Blood spurted, spectacularly crimson in the afternoon sun. Rhoodie let out a gobbling, choking scream, brought up his hands to clutch at the gaping wound. But blood poured between his fingers, from his mouth, from his nose. He took a couple of wobbling steps, tottered, fell.
Another Rivington man grabbed for a bandage pack like the one Benny Lang had used, knelt by Rhoodie. “Andries!” he shouted, and then something in a guttural language Caudell did not know. Rhoodie lay still. After a minute or two, the other Rivington man stood up, shaking his head. Under dirt and streaks of green and black paint, his face was white.
The Negro threw down the broken, bloody bottle. He turned to the Confederates, saying, “Massers, y’all do what you want wif me. I ‘dured more’n man was meant to ‘dure from dat white devil. You look heah.” He ran his hands up and down his ribcage, which showed in even sharper relief than that of the slave with whom Caudell had talked outside of town. “An’ heah.” He turned to show his back and the scars, old and new, crisscrossing it. “I ain’t no ornery, uppity nigger, massers, sweah to God I ain’t—dat Rhoodie, he jus’ evil to his boys. I seen him heah, an’ I couldn’t take no mo’.”
Caudell and the rest of the soldiers in gray looked at one another in confusion, wondering what to do next. A black who slew a white had to die; so said generations of law. But if the white was an enemy of the Confederate States, a man who’d led the Rivington fighters, who was wanted in connection with the Richmond Massacre, and who, moreover, had abused the black outrageously? Generations of law said the black still had to die. Generations of custom dictated against bothering with much law.
No one raised a gun against the Negro. After a long pause, Caudell jerked a thumb back toward Rivington. “You’d better get out of here.” The Negro stared, then fled as fast as he’d come.
“But—that kaf—that nigger—he just murdered a blank—a white,” a Rivington man spluttered furiously.
“Shut up, you,” four soldiers growled in the same breath. One added, “Reckon the son of a bitch had it coming, by God.” Caudell thought the same thing, but hadn’t quite had the nerve to say it out loud. That someone did showed the South was indeed different from what it had been in 1861.
* XIX *
The door to the Presidential mansion stood open for the fortnightly levee. Moths got in with the people, but to close the door would have made the place stifling: along with June, summer had come to Richmond. More moths fluttered hopefully against the window screen, looking for their chance to immolate themselves in the gaslights within.
Robert E. Lee and his daughter Mary stood just inside the front hall, greeting visitors as they arrived. “Good evening, sir and madam…How are you today, Senator Magoffin?… Well, Mr. Secretary, what brings you here?”
Jefferson Davis allowed himself a thin, self-deprecating smile. “I just thought I would drop by to see how this house was getting along without me. It seems to be doing quite well.”
“You also expressed a certain small interest in hearing the latest gossip, as I recall,” Varina Davis said with a twinkle in her eye.
“I?” Davis looked at Lee. “Mr. President, I submit myself to your judgment. Can you conceive of my making such a preposterous statement?”
“No, but then I cannot conceive of your lovely wife lying about it, either,” Lee replied.
“I never knew you were such a diplomat,” Jefferson Davis exclaimed, while Varina’s creamy shoulders shook with merriment. The former President went on, “Had you shown this talent previously, I might have sent you to Europe in place of Mason and Slidell.”
“In that case, sir, I am glad I hid my light under a bushel,” Lee said, which won him a small laugh from Davis and a bigger one from his wife.
Mary Lee said, “You both seem happier now that you are out of this house.”
“Happier?” Jefferson Davis soberly considered that, and after a moment shook his head…No, I think not. Easier might be a better word, in that the full weight of responsibility now lies on your father’s broad and capable shoulders.”
“The full weight of thirst now lies on my narrow, parched throat,” Varina Davis said. “With your kind consent, gentleman, Mary, I aim to raid the punch bowl.” Her maroon skins, stiff with crinoline, rustled about her as she sailed grandly toward the refreshment table set against the far wall of the room. With a final bow, Jefferson Davis followed his wife.
Once he was out of earshot, Lee said, “Let him claim what he will, my dear Mary—I am certain you are right. I’ve not seen such spring in his stride since our days back at West Point.”
When the stream of guests slowed, Lee claimed a goblet of punch for himself and drifted through the crowd, listening. That, to him, was what was most valuable about the levees: they let him get a feel for what Richmond thought—or at least talked about—which he could have had in no other way.
Two things seemed to be on people’s minds tonight: the recent surrender of the last America Will Break rebels down in North Carolina and the continuing congressional debate on the bill that weakened slavery. A plump, prosperous-looking man approached Lee and said, “See here, sir! If we are to set about turning our niggers loose, why then did we shed so much blood separating ourselves from Yankeedom? We might as well rejoin the United States as emancipate our slaves.”
“I fear I cannot agree with you, sir,” Lee answered. “We spent our blood to regain the privilege of settling our own affairs as we choose, rather than having such settlements enforced upon us by other sections of the U.S. which chose a way different from ours and which enjoyed a numerical preponderance over us.”
“Bah!” the man said succinctly, and started to stomp off.
“Sir, let me tell you something, if I may,” Lee said. The fellow stopped; however much he disagreed with his President, he recognized an obligation to listen to him. Lee went on, “When I went into Washington City after it fell to our arms, Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States, asked me a question I have never forgotten: as we had made the Confederate States into a nation, what son of nation would it be?”
The man had an answer ready: “The same sort as it was before the war, of course.”
“But we are not the same now as then, nor can we again become so,” Lee said. “As the minister pointed out, commerce demands we playa role in the wider world, and the war was hard on us and harder on our institutions, including that of Negro servitude. I would sooner make some small accommodations now, give the Negro some stake in the South—which is, after all, his country, too—than face, perhaps, servile insurrection in ten years’ time, or twenty.”
“I wouldn’t,” the man snapped. This time, he did leave.
Lee sighed. He’d had similar conversations before at these levees. Every one of them saddened him: how could so many people be unable to see past their own noses? He did not know the answer to that, but it was demonstrably true.
He cheered up when Mississippi Congressman Ethelbert Barksdale came over to him and said, “I heard the last part of your talk with that fat fool, Mr. President. Of course he doesn’t fear fighting in a slave uprising; by the look of him, he probably didn’t fight in the Second American Revolution, either—or don’t you think he’s the kind who would have hired a substitute?”
“I shouldn’t care to impugn the courage or patriotism of a man I do not know, sir—but you may very well be right,” Lee said. Sometimes a small taste of malice was sweet. The pleasure swiftly faded, though. “But there are so many with views like his that I fear for my bill.”
“It will pass, sir,” Barksdale said earnestly. He was a Confederate party man through and through, having backed Jefferson Davis in war and peace and Lee after him (he’d barely kept his own congressional seat in the past election, just riding out Forrest’s Mississippi landslide). Now he lowered his voice: “If you’d told him what the AWB was really working toward, he would have turned up his toes.”
“With men of his stripe, I wonder even about that,” Lee
said gloomily. But Barksdale had a point. Without the Richmond Massacre and the books in the AWB’s secret room, no bill limiting slavery in any way would have had a prayer of getting through the Confederate Congress. In the aftermath of the murders and of the revelations from the AWB sanctum, his legislation did have a chance, maybe even a good one.” As often happens with those who would do evil, the Rivington men proved their own worst enemies.”
“That they did.” Barksdale looked left, right, back over his shoulder, let his voice fall even further, so that Lee had to lean close to hear him: “And speaking of the Rivington men, Mr. President, what shall be done with the ones captured in the fighting round their home town?”
“Home base,” Lee corrected. “You pose an interesting question, Congressman. They were, of course, taken in arms against the Confederacy: a prima facie case for treason if ever there was one. Were we to hang them, not a voice could be raised against us.”
Barksdale stared at him. “You mean they might not hang? You startle me.”
“Nothing is yet decided. They fall under military rather than civil jurisdiction, both on account of their rebellion and because Nash County, North Carolina, where they were captured, had had the right to the writ of habeas corpus revoked and fell under the administration of General Forrest.”
“Ah, I see.” Barksdale’s face cleared. “The question is whether to hang ‘em or shoot ‘em? I don’t much care one way or the other; they’ll end up equally dead with either, which is the point of the exercise after all, eh?”
“As I say, nothing is yet decided. But ldo want to thank you again for your sterling work in support of the bill regulating Negroes’ labor. Have you any idea yet when it might come up for a vote?”
As was his habit, Ethelbert Barksdale licked his lips while he thought. “The vote in the House might be as early as next week. If it passes there…hmm. Senators having fewer limits on their debate than representatives, the bill may well encounter considerable delay in the upper house before it goes up or down.”
“I mislike delay,” Lee said fretfully. The longer legislators had to bury in their memories the Richmond Massacre and the truth about the AWB, the likelier they were to revert to comfortable, traditional Southern thought patterns—into which slavery fit only too well. “I trust, sir, that you will do your best to move the bill forward in the House with the utmost expedition.”
Barksdale puffed out the chest of his starched white shirt till he looked like a pouter pigeon. “Mr. President, you may rely upon me.”
If he was pompous, he was also sincere. Lee gave him credit for that, replying, “I do, sir; believe me, I do.”
The Mississippi congressman preened. Then his eyes narrowed in calculation. “One way to influence the tally might be the well-timed execution of a Rivington man or two.”
“I shall bear your advice in mind, I assure you,” Lee said. Barksdale swaggered off, pleased and proud to have influenced events. But Lee, though he would remember the advice, had no intention of taking it. He did not object to executing felons; he’d ordered rapists and looters in the Army of Northern Virginia hanged. To kill a man for the sake of political advantage, though—he rebelled at that, however richly some of the Rivington men deserved it.
He talked for a while with a veteran who had a hook where his left hand should have been. “Gettysburg, the third day,” the fellow said when Lee asked him where he’d been hurt.
He’d heard that too many times. “I should never have sent you brave lads forward then.”
“Ah, well, it came right in the end, sir,” the veteran said, smiling. Lee nodded, touched by his devotion. But he would have been equally mutilated had the South lost, without even the pride of victory to show for it. That would have been his bitter portion had the Rivington men not come, just as it was now for thousands of maimed men in the North.
Chatting with a couple of pretty girls helped restore Lee’s spirits. He’d always had an eye for women, had corresponded with several for years, but never did anything more all through his long marriage. Now the girls were also eyeing him, with a frank feminine speculation he’d never noticed before. He suddenly realized he was an eligible man once more. His face heated. The idea frightened him more than any two battles in which he’d fought. He retreated to the less intimidating company of Jefferson Davis.
“You’re rather flushed,” the former President observed. “Perhaps you should have the front door opened again in spite of the insects.”
“The heat is not what troubles me,” Lee said, with such dignity as he could muster. Davis, though far from a savvy politician, knew better than to ask what did.
As Lee’s carriage rolled east along Cary Street toward Libby Prison, it passed a mule team hauling a barge down the City Canal. In the James River, the twin stacks of the light-draft gunboat C. S. S. Bealeton sent pencils of smoke into the sky.
The prison was a three-story brick building, cream-colored up to the bottom of the second-floor windows and red above. A warehouse before the war, it had housed as many as a thousand Federal prisoners during the winter of 1863-64. Many of them managed to escape not long after Lee first met the Rivington men, but the chimney through which they’d gained access to the basement was long since sealed up. Moreover, more guards kept an eye on the fifty-one Rivington men on the third floor than had watched all those Yankees.
Lee’s own bodyguard nevertheless looked nervous as he preceded his charge up the stairs to the second-floor Chickamauga Room. “I shall be quite safe, Lieutenant, I assure you,” Lee said. “Only the one prisoner will be brought in, and not only you but several from the force here will be present to make certain nothing goes wrong.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, eloquently unconvinced. After a moment, he added, “With the AWB men, sir, how do you propose to make certain of anything?”
“That is the question,” Lee admitted.
“Yes, sir,” his guard repeated, fiercely now. “I mean, after what happened at your inauguration—” He broke off, not wanting to hurt Lee by reminding him of the ill-omened day. His expression said he would have executed all the captured Rivington men without a second thought.
The Chickamauga Room, as headquarters for the prisoners, interrogation, had been fitted with a desk by one of its nine-paned windows and a few chairs. Guards snapped to attention when Lee came in. While he settled himself at the desk, a couple of them hurried off to fetch a captive for him to question.
The man who returned between the guards was slim and dark and walked with a limp. In plain gray shirt and pants—slave’s clothes, actually; the prison warder saved a dollar where he could—he did not look like one of the fearsome Rivington men. “Good morning, Mr. Lang,” Lee said. He pointed to a chair a few feet in front of the desk. “You may sit if your wound still troubles you.”
“It’s healing well enough,” Benny Lang said. He sat all the same. Lee’s bodyguard, AK-47 ready to fire from the hip, interposed himself between chair and desk. The men from the Libby Prison detachment stood off to one side, their rifles equally ready. As he looked from one of them to another, Lang’s mouth shaped an ironic smile. “I suppose I should be flattered at how dangerous you think I am.”
Lee’s answer was serious: “The Confederacy has learned, to its cost, how dangerous you Rivington men are.” He watched Lang’s smile fade, went on, “I also wish to inform you, so you may pass it on to your fellows upstairs, that the House of Representatives yesterday passed by a vote of fifty-two to forty-one the bill regulating the labor of this nation’s colored individuals. The way in which you sought to turn us from that course succeeded only in putting us more firmly upon it.”
Lang set his jaw. “Get rid of us, then, and have done.” The bodyguard’s back seemed to radiate agreement with the suggestion.
Lee said, “You must understand beyond any possible doubt that the direction in which you intended to go is not the one we have chosen for ourselves. Those of you who grasp that and are able to fully ac
cept it may yet gain the opportunity to redeem your lives despite your treason.”
“How’s that?” the Rivington man asked scornfully. “Say we’re sorry and go scot-free? I’m not a big enough fool to believe it. I wish to heaven I could.”
“You needn’t,” Lee said. Benny Lang gave a mordant chuckle. Ignoring it, Lee went on, “If you were ever to regain your freedom, you would earn it, I assure you.”
Lang studied him. “You’re not a man in the habit of lying,” he said slowly. “Tell me more.”
Lee still wondered if he should. As his bodyguard had said, being certain about anything that had to do with the Rivington men was impossible. Even though they’d been stripped of all their gear from the future, right down to their very clothes, he couldn’t be sure that, knowing something of which 1868 was ignorant, they might not yet find a means to escape and give the Confederacy more grief. He felt, in fact, rather like a fisherman who had rubbed a lamp, seen a genie come forth, and was now wondering how—or if—he could control it.
If he could, though, how much good that would bring his country! And so, cautiously, he said, “You know, Mr. Lang, that in capturing the AWB offices here in Richmond and your headquarters down in Rivington, we have come into possession of a large quantity of volumes from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our scholars, as you may imagine, have fallen on these with glad cries and will spend years gleaning what they can from them.”
“If you have the bloody books, what do you want with us?” Lang said.
“Primarily, to serve as bridges. A complaint I have heard repeatedly is that your volumes take for granted matters about which we know nothing. I confess that, having seen your works in action, I find this unsurprising: we are speaking, after all, of a gap of a hundred fifty years. You men may well prove of great value by helping us understand—and perhaps helping us use—your, ah, artifacts. Performing that task faithfully and well could, in time, possibly even expiate the crimes of which you are surely guilty.”
The Guns of the South Page 67