“I shall fret over it. By what you said, you’ll be in these parts for a while, in Nashville or—what was the name of the other town?—Castalia, that was it. I expect the postmaster will be able to track you down. You’ll hear from me, sir.” He started for the station.
Caudell went with him. Not long after Pleasants bought his ticket, a southbound train chugged into the station. More discharged Confederate soldiers got off, but none from Caudell’s company. Some stared at the warm good-bye one of their kind gave an obvious Yankee, but no one said anything about it.
Caudell decided to walk to Nashville after all. He had only the pair of one-ounce gold coins from Rivington in his pockets, and doubted a stage driver would be able to make change for his passage. Almost easier, he thought, to be honestly poor.
The walk, at his own speed instead of to the tap of a drum, was pleasant enough. Tobacco alternated with corn in the fields by the side of the road, along with forests of pine and maple. Squirrels wearing Confederate gray chattered in the branches of the trees. Caudell closed his eyes, stopped in the middle of the road. He had gone faraway, done things dark and terrible, things he’d never imagined when he set out for Raleigh to be a soldier; seen the marvels—and behind the marvels—of two nations’ capitals. Now he was home, and safe. The realization soaked into him, Warm as the sun that beat down on his head. He never wanted to leave Nash County again.
He walked on. After another mile or so, he passed a gang of blacks weeding in a tobacco field. They did not notice him; Their heads were down, intent on the work. Hoes rose and fell, rose and fell, not quickly but at a steady pace that would finish the job soon enough to keep the overseer contented—the eternal pace of the silver.
He’d grown used to faster rhythms. He also remembered, from his dealings with the Rivington men and from what he’d seen in Rivington itself, that slaves could be made to work to those rhythms. But why bother? Things got done, either way. Slowing down was part of coming home, too.
And as for slowing down, he would have screamed at the Castalia Invincibles for ambling along as he was doing. He did not get to Nashville until late afternoon. Maples and myrtles lined and shaded the road, which took the name First Street for its short journey through the town. Though born and raised in Castalia, Caudell had spent most of his adult life here: the county seat and the surrounding farms boasted enough children to keep a teacher busy.
But how small the place looked, now that he was seeing it with his traveled eyes! A well-thrown stone would fly from one end of Nashville to the other. Not even a hotel: what point to one, since the railroad had passed the town by. Old Raeford Liles ran the post office as part of his general store on the corner of First and Washington. The post office…Caudell remembered a promise he had made. He walked in. A bell above the door jingled.
The grocer looked up over the rims of his half-glasses. A grin split his whiskery, wrinkled face. “Good to have ye back with us, Nate! Tell me what the war was like.”
Filthy, boring, hungry, terrifying past any nightmare. How to explain all that to the eagerly waiting old man, to show him the stuff from which his imagined glory was distilled? At his first bump against it, Caudell saw the problem was as impossible as squaring the circle. “Another time, Mr. Liles,” he said gently. “For now, have you any writing paper?”
“Matter of fact, I do,” the storekeeper answered. “Got in some a few months back, and it don’t move what you’d call quick. Even got envelopes, if you need one.” He looked over his glasses at Caudell again, this time slyly. “You find yourself a sweetheart up in Virginny?”
“No.” Caudell shook his head at the very idea, no matter how many times he’d bedded Mollie Bean. Comrade, friend, bed partner—all that, certainly. But sweetheart? If she’d been his sweetheart, he told himself, he’d have brought her to Nashville. He borrowed a pencil to write her a note that said where he was.
“Got money to pay, or we gonna have to do some kind of swap?” By his tone, Raeford Liles expected the latter. His reading glasses magnified his eyes. They got bigger still when Caudell took out one of his one-ounce gold coins. He rang it on the counter, bit it, weighed it in an apothecary’s balance. “Goddam, it’s real,” he remarked when he was satisfied at last. “Gonna have to dig some to change it. It’d be, hmm, close on twenty gold dollars, eh? Call it nineteen and three bits, if that’s all right with you.”
Caudell had already made the calculation. “Square enough, Mr. Liles.”
“All right. Don’t you go away. I got to retreat to the plunder room.” The grocer shuffled into the back of the store, where he remained for some time. He emerged at last with a gold eagle and enough silver to make up the other nine dollars and change. “Wouldn’t give this for them ass-wipes the gov’ment calls money, but you give me straight goods, you get straight goods back.”
“Thanks.” Caudell shoved two silver half-dimes back toward him. “I’ll have a postage stamp, too, if you please.” While Liles got it, he wrote Mollie Bean’s name on the envelope, sealed the note inside. Lilies smiled knowingly when he saw the addressee. Caudell had been sure he would, but somehow it annoyed him less than he’d expected.
“Gentlemen.” Robert E. Lee bowed as he entered the Cabinet room on the second floor of the former U.S. customhouse.
“General Lee.” His fellow Southern commissioners both rose from their seats to return the compliment. Lee was struck by how odd they looked, standing side by side. Vice President Stephens was short, gaunt, gray, and sober-looking, Secretary of State Benjamin tall, portly, dark-haired, though a year older than Stephens and only four years younger than Lee, and wearing his usual bland smile, a smile that claimed he knew more about matters of state than any other three people living.
He said, “Join us, General. Our Federal counterparts, as you see, are not yet arrived.” Lee took a seat, leaned back against green baize. Note paper, pen, and inkwell waited his use, but he wished he’d thought to ask that a map be brought to the Cabinet room.
A Confederate captain, commander of the armed guard assigned to the Federal peace commissioners, strode into the Cabinet room. “The honorable William H. Seward, U.S. Secretary of State,” he announced. “The honorable Edwin M. Stanton, U.S. Secretary of War.” Polite neutrality left his voice; scorn replaced it. “Major General Benjamin F. Butler.”
The three Northern men came in. Lee, Benjamin, and Stephens rose to greet them. As they had decided beforehand, the Confederate commissioners bowed to Lincoln’s emissaries, then sat down again, thus avoiding the issue of whether or not to shake hands with Ben Butler.
One of Seward’s eyebrows rose slightly as he bowed in return, but he made no comment. Though a New Yorker, he looked hewn from New England granite—most especially the majestic promontory of his nose, which dominated his long, thin, clean-shaven face. Stanton was younger, shorter, stouter, with a thick, curly beard and a look of driving energy. He made Lee think more of the high-priced lawyer he had been than the Cabinet member he was now.
Ben Butler came last, the uniform of a Union major general still stretched over his short, corpulent frame. With his mustache curling down over each corner of his lips, he reminded Lee of nothing so much as a sagging walrus. His wattled jowls sagged, the sacks under his eyes—sacks as big and dark as carpetbags—sagged onto his cheeks, which also sagged themselves; the fringe of hair that wreathed his bald crown sagged greasily onto his neck. Even his eyelids sagged. But the eyes they half-concealed were sharp and dark and full of calculation. He was no soldier—he’d proved that in several fights—but he was not the buffoon he looked, either. Before the war, he’d been an even fancier lawyer than Stanton.
The Federal commissioners sat down across the mahogany table from their Southern hosts. After a couple of minutes of chitchat meant to be polite—but during which the three Confederates managed to avoid speaking directly to Butler—Seward said, “Gentlemen, shall we attempt to repair the unpleasantness that lies between our two governments?”
“Had you acknowledged from the outset that this land contained two governments, sir, all the unpleasantness, as you call it, would have been avoided,” Alexander Stephens pointed out. Like his body, his voice was light and thin.
“That may be true, but it’s moot now,” Stanton said. “Let’s deal with the situation as we have it, shall we? Otherwise useless recriminations will take up all our time and lead us nowhere. It was, if I may say so, useless recrimination on both sides which led to the breach between North and South.”
“You speak sensibly, Mr. Stanton,” Lee said. Stephens and Benjamin nodded. So did the other two Federals down from Washington City. He went on, “Our chief difficulty will be to keep the bitterness engendered by our Second American Revolution from poisoning further relations between the two countries which now comprise the territory formerly held by the United States of America.”
Butler said, “We have recognized your Confederacy’s independence, General Lee—recognized it at rifle point, I concede, but recognized it nonetheless.” He paused to draw in a wheezy breath. “Further, in exchange for your withdrawal only from our capital, we have removed our forces from the entire broad reach of territory under our control this past June, withdrawing to the line you yourself proposed, sir. I question the propriety of entering into these further negotiations for any purpose whatsoever.”
Judah Benjamin turned to Lee. “If I may, sir?” Lee raised one finger of his right hand as a sign for the Secretary of State to continue. Benjamin did, in the deep, rich tones of a trained orator: “Mr. Butler will surely be aware that, in a republic, soldiers have not the authority to set down final terms of peace. Nor did General Lee presume to do so. He merely arranged a halt to hostilities so that peace might afterwards be established: thus we are met here today.”
“So we find out how much you rebs can jew out of us, you mean,” Butler said coarsely.
A slow flush mounted to Benjamin’s cheeks. Lee was, outside of his profession, a peaceful man, but he knew that, had anyone touched his own honor so, he would have continued the conversation only through seconds. But Benjamin had risen to prominence despite a lifetime of such abuse. His voice was calm as he replied, “Mr. Butler will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting the wild boar in the forests of Saxony, mine were the princes of the earth.”
“Oh, bravo, Mr. Benjamin,” Stephens said softly. Edwin Stanton coughed and spluttered and looked away from Ben Butler. Even Seward’s craggy features found room for a small smile.
As for Butler, his countenance changed not a jot. It was as if he’d tried to anger Benjamin not out of hatred for his race, but solely to gain an edge in these talks. Studying him, Lee concluded that was exactly why he’d done it. No, not a buffoon, he decided. A dangerous man, the more so for being in complete control of himself
“Shall we continue?” Seward said after a moment. “Perhaps the simplest way would be to set forth the points remaining at issue between us, and then to seek to settle them one by one, not letting failure over anyone deter us from reaching agreement on such others as lend themselves to it.”
“A reasonable plan,” Alexander Stephens said. Where Butler had been personally inflammatory, the Confederate Vice President was politically so;, ‘There is, to begin with, the matter of Maryland—”
Edwin Stanton jerked as if stuck by a pin. His face turned red. “No, by God!” he shouted, pounding the table with his fist. “Maryland belongs to the Union, and we will fight again sooner than yield it. For one thing, with it goes Washington City.”
“We had Washington, sir,” Judah Benjamin interjected.
Stanton ignored him. “For another, despite any troubles we may have had there at the outset of the war, the people of Maryland stand foursquare behind the United States. They shall not willingly submit to your rule.”
Lee suspected that was true. “Maryland, My Maryland” notwithstanding, the Army of Northern Virginia had received scant aid or comfort from that state’s inhabitants in either the Sharpsburg campaign or the more recent invasion that had led to the capture of Washington. Despite some thousands of slaveowners, Maryland was in essence a Northern state. He said, “Let us set Maryland aside for the time being, merely noting now that its status has been questioned. Perhaps it may be included in some larger agreement solving the status of all disputed border states.”
“Very well, General. I did but raise the question,” Stephens said. “As Secretary Seward so wisely stated, we should proceed to settle what we can. There are, for example, the thirty-eight northwestern counties of Virginia which have been illegally included among the United States under the name West Virginia.”
“Illegally?” Seward raised a tufted eyebrow. “How can a nation founded on the principle of secession fail to acknowledge the applicability of the principle when employed against it? Surely you would not be branded hypocrites before the world?”
“Successful hypocrites seem to bear up under the opprobrium remarkably well,” Benjamin said, his habitual smile perhaps a hairsbreadth broader. “But let us continue to layout the territories whose possession remains at issue, or rather the states: we have not yet mentioned Kentucky or Missouri.”
Both sets of commissioners leaned forward. Both nations had strong claims to both states, though Federal forces were currently in possession of them. Ben Butler said, “Given the pleasant time your armies are having farther south in the valley of the Mississippi, it will be a long time before you see Missouri, Mr. Benjamin.” Now he addressed the Confederate Secretary of State as if completely indifferent to his religion.
He managed to be unpleasant nonetheless. Not all the Negro regiments the Federals had raised while occupying Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee had gone north with their white comrades upon the armistice. Some stayed to carry on the fight. Lincoln predicted as much, Lee remembered; he said it would take a war to return slavery to those parts.
“Bedford Forrest bas beaten the niggers at Sardis and Grenada,” Stephens said. “He is advancing on Grand Gulf now. I expect he will manage to hit ‘em again, as people say.” His laugh sounded like the wind ruffling dry grass.
But he did not ruffle Butler. “He may well defeat them in the field, orphaned as they be,” the fat political general admitted. “What then? Did you not recently call the territory north of the Rapidan ‘Mosby’s Confederacy’? You shall presently face the prospect of subduing a ‘Nigger Union’ down there, and may you have the same joy of putting it down as we did with Mosby.”
Obnoxious as Butler was, Lee began to see why, aside from his political connections, Lincoln had chosen him as a peace commissioner. Born with an eye toward his own advantage, he sought advantage for his country with a like single-mindedness.
Lee said, “Thus far, we appear to have more problems than solutions for them. Shall we continue to set them forth, so they all lay on the table at once?”
“We may as well,” Seward said, “though I hope we shan’t provoke ourselves into a new round of fighting because our difficulties appear insuperable.”
“The state of Texas borders both the Indian Territory and New Mexico Territory,” Alexander Stephens said significantly.
“Good luck sending another expedition to New Mexico,” Stanton replied. “We can bring men down from Colorado faster than you can get them across the West Texas desert. We showed you that two years ago.”
“You are likely to be right there, sir,” Lee said. Stanton, he noted, made no such claim for the Indian Territory north of Texas. The war there had not ended with the armistice, for the Indian tribes roused to battle by the Union and Confederacy could not be checked so easily by the Great White Fathers, commands. Only chaos ruled the Territory now.
“Are there any other territorial questions at issue between us?” Judah Benjamin asked.
Stanton said, “There had better not be, for we’ve gone from the Atlantic to the Rio Grande. Wherever we touch, we disagree.”
“So it would appear.
” The Confederate Secretary of State’s smile never wavered. “That leaves the question of the amount of indemnity owed to us for the destruction U.S. forces wreaked upon our land. I would say”—which meant, as everyone at the table knew, that Jefferson Davis would say—”two hundred million dollars seems an equitable sum.”
“You may say it if you like,” Seward replied. “I gather that your constitution, derived as it is from our own, guarantees freedom of speech. Collecting what you claim is another matter altogether.”
“Hell will freeze over before you rebs see two hundred million dollars,” Stanton agreed.” A quarter of that sum would be extravagant.”
“We may not have to wait for the devil to get chilblains, nor anywhere near so long,” Benjamin said silkily. “Today is September 5, after all. In two months, you Northerners will hold your Presidential election. Would Mr. Lincoln not like to have a treaty of peace to present to the people before November 8?”
The three Federal commissioners looked glumly across the table at him. Defeat had turned Northern politics even more chaotic than they had been in the then-United States during the four-cornered Presidential race of 1860. Lee’s seizure of Washington had delayed the Republican convention in Baltimore, but when it finally convened, it renominated Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin…whereupon the radical Republicans seceded—both Northern papers and the Richmond Dispatch used the word, with perhaps different flavors of irony attached to it—from the party and put forward as their candidate John c. Fremont, who as general in Missouri had tried to emancipate that state’s slaves in 1861, only to see his order overruled by Lincoln. They chose Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee to run with him; Johnson still stubbornly refused to admit that his state no longer acknowledged the authority of Washington, D.C.
The Democrats were in no better condition. Meeting in Chicago, they had just finished choosing Governor Horatio Seymour of New York as their Presidential candidate, with Clement Vallandigham of Ohio for a running mate. And General McClellan, disappointed at failing to gain the nomination, was vowing that he, like Fremont, would mount an independent campaign. That second split gave Lincoln a ray of hope, but only a faint one.
The Guns of the South Page 31