How Few Remain (54 page)

“Not where I come from, they ain’t,” the prisoner said, and spat again. He turned to the U.S. soldiers guarding him. “You done caught us. Ain’t that bad enough? We got to put up with this damn mouthy nigger, too? Take us away and put us somewheres, why don’t you?”

“You’re damn lucky you’re breathin’, Reb,” one of the soldiers in blue answered. “You want to stay lucky, you’ll do like you’re told.”

Douglass had often anticipated interviews with ordinary Confederates. This one wasn’t going the way he’d anticipated. The other Rebel who admitted to being a slaveholder said, “What in blazes are the Yew-nited States invadin’ us for, anyways? We ain’t done nothin’ personal to you, nigger. We ain’t done nothin’ to nobody in the USA. All we done is buy up a chunk o’ Mexico wasn’t doin’ nobody no good nohow. An’ you-all start shootin’ at us an’ blowin’ us up on account of
that?
My pappy always told me they was funny up in Boston and Massachusetts and them places, and I reckon he was right.”

“The existence of a nation built on bondage is a stench in the nostrils of the entire civilized world,” Douglass said.

“It ain’t your business.” Both Confederate soldiers spoke as one.

“It is the business of every man who loves liberty,” Douglass declared. He threw his hands in the air; he and the slaveholders might have been speaking two different languages. He asked them, “How were you captured?”

The uninjured one said, “Three Yankees yelled at me to throw down my rifle at the same time. Right about then, I reckoned that’d be a plumb good idea.”

“What about you?” Douglass asked the other one.

“You really want to know, nigger?” the Reb with the bandaged head answered. “I was squattin’ in the bushes with my pants around my ankles, doin’ my business, when this motherfucker in a blue coat says he’ll blow me out a new asshole to shit through if’n I don’t put my hands high. So I done it.” He gave Douglass a sour stare. “An’ looky here—I got me the new asshole anyways.”

That set not only the Confederate prisoners but also their guards braying like donkeys. Douglass stomped off. The Rebels’ jeers pursued him. He paused to scribble in his notebook:
They are now, as they have long been, ignorant, uncouth, and stubbornly indifferent to the sentiments of their fellow men and to the appeals of simple human justice. Only a brute-like hardiness—ironically, the very trait they impute to their enslaved Negroes—enables them to persist in their infamous course
.

A second look told him that was hardly objective. He grunted. “So what?” he said aloud. He put the notebook in his pocket and tramped off toward the southwest.

XII

General Thomas Jackson looked up from the map. “They are throwing everything they have into this,” he observed. “Can we reduce our forces within the city of Louisville to add a core of battle-hardened men to the forces we are deploying against their flanking maneuver?”

“I believe so, sir,” Major General E. Porter Alexander answered. “They have stepped up their attacks within the city, but their troops there have not the dash and spirit they did when the fighting was new. They know they are likely to gain little and to pay dearly for what they do get. Few men give their best under such circumstances.”

“Any men who fail to give their best under any circumstances deserve the sternest treatment from their own superiors,” Jackson said. “The old Roman custom of decimation has much to recommend it.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as that, sir,” Alexander said, trying to turn it into a joke.

“I would,” replied Jackson, who saw nothing funny in it. Raising one arm above his head, he went on, “But back to the nub of things. What can you do, General, about the Yankees’ artillery? Their guns seriously hamper our efforts to move troops to face the attack from the east.”

“They have more guns than we do,” E. Porter Alexander said unhappily. “They’ve taken some off the Louisville front to do just as you say: to make shifting soldiers harder for us. It’s a good thing you had the forethought to build so many trench lines around the city before the Yankees started moving against our flank. If we had to dig while we were fighting, we’d be in worse trouble than we are already.”

“This demonstrates a point I have repeatedly stressed to President Longstreet,” Jackson said: “namely, that having a servile population upon which we can draw in time of need confers great military advantage on us.” He sighed. “The president is of the opinion that other factors militate against our retaining this advantage. Perhaps he is even right. For the sake of the country, I pray he is right.”

“Yes, sir.” General Alexander hesitated, then said, “Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“By no means, General. Ask what you will.”

Despite that generous permission, Alexander hemmed and hawed before he did put the question: “Sir, why do you stick your arm up in the air like that? I’ve seen you do it many times, and it’s always puzzled me.”

“Oh. That.” Jackson lowered the arm; he’d all but forgotten he’d elevated it in the first place. “One of my legs, it seems to me, is bigger than the other, and one of my arms is likewise unduly heavy. By raising the arm, I let the blood run back into my body and so lighten the limb. It is a habit I have had for many years, and one, I believe, with nothing but beneficial results.”

“All right, sir.” Alexander grinned at him. “I expect I ought to be glad I’m the same size on both sides, then.”

“Is that levity?” The general-in-chief of the C.S. Army knew he had trouble recognizing it. “Well, never mind. The key to this fight will lie in halting the new Yankee thrust before it can crash into the flank of the position we were previously maintaining. The foe has been generous enough to give us considerable room in which to maneuver.”

“He’s given himself considerable room to maneuver, too,” Alexander pointed out.

“You have set your finger on an unfortunate truth.” Jackson studied the map again. “We have to maneuver more effectually, then. We have no other choice. As best I can judge from the reports reaching this headquarters, the intended direction of the Yankee column is—”

“Straight at us, near enough,” Porter Alexander broke in.

“I believe you are correct, yes.” Jackson took another long look at the indicated U.S. line of attack. “Absent interference, they would be here in a couple of hours. I intend to see that such interference is not absent.”

“Sir!” A telegrapher waved for Jackson’s attention. “I have an
urgent wire here from Second Lieutenant Stuart, commanding the Third Virginia south and west of St. Matthews. His line to divisional headquarters is down, so he calls on you. He says the Yankees are there in great numbers. He’s thrown an attack at them to delay and confuse them, but requests reinforcements. ‘Whatever you have,’ he says.”

“He shall be reinforced.” Jackson’s head came up. “A lieutenant, commanding a regiment?”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir, past what the wire says,” the telegrapher answered. “Shall I order him to report the circumstances?”

“Never mind,” Jackson said. “If he has the command, he has it, and does not need his elbow jogged for explanations. Afterwards will be time enough to sort through the whys and wherefores.”

E. Porter Alexander said, “One way or another, he won’t be a second lieutenant by this time tomorrow. Either he’ll be a captain or maybe a major, or else he’ll wind up a private with no hope of seeing officer’s rank ever again.” He paused. “Or, of course, he may well end up more concerned about his heavenly reward than any he might gain upon this earth. A lot of good men must have fallen for a lieutenant to assume regimental command. If afterwards he ordered an attack, he would hardly be removing himself from danger.”

“That’s true, General.” Jackson studied the telegram, trying to divine more from it than the operator’s bald statement had given him. Then, suddenly, his tangled eyebrows rose. “Second Lieutenant Stuart—that’s S-T-U-A-R-T, General Alexander. Is our colleague’s son not of that rank, and in this army?”

“Jeb, Jr.?” Alexander’s eyebrows went up, too. “I believe he is, sir. Of course, even with that spelling, it’s far from the least common of names. Would you answer his request any differently if you knew he was, or, for that matter, if you knew he wasn’t?”

“In the midst of battle? Don’t be absurd.” Jackson tossed his head. As he did so, he remembered Robert E. Lee’s habitual gesture of annoyance—Lee would jerk his head up and to one side, as if trying to take a bite out of his own earlobe. It was, in Jackson’s view, ridiculous. Raising his arm over his head again, he concentrated on the map. “The Fourth Virginia, the Third Tennessee, and the Second Confederate States are ordered to support the attack of the Third Virginia, if their commanders shall not have already moved to do so of their own initiative.”

“Yes, sir.” The telegrapher’s key clicked and clicked, almost as fast as the castanets of the Mexican
señoritas
whose sinuous grace and flashing eyes Jackson had admired during his long-ago service in the U.S. Artillery.

No sooner had he thought of artillery in one way than General Alexander did in another, saying, “We have three batteries by the village of West Buechel, sir, that could lend the infantry useful assistance.”

“Let it be so,” Jackson agreed, and the telegrapher’s key clicked anew.

More and more wires began coming in to headquarters from that part of the field. Second Lieutenant Stuart, from whom nothing further was heard, had been right in reporting that U.S. troops were there in great force. They had been driving forward, too. They no longer seemed to be doing so; Stuart’s attack had done what he’d hoped, rocking them back on their heels. They must have thought that, if the Confederates were numerous enough to assault them, they were also numerous enough to beat back an assault.

Jackson knew perfectly well that they had not been so at the time when Second Lieutenant Stuart ordered the attack. (Was it Jeb, Jr.? Hadn’t Jeb, Jr., been born day before yesterday, or last week at the outside? Hadn’t he just the other day graduated from a little boy’s flowing dress into trousers? Intellectually, Jackson knew better. Every so often, though, the passing years up and ambushed him. They had more skill at it than any Yankees. One day, they would shoot him down from ambush, too.)

Even had it not been so then, it was rapidly becoming so now.
He who hesitates is lost
was nowhere more true than on the battlefield. The brief halt Stuart had imposed on the enemy let Jackson bring forces up to yet another of the lines he had had the conscripted Negro slaves of the vicinity build. (He had every intention of sending President Longstreet an exquisitely detailed memorandum relating everything the slaves’ labors meant to his forces. Longstreet, no doubt, would consign it to oblivion. That was his affair. Jackson would not keep silent to appease him.)

By midafternoon, the line had stabilized. Jackson called off the counterattack, which, he knew, must have cost him dear in terms of men. Though his instinct was always to strike at the enemy, he had come to see a certain virtue in the defensive, in making U.S. forces rise from concealment to attack his men while the soldiers
in butternut and gray waited in trenches and behind breastworks. (Unlike his thoughts on slave labor, he did not plan on confiding that one to James Longstreet.)

When the crisis was past, he told the telegrapher, “Order Second Lieutenant Stuart to report to his headquarters immediately.” As the soldier tapped out the message, Jackson sent a silent prayer heavenward that the lieutenant would be able to obey the command.

He caught E. Porter Alexander looking at him. His chief artillerist crossed his fingers. Jackson nodded. Alexander had been thinking along with him in more than matters strictly military, then.

When Lieutenant Stuart did not report as soon as Jackson thought he should, the Confederate general-in-chief began to fear the officer was now obeying the orders of a higher commander. But then, to his glad surprise, a sentry poked his head into the headquarters tent to announce that Stuart had arrived after all. “Let him come in; by all means let him come in,” Jackson exclaimed.

He and E. Porter Alexander both exclaimed then, for it was Jeb Stuart’s son.
“How
the devil old are you?” Alexander demanded.