Hell or Richmond (38 page)

He had been audacious himself. At Cerro Gordo. Then in the battles before the great City of Mexico, combats that he, in his innocence, had considered fraught with gore. Now he was engaged in a war grim beyond his earlier powers of imagination, a contest of vast armies and fearsome weapons. It was a war that he had never wanted, but one to which he had committed his soul for the sake of Virginia, a war scorched with pride and one that, even in its satisfactions, clamored at his conscience in the night.

This day, though, had been pleasing. Each of his subordinates had done precisely the right thing without his urging.

“Figure Grant’s had about enough, sir?” Ewell asked. “Think he’ll run off like the rest of them?”

“General Grant … appears tenacious. If he has moved his army here, it is not without purpose. He will attack us again. After some preparation.”

“And we’ll whip him again,” Ewell said.

“Here, here!” Anderson agreed.

“As the Lord decides,” Lee said. “General Anderson, the bread, please.”

“Oh, we’ll whip him,” Ewell insisted. “Him and old Granny Meade. These beets got sass, don’t they, though?”

Negro servants ghosted in and out, passing a dead hearth, their doings so much the custom of the country that it seemed odd to Lee to notice them of a sudden. He held up his cup a few inches: water. And it was served to him.

“I believe,” Lee resumed, “that we face one more trial. Grant will put in his all.” He looked at the candle’s flame and into the future. “But should we disappoint his hopes and those of General Meade, those people must withdraw to Fredericksburg, if not beyond. Their losses have been so heavy I see no alternative. Then we may recuperate the army and look to—”

“
Nobody
can take the whippings we’ve given those blue-bellies,” Ewell declared. He seemed unaware he had interrupted Lee. His voice, excited, had risen to a pitch that was almost girlish. It did not become a man of his age and position.

“If their losses have been severe,” Lee said, “our own have not been welcome.” He abandoned his attempt to finish his portion of cheese, adding, “This is a graceless form of war. It asks much of the men.”

“Oh, they’re up to it,” Ewell said. He swilled down his water as if it were strong drink. “They won’t shy.”

“I agree,” Anderson put in. “We’re tougher than the Federals. In flesh and spirit.”

Lee let the exchange drop. He had crossed harsh words with Marshall that very morning. The report on deserters had angered him and, caught off guard, he had taken it out on his military secretary. He had not expected so many desertions so early in the campaign. Might it not be wiser to stop shooting such men and hang them instead? The better to deter others? The rope was more fearsome than bullets.

Next, there had come a letter from President Davis, a communication so embarrassing that, after reading it twice, he had burned it himself. Posterity had to be spared such childish moonshine. The president had gone from expecting miracles to imagining that he, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, performed them. He had written of his renewed certainty that Britain would come in with the Confederacy any time now and the blockade would be broken. The South’s problems would be solved by cotton sales, the Royal Navy, and an invasion from Canada.
And
he expected Lee’s old classmate Joe Johnston to defeat Sherman’s army before the month was out.

As for Johnston, Lee wished him success, but did not believe he would have an easy time of things. The matter of Great Britain was clear nonsense, though. Lincoln had sewn up the matter a year and a half before, although it had taken Lee months to see through the matter. When Lincoln issued his emancipation decree—a dictator’s act—they all had expressed public outrage, while indulging in quiet glee at “Honest Abe’s” folly. Such imperious behavior would further unite the South in righteous anger, they had believed, while dividing the North between the abolitionists and sensible men who saw the need for peace. They all had been blindly confident. But Lincoln had seen the future, while they clung to the past. That piece of paper had caused the North only hiccups, not lasting distress, while the decree had made it impossible for the European powers to intervene, since to do so would be to champion slavery outright. The English public, especially, would not countenance it, and the South’s sympathizers in Parliament had been stymied. They had underrated Lincoln, who was canny. And far more capable, Lee feared, than the man who lived in the president’s house in Richmond.

The only hope now, the last hope, was to so bloody the North’s armies that the voters would turn out Lincoln in the fall, bringing in a peace candidate. Were Lincoln to be reelected, Lee envisioned only further destruction, immeasurable bitterness, and, if necessary, a war carried into the hills and lasting decades. The South would die before it would surrender.

Lee came back to the living moment, half listened to the two corps commanders teasing and praising each other, and watched a Negro servant clear the table.

What did any Northerner know of the Negro? Lee found it distasteful to hear slavery praised from the pulpit, but, practically speaking, what was the alternative for the present? To unleash millions of savages upon a civilized land? He did not need to read lurid accounts from Haiti: As a lieutenant with a new wife at Fort Monroe, he had discovered what Negro terror meant. The slave uprising in nearby Southampton County had revealed the full barbarity of the African, the instinctive outrages against chaste women and gentlefolk. No, the Negro needed a firm hand to refine him, or he would degenerate into lifelong indolence punctuated by bursts of crimson slaughter.

Of course, slavery could not persist in the modern world. But its elimination had to be gradual. Across the span of a century, the Negro might be fitted to an elementary role in American society, but it was unfair to the creature to expect more. He had long since freed his own few slaves, glad to be rid of a practical vexation, and had even paid passages to Liberia for those who wished to go. But it was too late to ship millions back to Africa.

What
was
to be done with these simple, feckless people? His father-in-law had specified that his slaves were to be freed upon his death, if Arlington’s financial affairs permitted; otherwise, they would go free after five years. And the Negroes had misunderstood, expecting ladders to descend from Heaven when Mr. Custis shed his mortal coil. The plantation’s books had been in dreadful shape after years of neglect and, as the new head of the family, Lee had needed to keep the servants and field hands bound for the five allotted years. He had had no choice. A few of the disappointed slaves had run away, and their apprehension had been essential to scotch the flight of the others. Upon their retrieval by slave catchers, he had required the sheriff to whip them. He had taken no pleasure in the matter, but a plantation had to have order, as did an army. Discipline was salutary. He had refused to shield himself, though, and had stood by to watch the punishment, feeling each lash himself.

And that was the South’s conundrum: Wise men understood that the institution of slavery must crumble. But hotheads had ruled the day, only playing into the hands of the worst forces in the North. Madcap fools had made this war, not soldiers. Now the soldiers must win it for the fools.

After five years, he had honored the Custis will and freed Arlington’s slaves. The worst of his blacks had slipped into the maelstrom, while those who remained loyal expected gratitude. As for the plantation he had labored to save, it was lost forever now, profaned by those people to spite him. They had burned White House plantation, too, depriving his son Rooney of a home. So much of his golden world was gone forever.…

As if reading his thoughts, Ewell said, too loudly, “I do wish Sam Grant would send his nigger division to face my boys. We’d see about the ‘dignity of the colored man,’ all right. We’d set those coons to running so fast they’d be climbing trees in Maine before the morning.”

“If they lived that long,” Anderson said.

And now it had come to this: black men armed and uniformed, to be set upon white men with a government’s blessing. The abolitionists had not seen what Nat Turner’s knives and axes had wrought on the helpless.

Well, if it came to that, his men were not helpless.

For all his private complaints, he knew war suited him. As did the faith he had discovered late in life. He was not meant to be a man of business and scorned the undisguised pursuit of wealth, but he had been called upon time and again to straighten out matters reflecting on his kindred. He had dirtied his hands not by preference, but to salvage the Custis name for his dear wife. He always had done his duty, however unpleasant, by his family, by the army, and by Mary’s family, and he did it with rigid probity.

The paramount aim of his life had been to restore the honor of the Lees of Virginia. After his father, once a hero and intimate of Washington’s, had perished a bankrupt, and half-brother Henry, the next head of the family, descended into odium and scandal, his people had been reduced to near pariahs. Old Custis had not wished his daughter to bear the name and relented only because Mary was of age. Then, with painful irony, Custis had mishandled his own affairs. Not criminally, but incompetently. His death had left them all headaches and debts as inheritance. Dutiful yet again, Lee had taken a leave of absence to clear the estate. His life from early manhood had been naught but a succession of such obligations, and the sweetness of his childhood, of the years before the fall, at Stratford Hall or visiting the endless supply of cousins in ripe summers, all that was gone, an age as vanished as those of the Tudors and Stuarts.

He had learned what it meant to be the poor relation, disregarded in social coalitions. On top of all, he had, still a boy, nursed his ailing mother, in a household where poverty was not always genteel. It seemed he was fated to see the women he loved most dearly turn invalid, just as he must suffer other men’s scandals. West Point had been his first attempt at escape.

From the day he arrived on that shelf above the Hudson, he determined to be a man of flawless deportment, of measured speech and immaculate integrity. He bound himself to every regulation and worshipped every detail of the code of honor. He did not drink or smoke, would not gamble or curse, and never did he associate with light women. Even his posture announced his rectitude, armoring him against life.

And he had come far. Perhaps, he sometimes feared, a bit too far. The night harbored demons the day might slay with reason: Would raising his sword against the flag he had once sworn to defend bring greater shame than his father’s speculations? When his heart no longer beat, how would the living regard the name of Lee?

How much of his life, of his actions even now, had been decided when his father first took on a debt he could not settle? Was each man a slave to something? He had heard that George Meade, too, had suffered a family’s fall, although the elder Meade’s conduct had not been improper. Did Meade feel driven to mend his family’s repute? Grant, for his part, was plebeian, the new sort of man, and had only his own shame to cover.

“General Lee, you look wearied,” Anderson said. “Best take your rest, sir.”

“Thank you, General Anderson,” Lee answered. “I’m afraid I must write a few letters before I retire.”

The problem with sleep was dreams.

FOURTEEN

May 9, six thirty a.m.
Union lines, Spotsylvania

Major General John Sedgwick preferred to keep a man his friend, rather than make an enemy, and he knew Warren was sensitive to slights, real or imagined. So he rode to Fifth Corps headquarters himself, hoping to soothe its commander, before the wound of Meade’s order cut too deep.

His passage along the lines attracted a minor cannonade.

Warren wasn’t at the shack he had commandeered for a headquarters. His aide intercepted Sedgwick on the porch. A young man, Roebling looked ashen-faced and aged. He wasn’t certain where his chief had gone.

Off to complain to Meade? Warren was fool enough to do it. Meade would be all right once his temper calmed, but Grant didn’t care for handwringers. Warren would just make a bad situation worse.

Up along the entrenchments, the
crack-crack-crack
of skirmishing rose and fell. The intervals between bursts belonged to sharpshooters. The racket had kept up all night, making sleep a ragged affair, at best. At fifty, Sedgwick wasn’t the physical specimen he had been.

You’re no more tired than your men, he told himself. At least you get to ride a goddamned horse.

He said: “All right, Roebling. You know I’m not going to lord it over anybody. No matter what Meade’s order says. Tell General Warren to go on and command his own corps, as usual. I have perfect confidence he’ll do what’s right. He knows what to do with his corps as well as I do.”

In one of his fits of spleen, Meade had sent down orders putting Sedgwick in overall command of both his Sixth Corps and Warren’s men in Meade’s absence. Warren had not been relieved, but put on a leash. And Warren had brought it on himself, not just by the slovenly way he’d put in his weary soldiers the day before, but by throwing a tantrum of the sort that raised Meade’s ire.