Love and War

by John Jakes

  In the hearts of the black people of the nation, Lincoln had changed from a man to a god by means of his own pen stroke. But in one way, George reflected, the man had never changed at all. He remembered Executive Mansion aides gossiping that Lincoln often lost his patience and sometimes his good humor and on rare occasions his compassion for the enemy. But it seemed to George that the man had never lost sight of his own North Star. He loved humanity, Southern as well as Northern, with a great heart. But he loved the Union more.

  To preserve it, he had sorrowfully led a people to war. He had suffered mental depression and haunted sleep, fought the demons of ineptitude and incompetence and innuendo, hectored and joked, preached and cajoled, dreamed and wept for it. And then he had been chosen as the last sacrifice at the site where its continuity had been assured: the blood altar.

  At least Abraham Lincoln had known for five days that his North Star still shone bright and pure, above the cooling embers of fires first kindled in that long-lost spring George remembered vividly, frighteningly, to this hour. The Union stood—profoundly altered but fundamentally unchanged.

  George recognized but couldn’t fully understand the paradox. It was simply there, mighty, majestic, and mysterious, like the murdered President himself. It was there—Lincoln was there—and would be forever, George suspected.

  Closing his eyes, he rested a moment. Then he drew a circle of thought of much smaller diameter and meditated on the changes within that.

  Orry dead—and his widow making no secret that she was, at least in the strictest view of Southerners, a Negress. He had heard it first from his brother Billy, but Madeline had candidly discussed it before the Hazards left Mont Royal.

  And Charles. Everyone agreed Charles had been burned out by the war. Become a sullen, angry man. Brett, by contrast, was eagerly anticipating motherhood and, amazingly, often sounded more like Virgilia than a Southerner.

  Cooper occasionally displayed a new, almost reactionary streak, as if he had turned about and finally accepted the Southern inheritance his father had always wanted to bequeath to him, and he had scorned for such a long time. In Cooper’s case, anyway, George could identify the causes of the transformation. Cooper had lost his son, and he was growing older. Age brought a man more conservative thoughts and opinions. As George well knew.

  Billy’s views about blacks had changed, too, although his plan for his life was one of the few things that hadn’t. Saying good-bye to George in South Carolina—he had two more weeks of leave and planned to spend it working for and with the Mains—he had stated his intention to remain with the Army Engineers. Unless, of course, something impeded his advancement, in which case there was always that railroad construction he and George had discussed. Trains were the coming thing. People had a nickname to certify it. The iron horse.

  How intimately the process of change accelerated by the war had touched all of them, and the country. How deeply it had affected them and the country. No one was spared, neither those who accepted it nor those who denied it. Witness the pair on whom he had eavesdropped. The hardening of attitudes was in itself a change, in response to change.

  Why did so many deny the universal constancy of the process, he wondered. Through some quirk of temperament or upbringing, George had embraced it early, within the framework of the family business. He had been open to innovation and had fought Stanley, who was not. Gradually, his perceptions had widened until he saw the benefit—or at least the inevitability—of change outside the gates of Hazard’s as well.

  Why did people ignore the lessons of history and their own senses, deny a law of life immutable as the seasons, and erect twisted barriers against it in their minds? He didn’t know why, but they did. They wept for the goodness of half-imaginary yesterdays, yesterdays beyond altering, instead of anticipating and helping to shape the good of possible tomorrows. They found things to blame for the flow of events they wanted to stop and could not. They blamed God, their wives, government, books, fanciful combinations of unnamed men—sometimes even voices in their own heads. They lived tortured and unhappy lives, trying to dam Niagara with a teacup.

  But he doubted anyone could change people of that stamp. They were the curse and burden of a race laboring forward up a mountain in half-darkness. They were—it brought a weary smile—constant as the very change they hated.

  Which reminded him of a certain small but important change he wanted to make at Belvedere. Ever since finding the fragment of iron-rich meteorite in the hills above West Point, he had kept it on the library table as a symbol of the power and potency of the metal that had created the Hazard fortune. For many years he had been seduced by iron’s wide application in weaponry, and thus by its potential to change the fate of nations, the globe itself.

  But in Virginia, he had begun to think that a certain adjustment or balance was required. During the last four years, Americans had fallen on other Americans like ravening animals. The full impact of the blood-letting—the ultimate shock when all the casualties, tangible and otherwise, were at last enumerated—lay in the future. When the shock set in, it would not soon pass, he was convinced. So it was wise to prepare, identify a balancing force.

  When they reached Belvedere, he surprised Constance by what he did immediately after he spent a half hour hugging and talking with his son and daughter. He went out through the kitchen and up the hill, bringing back a green sprig of laurel, which he laid beside the piece of star-iron in the library.

  “I should like a fresh sprig to be kept there at all times,” he said. “Where all of us can see it.”

  That same night, on the 6:00 P.M. train bound for the transfer point at Baltimore, Brigadier Duncan and Charles sat opposite each other in a first-class car. Charles hardly looked as though he belonged there, smoking cigars and wearing that disreputable rag robe. Duncan insisted they take time on the trip west to obtain a decent suit until he was issued a new uniform.

  Several times since Charles’s return from the cemetery, Duncan had tried to draw him out on the subject of his vigil, particularly the thoughts and emotions that had led to his decision. But it was impossible for Charles to describe or even be open about the various alternatives that had flowed through his mind during that long night of rain, uncertainty, guilt, despair.

  There was the possibility of sailing for Egypt to serve in the khedive’s army, as he had heard in a Washington barroom that some Confederate officers were doing. There was the possibility of taking to the hills to continue guerrilla action against the Yankees. There was going home and wasting away in drink and idleness.

  There was suicide.

  There was also the West, where Duncan was bound. He had always loved the West, and Duncan reiterated the need for cavalrymen out there. Charles was trained for nothing else.

  But all of that was peripheral to the central issue he confronted during the vigil: Gus’s death and his son’s life. They were not separate but one, inextricably interlocked.

  It was Gus who had shown him the way. At the grave he had remembered their best times together. Remembered her strength, her will. No miraculous transformation had occurred while the rain fell on him in Georgetown and washed against his own flooding tears. He had never hurt so badly as he did then and now, and he knew the uncertainty and pain would persist for a long time. But he had learned, keeping vigil with the guilt and grief un-dammed at last, one truth above all: he still loved Augusta Barclay beyond life itself. So he must love the boy. He must live for the boy as well as for her, because they were one.

  Seeing Charles’s somber expression as he stared out the window into the sunlit meadows of evening, Duncan frowned. He was not yet comfortable in the Confederate officer’s presence and wondered if he ever would be. Further, he wondered if Charles understood the ramifications of his decision. While the train was passing through one of the many small hamlets dotting the right of way in Maryland—Charles saw two demolished houses and a shell-blasted barn—Duncan cleared his throat.

  “You kno
w, my boy, this duty you plan to take on—serving in the regular army again—it won’t be easy for a man of your background.”

  That drew blood. Charles chewed hard on his unlit cigar stub.

  “I went through the Academy the same way you did, General. I’m a professional. I changed uniforms once. I can change a second time. It’s all one country again, isn’t it?”

  “That’s true. Still, not everyone will treat you as we both would wish. I’m only trying to warn you against the inevitable. Discourtesies. Insults—”

  In a hard voice, Charles said, “I’ll handle it.” A flash of sunlight between low hills illuminated his ravaged face, unsmiling.

  Duncan looked up, gratefully. “Ah—here’s Maureen—”

  The wet nurse appeared in the aisle, gently cradling the baby she had brought from her seat in second class. “He’s awake, General. I thought perhaps you might like—” She stopped, plainly uncertain about which man to address.

  “Give him to me.” Then, catching himself, Charles said in a gentler way, “Thank you, Maureen.”

  With extreme care, he took the bundled shape into his arms, while Duncan leaned across to raise the corner of blanket with which Maureen had covered the infant’s face while carrying him between cars. Duncan beamed, the picture of the proud great-uncle.

  The pink-faced child regarded his father with wide eyes. Awed and fearful of somehow damaging him, Charles tried a tentative smile. The younger Charles grimaced and bawled. “Rock him, for God’s sake,” Duncan said.

  That worked. Charles had never rocked a child, but he quickly caught on. The train passed through fields where a farmer walked behind his mule and plow in the dying daylight, turning new earth.

  “Frankly, my boy,” Duncan said, “although I’m extremely pleased the three of us are here together and headed where we are, I continue to admit to some astonishment. I felt that if you took your son, you would undoubtedly want to return to South Carolina and raise him as a Southerner.”

  The father stared at the older man. “Charles is an American. That’s how I’ll raise him.”

  Duncan harrumphed to signify acceptance, if not understanding. “He has a middle name, by the way.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “It slipped my mind. This has hardly been an ordinary day. His full name is Charles Augustus. My niece chose it just before—”

  He pressed a closed hand to his lips. Remembering was hard for him, too, Charles realized.

  “Before her confinement. She said she had always loved the nickname Gus.”

  Feeling tears, Charles blinked several times. He gazed down at his son, whose face had mysteriously reddened, and taken on a puzzling appearance of strain. Duncan peeked at the infant. “Oh, I think we shall need the assistance of Maureen. Excuse me while I fetch her.”

  He stepped into the aisle. With great care, Charles touched his son’s chin. The baby reached out and grasped his index finger. He drew it into his mouth and gnawed vigorously.

  Duncan had already lectured Charles about the need for cleanliness. So far today, he had scrubbed his hands three times—something of a record in his adult life. He wiggled his finger. Charles Augustus gurgled. Charles smiled. With all of his attention on his son, he didn’t see the rail fence that suddenly appeared beside the track or the feasting buzzards disturbed by the train and swirling upward, away from the rotting remains of a black horse.

  The war has left a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since… It does not seem to me as if I am living in the country in which I was born.

  GEORGE TICKNOR of Harvard, 1869

  AFTERWORD

  All changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.

  SO WROTE YEATS IN “EASTER 1916.” His nine words are the underpinning of this novel.

  Love and War was not written to demonstrate, again, that war is hell, though it is; or to show slavery, again, as our most heinous national crime, though arguably it is. Both ideas figure in the story, and not in a small way. But this is meant to be a tale about change as a universal force and constant, told in terms of a group of characters living through the greatest redefinition of America, in the shortest time, that we have ever experienced: the Civil War.

  In his book Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, Professor James McPherson of Princeton splendidly characterizes the war as “the central event in the American historical consciousness… [It] preserved this nation from destruction and determined, in large measure, what sort of nation it would be. The war settled two fundamental issues … whether [the United States] was to be a nation with a sovereign national government, or a dissoluble confederation of sovereign states; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men are created with an equal right to liberty, was to continue to exist as the largest slave-holding country in the world.”

  Beyond the essential element of a strong narrative, I felt the book needed three things if it were to do its job.

  First, it needed detail. And not the detail of the more familiar events, either. As the book developed from a first draft on my typewriter through the final draft on my IBM PC, a new mental signboard was hung where I couldn’t miss it. (The permanent signboard, very old now, reads: Storytelling first.) The new one said: Not Gettysburg again.

  The details I wanted were many from what I call the byways: the fascinating places novels about the Civil War seldom go. To the bottom of Charleston harbor, for instance, where the astonishing and astonishingly small, submersible Hunley forecast a dramatic change in naval warfare. Into the bureaucracy and the cavalry camps. To the work sites of an engineer battalion and a military railroad track crew. Inside Libby Prison, over to Liverpool, and back to the Ordnance Department in Washington, with its permanent parade of inventors, some sane, many mad. I even wanted to go onto a camp stage to show a bit of the Civil War equivalent of a USO show; the skit that Charles and Ab watch is authentic.

  Hoping that what interests me would interest readers, I chose a number of these lesser-known byways and began the search, which took a year. There is certainly no shortage of material. Quoting McPherson again, “Perhaps it is simply because the conflict was so astonishingly rich and varied that it is inexhaustible.” Historian Burke Davis observed that “more than 100,000 volumes of [Civil War literature] have failed to tell the tale to the satisfaction of … readers.” Or of writers, for that matter. I could see no way to include a relatively recent, fascinating finding that in England, in the desperate late hours of the Confederacy, operatives may have developed a primitive two-stage guided missile. The device was allegedly shipped to a site in Virginia, then tested and fired at Washington. The burning of records in Richmond consumed whatever report may have been made of the missile’s performance, and we have no evidence that it struck or even came close to its target or, indeed, any evidence that it existed at all. No room for that story. And many more.

  But I hope there are enough specifics, for only by means of them is it possible to take a stab at suggesting what it was like to serve in, and live through, the struggle.

  Librarian-scholar Richard H. Shryock aptly stated the case for detail fifty years ago: “Political and military traditions, plus the apparent necessity for abstraction, rob historical writings of that realism which alone can convey a sense of the suffering involved in a great war. An historian’s description of the battle of Gettysburg is likely to tell of what occurred to Lee’s right wing, or to Longstreet’s corps, but rarely of what happened to [the bodies of] plain John Jones and the thousands like him… The historians might, however, picture reality and convey a sense of the costs involved if, in describing campaigns, they gave less space to tactics in the field and more to … the camps and hospitals.”

  Amen. That is the reason Charles encounters the first land mines on the peninsula, and Cooper experiments with “torpedoes” (confusingly, that term at the time meant naval mines). That is one reason Cooper descends
in Hunley, whose full-size replica stands outside the entrance of the Museum of the City of Charleston today. That is why there is less here about generals than about soldiers of lower rank tending their horses, losing company elections, getting ill, feeling homesick, reading tracts and pornography, scrounging food, sewing clothes, scratching lice.

  One problem with some of the details of the war is their tendency to strain credulity because we gaze at them through a modern lens flawed by the circumstances and skepticism of our own time. Thus it may be hard to accept the virtual absence of presidential security even in the Executive Mansion, or the fact that Lincoln got his first solid news of the Fredericksburg defeat from an angry field correspondent frustrated by military censors, or that the unsteady General Burnside, in connection with the same engagement, consulted his personal chef for strategic advice. The reader must take particulars like these on faith; they are not invented, no matter how odd they may seem.

  Some of the details that are fictional have a sound and reasoned base in possibility. Powell’s scheme, for one—no more unlikely than the real plan to establish a “third nation” by joining the Upper South—the so-called border states—with the Middle West. This idea was afloat in Richmond during the winter of ’62-’63. A Pacific Confederacy, also mentioned in the novel, was widely rumored early in the war.

  The assassination plot against Davis is an invention, but it, too, seems logical in view of two givens. One, if Lincoln was constantly considered an assassin’s target, why not his Confederate counterpart? Especially since—two—Davis was just as passionately hated, most notably by some from his own cotton South. I sometimes wonder if the few present-day Southerners who ride around in pickups adorned with crass license plates declaring Hell no I ain’t fergittin’! have ever heard of Messrs. Brown and Vance—the war governors of Georgia and North Carolina respectively—surely two of the most venomous enemies a Chief Executive ever had. Furiously waving the banner of states’ rights, they damned and defied the central government, withheld men, uniforms, and shoes the army desperately needed, and generally did as much, or more, damage as many a Union field commander.