House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  They followed the commanding generals down the slope. Lee and Longstreet, comrades through these years now ending, dismounted in an apple orchard in the curve of the road and a little short of the stream and sat down on a pile of fence rails there, speaking quietly together with intervals of silence. Their words could not be heard, except once when Longstreet’s voice was a little raised in strong emphasis.

  “Unless he offers honorable terms, General, return and let us fight it to the end!”

  Presently a horseman trotted down the steep descent from the village and crossed the stream and approached them. General Lee listened to him, then called for his secretary and a courier and rode up toward the court house to meet his adversary. When he had disappeared, General Longstreet walked slowly to where Trav and the others waited. He mounted without assistance, using his weak arm, then slipping it back into the sling and holding the reins in his left hand; and they returned in silence the long three miles to where the First Corps stood in unshaken line of battle, ready for whatever was to come.

  At sight of those orderly ranks Longstreet pulled up his horse, and Trav beside him saw sudden tears in the big man’s eyes, and a high pride. “Well, Currain,” he said, “the First Corps is still ready for a fight. There were never better men.”

  General Field approached to ask what was happening. Longstreet hesitated. “Surrender, I believe,” he said. “Unless ’Lys Grant is less reasonable than he used to be.”

  Field protested: “There is still fight in my men, General! We’re as strong today as we were a week ago.”

  Longstreet nodded. “That is true. But we’ve had the easy part, no hard contention; and aside from your men here, there is not much left of the army.” He looked toward the ranks. Every man was watching him. “Perhaps they had better be kept busy till the business is settled, General,” he suggested. So the men were put to work improving their position here, till a Union officer came to announce a general truce and even this activity was halted.

  Longstreet, as composed during this long waiting as in the flush of battle, sat under a tree with Trav and others of the staff, puffing hard at his pipe; and the fine Sunday afternoon droned away. Trav thought there was an unearthly stillness in the forest and along the roadside. His ears had for so long been tuned to the crackle of musketry that the silence made him restless. There had been some action at dawn when Gordon tried the enemy in their front, but now for hours hardly a shot had sounded. What would life be when the staccato of musket fire and the occasional single shots of skirmishers and sharpshooters were no longer a commonplace of every daylight hour; when the sound of a distant shot meant only that a rabbit, or a duck, or possibly a deer had been killed, and not a man? He sat leaning against a tree, Nig cropping grass near-by with a grinding sound; and he felt a heavy beating in his blood, and his thoughts went wandering. Presently there would be surrender and an end to all this. What then?

  He groped back toward contact with the peaceful world as it had been; but that world was gone; for now the Negroes were no longer “our people.” They were no longer men and women with whom you worked in a sort of partnership, and toward whom you had a duty of which you were much more conscious than you were of your authority over them. There would be no more slaves.

  But—what would become of them? They would not disappear; they would not vanish off the face of the earth. They would still be here, as liable to hunger and to sickness and to cold as they had ever been. Who would feed them, warm them, cure them when they were ill, shelter them when they were feeble and old?

  Why, that was a task which the South must accept. Now the slaves were free, but not the masters. As a matter of self-interest, if for no other reason, you had always taken solicitous care of your people. They had been yours, but also you were theirs. Now they were no longer yours; but you were still as surely theirs. They would forever be a part of your world, a part of your community. If a Negro were sick or hungry, it was as necessary as it had ever been to provide in some way for his healing and his sustenance. If you did not, then all around you and your family there would be pestilence and famine; and to live in the South would be like dwelling in a wilderness where roamed bands of starved and rabid wolves.

  Clearly, the Negroes were destined, at least in the beginning, to work the land. This was a task they knew; it would serve as a stopgap until somehow they developed rew capacities. Thus thinking, Trav remembered Great Oak and the labors which had absorbed him there. But the house was gone, and to make Great Oak again a healthy and a fruitful property would require years. Not for a long time could those fields be restored to productivity.

  But Chimneys now was his, tossed back to him by Tony. War had not ravaged that region; he might return there. Enid would hate it, but she would have to accept his decision. Certainly he must somehow provide for her and for Lucy and Peter a living and a home. In a South where no one had anything, they were as well off as anyone; but when peace came, from the dead level of impoverishment, here and there an individual would presently emerge. Every man with an aptitude would seek a way to use it. Trav knew his only aptitude was for husbandry; but how could anyone work land without black hands to help him? His own thoughts brought him to a stop; against this blank wall he could make no forward progress.

  He was too tired to think, too hungry to think. For a week now, since that other Sunday which seemed so long ago when he rode out of Richmond, there had been short rations or none at all even for Longstreet and the officers of the staff. They were better off than the men, but not much. Trav was hungry for food, and hungry for sleep. He shook his head, brushed his hands across his eyes. General Lee had gone to meet Longstreet’s friend, ’Lys Grant, and to surrender this army. Beyond that no man could see.

  This waiting was hard. Even Longstreet, as though unable to endure it, at last rose and called for his horse; and they returned with him toward the front. He pulled up on the heights above the valley, looking across toward the Court House. This morning there had been cavalry in the valley to the right, but Trav did not see them now. He spoke of this to Longstreet, and the big man nodded.

  “Yes, Fitz Lee last night asked permission to ride away before any surrender and try to join General Johnston.”

  Then Burr was gone, with Rosser’s division of Fitz Lee’s command. So Burr was not yet done with the hard gallop, the weary days, the mêlée of the charge, the pistol shot, the thrust, the wounds and death. Yet if Lee surrendered, what could Johnston do?

  On the heights across the stream where the court house stood, they heard a sudden distant clamor of cheering, quickly silenced. The Yankees up there in Appomattox Court House had learned something which pleased them. It was not long after that cheering before Trav saw General Lee, with two or three companions, ride down the hill and cross the little stream that threaded the valley between them and the village and come slowly toward them. Gordon’s men gave him a cheer, but the cheer was broken off in a clamor of many voices as the men rushed to meet him with questions.

  As General Lee approached, Trav and the others had no need to question. The commanding general rode with his hat in his hands, his hands resting on the pommel; they saw him nod to those urgent questioners, nod and nod with a heavy head; but his eyes were fixed between Traveller’s ears. Behind him, when he had passed, the men halted and stood still. They looked after him, they answered the questions asked by others who came running up to them, they dropped to the ground or wandered off by ones or twos, or they went alone; and Trav saw grown men crying without shame, crying openly and with a dreadful violence, beating their fists together, shaking with sobs. They were like children after a harsh whipping, convulsed with the bruising sting of the lash, helpless to control themselves. He saw a man throw himself flat on the ground and lie on his back and cry aloud, howling like a lost dog in an intolerable grief and woe. He saw men with blank faces from whose red, haggard eyes tears streamed unheeded, like water from a leaky cup. He saw men draw together in groups, not speaking, staring a
t one another as though at strangers. He heard curses and monstrous obscenities, and he saw men everywhere frankly kneel and pray. General Lee’s passage left these valiants in collapse behind him as a tornado leaves broken trees in its path through what was a noble forest.

  The commanding general turned off the road at the orchard and dismounted and withdrew among the apple trees. There, alone, he paced slowly up and down; and Trav in his own heart shared the lonely man’s solitary Golgotha. Surrounded at a respectful distance by the circle of these men who loved him, General Lee moved like an animal in a cage.

  To that circle newcomers constantly were added. After a time, two or three Yankee officers came to speak to members of his staff, and someone took them to General Lee for introductions; and at that Longstreet turned his horse.

  “I’ll not watch that lion-baiting,” he said through grating teeth; and Trav heard the furious anger in him. “Let us ride into the enemy lines.” He added sternly: “If they have rations to spare, they must share with our hungry men. We can see to that!”

  This sharing, as it proved, had already been arranged. Before they reached the bridge at the foot of the hill, they saw laden wagons coming down the road from the village. General Longstreet, riding on up the hill, left Trav and the others to see to the distribution. There was bread in some wagons, meat in others; but the men were too nearly famished to make selection. Those who got bread ate it, and those to whose lot fell the meat scarce waited to start their cooking fires and scorch it a little before it was hungrily devoured.

  During the afternoon, the terms of the surrender were reported by word of mouth from man to man; and Trav shared the surprised gratefulness at General Grant’s generosity. The men would be paroled; those who owned horses would retain them; the officers would keep their side arms; the railroads would, so far as their capacities permitted, help the infantrymen to distant homes.

  Of the surrender itself, Trav heard the details from General Alexander. “They met in Major McLean’s house,” he said. “Wilmer McLean. It’s just beyond the court house.” And Alexander added: “Major McLean owned the farm at Blackburn’s Ford, where Longstreet threw back the first Yankee thrust, a day or two before Manassas, four years ago. You might say the war began and ended on his farm.” The artilleryman confessed that he himself had begged General Lee not to surrender. “My men had saved their ammunition, still had a good supply, hated to give up without using it. I thought we might scatter and find our separate ways to join General Johnston; but probably General Lee is right.”

  Darkness came, and the night air held a threat of rain. General Lee had named Longstreet and Gordon and Pendleton to arrange the details of the surrender; so Monday morning Trav and the other staff officers turned to long dull drudgery of paper work, tallying the names of men to be paroled. That day, while rain fell softly as tears upon them all, Trav found solace in totting up long columns, checking his results. The regimental reports as of Sunday morning showed only a scant eight thousand infantry in those units which still retained their organization. Seven thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two. But that figure met continual modification, for all day Monday, hundreds of stragglers rejoined their commands. They were usually weaponless. It would be a proud man who could say in the years to come: “I surrendered my musket at Appomattox.” No more than a few thousand would be able to rank themselves in that category. Trav suspected that many of the stragglers were actually deserters who came now to secure the protection of parole. Hour by hour the totals grew, and once he thought with grim amusement: Why, if this keeps on, we’ll have a sizeable army to surrender before we’re through!

  All day, that first pleasantly precise figure—seven thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two organized infantry with seventy-five rounds of ammunition, and sixty-three guns with ninety-three rounds—grew and grew. That night Trav copied off the tally:

  General Lee and his staff 15

  Longstreet’s corps 14,833

  Gordon’s corps 7,200

  Ewell’s corps 287

  Cavalry 1,786

  Artillery 2,586

  Detachments 1,649

  28,356

  He took these totals to General Longstreet, and the big man scanned them thoughtfully. “The First Corps had accretions, Currain,” he remarked. “Part of Hill’s corps, and those who escaped the shambles at Sayler’s Creek, have come into our ranks. But of the force committed to me by General Lee at Petersburg, we’ve lost hardly two hundred men, including stragglers. Yet we’ve marched a hundred miles, and eaten little, and had a dozen skirmishes. The First Corps is a fighting weapon still.”

  Trav said honestly: “You’ve reason to be proud of them, General.” He added: “Gordon’s corps was fought to a shadow. His figures there include about five thousand fragments and stragglers.”

  “Twenty-eight thousand altogether,” Longstreet reflected. “No doubt ’Lys Grant could count a hundred thousand men, in hand or within call.”

  Trav asked: “Have you seen him?”

  “Briefly, yes.” Longstreet and the others had done their work as commissioners for the surrender in a room in the McLean house. “Yes, as I passed his door he called me in for a friendly word.”

  “Will he receive the surrender?”

  “No, he and Meade and Sheridan have already gone.” His voice checked in his throat; and Trav understood and turned away.

  Since the capitulation, Lee’s army had contracted, the First Corps moving up from New Hope Church, where they had drawn that last defensive line across the road, to make themselves as comfortable as was possible in the woods on the upper slopes no more than a mile from the Appomattox. Tuesday morning, General Alexander put his guns in single column along the road and delivered them where they stood to the Federal officers appointed to receive them. Trav, from the slopes above, watched that formality; and he waited to see the guns file away down to the bridge and up the hill to the village. But they did not move, and after a time the men grouped around them began to drift back up the road again, and Trav saw Brett and joined him, walking Nig by Brett’s side.

  “Why didn’t they take the guns?” he asked.

  Brett said in a hoarse voice, his eyes on the road: “They’re too deep in mud. Our horses can’t move them. We had to manhandle every gun to get them into line. The Yankees haven’t any horses to spare. They haven’t decided what to do.” His tone was heavy with stale fatigue, and Trav did not speak. Brett said absently: “General Alexander plans to leave the country, go to Brazil, or anywhere there’s work for a good artilleryman.”

  “West Point men have no other trade but war,” Trav reflected. “But I suppose they can never have an army command again, not Confederate officers.” He added: “Latrobe is planning to go to England.”

  Brett plodded through the mud. “Fitz Lee took his men away before the surrender. Burr and Rollin are gone. I don’t hear any more talk about taking to the mountains, guerrilla war.”

  “No, this will end it all. Will you go back to Richmond?”

  “Yes, at first. I think we may all go to the Plains when we can. If we can. Probably Richmond will be garrisoned.”

  “General Longstreet and I will go to Lynchburg,” Trav told him. “Enid’s there, and Mrs. Longstreet.”

  After a few paces Brett said: “Trav, I have some news of Tony.” Trav looked at him in surprise, and Brett explained: “From Mr. Owen, of the Washington Artillery. He had a letter from a friend in New Orleans, describing conditions there. Mr. Owen did not know there was any relationship between Anthony Currain and me, and I did not inform him.”

  “What was it he said?”

  “Why, that Tony has set up an establishment there.” Brett did not meet Trav’s eyes. “His wife is a very beautiful—Creole. Every Yankee in New Orleans knows Miss Sapphira.” Trav felt his spine prick, and Brett went on: “According to Mr. Owen’s correspondent, Tony is in politics. There have always been free negroes in New Orleans, and now Tony is on familiar political—and social—ter
ms with their leaders. He seems to have a financial interest in a Republican newspaper there, run by some San Domingan negroes.” Trav could not speak, and after a moment Brett added: “You see, New Orleans has been a Northern city for three years now. I suppose it’s a sample of what will happen in the whole South. Mr. Owen is afraid that when civil government is re-established, negroes may get the suffrage. Apparently, if that happens, Tony will control a good many votes.”

  Trav felt anger like a sickness in him. He would not look at Brett, trudging with downcast head beside him; and when someone called his name—“Mornin’, Major Currain!”—he welcomed the interruption. He turned and saw, lounging among the trees with half a dozen others whose faces were familiar, Lonn Tyler. Here were the fragments of the Eleventh North Carolina, the regiment with which he had faced those flaming guns at Gettysburg. When he pulled up his horse, Brett went on; and Trav after a moment’s hesitation let him go. Of Tony, there was no more to be said. Let him be forgotten.

  So he stayed, sitting his horse with these simple men grouped around him. Lonn offered him a canteen, and more from politeness than desire Trav lifted it to his lips. Some fiery liquid with a bitter flavor burned his throat, and he stifled a cough. “God Almighty, what’s that?”

  “Pine-top whiskey, Major. They make it around here. A farmer back along give us a jug of it. You got to say for it, it warms you!”