House Divided (107 page)

G
ENERAL LONGSTREET, when on the ninth of May he and Trav left Richmond to rejoin Lee's army, wished he need not go so far from Louisa. Last year, months of active campaigning had helped him forget his grief for his babies; and at Christmas in Lynchburg he found that Louisa too had learned to laugh again. They were so happy together that she was easily persuaded to come and be with him for a while in January at Hamilton's Crossing. The orders that sent him to Petersburg, where he counted on having her and Garland near him, were welcome; but when she came to meet him in Richmond, she told him in resentful terror that she was to have another baby.

He tried to give her comfort and reassurance, but his own fears would not down. Perhaps Death was not done with him. Perhaps now Louisa was to die. She was so little that it had always seemed to him a miracle, a part of the miraculous of which she was a concentrate, that she could bear his children at all. During her first pregnancy, like any young father, he was half frantic with fears he would not let her see. That was Garland, and then there was Gus, and then Dent who lived only a few months. Harriet died in her first summer, and Jimmie and Mary Ann died when Gus did, last year. He and Louisa had had six children, but now five of them were gone, dead and gone; and another was coming, and Louisa this time was more miserable than she had ever been.

Yet she had still to endure the hot summer that was coming, and all the long months till October. During his stay in Petersburg and at Franklin, she had made a valorous jest of her own weakness. When
he came to her, she gave him a gay and tender welcome; but he knew that when he was away she kept her bed, husbanding her strength in order to be able to meet him thus smilingly; that after he left her she might be days recuperating. In loving solicitude he urged her to stay abed even while he was there, but she laughed and told him:

“Indeed I will not! No man likes to come home to an ailing wife, Jeems. Don't worry about me! You've quite enough on your mind.”

He wished the seat of this war could somehow be transferred to the South Side so that he might do his duty and still be near her; and he tried to devise some worth-while stroke that might be dealt the Yankees at Suffolk during these months of early spring, while snow and rain and mud still held in restraint the hosts of the enemy along the Rappahannock. But he was too much the soldier to waste men in an enterprise that could only succeed at heavy cost, and that would yield at best a prize which could not be held.

He accepted the certainty that sooner or later he must leave her; but he dreaded the moment and welcomed each delay. When General Lee advised him that Hooker was moving and that it was time for the First Corps to rejoin the army, Longstreet was glad that his foraging wagons, too precious to be abandoned, were widely scattered. To collect them would keep him near her a few days more. For the same unacknowledged reason he managed the withdrawal from Franklin with utmost care, persuading himself that not to do so was to invite pursuit and disaster. As his men moved, sappers notched every tree along the roadside; the rear guard with a few axe strokes dropped these trees across the roads. Even when it was clear that there would be no pursuit, he did not relax his precautions; for these obstructions would prove obstacles to any Yankee attack on Petersburg—where he must leave Louisa. When word came that Lee and Jackson had smashed Hooker's army at Chancellorsville, he knew he need not hurry, he could take his time, could stay near her another day, another day.

For when he left it might be forever; he might never see her face again.

But at last there were no more delays which he could justify even to himself. Reluctantly he went as far as Richmond. President Davis urged him to rejoin Lee at once; but the Yankee cavalry was on the
move all about the Capital. They might even make a foray toward Petersburg and Louisa. His military duty would be served by making Richmond, and therefore Petersburg, secure against them. He said so to President Davis, and a letter next day from General Lee supported his decision. Longstreet loved the man for that letter.

But presently the blue-clad raiders withdrew; the way to Fredericksburg was open; he must go. On the cars with only Trav for company he sat for a long time silent. The noises of the train, jolting and swaying along the worn and ill-laid rails, helped shut out the world. But Currain was a man you could talk to. Longstreet's own sadness led him at last to speech.

“I hate leaving Louisa,” he confessed; and since Trav merely nodded, he drifted into reminiscence of their years together and of his youth before he met her. “I was young for my age,” he said, remembering. “I went to West Point as a boy from the country, shy, ignorant of city ways. When I landed in New York a couple of street urchins pounced on me with a long tale of woe about a dead father and a sick mother. I'd have divided my money with them if a policeman hadn't come along and sent them scampering.” His own words made him smile. “And at Jefferson Barracks I wasn't much wiser; just a country bumpkin. Someone organized some dramatics and planned to put on
Othello
and cast me as Desdemona, because I was the only lieutenant who blushed easily; but I was six inches taller than the man who was Othello, so that wouldn't do. 'Lys Grant played Desdemona.

“When I knew I wanted to marry Louisa, Colonel Garland said I must first win a promotion or two; so off I went to Mexico. Colonel Garland and I both took wounds there, but he came home before me. When I returned, I telegraphed for permission to pay my addresses to Louisa and he replied: ‘With all my heart!' So we were married, and we've had happy years. After I became paymaster I could be at the post, live at home. That's the sort of work I wanted in this war, and for the same reason. I like being with my family, Currain.” He added grimly: “Though there's not much family left now; just Garland and Louisa.”

At his own words, old pain clamped like an iron band around his heart and silenced him. The train stopped and started, started and stopped, jolting slowly northward. Trav said: “I could almost walk
faster than this train. We've made less than eight miles in the last hour.”

It was typical of Currain to think in figures—and also it was characteristic that he should listen without comment and speak afterward of something entirely unrelated to what had just been said. Talking to him was like talking to yourself, like bouncing a ball against a wall. That pretty little wife of his must sometimes find his unresponsive silence irritating.

As they approached their destination and from the car windows saw the rude camps, the parked guns, the wagons slowly moving and the ragged soldiers, the General's thoughts swung back to this business of war. He remembered his talk with Secretary Seddon; his proposal that he go west and take Hood and Pickett to help Bragg. That was good strategy. The Confederacy had in this conflict one advantage; it held the interior lines. Its forces, even on the ill-managed, badly equipped, poorly supplied Southern railroads, could be shifted from east to west and from west to east more rapidly than Northern armies could be moved. Now that Hooker was shaken by defeat, it would be a long time before the Yankees again offered battle. If during this lull Bragg were reinforced, he could crush Rosecrans and march on Cincinnati. Then Washington would call Grant away from Vicksburg. 'Lys Grant would not want to come, true. Secretary Seddon had said so, and he was right. But Lincoln would make Grant let go his death hold on Vicksburg in order to save Cincinnati. Lincoln would never risk losing the West.

Longstreet, contemplating these strategic possibilities, felt his blood begin to stir again. He must forget Louisa if he could. The war was his task.

Yet she was so little and so weak, so tender and so brave!

No matter! Here was his work to do. The train stopped at Hamilton Crossing. He rose and shook his great shoulders and settled his hat on his head.

 

He reported to General Lee and though he saw the marks of fatigue on the older man, Lee's welcome was as warm as always. They clasped hands, and Longstreet said: “You've had heavy work, General.”

Lee nodded gravely. “Yes, a severe affair.”

“A great victory.”

“I would trade that victory to have General Jackson back again.”

Longstreet was surprised at the other's anxious tone. “Secretary Seddon said he stood the amputation well.” His word was a question.

Lee shook his head. “I've a message from Hunter McGuire today. Jackson's recovery is very doubtful.” Longstreet's throat filled with such a gush of grief that he could not speak; and after a moment Lee added: “And we have had heavy losses. The organizations are badly broken up. There is much to do, much to do.”

Next day Jackson died; and sorrow hushed voices in the camps and around the cooking fires and damped even the pride of recent victory. Longstreet and Trav and some others went to Richmond for the ceremonial funeral march; and on the return journey Longstreet fell to thinking of the difference between himself and Jackson. Jackson as a general had qualities which he himself could never emulate; a driving force, a lancelike velocity. “Stonewall” they had called him, ever since First Manassas; but actually his genius was not defense but attack. That could be a weakness. After Fredericksburg, if Lee had not forbidden, Jackson would have thrown his men against the shattered Federals along the river; but such an attack would have cost the South as many men as Burnside had wasted in attacking the sunken road. No, Jackson was not a stone wall; he was a hammer, a lance, a thrusting sword. “He was better than I at rapid movement, at quick and headlong assaults,” Longstreet thought. “I'm slow, ponderous. I can hit just as hard, but not as quickly.”

His quiet thoughts perceived a deeper difference between them. Jackson was a man about whom legends gathered. Everything he did was marked and noted and told and retold. During the fighting around Richmond he personally supervised the process of cleaning up a battlefield, directing men as they buried the dead, and removed the wounded. Someone asked why. “Because I must presently march my men across this field and I do not wish them to see disturbing sights.” His shabby dress, the sorry nag he rode, his habit for a while after First Manassas of holding up his hand to ease the pain in the finger he had lost there, his insistence when gentlemen called on him upon collecting their hats and putting them away, his ferocity in battle, his
kindness in camp, his profound religious feeling, his flashes of humor, his care of his men on the one hand and his orders to shoot stragglers on the other—every smallest trait was observed and remembered and reported as mortals might chronicle the actions of one of the lesser gods come down to earth.

Longstreet thought no one would ever repeat anecdotes about him, not as they did about Jackson. Without envy, he wondered what was this quality which made one man a picturesque and memorable figure, while another—no matter what great deeds he might perform—never heard his name on the tongues of men? To be sure there were men like Stuart who courted such notice. Stuart loved the spectacular exploit, he delighted in holding the center of the stage; but Jackson never sought to be conspicuous. He sought only to do his great works, and did them; he never seemed to think of himself but only of his work.

So it was not by intention that Jackson had become a legend, but by performance; and Longstreet knew that nothing he himself might ever do would win him an equal fame. Men would remember him as a silent, somewhat forbidding person of whom they were a little afraid and whom therefore they easily disliked. They would credit him with strength and stubborn persistence, but that was all. Even if he wished to do so, he could not change himself. Jackson was one man; he was another. Nevertheless, there was useful work which he could do.

 

Back in camp, thinking thus to distract General Lee and help him forget grief for Jackson, Longstreet spoke of his proposal to Secretary Seddon to send a force west, and pointed out its possibilities.

“Yes, even its necessity, General,” he urged. “If we do not relieve the pressure, Grant will have Vicksburg, and the whole line of the Mississippi. If he can lop off the western states, the Confederacy will be as much weakened as a man who loses a leg.” It was not necessary to elaborate the point, for General Lee knew better than he every aspect of the South's problems; but Longstreet did so, anxious to hold the other's attention.

“The thing would be worth doing, and doubtless could be done,” Lee said at last. “But I need Hood and Pickett. I need you, General.” He smiled a little, sadly. “I need you more than ever now.”

Let him not think of Jackson. Longstreet urged: “Our most pressing task is to save Vicksburg.”

“It's true,” the other assented. “To lose the Mississippi would hurt us sadly; but to lose Virginia would hurt us worse.” Lee was for a moment silent. “My own loyalty is to Virginia above all; but if Virginia falls, so does the Confederacy. I am sure of that.”

“Isn't Virginia safe for the present, General?”

“I want those people a little farther away.”

“You can't drive them. They're secure behind the Rappahannock. Neither they nor we can force and maintain a crossing.”

“We must not waste the summer,” General Lee reflected, and Longstreet saw that his attention now was all upon matters of strategy. “Our problem is how best to use it. The western venture has virtues; but there may be a nearer way that is less hazardous.” Longstreet looked at him, already guessing what was in his mind; and General Lee said quietly: “Those people would abandon everything else if we were to threaten Washington.” He added: “It's hard to provision our army where we are, General; but there are fat lands within our reach.”

So these two, as men will, turned from a shared grief to the solace of work. Fat lands? That meant invasion of the North. Longstreet's instinct was to urge the defensive; but a thrust north through the sally port of the Valley might be the best defensive.