House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  While they were talking, Trav remembered what Mrs. Blandy had told him, and he asked: “By the way, General, is the Eleventh North Carolina in your command?”

  “Yes, of course. There’s not a better regiment in the army. Colonel Leventhorpe served in the British army, and he had time to give his men some real work on the parade ground before they ever heard an enemy musket. It’s a pleasure to watch them. Why?”

  “Two Martinston men are in that regiment. You remember Ed Blandy. He and Tom Shadd. I’d like to see them.”

  “Blandy? God bless me, I didn’t know that. But they’re not here today. Off toward Kinston keeping an eye on the Yankees. Can you ride out to see your friends?” Trav felt he should take the first train back to Petersburg, but he wrote Ed a note which General Hill promised to forward.

  Back in Petersburg, Trav found General Longstreet recovered and himself again.

  “I think I’ll go see General Hill myself,” the General decided, when he heard Trav’s report; and he said with a lively satisfaction: “But Currain, I’ve found a place for Louisa to live. To satisfy Louisa I had Doctor Jimmie Dunn come in and physic this damned cold of mine, and he says Mrs. Dunn will be glad to have another lady in the house. They live on Sycamore near Wythe; and they have plenty of room for refugees like us.” He was in a high good humor at the solving of this problem. “I’ll take the morning train for Goldsboro and see Harvey Hill, and you go fetch Louisa and Garland down from Richmond, see her established here. I’ll be gone four or five days, long enough for her to get settled and to get over blaming me for not finding a house for her.”

  So Trav had another night at home. He found Lucy and Garland the best of friends; but Mrs. Longstreet seemed glad of the prospective move to Petersburg, and Enid gave him no peace. She was disappointed with some of the furnishings of the Clay Street house. “Everything’s dark and dull,” she said. “I want to do over the drawing room, make it all bright and cheerful like Cinda’s.”

  “You can’t buy anything in the Richmond stores.”

  “Captain Pew says he can get me just anything I want in Nassau.”

  Trav was weary of the virtues of Captain Pew. “He’d better use his cargo space to bring back some of the things the army needs!”

  “Oh you! All you think about is your old army! Can’t you think about us once in a while?” She added: “Besides, I’ve already told him what I want, and he’s already gone to Wilmington. He didn’t know for sure what he’d have to pay, but I said you’d pay him when he got back.”

  Trav looked at her with bleak eyes. “You should have consulted me.”

  “I never know when you’ll be home.” She was watching him expectantly; but of course he must accept this obligation she had thrust upon him. Yet probably these purchases of hers would amount to a staggering sum. Nevertheless he must meet Captain Pew’s account when it should be presented. He nodded absently.

  “But don’t spend any more unnecessary money without my permission,” he warned her; and she said he was ever so good to her and came to kiss him gratefully.

  Before he left for Petersburg, she said he ought to do something about Peter. “He’s simply beyond me, Trav; just doesn’t pay the slightest attention to anything I say. I wish you’d talk to him.”

  Trav did talk to Peter, groping awkwardly. “I count on you, you know, son, to take care of Mama when I’m away.”

  “Oh Papa,” the youngster protested. “She doesn’t want me around! She just sends me to bed or something!”

  “If you tried very hard to be nice to her——”

  “That wouldn’t do any good! You’re always nice to her, Papa; but she’s awful mean to you!”

  Trav almost nodded, but a sense of danger touched him and he checked himself. “Oh no, son! You don’t understand us, that’s all. Grown people say things jokingly that aren’t meant the way they sound to you. No, Peter, Mama’s as nice to me as she can be. You try being nice to her and see what happens.” For Peter or Lucy to side with him against Enid would be a tragedy.

  When Trav escorted Mrs. Longstreet to Petersburg, concern over Enid’s extravagance went with him; and a few days later a chance remark from Captain Blackford, the Judge Advocate attached to Longstreet’s staff, caught his attention. Captain Blackford was a Lynchburg man; and, reading a letter from home, he exclaimed: “Hullo! Here’s a windfall! I bought some tobacco early in February and my father’s just sold it at fourteen thousand dollars profit.”

  Those who heard him spoke in cheerful envy, and Trav later made an opportunity to refer to the subject again. “I used to send my bright tobacco from Chimneys to the Lynchburg market; but a year’s crop wouldn’t bring half that.”

  “Oh, this is just speculation,” Blackford explained. “With prices rising every day it’s like finding money.”

  “I can raise tobacco, but I don’t know anything about trading in it.”

  “Let my father make some money for you,” the Captain proposed; and Trav, with an exciting sense of his own temerity, gave Blackford fifteen hundred dollars, enough to margin a purchase of four thousand pounds at a dollar and ten cents a pound. When his purchases presently sold at a dollar and sixty-five cents, the twenty-two-hundred-dollar profit gave him an intoxicating satisfaction; and at Captain Blackford’s advice he reinvested his original capital and a thousand dollars of his gains.

  “Father made over ten thousand dollars in one week for John Minor and Staige Davis,” the Captain told him. “And of course, the more you invest the more you make.”

  This first success, and the prospect of further gains, gave Trav as far as money was concerned an easier mind.

  Trav had little comfort from his trips to Richmond, nor were these weeks a time of content in Petersburg. Mrs. Longstreet was by no means well, so the General was distracted; and except when military business demanded his attention he stayed much with her. Sometimes he seemed half-drugged with weariness, and his temper was sluggish; yet he could rouse to hard anger too. The strain of administering an independent command, where the inadequacy of their means was a continual problem, one day woke him to an almost pettish outburst.

  “Damn it, we’re in a hopeless struggle, Currain!” he cried. “Everybody is forever wanting more, more of this and more of that! Whiting wants another brigade at Wilmington, Hill wants more men and more guns.” He grunted. “He burst his guns by putting too much powder in them, and then asks for more powder with which to burst more guns. Ransom, Elzey, they all wanted more! French—” He thrust irritably at a letter on his desk, quoted in a piping voice: “ ‘I am having chills or I would come and see you.’ French is always having chills! But even he wants more!

  “Why, God damn it to a blistering Hell, I’m as bad as any of them! I want more men, if I’m to do anything. Hood and Pickett are here for defense only; I can’t move them away from the railroad for fear General Lee will want them. He’s another who is condemned always to want more, more men! If he does, he’ll want them in a hurry. Each of us wants more! And there’s not enough of anything, not enough men, not enough horses, not enough food, not enough guns, not enough powder and ball and shell. The Confederacy will die of ‘not enough’, Currain, with all of us forever whining for more!”

  “We’re getting more food, at least, General.”

  Longstreet grudgingly assented. “Yes. Yes. And that’s what we’re here for.”

  “No move against Suffolk?”

  “Not seriously, no. General Lee says he doesn’t see how we can accomplish anything there, and neither do I.” Trav was surprised, since the preparations for an advance went on day by day; but as though reading his thoughts Longstreet explained: “No, whatever we pretend to do in that direction is just pretense. Perhaps we can fool the Yankees into expecting us to attack them, so they’ll stay in their lines and let our wagons range as they choose. The Yankees like to play tricks, and tricksters are always easily tricked. No, I won’t lose a man or fire a gun unless we must.” He scowled at Trav. “I know
you’ve a still tongue, Currain. Keep it so. If even our own men expect some great stroke by us, the Yankees will expect it too.”

  Trav nodded, half understanding. He heard complaints enough against this long inaction; but if others were discontented he found comfort in the steady collection of supplies from all the territory where their wagons were free to go. He and Major Walton worked with Major Moses at that task, while General Longstreet made a great show of military activity. He sent General Hill to threaten New Berne and to make gestures toward the North Carolina town of Washington; he moved the forces here in hand toward Suffolk and established his lines along the Nansemond. But while the enemy lay behind his fortification waiting for the assaults that never came, the wagon trains were busy, foraging undisturbed through the coastal counties.

  Yet Trav, despite what he knew of the other’s mind, was distressed by General Longstreet’s inertia. He sometimes thought that if Mrs. Longstreet had not been so near, the big man’s energies would have been more actively directed against the enemy. Yet this may not have been the only reason. The cold the General had taken in Richmond had not completely left him; he coughed a great deal, in a hacking, weary way. Certainly either ill health or worry over Mrs. Longstreet weakened him. Something of his firm command of men was lost. Major Sorrel showed Trav one day a letter from General French.

  “Just see this, Currain,” he said. “I wrote General French some instructions, in General Longstreet’s name. Here’s his reply. Listen.” And he read: “ ‘In answer to the general’s kind inquiry if it will be agreeable to me to resume the responsibilities of the river batteries and their protection, I reply it will not be.’ ” Sorrel crumpled the letter angrily. “Sarcastic insolence! I thought the General would order him under arrest; but when he read it he just grunted, made no comment at all. What’s wrong with him?” He added, almost apologetically: “Yet I suppose he’s accomplishing the important thing, collecting enough supplies to feed the army for a while.” He laughed in hot scorn. “Though Colonel Northrop’s men from Richmond make it as hard for us as possible. Major Moses says he could buy bacon for twelve and a half cents when he began; but now commissary agents from Richmond are paying a dollar, and we have to meet their price. And most of what they buy they’ll charge to the Government at twice that, and pocket the difference.” He shook his head. “I don’t suppose we could take Suffolk anyway, without some protection from the Navy on our river flank. And we couldn’t spare men to leave a garrison there if we took it. But I can’t understand the General’s inaction.”

  “Like Jackson last June,” Trav reminded him. “For a few days after he came from the Valley he didn’t have any driving energy. If he’d come up in time, that day at Frayser’s Farm, we’d have cut McClellan in two.”

  Sorrel nodded. “I know. Every man is better on some days than on others. But I never expected to see General Longstreet take this insolence from French—or let George Pickett ride off to Chuckatuck every night to shake his perfumed locks at his lady there—or let that burlesque duel between Major Belo and Captain Cussons go as far as it did. Has he said anything to you?”

  Trav evaded a direct reply. “After all,” he reminded the other, “anything he did here would cost men and ammunition; and we’ve neither men nor ammunition to spare. And of course, he’s always been against attacking except defensively. You know how often he says that we don’t have to beat the North, that we just have to keep them from beating us.”

  “I know,” Sorrel agreed. “And at least he’s kept us busy enough so that the men are keen and in good spirits, and we’ve collected God knows how much pork and corn.” He spoke more cheerfully. “Maybe this loafing has been good for us. Spring’s here. We’ll have fighting enough now before long.”

  He was right. On the twenty-ninth of April a message came from General Lee. The enemy had crossed the Rappahannock. It was time for the army to unite again, to rise and once more hurl the Yankees back.

  23

  February-May, 1863

  JULIAN would be eighteen in September, and Anne Tudor was a few months younger; so as such things go in normal times, Julian was a boy, Anne a young woman. But boys in battle and in the hurting aftermath of battle become men more quickly. Through weeks of desperate sickness Julian came back to life again, and he thought his youth as irrevocably gone as that leg the surgeons had removed. The fact that his hearing was at first impaired added to this feeling; there was a hush all around him, as though people walked on careful tiptoe, and talked in whispers. Anne’s was the only voice which he heard clearly and without any effort. One day while they were still in Washington he asked her: “Anne, do you talk louder when you’re talking to me?”

  “No, Julian. Why?”

  “Well, I hear you all right; but I can hardly hear the others at all, not even Mama.”

  For this and for other reasons he was happiest with Anne. With her he could jest at his own hurt and feel no pain in her nor in himself. When he was with his mother or his father or with any other of those by whom he was beloved, he was always conscious of the anguished sorrow in their hearts. No matter how bravely they hid it, he knew it was there. They treated him like a cripple, forever offering him a helping hand, steadying him on his crutches; and even their unspoken solicitude brought him so near tears of self pity that he hated it. But Anne never offered to help him; if he fell, she laughed at his awkwardness and let him get up again. She did not seem to be sorry for him at all, and that was wonderful. Julian did not want to go through life nagged by perpetual sympathy.

  Next to Anne, his father and Burr came nearest to understanding this; but even with them, to treat him as casually as he desired was an obvious effort. Anne made no effort. She was—without trying—just what he wished her most to be.

  He was much with her, turning to her at every opportunity. They talked together hour on hour. That was a long and cold and snowy winter in Richmond, so fine days were rare, but if the day were fair she was likely to suggest that they take a walk. At first these were not long excursions; perhaps no more than around the block. Later they began to go the few blocks to Capitol Square, where on good days there might be many gentlemen gathered in groups discussing the latest news from General Lee, or the scandalously high prices, or the chance for a profit in blockading, or how much So-and-so won at Monteiro’s last night, or whether the expedition against Charleston which the Yankees were preparing would succeed, or whether President Davis would ever be able to persuade the courts to accept the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Capitol Square was always a popular gathering place for gentlemen, or for ladies with wide skirts swaying to their leisurely promenade, or for nurses with their charges; and sometimes the Battalion Band played lively airs, and on sunny days the scene was almost gay.

  Through the last months of that winter Julian and Anne avoided the residential streets; for smallpox was widespread and it was sad to see many houses fly the white flag of pestilence. Little Andrew Pizzini, the confectioner on Broad Street between Eighth and Ninth, came to know the two young people and to welcome them; and long before the season opened he promised they should have the first strawberries that appeared. As spring days began to come and the flood waters in the river roared across the rapids, they more and more often turned that way to follow the path along the canal and watch for first spring flowers in the woods on the hillside above, or by the waterside; and canal boats might pass below them, setting out for Lynchburg or dispatched by one of the hospitals to trade for food among the farms along the way.

  Anne insisted that unless it were actually raining or snowing Julian should walk somewhere every day; so even on dull days she remembered errands she must do and took him with her; and sometimes they stopped idly at one of the auction rooms, where dresses, fine lace, silverware, jewels, oil portraits, furniture, a thousand family treasures were put up for sale. These were the possessions of refugees from the Virginia counties now occupied by the Yankees, being sold to provide their owners with money to buy,
at steadily rising prices, the bare necessities of life. At first Anne and Julian laughed at the haggling bidders forever alert to seize on any bargain, till they came to despise the sleek complacent folk grown suddenly rich through speculation who paid casually any price at all for some object to which they took a fancy, and decided not to enter these establishments again. But one day they met Mrs. Harrison, whose home on the Northern Neck had been only twenty miles or so from Faunt’s and from Judge Tudor’s, so that she and Anne were old friends. She was a lively, merry woman as old as Cinda; and Julian thought there was something feverish in her gaiety. Anne was particularly nice to her, saying reproachfully: “We’ve missed you. You know, you never come to see us.”

  “Oh I’m much too busy,” Mrs. Harrison assured her; and she told Julian, with laughter in her tones: “You see, I’ve a family to support. Not my own, to be sure; but little Betsy Annabel’s husband was killed last summer. He and my boys rode with Stuart. So Betsy and her baby and I have a nice room together, and Judge Tudor persuaded Colonel Northrop to make me a clerk.” She added gaily: “I wanted to help sign money, but all those places were filled months ago and there were a hundred applicants for every vacancy.” They were moving slowly along Main Street, and she talked as they walked. “I had to pass a horrible examination in arithmetic, vulgar fractions, tare and tret, all sorts of silly things. Heaven knows how I did it! So now I earn a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Isn’t that remarkable, Mr. Dewain?”

  “I should think so. I never earned a penny in my life.”

  “But our day’s work’s done at three o’clock,” Mrs. Harrison explained. “So—” They were opposite the doors of an auction room, and she cried: “Oh, let’s go in!”