? It’s a fitting place to be tomorrow night.”

  “I agree. I’ll take you.”

  So here they were, George and his Roman Catholic wife, seated in one of the gold-trimmed pews of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. Only a third of the candles in the chandeliers had been lit, for this was an hour of meditation, an hour to look backward and ahead. The choir hummed the “Battle Hymn” while the minister stood with head bowed, black hands gripping the marble of the pulpit. His short message to the worshipers, most of them members of the affluent Negro congregation—there were no more than a dozen whites present—had been drawn from Exodus 13: And Moses said unto the people, Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

  Midnight was near. Though not a religious man, George was moved by the experience of sitting here and seeing the dark faces upturned, many showing tears, and some with expressions approaching rapture. A shiver down his spine, he reached for his wife’s hand and clasped it tightly.

  All across the North, similar watch-night services were being held to observe the coming of the new year. In the morning Lincoln would sign the proclamation. George felt tension grow as the final minute passed. The choir fell silent, and the entire church. Then, in the steeple, the first bell note.

  The minister raised his head and hands. “O Lord our God, it has come. Thou hast delivered us. Jubilo at last.”

  “Yes, jubilo.” “Amen!” “Praise God!” Throughout the church, men and women proclaimed their joy, and the sound of the bell seemed to swell. The shiver rippled down George’s back again. Constance had tears in her eyes.

  The bell pealed, soon overlaid by a counterpoint of other bells in other churches ringing through the starry dark. The joyful exclamations grew louder. George felt like shouting too. Then suddenly, sickeningly, like a hailstorm, rocks struck the church. He heard epithets, obscenities.

  Several men jumped up, George among them. He and two whites and half a dozen blacks stormed up the aisle. The hooligans were jeering shadows on the run by the time the men reached the steps.

  George shoved his dress saber back in its scabbard, listening to the bells chime across the black arch of winter sky. The brief exaltation had passed. The rock-throwing brought him back to the realities of this first day of 1863.

  Although the mood of the worship service had been broken, nothing could cancel the power of it. That was clear from the faces of the men and women scattering to the carriages left in the care of little black boys bundled against the cold. Rattling homeward to Georgetown through deserted streets, Constance snuggled close and said, “Are you happy we went?”

  “Very much so.”

  “You looked so grave toward the end of the service. Why?”

  “I was speculating. I wonder if anyone, Lincoln included, knows precisely what this proclamation portends for the country.”

  “I certainly don’t.”

  “Nor I. But as I sat there, I had the oddest feeling about the war. I’m not certain the term war applies any longer.”

  “If it isn’t a war, what is it?”

  “A revolution.”

  Silently, Constance clung to his arm as they absorbed the bite of the wind. George had preferred to drive tonight rather than ask one of their hired Negro freedmen to be absent from his family. The bells kept tolling, ringing their knell of changes across the city and the nation.

  Washington had undergone drastic change in the months the Hazards had lived there. Business had seldom been better, but that was true everywhere in the North. Hazard’s was operating at capacity, and the Bank of Lehigh Station, opened in October, was enjoying great success.

  Scores of European immigrants, attracted in spite of the conflict—or perhaps because of it; war brought boom times—added to the general overcrowding in Washington. The martial spirit of the early days was gone, washed away by bloodshed in the great battles lost by the Union. No elegant uniforms could be seen on parade on the mall; no military bands performed for the public. At
book and novelty stores, people bought Confederate bank notes and kepis picked up by souvenir hunters after Second Bull Run. They paid with government promissory notes; with Treasury-issued fractional currency—green-backed bills in denominations under a dollar, derisively called shinplasterers; or with wartime coins minted by private firms and bearing their advertising. They accepted the presence of black waiters at Willard’s—all the white regulars had enlisted—and they accepted the presence of maimed veterans wandering everywhere.

  At the start of the war, everyone had agreed that Washington was a Southern city. Only a few months ago, however, Richard Wallach, brother of the owner of the Star, had been elected mayor. Wallach was an Unconditional Union Democrat, who wanted the war prosecuted fully to the end, unlike those in the peace wing of his party. Copperheads, some called the peace Democrats; poisonous snakes.

  Emancipation had come to the District last April. Stanley and Isabel were in the forefront of those promoting it, although at one of the rare and difficult suppers arranged by the two Hazard wives to maintain a pretense of family harmony, Isabel had stated that emancipation would turn the city into “a hell on earth for the white race.” It hadn’t exactly worked that way. Almost daily, white soldiers fell on some black contraband and beat or maimed him or her, without subsequent punishment. Negroes weren’t permitted to ride the new street railway cars shuttling along Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the State Department. Isabel deplored such bigoted behavior when paying court to her radical friends.

  In the demoralized army, change was certain. Encamped on the Rappahannock, Burnside kept planning winter advances against all advice. He was wild to redeem his failure at Fredericksburg. On more than one occasion, George had heard senior officers say Burnside had lost his mind.

  Fighting Joe Hooker was most frequently mentioned as Burnside’s replacement. Whoever took command faced a monumental job of reorganizing the army and restoring pride and discipline. Some regiments refused to march past the Executive Mansion, but would go out of their way to reach McClellan’s residence on H Street, where they would cheer as they went by or sing a popular song praising the general. There were some blacks in the army now. Like the contrabands, they were beaten frequently, and were paid three dollars less per month for the same duty than their white counterparts.

  In the executive branch, change was likewise a virtual certainty in this new year. The congressional elections had gone badly for the Republicans, and the melancholy President held office in an atmosphere of mounting disfavor. Lincoln was blamed for all the military defeats and called everything from a “country cretin” to a “fawning Negrophile.”

  So change was in the air—needed, unwanted, immutable. Sometimes, as in the Presbyterian church, just imagining possible futures made George’s head ache.

  When they reached home, Constance looked in on the sleeping children, then prepared hot cocoa for George. As she waited for water to boil, she reread her father’s letter. It had arrived yesterday.

  Patrick Flynn had reached California in the autumn. He found a land of sunny somnolence, remote from the war. In ’61 there had been rumors of revolt and a Pacific Confederacy, but those had died out. Flynn reported that his new legal practice in Los Angeles brought him virtually no money, but he was happy. How he survived, he didn’t say, but his daughter’s fears about his safety were eased.

  She carried the cocoa to George in the library. She was tired but he, wearing just his uniform trousers with braces and his shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, looked exhausted. He had turned the gas up full and spread sheets of paper in front of the inkstand. Some bore writing; some were blank.

  She set the cocoa down. “Will you be long?”

  “As long as it takes to finish this. I must show it to Senator Sherman tomorrow—that is, today—at the President’s reception.”

  “Must we go? Those affairs are horrid. So many people, it’s impossible to move.”

  “I know, but Sherman expects me. He’s promised me an introduction to Senator Wilson of Massachusetts. Wilson’s chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. An ally we very badly need.”

  “How soon will the appropriations bill be introduced?”

  “In the House, within two weeks. The real fight comes in the Senate. We don’t have much time.”

  Bending over him where he had sunk into a chair, she touched his hair tenderly. “You’re a remarkable zealot for a man who never liked soldiering.”

  “I still don’t like it, but I love West Point, though I didn’t know it till long after I graduated.”

  She kissed his brow. “Come to bed as soon as you can.”

  He nodded absently. He never saw her leave.

  He inked his pen and resumed work on the article he had agreed to write for the New York Times, one of the Academy’s staunch defenders. The piece was a rebuttal of a favorite argument of Senator Wade, namely, that West Point should be abolished because two hundred out of eight hundred and twenty regular officers in the army in 1861 had resigned to join the Confederacy.

  If that is sufficient reason to dismantle worthy institutions, George wrote under the gaslight, we must perforce carry it into other spheres and, recollecting the divers senators and representatives who similarly resigned—among them Mr. Jefferson Davis, whom Senator Wade characterizes as “the arch-rebel, the arch-fiend of this rebellion”—dismantle our national legislative bodies, for they, too, have bred traitors. In this context, Senator Wade’s argument can be seen for what it is—specious and demagogic.

  He would make enemies with those last three words. He didn’t give a damn. The battle had been joined, and a powerful cabal meant to bury the Academy permanently this year. Led by Wade, the cabal included Lyman Trumbull of Illinois and James Lane of Kansas. Senator Lane was so confident, he was boasting of West Point’s demise all over Washington.

  Sipping cold cocoa, George wrote on, shivering as the house cooled, yawning against fatigue, firing verbal cannonades in the small war whose outcome he deemed almost as vital to the nation as that of the larger one. He wrote on into the new morning of the new year, until he fell asleep on top of his manuscript around five, a strand of his hair lying across the nib of his discarded pen and getting inky.

  “Yes, I’m happy to say she’ll be joining me soon,” Orry told the President. In his right hand he held a punch cup, but he had declined a plate. Dexterous as he had become, he still could not eat and drink at the same time. “It’s entirely possible that she’s on her way right now.”

  The President’s appearance disturbed Orry. He was paler than ever, haggard, with the tight, slightly hunched posture of a man in pain. Much more than neuralgia bedeviled Jefferson Davis these days. His cotton embargo was a failure despite a shortage in British mills. Diplomatic recognition in Europe was no longer even a remote hope. Critics sniped at him for continuing to support the unpopular Bragg in the West and for causing shortages at home. In Richmond, coffee had been almost completely replaced by vile concoctions of okra or sweet potatoes or watermelon seeds sweetened with sorghum. Messages were starting to appear, slashed in paint on city walls: STOP THE WAR. UNION AGAIN!

  This New Year’s afternoon, officers, men in civilian clothes, and many women packed the official residence on Clay Street in the distinguished old Court End neighborhood. Davis strove to fix his entire attention on each guest, if only briefly. Despite his tribulations, his smile and manner were full of warmth:

  “Good news indeed, Colonel. You hoped to have her in Richmond long before this, I recall.”

  “She was to join me early last year, but the plantation was struck with a series of misfortunes.” He mentioned his mother’s seizure but not the increasing problem of runaways. Davis inquired about Clarissa. Orry said she had regained most of her physical faculties.

  Then Davis asked: “How are you getting on with Mr. Seddon?”

  “Fine, sir. I’m aware of his outstanding reputation as a lawyer here in Richmond.”

  That
was all Orry would say. James Seddon of Goochland County had replaced General Gustavus Smith as Secretary of War. Smith had served a total of four days after Randolph resigned in November to accept a commission. Orry disliked the gaunt Seddon’s somber disposition and strong secessionist views. Seddon and his wife were here somewhere. He changed the subject.

  “Permit me a question in another area, Mr. President. The enemy is arming black troops. Do you feel we might benefit by taking the same course?”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, possibly.”

  Davis’s mouth straightened to a tight line: “The idea is pernicious, Colonel. As Mr. Cobb of Georgia observed, if nigras will make good soldiers, our entire theory of slavery is wrong. Excuse me.”

  And off he went to another guest. Orry felt irritated with Davis; it was a harmful weakness, that inability to entertain opinions different from his own.

  He sipped the excessively sweet punch, alone in the large crowd in the central drawing room of the mansion people called the White House because of its exterior layer of plaster on brick. It was a splendid residence, bought by the city and presented to Mr. and Mrs. Davis as a gift. There was a drawing room on the west side and a dining room on the east. There, from high windows behind the refreshment tables, Orry had looked out across Shockoe Valley to Church Hill and winter skies dark as the slate roof of the house.

  Behind him, some guests discussed a rumored plot to establish yet a third country on the continent, this new one to be combination of states in the Northwest and upper South. The speakers all sounded agitated, even slightly hysterical. The reception was beginning to depress him. He edged toward the door. Suddenly he heard a voice he recognized—Varina Davis’s.

  “—and henceforward, my dear, I reserve the right of not returning social calls. That is my Fort Sumter—and to the devil with the objections of that pipsqueak editor Pollard.”

  Orry didn’t turn to look at the First Lady, but he heard the strain within her sarcasm. Strain infected this crowd and Richmond like a pestilence.