by John Jakes
So that was the relationship; mother and daughter. Bent couldn’t take his eyes from the painting.
“And they knew the child was not French or Spanish but octoroon. Years ago, attractive young women of mixed blood were favored creatures. No longer. The furor over slavery has seen to that. Today”—an expressive shrug, a melancholy smile—“being one-eighth Negro, however light the skin, is exactly the same as being all Negro—Monsieur Benton, what is wrong?”
Bent’s hand had jerked, spilling champagne on her fine carpet. “An accident, Madame. My profound apologies.”
He whipped out his kerchief, bending down to mop the rug, a difficult task because of his huge paunch.
The daughter of a nigger whore connected with that arrogant Main crowd? Obviously they didn’t suspect; no woman with nigger blood would be permitted in a group portrait of plantation aristocrats. What a splendid piece of information! He didn’t know how he’d use it, or when, but that he would use it he didn’t doubt for a moment.
“Madame, you’re quite right. The champagne has a soothing effect.” His moist face beamed. “The services of the young lady were extremely satisfying, and I was wrong to quibble over the price. I’ll pay in full. I’d even like to give her a handsome tip, if you’ll permit it.”
Madame Conti exchanged a look with the huge black man who for several minutes had been cleaning his nails with a long knife. At her faint signal, he slipped the knife out of sight.
“But of course,” she said with a courteous nod.
A cold rain fell from the Texas sky. A dispirited Charles Main watched the last trunk being lifted and placed with others in the Army ambulance. The trunks belonged to Colonel Lee.
Five days ago, on February 8, Charles and two enlisted men had left Camp Cooper with urgent dispatches for the regimental commander. They had ridden 165 miles in foul weather and had arrived to find that Lee had been relieved and called back to Washington by direct order of General Scott. No doubt Scott wanted him to declare his intentions—and his loyalty.
Lee’s departure was more evidence of the chaos spreading through the land. Although important border states such as Tennessee and Lee’s own Virginia had not yet joined the secession movement, Texas had been out of the Union since the first of the month—against the pessimistic advice of Governor Houston.
During the hours Charles had been riding with the dispatches, a new Confederate government had been born in Alabama. Jefferson Davis was its provisional president, and its provisional constitution was already drafted.
President-elect Lincoln was traveling eastward from Illinois by train. He was forced to stop frequently along the way to make exhausting speeches to constituents. In Washington, Senator Crittenden had put forward desperate compromise proposals on slavery, but the effort had failed. With all the cotton-state members gone, it had been easy for the Senate to pass a measure admitting Kansas to the Union as a free state.
Meantime, Major Anderson’s command remained huddled in Fort Sumter, ringed by strengthened batteries and South Carolina gunners itching for a scrap. Charles often wondered if Billy was still on duty at the fort. Anderson had sent several of his men to Washington with dispatches or requests for instructions. Perhaps Billy had been one of them. Charles hoped and prayed his friend would get out of the fort alive.
In Texas the frontier posts seethed with suspicion and rumors of impending takeovers by state military levies or the Texas Rangers. Although known to be a Southern sympathizer, General Twiggs had four times appealed to Washington for orders. Four times he had received vague and meaningless replies.
One story, authenticated by a San Antonio paper, seemed to typify the Army’s state of turmoil. In January one of the Military Academy’s most respected graduates, Pierre Beauregard, had been appointed superintendent. He had held the post less than a week and been removed because Louisiana’s secession made him suspect. Men who had bled in Mexico, broken bread together, and shared hardships for years now regarded each other as potential enemies, capable of almost any treachery. It depressed Charles, who was still uncertain about his own decision and his own future.
Now he waited for Lee in the rain. Nine other officers were waiting with him. Finally the colonel appeared, wearing his talma and forage cap. One by one the officers stepped up to offer a salute and a word of good luck. The last to arrive, and the most junior, Charles was the last to speak.
“It has been an honor to serve with you, sir.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“I wish you a safe journey.”
“I don’t relish the circumstances that require me to undertake it. I do want to say this to you, however. You’re a good officer. No matter what else changes, that won’t.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Lee started away. Charles’s inner confusion prompted him to disregard protocol. “Colonel?”
By the side of the ambulance, Lee turned about. “Yes?”
“Which way will you go, sir? North or South?”
Lee shook his head. “I could never bear arms against the United States. But what if it became necessary for me to carry a musket to defend my native Virginia? I had frankly hoped to avoid that kind of question. I thought President Buchanan might restore harmony between the sections by playing on love of country, but he failed. I thought the melting influence of Christianity might resolve the slave issue, but it hasn’t. I’ve owned slaves, and my conscience has tried me because of it. The institution will wither. It should. As for secession, in my view it’s nothing but revolution. Yet at this moment, men who are in most respects eminently decent have established a new government on the pillars of secession and slavery, and so I am unsure of the future and of my own reactions as well.”
Lee’s face looked haggard in the rain. “I’m certain of one thing only. No matter how each man or woman answers the question you asked, I think there will be but one result from what we’ve allowed the extremists to do to us. Heartbreak. Good-bye, Lieutenant.”
He trudged to the front of the ambulance and climbed up beside the driver. The vehicle lurched forward through the mud and rapidly faded into the dreary distance.
Charles walked back to the stockade. Pondering his own confused state of mind, he could only conclude that Lee was right. North and South, both would suffer before this terrible business was done.
Two days later, in San Antonio, old Davey Twiggs surrendered all the Federal posts in Texas to state forces. Men loyal to the Union were urged to depart for the Gulf ports and given assurance of safe conduct, though for how long no one was prepared to say.
Charles completed his journey from Fort Mason and arrived at Camp Cooper just an hour before its Union contingent was to pull out. The men were under the command of Captain Carpenter, First Infantry. Some were on horseback, some on foot.
Dirty and exhausted from long hours in the saddle, Charles watched the Ohioans from Company K ride out in a column of twos. One was Corporal Tannen, who had been a private in the skirmish at Lantzman’s farm; Charles had pushed for his promotion. Tannen took note of those remaining behind, leaned out to the left, and spat.
“Any man who stays is unfit to wear Army blue.” He said it loud enough for all to hear.
“What’s that, Corporal?” Charles called.
Tannen returned his stare. “I said if you stay, you’re a yellow traitor.”
“I seem to have been robbed of my rank,” Charles said as he flung off his bear-claw necklace, then his filthy and sweat-blackened hide shirt. Before anyone could react, he cocked his revolver and passed it to an Alabama trooper standing next to him.
“So no one interferes.”
The Alabama boy grinned, nodded, and got a better grip on the gun. Charles approached Tannen’s horse.
“You helped me once. I was grateful. But your remark cancels that.”
Tannen looked down at him. “Good. Fuck you.”
Charles reached for him. Tannen tried to lash Charles’s face with his rein. Charles caught
the rein and whipped it round and round the corporal’s left wrist. The horse began to buck.
Tannen drew his saber. Charles twisted it away and flung it out of reach. Then he dragged the Ohioan from his saddle and pounded him until his nose looked like pulped berries. Breathing hard, he spoke to the others who were leaving.
“Pick him up if you want him. I’ll kill the next one who calls me a traitor.”
He removed his foot from the middle of Tannen’s back and stood with his hands at his sides until Tannen was thrown belly down over a horse. Soon the Union men were gone.
An hour later, Charles wrote his resignation. Then he packed. Since there was no regular Army officer left to accept the resignation and report it to Washington, he hammered a nail into the door of his room in the barracks and impaled the paper on the nail. Within minutes he was bound for the Gulf.
Lee might ponder the philosophical subtleties, but his own future had been decided in a far simpler way. Ah, well. He had never been a deep man. Just a hell raiser and a horse soldier. The South might need someone like him as much as it needed philosophers.
He hated leaving Texas, which he had come to love. He thought slavery a foolish system and likely a dying one. But his blood called him home. He pushed his horse hard all the way to the coast.
Book Four
March Into Darkness
I tell you there is a fire. They
have this day set a blazing torch
to the temple of constitutional
liberty, and, please God, we shall
have no more peace forever.
LAWYER JAMES PETIGRU
OF CHARLESTON, during the
celebration of secession
DECEMBER 20, 1860
59
SUMTER FELT MORE LIKE a prison every day.
Billy occupied a dank, brick-walled room in the officer’s quarters along the gorge. The room was doubly dismal because it was dark most of the time. The garrison had almost used up the candles and matches Mrs. Doubleday had purchased in January, one day before she and the other garrison wives went North. Billy had one waxy stub left. He lit it for only a few minutes each day while he added a mark to his improvised calendar—vertical lines scraped into the wall with a fragment of brick. So far in February he had marked the wall twenty-one times.
He no longer saw Brett. He was not one of those detailed to travel over to the city every couple of days, there to purchase some salt pork and vegetables. This reprovisioning was carried out with the sufferance of Governor Pickens, at the urging of some prominent gentlemen of Charleston.
Some other gentlemen, equally prominent, hated the idea of the garrison’s receiving food and mail, and said so frequently. One of Brett’s letters informed Billy that Rhett of the Mercury was particularly strong about starving the garrison into surrender. Billy suspected the governor had the same objective and was merely pursuing it in a different way. Pickens had refused to permit the forty-three civilian masons and bricklayers to leave Fort Sumter. Presumably they would continue to devour provisions, thus hastening the day when Anderson would have to ask for terms. Several officers were outspoken in saying that the governor was bluffing, that he had no power to issue such an edict. Doubleday argued that the workmen could be dumped ashore in the dead of night if Anderson truly wanted to be rid of them. He didn’t say it to Anderson’s face, however, and the commandant, sensitive to the immense danger in any confrontation with local authorities, didn’t push for a test of the question.
Brett reported that the provision detail marched to and from the Charleston market with loaded muskets. Crowds followed the soldiers, and now and again someone yelled Doubleday’s name. He was the most hated man in the fort, a known Black Republican. If he ever set foot in the city, she predicted, he would be mobbed and hanged. So, like Billy, Doubleday remained a prisoner in the harbor.
Billy kept as busy as he could. When the masons under his command finished bricking up the unused windows in the second-tier casemates, Foster put them all to work on the main gate. A thick wall of stone was mortared into place on the inside, with just a single, iron-covered bolt hole left in the center. As soon as wall and bolt hole were done, Anderson ordered a twenty-four-pound howitzer moved up to cover the new, smaller entrance.
Everyone in the fort had fallen into a kind of stupor. Working hours were long; tension heightened normal tiredness. The toll was particularly heavy on Captains Seymour and Doubleday. They alternated as officers of the day and spent every other night awake.
The seriousness of the situation made the soldiers more candid, less concerned with protocol. This was demonstrated one afternoon when Doubleday and Billy watched from the parapet as a small schooner warped in to a wharf on Morris Island. The schooner was carrying railroad plate that would be spiked to the slanted timber face of a battery under construction on Cummings Point, little more than twelve hundred yards away.
“Look at that,” Doubleday exclaimed. “We’re giving them all the time in the world to place their guns and bring up their ammunition.”
It was true. From Moultrie, now heavily fortified with cotton bales and sandbags, all the way around to Cummings Point, cannon menaced the harbor fort. Their state artillery crews practiced regularly. Right this moment Billy could see men scurrying around a dozen guns while above them strange flags with palmetto or pelican devices fluttered in the sunshine.
Like most others in the garrison, Billy found Major Anderson a decent, conscientious man—if rather old and pious. He felt compelled to respond to the implied criticism.
“If the major tried to stop it, he might plunge this whole country into a shooting war. I wouldn’t want that responsibility, sir.”
“Nor I,” Doubleday snapped. “Believe me, I appreciate the dilemma, but it doesn’t change the fact that hesitation deepens our danger.”
“Do you think that peace conference will help matters?” Billy asked. The state of Virginia had issued the call for the conference, and ex-President Tyler had convened it at Willard’s Hotel in Washington. But some important states, including Michigan and California, had refused to send delegates.
Doubleday’s answer to the question was blunt: “No. In my opinion we can’t save the Union and slavery too.” He thumped the parapet with his fist. “I wish the major would forget his orders for an hour and let us reduce those batteries. If we don’t, we’ll soon be surrounded by a ring of fire.”
A ring of fire. An apt term, Billy thought as he watched stevedores continuing to unload the schooner’s cargo. South Carolina guns were trained on Sumter from every direction except seaward. Wasn’t it inevitable that someone, impetuously if not on direct order, would discharge one of those pieces at the fort and start a war?
Brett’s next note confirmed the impending danger. War fever was running high in Charleston. Doubleday and others in the garrison assumed this was why President Davis moved forcefully to take over the Charleston batteries in the name of the new government. Davis also dispatched official Confederate emissaries to Washington to sue for a surrender of the disputed property.
It was from Anderson himself, a few nights later, that Billy heard one more surprising piece of news. “Davis is sending his own officer to command the batteries.” The major sighed. “Beauregard.”
They stood by one of the ten-inch columbiads on the barbette. Half of Sumter’s forty-eight usable guns were mounted in the open, the other half in the casemates below. About fifty yards off the fort, the Nina was passing. She was one of the pair of guard steamers the state kept on constant patrol in the harbor. Sharpshooters at her stern recognized Anderson, hailed him, and flung mock salutes. The tall, hollow-eyed commander remained motionless.
“Captain Beauregard of Louisiana?” Billy said.
“Brigadier General Beauregard now. Confederate States of America. When I taught artillery at the Academy in thirty-six and thirty-seven, he was one of my best pupils. He was so good, I retained him as an assistant instructor after he graduated.” The maj
or’s gaze drifted to the iron battery rapidly nearing completion on Cummings Point. “I expect we’ll soon see a more professional placement of many of the guns.”
Then Anderson swung to face his subordinate. Sunset light falling over Charleston’s rooftops and steeples emphasized the lined look of his face. “But I’ve been meaning to inquire about your young lady, Lieutenant. Is she still in the city?”
“Yes, sir. I get a letter every day or so.”
“The two of you still want to marry?”
“Very much, sir. But that doesn’t appear practicable right now.”
“Don’t be too sure. As you know, Captain Foster doesn’t wish to see you gentlemen from the engineers do line service”—all the engineering lieutenants had volunteered as officers of the guard, but Foster had vetoed the idea—“so when your work is finished, I shall keep your situation in mind.”
Billy’s hope soared. Yet at the same time he felt another pull. “That’s good of you, sir, but I wouldn’t want to leave if there were to be hostilities.”
“There will be no hostilities,” Anderson whispered. “None of which we initiate in any case. Can you imagine the catastrophic results if Americans were to open fire on other Americans? That kind of collision will not take place because of any action of mine, and I’m not ashamed to say I fall on my knees every night and beg God to help me keep that vow.”
The contrast with Doubleday’s simmering pugnacity was clear. Billy watched the sun fading from the roof peaks and turned his mind to the hope Anderson had held out. He hardly dared think about it because of the great possibility of disappointment.
Slowly he gazed around the harbor, picking out the various batteries on the sand and mud flats. He identified each in terms of its armament: columbiads, mortars, twenty-four and thirty-two- and even forty-two-pounders.
A ring of fire. Waiting to be ignited by order or mischance. As the sun sank, he felt a renewed, almost overwhelming pessimism.