by John Jakes
George let the canvas fall and managed to suppress vomit as it reached his throat. What he had seen conjured strange specters. Not merely fire. Death. Suffering. Loss. And, in overpowering summation, war.
Shuddering, he walked back to the chief, feeling deep, unexpected things stirring within him.
“Can I be of help, Tom?”
“Mighty good of you to offer, sir, but it’s too late to do anything except wet down them places next door.” A fireman ran up to say Fenton had died. George shivered again; why did he still hear screaming? He shook his head. The chief went on. “It was too late when we got here.” George nodded sadly and walked back to his horse.
What happened to George as he left the scene, mounting and letting the horse walk, was the result of tragedy encountered, of horror witnessed. The numbed state in which he’d lately been drifting vanished.
He had known there was—would be for many weeks, possibly months—a civil war. But knowing was not the same as understanding. He had known and not understood, and that was true even though he’d fought in Mexico. But the Mexican campaign was a long time in the past. As he rode slowly back up the hillside with wind-driven ash blowing overhead, he at last came to grips with reality. The nation was at war. His younger brother, Billy, an officer in the Corps of Engineers, was at war. His dearest friend in all the world, West Point classmate, comrade in Mexico, sometime financial partner, was at war. He didn’t remember the writer, but he remembered the passage: No man is an island—
He cast his thoughts back over the past two weeks, attempting to discover in the national mood an explanation of his own. To many, perhaps most, citizens in the North, the final relieving of three decades of tension by the bombardment of Fort Sumter on the twelfth of this month of April, 1861, had been a welcome, if not a joyous, event. George’s principal reaction had been sadness; the guns said that men of good will had failed to solve a grievous human problem conceived the first day white traders sold black men and women on the coast of the American wilderness.
Sadness because the problem had been so long deemed insoluble—and, toward the last, not even capable of examination, so thick were the barbicans of rhetoric surrounding the opposing camps. For others, the forever self-occupied and self-serving, the issues were not threatening, or even serious, merely nuisances to be stepped around—treated as invisible, as one would treat beggars sleeping in some gutter.
But in the years in which the war cauldron came to the boil, America had not consisted of two classes only—the fanatical and the indifferent. There were men and women of decent intention. George thought of himself as one of them. Might they have kicked the cauldron over and soaked the coals and called a council of the reasonable? Or were the divisions so deep, so pervasive, that the hotheads on both sides would never have permitted that? Whatever the answer, the men of good will had not prevailed, had let the rest take charge, and the cloven nation was at war.
Sadness. Orry Main had shared it when he visited Lehigh Station. Just two weeks ago, it was. His courageous journey from South Carolina to Pennsylvania was laced with menace, and the visit itself had become a night of desperate danger when George’s sister, Virgilia—extreme abolitionist, obsessive hater of all persons and things Southern—had betrayed Orry’s presence to a mob that George held off at gunpoint until he could get his dear and honorable friend out of town.
After that had come—what? Not lassitude, not quite. He had coped with daily problems: contract proposals; uneasiness about Fenton’s plight at home; a hundred things, small and large, with one excepted. Until tonight, he had somehow walled out understanding of the meaning of the war. The fire and the knife had destroyed that wall and retaught a basic lesson. The hell with fools who blithely predicted “only” a ninety-day conflict. You needed nothing but brief moments for death and ruin.
His head pounded. His stomach felt vile. Beyond the leveled wall he saw the threat from which he’d been trying to hide these past two weeks. It was a threat to the lives of those for whom he cared most in the world, a threat to the slowly forged bond between his family and that of the Mains of South Carolina. He’d been hiding from the truth about those lives, that bond. The fire had shown him they were perilously fragile. Fragile as Fenton, and the other two, and the house that had held them with all their passions, imperfections, dreams. Of them, that house, those emotions, nothing remained but that which followed George on the wind, spotting his collar, flicking his ear—ashes; blowing, blowing all around him.
Riding up the Pennsylvania hillside after midnight on the first of May, he could turn his back on the glow of a small, soon-to-be-forgotten domestic tragedy—a cliché in its commonness; so goddamn horrifying and heartbreaking in its specifics. He could turn his back but not his mind. His inward vision swept beyond the past two weeks to embrace two decades.
The Hazards, ironmasters of Pennsylvania, and the Mains, rice planters of South Carolina, had formed their first ties when a son from each house met by chance on a New York City pier on a summer afternoon in 1842. George Hazard and Orry Main became acquaintances on a northbound Hudson River boat that day. As soon as they left the boat, they became new cadets at West Point.
There they survived much together, much that strengthened their natural affinity for one another. There was the skull work—easy for George, who had no great desire for a military career; hard for Orry, who wanted nothing else. They managed to endure the hazing of a deceitful, some said lunatic, upperclassman named Elkanah Bent, even conspired to get him dismissed after a series of particularly heinous acts on his part. But influence in Washington had returned Bent to the Military Academy, and he had graduated promising George and Orry a long memory and full accounting for their sins against him.
The Mains and Hazards got to know one another, as Northern and Southern families often did in those years while the long fuse of sectionalism burned down to the powder of secession. There had been visits exchanged, alliances formed—hatreds, too. Even George and Orry had seriously quarreled. George was visiting at the Main plantation, Mont Royal, when a slave ran away, was caught, then cruelly punished on orders from Orry’s father. The argument of the two young men afterward was the closest they ever came to seeing their friendship destroyed by the divisiveness dripping into the country’s bloodstream like a slow poison.
The Mexican War, which found the two friends serving as lieutenants in the same infantry regiment, finally separated them in unexpected ways. An encounter with Captain “Butcher” Bent sent George and Orry into action on the Churubusco Road, where a shell fragment destroyed Orry’s left arm and his dreams of a career. Not long after, news of the death of the senior Hazard called George home, because his mother, with sound instincts, could not trust George’s older brother, Stanley, to be a wise steward of the immense family business. Soon after taking charge of Hazard’s, George wrested control of the ironworks from his ambitious, irresponsible brother.
Amputation of Orry’s left arm put him in a brooding, reclusive mood for a time. But as he trained himself to run the plantation and perform two-handed tasks with one, his outlook revived and the friendship with George renewed itself. Orry stood up as best man when George married Constance Flynn, the Roman Catholic girl he’d met in Texas while en route to Mexico. Then George’s younger brother, Billy, decided he wanted to attend the Academy, while Orry, desperately seeking some way to save his orphaned young cousin Charles from a wastrel’s life, persuaded him to seek an Academy appointment. The friendship of Charles Main and Billy Hazard, already acquainted, soon replicated that of the two old grads.
In the last decade of peace, many Northerners and Southerners, despite ever fiercer rhetoric, ever sharper threats from political leaders and public figures on both sides, remained personal friends. It was so with these two families. Mains came North, Hazards traveled South—though not without difficulties in each case.
George’s sister, Virgilia, who had carried her passionate abolitionism across an invisible line into extremism,
had nearly undone the friendship. During a Hazard family visit to the Main plantation, she’d met a slave belonging to the man who later married Orry’s sister, Ashton. Virgilia encouraged the slave to run away. When he did, he succeeded.
Ashton Main, beautiful and unprincipled, had fancied Billy for a while, but he soon saw the fine and genuine qualities of Ashton’s younger sister, Brett. As headstrong and crazed as Virgilia in some ways, the rejected Ashton had waited for her moment of vengeance; she conspired to have Billy murdered in a trumped-up duel not two hours after he married Brett at Mont Royal. Cousin Charles had dealt with that plot in his direct cavalry officer’s way—rather violent, it was—and Orry banished Ashton and her fire-eater husband, James Huntoon, from Main land forever.
Virgilia’s black lover, the slave whose escape she’d assisted, had been slain with others of John Brown’s murderous gang at Harpers Ferry. Virgilia, at the scene and panic-stricken, had fled back home and was thus at Belvedere the night Orry made his perilous visit. It was this visit and the circumstances leading to it that a grieved and thoughtful George pondered as he rode up the last bit of steep road to Belvedere.
Orry’s iconoclastic older brother, Cooper, had usually disagreed with most Southerners regarding their peculiar institution. In contrast to an economy based on the land, and the working of it by human property, he pointed to the example of the North—not perfect by any means, but in step with the new world-wide age of industrialism. In the North, free workers were speeding into a prosperous future to the hum of machines, not dragging a load of rusty methods and ideologies as heavy as wrist cuffs and leg manacles, and fully as hampering. As for the traditional apology of Cooper’s state and region—that slaves were more secure, therefore happier, than Northern factory workers fastened by invisible chains to huge, hammering machines—he laughed that off. A factory worker might indeed starve to death on what the owners paid him. But he could not be bought or sold like mere chattel. He could always walk away, and no posse would ride in pursuit; no laborer would be recaptured, flogged, and hung from the flywheel of his great engine.
Cooper sought to establish a shipbuilding industry in Charleston and had envisioned, even started to construct, a huge iron vessel patterned after one designed by the British engineering genius Brunel. George had put capital into the venture, as much for the sake of friendship and belief in Cooper’s principles as for the possibility of quick profit, which was slim.
In the final days of Sumter’s survival as a Union bastion, with war no longer a doubtful question, Orry had gathered up as much cash as he could by mortgaging family property. It amounted to six hundred fifty thousand dollars of the original one million nine hundred thousand George had invested. Despite Orry’s pronounced Southern accent, he had undertaken to carry the money to Lehigh Station in a small, plain satchel, by train. The risk was enormous, yet he came. Because of his friendship and because of a debt of honor.
The night the two friends met, Virgilia furtively summoned the mob—most certainly to lynch the visitor. But the attempt failed, and Orry had gotten safely on a late train and now was—where? South Carolina? If he had reached home safely, he had at least one chance for happiness. Madeline LaMotte, the woman whom Orry had loved, as she had loved him despite her imprisonment in a disastrous marriage, had rushed to Mont Royal to warn of the conspiracy against Billy’s life. Once there, in defiance of the husband who had deliberately and systematically mistreated her for years, she stayed.
The aftermath of Sumter forced other decisions, however uncertain or emotional. Charles had enlisted in a South Carolina legion of cavalry after resigning from the United States Army. His best friend, Billy, remained with the Union engineers. And Billy’s Southern-born wife, Brett, was living in Lehigh Station. The personal world of the Mains and the Hazards hung in a precarious balance as massive, threatening, unpredictable forces gathered.
It was that fact which George had been shunning these past fourteen days. Life was fragile. Friendship the same. Before parting, he and Orry had pledged that the war would never sunder the bonds between them. In this night’s remembered ugliness, shrieks of pain, geysers of fire, George wondered whether they were naïve. He felt, almost wildly, that he must do something to reaffirm his dedication to defending the ties.
He stabled his horse and went directly to Belvedere’s library, a vast room with smells of leather and fine book papers. It was as silent as the night house.
When he crossed toward his desk, he spied a memento always kept on an otherwise bare refectory table. It was a conical object, rough-textured, measuring six inches from apex to base. The dark brown color indicated heavy iron content.
He realized why it had attracted his eye. Someone—a maid, probably—had moved the object from its customary position. He picked up the meteorite and continued to hold it while he envisioned the place in the past where he’d found it—the hills around West Point during his cadet days.
What lay in his hand was a piece of a much larger meteorite that had traveled through starry dark, and distances beyond his power to comprehend. Star-iron, the old men of the trade—his ancestors—called it. Known since the pharaohs ruled the Nile kingdoms.
Iron. The most potent stuff in the universe. The raw material for building civilization, or leveling it. From iron came the immense death weapons George planned to cast for a whole battery of reasons: patriotism, hatred of slavery, profit, a paternal responsibility for those who worked for him.
What lay in his hand was, in its way, war. He replaced it on the table precisely where it belonged, but he did so quickly.
He lit the gas mantle above the desk. Opened the lower drawer in which he had put the small, plain satchel—for remembrance. He looked at the satchel a while. Then, out of profound emotion, he inked a pen and wrote with great speed.
My dear Orry,
When you returned this valise, you performed an act of supreme decency and courage. It is one I shall hope to repay in kind someday. But in case I do not—cannot—I place these words herein so you will know my intentions. Know most of all that I want to preserve the bonds of affection between us and our families which have grown and strengthened for so many years—want to, and have striven to, despite Virgilia, despite Ashton—despite the lessons about war’s nature which I learned in Mexico but forgot until tonight. I know you believe in the worth of this bond as much as I do. But it is fragile as a stalk of wheat before the iron scythe. If we fail to preserve what so richly merits preservation—or if some Hazard or Main falls, as, God pity us, some surely may if this conflict is anything other than brief—you will know I prized friendship to the last. Prized and never abandoned it. As I know you have not. I pray we meet when it ends, but if we do not, I bid you—from my deepest heart—an affectionate good-bye.
Your friend—
He started to inscribe the initial letter of his first name but then, with a swift, sad smile, wrote instead his West Point nickname. Stump.
He slowly folded the sheets; slowly placed them in the satchel and latched it; slowly closed the drawer and arose to the accompaniment of several irritating noises from his joints. Windows were open throughout Belvedere because of the warm night. He smelled the diminishing fetor of burning carried by the high wind. He felt cold and old as he put out the gas and wearily climbed the stairs.
Book One
A Vision From Scott
The flag which now flaunts the breeze here will float over the dome of the old Capitol at Washington before the first of May.
CONFEDERATE SECRETARY OF WAR
LEROY P. WALKER, speaking in Montgomery, Alabama, APRIL 1861
1
MORNING SUNSHINE DRENCHED THE pasture. Suddenly, at the far side, three black horses burst into sight at the summit of a low hill. Two more followed them over and down into the windblown grass, splendid coats shining, manes and tails streaming. Close behind the five appeared two mounted sergeants in hussar jackets heavy with braid. Riding at the gallop, great grins on their faces
, the sergeants hallooed and waved their kepis at the black horses.
The sight immediately distracted Captain Charles Main’s troop of young South Carolina volunteers walking their matched bays in file along a road that meandered through the woods and farmlands of Prince William County. The three-day field exercise had taken them well north of their camp between Richmond and Ashland, but Charles felt a long ride was needed to sharpen the men. They were born riders and hunters; Colonel Hampton wanted no other kind in the cavalry units of the legion he’d raised in Columbia. But their reaction to the Poinsett Tactics, the unofficial name for the manual that had been the cavalryman’s textbook ever since ’41, ranged from restrained indifference to loud contempt.
“Deliver me from gentlemen soldiers,” Charles muttered as several of his men turned their mounts toward the rail fence separating road and pasture. The black horses veered, galloping beside the fence. The sweating sergeants chased them hard, speeding past the long line of troopers in trim gray jackets decorated with bright gilt buttons.
“Who are you, boys?” shouted Charles’s senior lieutenant, a stocky, cheery young man with red curls.
On the June breeze, blurred by hoofbeats, the answer came back: “Black Horse. Fauquier County.”
“Let’s give ’em a run, Charlie,” First Lieutenant Ambrose Pell yelled to his superior.
To stave off chaos, Charles reacted with a bellowed order. “Form twos—trot—march!”
The execution of the maneuver was so sloppy as to defy belief. The troop managed to straggle into a double file at the proper gait, then responded with whoops and much kepi-flourishing when Charles gave the order to gallop. But they were too late to catch the sergeants, who drove the five black horses away to the left, crossing the pasture and vanishing in a grove.
Envy stung Charles. If the noncoms indeed came from the Black Horse Cavalry he’d heard so much about, they had found some fine animals. He was dissatisfied with his own mount, Dasher, bought in Columbia. She came of good Carolina saddle-horse stock, but she was frequently balky. So far she didn’t live up to her name.