by John Jakes
During the night of the twenty-second, wagons arrived with the regular pontoon train and additional men—the Fiftieth New York Volunteer Engineers. He worked until dawn, frequently wading in chilly water, and at first light on the twenty-third was relieved to sleep a while. He covered himself with a blanket. The long separation from his wife produced night dreams and embarrassing evidence afterward.
After four hours, he woke and ate, feeling he could go on now. Some of the engineers formed a betting pool; each man drew a slip with a date on it. The date was understood to be that on which McClellan would be relieved. Choices were offered all the way through the end of December.
Billy heard no great condemnation of the commanding general, just acceptance of a fact. Little Mac had failed to pursue and destroy Lee’s army when he had the opportunity, and the Original Gorilla would not like that.
Two days later came news of what Lincoln had announced publicly on the twenty-fourth. Over the evening fires, men argued and, in the time-honored tradition of armies, garbled the details.
“He signed this paper freeing every goddamn coon in the goddamn country.”
“You’re wrong. It’s only them in the states still rebelling come the first of January. He didn’t touch Kentucky or places like that.”
“Well,” said one of the New York pick-and-shovel volunteers, “the thing is still an insult to white men. No one will back him up. Not in this army.”
Much agreement there.
Unsure of his own reaction, Billy went to Lije’s tent and poked his head in. His bearded friend was kneeling, hands clasped, head bowed. Billy withdrew, waited five minutes, coughed and scuffed his feet before entering again. He asked Lije what he thought of the proclamation.
“A month ago,” Lije said, “Mr. Lincoln was still meeting with some of our freed brethren, urging them to search out a place in Central America to colonize. So the conclusion cannot be escaped. He has promulgated a war measure, nothing more. And yet—and yet—”
Lije’s index finger ticktocked, as if admonishing caution from a pulpit. “I have read books about Washington and Jefferson and foul-mouthed Old Hickory which hint of powers in events—in the presidency itself—that sometimes transmute base metal to gold. It could be so here, with the deed and with the man.”
“He exempted any state that comes back in the Union by January.”
“None will. That is why it is a war measure.”
“Then what’s the worth of it, except to make the rebs mad and maybe start uprisings that won’t amount to much?”
“What is the worth? The worth is in the core of it. The core of it—however equivocated, however compromised—is right. It creates, at last, a moral spine for this war. Henceforward we fight for loosing the shackles on fellow human beings.”
“I think it’ll bring down a hell of a lot of trouble—inside the army and out.”
He hadn’t changed his mind at dusk when he went for a stroll along the Potomac. He wanted to shake off lingering revulsion for the sights of the campaign and confusion over this newest twist in the war’s course. He concentrated on thoughts of Brett.
A melancholy bugle call sounded beneath the bluffs—a new call, played for the first time down in Virginia in June or July. Who had composed it and where, he didn’t know. A last salute to a soldier.
Who was it for, who had died, he wondered. And what had died with the stroke of Lincoln’s pen? What had been born? All were questions appropriate to the gathering autumn darkness.
He stood motionless, listening to the river’s purl and the familiar camp noises and the fading of the final notes of “Taps.”
In Virginia, Charles showed Ab An Essay on Man. Touching the lead ball embedded in the center, then the book itself, Ab asked, “Who give you this?”
“Augusta Barclay.”
“Thought you told me you didn’t have a girl.”
“I have a friend who sent me a Christmas present.”
“Is that right?” Ab fingered the flattened bullet again. “You was saved by religion, Charlie. You didn’t get a Testament wound”—every month or so you heard of someone’s life being spared because a shot hit his pocket Scripture—“but it’s near as holy.”
Silence.
“You got a Pope wound. Says so right here.”
Charles didn’t smile, just shook his head. Ab looked embarrassed and unhappy. Charles replaced the book, pulled the drawstring, and hid the bag under his shirt.
Cooper took his wife out of the house to tell her.
It was the hour of soft gray, with stars sparkling and a bar of orange light narrowing over the Wirral. Autumn breezes swept Abercromby Square, sending the swans to their sleeping places under the willows around the pond. A few leaves, already crisped and reddened, spun around the black iron bases of the street lamps.
“They want us home again. The message arrived in today’s pouch from Richmond.”
Judith didn’t reply immediately. Hand in hand, husband and wife crossed the square to a bench where they liked to sit and discuss decisions or the events of the day. A part of Cooper never surrendered fatherhood; he had given Judah permission to run a while, on the condition he not stray too far. He repeatedly glanced toward the fence for a sign of the boy returning.
They reached the bench. The wind was sharp. The Mersey smelled of salt and some newly berthed spice ship. “That is a surprise,” Judith said at last. “Was a reason given?”
Across the way, an elderly manservant emerged from Prioleau’s house to trim the gas lamps flanking the front door. On the second floor, centered in a window lintel, a single star in bas-relief declared Prioleau’s loyalty.
“The war isn’t going well for the Yankees, but neither is it going well for our side. The toll in Maryland was dreadful.”
And lives were not the only loss. When reports of the battle reached Europe, the outcome was construed as a defeat for the Confederacy. Despite false cheer and pretense to the contrary, those in Bulloch’s section knew the silent truth of Sharpsburg. The South would never gain diplomatic recognition.
“I’m wanted in the Navy Department,” he told her. “Mallory needs help and evidently believes I’m the one to provide it. James has matters well in hand here, and I know he sent a favorable report on my work after we launched Alabama.”
Bulloch had officially commended Cooper’s clumsy but effective defensive action on the pier. Cooper had stayed aboard the ship until the middle of August, when she was joined in the remote Bay of Angra, on the island of Terceira in the Azores, by two other vessels. One was Agrippina, a bark that Bulloch had purchased; aboard were a hundred-pound Blakely rifle, an eight-inch smoothbore, six thirty-two pounders, ammunition, coal, and enough supplies for an extended cruise. Bahama brought twenty-five Confederate seamen and Captain Semmes. The new ship was armed, coaled, commissioned, and christened, and Cooper felt another unexpected thrill of pride when the small band blared “Dixie’s Land” in the hot tropical afternoon.
The secret mission completed, he returned to Liverpool by passenger steamer. Judith was grumpy the day he told her about his feelings during the ceremony. One of their rare quarrels developed. How could he feel pride in a cause he had once derided? Caustically, he replied that she would have to forgive his lack of perfection. The statements and counterstatements rapidly grew incoherent. It took them a day to patch things up.
Now she asked softly, “How do you feel about Secretary Mallory’s request?”
He pressed his shoulder to hers. The wind was cold; the stars shone; the orange horizon-glow was nearly gone. “I’ll miss this old town, but I’ve no choice. I must go.”
“How quickly?”
“As soon as I finish a couple of current projects. I would hazard that we’d be on our way by the end of the year.”
She lifted his arm and placed it around her shoulders for warmth and because she loved his touch. “I worry about a winter crossing.”
What worried him more was the last leg of the trip, th
e run from Hamilton or Nassau through the blockading squadron. But he refused to upset her by saying it aloud. Instead, he sought to reassure her with a squeeze, a press of his lips to her cold cheek, a murmur.
“As long as the four of us are together, we’ll be fine. Together we can withstand anything.”
She agreed, then pondered a moment. “I do wonder what your father would say if he saw you so devoted to the South.”
He hoped they wouldn’t argue again. He answered cautiously. “He’d say I wasn’t the son he raised. He’d say I’ve changed, but so have we all.”
“Only in some respects. I loathe slavery as much as I ever did.”
“You know I feel the same way. When we win our independence, it will wither and die naturally.”
“Independence? Cooper, the cause is lost.”
“Don’t say that.”
“But it is. You know it in your heart. You talked of resources in the North, and the lack of them in the South, long before this horrible war started. You did it the first day we met.”
“I know, but—I can’t admit defeat, Judith. If I do, why should we go home? Why should I take any risks at all? Yet I must take them—The South’s my native land. Yours, too.”
She shook her head. “I left it, Cooper. It’s mine because it’s yours, that’s all. The war is wrong, the cause too—Why should you or Bulloch or anyone keep fighting?”
The lamplight fell on her face, so beautiful to him, so beloved. For the first time, sitting there, he admitted her to the small inner chamber where he kept the truth she had already identified, the truth made manifest by the dispatches about Sharpsburg. “We must fight for the best conclusion we can get. A negotiated peace.”
“You think it’s worth going home to do that?”
He nodded.
“All right, my dearest. Kiss me, and we will.”
A gust set leaves chuckling around their legs as they embraced. They were still kissing when a constable coughed and walked by twirling his truncheon. They separated with muddled, chagrined looks. Since Judith wore gloves, the disapproving officer couldn’t see her rings. He probably thought she was misbehaving with a lover. It made her giggle as they hurried back across the square. Full dark had come. It would be good to be inside.
In the gaslit foyer, Cooper paled and pointed to a drop of blood on the tile floor. “Good God, look.”
Her eyes rounded. “Judah?”
Marie-Louise popped her blonde head out of the parlor. “He’s hurt, Mama.”
Cooper flew up the stairs, his belly tied up like a sailor’s knot, his head hammering, his palms damp. Had his son fallen into the hands of some thief or molester? The slightest threat to either of his children was like a barbed hook in his flesh. When they were ill, he stayed up with them all night, every night, until the danger passed. He ran toward the half-open door of the boy’s room. “Judah!”
He thrust the door open. Judah lay on the bed, clutching his middle. His jacket was ripped, his cheek bruised, his nose bloodied.
Cooper ran to the bed, sat, started to take his son in his arms but refrained. Judah was eleven and deemed such contact sissified. “Son—what happened?”
“I ran into some Toxteth dock boys. They wanted my money, and when I said I hadn’t any, they swarmed on me. I’m all right.” He made the subdued declaration with evident pride.
“You defended yourself—?”
“Best I could, Pa. There were five of them.”
Uncontrollably, he touched Judah’s brow, brushed some hair back, fighting his own trembling. Judith’s shadow fell over his sleeve. “He’s all right,” Cooper said as the fear began to run out of him like an ebbing tide.
59
IN THE OCCUPIED CITY of New Orleans, the weather was warm that morning. So was Colonel Elkanah Bent’s emotional temperature. It matched that of the local citizens with whom he shared the corner of Chartres and Canal streets, watching the tangible evidence of General Ben Butler’s radicalism.
The limpid air smelled as it always did, predominantly of coffee but laced with the Mississippi and the toilet water of gentlemen who had to be out because they were in commerce; gentlemen who had lived off cotton once and were perhaps doing so again, less covertly every day. Those of the better classes were still indoors. Perhaps they had received a hint of what they might see if they ventured out. Most on the corner had been caught there by chance, like Bent, though undoubtedly one or two watched by choice, to keep hatred stoked.
Fatter than ever and puffing a cigar, Bent was fully as angry as the civilians, though he dared not show it. The drums tapped, the fifes shrilled, and with limp colors preceding them, the First Louisiana Native Guards came parading up Canal.
Major General Butler had raised the regiment in late summer in the wake of other outrages, which included hanging Mumford, the man who dared to pull down an American flag from the mint building, and an order of May 15 stating that women who spoke or gestured to Union soldiers in an insulting manner would be arrested and treated as prostitutes.
Those were schoolboy pranks compared to this, Bent thought. He found the mere existence of the guards, officially mustered on September 27, both unbelievable and repulsive. He pitied the officers chosen to command this regiment of ex-cotton pickers and stevedores.
The town was abuzz with rumors generated by aspects of the Butler style. The Yankee general who pillaged private homes for salable silver pieces would be replaced because of such crimes against the civilian population. Lincoln would not allow the guards to serve in the federal army, wanting nothing to upset the delicate potentialities—the chance that a wayward sister might return—before the fateful proclamation deadline. Bent had heard those and many more.
The Negro regiment wasn’t a rumor; it was right in front of him—yellow faces, tan faces, sepia and blue-ebony faces. How they grinned and rolled their eyes as they pranced past their old oppressors, who were standing still as statues, paralyzed by disbelief and disdain.
The fifes struck up the “Battle Hymn” to heighten the insult. The black unit, one of the first in the army, tramped on toward the river. Bent flipped his cigar into the street. The sight was enough to turn a man into a Southerner—a breed he had always hated but now regarded with a deepening sympathy.
Bent’s hands began to itch as he thought of a glass of spirits. Too early. Much too early. But he couldn’t banish the desire, to which he gave in with increasing frequency these days. He had no friends among his fellow officers in the occupying army; few even spoke to him except in the line of duty. He cautioned himself not to give in to the temptation, knowing full well he would. Only a drink, or several, would relieve his misery.
Pittsburg Landing had sent his life spiraling downward. He had reached Butler’s headquarters in New Orleans after a difficult journey to the East Coast and a steamer voyage around the tip of Florida to the reopened port. After a two-minute meeting with the cockeyed little politician from Massachusetts, Bent found himself attached to the provost’s department. The duty was ideal, because it allowed him to give orders to civilians as well as soldiers.
Bent had been in New Orleans before. He enjoyed the city’s cultured atmosphere and the delights it offered to gentlemen with money. It was in the bordellos of the town that he had gained a certain limited passion for equality; he would pay a high price to fornicate with a nigger girl, especially a very young one. He had enjoyed that experience last night.
He peered down the street after the regiment—the Corps d’Afrique, the presumptuous darkies styled themselves. White officers had to be coaxed, bribed with brevets, or threatened with a general court before they would accept command of so much as one company of a new Negro regiment—of which there were several.
What a remarkable about-face General Butler had done in organizing them. Initially he had declared himself against the idea. In August he changed his mind, persuaded, it was said, by his wife, his friend Secretary Chase, and perhaps by belated realization that the appearance of
black regiments would make local whites apoplectic. At first Butler said he would recruit only the semitrained members of a black unit formed to defend the city before it fell. He reversed himself on that, too, and was soon signing up plantation runaways.
Bent started toward the old square, encountering unfriendly faces on the walks shaded by charming iron balconies. Ah, but the civilians did step aside for him. Indeed they did.
His thoughts drifted to the brothels again. There was one house he particularly wanted to visit at an opportune moment. He had chanced on the place before the war, on his way back from the hellish duty in Texas. In the madam’s quarters there hung many fine paintings, including a portrait of a woman connected with the Main family in some way he did not as yet understand. The connection itself was certain. In Texas, in Charles Main’s quarters, he had seen a photograph of a woman with virtually identical features.
What stimulated Bent’s imagination were facts conveyed to him by the owner of the bordello, Madame Conti. The painting depicted a quadroon who had once worked in the establishment. In other words, a nigger whore.
That painting was one of the few positive aspects of Bent’s current exile. He believed it to be a weapon he could use eventually against the Mains. He never forgot or abandoned his desire to harm members of that family; only set it aside periodically because events forced him. He knew the bordello was still operating under Madame Conti’s management. He assumed the painting was still there.
By the time he reached Bienville, he knew he must have a drink soon. Just then he noticed a well-dressed white woman alighting from a barouche beyond the intersection of narrow streets. She dismissed the driver and, like Bent, walked in the direction of the cathedral. Two black soldiers were coming the other way, laughing and jostling each other. Yellow stripes on light blue breeches showed they belonged to the cavalry Ben Butler had raised.
The woman stopped. So did the soldiers, blocking the walk. Bent saw the woman’s hat bob as she said something. The soldiers replied with laughter. Bent drew his dress saber and lumbered across Bienville.