Mexico (76 page)

In the thirteen years between 1848, when he left Mexico, till 1861, when he became intensely concerned about the efforts of the Northern politicians to deprive Southern planters like himself of their right to own and work slaves, Jubal Clay lived a happy life on Newfields, his cotton kingdom northeast of Richmond. Now most of his family's two thousand acres had been cleared of trees that had once formed a part of the Wilderness;

carefully cleaned and graded, his cotton was drawing top prices in Liverpool, his slaves were passive again after creating minor disturbances fomented by Northern radicals, and he and Zephania, with their two boys and a girl, lived the stately life of Virginia planters. At home they entertained the gentry of their district and participated in musical evenings in which Jubal's mother, in her seventies, played the piano while Zephania played the cello, an instrument she was still learning to play, and he the flute. Among the neighbors were several fine voices, both male and female, so that varied concerts of high quality could occasionally be offered the neighbors in the county.

But the highlight of any month came when Jubal and Zeph, as everyone called his wife, drove into Richmond for the richer social life there. On these occasions the Clays saw Southern culture at its best. Businessmen trained in the fine universities of the North mingled with religious and political leaders educated at William and Mary or Tom Jefferson's University of Virginia. But any Richmond gathering carried a somber, stabilizing influence exerted by the military men who had been trained at West Point. These were men of honor, who, in those excitable years, were already grappling with some of the gravest dilemmas a man can face: Do I owe my allegiance to the army at whose headquarters I was trained or to my home state, which nurtured me and instilled in me the scale of values to which I subscribe? At one informal meeting in 1860 a colonel named Longstreth who had served in the Mexican War with two junior officers he admired told Clay's social group: "I knew no finer Virginian than young Robert E. Lee, a West Point man devoted to the army, but also a staunch Virginian. If trouble comes, and I'm increasingly sure it will, he'd face a difficult choice. Fight for the North or the South? But I also watched another type, an aggressive, almost uncivilized lout from some Western state, name of Grant--he was also West Point--and I'm sure he'd remain with the North. I liked Lee, disliked Grant intensely for his lack of any culture whatever, but judged they'd each be honest military men according to their different lights."

This concept of two men, each a graduate of West Point, heading in two radically different directions, and each with ample justification, fascinated Clay: "Maybe men like me were luckier. We didn't go to West Point to absorb Northern ideas.

We stayed home and sharpened our Virginia, Carolina and Georgia loyalties, then got our military training on the field, in Mexico. Our choice is a lot simpler. Let the North make one false move against us, and it's war."

"Do you expect it?"

"No. I see quite clearly that the commercial interests of both North and South require a prolonged period of peace." Several in the group agreed, with one planter named Anderson making an interesting observation: "Of the two nations"--here he pondered the appropriateness of that term--"yes, I do believe we've become two nations, whether we wanted it that way or not, but of the two, the South has far more to gain by an extended period of peace than the North."

This differentiation was far from self-evident to most of the listeners, all ardent partisans of the South, and one planter argued: "You'll have to explain that, Anderson. Seems to me that our position, what with our command of cotton, which Europe must have, is secure."

"No," Anderson countered. "The true situation is that each day of peace we have a chance to grow stronger relative to the North."

"Good God, man! Are you trying to argue that the North is stronger than us?"

"Sir, I've said that the present drift of peace is all in our favor. But only a madman would argue that as of the present we're as strong as they are."

This unpatriotic reasoning exasperated the planter: "Anderson! Look at the balance sheet. We've got twice as much money from Europe as the North does. Our financial structure is much sounder, and our system of management and control is superior. We're in a favorable position financially."

Anderson, a studious man in his fifties, had traveled in the North and could not be dislodged from conclusions that he had judiciously developed: "A nation's survival capability is not measured by deposits in a bank. Factories are what count, miles of railway line, shops in cities, and above all, the number of men of fighting age that can be called upon."

"None in the North have men that can fight like ours," another planter argued, to which Anderson replied: 'True, but fifteen men who can keep coming at you, one after another as required, must overwhelm the one trained rifleman."

"Now, that's a dangerous theory, brother Anderson," a man in his thirties said. "I signed up yesterday to lead a company in case trouble starts."

"So did I," Anderson said, and the men laughed at the thought of a fifty-year-old volunteering for active duty, but Anderson explained: "I'll be training our young men in military tactics, how one properly trained Southern boy with his good rifle, revolver and saber can hold off fifteen Northerners--for a while."

On the ride back to the plantation that evening Jubal Clay found persistent images forming in his brain: 'Trains, factories, unlimited numbers of men. And those figures growing larger every day. Hell, we don't even have a train heading northeast out of Richmond, and won't have one for another ten years." As he plunged into the Wilderness other images appeared: "New men up there, as he said, piling out of every boat from Europe. No training, no traditions. But there they come. And down here? Half of our men are black and they don't count. More important, they can't be counted upon." As he broke out of the Wilderness and saw the neatly tended boundaries of Newfields, its image superseded all others: "This plantation is what the fight will be about--supposing it comes. An orderly way of life in which a family can grow."

He had always been pleased with the name the old Clays had given their plantation, Newfields, rather than some classical name like Sparta or one like The Oaks or The Pillars. He could picture his ancestors girdling the last tree, pushing it over when it died, lopping off the branches, burning them around the fallen trunk and scattering the fertilizing ashes over the newly formed field. "It must have been exciting," he said to himself as he approached the big house, "to see a new field come into life and to know that it did so through your work. But the delight in seeing that first crop of cotton white as far as you could see on what had once been black forest! That's what a man lives for."

When he reached the portico, gleaming white in the moonlight, he turned his horses over to the Negro groom and hurried immediately to his office, sat in a big chair at his kneehole desk and rang for the maid: "See if Mrs. Clay can join me." As he waited for his wife the persistent images returned: "Factories, railroads, men, slaves, fifteen against one." Staring at the walls of his office he thought: From this desk the Clays before me built our little kingdom. They cleared the land, planted the cotton, bought the slaves and handled them properly, found the markets and educated their children. It's inconceivable that I would commit mistakes that would destroy all they accomplished. Nor shall I.

When his wife joined him she immediately asked: "What happened in Richmond?" for she had learned that when Jubal invited her into his study rather than joining her in the pleasant sewing room, she could be sure that matters of gravity were involved.

"Zeph, take the easy chair. This could be a long one."

"Is this about those fields we wanted to buy?"

"I'm talking about all Virginia. The entire South. Maybe the nation itself."

"Jubal, what are you saying?"

"It was one of those questions that cut to fundamentals. A military man, I think he was, talked seriously about North and South. Pointed out that they have the factories to produce weapons and gunpowder. They have the railroads to move them quickly here and there. And they have almost unlimited men to press these advantages."

"But who says we're going to have a war?"

"It seemed to me, Zeph, that all the men at the meeting thought so, and if each had felt free to speak his mind, I do believe that most would have warned: 'The South cannot win, in the long run, if the war drags on, and if the Northern advantages are applied with relentless pressure.' "

'Then why have a war?" He had always appreciated the ground-level common sense with which his wife approached any difficult problem: "If prospects are so bleak for our side, why fight? Can't the differences be reconciled?"

"No! Flatly, no! Those in the North have put themselves in a self-righteous position from which they cannot retreat and save face."

"Is the same true about us?"

"With me it is. I can't agree to a situation in which one day we have two hundred slaves worth a fortune and the next day none and no way to keep this plantation functioning. You simply cannot ask men who have spent their lives building--"

"So you too think war's inevitable?"

"No," he said reflectively, "as traditions in our family affirm, I don't want war. I want to see a rational solution." But then he made a statement I've heard members of the Clay family repeat a score of times in this century: "But if they threaten your entire way of life you've got to do something."

They continued all that night, if I understand correctly from the notes Jubal left, to discuss the serious problem of how they would function as a family if Jubal had to volunteer to help fight a war: "I'm thirty-seven and entitled to major's rank in the Virginia Third. You're thirty-four and the ablest woman I know--in all fields. When I went off to war in Mexico you managed--"

"But this would be a real war, wouldn't it?"

Recalling the fight at Chapultepec, he told her: "Any war is real. A skirmish of three against six is real," and this brought him to a major concern: "If the North is as strong as they say, and if we're as good fighters as we know we are, this could be a long war. As years pass--"

"Years?" her voice trembled and said what he had been afraid to mention: "Our boys would be old enough . .." and he nodded. Their older boy, Noah, was seventeen; his brother, Paul, fifteen. If the war dragged on, with the North always throwing in more men, the South would have to call upon boys as they neared manhood. This realization altered everything.

Zephania spoke first: "Rock-bottom truth. You think war's inevitable?"

"Yes. Those in the North are determined and we Southerners are resolute. Result? War."

"And you think we would lose?"

"I can't say this to any man--it'd sound like cowardice, but I can tell you the truth. We'd run a great risk."

The Clays sat silent and brooding. When the sun rose, she coughed before starting anew. "Did the men think a war, if it happened, might reach down here?"

"We didn't discuss that. Didn't even mention it."

"Let's think about it. Could the war reach down here?"

"In Mexico I learned one thing. If General Santa Anna starts his war in Texas he must consider the possibility that it will end up in his capital at Mexico City, six hundred and fifty miles farther south."

"Our troops would never let them reach as far as Richmond, surely not."

"Our troops won't want them to reach that far, just as their troops would not expect us to reach New York. But once you cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war you cannot predict at whose house they will bay."

"Oh, Jubal, that's too horrible to contemplate."

"But we are contemplating it, and I see this as our probable future. There will be a war. Those Northerners will insist on it. I shall volunteer, maybe within the week, and then we're in till the end. You've already proved you can run Newfields, so long as the slaves do not take this as an opportunity to rebel. In due course Noah and Paul will be in uniform, which means that you and Grace--she'll be old enough to help--must hold our little kingdom together. And when the war ends, we reassemble in peace and do our best to make up for the time we've lost." After a moment's silence he said: "The fields will need clearing of brush. It does sneak in, you know, if left untended for a while."

The war did come as Jubal Clay had foreseen, but to his surprise it was triggered not by some insolent act of the North but by Southern hotheads firing on a United States fort in Charleston, South Carolina. From that moment there were two flags, the Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes; two names, the Confederacy and the Union; and two groups of fighting men, Johnny Reb and Yank.

As expected, Jubal Clay reported for duty as a major in the Virginia Third and quickly became what I called in my wars a light colonel. During the early years of the war he seemed to be fighting incessantly, but since most of the fighting occurred in what was called the Peninsula Campaign, he was often engaged in fights defending Richmond, so that he was on familiar terrain in areas like Mechanicsville and Gaines' Mill. This meant that he sometimes arranged to sneak home to see Zephania and the children. On such trips he repeatedly said: "It's going to be a long war. We're outnumbered badly, but one of our men trained in country shooting is worth six of their raw recruits straight from some overcrowded city, so in the end we have a chance to win."