by Rinaldi, Ann
“I wish I could feel so.”
“You know it’s true.”
“I think the North lost a lot when it lost Lee,” he said. It was the only comment he’d said so far about the war.
“What if the North loses?” I asked. “What will become of the country?”
“No matter who loses, it will never be the same,” he answered.
Never be the same. He was right. But what would it be? And why couldn’t Mr. Lincoln have offered Lee whatever he wanted to stay? What kind of a president was he? More to the point, what did Lee want? What did any of the South want?
I was sure Upton knew, but I did not ask him.
The cannons stopped for an hour and then recommenced until dark.
The servants and Nigra workmen were not to be found anywhere by the end of the day, so Upton sent the other workmen home. Only Jane came into the kitchen to cook.
The cannons stopped at dusk. The servants came back to the house. Dandridge said a man going by on the river had said that sightseers had been on a hill in Centreville watching the fight. That they ran back to Washington with the retreating Federals, some knocked down and hurt in the melee. That the Federals retreated instead of regrouping, wounded and bloodstained and dying. That the Rebels were headed to Washington City.
But Southern general Beauregard did not follow up and take Washington.
That evening Mrs. Harbinger came around. I let her in the front door. “Oh, thank heavens, Sarah, thank God above. We won a marvelous victory.”
“We?” I asked.
“Yes, the South.”
I offered to make her tea, but she said she had to go on and give the news to the neighbors. The Long Bridge had been tied up all day, she said, with wagons carrying the wounded back to Washington. She had heard that thousands were dead.
That night a terrible thing happened. I awoke to hear voices in the near distance. I went to my window and saw torches, the light of which gave me sight of men wandering on the lawns, in and about the trees.
Priscilla stirred in her cot at the foot of my bed. “What be happenin’?”
“Men,” I whispered. “Soldiers wandering outside.”
We went downstairs, where we met Upton walking about with a candle in hand. He was fully dressed.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Likely strays from the battle who’ve wandered over.”
“Should we go to them? Do you think they are hurt?”
He handed the candle to me and went to the dining room and came out with his musket. “If they are, it isn’t our place to care for them. We haven’t the means. Stay right there. Tell the servants to be quiet.”
He went to the front windows, but I went too and peered out.
“Put down the candle if you’re going to stand here,” he whispered fiercely.
I did so.
It seemed like an hour that we stood there watching those figures wander the lawns with their makeshift torches. To me they looked like ghosts. I thought: Mayhap they are. Mayhap they’ve died in the battle and have come to tell General Washington what has happened.
My thoughts wandered, too, in all directions as we stood there.
Finally the tall case clock behind us in the hall struck the hour. One in the morning. The sliver of moon outside went behind a cloud. It looked like it might rain.
The figures came closer to the piazza.
“I’m going out,” Upton said. And he picked up his rifle.
“Oh, please, be careful!” I admonished.
He gave me a look of annoyance, as one of my brothers would, and went out the front door. I saw some other figures come from behind trees and bushes when they saw him. All had torches, and their burning gave a fearful and dreadful light.
I heard Upton talking, heard the mens replies. Was I expected to go out? The presence of a lady here, Miss Cunningham had said, would give the place protection. But Upton would take exception to my presence now He seemed to be handling things.
The visitors turned to go. He came back inside and locked the door.
“They thought the place was empty,” he said. “Likely they wanted to bed down here. They’re from a Southern regiment, and they’ve been in the battle and they seem somewhat dazed.”
“Are they going to leave?” I asked.
“They are going to find their way back to their regiment. I gave them directions to where they wanted to go.”
He said we should all go to bed then. Priscilla and I went upstairs. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept watch, out the windows. It seemed like hours that the men wandered around outside. Their voices carried on the air as they shouted back and forth to one another.
I knew that Upton was downstairs in the foyer with his rifle.
I wanted to go to him. But I also knew, because I had two older brothers, how that would displease him. So I sat on my bed and watched the torchlights going from place to place outside.
At first Priscilla sat up on her bed too. Then she lay down. Then I heard her snoring. It comforted me. And finally, oh, I am so ashamed! I put my head down too and fell asleep.
Ten
The next morning when I awoke, the silence seemed strange. And the wind was blowing from the west. It had rained during the night. The bushes and gardens were still dripping water, and the world seemed washed clean, as if no battle had ever taken place.
“How late were you up?” I asked Upton in the kitchen.
He was finishing his breakfast. Why did I get the feeling he had never gone back to bed? “They meant no harm,” he said. “They were simply lost and dazed from the fighting.”
He took a final sip of coffee and got up and reached for the musket. “Nevertheless, I’m going to visit the neighbors today to try to start a Home Guard. Dandridge knows what must be done.”
He took his horse. Yes, he has a horse. Calls her Peaches. She’s a roan color with a light mane. Very pretty. It surprised me somehow, though, seeing him on a horse with a musket. But then, I forget. He is Southern, And it is their men’s First Commandment that they learn to shoot and ride. He was morose that morning. I suppose not being in the battle made him morose. I hope he doesn’t decide to join.
We still didn’t know who had won the battle the day before. And I kept telling myself that to us here at Mount Vernon, it doesn’t matter.
Around noontime I was picking some beans in my garden, glad to see my crow back, when I heard the workmen and servants shouting and running beyond the bowling green to the far reaches of the property. I ran to see them pointing at the heavens.
Now what? I thought. The South’s President Jeff Davis on a cloud bank?
It was a balloon. Nothing less. The servants and workmen alike ran in the direction in which it was coming down, on the edge of our plantation.
I ran too and stood, openmouthed, with the others as the basket, holding a man in a tall black ridiculous hat, hit the ground. Immediately the men grabbed the sides of the skidding basket and brought it to a halt on the road just outside the west gate.
“Thank you, thank you, gentlemen,” the man inside said. And he nimbly jumped out, took off his hat, seeing me, and bowed. “I am Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe,” he said, “special agent of President Abraham Lincoln, commissioned by him to send telegraph messages from the air to the White House. To whom am I speaking?”
I introduced myself.
“Ah, I have heard of the Association and its good ladies. Could I trouble you to let your men help me hide my conveyance here while I telegraph my wife to come and get me?”
“As long as you don’t come on our property,” I said. “We do not give succor to either side. We are neutral in this war.”
“Miss Tracy,” he said, “I wish I had the luxury to be neutral, but I do not. How I envy you, yes, how I envy you. That’s it, men, gather the balloon in. Be careful there.”
He then proceeded to explain its hydrogen-generation apparatus to the men, who were fascinated, all thoughts of mundane work forgotten. They
gathered in the colorful folds of the balloon, which now looked like a painted beached whale. He told them what to do and they did it. I stood by, still in amazement. The night before, dazed men with primitive torches, and that morning a balloon! What kind of war was this?
After assuring me that he would not come onto our property, and that he would send our workers home soon, Mr. Lowe said his wife would be coming in a covered wagon, disguised as a farm woman, to take him back to Washington.
What had he seen from the air? one of the men asked him.
He could not say. It was military intelligence. He was working for President Lincoln. He was scouting the placement of Southern troops.
He said the North lost the battle the day before, and that if Southern general Beauregard had the sense of a mountain goat (which he doesn’t), he could have followed his win up with taking Washington. He said that before the battle the soldiers in Washington City were getting rowdy and drunk. He said the best possible order did not prevail in Washington but that the town was a great, confused garrison.
“But the North has had its first defeat,” he said, “and no one is very happy.”
Upton succeeded in getting enough men for a Home Guard.
He told me the Confederates have declared July 30 to be a muster day. And that many men in the area who do not wish to be drafted into the Southern army will be making their way North. “Don’t let any of them in if they come this way and you want to be considered neutral,” he told me.
I said I would be careful.
This afternoon some soldiers came by to see the house and Washington’s tomb. We made $7.25 from them. We are in need of money. I decided to send Dandridge to Alexandria with another load of cabbages to sell.
On muster day a group of Northern officers came by. We greeted them, and I showed them the tomb. They adhered to my rules as to covering their signs of rank on their uniforms and setting their guns down. But then I got the feeling that, being officers, they wanted to be invited to dinner.
I had just shown them the house when the smell of cooking wafted in from the kitchen. They lingered.
“Gentlemen, I would invite you, but I am under command also,” I said, “to stay neutral and not show favor in this war. I know the people at Hollin Hall are prepared today for visitors,” I told them. “They are just half a mile from here.” I gave them directions.
As luck would have it, Upton was not with us. He was out amongst the neighbors, vouching for those who had joined his Home Guard with the muster men from both North and South. For the North had decided to compete and send men into the area also, to recruit.
I was just sitting down in the dining room by myself when there came a knock on our front door. More officers, I thought. But it wasn’t.
It was Robert Harbinger. “Miss Tracy, can I please come in?”
He had a blanket strapped onto his back, army fashion. “Are you here for something for your mother?” I asked.
“No. I’m hiding from my mother. I’ll explain if you let me in.”
I know I shouldn’t have, but I did. After all, I’m hiding from my mother too, aren’t I? He stepped into the foyer. “I want to join the Northern army,” he said. “Today. And I know my mother won’t let me. So I’ve come here to hide until I see a muster man from the North.”
“But I can’t hide a soldier,” I said. “You know how I’m supposed to stay neutral.”
“I’m not a soldier. Not yet. Miss Tracy, I’m sure a Northern recruiter will be by soon. I just ask you to let me stand here and peek out the windows until I see one. Then I’ll go. I promise.”
I let him stay. I know I shouldn’t have. And soon a recruiter was sighted, across the bowling green in back, on the other side of our fence.
“He’s Northern!” Robert was ecstatic. “The man is from the North! He’s wearing a blue uniform. I’m going, Miss Tracy. And I thank you.”
“Just like that?” I stared at him. “You’re going to war?”
“Yes. It’s the only way. Otherwise my mother will stop me.”
And he went out the back door. I watched him stride masterfully across the bowling green in back and hail the recruiter. I watched them speak awhile. I saw him hand the recruiter a paper. And then they turned and walked back to the fence. And to the road that took them away from Mount Vernon.
Well, General Washington, I thought, I know how badly you need men. You’ve got one more now. God bless him.
Eleven
So now I am deemed a spy.
This time it is a Philadelphia newspaper. They suggest I am “residing at Mount Vernon and entertaining friends there like a princess.”
Like a princess, yes, especially when I help Upton scrape the wallpaper off the dining-room walls in its refurbishing. More especially when I weed my garden. Maybe somebody saw me talking to my pet crow and decided he was a member of my court.
These same troublemakers say that Mount Vernon has been paid for by Northern money and that I now make frequent trips from here to Washington to “damage the free states and assist the armed traitors in the South.”
Why must people be such meddlesome troublemakers? Don’t they know that if you leave trouble alone, it will find you?
The article went on to say that I was seen talking to Professor Thaddeus Lowe in the field, “gathering information to give to the Southern traitors.”
Whatever else they say of me, I will not be construed as a spy! I must write, today, to all the Northern vice-regents and to Miss Cunningham to have them respond to these falsehoods.
But what hurts even more in the article is that it claims that we employ slave labor here at Mount Vernon.
It says our Nigras are not paid. That they are not free.
Upton advises we don’t respond to any of it. Isn’t that just like a man? My brothers would say the same thing. But I cannot abide such lies, when we are all working so hard to put this place to rights.
“We must free the Nigras,” I told him.
He sighed. He scratched his head. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Do you know how to do this?” he asked.
I was dumbfounded. The how of it had never occurred to me.
I didn’t know how. And it came to me, for all my family’s abolitionist talk up North, that I never have known how. I thought for a moment.
“I would think something like this should be done by President Lincoln,” he said.
“Well, he isn’t here,” I said sharply. “And he isn’t likely to come.”
Upton looked abashed. “Are there some kind of magic words that one says?” he asked. “Some ceremony?”
And then I came to my senses.
“I suppose it is sufficient to gather them together and tell them all that they are now free and may go and do as they please. Those words are magic in themselves. Aren’t those the words so many Nigras in the South are praying to hear?”
“And suppose they do just that? Go and do as they please? What will we do without them?”
“Hire others! What is it about you Southerners that you think you can’t do without your Nigras?”
He took the scolding in good cheer. “Who will make my mint julep if Jane goes?”
“Stop joking. We must do it. This very day.”
And then he had a thought. “I think it involves free papers. I think that I’ll have to write it out and file it at the courthouse. Now that I think of it, my father did that once for one of his slaves when I was a child.”
“All right,” I said. “Then, you must do it.”
So this very day we gathered them on the piazza, and Upton told them that they were free. They could leave us if they wished. They no longer had to stay in our employ. In his hands he had papers he had written out for each of them. He told them always to keep a copy and that another would be filed at the Fairfax County Courthouse for them as soon as possible.
Jane shook her head as if we were pure mad. Emily nudged Priscilla. “You do this?” I heard her whisper savagely. “You do this ju
s’ to get me to leave?”
Priscilla scowled back.
Dandridge shuffled his feet. “You want me to leave, boss?” he asked Upton.
“Of course not,” Upton said.
“Then, why you do this for?”
“I have to do it. The newspapers are saying you’re in slavery. It doesn’t look good for Miss Tracy.”
“We ain’t in no slavery,” Priscilla mumbled. “If’n I was, an’ wanted to be free, doan you think I cudda walked off any time I went travelin’ with Miss Sarah?”
We all stood looking at one another, alternately embarrassed and proud. They of their loyalty, and we that we were setting them free.
“Well, at any rate,” Upton said, “if anybody asks you, you’re free. Now that your papers are in good order.”
They walked away mumbling and questioning the sanity of white people.
“We knows we free,” I heard Dandridge say to the others.
“They gots to make it look good for themselves,” Priscilla answered.
“I cudda run a hunnert times,” Emily said. “If I felt like it.”
In the evening, when all the chores are done, I often take tea on the piazza. I have managed to convince Upton to sit with me. It is still in disrepair, but at least the falling-down pillars are fixed.
I am told that General Washington and Martha took tea here, though I do not know the exact spot. I am told that General Washington sat here with General Lafayette, too, and discussed slavery.
When the shadows lengthen, I can believe it. I can believe anything about this place. Things change with the deepening light. In the distance we can hear the frogs croaking on the riverbanks. Tree branches sway in the evening breeze, revealing long-held secrets. But what? I can smell the roses I planted in my flower garden, as well as the geraniums and phlox, mixed with the smell of fresh wood that is lying around for repairs.
I love the smell of fresh wood almost as much as flowers.
The pansies are in borders in the shade because they cannot take full sun. Next to my flower garden is the old greenhouse that George Washington had built so long ago. It burned years ago, and what is left is covered with vines. Vinca grows in a riot of green all around the ground near the mansion. There are wild grapevines down by the river. In the evening, just for a moment or so, I can feel the peace of this place and the secret it is trying to tell me.
