The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  “Had it not been for the President’s urging, I should not have sought the Presidency; that I admit,” Lee said. “I could hardly deny it—I was never struck with political ambition, nor do I feel it now to any great degree. But if you doubt I am my own man, then I thank you for your time here today and apologize for having inconvenienced you. I will discuss the position with someone else.”

  “No need,” Brown said quickly, holding up a hand; he had political ambition. “You are quite clear; indeed, the fact that you have asked me says a great deal for your independence from Davis in and of itself. But the next question cuts to the bone: what precisely is your stand on the Negro and his place in our society?”

  “I do not believe we can successfully keep him in bonds forever, and so I feel we must begin the process of lifting those bonds as quickly as is practicable, lest he tear them off himself and, in so doing, work far more harm upon us. If you find that position untenable, sir, the door is but a few steps away.”

  Brown did not get up and leave. But he did not sing hosannas in praise of Lee’s generosity, either. He said, “Let me quote for you article one, section nine, clause four of the Constitution of the Confederate States: ‘No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed.’”

  “I am familiar with the clause,” Lee said. “That it is an impediment to what I propose, I cannot deny. Let me ask you a question in return, if I may.” He waited for Brown to nod before continuing: “Suppose the war, instead of turning in our favor in 1864, had taken a downhill course, as it might well have done without our troops’ being newly armed with repeaters. Would you then have favored giving weapons to and emancipating certain of our slaves in order to preserve our republic, the Constitution notwithstanding?”

  “In such a crisis, I would,” Brown said after only a brief pause for thought. “Saving the nation is to me more important than any temporary damage to the Constitution, which can be made good later if the nation survives.”

  “Fair enough. I submit to you, then, that the Negro as slave presents us with a continuing crisis, even if one less imminent than the prospect of forfeiting the Second American Revolution. The time to deal with it is before it becomes imminent, lest we be forced to act in haste and perhaps desperation.”

  Brown pondered that, then startled Lee by throwing back his head and laughing. At Lee’s quizzical look, he explained rather sheepishly, “I marvel that I am sitting here listening to you at all, let alone carefully considering your ideas, when in the U.S. Congress I called for opening California to slavery, by force of arms if necessary, and for the annexation to the United States of Cuba and the Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Potosí to serve for the planting and spreading of slavery.”

  “Yet here you sit,” Lee said. From Brown’s words and votes in the Confederate Senate, he had gathered that the man was moderate on the question of the Negro. He had not thought to go back and learn what Brown had said as a U.S. congressman and senator. That, evidently, had been an oversight on his part. He wondered why the man did not rise up on his hind legs and storm out, as Nathan Bedford Forrest and Andries Rhoodie had before him in like circumstances.

  “Here I sit,” Brown agreed. He laughed again. “Circumstances alter cases. When we were part of the United States, we had to seek to extend slavery wherever we might to balance the corresponding expansion of the Northern States and our consequent loss of power within the U.S. But now we are no longer within the U.S. and may act as we deem best, without fear it will weaken us before our political foes.”

  “That is most sensibly spoken, sir,” Lee said with admiration. “Then you are with me?”

  “I have not said so,” Brown answered sharply. “I concede there may be circumstances under which some form of emancipation is justified. We must, however, offer the voters a program they can stomach, or all this fine talk is so much moonshine. How do you propose to go about setting the niggers free?”

  “In a word, gradually,” Lee said. “I have, I hope you will believe, given this a good deal of thought. I do not and shall not propose confiscatory legislation. I understand that would be politically impracticable.”

  “I hope you do,” Brown said. “If you don’t get elected, nothing else matters.”

  Again Lee longed for the clean, well-defined world of the soldier, where compromise had to be made only with weather and terrain and what the enemy would allow, not with one’s own principles. But the politician who could bring home half a loaf counted himself ahead of the game.

  “I do not wish slavery to become the sole issue in this campaign,” Lee said. “Many others are of no small urgency: our relations with the United States, the still deplorable state of our finances, and our posture relative to Maximilian and the Mexican insurgents, to name just a few. We have yet even to establish a Supreme Court. On none of these matters has Forrest expressed a position; he owns but one drum to beat.”

  “A good point, and one we can tax him with. But none of those, save maybe what we do about the United States, will make people sweat. They’ll get up in arms over the nigger question. You still need to answer me about that.”

  “So I do,” Lee said. “As I see it, as a beginning we need to encourage emancipation in every way possible and to prepare freedmen to learn useful trades. During the war, several of our states relaxed their laws against slaves’ learning to read and write. I would extend that relaxation throughout the Confederacy. For the next step, I would propose a law allowing a slave, or anyone else on behalf of that slave, to pay for his release at the price for which he had been sold or was valued by a competent appraiser, the owner not having the privilege of refusing said price.”

  Albert Gallatin Brown pursed his lips. “You might get by with that, not least because it is so much less radical than what hotheads on the other side say you want.”

  “I have not finished,” Lee warned. Brown sat back and composed himself to listen further. “If a slave or someone who wished to buy his freedom could not pay the whole price at once, I would let them pay one sixth, the master again being compelled to accept, to give the slave one day to work for himself each week, another free day being added for each sixth paid, until the slave’s labor is entirely his own.”

  “That goes farther, but is again reasonable, and certainly not confiscatory,” Brown said.

  “The plan is modeled after one proposed but unfortunately not accepted some years ago in the Empire of Brazil,” Lee said. “Since I became convinced of the necessity of this change, I have sought intently for ways to facilitate it. My former aide Charles Marshall, whose training is in the law, recently brought the Brazilian proposal to my notice. To it I would add a couple of additional features.”

  “Which are?” Brown asked.

  “First, I would take a small percentage of the property tax paid into the Treasury on slaves each year and use it to establish an emancipation fund to free or begin freeing as many Negroes as this revenue would permit. And second, I would propose a law to the effect that all Negroes born after a certain date should be reckoned freeborn, though owing service to their mothers, masters for the first twenty-one years of their lives, in which time they should also be prepared to live free. I have in mind, you see, not to murder slavery, but to let it peacefully die of old age.”

  “Ten years ago, in Charleston or Mobile or Vicksburg, they’d have hanged you from a lamp post for putting forward a scheme like that,” Brown remarked. He ran a finger along the bottom edge of a side-whisker as he thought. Finally he said, “We’ve all seen a great many surprising things these past ten years, haven’t we? All right, General Lee, I’m with you.”

  “Splendid!” Lee stuck out his hand. “Sir, we are confederates.”

  Brown’s gaze suddenly turned inward. “Not just confederates,” he said quietly, “but Confederates.” Lee could hear the capital letter falling into place. Brown went on, “I think you’ve just named our party.”

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sp; “Confederates.” Lee tasted the word on his tongue. He said it again, firmly, and nodded. “Confederates we are.”

  The fiddler and banjo player swung from “Ye Cavaliers of Dixie” to “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” to “Mister, Here’s Your Mule.” Hearing the old war songs again took Nate Caudell back to campfires and sore feet and the smell of powder. Nothing made a man feel so intensely alive as knowing he might not be alive much longer.

  When the musicians played “Dixie,” that remembered intensity—cherished all the more now that it was gone—filled him too full to let him keep on singing as he had been doing. From somewhere deep inside him, a rebel yell clawed its way up his throat and out between his teeth. It was not a sound that properly belonged in the sleepy, peaceful Nashville town square, but he did not care, He had to let it loose or burst.

  Nor was his the only yell that ripped through the afternoon. Most of the men in the crowd—almost an the men under forty-five in the crowd—were veterans of the Second American Revolution, and most of them, by their faces, by their shouts, were as caught up in their memories as he was. A hat sailed through the air, then another.

  The last sweet notes of “Dixie” died away. The banjo man and fiddler got down from the flag-draped platform. George Lewis climbed up onto it. Caudell found himself coming to attention and had to fight back a sudden, sharp order to the people around him to straighten their ranks. Then he saw a good many other men, especially those who had fought in the Castalia Invincibles under Captain Lewis, were also squaring their shoulders and bringing their feet together.

  But Lewis was not wearing a captain’s three bars these days, only the wing collar and cravat that befit a prosperous civilian and legislator. The collar fit snugly, too; he had to have gained twenty or thirty pounds in his time down in Raleigh. Noticing that made Caudell smile; anyone who hadn’t put on weight since his army days wasn’t half trying.

  Lewis said, “My friends, I don’t even know that we needed to get together here today. So many of us marched under Marse Robert, fought under Marse Robert—we an know what he’s like. Is there anybody here from the Army of Northern Virginia who’s such a big fool that he doesn’t aim to vote for Robert E. Lee come November?”

  “No!” Caudell shouted. So did most of the men around him. Carried away by the moment, several women called “No!” too.

  But most was not all. Just as Caudell had heckled Isaac Cockrell at the Forrest rally, so now someone bellowed, “I ain’t gonna vote for nobody who wants to take my niggers away!”

  Cockrell had tried to go on as if no one were harassing him. George Lewis met his challenger head-on. Peering into the crowd to see who had shouted at him, he said, “Jonas Perry, you are a big fool.” That raised a laugh. Lewis went on, “For one thing, everybody here knows those three niggers of yours don’t do a lick of work anyway, so they’d be no great loss to you.” The laugh got louder; whenever he was in town, Perry spent most of his time complaining about how lazy his slaves were. Lewis grew serious: “Anyhow, Lee doesn’t aim to take away anybody’s niggers. That’s a damned lie.”

  “He don’t want us to keep ‘em no more, neither,” Jonas Perry yelled back. “How we gonna get our crops in without ‘em? You, Mr. Big Assemblyman George Lewis, sir, you got a lot more niggers’n me. How you aim to get your crops in without ‘em?”

  Lewis hesitated. The crowd muttered. Caudell started to worry. If a rally went wrong, a lot of votes could go wrong, too. He looked around. Like him, a lot of people stood tensely, waiting to hear what George Lewis would say. Along with the whites, he also saw several colored men and women in the square. They were not part of the rally; they had work to do. But whatever they were doing, they had their heads turned toward the platform OR which some of them had been sold. All at once, Caudell realized the election in which they could not take part mattered more to them than to him or George Lewis or any white man. He would merely be dissatisfied with the results if Lee lost, while they would have any hope of liberty dashed for at least six years.

  Almost too late, Lewis answered Jonas Perry: “Jonas, if I said I liked the whole of Lee’s plan, I’d be a liar. But the way I look at it is this: Sometimes holding on to a thing just for the sake of holding on to it gets to be more trouble than it’s worth. Bedford Forrest did everything he could to whip the niggers in arms and make them Stop fighting, but you still read about bush. whackings and murders in Louisiana and Arkansas and Mississippi in the papers all the time. And Tennessee—the Yankees sat on Tennessee for two years and turned every nigger in the state loose, near enough. There’s not a prayer of getting them all back with their proper masters there. Hell’s bells, man, you know half the free niggers, and then some right here in North Carolina were slaves before the Yankees came down on the coast. I’m not asking you to like it. I’m asking you if it’s true. Is it?”

  “Yes, but—” Perry said. This time, Lewis interrupted him. “But me no buts. The niggers who are uppity can’t run North anymore, either; now that we’re free of the United States, they don’t want our riffraff. We always said we hated niggers running off, but it was a kind of safety valve for us. Now we’re stuck with all of ‘em, and the valve’s tied down. Do you want it to blow? Do you want to see Santo Domingos all through the South?”

  “You think I’m crazy?” Perry said hoarsely. Caudell understood the catch in his voice; to a Southerner, Santo Domingo carried the same frisson of horror as violation did to a delicately reared woman. Slave uprisings, slave massacres, had always been rare and tiny in the South. But all whites knew, admit it or no, that a great rebellion could always happen…and tens of thousands of black men had learned to handle firearms in the course of the Second American Revolution.

  “No, I don’t think you’re crazy, Jonas; I just think you haven’t thought the thing through, and I think Marse Robert has,” Lewis said. “Lee’s plan doesn’t hurt anybody in the pocketbook, and it gives us back our safety valve again. It gives us lots of years to figure out what the hell to do with the niggers. Vote for Forrest, and things stay just the way they are now—till they blow sky high.”

  Perry didn’t answer, though the crowd had grown so quiet a whisper could have been heard. Caudell had his doubts that Lewis had convinced the burly farmer, but he’d made him thoughtful.

  Into that silence, Lewis said, “Here’s one more thing: This is Lee we’re talking about. If somebody else had put this notion forward, I’d fret about it a lot more than I do. If I trust the judgment of any man on the face of the earth, it’s Robert E. Lee.”

  Heads bobbed solemnly up and down, Caudell’s among them. Lee was human; he could make mistakes. Any man who’d charged up toward Cemetery Ridge wearing gray knew that—for too many, it was the last thing they ever knew. But Lee had held off the Federals in Virginia, though constantly outnumbered, and beat them and taken Washington City when the repeaters gave him a chance, had helped arrange the peace with the U.S.A. and presided over Kentucky’s joining the confederacy. If all that was not enough to deserve support, what was?

  “I had a whole big speech all ready to roll out, but I don’t think I’m going to bother with it now,” Lewis said. “The only reason I can see that anyone would want to vote for Forrest instead of Lee is over slavery, and I’ve covered that as well as I know how, talking with Jonas here. When we’re talking about anything else—dealing with the United States and other foreign countries, making paper money worth what it says it is, all that sort of thing—Lee has it over him, and I think everybody knows it. A vote for Lee and Brown moves the Confederacy forward. A vote for Forrest and Wigfall holds us back. Thank you for listening to me, my friends. I’m through.”

  The crowd cheered lustily, and began the chant of “Lee! Lee! Lee!” that Henry Pleasants had begun at the Forrest rally. The banjo picker and fiddler struck up “Dixie” again. Voices lifted in song. Caudell raised his with the rest. Only when he was walking back to his room did he think to wonder how fitting the tune was at a rally for a man who wan
ted to move, however gradually, on slavery.

  Chattering like magpies, Caudell’s students hurried out of the run-down schoolhouse and scattered for their homes. It had been a long day for them; summer was almost here, and the sun rose early and set late. The only thing that helped them—and their teacher—endure was knowing that with summer came an end to lessons.

  When Caudell, slower and tireder than the children, went outside, he found a black man waiting for him. “Hello, Israel,” he said. “Can I do something for you?”

  “Yes, suh, you can. I wants you to help me with my ‘rithmetic, suh. I pays you to do it.” He reached into his pocket, took out a tan-and-brown Confederate five-dollar bill.

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Caudell put his hands in the air. “You don’t need me, not when you work for Henry Pleasants. He’s a real engineer—he knows more about mathematics than I’ll ever learn.”

  “Yes, suh, he knows it. But he knows it so good, he cain’t teach it to me: seem like he done forgot how he ever learn in the fust place, if you know what I mean,” Israel said. Caudell had to nod; he’d known people like that. The Negro went on, “But you, suh, you a schoolteacher. You used to showin’ folk what don’t know nothin’ how to do things jus’ a step at a time, like them Yankee teachers they had at the Hayti ‘cross the Trent from New Berne. An’ these here fractions, they drivin’ me to distraction. I gots to know ‘em, if I’s ever goin’ to keep Marse Henry’s books for him. Please teach me, suh.” Israel displayed the banknote again.