As seemed to be his way no matter what he did, he returned to the relentless attack: “My friends, I give you that Robert E. Lee helped the Confederate States get free of the Yankees, and I tip my hat to him on account of it. But before Robert E. Lee ever fit for the Confederacy, the Yankees wanted to make him their commander—and he almost took on the job. When he did decide to stick with his state, Virginia made him a general straight off. That’s a rugged way to fight a war, by God, isn’t it?”
The men in the crowd laughed appreciatively. Warming to his subject, Forrest went on, “Me, I started the fight as a private. I wanted to get right in—couldn’t wait to get right in. My friend Senator Wigfall, our next Vice President”—he paused for applause—”helped fix up the surrender of Fort Sumter back when Robert E. Lee, that gentleman up in Richmond, was still a colonel in the army of the U.S. of A. If you all Want some Bobbie-come-lately, I reckon you can vote for Lee. But if you want men who were with the Confederate States of America from the git-go, you’ll stick with Wigfall and me. I thank you kindly for listening to me today.” He bowed and got down from the platform.
The drum began to beat again. Forrest’s Trees chanted, “Hit ‘em again! Hit ‘em again!” One of the Rivington men raised his AK-47 to his shoulder and fired a short burst into the air. Caudell saw the muzzle flash, but hardly heard the report through the thunderous cheers of the people around him.
The band struck up the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep,” and then a minstrel tune, one Caudell didn’t know. He turned to Raeford Liles, asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s called, ‘I’m Coming to My Dixie Home.’ It’s a nigger talkin’ about life up North,” Liles answered. He sang a few bars: “I’d rather work de cotton patch, And die on corn and bacon, Dan lib up Norf on good white bread, Ob Abolition makin ‘.’ I got the sheet music back at the store, if you ever want to take a look at it.”
“That’s all right,” Caudell said quickly: trust Liles not to miss a chance to try to sell him something. Just then, the noise around them redoubled. Nathan Bedford Forrest was plunging into the crowd, shaking men’s hands and bowing over those that belonged to ladies. People surged toward him from allover the square. Caudell didn’t particularly care to meet him, but was swept along by the tide.
Forrest’s big hand almost swallowed up his. “Will you vote for me, sir?”
Looking up at that strong, determined face, Caudell had to work to make himself shake his head. “No, sir, don’t reckon so now. I fought under General Lee, and I’ll stick by him.”
Behind Forrest, a bodyguard who had plunged after him—and whom he was ignoring—scowled at Caudell. Caudell waited for the famous Forrest temper to explode. But the ex-general only nodded and said, “Good to find a man who’s loyal and not ashamed to say so. You might”—as a rustic would, he pronounced it mought—”change your mind. I hope you do.” He turned to Raeford Liles. “What about you, sir?”
“I might could vote your way,” the storekeeper allowed. “I was leanin’ that way, but I’d care for you more if the Rivington men cared for you less.”
Now Forrest showed anger. “Any man who wants to keep the right of property in niggers is a Patriot, by God. If that’s you, you’re with me, same as they are. And if it ain’t, be damned to you.” He spun away as if Liles had ceased to exist.
“He doesn’t leave much room for doubt, does he?” Caudell said after they had finally got free of the crowd and headed back toward the buggy.
“No.” Liles still looked like a man who’d bitten into something sour. “That’ll hurt him, too.”
“Good,” Caudell said. He waited for the storekeeper to argue with him, but Liles just kept walking.
* XV *
No sooner had Robert E. Lee ventured outside the Powhatan House to enjoy the brisk fall air than reporters swooped down on him like stooping hawks. He nodded to them, unsurprised; they had become familiar over the past few months. By unspoken agreement, they let him alone as long as he was within the hotel, but he became fair game the moment his foot hit the sidewalk.
“Mr. Quincy, you were here half a step ahead of the rest, I believe,” Lee said to the man from the Richmond Whig.
“Thank you, General.” Virgil Quincy poised pencil over pad. “If I may ask, why have you chosen to remain here in Virginia while Bedford Forrest travels allover the country, speaking, it seems, at every town big enough to boast a railroad station?”
“General Forrest is, of course, free to conduct his campaign in any fashion that suits him.” Lee had learned to speak slowly enough to let the reporters take down his words. “I might add a point which sometimes seems in danger of being forgotten: that is to say, I also enjoy the same freedom. The entire Confederacy surely knows where I stand on the issues of the day; perhaps General Forrest still feels the need to make his ideas more widely accessible to the voters.”
Quincy twirled a waxed mustache between thumb and forefinger as he considered his next question. “How do you feel about Forrest’s questioning your initial loyalty to the Confederate cause?”
“I prefer to allow my contributions to that cause to speak for themselves. If they do not make it plain where my loyalty lay, nothing I can say will do so.” For public consumption, Lee kept his fury tightly bottled. He was used to newspapers sniping at him from time to time. But to have his loyalty impugned by a man he had admired until their differing views created a chasm between them, and for no better purpose than political advantage—that was hard to bear. He had not imagined Forrest would stoop so low, which, if anything, but served to illuminate his own political naïveté.
Virgil Quincy took a step back; Lee’s rule was to allow each reporter two questions. Edwin Helper of the Richmond Dispatch approached in Quincy’s place. “To change the subject, if I may, sir, what do you think of the war just begun by the United States against England over the Canadas?”
“I deprecate war in general,” Lee replied. “As to this war in particular, I would be less than truthful if I said I was sorry to see so many U.S. troops drawn hundreds of miles to the north of our frontier.” He smiled; several reporters chuckled. He added, “Even with the accession of Kentucky to the Confederacy, the United States are a larger, more populous nation than the C.S.A. The implications to be drawn from that should be clear to the observer.”
“They’re not quite clear to me,” Helper said. “What do you think our course ought to be?”
“To continue the scrupulous neutrality President Davis has proclaimed and is observing,” Lee answered at once. “Any other course involves us in risks which should not be run.” Senator Wigfall was shouting for a Southern invasion to seize the slave states remaining in the U.S.A. while that country was otherwise engaged. Some fire-eaters shouted right along with him. Others, though, remembering how England’s not-so-scrupulous neutrality had almost ruined the Confederacy during the war, were all for allying with the United States against her.
“Should we not at least demand concessions from the U.S.A. as the price of our neutrality?” asked Rex Van Lew of the Richmond Examiner.
Lee shook his head. “They are our brothers. Though we no longer live in the same house with them, having grown up to enjoy one of our own, putting demands upon brothers strikes me as a bad business, and one which cannot fail to bring resentment.”
“He’s right about that, by God,” Virgil Quincy said. “I’ve yet to hear the end of the time I asked my brother for fifty dollars, and it was back before the war.”
The reporters laughed. Lee walked down Broad” Street with the newpapermen trailing along behind him. Van Lew said, “What is your opinion of General Forrest’s actively campaigning for a whole year in his quest to defeat you?”
“I admire his energy without wishing to employ mine to similar purpose,” Lee said. “I also doubt the benefit, either to the nation or to the electorate, of repeating oneself so often. Now, gentlemen, if you will excuse me, I should like to get in something of a constitutional.” He incr
eased his pace. The reporters were decades younger than he—he would be sixty-one come January—but several of them began puffing as they hurried to keep up.
Rex Van Lew had used up his allotted questions, but asked another one anyhow: “How will you feel when the election is over, sir?”
“Relieved,” Lee answered promptly.
“Win or lose?” three reporters asked at the same time.
“Win or lose,” he said. “Relieved at least of suspense if I win, relieved of responsibility if I lose. While I hope and expect to win, the prospect of quiet retirement is by no means altogether unattractive, I assure you.”
He walked on. Three years before, the Army of Northern Virginia had paraded in triumph down this very street. Now most of those soldiers were long since back at their peacetime trades. That, he thought, was as it should be. He blinked, then smiled—he even had a peacetime trade of his own, though he’d never expected to turn politician.
“What’s funny, General?” Edwin Helper asked.
“Life; or, if you’d like, the fortunes of war,” Lee said. In Capitol Square, George Washington in bronze pointed ahead, urging on invisible followers, or perhaps the country as a whole. Lee gravely tipped his hat to his wife’s adoptive ancestor, then went on with his constitutional.
Nate Caudell gauged the creeping shadows in the classroom. He put down his chalk. “That’s enough for now. We’ll pick it up again after dinner.” Several students let out barely suppressed cheers and grabbed for the bags and old newspapers in which they’d brought their noontime meals. For that matter, his stomach was growling, too.
He wolfed his ham and corn bread, gulped from a canteen full of cold coffee. Then he hurried over to the town square. Extra flags flew above the courthouse; a long line of men snaked in through the front door. Unfamiliar buggies and wagons, horses and mules, were hitched everywhere—farmers from half the county were in town to vote today.
A lot of them were men he’d known in the army but seldom saw these days. He waved to Dempsey Eure, who was just tying his horse in a narrow space between two buggies. They got into line together: “Patriot or Confederate?” Caudell asked. Since Eure had heckled Mayor Cockrell at the Forrest rally, he thought he knew what answer to expect.
Sure enough, the ex-sergeant said, “I’m voting Confederate. I followed Marse Robert into Washington City, so I don’t reckon I’ll run away from him now. How about you, Nate?”
“The same,” Caudell said. “He ought to have an easy time of it here and in Virginia, where so many served under him. Out farther west, though, they know about him but they don’t really know him, if you know what I mean. And they do know Forrest out there.”
“That’s why they vote—to see what happens,” Eure said.
“Yup.” Caudell looked his friend over, smiled as he saw something familiar. “You still wear a feather in your hat, do you? How are you getting along?”
“I get by,” Dempsey Eure said with a shrug. “Married Lemon Strickland’s sister Lucy not long after I got home, you know. We got ourselves a boy two years old, an’ she’s in the family way again. How times does get on—before too long, suppose I’ll be sendin’ Wiley to that school of yours. You fix him so he knows more’n his old man, you hear?”
“If he’s anything like his old man, he’ll do fine,” Caudell said. He noticed Eure hadn’t really said anything about his fortunes except I get by. He didn’t push for more; come to that, he couldn’t have said more himself.
The line advanced. Caudell blinked as he went from sunshine into the gloom inside the courthouse. Mayor Cockrell and Cornelius Joyner, the justice of the peace, sat behind a stout wooden table. “Here’s the roll, Nate,” Joyner said when Caudell came up to him. “Sign your name on the line.” He pointed to show where.
Caudell signed. Quite a lot of men had already voted. Most had signed their names, but for a depressingly large number of voters, only an X, witnessed by mayor and justice of the peace, appeared in the signature column of the register. Isaac Cockrell handed Caudell a ballot and a much-sharpened stub of pencil.
He voted for Lee and for Albert Gallatin Brown without hesitation, then went on through the rest of his choices. Sion Rogers, he saw, was running for Congress and billing himself a Confederate. Caudell voted for him. He might have done so even if Rogers ran as a Patriot, for he’d been the 47th North Carolina’s first colonel until he resigned his commission early in 1863 to become Attorney General of North Carolina.
When Caudell was done, he folded his ballot and returned it to Cornelius Joyner, who slid it through the slot of a wooden box with an impressively stout padlock.” Nathaniel N. Caudell has voted,” the justice of the peace intoned, his voice loud and deep enough to make Caudell proud of having done his civic duty.
“Wait a minute,” Mayor Cockrell exclaimed when Caudell started to walk out with the pencil. “You bring that back right now, you hear? We’re startin’ to run low on ‘em.” Red-faced, Caudell returned the little stub.
Meanwhile, Judge Joyner announced to the world that Dempsey Eure had exercised his franchise. Eure’s eyes were twinkling as he left the courthouse with Caudell. “You should’ve told him to buy a substitute for his damn pencil, Nate,” he said. “That was you back this spring,” wasn’t it? Sure sounded like you if it wasn’t.”
“It was me, all right,” Caudell said. “Good thing his honor’s ears aren’t as good as yours.” The clock above the courthouse chimed one. “I’ve got to get back to the schoolhouse, Dempsey, before they burn it down. By God, it’s good to see you.”
“And you.” Dempsey Eure thumped him on the back. “I wondered if they’d have to get us back into butternut before we met up again.”
“It would take a good deal to get me back into uniform, and that’s a fact,” Caudell said. His friend laughed and nodded. He went on, “I really do have to get back.” He hurried on down Alston Street while Dempsey Eure went to reclaim his horse.
When he walked into the schoolroom again, one of the little boys there called, “Who won the election, teacher?”
Through the snorts and giggles of the older pupils, Caudell—who had to smile himself—gravely answered, “We won’t know for a few days yet, Willie. They have to count all the votes and send the count to Richmond, which takes a while. Now, class, who can tell me all twelve Confederate states and their capitals?” Hands shot into the air.
As he had in the Galt House in Louisville, so Lee now sat in the dining room of the Powhatan House in Richmond with telegrams piled so high on the table in front of him that he could hardly get to, let alone enjoy, his plate of smothered chicken. He knew now that he’d been foolish to order his favorite dish on a night when he couldn’t give it his full attention.
A boy brought in a new set of returns. Since Lee had knife in one hand and fork in the other—he did manage a distracted bite every now and then—Albert Gallatin Brown took the telegrams. As he read them, his face fen. “Forrest and Wigfall remain ahead of us in Louisiana.”
“That is unfortunate,” Lee said—blurrily, as his mouth was full. He chewed, swallowed, and resumed, sounding like himself again: “I had hoped to carry Louisiana, as its white voters have greater and longer familiarity with free Negroes, especially in and around New Orleans, than is the case elsewhere in the Confederacy.”
“The election is more closely contested than I thought it would be,” Brown agreed. He sounded gloomy, and with reason: he and Lee were also trailing in Mississippi, his home state.
Lee looked at the map tacked up on an easel beside the table. Having it there made him feel more as if this were a military campaign; it was, in fact, borrowed from the War Department, and would have to go back to Mechanic’s Hall once all the results were in. He was leading handily here in Virginia and in North Carolina, by rather less in Georgia and lightly settled Florida, and by a fair margin in Kentucky, which he had helped bring into the Confederacy and which was now voting for the first time for the President of the country it had fr
eely chosen.
South Carolina had already come down against him: the Palmetto State, alone in the South, still chose its Electoral College representatives by vote of the legislature rather than of the people. Thus its choice had quickly, and painfully, become known.
He was losing Alabama; too, along with Louisiana and Mississippi. The cotton states; the ones whose livelihoods most depended on plantations and their slave labor, were unwilling to vote for anyone who questioned Negro servitude in any way.
That left Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee. Votes from the two western states were slow coming in. Those from Tennessee had arrived in large numbers, but every new telegram changed the leader there. At the moment, Forrest was ahead by nearly a thousand votes; an hour before, Lee had led by almost exactly as many.
Albert Gallatin Brown was studying the map, too. “We badly need Tennessee,” he said. The deliberate lack of emphasis in his voice highlighted his words as effectively as a shout.
“You have no confidence in the results from the other two?” Lee asked.
“Have you?”
“Possibly some hope for Arkansas,” Lee said. Only after he had spoken did he realize he had in effect written off Texas. It, too, was a cotton state, and also one that had boomed since the war, with Negroes in great demand and fetching high prices. Were Texans likely to vote against prosperity? It went against human nature.
Brown had been doing sums on the back of a telegram. “If Forrest takes Tennessee—and Arkansas,” he added in deference to Lee’s hope, which he did not seem to share, “that will give him sixty-four electoral votes.”
“And sixty are required for election,” Lee said heavily. Only once before had he felt as he did now: watching his men swarm up the slope toward the Union lines on the third day at Gettysburg. He had been confident they could carry everything before them, as he had been confident his own campaign would convince the people he offered the nation the wisest course. Was he to be proven as disastrously wrong now as he had been then?
The Guns of the South Page 51
