“I presume you are working toward remedying this difficulty?”
“Working toward it is the appropriate phrase, sir. I am endeavoring to tool up to produce AK-47s as we did Springfields, but the going is slow. We were aided immeasurably in turning out Springfields by capturing the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and the tools it contained. Here I can gain no such advantage. Much as I love our country, sir, we have not been a manufacturing nation. Much of our industry, such as it is; was called into being by the exigencies of the late war.” Gorgas’s face assumed the mournful expression of a bloodhound on a difficult track. “Moreover, the AK-47 is a considerably more complex weapon, requiring many more steps in its production, than the rifles we are used to making. By this time next year, I expect to be producing it in some quantity. How much earlier than that I can hope to turn it out remains to be seen.”
Lee considered what the ordnance chief had said. It was not all he might have wished to hear. The United States emphatically was a manufacturing nation, second in the world after only Great Britain. He had visions of huge factories in Massachusetts or New York—or Massachusetts and New York—making repeaters in carload lots. But as Gorgas said, the South had been proudly agricultural until war and Federal blockade forced it to try to make some of the things it could no longer buy with cotton and tobacco. He supposed he should have been pleased with its progress, not worried about how backward it remained. He willed himself to be pleased, since he had no other choice.
“You’ve done splendidly, Colonel,” he said, as enthusiastically as he could. “By all means convey my congratulations to your clever artisans. I am glad to know we may one day be able to declare our independence from the men of America Will Break, just as we have from the United States.” He wished that day would come at once, but even seeing it ahead gave him no small relief.
Given the reported deployment of the Federal troops who have entered New Mexico from Colorado, Mr. President, I am convinced those troops are intended to lend moral support to the rebels in conflict with the Mexican Emperor Maximilian, as President Seymour has publicly declared. Nevertheless, I hope I might take the liberty of urging upon you the westward extension of railroads in Texas so that we become more readily able to meet dangers which may arise from that quarter. Now that the Tredegar Iron Works are producing track once more, the prospect of such a line appears to me to be deserving of your most serious consideration. You may perhaps recall Secretary Stanton’s contemptuous reference to our lack of any such means of transportation throughout the vast expanse of west Texas. I—
He looked up from the passage to gather his thoughts… and discovered Andries Rhoodie standing across the desk from him. The big Rivington man had come into his office so quietly that he’d failed to notice him. “Do please be seated, Mr. Rhoodie,” he said, embarrassed. “I hope I’ve not ignored you long?”
“No, not long,” Rhoodie said as he sat. A man of lighter spirit might have eased the moment with a joke, but Rhoodie, serious to the core, made no such effort. He paused only to rub at his reddish mustache for a moment before bulling ahead: “We of the AWB are not pleased with you, General Lee.”
“This is not the first time such a misfortune has occurred, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee observed. He watched Rhoodie frown, as if unsure whether he was being made sport of. Like General Grant, the Rivington man had trouble going in any direction but straight on. “What have I done to raise your hackles this time?”
“You favor freeing the blacks here,” Rhoodie said, blunt still.
“I was not aware my private opinions were your concern, sir, nor do I believe them to be so,” Lee replied. As against Grant, he essayed a flanking maneuver. “In any case, how have you become privy to my opinions on the subject? I have kept them private, and certainly have not communicated them to you.”
“You have spoken of these opinions to patriotic officers who disagree with them as strongly as we do.”
To Nathan Bedford Forrest, he meant: Lee worked that out with hardly a pause for thought. The rough Tennesseean had as much as said he was hand in glove with the Rivington men. Lee wondered if he’d said too much to Forrest. He decided he had not: keeping his thoughts secret would have implied he was ashamed of them, which he was not. He said, “I repeat, sir, that my private opinions are not your concern.”
“If they stayed private, I might agree with you,” Rhoodie answered. “But everyone says you will be the one to succeed Jeff Davis, and then your private opinions will be all too public. They go square against everything we stand for. My opinion—my private opinion, General Lee—is that they go square against everything the Confederacy stands for.”
“There, obviously, we disagree. In a republic like the Confederate States, the people and their representatives will eventually be responsible for choosing between us.”
Rhoodie breathed hard through his nose. “So you do aim to run for President, do you?”
As he’d told Jefferson Davis, Lee had no knowledge of politics, no interest in politics. But he also had no intention of permitting Andries Rhoodie to dictate to him. He thought he’d taught that to the Rivington man in the aftermath of Bealeton. Rhoodie, though, seemed hard to convince. Lee said,” And what if I do?”
“If you do, General Lee, you will certainly never see another vial of nitroglycerine tablets as long as you live—I promise you that,” Rhoodie said.
This man would sooner see me dead than President, Lee thought with a slow surge of wonder. He truly would. But more even than that, he wants to bend me to his will. He looked steadily at Andries Rhoodie. “I have known for some years now that I am no longer a young man. I am also a soldier. No doubt I should be lying if I said death held no terror for me, but I assure you most earnestly that whatever terrors it does hold are insufficient to make me deviate from my chosen course for the sake of your white pills.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Rhoodie said, and startled Lee by sounding completely sincere. He went on, “Of course I do not question your courage. I took altogether the wrong tack to persuade you that your views are mistaken, and I apologize for it.”
“Very well.” Lee still eyed Rhoodie with suspicion, but no more handsome apology could have been demanded on pain of meeting with pistols.
“Let me suggest something else,” the Rivington man said after a short pause for thought. Now he made his blunt-featured face as affable as he could, and sweetened his voice: “Your charming wife has long suffered from ailments beyond the power of the medicine of these times to cure. That does not mean, though, that those ailments will stay incurable forever…”
He was a good fisherman. Having dangled the bait in front of Lee, he fell silent and let him paint his own mental pictures: Mary free of pain; Mary hurrying toward him, upright and happy and out of the prison of her wheeled chair; Mary whirling with him as an orchestra played a sprightly waltz. Had Rhoodie spoken of Mary before he crassly threatened with the nitroglycerine pills, Lee knew he would have been tempted as, perhaps, never before in his life. He was more vulnerable through his family than through any danger aimed at himself, for their well-being was more important to him than his own.
Now he waited until his words were properly deployed before he committed them to battle: “You had better go, Mr. Rhoodie.”
He felt fury like a fire inside him. Most men quailed from him when he let that anger show. Andries Rhoodie, however, was an ironclad himself. He scowled back at Lee. “You think America Will Break will let you get by with your insolence forever, because we tolerated you more than we should have, back when the Confederate States still had the North to beat. We needed you then. But now the Confederacy is well established. If you try to twist it out of its proper course, America Will Break will break you.”
“And what, in your doubtlessly omniscient opinion, is our proper course, pray tell?”
The Rivington man ignored the heavy sarcasm. He answered as if the question were seriously meant: “The one for which you left the useless Union, of course:
to preserve the South as a place where the white man can enjoy his natural superiority over the nigger, to show the world the truth of that superiority, and, at need, to act in the future in concert with other nations to preserve it.”
“Ah, now we come down to it,” Lee said. “You are saying that unless we serve as your obedient cat’s-paws in some time to come, we fail of our purpose—our purpose to you, that is. Mr. Rhoodie, our reasons for leaving the United States were more complex than those you name, and if we fought to gain our independence from them, we shall do likewise as necessary against you and yours. And I warn you, sir, that if you speak to me of this matter again, I shall not be responsible for my actions. Now get out of my sight.”
Andries Rhoodie stood up, dug in his pocket, and tossed an old, worn half cent on the desk in front of Lee. “This is how much I care for whether you’ll be responsible for your actions.” He tramped out of the office, slammed the door behind him.
Lee glared in shocked outrage. Had he been Bedford Forrest, Rhoodie never would have got out of Mechanic’s Hall alive. But Forrest and Rhoodie were allies. Lee’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. As had become his habit, he reached for his pills. He had the vial in his hand before he consciously noticed from whom it had come. With an angry growl, he put it back in his waistcoat pocket. His first thought was Better to die without the Rivington men than live with their cures.
He wondered if that also held true for the Confederacy as a whole. He thought about it seriously, then shook his head. His nation deserved to be free. For that matter, how could a good and effective medicine be morally wrong, no matter where it came from? He took out the pills again, let one melt under his tongue. While he had them, he would use them. When they were gone, he would do without, as he had until the Rivington men found their way into his life.
There, that was one decision made, he thought with some satisfaction as he replaced the nitroglycerine tablets once more. “One?” he said aloud. Then he realized that, as in the heat of battle, he had made up his mind without understanding how or even when he’d done so.
He would seek the Presidency next year. That the men of America Will Break did not want him to have it was reason enough, and more.
“How are you tonight, dear Mary?” he asked in the quiet of their bedroom after he’d helped her upstairs that evening. Down below, Mildred was playing the piano and singing with her sisters. Most nights, he would have stayed down there and sung with them, but his mind remained full of Andries Rhoodie.
“I am as I am—none too well, but very much here. And how are you, Robert?” Few people could have followed Lee’s thoughts, but after more than a third of a century, his wife was one of them. She went on, “Something new is troubling you, or I miss my guess, while I have only my usual collection of aches and pains.”
“Troubling me indeed.” As exactly as he could, Lee recounted the confrontation with Rhoodie.
Mary Custis Lee bristled indignantly when he told how the Rivington man had promised to cut off his supply of pills. Lee could almost see her hair rise under her ruffled nightcap. Then he had to tell her Rhoodie had offered to restore her health. Candlelight filled the lines of her face with deep shadows as she cocked her head to one side to study him. Slowly, she asked, “Could he have—cured me, Robert?”
“I do not know,” he answered. After a moment, he reluctantly added, “I confess I have not known the Rivington men to make false claims. However big their brags, they have a way of backing them up.”
“What…what did you tell him?”
“I told him to get out of my office and never come back,” Lee said. “Can you find it in your heart to forgive me for that?”
His wife did not reply, not right away. Instead, she looked down at herself, at the shrunken, twisted legs that had once been so lively, at the pain-filled flesh that had imprisoned her spirit for so many years. At last she said, “I am not surprised at it. I’ve known all our lives together that you place your country ahead of everything else. I understand that; I am used it it; I have taken it as an article of faith since the day you set the ring on my finger, and I dare say before that.”
“Then you do forgive me?” he said in glad relief.
“I do not,” she answered sharply. “I understand. I can even accept; you would not be the man you are, had you said yes to Rhoodie. I would no more have expected you to say yes than that the sun would shine green tomorrow. But sometimes I wish you had even an ounce of bend in you.”
“Do you want me to visit Rhoodie in his headquarters? He would receive me, I think, despite the harsh words that lie between us.”
“You say now that you would go to him.” Her hands brushed the notion aside with a quick, scornful gesture. “Surely your precious duty would find. some way of coming between the words and the deed.”
He wanted to be angry at her for that cynical gibe, but could not: she was too likely right. Already he regretted his rash offer: how could he sell the Confederacy for the sake of one person’s comfort, even if that person was his wife? He knew he could not, and knew she would pay the price for his not doing so, Sighing, he said, “I unfortunately belong to a profession that debars all hope of domestic enjoyment.”
“You have been wed to that profession, and to your country, longer and more deeply than ever to me,” Mary Custis Lee said, which was also true.
He said, “I am not necessarily wed to that profession forever.” His wife, taking a wifely privilege, laughed at him.
Richmond, Virginia
June 27, 1866
Sir:
I have the honour to tender the resignation of my commission as general in the army of the Confederate States of America.
Very resply your obt servt,
R. E. Lee
General, C.S.A.
Lee sanded the letter dry, looked down at the words he had written. Even in black ink on creamy white paper, they did not yet seem real to him, just as there was a moment of quiet shock before the pain of a wound struck home. Yet this resignation came easier than the one he had made six years before, from the colonelcy of the 1st U.S. Cavalry. Then he had been cruelly divided in his own spirit, wishing he could remain with the United States but knowing Virginia in the end meant more to him. Now the Confederacy was at peace; its armies could carry on without him. His course lay elsewhere.
He wished he could show the letter to his wife first, to see her expression once she’d read it. After their go-round of the night before, her expression ought to be worth seeing. But that was a diversion he would have to forgo. He picked up the paper, carried it down the hall.
Secretary of War Seddon looked up from the papers that crowded his own desk. Despite those papers, he looked stronger and healthier than he had during the war, when his labors all but consumed him. Even his smile was less cadaverous these days” A good morning to you, General. What can I do for you?”
“I have here a letter which requires your attention, sir. “
“Give it to me, then.” James Seddon read the two-line note, then raised his large head to stare at Lee. “What has occasioned this?”
“If I am to meet my full responsibility to the Confederate States of America, Mr. Secretary, I must necessarily do so in and from a civilian capacity. Proceeding directly from the ranks of the military to any civil office strikes me as more appropriate to ancient Rome than to our present republic.”
“Civil office, you say?” Seddon studied Lee, then slowly nodded. “You will understand, General, that rumors pertaining to your possible plans for the future have been in wide circulation for some time now.”
“As with paper money, so with rumors: the wider the circulation, the less value they retain,” Lee said.
The Secretary of War smiled his rather unnerving smile.” No doubt, no doubt. I certainly did not care to presume on our acquaintance to enquire of you your plans, the more so as they may well have been unclear even to you. I hope you will permit me to say, however, that I should be confident of our n
ation’s future in your hands.”
“You are gracious, sir, and place more trust in me than I deserve,” Lee said. Seddon shook his head, no doubt taking Lee’s words for a commonplace of polite speech. Lee wished it were so. The—disorderly—quality of civilian life, and especially of civilian administration, worried him. The Rivington men worried him more. In war and peace, he had tested himself against the ablest of his own time, and had prevailed. But how could he know all the resources the men from a distant time held in reserve?
He could not know…and he had made the men of America Will Break his enemies, past hope of reconciliation. As best he could tell, he had earned the right to worry.
Jefferson Davis held a fortnightly levee at the Confederate White House. As Lee rode Traveller up Twelfth Street toward the Presidential mansion, he reflected that one day the place would need a name not derived from one in Washington City. The Confederacy could not go on forever as a mere copy of the United States and its institutions; the South would develop institutions of its own.
His lip quirked. The South had one institution all its own, and he hoped to begin the job of laying that one to rest.
Lamps and candles blazed bright through the broad windows and open door of the Presidential residence, casting a warm golden glow on the walkway outside. Lee dismounted from Traveller, tied the horse to the iron fence outside the mansion, gave him a nose bag full of hay. Traveller snorted appreciatively and began to eat. “I wish some people were so easily pleased,” Lee murmured and went up the stairs and into the house.
Varina Davis met him near the door. “How good of you to join us this evening,” she said with a smile. “You are quite as handsome as ever in your dark civilian suit.”
The Guns of the South Page 46