by Tom Blair
On the kitchen porch the following morning, overlooking the western fields of soon-to-be-picked fluffy white coins, Oliver asked how I could tolerate Hammond’s thoughts; thoughts that crushed human dignities for no greater crime than excess pigment. I took a few moments to distill my response to fact, not conjecture. I pointed to cabins, the roofs barely visible over a rise. A dozen or more small ones with rooflines as level and true as the ocean’s horizon, and then two larger cabins, over twice the size of the others, both with roofs decidedly swaybacked. With Oliver looking as if he wanted to challenge me to a duel, I explained that two of our slave families had asked if they could move to larger cabins if they built them on their own time—larger than the ones that were provided by my father’s father. Permission granted. When the first was built, to make less their effort, no foundation of river rock was laid. The cabin was built on earth, earth that settled and moved with spring rains and winter freezes. Two years after the first one was built, another was built just as before, even though they had seen that building on earth was only good for a year at most. Blacks were not the same as us, I concluded.
Oliver shook his head. “They humbly request a larger hovel, and you require them to labor when already exhausted from serving you all day, as if granting them a king’s favor. Then you wonder why they take little pride in a house they do not own?” He turned and walked quickly away.
I put Oliver on the boat a few days later; he looked me in the eye, thanked me with obvious sincerity for all our hospitality, then said, “I still cannot believe that a man of your…” pulled himself up—he clearly still considered himself our guest—muttered, “Oh well, see you in the autumn,” and clumped on board.
Yes, we did see one another that autumn, the last autumn of our youth, of so many others’ lives, of so many fast, hard choices. For this was the autumn of 1860, and the Democratic Party, true party of the white man and national compromise, tore itself apart at Charleston, and Mister Lincoln, we Southerners lamented, came gibbering out of the trees into the White House.
I paid my last “business” visit to Boston, and got married, in pretty close order, and by springtime was drilling my baby-faced militiamen to scatter the cowardly Yankees. Of course, I was baby-faced too, but we all grew up fast enough, all except the ones who died.
But I don’t think I was ever in a worse battle with Yankees than when I proposed to Rebecca. Oliver himself kept quiet, I thought then because he felt embarrassed and responsible, but Rebecca later made me see that he was entirely on our side, only knowing that if he came out for us it would be the last straw for the old man, and Rebecca would be shut in her room until I had sailed. In the end old Sargent conceded, although in a rage—“But not a penny in dowry or settlement to underwrite your iniquities!”
“Sir,” I replied gravely, “I would not contemplate money wrung from one of those pitiful girls who died in the alleys two winters ago.” I’m glad I didn’t say “we,” that might have cooked the goose, but I knew that Rebecca was as firm as I. Of course, she was certain she could turn me from my way of seeing things….
So we were married in Old North Church, with every lady in Boston showing her breeding by her face of horror; went to the cheapest, grimmest reception I have ever attended; and took ship. It was on the dock that Oliver spoke to me alone. “Bad times,” he said, then flushed and added, “For the country, not for you.”
“For our countries,” I said with some emphasis—for South Carolina had been first to secede, though it was then the only state to have done so. “Grave difficulty now, but soon lasting peace.” And, trying to put a laughing face on it, “The mills will have to make so many uniforms their bobbins will break—that is, if your Mr. Lincoln isn’t the poltroon he pretty clearly seems to be.” True words—there were to be a great many Yankee uniforms.
We looked hard at each other and saw the impasse meant war indeed. We were both young and healthy, and born to be leaders, and absolutely persuaded of our respective causes. And we were to each other as good a friend as either was ever likely to meet. This would, indeed, be a brothers’ war. It was as if we heard the screaming and smelled the blood we would soak up for the next four years.
We—a very different “we”—got back to Clayton’s Ride, and everyone for thirty miles around fêted us and put us up and held cotillions for us. I wanted to write Sargent to tell him how welcomed Rebecca was by my South. How it made no matter that she was a Boston Yankee. How the South, my friends, saw the person, not the wrapper. To let him know any local society of the South held more of gentlemen and ladies than could be found among his blue-nosed, eyes to the sky, wealth-worshipping friends and relatives. But I didn’t. I didn’t because Rebecca told me that I should not. And asked me, with a knowing smile, was I most pleased that she was in the South or that I was not in the North? I smiled and replied with a warm kiss. Later, in silence, I considered her question.
When Rebecca wasn’t softening Clayton’s Ride—in twenty years of men only it was, perhaps, threadbare and blandly utilitarian to her soft blue eyes—she was flitting about those cabins, the cave-like cabins, and coming back with lists of improvements: mats to cover the dirt floors, clothes for their children. Father paid for all of them, because he loved her too and was set on her being happy. She begged the biggest rogues in the plantation off punishment and—this was the talk of three counties—well, let me explain….
Old Colonel Heth at Cowpens Hall was truly a brave man, but never so much as at horserace meetings, for he liked to bet deep, though he could barely tell one end of a thoroughbred from another, and Father, with a shrewd eye, gladly covered him—not to hurt him, but because he loved to be proved a good judge of horseflesh; and, I admit it, we had eighty-something slaves all told, and Father longed to see a hundred at work. The Colonel fancied Buena Vista, a spavined brute if ever I saw one, and Father’s muscle-rippled Windermere swept him away. Of course the Colonel couldn’t cover his stake, not in coin, but coin was not what Father wanted.
We were all ready to take delivery of the new hands, when Rebecca rode over with me when I was settling the last details and heard the wailing. Good Lord—it wasn’t that we were actually splitting up families, but I suppose we were separating sisters and uncles and whatever, and it was all very messy; but what took everyone aback was that Rebecca put Father and old Heth together, and instead of the hands she got old Heth to lease a third of his land and labor to Father for a dollar a year—very profitably, I must say, don’t talk figures with a New Englander. She had a way with her, Rebecca.
Then the war … and not the war games my brothers and I had played. As children soldiers only half as tall as a man, when one was shot, there was no report of powder and lead, but a yelled “Pow!” and a compliant and silent fall to the ground, all so neat and tidy. Tired of our skirmishes a curt yell to a house servant—lemon water would be quite pleasant. But no make-believe battles for our South. Near the end of the Petersburg siege, a young fellow, maybe fifteen or so, walked past me from the front, his alabaster skin covered with bloody grays. No weapons, but his arms were full: he cradled his intestines as if carrying a bushel of wash. Later the same day, a captain I slightly knew, from Mayesville I recall, was leaning against a stone wall during a pause in the shelling, this officer singing in a soft voice of bluebirds and little girls. When I drew near I could see flies dining; from the top over one ear to his crown, no skull, just brain.
Not much else to say about war, just that it resembled growing old at full gallop—the endless deaths of friends, the continuous likelihood of one’s own demise, the chipping away of powers one took for granted until the ordeal struck. Never again did I outrun children to the crest of Luttrell’s Hill—the ball lodged next to my shin at Gaines Mill would have seen to that, even without the shell splinter at Suffolk. That burst didn’t take my head off, as I thought it might, but it did shatter my leg.
It was after Sharpsburg—or Antietam, as the war’s victors commended it to history—wit
h sparse rations, that I ate, gagged, my first horsemeat, repugnant to taste, repugnant to mind. Two years later, with my skin stretched taut over bone, the smallest slice of stallion or mare was most craved for. My father a fine judge of horses, his filthy and spent son a connoisseur of their meat. My South, my dear South.
In time I was told the tale, while my regiment was detached with Longstreet to Suffolk, of how my brothers took part in the glorious victory at Chancellorsville. Derided early in the war as the Pound Cake Regiment, owing to their initial posting in Charleston Harbor, that designation was already long obsolete by the time the South Carolina First Regiment Rifles filled the railroad cut at Second Manassas. My brothers rushed the Yankee line at Chancellorsville, beckoning their men on, and breached the human wall; and though they gave a good account of themselves indeed when they got there, Joseph Hooker’s men fought like demons, the ones who held, because they knew so many of their comrades had been routed, and it was their lot to try to save the bluecoat army from complete disaster. So that was the last hill that Joe and Harry would ever climb, and there they lie, brave boys, there their bodies lie. A small comfort, but a comfort no less, that the great Roman centurion Stonewall Jackson marched with them from Chancellorsville to heaven’s gate. No comfort at all to find the Yankees swarming back over that same hallowed ground, over their graves, a year later in the Battle of the Wilderness.
It was like that from the first: courage, yes, and glory and victories, but only with bloody losses, losses, losses. Father put all our loose money into Confederate States bonds—“an investment in victory”; the paper kept Black Sally and her new baby warm, the bonds and our bales of shinplaster dollars, for an hour or so on a bad winter’s night in ’64. The baby died anyway. Then the blockade choked off our trade with Europe, and cotton rotted in the warehouses.
Father broke his neck on an unmaintained road—riding to sit in the Congress at Richmond. Perhaps, I thought at the time, God’s blessing; no need for him to see Northern maggots feasting on the carcass. I inherited the plantation; same as inheriting an ingot of lead when swimming from a shipwreck. I’d heard people opine that such were the responsibilities of our class, that the gentry were more the slaves of their slaves than the other way around: mock-self-pity over the Madeira in good times, stark horrid truth in times when holding slaves could only be maintained by seemingly endless war.
Although that great fraud of national humanity, Lincoln, had proclaimed all slaves in our territory to be free, Hosey was by me throughout the war, though never, of course, bearing arms. He had opportunities to slink away in many a bloody retreat or madhouse confusion. And when those Wisconsin boys turned that battery on us at Suffolk, he could have bolted off or shammed dead till the Yankees came; but he got me over his shoulder like a portmanteau on a Harvard staircase, though I was screaming and cursing him, it hurt so. My poor old horse lay dead where I’d been lying—marking the spot until, moments later, it erupted into fragments by a shell. I often wondered if it wasn’t my damned bad luck that Hosey didn’t run away and leave me to a clean death beside my mount. But he didn’t. He worried for me. This I couldn’t bring myself to reconcile; I was a master and he a slave. Then I came to understand, my life was not spared for me. My life spared as a present to Rebecca; for her Hosey, and all his troop of blacks, wished only good, as she wished them.
So we were losing—the war, and our money, and our hopes, and our brothers, and then Rebecca.
She’d been sacrificing, far more than I knew. Brick, the house servant, said that she had fooled him; she ordered good meals and then sneaked them in baskets to old Mrs. Johnson, who really was frail, and to neighbors who had been no worse wounded than I. Brick was a good house manager; he managed for himself; he didn’t lose an ounce over the whole war. Food, not Rebecca, was his mistress.
As for the pains of war, and the pains that racked my body, and the far worse pain I would know at seeing my Rebecca fade to a ghost haunting the house she had come so to love, there began another pain gnawing, mounting inside my soul. Our system, our society was not bringing victory. A British officer I had met—Colonel Fremantle of Her Majesty’s Brigade of Guards, by heavens, stiff as a ramrod though he never knew it, pleasant enough gentleman when we forgot who he was—who was watching the war from up a tree he climbed at Gettysburg, told me that the English Aristocracy was for us to a man and they loathed the Yankees, but couldn’t bring themselves to fight for a slave power, which they found unchristian. In time I climbed the same tree, with the same view, so to speak, as had the good Colonel Fremantle. But before I did, more Southern blood poured on fields of hope, blood necessary to bring our crop of assumed destiny to full growth, only to be cut down by Yankee sickles.
But my mind did not surrender. Neither did my mind’s South.
And born from this South the most magnificent human creature ever to lead an army, General Robert E. Lee. Yet we were losing. We were losing to this man, Lincoln, who hated every moment of conflict, every man he sent to his death, every enemy he left to rot in a hospital, every sleeping sentry he had to refuse to pardon and leave to be shot. He had none of General Lee’s great-nobleman, high-chivalric love of putting matter to the ultimate test. He saw deeper than the generals he had to discard. He hated it all; he only did for the greatness beyond, greatness that he would never see, could never see. Lincoln was doing better in his misery and ungainliness than Davis and Lee in their shining genius. Perhaps he did so because he hated it, and felt compelled to look deeper. But he was not just a worthy enemy in the end; he was a man not just fit, but right, to be defeated by.
Even the sharp pain of wounds did not draw me from the unthinkable; was the South’s cause not a noble cause? Lying awake on the edge of delirium, in what we called a hospital, in fact a barn, with my leg now threatened with amputation, my mind kept returning to the same thing—perhaps because just the week before we’d been arguing with a captured Union officer that the Constitution gave us the complete right to secede. I pondered how the Founders never dared use the words “slave” or “slavery” in the Constitution. Were they ashamed of it, just as Yankees were of the original roots of their wealth? General Washington had not liked slavery and wrote to friends, following the war, that “Among my first wishes is to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.” Mr. Jefferson had said that he trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just. General Lee, a hidden abolitionist, did not conceal that he had no love for slavery, that he was fighting for Virginia, not for the human bondage that the vice-president had said was our country’s cornerstone. And it was a cornerstone, and more: it was the foundation of the South. A magnificent South.
But there was a war to be fought—if only because so many of us had died to win it. If I were to have any prospect of keeping my leg and returning to fight, to paraphrase Falstaff, I had better exercise discretion in the service of valor. I reckoned my wounds would fare better with Mischianza’s old Doc Marion than under the tender mercies of the beleaguered army sawyers. And there was a deeper consideration. Rebecca’s letters, her hand, had grown so shaky that it was unnerving. I had a word with my divisional adjutant, who requisitioned a wagon too flimsy to be missed, and Hosey hitched our poor horses and hauled me south, as cargo, moaning on my back. For two hard weeks Hosey cared for me as Aunt Hepsibah had done two decades before. By Raleigh, I could manage to sit. By the time we attained the Ride, I could stand, if not much more than that. I thought myself tired, tired to the bone—but that was before I went up to Rebecca.
War teaches many fundamentals: one look, and I knew that I was only just in time, and I could see that she knew as well. So at least we didn’t have to say it aloud; I just sat on the bed and we talked of what had happened, and who was left, and how brave everyone had been. But I knew well enough what she would have to say, and in the end she came up with it:
“Jack, let them go.”
And I had to say
I could not. The Ride had its part to play, however poor, in keeping the war going; and where were they to go, especially the old ones, and the brats, who were thin and wheezy? No, it was better that they stay, and so they needed to have a master. Poor Rebecca had no spirit to sway me. A few brief days and nights together, whispered tender words, and it was over.
I will not write of the black time between Rebecca departing and my love’s stark burial, other than to say I leaned heavily on Hosey with my grief; no brothers, no father, I had no one to mitigate.
It was the last hours of the war, and the country was starving. By “the country,” I don’t mean the Yankees’ bloated Union, but rather the Confederate States of America, which in four brief but magnificent years raised itself to a cause unsurpassed in the record of human sacrifice. But sacrifice, yes—that was the very point. You saw maids in Richmond with arms like rods protruding out of ragged clothing, and their mistresses weren’t much better. Good men were pulling out and going home—not just the weaker brethren, but some of our best—because their babies were dying of influenza on top of hunger and their wives couldn’t keep up a pretense that things were all right in the face of the misery of the children.
You felt sick to see the Provost Marshal after fellows like that. I never did actually see one of our beaten-down starving men appear before a court-martial, although there were people who believed that shooting a few would put spirit into the others. There was death before us and death behind us in those darkening months. For we were a dying dragon. Individually, we were still its deadly sharp teeth and claws; but the fire was burning out in our great beast’s belly. We could scratch deep but not strike through muscle or bone. Our armoring scales were falling off, leaving us and ours—poor worn-out women, two-year-old mites with the faces of old men—slow-marching toward death while we soldiers at least had the chance of a quick shot to end it all.