The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  Lee, Stephens, and Benjamin made the by-now-familiar trip to Jefferson Davis’s office once more. The President heard them out, read through the paper, then turned it sideways, as if scrutinizing it from a new angle might reveal some hidden pitfall. Not seeming to turn one up, he asked his commissioners, “You gentlemen are inclined to agree to these terms?”

  “We are,” Lee said firmly. The Vice President and Secretary of State echoed him.

  “Let it be so, then,” Davis said. He looked down at the paper again, set a hand over his eyes. His fingers were long and thin and pale, the fingers of a violinist or a concert pianist. “I never dreamt, when I first ascended to this position, that the road to peace would be so long or require so many sacrifices. But I thank God we have successfully traversed that road to its promised end.”

  Lee also briefly bent his head in a thankful prayer. When he raised it again, he asked, “Will you also post me to the disputed states as Lincoln suggests, Mr. President?”

  Davis pursed his thin lips…My only concern there is that Lincoln has, throughout his administration, demonstrated himself to be a politician with few scruples when it comes to reaching his ends. Our interests in Kentucky and Missouri might be better served by someone of, ah, similarly elastic principle.”

  “If he intended chicanery, he would have proposed as his own nominee there someone other than General Grant, who is not himself a political man,” Lee said. “Nor would he have set the date for the election three months after the end of his own term. And finally, a bold man indeed would be required to plot deceit when the White House now lies within range of Confederate artillery.”

  “All cogent points, especially the last,” Davis admitted. “I am to infer, then, that you desire the position?”

  “Yes, so long as you believe I can properly fill it,” Lee said. “The proposal, after all, was mine; I should like to help bring it to fruition.”

  The President leaned forward, extended his hand to Lee. “On to Kentucky, then, and to Missouri.”

  “Kentucky?” Mary Custis Lee’s voice betrayed her dismay. “Missouri?”

  “You need not say them as if they were the ends of the earth, my dear Mary.” Lee essayed a small joke. “Texas, now, Texas is the end of the earth.”

  The joke fell flat. “With the war over, I had hoped you would be able to stay here in Richmond with me and with the rest of your family,” his wife said.

  You’d hoped, in other words, that I’d be able to carry on my soldiering from behind a desk, Lee thought. But the thought brought no anger with it. How could Mary be blamed for wishing they might stay together? Gently, he said, “True, the war is over, but I still wear my country’s uniform.” He touched the sleeve of his gray coat. “You knew that when you married me, all those years ago; you’ve always managed very well.”

  “Oh, indeed, very well,” she said bitterly. Where he had touched his coat, she set her hand on the arm of the wheeled chair that confined her.

  Lee flinched, as he would not have under enemy fire. Mary had not been a cripple during earlier separations; the war had cost her what was left of her health. He offered what comfort he could: “I am not going into battle, only to oversee peaceful elections. And I shall be back in Richmond for the summer.”

  “Another half a year, gone forever.”

  He pulled a dining room chair close, sat in it so he could talk without looking down at her. “For better or worse, my dear, I am a soldier, as you have known these many years; the idea is not one to which you must suddenly accustom yourself. And I have my duty and shall not turn aside from it.”

  “Not even for those who love you,” his wife said. He bent his head and did not answer; it was, after all, the truth. Mary Lee sighed. “As you say, Robert, I know I am a soldier’s wife. Sometimes, though, as in these past few months’ peace, it is pleasant to try to forget.”

  “Dear Mary, we have no peace, only an armistice which may be broken at any time, should the United States—or ourselves—find that advantageous. If heaven grant, I hope to help forge a true peace, a lasting peace. Were anything less in my mind, I assure you that I should not have accepted this posting.”

  “So you say. So you may even believe.” His wife’s voice remained sharp, but the anger had gone from her face, leaving behind only resignation. “I am still of the opinion that, if Jefferson Davis commanded you to campaign in hell to fetch a coal to light his cookstove, you would make your good-byes to me as you always do and set off without any thought past the fact that you had been ordered.”

  “Maybe I would.” Lee thought about it. He started to laugh. “Likely I would, I suppose. I trust I would return with that coal, though, or at least give Old Nick a fight for it worth his remembering.”

  That at last won him a smile from Mary. “I’m certain you would.” One of the lamps in the dining room flickered and went out, filling the chamber with shadows and the odor of cooling oil. Mary asked, “How late has it gotten to be?”

  “Half past ten,” Lee answered after a look at his pocket watch.

  “Late enough,” she declared. “Will you assist me upstairs?”

  “Of course. Let me go up with a light first.” He rooted through a sideboard drawer until he found a candle, which he lit at a lamp that still burned. He took it up to their bedroom, where he lit two more with it, then quickly went downstairs again. The house was very still; his daughters and Julia had already gone to bed. The wheels of Mary’s chair rumbled over the floorboards as he pushed her to the stairway.

  Leaning some on the banister and more on him, she made her way to the second floor. He steered her to the bedroom. She sat down on the bed while he took out a nightdress, held it up for her approval. “Yes, that will do,” she said. He helped her out of the confining, tight-waisted dress and petticoats she wore during the day. From long practice, he dealt with her clothes as readily as with his own. “Thank you,” she told him. “I’ll miss your touch when you’re gone.”

  “Will you?” he said. At that moment, as much by chance as anything else, his hand happened to lie on her left breast. It was not, in the abstract, a breast to kindle passions; the years and a succession of hungry babes had had their way with it. But his wife’s flesh remained dear to him. Their long separations made each return seem like a new honeymoon. Of itself, something in his voice changed. “Shall I blowout the candles?”

  She understood him; after thirty-three years of marriage, she generally understood him. “If you think you will be able to get that nightdress onto me into the dark,” she answered.

  “I expect I shall,” he said. He got up and blew out two of the three candles, then paused thoughtfully, took a nightshirt from its drawer, and set it on his bed. The room plunged into blackness as he blew out the last light.

  Afterwards, he felt the sharp twinge in his chest that came with exertion. He reached over to the nightstand for the bottle of little pills from the Rivington men. He put one under his tongue. The pain faded. The bottle did not rattle as he put it back; he remembered it had been all but empty. As sleep took him, he reminded himself to get more nitroglycerine from them before he set out on his travels. Their arrogance was disagreeable, but their abilities helped justify it.

  As the crow flies, Louisville is about 460 miles from Richmond. Lee was no crow. He had to take the railroad, which made his journey almost twice as long. The Virginia and Tennessee train squealed and skidded along tracks slick with winter ice as it fought its way down to Chattanooga. That journey alone was as long as the crow’s flight to Louisville. In the bad weather, it took three days. Lee was glad to layover for a couple of days and recover his strength.

  “I wish some ingenious Southerner—or even Yankee, come to that—would invent a railroad car in which it was possible to lie down and get some decent sleep,” he said to Charles Marshall. Sitting bolt upright all the way from Richmond had left him sorer than he would have been from the same amount of time in the saddle.

  Major Marshall was younger
and sprier, but the journey had taken its toll on him, too. He nodded as vigorously as the crick in his neck would allow. “We have smoking cars and dining cars and cars with washrooms. Why not sleeping cars? They’d let a man ride the rails as the rails could be ridden, rather than his being forced to pause every few hundred miles or perish.”

  A white man drove Lee and Marshall from the railway station to a hotel. Their locomotive chugged off to the train shed, a long stone and brick building with a curious curved roof and a half-story lengthwise arcade, mostly devoted to windows, poised atop that.

  Two more whites at the hotel manhandled the luggage into the lobby. Lee watched them with more than a little curiosity; in a Southern town, he would have expected slaves to do the hauling. The driver noticed his repeated glances. “Ain’t many niggers left hereabouts,” he said. “Most of’ em went north with the Yankees when they pulled out, and the ones that’s left, they’re still actin‘ like they was free—eeemancipated, they calls it, an, they won’t work less’n you pay ‘em. A lot of folks, they’d sooner give cash money to whites.”

  “You haven’t tried forcing them back into bondage?” Marshall asked. He’d accompanied Lee because, being a lawyer, he was the most politically astute of the general’s aides.

  “A couple men what tried that, they ended up dead, and their niggers run off to join the bandits in the hills,” the driver answered morosely. “Makes some folks reckon it’s more trouble’n it’s worth, less’n Hit-’em-Again Forrest’s got his army in town.”

  “Once a man has been some while free, it’s hard to take that from him again, even with an army at one’s back,” Lee said. The driver gave him an odd look but finally decided to nod.

  From Chattanooga, the railroad crossed the Tennessee River at Bridgeport and swung down briefly into Alabama. At Stevenson, Lee and Marshall switched to a Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad train for the trip northwest to the capital of Tennessee. The farther north and west they got, the longer the land had lain under Federal hands…and the fewer Negroes they saw. Lee wondered how many lurked in the bare-branched forests, clutching Springfields and wondering if this particular train was worth attacking.

  Sometimes, when the train would stop at a town, Lee got off and walked about for a few minutes. Whenever he did, men in worn coats of gray or butternut came up to shake his hand or just to stare at him. It made him uneasy. He wondered how politicians so easily went out to press their constituents’ flesh. Then he wondered how, if the Confederate Presidency came his way, he would manage himself.

  From Nashville’s station and train shed—which, by contrast to Chattanooga’s, were solid and square, with crenelated walls and with towers at each corner—he rode north into Kentucky. The Stars and Stripes still flew there, not the Stainless Banner. Kentucky’s own blue flag was also prominently displayed, as if to show that the people there thought of their own homes first, ahead of both nations competing for their allegiance. To Lee, who had chosen Virginia over the United States, that was as it should be.

  Men in pieces of Confederate uniform still came to see him at every stop. But so did men who wore blue coats: Kentucky’s sons had fought on both sides in the war, more of them, in fact, for the Union than the Confederacy (the North, after all, had held the state through almost the whole of the war). The Federals seemed as curious about him as did their brothers and cousins who had fought for the South.

  “You rebs gonna invade us again if we vote to stay in the U.S. of A?” a fellow wearing corporal’s stripes on a blue coat asked at Bowling Green, where Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston had made his headquarters back in the days when the war was young.

  Lee shook his head; he tried to put Albert Sidney Johnston, killed at Shiloh, out of his mind. “No, sir, we shall not: we intend to abide by the results of that vote, whatever it may be, so long as it be free and fair.”

  “Reckon you can’t say plainer’n that,” the ex-corporal remarked. “I heard tell you was a devil of a fightin’ man, but I never heard you was a liar.”

  At Munfordsville, another thirty or forty miles up the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, two groups of former soldiers, one in gray, the other wearing blue, approached Lee at the same time. They glared at each other. Some of them carried pistols on their belts; they all wore knives. Lee was about to turn and go back into his coach, in the hope that that would end the confrontation. Then one of the bluecoats surprised him by starting to laugh.

  “Tell us all what amuses you, sir,” Lee said cordially, including himself, the veterans in gray, and the other ex-Federals with a broad wave.

  The Union man carried himself like a young officer. He spoke like one, too: “I just happened to remember our lovely state’s motto, General Lee.”

  “Which is?” Lee asked, wondering what a motto could have to do with anything.

  Then, with relish, the bluecoat quoted it: “‘United we stand, divided we fall.’” He waved too, encompassing the rival groups at the train station and, by extension, all the disunited groups in a most disunited state.

  Lee laughed, loud and long. The ex-Confederates followed his lead, as he’d thought they might. Then the men who had fought for the North laughed, too. After that, whatever trouble there might have been evaporated. He chatted with both groups until it was time for the train to pullout. Then, as he turned to leave, he said, “See, here you are, my friends—fraternizing again.”

  The men chuckled. One of them, a lean, muscular fellow in ragged butternut, said, “You officers wasn’t supposed to know about that.”

  “Oh, we did,” said the former Federal who’d known about Kentucky’s motto, thus confirming Lee’s impression of him. He added,” Sometimes we knew when to look the other way, too,” which drew more chuckles.

  “If we fraternized even in the midst of war, as we did, surely we shall contrive to get along with one another now that peace is here,” Lee said. Without waiting for an answer, he returned to the train. As it jerked into motion, he looked out the window at the men who had so recently fought each other. They went on talking together, amiably enough. Lee took that to be a good omen.

  Louisville, on the southern bank of the Ohio, was a big city. Before the war, it had held 68,000 people to Richmond’s 38,000, though becoming a national capital was swelling the latter town these days. As Lee got down from the train, a man jumped in front of him, pencil and notebook poised. “Fred Darby, Louisville Journal, General Lee,” the fellow said rapidly. “How does it feel, sir, to enter a town Confederate armies never succeeded in reaching?”

  “I am not here as a conqueror,” Lee said. “That the United States and Confederate States went to war once was disastrous; a second conflict would be catastrophic. Rather than fight again, the two nations have agreed the justest course is to let the citizens of Kentucky and Missouri choose which nation they prefer. My role here, like General Grant’s, is to serve as an arbiter of that process, to ensure that it takes place without coercion of any sort.”

  “What do you think Kentucky ought to do with its niggers, General?” Darby said.

  That question again, Lee thought. Wherever he went, it went with him. “That is for your people to decide,” he answered. “Negroes may be either slave or free in both the U.S.A. and the C.S.A.”

  “We’d have to be a slave state if we voted for the South, wouldn’t we?”

  “So the Confederate Constitution states, yes,” Lee admitted reluctantly.

  “Does that mean the niggers who were freed here during the war—and there were a lot of ‘em—would have to go back to being slaves?” the reporter asked.

  “By no means,” Lee said, firmly this time. “Again, barring legislation from Richmond”—he thought of Congressman Oldham—”that would be a matter for your own legislature. As I am sure you are aware”—though sure of no such thing, he was unfailingly polite—”there are free Negroes in every state of the Confederacy, many thousands of them in some states.”

  Darby scribbled in his notebook.
“General Lee, let me also ask you—”

  “If you please, sir, not now,” Lee said, holding up a hand. “Having just arrived after some days of travel, I would prefer not to be interviewed here in the train station. I expect to remain in Kentucky and Missouri until June. Surely we shall speak again.” The reporter started to ask his question anyhow; Lee shook his head. Charles Marshall came up beside him, his face stern. Darby finally seemed to get the message. With a half-disappointed, half-angry scowl, he hurried away.

  “The nerve of the damned Yankee,” Marshall grumbled. “President Davis would have no business interrogating you so, let alone some brash reporter.”

  “He is but doing his job, Major, as we do ours.” Lee grinned wryly. “I will admit to not being sorry he is now doing it somewhere else.”

  In the ride to the Galt House on the corner of Second and Main, Louisville seemed very much a northern city, in that the vast majority of the people on the streets were white. Of the few Negroes Lee saw, several wore the remnants of Union uniforms. A couple of them turned to stare—and to glare—at his gray coat, and Charles Marshall’s.

  General Grant was standing in the hotel lobby when Lee came in. He walked over to shake Lee’s hand. “One glance at the map and I knew I would beat you here, sir,” he said. “The railroad line from Washington to Louisville is much more direct than that from Richmond. I would have arrived sooner still if all the line of the Baltimore and Ohio ran north of the Potomac. But even so, I got in day before yesterday.”

  “As you say, General, you enjoyed the shorter route.” Lee hesitated, then added, “I must say, sir, that I am happier to be meeting you again in this fashion than I was during the late war.”

  “I’m a great deal happier to see you like this, that’s certain,” Grant said, puffing smoke from his cigar, “and ever so much better here than in the melancholy circumstances that surrounded us at Washington. Shall we dine together? Lieutenant Colonel Porter, my aide, is here with me. I hope he might join us.”