House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Brett nodded. “I’ve heard complaints that some railroads carry such heavy shipments of speculators’ goods that corn and bacon and uniforms for the army lie for weeks in the freight houses, and the foodstuffs rot.”

  “Not on our road,” Mr. Daniel insisted. “But it’s hard to blame the railroads that do take that trade. It’s at higher rates than government traffic, and the pay is prompt.”

  Mr. Harvie grimly echoed that word. “Prompt, yes! The Government doesn’t know the meaning of that word. Half our troubles come from their unnecessary delays. If the Weldon Railroad is ever cut, Richmond’s only rail line to the interior and the south will be through Danville. The Piedmont Railroad from Danville to Greensboro would let us reach the lower south. That’s only fifty miles. Congress voted a loan to build that road over a year ago, and we agreed to take over all the Piedmont stock and do the work; but we can’t get proper surveys, we can’t get labor, we can’t get iron, we can’t do a lick. We can’t get iron to repair our own road. We’ve five miles of line between here and Danville that you can’t call a railroad at all, till we get new rails; and our rolling stock is wearing out. But of course, as Mr. Daniel says, we’ll do our best.”

  There was nothing to be said to that. The picture was plain enough. Brett looked at Mr. Haxall. “I’m trying to get some idea of what’s in the future,” he explained. “Outside of this room, all of us curb our tongues; but here we can perhaps speak more frankly. I’m disturbed about the financial situation, the depreciated currency, the inadequate tax program, the steady borrowing. Funding the currency last June, forcing people to take bonds—that was repudiation. What do you gentlemen think of the government finances?”

  “Why, they’re in bad shape,” the banker said honestly. “I’d rather see our bank buy state bonds, Virginia or Tennessee, than Confederates. Last March, Virginia bonds were at a hundred and fifteen, and we sold them and bought Confederate eight percents; but by Christmas the eight percents won’t be worth fifty cents on the dollar.” He shook his head. “Bad, yes. Bad and getting worse. Look at the Erlanger Loan. The Erlanger people took the bonds at seventy-seven, and put them on the European market at ninety. They were oversubscribed five times, sold up to ninety-five. Then they began to go down, and the Confederacy agreed to support them. Right now we’re shipping gold to support those bonds. The Erlanger people will make more out of that loan than the Confederacy.” After a moment he went on: “If we’d shipped cotton while we still could do so, and had held it abroad, we could have established a credit to last us five years. Cotton’s worth seventy cents in London now, and every ship that takes a load through the blockade makes a fortune for its owners. North Carolina troops are the best clothed and the best equipped in the army, and North Carolina has largely financed that by buying cotton and sending it to market through the blockade. But Mr. Davis preferred to use cotton as a club, to try to bully England into recognizing us. Now it’s too late. It takes fifteen or twenty of our dollars to buy a gold dollar today. It will take a thousand of our dollars before we’re through. The Government’s wasting money right and left, allowing a seventy-five percent profit on every contract for shoes or cloth or war supplies.”

  “And that isn’t enough!” Mr. Crenshaw reminded him. “The speculators outbid the Government, so the Government has to threaten to conscript a firm’s employees before it’ll accept a contract at that figure.”

  “Oh I suppose seventy-five-percent profit isn’t so bad,” Mr. Haxall agreed. “If the work were done in a businesslike way. But under such an arrangement every contractor knows that the higher his costs, the bigger his profits. If he wastes a dollar, the Government pays him a dollar seventy-five.” He made an angry gesture. “There’s only one end to it, Mr. Dewain. Two years ago, our credit was better than the credit of the Washington Government. It was a strong cable. We’ve stretched it till it’s thin as a string. It will snap by and by.”

  “And our private fortunes will go with it?” Brett suggested.

  “We’ll all be paupers,” Mr. Crenshaw agreed. “And proud of it.” His jaw set stubbornly.

  Brett looked from man to man. “So our army is weaker every day, the states are insisting on their rights even if to do so means destroying the Confederacy, our railroads are breaking down, and our finances are collapsing. Is that a fair statement, gentlemen?”

  He waited, but no one contradicted him.

  When Brett returned from bidding them good-by at the door, Cinda kept her eyes on her knitting. Brett sat down, his legs extended, staring at his boots, and for a long time he did not speak at all; but at last his head lifted, and he looked at her and smiled. “How’d you like to be a pauper, Mrs. Dewain?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I’d like it very much.” She finished one needle, turned the sock, began to throw stitches on the next needle. Her hands were trembling, but her voice was steady. “You were a clever man to put our money into Northern securities.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Everything but some stock in the Wilmington bank. Yes, that was the prudent thing to do. Of course.”

  She looked at him sidewise. He resumed his scrutiny of his toes. “Don’t be afraid of me, Mr. Dewain,” she said softly.

  His eyes rose and met hers for a moment, then returned to his boots again. “I think,” he said in a dispassionate tone, “that the invasion of Pennsylvania was our last chance for victory. If we ever had a chance. I’ve never thought we had a chance, really. The odds were always too heavy.” And he added: “I’ve even thought sometimes that the moral odds were too heavy. This is a war to defend slavery. Oh, I know we cloud the issue by talking about resisting coercion; but the Gulf States seceded to prevent the abolition of slavery. They admitted it, avowed it; the men they sent as emissaries to the Virginia Convention in 1861 said it over and over. Take them at their word. They seceded so they could continue to own slaves. They shouted about their right to own slaves and their right to secede; but by seceding they broke up the Union. I was always a Union man. I’m not sure the Union isn’t more important than the rights of any of us. States or individuals. I’ve sometimes thought—” He hesitated, said reverently: “I’ve sometimes thought that God might one day have work for a strong United States to do in the world.”

  “I love you very much, you know,” she told him.

  He nodded, abstracted, only half hearing. “I suppose,” he reflected, “that you and I don’t matter to anyone but ourselves. I began by thinking first of us; by stocking the Plains against famine, by saving as much of our fortune as I could save to insure our future. But we’re on the losing side, Cinda.”

  “What then?” she asked softly.

  He almost smiled. “I suspect our side ought to lose,” he said. “And yet, if our side is to lose, I’d rather lose too.” The needles helped keep her fingers steady. After a moment he went on: “Our family finances, the Currain finances, are somewhat involved, as you know. Your father left everything to your mother, with power to dispose of it as she wished. Under her will, made ten years ago, she left Chimneys to Trav, Great Oak to Tony, Belle Vue to Faunt, the Plains to you.”

  “Not to me, to you,” she reminded him. “When a woman marries, she and her husband become one person, and he is the person.”

  He nodded. “To us, then. She had made a gift to Redford Streean when he and Tilda married, so there was nothing for Tilda; but all of you, including Tilda, share equally in her monetary estate.” He frowned at his own thoughts. “I haven’t consulted Streean, but I’ve talked to Trav and Faunt, and I wrote Tony. Trav and Faunt leave the decision to me; and Tony writes that he will take a deed to Chimneys as his share.”

  “Just what is it you’re going to do, Brett Dewain?”

  “Why, write Mr. Gilby,” he said. “I’ll have him set apart Streean’s share.” He met her eyes. “If you agree, of course. Then I’ll have him send the rest to London in sterling exchange, and buy Confederate bonds there.”

  She bit her lip. “Everything?”
/>   “Yes, the Currain funds, and what I had from my father.”

  “If you do, and the Confederacy falls, we and our children won’t have anything?”

  “No honorable man in the Confederacy will have anything, Cinda; not when this war ends.”

  She tucked her knitting away. “I don’t understand business,” she said cheerfully. “But I understand you. I knew you’d get over being a business man some day. I’m very proud of you.” She went to kiss him. “Proud and proud of you.”

  “We’re probably damned fools!”

  “Of course we are. I’m proud of that, too.”

  Brett laughed, lighthearted now in her approval. “When this is over, Jenny’ll have to support the family; Jenny and the Plains.”

  Cinda tossed her head. “Why not?”

  She kept, as long as he was in Richmond, a high heart; but when he was gone terror swept her like a strong wind. What would it be like to be poor, poor, poor?

  3

  July-September, 1863

  TO TRAV, the retreat from Gettysburg had the quality of a nightmare. On the afternoon of that terrible third day at Gettysburg, he marched with those simple friendly men from the mountain coves around Martinston through dreadful fire from the guns on Cemetery Hill and through a driving storm of musketry into the very lines of the Yankees. He met them breast to breast, emptying into their ranks every chamber of that huge revolving pistol von Borcke had given him, hurling the charge of slugs from the lower barrel into the face of a great bearded man with the insignia of rank on his shoulders. Then the pistol in his left hand served to parry the strokes of an enemy officer’s sword, while he himself wielded that terrible long blade which had been his father’s. He would find later, deep scars cut into the steel barrel of his pistol where the Yankee’s slashes had been caught and turned aside; but at the moment he saw only the spilled dead sprawling, the wounded shocked and still in their first numbed hurt.

  That was reality, but the days of retreat that followed were a bewildering dream. He had seen these men beaten, but they did not march like beaten men. Their heads were high; the rough jests that broke the tedium of any march ran along the files. Their manner was that of victims of a clever practical joke, at which even though they were its butt they could still be amused. He thought their cheerfulness might be half-hysterical relief to find themselves still alive; yet it had the ring of complete sincerity.

  Some of the officers by their mien confessed defeat. Pickett, sent off with his shattered division to guard prisoners on the march to Richmond, raged at the assignment; but most officers shared or imitated the good humor of the men. When on the morning of the Fourth a flag of truce brought Meade’s message that General Longstreet was wounded and a prisoner and receiving solicitous care, Longstreet laughed aloud.

  “Thank your commanding officer,” he directed the messenger. “But say you saw me neither wounded nor a prisoner, and quite able to continue to take care of myself.”

  His staff took their cue from him. They laughed at Major Moses because someone had stolen a small trunk in which he kept the First Corps’ supply of currency; and they laughed when he had a lively argument with a gathering of women in a farm house. They laughed at the furious rain that began soon after noon on the Fourth and turned the roads over which they must retreat to muddy sluices; and they laughed when the dinner which General Longstreet had ordered to be ready for them at a tavern on the way was pre-empted and devoured by General McLaws and some companions, before they could arrive for the expected feast. They laughed at a proud Negro in Yankee uniform who marched two prisoners into camp. They laughed when a cry in the night that Yankee cavalry was coming caused a minor stampede in the darkness and the rain, till the Yankee cavalry turned out to be a carriageful of women. They laughed at rain and mud, at their own discomfort and their hunger and their pain.

  Yet Trav noticed that it was only when there were a number of them together that they laughed so easily. If you were with one man or with two, you were serious enough.

  Before the retreat began, in Longstreet’s tent on the Fairfield road, while the rain slashed at the dripping canvas over their heads, Trav heard the General briefly discuss the battle with Colonel Fremantle. “What if Meade had attacked, after the repulse?” the Englishman inquired.

  Longstreet spoke with certainty. “We would have smashed them. McLaws and Law would have crushed their flank, Alexander’s guns would have shattered their front.”

  Fremantle remarked: “I’ve heard the opinion that the Second and Third Corps artillery, properly placed, could have taken the hill above the cemetery under enfilade. Colonel Alexander thinks so.”

  “If there was such an opportunity, General Pendleton would have seized it. After defeat, it is an evasion to seek scapegoats.”

  The big man spoke so sternly that his tone was a dismissal. Trav and Fremantle left the General’s tent together; but the Englishman’s curiosity was not satisfied. “You went with the assaulting troops, did you not, Major Currain?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it like?”

  Trav said thoughtfully: “Well, it was like walking all by yourself for a mile across open ground and up to a stone wall, with two men behind the wall shooting at you, and three or four more shooting at you from the sides.”

  Fremantle nodded. “Did you not underrate the enemy?”

  “I suppose so,” Trav smiled mirthlessly. “No Southerner ever doubts that he’s better than any two or three Yankees. Yes, I suppose we did.”

  “I’m told that General Longstreet argued against the attack.”

  “General Longstreet will always say what he thinks.” He was glad to be rid of the other’s persistent probings.

  They began their retreat on the afternoon of the Fourth, and they marched that night a few slow miles, following Hill’s corps. Ewell would bring up the rear and fight off any hard pursuit. The road beyond Fairfield wound to and fro like a snake’s track in the dust, and it was flanked by friendly hills; but presently they turned off that road to ascend the valley of Miney Branch. In that narrow gorge the road at first climbed gradually and then became abruptly steep and arduous, with many hairpin turns and tortuous zigzags. It was scoured by steady rain, so that they waded in little casual torrents or plucked each foot painfully out of deep mud; and every upward step was a conscious effort.

  At the summit of Monterey Pass there was the blessed relief of level going for a while, though they had to make a wide circuit around a green morass which rain had converted into a shallow lake. Beyond, the road descended through another ravine, following a waxing stream down into a valley that promised easy travel; but there was another hard short climb into Waynesboro, and the miles to Hagerstown were a wearying succession of heights from which they looked down into rain-shrouded valleys, and of valleys where they moved blindly through the pitiless rain.

  That day in a village store someone chanced upon a heap of colored prints of President Lincoln; and as the pictures passed from hand to hand along the plodding files, every man had his own comment. “Turn around, Mister, so we can see your tail!” “You’re wrong, thar; it’s monkeys that have tails. This here’s a baboon!” “Say, if that was all the face I had, I wouldn’t have my picture took.” “Hey, come down out of that hat. I know you’re thar! I see yore laigs a-hanging down.” “If I ever seed that phiz over my sights it’d skeer me so bad I’d run clear home to Mammy.”

  Trav, listening to their good-humored jests, realized with some surprise that they were actually all good-humored. No one cursed President Lincoln. No one damned him. He saw a sullen soldier tear one of the pictures across twice and trample it into the mud; but there was no other sign of anger. Abraham Lincoln seemed to command even from his enemies a jocular and tolerant affection.

  It occurred to Trav that except for an occasional loose-tongued woman, he had not for a long time heard anyone speak bitterly of Lincoln. They damned Milroy, and Pope, and Butler most of all; but though they laughed at Pre
sident Lincoln, it seemed to Trav most people no longer hated him. The politicians, of course, and some women, and the voluble bombproofs and skulkers loud for war who nevertheless took care to stay at a safe distance from the battle lines—they all hated him and cursed him; but these simple, hard-fighting, incredibly and recklessly valorous, patient, cheerful men did not hate him. Was it because fighting men learned to respect a stout enemy? Or was there in Lincoln some deep gentleness, some profound sorrow and compassion, some tremendous comprehension which they recognized, and which made them accept him as an honest, greatly troubled man not much different from themselves?

  Trav’s head lifted; he felt a slow stir of pride because in Lincoln’s veins ran Currain blood. “I’d like to tell him, some day,” he thought. “I wonder if he knows.”

  On the march they had heard occasional firing behind them, where enemy cavalry sought to find or to make an opportunity; but at Hagerstown a message from Stuart asked for infantry to help beat off a mass of Union horsemen threatening their flank; and Longstreet sent Trav to throw two brigades that way. Trav went with them, taking detachments from Semmes’ brigade and from that of G. T. Anderson across Antietam Creek toward Funkstown. They did their work at cost of heavy punishment by the horse artillery, and when they fell back toward the river, they crossed the creek again near the battlefield of Sharpsburg. Riding through a field of corn, keeping between the rows with a farmer’s instinct to avoid danger to the standing crop, Trav saw rain-washed bones under Nig’s feet, and headboards tumbled down, and torn rags sodden in the mud. Some of the Sharpsburg dead had been buried here last fall in shallow graves, but all winter the hogs had had their way, and this spring the farmer here had run his plow. When Trav came to the fence, some rails had been replaced, but other rails and boards must have been here during the battle; for they were pierced by many bullet holes as close together as the holes in a sifter. He was glad to leave that field behind and come back to headquarters again, and to the ranks of living men.