The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  Judah Benjamin rubbed it in: “Perhaps we should wait to see how your patron fares come November, gentlemen. A Democratic administration might well prove more reasonable.” Any administration with Vallandigham in it was likely to be reasonable from a Southern point of view; he had favored accommodation with the Confederacy even when its prospects looked blackest.

  But Ben Butler said,” No matter what happens in the election, I remind you that Abraham Lincoln ‘Shall remain President of the United States until March 4 proximo.”

  “A point well taken,” Lee said. Though reluctant to agree with Butler on anything, he found a half-year’s delay unconscionable. “The sooner peace comes, the better for all, North and South alike.”

  “A man bolder than I would be required to presume to disagree with General Lee,” Alexander Stephens said. “Let us continue, then.” Lee could not tell what went on behind Judah Benjamin’s smiling mask. But Benjamin did not say no.

  Secretary of State Seward said, “Having set forth the areas where we disagree, I think we would be hard-pressed to do much more today. In any case, I should like to telegraph a statement of your position to President Lincoln, and to receive his instructions before proceeding further. May I propose that we adjourn, to meet again on Wednesday the seventh?”

  Lee found both Stephens and Benjamin looking at him. It should not have been that way; the other two commissioners outranked him by virtue of their places in the civil government. But they were looking at him. He would not show annoyance in front of the men from the United States. “That seems satisfactory to me,” he said, adding, “We shall also have to consult with our President as to our future course.”

  “Simple enough for you,” Stanton said. “We, though, are like dogs tethered by a wire leash.” His voice had a rumble in it that made it sound like a growl. Lee smiled at the conceit.

  Butler said, “Better dogs tethered by a wire leash than a dog running loose from a wire leash, as Forrest did last June.”

  “I trust the gentlemen in this room will not permit General Butler’s opinion to go beyond it,” Lee said quickly. Butler was no gentleman; he’d made that plain by his every action during the war, and again by his slur aimed at Judah P. Benjamin. But Nathan Bedford Forrest, by all accounts, was no gentleman either. If he heard what Butler had called him, he would not bother with the niceties of a formal challenge. He would simply Shoot Butler down…like a dog.

  The Federal commissioners rose, bowed their way out. When they were gone, Alexander Stephens said, “If you will forgive me, General, Mr. Secretary, I shall leave the consultation in your no doubt capable hands. The President and I, while always preserving our respect for each other, have not been in agreement often enough of late for us to find it easy to speak together without friction. Good day to you both; I shall see you on Wednesday.” Getting out of his chair took a struggle, but he managed, and walked out of the Cabinet room.

  Benjamin and Lee walked up the flight of stairs to Jefferson Davis’s office. “Ironic, is it not,” the Secretary of State said, “that four years ago Benjamin Butler did everything in his power to gain Davis the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. I wonder where we should all be today had he succeeded.”

  “Somewhere other than here, is my guess,” Lee answered, admiring the dispassionate way in which Benjamin spoke of the man who had insulted him. He also wondered if Benjamin knew the true origins of the Rivington men; his own thoughts, since the day when Andries Rhoodie set forth those origins to him, had frequently dwelt on the mutability of history. Before he could find a way to ask that would Cover him if the answer was no, he and the Secretary of State reached the President’s door.

  Davis listened to their report, then said,” About as I expected. Maryland would cost us another war to win, and would make the United States our eternal enemy even if we took it. Likewise Virginia’s departed counties.” He did not mention the troubles Lee had had in what was now West Virginia early in the war. Every Confederate general there had come to grief.

  “I think we will win the Indian Territory in the end, for whatever it may prove to be worth,” Benjamin said.

  “As to what, who can say? Kentucky was worth little when I was born there.” Davis frowned. “I should like to gain possession of New Mexico, and Arizona and California with it. A railroad across the continent will surely come soon, and I would have it come on a southern route. But again, that will prove difficult. The Federals currently hold the land, and we should be hard-pressed either to conquer it or, given the present unfortunate state of the Treasury, to buy it from them even if they were willing to sell. Perhaps we shall be able to make arrangements with the Emperor Maximilian for a route from Texas to the Pacific coast of Mexico.”

  “Better that a transcontinental railroad should lie entire within our own territory,” Benjamin said.

  “Not if we have to fight to make a thousand-mile stretch of that territory our own,” Lee replied. “Stanton had the right of it earlier today; our logistics are poor, and we have as yet few repeaters in the Trans-Mississippi. Besides which, no war with the United States would remain confined to the western frontier.”

  Jefferson Davis sighed. “I fear you are probably right, sir. And even with the repeaters, we desperately need to restore ourselves before we contemplate further combat. Very well; if we cannot talk the Federals out of New Mexico and Arizona, we shall have to go on without them. The same cannot be said of Kentucky and Missouri.”

  “The United States will not yield them,” Lee warned. “Lincoln said as much when I was in Washington City, and his commissioners were not only firm but also vehement on the subject this afternoon.”

  “I shall not tamely yield them to the North, either,” Davis said. “With them, we should be a match for and independent of the United States in all respects. Without them, the balance of power would tilt the other way. We should find especially valuable the manufactories which have sprung up in Louisville and elsewhere along the Ohio. I reluctantly infer from the war that we may not remain a nation made up solely of agriculturalists, lest in a future conflict the United States overwhelm us with their numbers and their industries.”

  “We have the Rivington men to set against their factories,” Benjamin said. “But for the Rivington men, I gather we should have been overwhelmed.” He does know, then, Lee thought.

  Davis said, “The Rivington men are with us but not of us. Against the day when their purposes and ours might diverge, I would have the Confederate States capable of proving a match for and independent of them, as well as of the North.”

  “That seems a wise precaution,” Benjamin agreed.

  Davis was not really interested in the Rivington men at the moment; the talks with the United States were his principal concern. He pulled the conversation back toward those talks; “How did the Federals take the demand for two hundred million?”

  “Noisily,” Benjamin answered, which made the President laugh. The Secretary of State went on, “Stanton claimed a fourth of that would be—extravagant was the word he used.”

  “Which means the United States might pay that fourth, or more,” Davis said. “Even fifty million in specie would be more backing than our paper now enjoys, and would greatly boost confidence in that paper’s value, which in turn would help bring prices down to a more realistic level. Gentlemen, I rely on you to wring as large a sum from the Northern coffers as you may.”

  “We shall, Mr. President,” Lee said.

  “I have perfect faith in your abilities—and also in those of Mr. Stephens, though we are often at odds with each other,” Jefferson Davis said: almost a mirror image of the words the Vice President had used to describe their relationship. Davis continued, “Now I must needs return to these other matters of state, particularly this latest note from the British minister regarding our prospective participation in the naval patrol off the African coast to interdict the slave trade. You have seen it, Mr. Benjamin?”

  “Yes, sir,” Benjamin said.
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  “I do not care for its tone. Having recognized us, the British ought to use us with the politeness they grant to any other nation. Our Constitution forbids the importation of slaves from Africa, which should suffice to satisfy them but evidently does not. In any case, we, unlike the United States, have not the naval force to permit us to comply with the Ashburton treaty, a fact of which the minister cannot be unaware, but with which he chooses to bait us.” Davis’s lip curled in scorn.

  Judah Benjamin said, “The nations of Europe continue to abhor our policy, try as we will to convince them we cannot do otherwise. Mr. Mason has written from London that Her Majesty’s government might well have been willing to extend us recognition two years ago, were it not for the continuation of slavery among us: so Lord Russell assured him, at any rate. M. Thouvenel, the French foreign minister, has expressed similar sentiments to Mr. Slidell in Paris.”

  Slavery, Lee thought. In the end, the outside world’s view of the Confederate States of America was colored almost exclusively by its response to the South’s peculiar institution. Never mind that the U.S. Constitution was a revocable compact between independent states, never mind that the North had consistently used its numerical majority to force through Congress tariffs that worked only to ruin the South. So long as black men were bought and sold, all the high ideals of the Confederacy would be ignored.

  President Davis said, “The ‘free’ factory worker in Manchester or Paris—yes, in Boston as well—is free only to starve. As Mr. Hammond of South Carolina put it so pungently in the chambers of the U.S. Senate a few years ago, every society rests upon a mudsill of brute labor, from which the edifice of civilization arises. We are but more open and honest about the nature of our mudsill than other nations, which gladly exploit a worker’s labor but, when he can no longer provide it, cast him aside like a used sheet of foolscap.”

  Nothing but the truth there, Lee thought—but also nothing that would convince anyone who already opposed slavery, as did the vast majority of countries and individual men and women outside the Confederate States. Diffidently, he said, “Mr. President, now that we are no longer at war with the United States, would it not be possible to fit out a single naval vessel for duty off the African coast? The symbolic value of such a gesture would, it seems to me, far outweigh the cost it would entail.”

  Davis’s eyes flashed. Lee read Et tu. Brute? in them. Then calculation replaced anger. Judah Benjamin said, “If that be feasible, Mr. President, it would go some way toward accommodating us to the usages of the leading powers.”

  “And how far did those powers go toward accommodating us before we assured our own independence?” Davis said, his voice bitter with remembered slight. “Not a single step, as I recall: confident in their strength, they despised us, Britain chief among them. And now they expect us to forget? Not likely, sir, by God!”

  “In no way do I advise you to forget, sir,” Benjamin said. “I merely concur with General Lee in suggesting that we demonstrate acquiescence where we may, against a time when we are in a position to be able to give concrete evidence pf our displeasure.”

  Davis drummed the fingers of his right hand on his desk. “Very well, sir. Enquire of Mr. Mallory at the Navy Department as to the practicability of doing as General Lee suggested, then prepare a memorandum detailing for me his response. If the thing can be done, I shall communicate to the British our willingness to do it. There are times, I confess, when I believe our lives would have been simpler had no Negroes ever been imported to these shores. But then we should only have required some other mudsill upon which to build our society.”

  “Futile to pretend now that the black man is no part of our Confederacy,” Lee said. “And as he is such a part, we shall have to define his place in our nation.”

  “One reason we fought the late war was to define the black man’s place in our nation, or rather to preserve our previous definition of his place,” Benjamin said. “Do you now feel that definition to be inadequate?”

  “Preserving it may yet prove more expensive than we can afford,” Lee said. “Thanks to the Federals, the Negroes of parts of Virginia, the Carolina coast, Tennessee, and the Mississippi valley have had a year, two, three, to accustom themselves to the idea of being free men and women. General Forrest may—General Forrest had better—defeat their armed bands in the field. But can he at the point of a bayonet restore their previous habit of servility?”

  For some time, none of the three men in President Davis’s office spoke. Davis scowled at Lee’s words; even Benjamin’s customary smile slipped. Lee himself felt rather surprised, for what he’d said took him farther than he’d consciously intended to go. But a smoldering slave insurrection, no doubt aided and abetted from the United States, was every Southern man’s worst nightmare.

  He glanced toward Jefferson Davis. “Tell me, sir: If, earlier in the war, you found us forced to the choice between returning to the United States with all our institutions guaranteed by law and carrying on as an independent nation at the cost of freeing our Negroes, which would you have done?”

  “When the delegates of the Southern states met in Montgomery, General, we made a nation,” Davis said firmly; Lee gave him credit for not hesitating. “To preserve that nation, I would at need have taken any steps required, up to and including carrying on a guerrilla war in the mountains and valleys of the interior against Federals occupying an our settled places. Any steps required, sir, any at all.”

  Lee nodded thoughtfully; no one who once met President Davis could doubt that, when he said a thing, he meant it. “I am relieved it did not come to that, Mr. President.” He stroked his gray beard. “I fear I am too old to have taken up the bushwhacker’s trade.”

  “As am I, but at need I should have learned it,” Davis said.

  “Where now?” Judah Benjamin asked. “Shall Forrest continue unchecked with fire and the sword, or will you offer the Negroes in arms against us an amnesty during which they may peacefully return to our fold?”

  “As what? As free men?” Davis shook his head. “That would create more troubles than it solves, by offering our Negroes incentive to rise up against us and, once risen, to continue their insurrection in the hope of so impressing us by their spirit that we yield them what they seek. No, let them first see that fire and the sword remain our exclusive province and that they may not hope to stand against us. Once they grow convinced of that, a show of leniency is likelier to produce the results we desire.”

  “As you think best, Mr. President,” Benjamin replied.

  Jefferson Davis turned to Lee. “How say you, sir?”

  “I say that the prospect of armed Negroes stubbornly resisting so able an officer as General Forrest, and the performance of the colored regiments which confronted the Army of Northern Virginia, trouble me profoundly,” Lee answered. “That the one group shall be defeated, as the other was, is hardly open to doubt. But if the Negro makes a proper soldier, can he continue to make a proper slave?”

  Davis tried to make light of what he’d said: “Don’t tell me you are turning abolitionist, sir?”

  “That is not a word to use lightly to a Southern man, Mr. President,” Lee said, biting his lip. Thinking of General Cleburne’s memorial that had urged the arming and emancipation of certain black men, and also of General Hill’s loathing of the institution of slavery, he felt he had to add, “If I were, I should hardly be the only Confederate officer to hold such sentiments.” Davis’s mouth twisted, but after a few seconds he had to nod.

  Judah Benjamin sighed loudly. “We left the United States not least in the hope that the Negro problem would vex us no further once we were free and independent. And yet we have it with us still, and now no one to blame for it but ourselves—and the Negro, of course.” That gnomic observation effectively ended the meeting.

  * X *

  When Lee returned to the rented house on Franklin Street that evening, he was in a dark and thoughtful mood. The sight of the black serving woman, Julia, who o
pened the door for him did nothing to ease his mind. “Evenin’, Marse Robert.’ she said, “Yo’ wife and daughters, they already eat—they don’ expec’ you be so late. Plenty o’ chicken ‘n’ dumplings left over, though.”

  “Thank you, Julia.” He stepped into the front hall, took off his hat, hung it on the hat rack. Then, after taking a couple of steps toward the dining room, he paused and turned back.

  “Somethin’ wrong, Marse Robert?” Julia asked. The candle she held highlighted the frown lines on her face. She said quickly, “Hope I ain’t done nothin’ to displease you.”

  He hastened to reassure her: “No, Julia, not at all.” But he still did not go in to have supper. When he spoke again, he was as cautious as he had been while addressing President Davis: “Julia, have you ever thought you would like to be free?”

  The candlelight, with its exaggerated shadows, played up her shift of expression, or rather her shift to the lack of expression slaves used to conceal themselves from their masters. “Reckon everybody—everybody colored, I mean—think about that now and again, suh.” Her voice likewise yielded him nothing.

  He persisted: “What would you do if you were free?”

  “Don’t rightly know what I could do, Marse Robert. Don’t have much book learnin’. Much? Don’t have none.” Julia kept studying Lee from behind the cautious mask her face wore. She must have decided he meant what he said, for after a moment she went on, “Wouldn’t mind findin’ out what free was like, I tell you that, suh.”

  “I thought as much.” It was the answer Lee would have given, were he in Julia’s shoes; it was, he thought, the answer anyone with spirit, black or white, man or woman, would give. “If you were free, would you be willing to stay on here with my family and work for wages?”