by Frank Yerby
“No, thank you, Father. I don’t need anything. This last year the place showed a profit. So I cleared off all my debts, sold my Negroes—all but Inch, he’s with Ceclie and the children in New Orleans—and brought them back to Harrow. They’ll be safer here, Father . . . if you don’t mind having them.”
“Mind? Are ye daft, lad? ‘Twill be the greatest pleasure of my life. But ye said something about their safety. Were they in any danger?”
“Yes. This secession business . . . it means war, Father. And already in Missouri there have been barns burnt and a few houses. Your free-soilers aren’t a squeamish people.”
“And your proslavers? They draw very nice distinctions, I suppose?”
“We’ve had to fight fire with fire. ‘Tis a bloody business. I wanted Ceclie and the children out of it.”
Georges was coming through the hall with the dry clothing. Georges’ woolly thatch was white, and he had children grown, offsprings of his marriage with the long-reluctant Suzette, who were now house servants at Harrow.
“Monsieur ‘Tienne,” he chuckled. “You a man now, yes! What a fine beard! People call you Judge Fox, now, sho—yes?”
“Light a fire in the study, Georges,” Stephen said; “then go up and call Madame. Come, ‘Tienne, ‘tis best that ye change.”
Afterwards, in the study, the three of them sat beside the fireplace, talking over their coffee.
“I had a letter from Julie,” Etienne said. “That husband of hers has enlisted in the Federal Navy. I wrote her back immediately and suggested that she join us all here—I don’t like the idea of her being way up there among those Yankees alone.”
“Nor I,” Aurore said. “The Yankees will never reach us here—if something should happen . . .”
“Something will happen,” Stephen declared. “Ye may depend upon that, Aurore.”
“ ‘Twill be soon over,” Etienne said. “Why, we’d be in Washington within three weeks after it started—but I’m not sure those Yankees have any stomach for a fight.”
Stephen snorted.
“They fought ye well enough in Kansas, didn’t they? Seems to me they won that one. Kansas came in free. And what do ye propose that we use for ammunition? Cotton bales? Where are our foundries to cast cannon? Think ye that they will sell us the arms with which to fight them?”
“Well, from the arsenals we’ve taken—”
“About one hundred thousand pieces of arms—only about ten thousand of which are modern. Most of the rest are smooth-bores, and flintlocks to boot—vintage of 1812! And we’ll need half a million—mark ye that, ‘Tienne.”
“But we’re better fighters . . . and we’re more accustomed to the open, more responsive to command.”
“Ye speak as though the Yankees are a different breed of dog. We’re all Americans, remember Think ye that your Ohio, Iowa and Illinois farm boys are not as at home in the field as we? ‘Twill be a bloody business, ‘Tienne, which we cannot hope to win. They can lose man for man with us and still come up with thousands in the field after we’re bled white. How many railroads run out of New Orleans? Two! How many factories do we have for uniforms, boots, saddles, spurs, equipment of all sorts? I’ll tell ye, ‘Tienne, none! ‘Twill be a long and frightful war if it comes to war and we will lose. That’s why I’m going to do my utmost to keep Louisiana out of it. Perhaps then the others will think twice.”
“You paint a dismal picture, Father.”
“But a true one. Still, that’s not my only reason for the stand I take—nor even the chief one. Ye see, I was a man grown when I came to this country. I made comparisons and soon I knew that there was nothing like this land in all the earth. The thing ye would destroy is infinitely precious to me. I don’t believe any longer in aristocracy—even self-made aristocracy such as the South has. Ye can’t have a land like America unless the people—all the people—have a hand in its shaping. And the South has never dealt fairly with the people. Why, we’ve treated the Negroes better than we have our own. What of your landless white? Your mountaineer—your swampfolk? Must they go on eating the clay of the earth to keep from starving?”
“The people,” Etienne sneered, “that rabble!”
“Rabble? They used that word in France, ‘Tienne, and heads rolled into the basket. Either ye give the people their freedom—or they will take it, and ye and yours will perish in the whirlwind.”
“Even the blacks?”
“Aye. Remember Nat Turner? Remember Haiti? Remember Saint Domingue?”
“Yes,” Etienne said. “But that will never happen here!”
“No? Perhaps not—but freeing the blacks would not destroy our economy. Slave labor is about the most inefficient there is. There is only so much work ye can get out of an owned thing, no matter how much ye beat him. ‘Twould be cheaper in the long run to pay them a wage.”
“They’d only squander it,” Etienne declared; “and the next day you’d have to feed them.”
“Would Inch squander a wage? We have two hundred sixty thousand freedmen now—and they all seem to get along. But enough of this—ye must be dead for sleep. I’ll ride into New Orleans and bring in Ceclie and the children while ye rest.”
Etienne smiled, stroking his enormous beard with his hand.
“Yes, Father,” he said. “Anyway, ‘tis certain that we can’t solve the problem—or anything like it. You have my old room ready?”
“Yes,” Aurore said, slipping her arms around her stepson’s waist. “And I’ll have Georges up as soon as you’re awake—to shave off those horrible whiskers!”
“You’ll have to indulge me in that,” Etienne laughed; “I’ve grown quite attached to them.”
When Stephen came back from New Orleans, riding in the yellow coach, holding his two-year-old granddaughter, Gail, in his arms, while the two boys, Victor, named after Andre’s son, and little Stephen crawled all over him, peering out the windows, anxious to be home, he found a delegation waiting upon him. He excused himself and conducted Ceclie and the children upstairs, then returned to the grand salon to talk with his guests. They were all working men, sitting ill at ease among the magnificence of Harrow, rubbing their big-knuckled, horny hands together.
Stephen called a slave and ordered wine and cigars for the whole delegation. Then he faced them, smiling.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “What can I do for ye?”
Hearing the faint touch of brogue still present in his speech, the big-muscled man sitting near the front smiled and got to his feet.
“ ‘Tis Irish ye be, Mister Fox? I’d heard sich, but ye seemed too foine a gintilman—too much a lord. Well, so be we, and ‘tis that in part that brung us here.”
Stephen waited patiently.
“We be the representatives of all the trade guilds and unions in the city, and ‘tis thinking we was that we’d need a spokesman whin this business of secession come up for the voting. They wouldn’t listen to us—these quality folks—but ye be wan of thim. Yit we’ve heard tell that ye’ve been on our side many a toime. That’s true, ain’t it?”
“Yes, I see among ye men who’ve attended fetes here at Harrow. Ye know, gentlemen, I was once a typesetter and a printer’s divil. But first, I’d better find out how ye want your votes cast. I can’t agree to vote for something in which I don’t believe.”
“And sure ‘tis that that we wouldn’t ask of ye,” the spokesman said. “We be ag’in’ it—this secession business. And ye?”
“I’m your man,” Stephen said. “To secede from the Union is a folly—nay more, ‘tis a wicked folly. Ye men who come here from other lands know well what this country means. If slavery becomes too powerful, what chance has a free working man?”
“None. But this be queer coming from ye, Mister Fox—seeing as how ye hold as many niggers as any man in the state.”
“Aye. But ‘tis written in my will that upon my death they’re to be freed—not sold, but freed. When I came to this land, ‘twas in my mind to rise in life and everybody else co
uld go hang. But ‘tis an old man, I am now, by all the saints, and I know that we’ve all got to rise together or else we fall separately. I want to see this the best land in all the world for the common man, and if we have to rid ourselves of the aristocracy to do it, then we’re best rid of them and quickly say I. At any rate, gentlemen, ‘twill be a pleasure to serve ye.”
Shortly thereafter the workers took their leave, having consumed an enormous quantity of wine and cigars. Two days later he was notified in writing that he had been elected union delegate-at-large to the special secession convention. The family watched him leave in complete and utter silence, for there was not one of them who approved of his views in the matter. Stephen wished that he had Julie there to say an encouraging word; but although she had written that she was coming home to stay during Tom’s absence, she had not yet arrived. So it was that Stephen had to ride away from Harrow with the faintest kind of goodbyes, and no good wishes.
He made the journey upriver to Baton Rouge by packet, and took his seat with the other delegates. He listened quietly to the debates on the subject, and when his turn came, he rose and began to give figures covering the extent of Louisiana’s trade with the North as compared with its foreign trade, the amount of Louisiana capital held and working through Northern banks, the almost total absence of ownership of any seagoing bottoms by any firm of Louisianians, the lack of any kind of gun works, or large-scale manufacturing establishments of any sort within the state, the lack of the facilities or the raw materials to manufacture gun powder, and a detailed analysis, based upon his personal knowledge of the two countries, of why any belief that England and France would do much more than talk in behalf of the Confederacy was doomed to disappointment. In closing, he pointed out that the idea that the North and the rest of the world were economically dependent upon the South whereas she herself was self-sufficient and self-contained was a suicidal fallacy. That the upper Mississippi valley could not live if it were cut off from the gulf, as had been asserted in ringing oratorical tones by a previous delegate, he contradicted by reading figure after figure of trade increases in commodities in cities along the route of the Erie Barge Canal, and comparing them with the decreases and often complete disappearances of such commodities from the New Orleans market.
“The fact is, gentlemen,” he concluded, “the upper Mississippi valley has been getting along without us for years, but we never bestirred ourselves to notice it. I ask ye therefore before ye take this fatal step to name me one type of weapon or one military article of any sort that is manufactured South of the Mason and Dixon line. With what will you fight them? Your bare hands?”
In the end he was howled down. These were facts. The South has always preferred oratory.
When the vote was counted, it was one hundred three in favor of secession to seventeen against. Stephen Fox and several other of the minority delegates got to their feet to protest: they well knew that the division between Union and secession delegates as they had been informed was almost equal. There were turncoats in the hall that night. Finally a recount was made of the popular vote and the chairman read:
“For Union delegates: 17,296; for secession delegates: 20,448.” A difference, Stephen calculated, of merely three thousand, one hundred and fifty-two votes in a by-no-means-unquestionable tally. Less than one eighteenth of the voting population of the state, an amazingly small fraction of one percent of the total population. Louisiana was out of the Union. May God and the Virgin have mercy upon her soul.
The next day, back in New Orleans, Stephen Fox offered his services to the Confederate Army of America.
XXXIV
EARLY in February, 1861, when Julie finally reached Harrow, she found that Etienne was already gone, swallowed up in the vast wilderness that lay to the northward. Her father, his offer to serve finally accepted by the army after the personal intercession of Colonel Andre Le Blanc and Brigadier General Duncan, was in command of a regiment of cavalry under General Mansfield Lovell, whose troops were assigned to the defense of New Orleans.
Nothing had changed—except that there were no men at Harrow other than the Negroes. Ceclie, her temper growing daily more waspish as no word came from Etienne, required delicate handling. But the children were a delight. Someday, when this silly, all but bloodless war was over, Julie decided, there must be other children . . . with unruly dark hair and wide grey eyes.
She saw Stephen often, for there was nothing in the military situation that prevented him from visiting Harrow. The tall, rapier-lean figure of her father was exceedingly handsome in the fine, tailored grey uniform of a Confederate major; but he spoke little, and his eyes were troubled. Julie alone knew how much his decision had cost him, so with him her manner was one of perfect understanding tempered by a little sadness.
The weeks drifted on and nothing happened. Colonel Walton took Baton Rouge without fighting, taking his Washington Artillery upriver on the Natchez along with the Chasseurs a Pied, the Crescent Rifles, and the Orleans Cadets. Major Paul E. Theard with his Bataillon d’Artillerie on the Yanic took Forts Jackson and St. Phillips some ninety miles below the city at Plaquemine Bend. Fort Pike at Rigolet, and Fort McComb on the Bayou Chef Mentur were also in Confederate hands—all this without the firing of a shot.
It was a curious comic-opera sort of war, complete with splendid uniforms, flags and martial music. Life had never been so gay in New Orleans. There were parties and dances without number, the colorful uniforms adding glamour to the occasions. For a long while mail still came through from the North, so that Julie knew of the progress that Tom was making in his training and even a little of the confusion and blundering that were to mark the first year of Federal operations.
Then in April the picture changed: Major Anderson (Bob Anderson, my beau, Bob!) marched out of Sumter to the salute of fifty guns, bearing with him the shot-torn burned flag which at the last was to be wrapped around his body when they lowered him into the grave, and took ship aboard the relief vessels that President Lincoln had sent, sailing away to New York and glory even in defeat. And Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, late of New Orleans, whose guns ringing Charleston harbor had smashed the wooden structures on the island into flaming splinters, sent in a grey-clad garrison.
Now, indeed, it was war; but in New Orleans, few cared. The young men of the city strutted in their fine uniforms and battalion after battalion marched away to the North. A few women, like Julie and Ceclie, wept, their tears falling against the wall of silence separating them from their men. But most of them waved their silken banners from the galleries and cheered their men onward with blissful ignorance of stench and mud, lice, dysentery, bullet-spattered brains and the dreadful grating of the surgeon’s bone saw.
Near Washington, on Sunday, July 21, 1861, a picnic was held. A stream of spectators in buggies, carrying their lunch baskets, rode out to Bull Run Creek at Manassas, Virginia to watch “Northern Shovelry make Southern Chivalry” bite the dust. It had all been announced beforehand—the time, the place, the opponents. But on Sunday, the Union troops were pouring back into Washington, saved only by Colonel Sherman’s hollow square whose murderous fire cut down the Confederate cavalry. There were guns, hats, blankets, haversacks strewn every foot of the way for twenty miles, and every lawn in the Capital was filled with whipped, dog-tired, hopeless men lying in the drizzling rain of Monday morning.
This was war—the face of it—and civilian spectators had seen what it was like. The dust of the dry Sunday came up from the ground and choked the nostrils but that wasn’t enough. Hot bloodstench is a strong scent, horseguts dripping through the shellslashed bellies and tangling in the feet of the pain-maddened animals until they fell screaming to the earth are not calculated to help a picnicker’s appetite. They puked up their lunches, these watchers, and rode deathpale and sickened back to Washington. The wounded men were quieter than the horses. They lay in the mud that hot young blood had made of the bone-dry earth and they did not cry. They died holding the pictures of sweet
heart, mother, and wife in their hands and left bloodfroth on the photographs where they had kissed them.
This was war . . . the face of it. And in New Orleans, they danced.
The entire Missouri border, where Etienne Fox rode with the proslave irregulars, was flaming. Monday’s Hollow, Underwood’s Farm, Big River Bridge, Springfield. Minor skirmishes, these, but the dead, crow-tormented in the Missouri cornfields, were no less butchered, limb-smashed, minie-pierced than those at Bull Run. And up at Harrow, Julie Fox Meredith thanked the saints that her Tom was in the navy where he could never meet her menfolk. But Ceclie wept and stormed and slapped the children and cursed and prayed for Etienne at one and the same time.
Stephen rode up to see the women at Harrow, saying gloomily:
“Yes, it goes well now, but tomorrow . . .”
Tomorrow was the Fall of ‘sixty-one and the Winter of ‘sixty-two. Tomorrow was Ulysses S. Grant at Donelson, the men marching in an almost Summer sun, throwing away their overcoats and blankets, betrayed by the weather dropping to ten above, the bloody earth stone-hard. Tomorrow was February 16, 1862—“No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” The North had found its man.
In New Orleans, at the St. Louis and the St. Charles, they danced. In Royal and Conti they gambled. The whores did a landoffice business. Life was never so gay.
Lincoln’s do-nothing Napoleon, McClellan, idled, whining for men and more men, begging for material. (“Sending men to that Army,” Abe groaned, “is like shoveling fleas in a barnyard.”) Then McClellan moved at last upon Manassas, but Johnny Reb had upped stakes in the night and was gone, so McClellan marched back upon Washington. Reinforced, he marched south again, fell upon Yorktown, finding it empty, guarded by wooden log cannon as was Manassas, and took it thus, wiring heroic Napoleonic phrases to Washington.
And blackbearded Etienne Fox lived in the saddle, riding out of Missouri into Arkansas, fighting at Pea Ridge, then sweeping back into Missouri, hearing the whine of the minie balls at Sugar Creek, Leesville, Elkhorn Tavern . . . seeing it all end at the last in disaster for Confederate hopes. Missouri stayed in the Union.
