Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  “Got any more of those cigars you were smoking?” Washburne asked him. “I’m all out.”

  “Bill?” Grant called over his shoulder. In seconds, a black face—blacker than the surrounding darkness by a full degree—popped out of the depths of the tent.

  “Suh?”

  “Bill, fetch the congressman a handful of cigars. The good Havanas.”

  “Yassuh.”

  “That reminds me,” Washburne said. “Ferrero. His division. The Colored Troops.”

  “What about them?”

  “Careful how you use them. We can’t have another Fort Pillow. If the Confederates massacre those darkies, Lee won’t get the blame. The abolitionists will blame you, Sam. You’re the name in the papers now. And they’re still sore about that business with the Jews. They’ll claim that you used the Colored Troops as cannon fodder. Greeley and Stevens and the whole damned lot of them don’t really want their little black pets to fight, they just want them to march around bright and shiny.”

  “Well,” Grant said, “they’re guarding the army’s trains. That’s about as safe as I can keep them. May get to a point where I have to use ’em, though.”

  “Try not to. Really, Sam. I mean, you don’t really expect them to fight, do you? Against white men? They’d probably run at the first shot.”

  “From what I hear, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts didn’t run,” Grant said.

  “And what did they accomplish? Sam, this is a political matter. And you just went on about how you don’t want to fiddle with politics. Trust me on this.”

  Grant chose not to argue the matter further. He respected Washburne, was grateful to him. But he was not going to take military advice from the man. He turned to Rawlins:

  “Heard anything from your bride, John?” He felt great affection for Rawlins, who had been one of the few to believe in him back in Galena. Now he worried about the country lawyer who had come so far beside him, worried about the cough that suggested consumption—the disease that had killed John’s adored first wife—and worried that his second marriage, to a Yankee girl they had discovered stranded in Vicksburg, might have proven a disappointment. Grant thought he understood the weight of the loss of a much-loved wife. His long separation from Julia, those grim years in the desolate Northwest, had given him a taste of it. He could not imagine how he could go on, were he to lose her forever. He was not certain that any war, or the fate of any nation, was as important as the existence of his living, breathing, gently chiding wife. She, too, had believed in him when others did not. Years before John Rawlins and Elihu Washburne had come along.

  If a man needed anything, it seemed to Grant, it was for others to believe in him. When they did, he could believe in himself at last.

  Bill delivered a fistful of cigars to the congressman, who skillfully avoided the Negro’s touch. Washburne rose, followed by Rawlins.

  “Think I’ll retire to my lavish accommodations,” the congressman said. “After this, I’ll have some advice for Mr. Willard.”

  “I need to see what Humphreys has cooked up while we were visiting,” Rawlins said. “Won’t come waking you, unless it’s a thing that matters.”

  Grant nodded. He didn’t rise. Just didn’t feel like it. Not yet.

  He watched his two closest friends descend the back side of the knoll and fade into the darkness. Out on the roads, the commotion continued: supply wagons, provost men, redirected infantry regiments, and the endless ambulances. Curses, cries, and commands.

  He believed in getting what sleep he could. A few hours, anyway. Weary men made poor decisions. And the days ahead would be busy ones.

  His manservant came back out of the tent, carrying a shirt he’d been mending by lantern light—an excuse for listening in, Grant knew—and ready to receive the day’s final instructions. A freed slave, Bill had attached himself to Grant early on as well. He, too, believed in the “general in chief.” But not quite as unreservedly as the others. Life had taught old Bill a degree of skepticism a white man rarely attained, and the fellow had the biggest ears of any man Grant had met when it came to listening to every whisper around him. Even Washburne was a babe in the woods compared to his manservant. Or his “valet,” as Julia always wanted him to call the poor devil. Whatever folks might call the darkey, Grant enjoyed the man’s presence.

  “Well,” Grant said, “did you give the congressman the good cigars this time?”

  Bill shuffled a bit, fussing with the garment in his hands, then said, “No, suh. I give him the pretty good cigars, not the good cigars. That man don’t never know the difference. Them good cigars comes to you, ain’t nobody sent ’em to Washington.”

  “You’re supposed to do what I tell you, you know.”

  “Yassuh. I knows. I’m supposed to do ’zacly how you says, just like every man in this here army supposed to do ’zacly what you says.”

  Grant’s lips spread in amusement. “Meaning … they don’t?”

  “Some does, some don’t. That General Meade now, he do what you say, just like you say it. ’Least, he trying to. Downright pitiful, watching how hard that man try.”

  “Think I’ll need one more of those good cigars myself. But hold on. Put the shirt down and sit down. And tell me something. What do you make of Meade, Bill? What do you really think? Given that you haven’t missed a word that’s been said since the day I brought you east.”

  Bill laid the shirt, half-folded, on a camp stool. But he didn’t sit. “Not my place to say, suh. Not ’bout a general.”

  Grant enjoyed their routines. Many a day it was the only play he had, the only enjoyment, other than his cigars, that he could allow himself.

  “Well, then,” Grant said, “that suggests it isn’t my place to ask you. Do we have to go through this every time?”

  “Yassuh. I reckon we do. That’s how we keeps things right.”

  “So give me your honest opinion of General Meade. That’s an order.”

  Bill pretended to think hard on the question. As if he had not been pondering it for well over a month. “Well, suh, that man has him a powerful temper, terrible powerful. But he wants to make things be right, that’s all, and some things are all mule and no filly. When he’s not blowing his head off his own shoulders, he’s got him all the fixings of a true gentleman.”

  Grant smiled again. “And I don’t?”

  Bill feigned deep thought. “Well, now, Genr’l, I been knowing you years on years now. And I knows you got the soul of a gentleman, and the spirit of a gentleman. You just wasn’t born with the fixings.”

  Grant shook his head. “Bill, you’d make a better diplomat than Secretary Seward. I’d be downright fearful of dealing with you.”

  “Nawsuh. You ain’t feared of nothing but Miss Julia.”

  “That a fact?”

  “You has concerns. That’s a different thing, Genr’l.”

  “That I do. I have concerns. The congressman and every biscuit-grabbing journalist in this camp think I should wrap up things with a nice big bow and do it all by suppertime tomorrow. What do you think?”

  “Ain’t my place to go telling nobody what I thinks about manhandling this here army. That’s your paid business. Like mending shirts is my business.”

  “You do more thinking than half the generals I know.”

  “Ain’t much of a compliment, Genr’l. If that’s what you’re intending.”

  Grant laughed out loud. It was the first time he had laughed properly that day. The first time he had known reason to laugh. “Well, I’m appointing you a brevet major general. Commission to expire in five minutes. So tell me: You think we’ll whip Marse Robert tomorrow? And be done with it?”

  Bill hesitated. Grant knew the man didn’t fear an outburst of wrath. This was just the way they played the game. Bill’s opinion had to be courted. Even though he was swollen with opinions. You almost had to bring him flowers. Or let him “test” a fair number of cigars when things were slow.

  Another skirmish flared up in the
distance. It was an uneasy battlefield this midnight, crowded, uncertain, unclear, a place of the lost, of small and fatal blunders. He refused, again and adamantly, to think of the suffering. The price had to be paid. He had to get at Lee, and keep at him, until there was no more Lee left, no will left to fight on the other side. The army was a great blue hammer, and he would not hesitate to wield it.

  “Go ahead,” Grant told his manservant. “Before you bust open with not saying what you want to say.”

  Bill shook his head. “There’s that song, suh. One of them songs to make fun of the black man, like white folks do.…”

  “You know I can’t tell one song from another.”

  Bill shook his head in exaggerated mournfulness. “Ain’t the singing part, Genr’l, just the words.”

  “Which words?”

  “‘Richmond am a hard road to travel.’”

  May 6, twelve thirty a.m.

  Grant’s headquarters

  As he lay on his bed of pine branches and blankets, Bill was glad the general had not asked him about the use of Negro troops. He might have spoken his mind, really spoken it. Saying as how the general needed to let them fight, let them do what they hurt and ached and just plain wanted to do, to settle debts of a hundred years and more. Would black men fight? Near as he could tell, only army discipline was stopping them from fighting.

  The general was a good man, easy, half nigger himself after the low way he lived back in Missouri, back in his bad times. That man knew what it was to be shamed. But even he didn’t understand it all, no white man could. Mostly, they got it terrible wrong, body and soul, especially the ones who meant to do black folk good, the abolitionists. He had his letters solid, and he had thought over some of their writings. Heard them talk, too. And they were good Christian men and women, no denying. But it was like that book they all loved so much, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Poor little white woman didn’t understand slavery at all, not one little bit. All that fuss about whipping. Wasn’t all that many niggers got themselves whipped, not even downriver. And half of them who did were like to deserve it, for one thing or another. No, it wasn’t the whipping. Bill had never seen a master take a lash to a black man’s body, although he’d heard tell. Anyway, whipping just wasn’t a mighty doing like folks said. Ugly and unwelcome, surely. But whipping was an outside thing, like a bad storm come by, and it passed over, maybe leaving its mark, maybe not. The hellfire evil in slavery was the inside, everyday part of it, the mountain piled up from little bits of shame and insult, the way a man was lifelong caught between the place of an animal and that of a man. Scars on a black back were one thing, but the true scars were the ones white folk couldn’t see, the scars of shame, the un-ableness to stand up on your hind legs and choose ways for yourself and be admired for what you made of this span on earth—God’s blessing—and not for what you could steal, or how well you tricked white folks, or just for your sin-loving.

  “You let the black man fight,” he had wanted to tell the general, shout at him. “You just let them niggers fight out all the meanness they got built up in them, and you’re like to see what fighting really is. Just turn those black men loose, Genr’l, turn those black men loose.…”

  But he had held his tongue. He had spent a lifetime holding his tongue. Even with a good man like the general, there was a limit, clear as the words of Jesus Christ, past which no sober black man was going to step. Even with Grant, he affected a degree of coon speech because that was expected and easier. Safer. A black man who spoke well worried a white man. Any white man.

  Nor was he always honest in other things. Truth-telling every minute was a prideful matter even most white men couldn’t afford. And when a white man told the plain-dealing truth, the way that fireball, hellhound Griffin done told them all what was chewing on him that afternoon, he just got everybody riled up and no good come out of it. Take that General Meade, the fellow General Grant was always weighing in the scales, even when he claimed he wasn’t. Wouldn’t tell a lie, that man, and it hurt him like a sharp pain in the belly to pretty up the truth even a little. Anybody could see it. But all it did was make folks walk on tippytoe around him and say hard things about him behind his back. General Grant, now, he was wise as a church elder in his quietness. He understood the black man’s law that there was a lot to be said for not saying a lot.

  And he didn’t mind if a good cigar turned up in a Negro’s mouth every now and then.

  Nearing sleep, Bill smiled. The hard, brute world was fading, the crack of gunfire a distant lullaby, the occasional screams no worse than he’d heard before. He’d told the general a little lie this very evening, though for the general’s own good: He hadn’t given Mr. Washburne the pretty good cigars. Those were for the general, too, way he went through them. He’d given that high congressman the not-too-bad cigars, the way he always did. Man was so deep in love with himself, he never noticed one bit.

  Let the black man fight! Let him carve out justice for himself. Don’t hand it to him like a Christmas gift. Let him take it. Bill was too old for that nonsense now, nearly too old for the other, private, close-up, young man’s doings. But, just once, he wanted to see a black man with a foot on a white man’s back. A dead white man, if he had his druthers.

  Meanwhile, it didn’t trouble him to see white folk kill each other by the bushel.

  NINE

  May 6, five thirty a.m.

  Northern flank

  The smell of the coffee enchanted Gordon. No parsimony had degraded its preparation; the men who brewed it were spendthrift with the beans. The fragrance was so rich it was nigh on lascivious, enticing as the Sirens. He would have liked to stroll right over and help himself to a cup.

  The problem was that the coffee belonged to Yankees.

  It was an amazing, bewildering, breathtaking situation, so perfect for his army’s purposes that he could scarcely believe it. As he lay on the ground in the underbrush, peering through branches parted by a scout, the Union troops behaved as though safe in the rear: Their entrenchments were slapdash, their weapons rested by the low dirt parapets, and their leaders appeared unconcerned. The early morning firing along the corps’ line had sputtered out, and these men had not been engaged in it, anyway. The fighting was miles to the south now, a constant roar from down by the Plank Road. Here, the flank of the Army of the Potomac simply dangled, not refused by even one regiment. Blouses unbuttoned, the men and boys in blue studied their breakfasts, not the war.

  He ached to attack immediately, to deliver a blow that would send Grant and Meade and their self-righteous minions reeling. But he and a scout made an insufficient force.

  Still, the prospect before him was a gift, and he felt a thrill so rich it bordered on sin. His lack of sleep was nothing now, overpowered by the vision of what he knew could be done to these careless men. He foresaw his greatest moment of the war.

  In the black hours of the night, his brigade had been shifted from the corps’ right to its extreme left, to guard the flank of the Army of Northern Virginia. Upon arrival at the new position, a clean place beyond the infestation of corpses, he had sent scouts out past his picket line immediately, unwilling to let weariness suborn duty, preaching to his men on the virtues of diligence. And yet, he’d been cranky himself when they awakened him, until he heard the news the scouts had brought. They swore the Yankees were nowhere to be found to the brigade’s front, that his men could have lined up and marched straight forward.

  He knew what that meant, but didn’t believe it possible. His enemies, veterans now, could not have made such a blunder. But he also knew he would get no more sleep that night: The report would gnaw at him until he confirmed it.

  He sent out another brace of scouts, his best men, before dawn. They returned with an identical report, adding that they had located the end of the Yankee line off to the right.

  Thereafter, a cavalry patrol reported to him: There were no Union troops to the north, either, not even a cavalry screen. Nothing stood between his brigade and
the road to Fredericksburg but a supply train and a crawling procession of ambulances.

  He still had been unable to credit the news, so he set off himself with a scout who had been with him since his captaincy of the fur-capped Raccoon Roughs at the start of the war. They rode, unchallenged, for miles through the forest, and it might as well have been peacetime. Birds trilled and chirped with confidence, and though a scent of powder marred the air, the reek of death had not yet come so far.

  At last, the scout led him, afoot and then on their bellies, to the vantage point where the two now lay, within pistol range of their enemies. And Gordon was ravished by the aroma of coffee.

  He heard the Yankees speak of petty concerns—even complaining about the drink he envied—while he envisioned how the attack would be executed. The plan made itself. His brigade stretched a quarter mile beyond the end of the Union line. The Yankees had exposed not the mere heel of Achilles, but the leg right up to the hip. His brigade could simply advance and wheel to the right, hitting the Union flank at a right angle. Achieving surprise, his men could collapse the Union line like a squeezebox, spreading panic and pushing on at a left oblique to allow the other brigades of Early’s Division to connect with his right flank and sweep down to the Turnpike, where the rest of Ewell’s corps could finish the destruction of at least half of the Army of the Potomac.

  It would be a victory greater than Chancellorsville, more lopsided than Fredericksburg, and more powerful than either in its advantage to the Confederacy. It would make him. He’d gain a division command, Lee would have to create an opening. The old man’s sense of justice would demand it, as would the public. He would sew on his second star—if the war even continued after Grant, the North’s great hope, suffered such a disaster. In any case, his reputation would be indomitable. In war he could pick his command, in peace he could choose his office.