Texas

by James A. Michener

  But during the truce soldiers from each side had met with their opponents, and a respect had developed, so that invariably in the quiet evenings the men began to fraternize and sing. The Northern troops refrained from insulting their friends with the ‘Battle Hymn’ while the Southerners rarely sang ‘Dixie.’ Always, in the course of the night, some group of Southerners would begin the song they loved so deeply, and Northerners would fall silent as the winsome harmony began:

  ‘We loved each other then, Lorena,

  More than we ever dared to tell;

  And what we might have been, Lorena,

  Had but our lovings prospered well.’

  The song had a wonderfully rich sentiment which sounded elegant in the stillness, and some from the North almost chuckled at it, but toward the end, even the most indifferent hushed when a strong high tenor sang solo of death and life hereafter:

  ‘There is a future, O thank God,

  Of life this is so small a part,

  ‘Tis dust to dust beneath the sod;

  But there, up there, ‘tis heart to heart.’

  Otto did not care for such songs, too much about death, but he did stop his battlefield wandering when Northern troops sang one song he had not known before. ‘Aura Lee’ spoke of love as he recalled it, and sometimes when the singing ended he found himself humming the tune to himself or mumbling the words:

  ‘Aura Lee, Aura Lee,

  Maid with golden hair,

  Sunshine came along with thee

  And swallows in the air.’

  He thought of Franziska in those terms. He could see her bringing sunshine, and it was not preposterous to think of her as attended by swallows.

  In the following weeks, when starvation clamped its iron claws about the innards of the Texans, both Somerset Cobb and Otto Macnab took short, dreamlike excursions: Cobb, into Vicksburg to meet with the Peel sisters he had stayed with while on his way to Texas in 1850; Macnab, out into the battlefield at night to compare situations with O’Callahan of Missouri.

  The Peel sisters still had their house at the north end of Cherry Street, but since it was exposed to artillery fire from Federal warships in the Mississippi below, they lived, like so many others, in hillside caves. Lucky for them the caves were available, for their house had already taken two hits, and had they been sleeping upstairs, they would probably have been killed.

  Like all the citizens of Vicksburg, the Peels had started out confident that Grant would be forced to withdraw, but as the foodless weeks passed they began to see the inevitability of defeat. However, they would not speak of it.

  ‘You mean that fine young man who traveled with you from Carolina …?’

  ‘From Georgia, ma’am. My cousin.’

  ‘And he was killed on the first day?’

  ‘Most gallantly.’

  ‘I remember his reading to us from Ivanhoe.’

  ‘He loved Scott. We named our Texas plantation Lammermoor.’

  ‘That’s nice. That’s very nice.’

  ‘Miss Emma, I wish to God we had food in the lines to share with you.’

  ‘No, Major. We wish we had food for you.’

  Miss Etta Mae said: ‘Is my sister right? You’re a major now?’

  Before he could answer, the cave in which they were meeting was shaken by a violent attack of shellfire from the warships, and as soon as it stopped, a cluster of explosions from the batteries inland rocked the area. ‘They hold us in a crossfire,’ Miss Emma said. ‘It’s murderous. Three slaves on this street killed this week.’

  The Peel sisters did not leave their cave except for sunlight on quiet days, and even then they never knew when a stray shell from the river or from the battle line might kill them and everyone else in sight. They were wraithlike, each weighing less than a hundred pounds, but they maintained high spirits in order to encourage the soldiers who stopped by to see them.

  On the evening of July first, Otto Macnab, suffering from the acute hunger which had attacked him viciously that day, wandered through the battlefield during the customary informal truce, and when he saw how close to the Texan lunette the Yankee sappers had brought their trenches, he gasped. Starting to pace off the tiny distance that would separate the two lines when battle resumed next day, he was interrupted by a voice he was delighted to hear. It was O’Callahan.

  ‘Distance is seven feet, Reb.’

  ‘You could spit into our lunette.’

  ‘Spittin’ even a foot with you Rebs is difficult.’

  The two men sat side by side on the edge of the fatal trench, and each knew that when it progressed a few feet farther, the Texas position could be blown to hell with dynamite charges.

  ‘You ’bout starved out, Reb?’

  ‘Well, now …’ The posturing was ended. Macnab could joke about death, and the Union failure to consolidate, but he could no longer joke about starvation. ‘One hell of a way to end a battle.’

  ‘Only way you left us, you stubborn bastards.’

  As they parted for the last time, the Union man looked about swiftly, then moved toward Macnab: ‘I could be shot. If they catch you, say you stole it.’ And into Otto’s pocket he stuffed two pieces of bread and a chunk of Wisconsin cheese.

  Back in the lunette, Macnab knew that as a human being and especially as an officer, he ought to share his unexpected treasure with his men, but this he could not do. Surreptitiously he gnawed at a tiny piece of the cheese, and he believed that he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life; he could feel the nourishment racing through his body, as if one organ were shouting to another: ‘Food at last! Sweet Jesus, food at last.’

  He had slowly, secretly consumed one of the pieces of bread and much of the cheese when an orderly passed by: ‘Colonel wants to see you.’

  When he reported, his stomach reveling in the food it had found, the colonel, a medical doctor from Connecticut and a Yale graduate but now the defender of a lunette on the Mississippi, said: ‘I suppose you’ve heard about Major Cobb?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Visiting his two old ladies. Smuggling them food, I suppose. Came out of their cave just in time to meet a Union shell head-on.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Left arm blown off. The slave who ran out here said they thought he bled to death.’

  ‘May I go in?’

  ‘You’re needed here. You’re Major Macnab now, and your job is to hold off those sappers at the foot of our lunette.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ All day on the second of July, Macnab devised tricks for rolling giant fused bombs down into the Northern trench only a few feet away, and once when he was successful, blowing up an entire length of the trench and all its occupants, his men crowded around to congratulate him. That was the last major event at the Texas lunette, for that night the soldiers of each side, without orders from General Grant or anyone else, quietly decided that this part of the war was over.

  ‘Pemberton sent Grant a letter,’ a Northerner said. ‘I spoke with the orderly.’

  ‘I think Pemberton wants to surrender right now,’ a Rebel reported. ‘But Grant, he’ll want it for a big show on the Fourth of July.’

  ‘For us it ends tonight.’

  Otto searched for O’Callahan, but no one had seen him, so, still a professional, he walked to the daring sap which had carried the Union lines so close to his. ‘Six more days,’ he told a Northern soldier, ‘you’d have made it.’

  ‘We’d have made it today, but some clever Greycoat dropped a tornado on us.’

  ‘You know a man named O’Callahan?’

  ‘One of your rolling bombs got him this afternoon.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Probably alive. I saw them drag him away.’

  In the distance there was singing, ‘Aura Lee’ from the Northerners, and then, as an act of final Confederate defiance, ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag,’ whispered at first by the defeated Southerners and then bellowed, with many Northerners joining in:

  ‘We are a band of brothersr />
  And native to the soil,

  Fighting for the property

  We won with honest toil.’

  Along the Vicksburg line that night there was not one Negro in uniform, on either side. The fight had been about him but never by him. One Confederate trooper, who operated a cotton gin at Nacogdoches, summarized Texan thinking: ‘No nigger’s ever been born could handle a gun. They’d be useless.’

  The month of July 1863 was one of overwhelming sorrow at the Jefferson plantation, for tragedy seemed to strike the Cobbs from all sides. Petty Prue, in the big house at Lammermoor, knew that her husband was dead at Vicksburg and her older son at Gettysburg. Her younger boy was fighting somewhere in Virginia. On some hot mornings she doubted that she could climb out of bed, so oppressive was the day, so oppressive was her life.

  But she had a plantation to run, some ninety slaves to keep busy, and cotton to be handled for the Confederacy, so at dawn each day she was up and working just as if her husband were absent for a few weeks and the crop promised to some factor in New Orleans. What perplexed her as the cotton matured in its bolls and the picking began was how to handle the crop when it had been harvested, for the Yankee blockade of all the seaports prevented open shipments of fiber to Liverpool. Cotton was being grown but it was not being moved, and there was always the danger that if the bales accumulated at a spot like Jefferson, so near the border, Union forces might rush in and burn them, and the plantations, and set free the slaves. Now, with the entire Mississippi River in Union hands, the possibility of such a foray grew, and a lone woman like Petty Prue, somewhat flighty in peacetime, faced problems she could scarcely solve.

  The dismal news affected Millicent too, for in mid-July word was received via the telegraph to New Orleans that Colonel Persifer Cobb of Edisto, that erect, formal gentleman with his West Point education, had died at Gettysburg. The telegram had ended: SON JOHN ALSO DIED WILL YOU ALL COME BACK AND SUPERVISE PLANTATION TESSA MAE

  Millicent, weakened by the privations of war, was incapable of grappling with the changes contained in this message. Vaguely she remembered that it had been sweet-talking Tessa Mae who had encouraged the expulsion of the Somerset Cobbs from Edisto, and Millicent could not imagine any terms on which they might consent to return. But such selfish considerations vanished when she thought of Tessa Mae’s double bereavement and of how distraught she must be trying to manage that vast plantation. During the better part of a morning she wept for the lone widow on Edisto and for all the other widows this war was making.

  This led her to thoughts about herself, and her head sagged, for she could not be sure that Somerset was alive. All she knew for certain was that in the final days of Vicksburg a Yankee shell had ripped off his left arm. At first he had been reported dead from loss of blood, but then soldiers from his unit, now in prison camp in Mississippi, had sent word that Major Cobb—‘not the red-headed one’—had been taken in by two elderly women in the town and nursed. ‘And you can thank God for that,’ a fellow officer wrote, ‘because if he had fallen into one of our hospitals or into a Yankee prison camp, he’d be dead.’

  Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps her son Reverdy was dead, too. Perhaps the Yankees would invade Texas and set the plantations aflame, as they were doing in other parts of the Confederacy. The possibilities for disaster were so overwhelming that she could not face them, and her health, never good, began to deteriorate badly. As the heat of summer increased she found difficulty in breathing, and on one extremely hot afternoon she felt she must apologize to her energetic cousin: ‘Petty Prue, I am not malingering. I want to help but I’m truly sick, and I’m frightened.’

  ‘Stay in bed, Lissa. I’ll manage.’

  Prue could not have done it alone, but like many women all over Texas who had to manage large holdings while their men were absent, she learned that she could rely on her slaves, especially Jaxifer from Georgia and Trajan from Edisto. With no white master to berate him, and sometimes beat him, Jaxifer assumed a more important role, issuing orders to other slaves and seeing that they were carried out. It was he who kept a small herd of cattle hidden in the brakes, away from government agents who would have impressed them for military use. Occasionally he would butcher one of the precious steers in the dark of night and mysteriously appear in the morning with small portions of beef for all: ‘We got meat.’

  Trajan was even more ingenious. He found the honey trees which provided a substitute for sugar. He tracked down a bear now and then, knowing that when smoked, this made bacon almost as tasty as a hog’s, but when he first placed it on the table, Millicent whispered: ‘One can hardly eat this without salt.’ Trajan heard, and although store salt was absolutely unobtainable, he had the clever idea of digging up the soil where meat had been cured in peacetime and boiling it until salt could be skimmed off. It was dirty, but it was good.

  His major contribution to Petty Prue was the substitute he devised for coffee: ‘Now, this here is parched corn and this is charred okra, you mix them just right, you got …’

  ‘It tastes … well …’

  ‘Well, it ain’t coffee, and it don’t taste like coffee, but it looks like it.’

  Often during that dreadful July, Petty Prue wondered why her slaves did not run away, for with no master to check them they could have, but they stayed, without restraint, to keep the two plantations running. ‘It’s because,’ Prue explained to her neighbors, ‘they’re happy here. They like being slaves when the master is kind.’

  In whispers, when she attended church on Sunday, she asked the older people: ‘Do you think the slaves know what Mr. Lincoln’s done?’ The white folk were aware that on the first day of January 1863 he had tried to put into effect his Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves, and by the most rigid controls the whites in remote areas like Jefferson prevented this news from reaching their slaves, so that men like Jaxifer and Trajan worked on, legally free but actually still slaves.

  ‘Tell them nothin’!’ Petty Prue warned Millicent and the two Cobb daughters, and when an elderly white man from the village came to visit and refresh himself with the good food raised at Lammermoor, he gave them reason to keep silent.

  ’emancipation Proclamation! Rubbish. The most cynical thing that evil man in the White House ever did.’

  “Some day the slaves will have to be freed,’ Millicent protested.

  ‘Many would agree with you,’ the old man said. ‘Economically?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That young fellow who stayed with you—Carmody, who wrote the book about us. He made some points. But the slaves will never be freed the way Lincoln said.’

  ‘What did the gangling fool say?’ Petty Prue asked, for she was willing to believe anything bad about Lincoln, author of so many tragedies.

  ‘It isn’t what he said. It’s what he didn’t say.’

  ‘Tell me, please.’

  ‘Duplicity. Total duplicity. He has freed the slaves in all those parts of the former Union over which he now has no control. And he has not freed them in the areas which he does control.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Prue snapped.

  ‘You better. Your slaves here in Texas—where his words don’t mean a damn, thank God—are freed. So are they in Carolina and Georgia, and the rest of the Confederacy. But in Maryland, and Kentucky, and Tennessee and even in Louisiana, where the Federals control, they are not freed, because Good Honest Abe does not want to irritate his Northern allies, God damn their souls.’

  The four Cobb women had a difficult time digesting this immoral Northern charade, but the old man made it simple: ‘Where he can, he won’t. And where he can’t, he does. Some patriot with good sense ought to shoot him.’

  The owners of plantations had extra reason for caution, because once the slaves learned that they were free, they would surely desert and the cotton would rot in the fields. But by extreme caution they continued to keep news of emancipation, fraudulent though it might be, from their slaves, and it was well known that anyone who divulged the infor
mation, or even hinted at it, would be hanged.

  But now the problem arose as to what to do with this new crop of cotton which could no longer be sent to New Orleans, and Petty Prue, as the one who had to make decisions, pondered this for a long time, and the same old man, a furious patriot, came out from Jefferson to counsel with her.

  ‘If I was younger, ma’am, you can be sure I’d be tryin’ to sneak this cotton through the blockade to Liverpool. But I’m not young any more, and no woman by herself could do it.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ the old man said conspiratorily as he led her to the gin, ‘but this cotton is the lifeblood of the Confederacy. We have no manufacturing, as your book-writing fellow said. And we have few railroads. But by God we have cotton, and the world needs it.’ Picking at the edge of a bale, he fingered the precious fiber he had spent his life producing. ‘On this wharf it’s worth a cent and three-quarters a pound. Aboard ship to Europe, it’s worth a dollar-sixty a pound. With Vicksburg gone and Lee thrown back at Gettysburg, we must get it on board some ship somehow.’

  ‘I’ll try anything,’ Prue said.

  The old man looked at the bayou to which boats ought to have been coming, and tears showed in his eyes: ‘By water, no hope. Even if you could get it overland to Galveston, the Yankees would still intercept it when you tried to ship.’ Then his eyes brightened with the thrill of old challenges: ‘But, ma’am, if you could somehow work your bales far inland and then drop down to the safety of Matamoros in Old Mexico, you’d have a market as big as the world.’

  ‘I do not understand,’ Prue said, and the old man explained: ‘Abe Lincoln’s warships keep us bottled up everywhere. Oh, a few blockade runners slip in and out of the Atlantic ports, but not many. They’ve tied up Texas, too. For a while Brownsville was kept open, but Abe corked that real quick. So what does that leave us? Matamoros, just over the Rio Grande from Brownsville.’