by John Jakes
Across the Plain, on the veranda of the post hotel, the two old friends sat side by side in rockers, listening to the shouts in the June twilight. “Hats off whenever you address a superior, sir. Until you pass the entrance examination you are a disgusting object, sir. Putrefied matter, sir. Scum!”
Colonel Charles Main of the 1,500,000-acre Main Chance Ranch lit a cigar. William Hazard; president of Sundown Sea Realty Company and Diamond Acres Estates, rested his laced hands on his paunch.
“I enjoyed Willa’s performance last night.”
“She’s glad to get back at it for a few months.”
“Mr. Booth’s a personable fellow. Talented, too. It was a great treat to have supper with him. I tell you, though, I couldn’t expose my legs in black tights to six hundred strangers.”
Charles shrugged. “He’s an actor. He couldn’t build a pontoon bridge over a flooded creek at night under sniper fire.”
At the far edge of the Plain, members of the new United States Military Academy class stumbled into a semblance of a formation while upperclassmen continued to shout and scream. “You are lower than a plebe, sir! You, sir, are a thing, sir!”
Billy’s round spectacles reflected the sunset. “I do feel guilty about coming up here with G. W. You and I act like a couple of doting mamas. My boy resented it.”
“So did mine. Never mind, we’re old grads. We’re entitled to come back. I wanted to see the place.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“Not sure,” Charles said. He turned his chair so he could watch the great flag float in the evening breeze. Somewhere on the Hudson, a steamer whistled. “I think this place did some unexpected things to me. It made me into a soldier when I probably wasn’t cut out for it.”
“You were a good one, though.”
Charles didn’t comment. “About this place—I feel sort of fond of it now that I’m no longer part of it.”
“Except through your boy.”
“Well, yes. I had some doubts about letting him enroll. It’s a fine education, that’s what persuaded me. He can resign after he serves his hitch.”
“Certainly. There won’t be any more wars to fight.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“Don’t you wonder what will happen to our two boys, Bison?”
“Sure. But I think I know. What will happen to them are the same things that happened to Orry and George. The same things that happened to us. Things we never expected. Things we couldn’t have imagined if we tried for a week. Those are the things that always happen to people. Along with ordinary things.”
“Like getting old.” Billy rose, yawned. “I get so blasted tired anymore. Ready for supper?”
“Any time you are, Bunk.”
Billy watched the ragged formation marching away to evening mess. “I’m proud I was here,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his gold brocade vest. “I’m glad my brother and your cousin met here. Without that, I wouldn’t have Brett or my family. George wouldn’t have Madeline. I wouldn’t have my best friend.”
So many births, Charles thought. So many deaths. So important. So inconsequential.
“Yes, I’m glad they met,” he said. “I’d like to have seen them that day in 1842. I’ll bet they were a pair. The ironmaster’s boy and the rice planter’s boy. Oh, I’d like to have seen that.”
The West Point sunset gun boomed. The two friends went in to supper.
For his anger endureth but a moment:
in his favor is life:
weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.
Psalm 30
I form the light, and create darkness:
I make peace, and create evil:
I the LORD do all these things.
Isaiah 45
Afterword
He had heard it said that Ned had never got over the war… Plenty of men hadn’t.
Larry McMurtry,
Lonesome Dove
WITH THESE LAST FEW paragraphs, the curtain comes down on The North and South Trilogy, a project that has occupied me for a little better than five years.
The first volume, North and South, dealt with the antebellum period, and endeavored to illuminate the slow, grinding buildup to conflict, as well as the complex causes of it. Love and War dealt with the war itself, four years that forever marked, not to say scarred, our national consciousness, and ultimately seized the imagination of the world. To this day the war exerts a magnetic appeal for millions. It was a rare, even unique combination of the old and the new; pitiless suffering and shining idealism. “War is hell,” snapped Uncle Billy Sherman, amply covering the suffering. The idealistic aspect was well characterized in 1884 by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Recalling his war experiences (captain, 20th Massachusetts), he said, “Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.”
The change in our country during the four years of war was apocalyptic. As a footnote, it’s interesting to me that no one thus far has identified my metaphor for this change in the text of Love and War, the horses. Images of horses appear constantly in the novel. The very first image after the Prologue is that of sleek black horses galloping in a sunlit pasture. The last image is that of buzzards feasting on the remains of a black horse lying beside a railroad track. It seems that authors spend time on literary devices at their peril.
In Heaven and Hell I shifted the focus westward because I felt the sweep of historical events demanded that. At the same time, I wanted to detail something on the full-fledged civil-rights revolution, usually called Radical Reconstruction, that was won and lost in the years immediately after the Civil War. Historians generally designate 1876 as the end of Reconstruction, coincident with “redemption”—that is, return to a Democratic, all-white state government—in South Carolina, the last of the Southern states to be “redeemed,” in this case by the so-called Mississippi or Shotgun Plan. In the state where it all began, with John Calhoun propounding his nullification doctrine, it ended.
I have no quarrel with this use of 1876 as the end point. But while I was engaged in reading and research, I began to see the great wave of Radical idealism and opportunism cresting and breaking eight years earlier, dashed back by the failure of Johnson’s impeachment and a general Northern rejection of the civil-rights program of the Radicals. This was reflected in the 1868 elections when, as noted in the book, Republican majorities were sharply diminished, and several supposedly enlightened states in the North refused to pass a referendum on black suffrage—something Thad Stevens and his comrades in Washington were enforcing on the South by military means.
In the 1860s we were just not ready, as a people, to practice democracy without qualification. When Andrew Johnson, during his “Swing Around the Circle,” told his Cleveland audience to clean up Ohio’s house before attacking the South, he was booed and jeered. Even many avowed Northern Republicans—literary men such as the Freedmen’s Bureau officer John William DeForest and the journalist Whitelaw Reid—couldn’t keep condescension toward “darkies” out of their prose. Their work is full of racial stereotyping. Reid wrote, “Who has not admired the deep, liquid ox-eye of the Southern negro?” and “The ivories that were displayed would have driven a dentist to distraction.” Despite Lincoln, despite the Radicals, despite amendments to the Constitution, white America remained racist after the war. The body politic rejected the new social order briefly implanted by a few visionary social surgeons.
The Reconstruction story is relevant to modern America. In January of this year, while I was putting the final draft through the computer, racial violence racked Forsyth County, Georgia. Peaceful marchers were threatened by a white mob just because they were black. Sometimes the lesson that history teaches is a sad one; that we are unable to learn from our past, and must repeat it endlessly, as Santayana warned.
In writing about Reconstruction, I do not mean to ignore another group that playe
d a pivotal role in the novel. I refer to the original inhabitants of this country, the Native American Indians. During the period covered here, they were forced out of their lands at last, and effectively robbed of any chance to participate in the political process, by means of what we now call “genocide.” The Indians are not the main ethnic concern of Heaven and Hell, but even so, I do not mean it to seem that I have given them what amounts to a historical shrug. Theirs is a tragedy I would like to deal with more fully, in another book, at a later time.
Of course, like the two novels preceding it, this one is meant first as a story, and only second as history (though as always, I never knowingly change or falsify the record for the sake of a plot). Some of the historical aspects of the novel do need brief comment.
I found the Kuklux (that was the customary spelling) a difficult subject to write about, in this sense. Southern victims of the Klan quite rightly considered its hooded members terrifying. Yet it’s hard to look at hundred-year-old photographs of bed-sheeted Klansmen, or read their florid and pretentious handbills and newspaper announcements, without smiling. This duality isn’t convenient for storytelling, so I am not certain that I accurately captured Klan activities. I do want to assure readers that the bits of ritual and fragments of printed announcements found in the book were not invented by me; they are authentic. General Nathan Bedford Forrest did not start the Klan, but it’s generally conceded that he was Imperial Wizard for a couple of years, until violence got out of hand and he made a public statement ordering the Klan to disband.
If, in the sections set in the South, there seems to be a certain shrillness, almost hysteria, in some characters, I hasten to note that this originated in research, not imagination. The racist statements of fictional characters such as LaMotte and Gettys are based on similar pronouncements from the press of platform. On the matter of this overreaction, I agree with the film historian and biographer Richard Schickel, and the revisionist historian Kenneth M. Stampp. Schickel, commenting on Stampp in the former’s fine life of D. W. Griffith (who was the son of a Confederate officer, a circumstance that contributed to the racist tone of Griffith’s epic The Birth of a Nation), says, “The alleged brutalities suffered by the white southerners are difficult to find in any records; compared to the lot of almost any defeated nation in history, their ‘punishment’ was unprecedented mild.” True; but—emotionally—defeat is still defeat. A bitter cup, and, in this case, a cup poisoned by unreasonable and long-standing fears of those the South had enslaved. The word hysteria fits.
To this day, a firestorm of controversy burns around General George A. Custer. A case can be made for Custer as a fine soldier, or at least a successful one. He had an amazing record of wins with the Union Army. He generated tremendous loyalty among some of his men (in others he aroused fanatic hatred, and this was a problem in the Seventh Cavalry from the moment he joined the regiment until he led it to disaster at the Little Big Horn).
My interpretation of Custer is admittedly personal. I find too many negatives. His vanity was overwhelming, and so was that of his wife, which only fed it. He can’t be excused for refusing to command black soldiers in the Ninth Calvary. His punishments were harsh, frequently illegal, and many of his adventures in the field were reckless or personally motivated; the dash to his wife Libbie that got him court-martialed is a good example. Most of all, to his discredit, there is the Washita—the battle or the massacre, depending on which source you consult. To me certain aspects of the Washita bear an eerie similarity to Vietnam. A frustrated Army, up against guerrilla fighters whose unconventional tactics it was too cumbersome to match, moved in and destroyed an entire village—men, women, children—the theory being that even small boys might wield weapons against their enemies (some evidently did).
Probably I will be suspected of romanticizing the record and accomplishments of the soldiers of Grierson’s Tenth Cavalry. I plead not guilty. The Army offered these black troopers their first formal opportunity to get up and out of their past lives in northeastern cities, and they took splendid advantage of it. Most military scholars agree with author George Walton, who said of the Tenth: “The soldiers … developed an espirit de corps that has seldom been equaled in the United States Army… . The desertion rate, always an index of morale, became the lowest in military history.” White officers, initially so reluctant, eventually commanded in the Tenth with great pride. John Pershing won his nickname, Black Jack, during such a tour of duty.
I should also note that, although there was a C Company in the Tenth Cavalry, the officers and men of C Company in the novel are fictitious. The incidents of white harassment of the new regiment by General William Hoffman and others are not.
Although trumpets and bugles are distinctly different instruments, the Army circa 1865-70 ignored that. General orders of the period refer to various daily calls as “trumpeter assemblies.” But no cavalryman that I’ve ever heard of fingered the valves of a trumpet while galloping on horseback. In other words, in this period, trumpeters played bugles but were nevertheless called trumpeters.
As a final note, Henry Ossian Flipper demands mention. Flipper, of the West Point class of 1877, was the first black graduate of the Military Academy, the first black officer in the Tenth Cavalry, and also the first in the regular Army. He was born in slavery in Georgia in 1856, and he got through West Point despite virtual ostracism. “There was no society for me to enjoy,” he wrote. “No friends, male or female, so absolute was my isolation.” Yet Flipper persevered in the face of heartbreaking difficulty, and so have many black soldiers since, to their great credit.
Now for appropriate acknowledgments.
Unless otherwise noted, newspaper headlines, dispatches, and advertisements are from The New York Times.
“The Confederacy’s purple dream,” a beautiful phrase that I have incorporated in the text, comes from Samuel Eliot Morison.
An anecdote from historian Robert West Howard led to creation of the Fenway Piano Company.
Colonel John W. DeForest, mentioned above, wrote one of the major memoirs of the period at his post in South Carolina. I have made generous use of A Union Officer in the Reconstruction for details contained in Madeline’s journal.
In making DeForest and so many other books, periodicals, and newspapers available to me, I must first thank the endlessly helpful staff of the Greenwich Public Library. For years I’ve been what you might call a heavy user of libraries, and I have never before seen such a splendid one in a town the size of Greenwich.
On Hilton Head Island, the local library was diligent as usual in searching out interlibrary materials; particular thanks here to Ruth Gaul and Sharon Lowery. Librarians in South Carolina are fully as enthusiastic as those in Connecticut, the difference being the poor level of financial support South Carolina libraries receive. A majority of county and state legislators seems to care more about tourism and state-supported football teams than they do about learning, and this attitude shows in the inadequacy of many local collections. The librarians, always of good cheer, make the best of a bad situation.
Robert E. Schnare of the Special Collections Division of the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, was again helpful in providing special materials. Another important piece of research came from the Tennessee State Library.
Assistance with special research projects was provided by my good friend Ralph Dennler, my son Michael Jakes, my son-in-law Michael Montgomery, and my wife.
I also owe thanks to Bill Conti, to Al Kohn of Warner Bros. Records, and to Mrs. Auriel Sanderson, vice president of the David L. Wolper Organization.
As always, people and institutions lending a hand with preparation of the book must not be held responsible for it in any way; not for a single incident or opinion or anything else. I bear full responsibility.
Since Heaven and Hell closes a trilogy undertaken with a brief description and a great deal of faith, I would be remiss if I did not tender my thanks to Bill and Peter Jovanovich and all of the
good people I have gotten to know during the course of the project. I think especially of Rubin Pfeffer; Willa Perlman; my magnificent editor, Julian Muller; and his efficient and cheerful right hand, Joan Judge.
Through HBJ I was first introduced to Paul Bacon, whose powerful jackets have lent strength to the books in the trilogy, and to thousands of others as well. Paul stands at the top of his profession, and because of his work on North and South and its sequels, we have become friends as well as collaborators on a children’s book of our own. That kind of good luck is one of the joyous side benefits of publishing.
Frank R. Curtis, Esq., my able attorney and friend, remains a source of strength and wise counsel. In England, my agent, June Hall, and Ian and Marjory Chapman of Collins Publishers have been steadfast in their interest and encouragement.
Some books are easy to write, some are not. This was one of the latter, because of circumstances that had nothing to do with writing. In the midst of work on the first draft I lost my mother-in-law, Nina, to a cruel disease. She was a lovely, courageous woman, small in size but great in wisdom and spirit. She was born and lived most of her life in a conservative Illinois farm town. There she not only raised a strong family but publicly supported black’s and women’s rights long before either cause was fashionable. She stood by me at all times, and especially at a difficult time a few years ago when many others did not. I loved her with all my heart, and her death in October of 1986 was a grievous loss for all of us who cared for her. Against that event, both impending and actual, Heaven and Hell was written.
Another blow fell while the final draft was coming out of the computer. Last Friday my own mother died. It was a different sort of death, because she had been hospitalized for three years, and unaware of her surroundings for more than a third of that time. She was ninety-one, but that makes the loss no gentler.
Finally, without my wife Rachel there would be nothing, and certainly not this work. I acknowledge my debt of love; I can never repay it.