Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  “Ward is a hypocritical fool. I don’t know how you stand him, sir.”

  “I don’t wish to discuss General Ward.”

  “All the better. I await your orders.”

  “Are the men standing to arms?”

  “I think they fancy they are. No full battalion is under arms, much less a brigade.”

  “Ride through the camp and send every battalion to the head of the camp. Tell them to line the road and prepare to march off to the right by companies.”

  “Very well, sir. I took the liberty of sending your slave for your horse.” Lee saluted with his hat and withdrew, his spurs making a martial noise on the red pine floor.

  Great Dismal Swamp, July 3, 1775

  Virgil and the boy Jim slipped into the brush behind the log barn and crouched, safe in the green and screened by high grass. There were voices in the barn, all African. Jim started to move, but Virgil waved his hand.

  “No rush, boy.” He listened, and in a moment heard the white woman’s voice from the cabin. Two whites, two slaves. And two extra horses. The extra horses grazing at the short grass beside the house’s chimney made him cautious, the more so as one had a long gun of some sort tied to the saddle.

  “I got corn meal heah befo’,” said Jim, just audible. “Black folks is ol’. Whites is po’.”

  He watched the clearing. Far across it against the other edge, the white man and the male slave were girdling a tree in a field where crops and stumps seemed evenly intermingled. Men laughed inside the cabin.

  “They is too many men heah, Jim.” He turned his head as slowly as he could, but Jim was already gone.

  He missed the boy’s ghostly advance through the grass, but saw him just as he reached the edge of the barn, and then there was no sign of him for a while, except that he noticed that the black female voices in the barn disappeared in a moment. Virgil checked his priming.

  The woman who appeared around the log barn with Jim was the first that he had seen in some time, and that may have added to her appeal. She wasn’t wearing a jacket; most girls didn’t, in the little farms around the swamp. She had the sun full behind her and he could see the shape of her legs and most of her top through her shift, and her breasts, outlined in sweat, made him smile. She had a tiny, pointed face, too small for the body, but nice.

  Jim had a small sack of meal; far more precious, he had a brass kettle like the ones the whites gave to Indians to store dried goods in. He was almost bouncing as he crossed the grass, and the woman stood with her hands on her hips and watched the boy go.

  “Ol’ Nellie say those men be aftuh us!” said Jim, ducking into the brush. Virgil watched the girl, who walked along behind the barn with deliberate coquetry.

  “You nevuh said they was a gal,” Virgil hissed.

  “They wasn’t, las’ time. Maybe they bought her?”

  “Ol’ lady say they slave-takuhs?”

  “That what she say.”

  “They got dogs?”

  Jim looked guilty. “I didn’ ax.”

  “Don’ fret. You done good on that kettle. If’n they had dogs, I reckon we’d know by now. We gone have to do some walkin’ round befo’ we goes to camp. Jus’ in case they follow us.” He smiled back at Jim and rose for a last look at that handsome girl, but she was gone.

  “Let’s git.”

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 3, 1775

  He sat on Nelson and watched his army, a chaotic mob, as they attempted to form themselves in battalions. Men ran from company to company, yelling for their own officers; in fact, several approached him directly. Some had the sense to look for their militia banners displayed in the center of their regiments, but the lack of uniforms and the total want of standard places for assembly told against them. It was over an hour before he had six regiments formed and marching on the roads; he had failed to find any of the ranger companies that he knew abounded to scout the way, and the Massachusetts general officers were conspicuous by their glacial inefficiency or by their absence. It seemed possible that General Ward resented him more than he hated the British; it seemed that Israel Putnam was nowhere to be found. Washington sent his own aides as scouts to keep watch on the enemy, but eager as they were, they were untrained and talkative, and he waited in the summer sun, baking in his uniform, and watching his motley army of militia while imagining his outworks stormed, his camp taken, and his reputation ruined before he had learned the names of his own staff.

  His six battalions marched slowly, the sixty different companies all marching with different steps when they marched at all. Gaps opened and closed all down the line, making any thought of complex maneuver impossible, and Washington began to wonder if he could actually form a line and fight if he had to. He could only hope that a show of force would be sufficient.

  He rode up to Dorchester Neck at the head of his staff, the six battalions fifteen minutes behind him and strung out for a mile and a half. If the British were assaulting the Neck, he had fifteen eager gentlemen to stop them, all mounted. He was half-tempted to try, and avoid the consequences of disastrous defeat; indeed, he had thought of ordering the troops back to Cambridge rather than face the British with them. The truth of the battle at Breed’s Hill was obvious. Unless these untrained men were sent into entrenchments, they would never stand in the field, or even form; they lacked the ability to march up in column, form line under fire, and give their volleys.

  But no thick red column ascending the Neck met his eyes. The Neck was empty. Away toward the British lines and their south battery, two companies of light infantry were drilling, their files extended wide. Washington was comforted to see that they did not appear overly proficient.

  “Where is this column?” Washington looked over the Neck, relieved that he would not have to fight today with such a clumsy instrument. No one answered. A single understrength company of Marbleheaders stood farther down, where a rough tangle of felled trees had been thrown across the Neck to slow an enemy approach.

  “Captain Poole’s company?” Washington asked, sitting his horse easily.

  The man smiled and nodded.

  “Where are the British?” Washington waved his crop down the Neck toward Boston.

  Another man came up, smoking a pipe. “Oh, they formed up, right ‘nough. Jus’ a field day, I’d say. A walk in the pahk.”

  “Where is your captain?”

  “He went to find the Virginny general.”

  Washington shook his head, and the smoking man wandered off. He rode back to Lee.

  “Turn them around and march them home. Tell the general officers I want a complete muster and a complete return of military stores tomorrow.”

  “What do you want me to tell the churchwarden, General?”

  “I fail to take your meaning.”

  “General Ward, then.”

  “Tell him the same as the others.”

  “He should have turned to with the rest. Sir.”

  “That will be enough, General Lee. I mean to have absolute command, but I will not stoop to personal remarks about my officers.”

  Lee, unfazed, looked back where the first four companies, hundreds of yards ahead of the rest of the column, were wandering toward them, each company a small crowd of men without formation.

  “I imagine the only way to use them would be to ride up and down, showing each man his place and how to load his musket.” Lee laughed at his own sarcasm.

  “On your way, sir.” Washington tried to sound cool; Lee both amused and irritated him. Lee swept him a bow from horseback and was gone.

  It was a byword among farmers that often you had to make a tool before you could even start a job.

  He would train the army and officers, and bring the Massachusetts men to heel. They would obey and respect, and men would not smoke pipes while talking to generals. It would all be a great deal of work, and it wouldn’t succeed if the British attacked him before any part of it was done. He headed back to Cambridge, already composing his notes on the drill of the
army, but as he began to pass through the chaos of the leading battalion, a thought occurred to him and he pulled up.

  “You there,” he shouted at a man in a good coarse smock and proper military equipment. The man looked something like a soldier.

  “Sir?” The fellow at least had the sense to come to the recover, still the manner of a soldier.

  “How many cartridges do you have, soldier?”

  “Ten rolled, sir! Powder for six more.”

  Sixteen rounds. Washington saluted and rode on, checking soldiers as he went. By the time he reached the end of the column, he knew his Massachusetts men a little better, and he knew they averaged only nine rounds a man.

  Sometimes, before a farmer built a tool, he had to get the materials for it. Washington started a new set of notes. He was still dictating to his secretary when he climbed the stairs to his rooms and flung himself in a wingback chair.

  “What can I get you, sir?” asked Billy.

  “An army, Billy. Saving that, a staff of professional officers, sixty thousand rounds of ball cartridge, and ten thousand muskets.”

  “I’ll just get goin’ then, sir.”

  “I’ll settle for brandy and water.”

  “They have ice from an ice house, sir. It’s prime.”

  “Better and better. Iced brandy, then.”

  Washington turned to his secretary. “I’ve led you a damned chase today, sir, and you’ve held up well. Put down the notes about sashes as badges of rank and then get yourself a glass downstairs. I won’t trouble you again today.”

  The young man bowed and retired. In a moment, Billy returned, with a glass and some Naples biscuits. Washington devoured the biscuits and drank off half the glass. “They have no concept of discipline,” he said.

  Billy polished a silver salver quietly.

  “They do not seem to believe in subordination. Every man must have his say, no matter how half-witted.”

  Billy nodded to him.

  “I do not intend to discuss every notion of fortification with some Yankee captain who has read a book on the subject. Braddock may not have been the greatest general of the age, but his staff was a tool in his hand, an extension of him. He thought out the plans and gave orders. When will I reach a state where these men will obey me? I doubt that General Gage shares these troubles in Boston.”

  “You want to get those boots off, sir?” asked Billy, unmoved by his master’s tirade.

  “I thought that commanding this army would be like running a plantation, Billy. I would plan, dictate my orders, and the army would execute my designs. I’m not sure these men even know how to obey!”

  Billy looked up from the boots and smiled. But he didn’t speak his mind, and Washington didn’t note it.

  3

  Great Dismal Swamp, September 1775

  Caesar peered through the fringe of magnolia at the arm of open water stretching north from their new camp.

  “Where’s Virgil?”

  “Don’ know.” Old Ben looked shifty when he said it, and he probably did know. Something was going on; all the men smiled when they looked at Virgil or tried to cover his absences. Caesar shook his head, and rose carefully to his feet, the fowler crooked in his arm.

  “What are you all smiling at?” he said to the other men. “Come on. I’m gon’ teach you to use this gun.”

  It was by no means the first attempt, and Virgil and Old Ben had at least passed the stage where the guns scared them, but Caesar was determined that they would all learn to use the fowler well, even the boy. In a corner of his mind, he had considered trying to hit the militia for more muskets; if he had one for every man, and they could shoot, he would have a force to be reckoned with in the swamp. The militia was wary, and hadn’t come as deep in after the first foray, as if by the killing of one slave they had justified themselves and could go home.

  He led them, single file, well away from their camp to a sun-drenched clearing in the high tree cover. Some time back, a storm had knocked two big trees down, and their huge, dirt-clogged roots made pyramids at either end of a clearing long enough to run a horse.

  Two men lit pipes and sat down, and the rest stood in a loose knot. Caesar wondered idly where the tobacco came from; he suspected it was of a piece with Virgil’s forays, but only today did it strike him that the tobacco smelled fresh. He also wondered if he should have a man out watching the trail from the settlements. That would have been Virgil’s job.

  “Everyone look at this gun,” he began. “This is the butt, where you place her against yo’ shoulder. Not yo’ chest. Not yo’ arm. Like this.” He suited word to deed and tucked the fowler into his shoulder. He was quite familiar with it now, having fired it more times than he could count and killed any number of birds and several deer. He still preferred to get right up close to them, though.

  “This is the lock. She make the gun fire, and she mus’ be dry an’ clean all the time. This part, with the flint, be called the cock.”

  He looked up. Several men were smiling. Long Tom had taken out his folding razor and begun whittling at an old stick.

  “Bigger ‘an yours is, Lolly,” Long Tom said.

  Caesar rolled his eyes with the earnestness of the young and plowed on.

  “The cock holds the flint. She strikes against the hammer, like this.” He pulled the trigger so that the flint in the jaws of the cock struck the hardened face of the hammer and made sparks. “Them sparks fall in the pan, heah…here, and touch off that powder.”

  He took the small horn out of the pouch that had come with the gun, a tiny thing that barely filled his hand. He twisted the stopper out with his teeth and tapped the lip of the small horn against the pan of the lock until he had filled it with powder. Then he shut the hammer so that its “L” shape covered the pan, drew back the cock past half cock to full cock, and pulled the trigger. The cock flashed forward, struck the hammer, and snapped it back from the pan while making a shower of sparks that fell into the exposed pan. The priming powder went up with a small whoosh and a finger of smoke that trailed away over Caesar’s shoulder.

  He held the priming horn and the fowler out to Jim, the youngest.

  “You try, Jim.”

  Jim set his face in a look of concentration made a little comical by the fact that throughout the operation his mouth opened and shut slowly like a fish under water. He balanced the long weapon in his hand and found it lighter than he had expected. Then he pulled back the cock as Caesar had told them and took the stopper out of the little horn and tapped powder. It took him a long time to get the right amount of powder, much longer than it had taken Caesar, and his careful attention was almost spoiled when he saw the mermaid carved generously into the little horn. Then he shut the hammer on the pan, raised the fowler to his shoulder, and tugged at the trigger, turning his face away from the expected flash of the priming. Nothing happened.

  Caesar hit him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Nevah turn yo’ face away.” He scowled for a moment. “Never turn your face away.”

  Jim forced his head down over the fowler’s barrel, and pulled at the trigger again. The whole barrel moved, but nothing happened.

  “You’re still on half cock,” said Caesar, indicating the lock.

  “He still only got a half cock!” called Lolly, laughing.

  Caesar glared at the man, and the laughter died slowly.

  He knew he wasn’t old enough to give them orders, but none of them seemed to want to be in charge; they all simply wanted to make his life hard for trying to give orders. Joking when he was talking was common; if he fought it all the time, it just made things worse. Usually he laughed with them. Today, he wanted them to learn.

  Jim pulled at the cock, and it came back far more easily than he had expected, clicking home into the full cock position with a small and sinister noise. Jim was afraid of the gun, and more afraid now that it was full of potential to fire; the cock looked ready to leap at the hammer with the smallest provocation. He was very hesitan
t when he pointed the piece; he jerked the barrel several inches when he pulled the trigger. But the pan flashed, and it didn’t burn him, and he felt a glow of satisfaction.

  “You has to keep the barrel pointed at yo’ target. No pulling it. Like this.” Caesar aimed over the barrel and pulled the trigger, and the barrel stayed steady. Jim watched.

  “When you can flash the pan without twitchin’, I expec’ I’ll give you powder an’ shot.” He smiled at Jim, then at the rest of the men.

  “Jim can do it, I expec’ the res’ of you have no trouble at all.” Caesar held the fowler out like a dare. “Who wants to try next? No one wan’ to step forwar’?” He looked at them all. They weren’t scared; it was just that years of slavery had eliminated any tendency to volunteer. He looked at Lolly, the joker, sitting on a downed giant and puffing at the blackened stump of a clay pipe.

  “Lolly. You try. Here.” He handed Lolly the fowler, and Lolly shrank away until he felt its sleek wood and the lightness of the thing, and then he held it with an almost proprietary air. Jim handed him the little priming horn, and Lolly smiled at him.

  “There’s somethin’ I haven’ seen none of in a whiles!” laughed Lolly, looking at the horn and the mermaid’s breasts.

  “I tink Virgil be lookin’ at dat now,” murmured Tom, normally a silent man.

  Lolly was determined to excel, and he thumbed back the cock, pulled the stopper off the horn with his teeth, and primed the piece in seconds, then shut the hammer on the pan and pushed the stopper back into the horn and tossed it to Jim. Then he raised the fowler to his shoulder, seating it firmly where the muscles of the arm and shoulder knit together. The fowler looked tiny in his hands.

  He pointed the fowler squarely at Caesar and pulled the trigger. The pan flashed, but no one laughed with him.

  Caesar didn’t glare. He took the gun away from Lolly and looked away for a moment.