Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  Lee came back to the living moment, half listened to the two corps commanders teasing and praising each other, and watched a Negro servant clear the table.

  What did any Northerner know of the Negro? Lee found it distasteful to hear slavery praised from the pulpit, but, practically speaking, what was the alternative for the present? To unleash millions of savages upon a civilized land? He did not need to read lurid accounts from Haiti: As a lieutenant with a new wife at Fort Monroe, he had discovered what Negro terror meant. The slave uprising in nearby Southampton County had revealed the full barbarity of the African, the instinctive outrages against chaste women and gentlefolk. No, the Negro needed a firm hand to refine him, or he would degenerate into lifelong indolence punctuated by bursts of crimson slaughter.

  Of course, slavery could not persist in the modern world. But its elimination had to be gradual. Across the span of a century, the Negro might be fitted to an elementary role in American society, but it was unfair to the creature to expect more. He had long since freed his own few slaves, glad to be rid of a practical vexation, and had even paid passages to Liberia for those who wished to go. But it was too late to ship millions back to Africa.

  What was to be done with these simple, feckless people? His father-in-law had specified that his slaves were to be freed upon his death, if Arlington’s financial affairs permitted; otherwise, they would go free after five years. And the Negroes had misunderstood, expecting ladders to descend from Heaven when Mr. Custis shed his mortal coil. The plantation’s books had been in dreadful shape after years of neglect and, as the new head of the family, Lee had needed to keep the servants and field hands bound for the five allotted years. He had had no choice. A few of the disappointed slaves had run away, and their apprehension had been essential to scotch the flight of the others. Upon their retrieval by slave catchers, he had required the sheriff to whip them. He had taken no pleasure in the matter, but a plantation had to have order, as did an army. Discipline was salutary. He had refused to shield himself, though, and had stood by to watch the punishment, feeling each lash himself.

  And that was the South’s conundrum: Wise men understood that the institution of slavery must crumble. But hotheads had ruled the day, only playing into the hands of the worst forces in the North. Madcap fools had made this war, not soldiers. Now the soldiers must win it for the fools.

  After five years, he had honored the Custis will and freed Arlington’s slaves. The worst of his blacks had slipped into the maelstrom, while those who remained loyal expected gratitude. As for the plantation he had labored to save, it was lost forever now, profaned by those people to spite him. They had burned White House plantation, too, depriving his son Rooney of a home. So much of his golden world was gone forever.…

  As if reading his thoughts, Ewell said, too loudly, “I do wish Sam Grant would send his nigger division to face my boys. We’d see about the ‘dignity of the colored man,’ all right. We’d set those coons to running so fast they’d be climbing trees in Maine before the morning.”

  “If they lived that long,” Anderson said.

  And now it had come to this: black men armed and uniformed, to be set upon white men with a government’s blessing. The abolitionists had not seen what Nat Turner’s knives and axes had wrought on the helpless.

  Well, if it came to that, his men were not helpless.

  For all his private complaints, he knew war suited him. As did the faith he had discovered late in life. He was not meant to be a man of business and scorned the undisguised pursuit of wealth, but he had been called upon time and again to straighten out matters reflecting on his kindred. He had dirtied his hands not by preference, but to salvage the Custis name for his dear wife. He always had done his duty, however unpleasant, by his family, by the army, and by Mary’s family, and he did it with rigid probity.

  The paramount aim of his life had been to restore the honor of the Lees of Virginia. After his father, once a hero and intimate of Washington’s, had perished a bankrupt, and half-brother Henry, the next head of the family, descended into odium and scandal, his people had been reduced to near pariahs. Old Custis had not wished his daughter to bear the name and relented only because Mary was of age. Then, with painful irony, Custis had mishandled his own affairs. Not criminally, but incompetently. His death had left them all headaches and debts as inheritance. Dutiful yet again, Lee had taken a leave of absence to clear the estate. His life from early manhood had been naught but a succession of such obligations, and the sweetness of his childhood, of the years before the fall, at Stratford Hall or visiting the endless supply of cousins in ripe summers, all that was gone, an age as vanished as those of the Tudors and Stuarts.

  He had learned what it meant to be the poor relation, disregarded in social coalitions. On top of all, he had, still a boy, nursed his ailing mother, in a household where poverty was not always genteel. It seemed he was fated to see the women he loved most dearly turn invalid, just as he must suffer other men’s scandals. West Point had been his first attempt at escape.

  From the day he arrived on that shelf above the Hudson, he determined to be a man of flawless deportment, of measured speech and immaculate integrity. He bound himself to every regulation and worshipped every detail of the code of honor. He did not drink or smoke, would not gamble or curse, and never did he associate with light women. Even his posture announced his rectitude, armoring him against life.

  And he had come far. Perhaps, he sometimes feared, a bit too far. The night harbored demons the day might slay with reason: Would raising his sword against the flag he had once sworn to defend bring greater shame than his father’s speculations? When his heart no longer beat, how would the living regard the name of Lee?

  How much of his life, of his actions even now, had been decided when his father first took on a debt he could not settle? Was each man a slave to something? He had heard that George Meade, too, had suffered a family’s fall, although the elder Meade’s conduct had not been improper. Did Meade feel driven to mend his family’s repute? Grant, for his part, was plebeian, the new sort of man, and had only his own shame to cover.

  “General Lee, you look wearied,” Anderson said. “Best take your rest, sir.”

  “Thank you, General Anderson,” Lee answered. “I’m afraid I must write a few letters before I retire.”

  The problem with sleep was dreams.

  FOURTEEN

  May 9, six thirty a.m.

  Union lines, Spotsylvania

  Major General John Sedgwick preferred to keep a man his friend, rather than make an enemy, and he knew Warren was sensitive to slights, real or imagined. So he rode to Fifth Corps headquarters himself, hoping to soothe its commander, before the wound of Meade’s order cut too deep.

  His passage along the lines attracted a minor cannonade.

  Warren wasn’t at the shack he had commandeered for a headquarters. His aide intercepted Sedgwick on the porch. A young man, Roebling looked ashen-faced and aged. He wasn’t certain where his chief had gone.

  Off to complain to Meade? Warren was fool enough to do it. Meade would be all right once his temper calmed, but Grant didn’t care for handwringers. Warren would just make a bad situation worse.

  Up along the entrenchments, the crack-crack-crack of skirmishing rose and fell. The intervals between bursts belonged to sharpshooters. The racket had kept up all night, making sleep a ragged affair, at best. At fifty, Sedgwick wasn’t the physical specimen he had been.

  You’re no more tired than your men, he told himself. At least you get to ride a goddamned horse.

  He said: “All right, Roebling. You know I’m not going to lord it over anybody. No matter what Meade’s order says. Tell General Warren to go on and command his own corps, as usual. I have perfect confidence he’ll do what’s right. He knows what to do with his corps as well as I do.”

  In one of his fits of spleen, Meade had sent down orders putting Sedgwick in overall command of both his Sixth Corps and Warren’s men in Mead
e’s absence. Warren had not been relieved, but put on a leash. And Warren had brought it on himself, not just by the slovenly way he’d put in his weary soldiers the day before, but by throwing a tantrum of the sort that raised Meade’s ire.

  As Sedgwick’s staff related the tale, Meade had come forward for a firsthand look and had told Warren to cooperate with Sedgwick, after the Sixth Corps had become entangled in the Fifth Corps’ mess. And Warren had picked the worst possible time to tell Meade that he was willing to be commanded, or to command, but damned well was not going to “cooperate” with anybody. Warren had been worn to the nub, had just seen his men savaged to no good result, and was being pressed to do more. But no excuses counted on a battlefield. G.K. was too high-strung.

  “Sir…,” Roebling said in a careful voice, “the men are just used up. General Warren did the best he could. But this constant fighting, marching and fighting, day after day in this heat … then the ceaseless pressure from General Meade…”

  “It’s not from George Meade, Roebling. He’s a methodical man, an engineer. Like you or General Warren. Grant’s the one who keeps pushing to smash ’ em up, smash ’em up. Grant, and that menagerie of his.”

  Sedgwick decided that he’d said enough. Didn’t do to have such words repeated. Warren would have to take his medicine. But he admired Roebling’s loyalty to his chief. Loyalty was crucial to the officer corps. He made a final effort to be personable:

  “I heard about Fred Locke,” he said to Roebling. “Friend of yours, I believe?”

  Roebling lowered his gaze.

  “Any chance he’ll recover?” Sedgwick asked.

  The aide shrugged. Then he looked up, damp-eyed, and shook his head. “His face … dear God, I’ll see his face until the day I die, it was half shot away.…”

  Sedgwick had a knack for soothing words. But he didn’t seem to be doing so well this morning.

  Warren just needed to calm down and see things through Meade’s eyes. No need to get riled and flit about. Loyalty went downward as well as up the chain, and Meade was loyal in both directions. He’d saved Charlie Griffin from being relieved, and Meade would stand up for Warren, too, if G.K. didn’t paint him into a corner.

  It was all so hard and complicated now. Sedgwick had fought the Seminoles, moved the Cherokee, whipped the Mexicans, and chased Comanches, but all of that had been child’s play to this.

  “All right, Roebling. Just tell General Warren what I said. And we’ll hope for a quiet day.”

  The day before, he’d seen dead-eyed men stagger forward into hopeless assaults. Minutes later, a smaller number of those dead-eyed men staggered back. Some of them had been his boys. Even he had got caught up in the senselessness.

  Maybe Grant’s approach of keeping up the pressure on Lee would work. But it seemed to Sedgwick a good way to break their own army.

  Soldier on, he told himself. Wouldn’t mind a pan of fried eggs, though.

  Before Sedgwick could remount, Charlie Whittier, one of his aides, came on at such a gallop that he nearly collided with a wagon hauling off bodies like a medieval plague cart. Whittier was generally counted a cool one, despite his family ties to some silk-drawers poet, but today he was on the boil.

  The major reined in and didn’t take time to dismount, but shouted his tidings:

  “Sir, it’s General Neill. He’s withdrawing his division from the line.”

  Sedgwick stiffened. “Who ordered that?”

  “Nobody. Colonel McMahon checked. Neill’s doing it on his own, he’s gone to pieces, sir.”

  Sedgwick leapt to horse. Fifty years old or not, his time in the First Cavalry counted for something.

  “Where’s Neill now?”

  “Just behind his division. He won’t hear reason, sir.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Tom Neill, the hero of Salem Church and the man he had chosen to lead George Getty’s division after Getty got himself shot up in the Wilderness. Neill was big and Irish in the best ways, with the grip of a bear, the finest mustache in the army, and an easy way with the men. You just never knew who would break under the strain.

  After riding pell-mell along an exposed portion of the line, they found Neill and his worried staff men back in a copse of trees. Neill appeared perfectly fine, nodding as his men marched for the rear.

  Sedgwick had a temper, too. He wanted to give Neill what for, and in clear language. Instead, he reined in and said, “Tom, what’s the matter here?”

  Neill looked at him as if only now aware that his corps commander had arrived.

  “We have to withdraw,” Neill said. His tone was alarmingly calm. “My men … they’re going to be slaughtered. We have to leave.” He smiled. “Look at them, aren’t they fine? You can’t blame me for killing Getty’s men, I’m pulling them back as quickly as I can.”

  Neill began to weep.

  Frank Wheaton rode up. He looked as baffled as anyone, but his appearance was opportune.

  “Frank!” Sedgwick called. “Take command of this division. Stop this nonsense right now. Get these men turned around.”

  Wheaton looked relieved and instantly confident. He saluted and yanked his horse around, shouting orders to his own small retinue.

  Christ, if one of Lee’s bunch saw them vacating the line, the Confederates would be on top of them in a blink.

  “Charlie,” Sedgwick said to Major Whittier, “find Bidwell and Lew Grant. Tell them they’re to reoccupy their former positions at the double-quick. Or stay in them, if they haven’t left already. Go!”

  “I won’t let the men be slaughtered … killed like sheep … might as well cut their throats…” With tears leaving myriad tracks down his cheeks, Brigadier General Neill looked at his superior. “I did all I could, sir.”

  Sedgwick leaned from his saddle and gripped Neill’s forearm. “You did your best, Tom. But you need some rest now. You just go back and get a little sleep, go on back to the trains.”

  “My men … Getty…”

  “You go on back now. Get some sleep. I’m here to see to things.” He turned to one of Neill’s men, a trusted captain who had been a favorite of Getty’s. “Take General Neill to the rear.” His voice was not as gentle with the captain.

  They got things straightened out before the Rebels became aware of the confusion. Sedgwick figured the sorry buggers up on the ridge were at least as worn as his own men. Still, it was a relief worthy of the ages when the last of the division’s troops were back in their trenches.

  His chief of staff, Marty McMahon, found him.

  “General Morris has been shot, sir.”

  Oh, Christ. After Bill Morris had done so well in the Wilderness. Sedgwick had marked him down for a division.

  “What happened? Is he alive?”

  McMahon pawed sweat from his face. The morning was already torrid. His horse foamed green at the mouth, dripping on the ground.

  “He’s alive, but it’s bad.”

  “Sharpshooter?”

  McMahon nodded. “We ought to execute every one of those bastards we catch.”

  And then they execute our men, and we kill more of them, and it never stops, Sedgwick thought. All his life he’d been a soldier, but he wouldn’t mind when this war came to an end.

  “We’re not Comanches,” he said. “All right, let’s have a look at Ricketts’ lines.”

  McMahon looked doubtful. “Sir, it might be a good time for you to stay at headquarters.”

  “Nonsense.” But Sedgwick smiled. He liked McMahon and regarded him as something between a son and a younger brother. “Who commands this corps, Marty? You or me?”

  “Sometimes I do wonder about that myself.”

  Sedgwick laughed.

  “Just promise me,” McMahon went on, “that you won’t expose yourself needlessly today. We’re running a tad short of generals, sir.”

  “Tell you what,” Sedgwick said. “We’ll move the headquarters closer to the entrenchments, and you and I can call it a draw. Then I want an
officers’ call with the division commanders.” He thought for a moment. “No new orders from Meade?”

  “No, sir, nothing new. The corps is to remain in position, distribute ammunition, and bring up rations. Gather in the stragglers. And let the men rest.” McMahon grimaced. “Although they’ll have to work on the entrenchments, they’re unsatisfactory. That’s one thing the Johnnies do better than us.”

  “They have more reason,” Sedgwick said. He gee-upped his horse.

  Bill Morris down, too, after Getty’s wounding and the loss to the corps of so many other officers. The casualties on both sides were appalling. As he rode among his men, Sedgwick’s thoughts roamed across the lines to Jeb Stuart, a lovely young man. Despite the difference in their ages, they had grown close before the war. Sedgwick hoped the reckless cavalier would survive so they might meet as friends again.

  The war had torn the country apart, but also severed many a worthy friendship. Thinking about Stuart left Sedgwick wistful. What was that two-dollar word that Whittier liked? “Elegiac.” He supposed that captured something of how he felt, although he wasn’t sure of the definition.

  It was still only eight o’clock when Grant came up. He rode a sinewy pony, not the big bay horse all admired. Sedgwick sighed and mustered a dutiful smile.

  “Welcome to the Sixth Corps, sir!” he said. They were just far enough out of range to permit salutes.

  “How do, John?” Grant said, dismounting. He waved a hand at the surrounding hubbub. “Change from the old Army, ain’t it?”

  They shook hands.

  “Had the same thought myself this very morning,” Sedgwick said.

  “I heard about Bill Morris,” Grant continued. “Sorry to hear it.”

  Since Grant hadn’t mentioned Tom Neill right off, it meant he didn’t know about that problem. Sedgwick hoped to keep it that way. Neill was a good officer. A rest might fix him up.

  “Morris will be a loss to the army,” Sedgwick told the general in chief. “Coffee?”