Union commanders had underestimated Forrest throughout the war, and paid for it again and again. Lee was beginning to wonder if he and all of official Richmond had not made the same mistake. Who would have thought a rough-and-ready planter, with no education to speak of, would prove so effective on the stump? And who would have imagined he would prove as energetic in political campaigning as in military? He fairly flew from town to town, made his speeches, and was. gone on the next train to make another one seventy-five miles down the track. Lee thought of the shock Andrew Jackson had created in Washington after almost half a century of well-bred Presidents from Virginia and Massachusetts. The frontier might seize the Confederate capital much sooner.
Mary Lee said, “Help me up, please, Robert.” He got her to her feet. On his arm, she went over to the window, too. She, however, looked not across the Potomac toward Washington but down at the grounds of Arlington. She nodded, as if pleased with herself. “The snow hides them, and it is not all.”
“Them?” Lee asked.
“The graves of the Yankees who died here. Grass and flowers in the summertime, snow in the winter, and I can begin to forget those cursed Northerners who lie on our grounds. That is not easy, not after they did everything in their power to debase and desecrate Arlington.”
“The ones who lie here were not those who hurt this place,” Lee said. “The thieves, the mutilators, are most of them safe in the United States.” He still did not feel easy about letting her replant the sloping lawns and the gardens around Arlington to erase all remembrance of the Union graves, but in the end had let her have her way. She cherished the mansion as if it were part of her family, which in a way it was;
She said, “I wish they could be made to answer for their crimes. The garden my father laid out all ruined and changed; the splendid little forest leveled to the ground; the graves—The graves, at least, I have attended to.”
“Many crimes committed in time of war go unanswered,” Lee said. “And as for their perpetrators, they now live in another country, which was, after all, the point of the war. Nor are we guiltless of crimes of our own.” Thinking of Forrest made the affair at Fort Pillow spring to mind. He shook his head. That had been a bad business, with soldiers black and white (mostly black) shot down as they tried to surrender and after they had surrendered. The only thing Forrest had to say about it now was his familiar dictum: War means fighting, and fighting means killing.
Mary Lee’s comment was, “I think it is shameful for you to speak of our gallant men and the thieving Yankees in the same breath.”
“Through a good part of the war, our gallant men kept themselves supplied by thieving from the Yankees,” he said.
She waved that aside, as if it were of no account. She, of course, had never been in the field, never known firsthand the desperate want under which the Southern fighting man had suffered till the last days of the war. She went on, “I think it is shameful, too, for General Forrest to try to tar you with the Yankee brush. You did so much more than he to make our nation free, and now he calls you abolitionist.”
“To be just, it is what I seem to have become.” He felt Mary take a deep breath, decided to forestall her: “Oh, not in the sense he means, surely, the sense of imposing emancipation by force if necessary, and without compensation, as those people did in the lands they occupied. But we must find a means through which the Negro may be gradually brought toward freedom, or face trouble unbounded in the future.”
His wife sniffed. “How do you propose to gradually free the Negroes? Either they are slaves, as they have been, or they are not. I see no middle ground.”
“I shall have to define one,” Lee said. Normally, the middle ground was as dangerous politically as in war, for it left one vulnerable to fire from both sides. Here, though, he would at least be safe from that. Out-and-out abolitionists, in the Northern, radical, sense of the word, were so thin on the ground in the Confederacy that he could probably count them on his fingers and toes. All the fire his way would come from a single direction, from those who thought owning blacks only right and proper. But fire from a single direction could be deadly, too. He’d seen that in defeat and victory, at Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Bealeton…
“I wish we could have simply lived out our days here, without worry about either war or politics,” Mary said. “You have given so much, Robert; can there never be an end to it?”
“I wish there could.” He meant it; he’d never known how much he truly missed his family until, for the first time in his life, he saw them every day. The life of a gentleman farmer at Arlington would have suited him very well. But—”I fear I cannot so easily abandon my duty,”
“That word.” Mary Lee made a sour face. “Help me back to my chair now, if you please. I would not want you to try your strength too long by the necessity of supporting me and your duty both.”
He did as she asked, then returned to the window. A moving black dot in the snow became a horseman and, a moment later, a horseman he recognized. “Here’s Custis, up from Richmond,” he said, deliberately trying to sound cheerful and hoping the arrival of their eldest son would help lift Mary out of her bitter mood.
She was at least willing to change the subject. “Take me downstairs,” she said.
He pushed the chair to the stairs, then helped her down them. Another chair waited at the bottom on the stairway: procuring a second had proved easier and more convenient than manhandling a single one up and down several times a day, and Mary was almost helpless by herself now. The offer Andries Rhoodie had given Lee was seldom far from his thoughts. If only it had come from somewhere, anywhere other than America Will Break…
Custis’s three sisters were already greeting him by the time Lee and Mary came to the front hall. Between hugs, Custis stamped snow onto the rug. “Sisterly embraces aren’t Warm enough to thaw me out,” he said, whereupon Mildred poked him in the ribs and made him jump. “Let me sit by the fire and warm up; then I’ll tell my news.”
“And what is that news, dear boy?” Lee asked a few minutes later, after Custis was comfortably ensconced in a cane-back chair in front of the crackling fireplace.
His son waited to reply until he took a cup of coffee from the tray Julia brought in. “That’s the real bean,” he said once he’d sipped. “I’d grown so used to chicory during the war and afterwards that sometimes I find myself missing it.” He drank again, set the cup down on a small, square table ornamented around the edges with polished brass tack heads. At last he said, “General Forrest has settled on a running-mate.”
“Has he?” Lee leaned forward in his own chair. “Who is the individual so honored?”
“Another western man—Senator Wigfall of Texas.”
“I see.” After a few seconds’ consideration, Lee said musingly, “It is as well, then, that the election is not to be settled by pistols at ten paces. Both Forrest and Wigfall are accomplished duelists. While I would not hesitate to face either gentleman. my skill in such matters has never been tested, and I would not lightly hazard a Vice-Presidential candidate in such an affair.”
Custis chuckled, but quickly sobered. “You ought to get about the business of choosing a Vice-Presidential candidate, Father. When Forrest announced his candidacy against you, I took it for little more than a joke. But the man is in deadly earnest, sir, and is campaigning as hard as he drove his own troops, which is to say, very hard indeed.”
“From everything I have ever heard and from everything I have ever seen, anyone who underestimates General Forrest’s energy or resolve is but preparing himself to be dreadfully surprised,” Lee said. “Had he the education to accompany them, he might well have been the greatest of us all. That is by the way, however. I do now admit to regretting the absence of political parties among us; having such structures in place would have facilitated my selection of a colleague. I intend to deal with the matter soon, dear boy, and your telling me that Forrest had done so but fortifies my resolve.”
“He
has a party as well,” Custis answered. “He and his henchmen are styling themselves Patriots and working to enlist other office seekers to run under their banner. You will also no doubt have learned by now that he has the monetary support of America Will Break for his campaign; the building across the street from the War Department doubles as his Richmond headquarters.”
“Were I a man to shoot a messenger for the news he brought, son, you would do well to run for your life,” Lee said. “I have always shunned politics; soldiers in a republic can properly pursue no other course. When I agreed—reluctantly—to run for the Presidency, I expected the election to be a matter of form. But I never undertook a campaign in which I did not expect to prevail, nor do I aim to make this one the exception.”
His son nodded approvingly. That pleased him, but only in an abstracted way; his mind was full of what he would have to do to win. Up until a few minutes before, he had been doing his best to think like a politician. As that was not his forte, no wonder he’d had little luck. Now he resolved to do what he did best: think like a soldier, and treat Forrest as an adversary like McClellan or Grant.
His hand went up to the collar of his jacket. It was a plain civilian coat of black wool, but he imagined he felt the familiar wreathed stars of a general once more. He got up from his chair. “Back to Richmond,” he said. “I have work to do.”
Early fireflies winked on and off, like shooting stars brought down to earth. Nate Caudell tried to recapture his childhood glee at seeing them. He did his best, but could not quite manage it. The little bugs reminded him too much of muzzle flashes in the dark.
In any case, the fireflies were not the only beacons in the night. Caudell stood on Washington Street, watching the torchlight parade stream into the Nashville town square. Decked out in gray hoods, the paraders sang the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep” as loud as they could: “He chased the niggers and they did run; He chased the niggers and he gave ‘em the gun! Hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again—Forrest!”
Henry Pleasants stood beside Caudell. He said, “You know what these Trees of Forrest remind me of Nate?”
“What’s that?”
“You won’t like it,” Pleasants warned. Caudell gestured impatiently. Pleasants said, “They remind me of Lincoln’s Wide-Awakes in 1860: all dressed up in what’s almost a uniform, all full of piss and vinegar for their man, and all ready to stomp on anyone who doesn’t like him. And because they’re excited, they make other people excited, too.”
“We didn’t have any of those Wide-Awakes down here,” Caudell said. “Come to that, Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot down here.”
“Maybe not, but somebody in the Patriot camp must have been paying attention to the way he ran his campaign. Remember, he won that race, too, even if he wasn’t on the ballot anywhere in the South.”
“Are you saying that means Forrest will win, too? It’d take more than a fancy parade to get me to vote for anybody but Robert E. Lee, and that goes for anybody who served in the Army of Northern Virginia.”
“But not everybody in the country did serve in the Army of Northern Virginia. Me, I’d sooner vote for Lee than Forrest any day, but what do I know? I’m just a damnyankee—ask my neighbors.”
At the tail end of the parade marched a big man thumping a bigger drum. The watching crowd spilled into the street and followed him into the square. In front of the courthouse, the same platform that had served for the slave auction was up again. Three or four of Forrest’s Trees stood atop it, torches held on high. More crowded close, so the platform was far and away the brightest place in the square.
One of the hooded Trees shouted, “Here’s his honor the mayor!” The rest of the group hollered and clapped as Isaac Cockrell clambered to the top of the platform. He was not an old man; he was, in fact, several years younger than Caudell. But he was short and fat and rather wheezy. Among the stalwart Trees, he cut an unprepossessing figure.
“My friends,” he said, and then again, louder: “My friends!” The crowd kept right on chattering.
Caudell cupped hands to his mouth, yelled, “Hire a substitute, Cockrell!” The mayor had bought his way out of the 47th North Carolina a couple of months before Gettysburg. and stayed prosperously at home while the regiment did its desperate work. Caudell was not the only man who remembered. Several other veterans whooped in gleeful derision at his cry.
Isaac Cockrell flinched but quickly gathered himself. “My friends,” he said yet again, and this time was able to go on from there: “My friends, we’re here tonight to show we all want Nathan Bedford Forrest to be the next President of our Confederate States of America.”
Forrest’s Trees raised a cheer. So did a good many men and women in the crowd; the women, of course, could not vote, but they enjoyed a rousing political spectacle no less than their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons. But Caudell’s was not the only voice that shouted “No!”—far from it. To drown out their opponents, the Trees started singing the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep” again.
Henry Pleasants knew the answer to that. “Lee!” he boomed, making his voice as deep as he could. “Lee! Lee! Lee!” Caudell joined the one-word chant. So did the other Lee men—most of them veterans like him. Their cry rose to rival the bawled out “Quickstep.”
Raeford Liles was singing Forrest’s anthem at the top of his lungs. He saw that Caudell belonged to the other camp. “You look like nothin’ but a stupid damn tree frog, Nate, hunchin’ up your shoulders every time you chirp out ‘Lee!’”
“I’d sooner look like a tree frog than have the brains of one,” Caudell retorted. Liles stuck out his tongue. Caudell said, “Who looks froggy now?”
Having launched into his speech, Mayor Cockrell kept on with it through the hubbub, though for some time no one except perhaps the Trees up on the platform with him could hear a word he was saying. Just as well, Caudell thought. But gradually, backers of Forrest and Lee both quieted down enough to get bits of the mayor’s speech: “Do you want your niggers taken away from you? If you do, vote for Lee, sure enough. Vote for Forrest, though, and your children’ll still keep ‘em, and your grandchildren, too.”
“What niggers?” a heckler yelled from the back of the crowd. “I ain’t got no niggers. Most of us ain’t got no niggers—ain’t got the money for it. How many niggers you got, Cockrell?”
That hit home hard enough to make the mayor draw back a pace. He owned about half a dozen Negroes, which, while it did not make him a planter, certainly established him as well-to-do. He rallied gamely, though: “Even if you don’t own any niggers, do you want them free to work for low wages, lower than a white man would take?”
The heckler—Caudell suddenly grinned, recognizing Dempsey Eure’s voice—would not be stilled: “Can’t hardly work for less’n I make, farmin’ —the place I farm.”
Cockrell’s argument might have carried more force in a bigger town, a place where more people did in fact work for wages. But Nash County was overwhelmingly rural, even by the standards of North Carolina. Tied to the soil as they were, its people had scant experience with wages of any sort, high or low.
Seeing their speaker falter, Forrest’s Trees started singing again. By then their torches were guttering out, letting the square return to night. Caudell and the other Lee backers answered the “Quickstep” with their own call. Both groups, though, were running out of steam. By ones and twos, people began drifting away. Sometimes, in low voices, they carried on their arguments. Sometimes, away from the heat of the rally, they found themselves able to laugh at how stirred they’d gotten.
Caudell said, “It’s still early spring. We’ll all be done to a turn if this kind of thing keeps up till November.”
“Keeps life from getting dull, doesn’t it?” Pleasants answered as he walked back toward the stable to get his horse.
“I suppose so.” Caudell walked on another few steps with his friend, then added wistfully, “I remember when life was dull, or I thought it was, anyway. You kno
w what? Looking back, it doesn’t seem so bad.”
Lee had been waiting for the knock on the door of the suite at the Powhatan House. He got up and opened the door. “Senator Brown!” he said, extending his hand. “Thank you for doing me the honor of coming here.”
“The honor is mine, sir.” Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi was a strikingly handsome man in his early fifties, with dark wavy hair worn rather long, and bushy side-whiskers that reached down to the line of his jaw. His suit was of the most stylish cut (a good deal more so than Lee’s); his patent leather shoes gleamed in the gaslight.
“Do please sit down,” Lee said, waving him to a chair. Brown sank back into the soft cushions, crossed his legs, lay one arm on the velvet arm of the seat. He seemed the picture of ease; Lee envied him his ability to relax so completely. “You are perhaps curious as to why I asked if you would see me today.”
“Call me—intrigued.” Brown’s dark eyes, shadowed in their sockets, revealed very little. He was a veteran politician, having served in the Mississippi state legislature, in the U.S. Congress, and as a U.S. senator alongside Jefferson Davis until his state left the Union. He’d also fought as a Confederate captain before he was chosen for the new nation’s Senate.
Lee said, “My purpose is not to keep you in suspense, sir. I want to ask if you will serve as my Vice-Presidential candidate for the forthcoming elections.”
Brown’s relaxation dropped from him like a cloak. He leaned forward in his seat, said softly, “I thought it might be so. Even to be considered as your running mate does me more credit than I deserve—”
“Not at all, sir.”
But Brown had not finished. “—Yet before I say yea or nay, there are certain matters concerning which I must satisfy myself.” He waited to see how Lee would take that.
Lee was delighted. “If my views are in any way unclear to you, I would not have you blindly embrace them. Ask what you will.”
“Thank you, sir.” Brown dipped his head. “In one way, your invitation to me is surprising, for I perceived you as being President Davis’s chosen successor and, as you may know, the President and I have not always been in complete accord.” That was an understatement. While willing to do whatever proved necessary to win the war, Brown had consistently maintained war powers resided with the Confederate Congress, not with the President. He obviously remembered the angry exchanges he’d had with Davis.
The Guns of the South Page 48