“The pleasure is mine, General Forrest. Forgive me, I beg, for not knowing you at once.” As he spoke, Lee studied the famous cavalry commander. Forrest was a big man, a couple of inches taller than he, with wide shoulders but otherwise Whipcord lean. He bore himself almost as erectly as Jefferson Davis. His hair receded at the temples; gray streaked it and his chin beard. Deep shadows dwelt in the hollows of his cheeks.
His eyes—as soon as Lee saw those gray-blue eyes, he understood how Forrest had earned his reputation, for good and ill. They were the hooded eyes of a bird of prey, utterly intent on whatever lay before them. Of all the officers Lee had known, he could think of only two whose visages bore the stamp of implacable purpose that marked Nathan Bedford Forrest: Jackson, whom he would mourn forever, and John Bell Hood. What this man set out to do, he would do, or die trying.
Lee said, “I was just heading home, sir. Will you take supper with me?”
“I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble, General,” Forrest said doubtfully. His voice was soft and pleasant, with a strong flavor of backwoods Tennessee.
“Nonsense,” Lee declared. “There will be plenty. In any case, I may keep you too busy to eat, as I intend to talk your ears off.”
Forrest’s smile enlivened his brooding features remarkably. “I am at your service, then, General Lee, and I will make sure I keep my hands on my ears at all times.”
“My house is only a few blocks away,” Lee said. “Do come along. I’ve wanted to meet you for some time, to discuss with you your extraordinary campaigns in the west, but circumstances have kept you in the field even while the rest of us enjoyed the fruits of peace.”
“Blame the Yankees, for trifling with our niggers,” Forrest said.
“I am sick to death of blame, General Forrest, and of endless recriminations on both sides, let me say,” Lee added hastily. “The United States are here, as are we; our two nations have a common border which stretches for two thousand miles, more or less. Either we learn not to be distracted by our differences or we fight a war every generation, as the nations of Europe are in the habit of doing. I would not care to see such folly come to our shores.”
“Spoken like the true Christian you are, sir,” Forrest said. “Still and all, knowing I can lick the Yankees whenever I need to will make me sleep better of nights. As for the nigger soldiers they left behind, we’ll be years getting’ ‘em all to remember who their masters are. And for that, I wish God would send all the Yankees straight to hell.”
“Do you think it can be done, even given years?” Lee asked.
“Kill enough of ‘em, General Lee, sir, and the rest of ‘em will get the notion,” Forrest said with brutal pragmatism.
The cavalry general and Negro fighter seemed very sure of himself, but Lee still wondered if simple savagery could produce even a Tacitean peace. The promise of force had always had its place in maintaining slavery and keeping revolts from breaking out, yet that promise rarely had to be kept in the days before the war. He wondered how—and whether—the Confederacy could withstand a constantly simmering rebellion.
Hoping to change the subject, he asked Forrest, “What brings you to Richmond at last?”
“I think I wrecked the last nigger robber band that halfway deserved to be called a regiment, so I had the leisure to present my report in person,” Forrest answered. “I gave it to a clerk this afternoon, so I daresay you’ll see it tomorrow. I thought I’d look at the slave markets, too; plenty of prime niggers here, since this is the capital.”
“I see.” Lee could not keep a certain chill from his voice. He knew Forrest had made his fortune trading slaves, but he had not expected him to refer to it so openly. No Virginia gentleman would have done so, that was certain.
Forrest might have picked the thought from his mind. “I hope I’ve not offended you, sir. My father was a blacksmith who neither read nor wrote. He died when I was sixteen, leaving me the oldest of eight brothers and three sisters, so I’ve had to come up as I can. My son will be a gentleman, but I’ve not had the leisure to learn that way of life myself.” He drew himself up straighter than ever in touchy pride.
“You’ve done well for yourself, General Forrest, and for your family, and for the Confederate States,” Lee said, which had the virtue of being both true and polite—gentlemanly, as a matter of fact. Nevertheless, he could not quite suppress a touch of pique at Forrest’s implied criticism of his own upbringing and social class.
By then the two men had reached Lee’s house. Lee knocked on the front door, took off his coat as he waited for Julia to open it. Forrest followed his example; now that spring was here, an uncovered moment at night was no longer uncomfortable. Crickets chirped here and there in the grass.
The door swung open. Julia’s smile of greeting for Lee turned to a questioning look when she saw he had a companion. As he handed her his coat, he said, “I’ve brought a guest home, as you see. This is Lieutenant General Forrest, of the Confederate cavalry.”
Julia had been reaching out to take Forrest’s coat and hang it on the tree by Lee’s. The motion froze. So did Julia’s face. For the first time since Lee had manumitted her, he saw her features go blank in the special way Negroes used to hide all feelings from their masters. After a long pause, she did hang up Forrest’s coat. Then she turned and hurried away, long skirts rustling about her.
“You’re too easy on your staff, sir,” Forrest remarked with a tone of professional expertise. “Slaves need to have in mind who the masters are.”
“She’s a freedwoman,” Lee said. “I no longer own any slaves.”
“Oh.” Now Forrest hid whatever his true feelings were behind a mask as impenetrable as Julia’s. Lee remembered he had been a gambler as well as a slave dealer.
Julia returned, followed closely by Lee’s wife and daughters. In an instant, Forrest became, if not a gentleman, then at least a polished simulacrum of one, bowing over the younger women’s hands and bowing even lower over and kissing that of Mary Custis Lee. “We are delighted to welcome such a famous commander… Lee’s wife said.
“Thinking on the commander who lives here, you are much too kind to my own poor self,” Forrest said, bowing yet again. Then he grinned an impish grin. “I’ll take all the flattery I can get; though.”
He proved a lively guest at the supper table, using silverware, a gravy boat, and a heel of bread to show how he had won his victory north of Corinth, Mississippi. “You use your horses, then, merely to transport your troopers, but have them fight dismounted?” Lee said.
“That is my rule,” Forrest agreed. “A horse has use in getting a man from here to there faster than he can march, but what good is it in a fight but to give a choicer target than a man on foot? That was true before; what with the coming of the repeater, it’s doubly so these days.”
“Many others did likewise, both among the enemy and our own horse soldiers,” Lee said, thinking of Jeb Stuart. “How do you account for your greater success with the tactic?”
“From what I’ve seen, sir, most of ‘em did it because circumstances forced it on ‘em. Me, I aimed to fight my men so from the start. I drove ‘em hard, too, and always stayed up at the very front of the pack. With all the guns my own escort party carried, I used it to plug any holes or to break through when I saw the chance.” Forrest grinned again. “Worked right well, too.”
“There I cannot disagree,” Lee said thoughtfully. “Should we style your men dragoons, then?”
“General Lee, I don’t care what you call them, and they don’t care what you call them. But when you do call them, they fight like wildcats with rattlesnake fangs, and that I do care about. Will you pass me the sweet potatoes, sir?”
Lee watched ‘the way Julia acted around Forrest. She was a good enough servant not to ignore him altogether, but she plainly wanted to. Yet even when she was busy at the opposite end of the table, her eyes, big and fearful, kept sliding toward him. He must have seemed the bogeyman incarnate to her; Negroes had been u
sing his name to frighten their children ever since the Fort Pillow massacre, and his campaigns against the black soldiers left behind in the Mississippi valley when Union forces abandoned Confederate soil only made his reputation the more fearsome.
He knew it, too. Every so often, when he spied Julia watching him, he would raise an eyebrow or bare his teeth for a moment. He never did anything overt enough for Lee to call him on it, but Julia finally dropped a silver ladle, picked it up, and fled as ignominiously as the luckless Federal general Sturgis, whom Forrest had smashed though outnumbered better than two to one. Chuckling, Forrest said, “Sturgis moaned to one of his colonels, ‘For God’s sake, if Mr. Forrest will let me alone, I will let him alone.’ But I wouldn’t let him alone; I aimed to whip him out of his boots, and I did it.”
Mildred Lee rose from her chair. “If you men are going to fight your battles across the tablecloth, I will leave you to your sport.”
“If you stay, we won’t fight them,” Forrest said quickly. Hard-bitten as he was, he could also be charming, especially to women.
But Mildred shook her head. “No, I should only spoil your fun, for you know you’d still wish to, and Father did not bring you home so he could listen to me. He can do that any night, after all.”
“He can do that any night, after all, when he is in Richmond,” Mary Custis Lee said, an edge to her voice. Lee sighed silently. Even after nine months without straying from the capital, his wife had not forgiven him his long trip to Kentucky and Missouri. Mildred turned and left the room, followed by Agnes and Mary; Lee’s eldest daughter wheeled Mary Custis Lee ahead of her.
“Well.” Lee rose, took a cigar case off a cabinet shelf, offered Forrest a smoke.
Forrest shook his head. “I never got the habit, but you go on yourself.”
“I don’t use them, either; I keep them for guests.” Lee put the case away, then asked, “Did you also come” to Richmond to see the men from America Will Break?”
“What if I did?” Forrest said. “Those repeaters of theirs made my men five times the fighters they would have been without them.” He gave Lee a measuring stare. “By all accounts, we’d have lost the war without their aid.”
“By all accounts indeed.” Lee studied Nathan Bedford Forrest in return. Cautiously, he said,” Am I to infer that the accounts you mentioned include the one given by the Rivington men themselves?”
“Just so. I gather you’ve also heard this account?” Forrest waited for Lee to nod, then said softly, almost to himself, “I wondered if I was the only one they’d told. Well, no matter.” He gathered himself. “Do you believe what they say, sir?”
“Or do I find it fantastic, you mean? I can imagine nothing more fantastic than men traveling in time as if by railroad.” Forrest started to say something; Lee held up a hand. “But I believe nonetheless. Any madman may claim to come from the future, but madmen do not commonly carry proof for their assertions. Their artifacts convince more strongly than their words.”
“My thought exactly, General Lee.” Forrest drew in along, relieved breath. “But with the artifacts comes the tale, and the tale they tell of the history ahead makes me believe more what I already thought: that the South is the last and brightest hope of the white race, and if we ever turn loose of the niggers here, they’ll ruin everything everywhere.”
“If all the Rivington men say is true, that may be a justifiable conclusion,” Lee said. Maybe that belief explained some of Forrest’s savage conduct in his war against the blacks, although, as he’d said himself, he’d had no use for Negroes—save as a source of income—even before the Rivington men came to help the Confederacy win its independence. Lee went on, “Yet all the trend of the nineteenth century makes me wonder. The nations of Europe almost unanimously find chattel slavery abhorrent, and us on account of it; most of the South American republics have abandoned it; even brutal Russia has freed its serfs. The trend in history seems to be ever toward more liberty, not less.”
“Are you saying you believe the Negroes ought to be freed, sir, after the war we fit to keep them slaves?” Forrest’s voice remained low and polite, but took on an unmistakable note of warning; his rather sallow complexion turned a shade redder.
“We fought the war, as you say, to ensure we would be the only ones with the right to either preserve our institutions or change them, and we have won that right,” Lee answered. “Not only the opinions of the outside world but also the course of the war and of your own gallant efforts after our armistice with the United States have compelled me to alter somewhat my view of the black man.”
“Not me mine, by God,” Forrest growled. “At Fort Pillow, we killed five hundred niggers for a loss of twenty of our own; the Mississippi ran red for two hundred yards with their blood. That ought to show Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners—in other words, that they deserve to be just what and where they are.”
“They fought well enough at Bealeton, and elsewhere against the Army of Northern Virginia in our advance on Washington City,” Lee said: “no worse than their equally inexperienced white counterparts, at any rate. And in your campaigns in the lands formerly under Federal occupation, have you found them such easy prey as you did at Fort Pillow?”
He purposely did not mention the stories that said most of the Negroes at Fort Pillow had been slain after they surrendered. Forrest bristled even so. “Even a rat will fight, if you push him into a corner,” he said contemptuously.
“But if you don’t, he will not,” Lee replied. “The Negroes could quietly have returned to their bonds, at no danger to themselves. That they chose what most of them must have known to be a futile fight—all the more so, as your men were armed with repeaters—must, I believe, provoke the contemplation of any thoughtful man.”
“Their grandfathers fit when they were in Africa; too, I expect,” Forrest said with a shrug: “fit and lost, or they’d not have been caught and shipped over here. The ones I fit after the armistice? They were better than those worthless, hapless niggers at Fort Pillow, that I grant you. But that they fit ‘well enough’? I deny it, sir, or I’d not have licked them over and over again.”
“There our opinions differ,” Lee said. Forrest inclined his head to show he agreed with that much, if with nothing else Lee had said. Lee persisted, “I do not feel the views of the rest of the world may be ignored with safety for our state, nor do I think we can take the Negro’s lack of manliness as much for granted as before. Sooner than see the Confederacy eternally plagued with revolt and insurrection, should we not begin a program of—”
“Just one damned minute, sir,” Forrest broke in. Lee blinked; he was not used to being interrupted, let alone so rudely. Forrest sprang up from his chair and thrust his face, now quite red, up against Lee’s. “General Lee, you’re high-born, you’re high-minded, you might as well be a saint carved out of marble, and everybody says you ‘II be President as soon as Jeff Davis steps down. But if you are talking in any way, shape, or size about making people free Diggers, sir, I will fight you with every ounce of strength in my body. And I won’t be alone, sir, I promise you that. I won’t be alone.”
Lee rose, too. He wondered if Forrest would lay hands on him. The cavalry officer was some years his junior, but Lee promised him a nasty surprise if he struck first. He also wondered if Forrest would challenge him. He did not consider Forrest a gentleman, but the Tennesseean no doubt thought of himself as one…and was no doubt very quick with a pistol. But he had offered Forrest no personal insult: if anything, the reverse was true.
The two men glared at each other at closer than arm’s length for some little while. Lee battled down his own rage, said tightly, “General Forrest, I no longer find you an agreeable guest here, nor will you be welcome at my home again.”
Forrest snapped his fingers—left-handed; he had also eaten that way.” See how much I’d care to come back. I’d just as soon eat at Thaddeus Stevens’s house. The men of America Will Break may have saved the South from his tender mercies,
but I see we can grow our own crop of Judases.” He spun on his heel and stomped away, his boots crashing on the wood floor, then slammed the door so violently that the flame in every lamp and candle in the dining room jumped. Lee listened to his furious footsteps receding down the walk. He slammed the iron gate that gave onto the street with a loud metallic clang.
Several women exclaimed upstairs. Lee walked to the bottom of the stairway and called, “It’s perfectly all right, my dears. General Forrest chose to leave a bit sooner than he thought he might, that’s all.”
But it wasn’t all right, and he knew it. Till now, his only enemies had been men his professional duty called him to oppose: Mexicans, western Indians, John Brown, soldiers and officers of the United States. Now he had a personal foe, and a dangerous one. He blew a long breath out through his mustache. He could feel the difference. He did not care for it.
Nate Caudell wiped sweat from his forehead, paused to rest a moment in the shade of a willow tree. His chuckle was half amused, half chagrined. Henry Pleasants’s new farm was only five miles or so up the road from Nashville toward Castalia, and here he’d started breathing hard before it came into sight. In the army, a five-mile march wouldn’t have been worth complaining about. “I’m getting lazy and soft,” he said out loud.
He pushed on. Before long, he came to a split-rail fence. As soon as he turned into the lane that led to the farmhouse, a white man who was hoeing a vegetable garden enclosed by another fence turned and let out a loud halloo to announce his arrival. The fellow’s voice had an Irish lilt to it; when he turned back toward Caudell, his pale, freckled face looked vaguely familiar.
“Good day,” Caudell said, lifting his hat. “Have I seen you somewhere before?”
“Faith, sir, I don’t think so. John Moring I am, and I’ve spent most of me time till now down by Raleigh—saving a spell in the army, that is.”
“That’s where—” Caudell began, and then stopped. Moring hadn’t been in his company, and had disappeared from the Forty Seventh North Carolina not long after Gettysburg. But that was almost three years ago now, and no one these days was making any effort to track down deserters. Caudell shrugged. “Never mind. Is Mr. Pleasants at home?”
The Guns of the South Page 44