“History has never recorded any man less anxious to be noted as a conqueror than I.”
“Maybe so, but history will also note you are one.” Lee and Lincoln walked together to the door of the reception room. Lincoln opened it, gestured for Lee to precede him through. In the antechamber outside, Lee’s staff officers stood chatting amicably enough with a couple of bright-looking young men in civilian clothes. All heads turned toward the general and the President. No one spoke, but a single question was visible in the eyes of all. Lee answered it: “We shall have peace, gentlemen.”
His aides shouted and clapped their hands. The two men in civilian suits also smiled, but more hesitantly. Their gaze swung to Lincoln. “I see no good prospects remaining for the continuation of this war,” he said. Where to Lee that was a matter for rejoicing, Lincoln sounded funereal. Lee imagined what he would have felt, presenting his sword to General Grant in a conquered Richmond. In deliberately lighter tones, Lincoln continued, “General Lee, let me present my secretaries, Mr. John Hay and Mr. John Nicolay: They’re good lads; they should enjoy the privilege of meeting the latest hero.”
“Hardly that,” Lee protested. He shook each secretary’s hand. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, gentlemen.”
“Pleased to meet you, too, General Lee, but I’d sooner have done it under different circumstances,” Hay said boldly.
“Now see here, sir—” Walter Taylor began.
Lee held up a hand to head off his aide’s anger. “Let him speak as he will, Major. Would you wish otherwise, were your cause overthrown?”
“I suppose not,” Taylor said grudgingly.
“There you are, then.” Lee turned back to Lincoln. “Mr. President, if you will excuse me, I should like to give the good news of our”—he searched for the least wounding way to put it—”our agreement that there should be an armistice to the brave men who have borne so much these past three years.”
“I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” Lincoln said. “If this thing must be, we ought to put the best face we can on it and let them see us in accord.” Surprised but pleased, Lee nodded.
The crowd of ragged Confederates on the White House lawn had doubled and more since he went in to confer with Lincoln. The trees were full of men who had climbed up so they could see over their comrades. Off in the distance, cannon still occasionally thundered; rifles popped like firecrackers. Lee quietly said to Lincoln, “Will you send out your sentries under flag of truce to bring word of the armistice to those Federal positions still firing upon my men?”
“I’ll see to it,” Lincoln promised. He pointed to the soldiers in gray, who had quieted expectantly when Lee came out. “Looks like you’ve given me sentries enough, even if their coats are the wrong color.”
Few men could have joked so with their cause in ruins around them. Respecting the Federal President for his composure, Lee raised his voice: “Soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, after three years of arduous service, we have achieved that for which we took up arms—”
He got no farther. With one voice, the men before him screamed out their joy and relief. The unending waves of noise beat at him like surf from a stormy sea. Battered forage caps and slouch hats flew through the air. Soldiers jumped up and down, pounded on one another’s shoulders, danced in clumsy rings, kissed each other’s bearded, filthy faces. Lee felt his own eyes grow moist. At last the magnitude of what he had won began to sink in.
Abraham Lincoln turned away from the celebrating rebels. Lee saw that his hollow cheeks were also wet. He set a hand on Lincoln’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. Perhaps you should not have come out after all.”
“You don’t suppose I’d’ve heard them in there?” Lincoln asked.
Lee sought a reply, found none. He looked to the bottom of the steps, where Traveller remained calm in the midst of chaos. With a last nod to Lincoln, he went down the stairway to his horse. As he’d told the U.S. President, he had another call to make in Washington.
Neither the Stars and Stripes nor the Confederacy’s Stainless Banner flew over the building up to which Lee rode. No soldiers crowded in front of it to gape and point save the few who had followed him through the streets of the city, and they were gaping and pointing at him rather than his destination. Nevertheless, after the White House, this nondescript, two-story structure with the Union Jack on the roof was the most important place in the city for the South.
He walked up the slate pathway to the front door, rapped once on the polished brass knocker, and waited. Over the British ministry, he had not even the rights of a conqueror. His staff officers dismounted from their horses but did not presume to follow him, not here.
The door opened. An elderly, very bald man in formal attire peered out at him. “You would be General Lee?” he asked. His accent was soft in a way different from Lee’s Virginia speech.
“I am he,” Lee said, bowing. “I should like to pay my respects to Lord Lyons, if I may.”
“He has been expecting you, sir,” the elderly man said. “If you will come with me—?”
He led Lee down a long hall, past several chambers where clerks’ heads came up from their papers so they could stare at him, then into a sitting room. “Your excellency, the famous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. General, Lord Richard Lyons.”
“Thank you, Hignett. You may go.” The British Minister to the United States got up from his overstuffed armchair.
Lee already had his hand out. “I am delighted to meet you at last, your excellency,” he said sincerely. The South had been struggling to win British recognition since before the war with the Union began.
“General Lee,” Lord Lyons murmured. He was in his late forties, with a round, very red face, dark hair and side whiskers, and almost equally dark circles under his eyes. An elegantly tailored suit came close to disguising his plumpness. “Please make yourself comfortable, General. You are indeed the man of the moment.”
“Thank you, your excellency.” Lee sat in a chair not far from the one from which Lord Lyons had risen. “As I have, ah, come to Washington City, I thought it fitting that I pay my respects to you, since your government has no present minister in Richmond.”
Lord Lyons steepled his fingertips.” A state of affairs you hope will change.”
“I do, your excellency. Either the Confederate States of America are an independent nation, or they are but a dependency of the United States. No other earthly power claims the right to govern us, and my presence here argues against the second interpretation of our status that I mentioned.”
“Argues powerfully, you are too discreet to say. Am I correctly informed that you visited President Lincoln before you came here?”
“Yes, your excellency.” Lee concealed his surprise, and after a moment realized surprise was foolish. It was the business of the British minister to be well informed.
“May I enquire as to the results of that meeting?” Lord Lyons said. Lee briefly sketched the terms of the armistice agreement with Lincoln. Lord Lyons listened intently. When Lee was done, the minister gave a slow nod. “He has in effect, then, conceded the independence of the Confederacy.”
“In effect, yes. What choice had he, sir? Our armies have in the current campaigning season been uniformly victorious”
“This due in no small measure to the new repeaters with which you have equipped yourselves,” Lord Lyons interrupted. He could not hide the keen interest in his voice. Behind a calm exterior, Lee smiled. Everyone was keen to find out where those repeaters came from. He wondered what Lord Lyons would have made of the true answer. He remained unsure just what to make of it himself.
But that was by the way. “Yes, your excellency, with the aid of our new rifles, we have halted or driven back the Federals on all fronts—else I should not be here conversing with you. President Lincoln rightly recognized”—he chose the word with deliberation—”that it would be only a matter of time before we freed our territory and wisely chose to spare his soldiers t
he suffering they would have to undergo in struggles bound to be futile.”
“With these victories to which you refer, the Confederate States do seem to have retrieved their falling fortunes,” Lord Lyons said. “I have no reason to doubt that Her Majesty’s government will before long recognize that fact.”
“Thank you, your excellency,” Lee said quietly. Even had Lincoln refused to give up the war—not impossible, with the Mississippi valley and many coastal pockets held by virtue of Northern naval power and hence relatively secure from rebel AK-47s—recognition by the greatest empire on earth would have assured Confederate independence.
Lord Lyons held up a hand. “Many among our upper classes will be glad enough to welcome you to the family of nations, both as a result of your successful fight for self-government and because you have given a black eye to the often vulgar democracy of the United States. Others, however, will judge your republic a sham, with its freedom for white men based upon Negro slavery, a notion loathsome to the civilized world. I should be less than candid if I failed to number myself among the latter group.”
“Slavery was not the reason the Southern states chose to leave the Union,” Lee said. He was aware he sounded uncomfortable, but went on, “We sought only to enjoy the sovereignty guaranteed us under the Constitution, a right the North wrongly denied us. Our watchword all along has been, we wish but to be left alone.”
“And what sort of country shall you build upon that watchword, General?” Lord Lyons asked. “You cannot be left entirely alone; you are become, as I said, a member of the family ‘of nations. Further, this war has been hard on you. Much of your land has been ravaged or overrun, and, in those places where the Federal army has been, slavery lies dying. Shall you restore it there at the point of a bayonet? Gladstone said October before last, perhaps a bit prematurely, that your Jefferson Davis had made an army, the beginnings of a navy, and, more important than either, a nation. You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?”
Lee did not answer for most of a minute. This pudgy little man in his comfortable chair had put into a nutshell all of his own worries and fears. He’d had scant time to dwell on them, not with the war always uppermost in his thoughts. But the war had not invalidated any of the British minister’s questions—some of which Lincoln had also asked—only put off the time at which they would have to be answered. Now that time drew near. Now that the Confederacy was a nation, what sort of nation would it be?
At last he said, “Your excellency, at this precise instant I cannot fully answer you, save to say that, whatever sort of nation we become, it shall be one of our own choosing.”
It was a good answer. Lord Lyons nodded, as if in thoughtful approval. Then Lee remembered the Rivington men. They too had their ideas on what the Confederate States of America should become.
* VIII *
Mollie Bean’s eyes flashed when she saw Caudell. “You hear the latest of what that rascal Forrest done?”
“No. Tell me,” he said eagerly. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s exploits were usually worth hearing, and Mollie, being who she was, usually—as now—found out about them before most people.
She said, “When the telegraph for the armistice got to him, he made like it never did, and took his boys hell-for-leather up into Tennessee—wrecked a big long stretch of the railroad that was feedin’ General Sherman’s army. Some o’ them bluecoats is nearly starvin’, I hear tell.”
“After this past winter, I know more about starving than those Yankees are ever likely to,” Caudell said. “But what did Lincoln and the other Federal bigwigs have to say about him breaking the armistice that way?”
“Reckon they carried on some, but with us here where we are, what can they do but carry on?”
Mollie waved a hand. Along with a good part of the rest of A. P. Hill’s corps, the 47th North Carolina was encamped in the White Lot, the big empty space between the White House and the stump of the Washington Monument. The barracks they occupied had been intended for Pennsylvania regiments on the way south; now the shoe was on the other foot. What with those fine barracks and rations from the bottomless Federal depots, Caudell hadn’t lived so well since he joined the army, and seldom before.
Mollie went on, “They’re callin’ him Hit-’em-Again Forrest, ‘cause they say he wanted to hit the Yankees one more lick, to remind ‘em they was whipped.”
“Hit-’em-Again Forrest.” Caudell said it slowly, savoring the taste. “Yup, that does sound like him. And that’s about the best nickname I’ve heard this side of Stonewall Jackson.” With some dignity, he added, “Not that Nathan’s a bad name.”
“That’s right, it’s just about the same as yours.” Mollie laughed. “Too bad it ain’t your bankrolls that’s just about the same.”
Caudell laughed too, ruefully. “Too bad is right. But if he made his money dealing niggers the way I’ve heard, well, it’s not anything I’d feel easy about doing for myself.” He knew that was hypocritical. The Confederate constitution enshrined the right to own slaves and trade them within the nation’s borders. The Southern economy rested on the backs of its black labor force. But a lot of people who could never have stomached the butcher’s trade ate meat.
Mollie waved again. “Isn’t this grand? Here I am, a nobody from a nowhere town in North Carolina, and now I’ve seen Richmond and Washington City both. Who’d’ve figured I’d travel so far? Must be close to two hundred miles down to Rivington.”
Caudell nodded. The army had expanded his life. Before the war, outside of a couple of trips to Raleigh, he’d spent his whole life inside Nash County. Now he’d been in several different states and even—though recalling it still came hard sometimes—a foreign country: the United States.
Whether in a foreign country or not, Washington was still the source of traditions he held dear, as London once might have been to an early Carolina colonist. He’d spent most of his off-duty time wandering through the city rubbernecking, and was far from the only soldier in gray to go off and see what he could see. The White House secretaries had had to set up a regular tour, taking Confederates through the Presidential mansion in company-sized groups.
He’d also walked over to the Capitol. Federal senators and congressmen were beginning to return to Washington, though a fair number of the important-looking men he’d seen flinched from him and his comrades as if they were Satan’s spawn set loose on earth.
The ordinary folk of Washington City did better at taking their occupiers in stride. Their principal complaint against the rebels was that they had too little money, and that in Confederate currency. Lee had issued an order that made the locals take Southern money in exchange for goods and services, but he could not make them like it.
Caudell had bought himself a drink at Willard’s, a couple of blocks east of the White House, on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Lincoln and Grant had each spent his first night in Washington City at Willard’s. Everyone who was anyone in Federal Washington frequented the hotel; its bars, sitting and dining rooms, and corridors had probably seen more war business done than any other place in the city, the White House not excepted. That was why Caudell went there; Willard’s fame—or notoriety—had spread south as well as north.
He found his shot overpriced and the whiskey villainous. “Is this what you served General Grant?” he asked indignantly.
The bartender, an Irishman of impressive size, glared down at him. “The very same, Johnny Reb, and I found himself not so particular as you.” Caudell shut up. From some of the stories he’d heard about Grant’s drinking, the fellow might even have been telling the truth.
Fighting Joe Hooker had also drunk at Willard’s, and given his name to the blocks south and east of it. Caudell stayed away from what the natives called Hooker’s Division. Confederates who did go in to visit such establishments as Mme. Russell’s Bake Oven, Headquarters U.S.A., and Gentle Annie Lyle’s place quickly learned to trave
l in pairs. Gamblers, pickpockets, flimflam men, and the girls themselves preyed on soldiers in gray as readily as they had on soldiers in blue. Plenty of men came back without a cent; a few did not come back at all.
Outside of the monuments, Washington City left Claudell disappointed. So had Richmond, outside of Capitol Square. They both seemed just towns intent on their own concerns, For the leading cities of great nations, somehow that was not enough. Rocky Mount and Nashville back in Nash County were towns intent on their own concerns. One day, maybe, he’d get back to Nash County and to his own concerns. Soon, he hoped.
The Confederate bands on the White House lawn struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” General Lee saluted the color-bearer, who marched before the party of high-ranking Federal officers coming to reclaim Washington from the Army of Northern Virginia. The flag of the United States had been his, not long ago, and still commanded his respect.
The Federals also had a band with them. It returned the compliment by playing “Dixie”—not the South’s official anthem, but the tune most closely associated with it. A short, slim man with a close-trimmed, light brown beard and three stars on each shoulder strap stepped out from among his comrades, strode briskly up to the waiting Confederate officers. He saluted. “General Lee?” His voice was quiet, his accent western.
Lee returned the salute. “General Grant,” he acknowledged formally, then went on, “We met once in Mexico, I believe, sir, though I confess to my embarrassment that your face does not seem perfectly familiar to me. Doubtless it is the beard.”
“I remember the day,” Grant said. “I recognized you at once, beard or no.”
“You’re too kind, when I’ve also gone all gray while you remain so brightly fledged,” Lee said. “Let me commend you on your excellent band.”
Grant shrugged. His long cigar waggled at one corner of his mouth. “I care nothing for music, I’m afraid. I know only two tunes: one’s ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the other isn’t.” He brought the small joke out pat, as if he’d used it many times before.
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