The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  The idleness fell from him. He slammed the book shut with a noise like a rifle shot. “Mr. Marshall!” he called. “Come in here, please. I need you.”

  “Sir?” Behind his spectacles, Charles Marshall’s eyes were worried; Lee rarely sounded so urgent. “What do you require?”

  “Send a telegram to General Forrest at once, saying that I order him—be sure to use the word ‘order’—I order him not to include the name of the latest colonel to join his staff in any further dispatches, either telegraphic of postal. Do you have that?”

  “I—think so, sir.” The aide repeated the message accurately enough, though his voice was puzzled. “I confess I don’t altogether understand it.”

  “Never mind. Just take it to the telegrapher immediately.”

  Marshall shrugged but hurried away. Lee returned the Picture History of the Civil War to its place on the shelf. If Henry Pleasants was planning to do now to the Rivington men what had been done to the South in 1864 until those same Rivington men helped change history, Lee did not want them reminded of his existence. If they were tapping the wires between North Carolina and Richmond, and if Pleasants’s name seemed vaguely familiar to one of them, as it had to Lee…

  He shook his head, more than a little unnerved at stumbling over a new complication to fighting the men from the future. Not only did they have armaments and armor his forces could not match, they knew a great deal about the events of his own recent past and the people who shaped them. A mere name might have been plenty to warn them of what Forrest likely had in mind.

  Lee set Forrest’s telegram aside and read the latest papers from Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. He did not think the British would get the Canadas back any time soon. Vancouver had just fallen to a U. S. force pushing up from Oregon. The Washington Evening Star was even reporting that the Russian Empire, alarmed at the progress of Federal arms, had offered to sell Alaska to the United States as preferable to seeing it conquered like the rest of North America. Lee smiled at that—what good were more square miles of snow and ice to anyone?

  His smile faded as he read of continued English success at sea. The blockade of the eastern coast of the United States was probably tighter than the U.S. blockade of the Confederacy had been during the Second American Revolution, and the U.S. merchant fleet reduced to desperate straits. Confederate corn production was booming, to make up for the U.S. wheat no longer available to the British Isles.

  That led him into the latest report from Julian Hartridge of Georgia, his Secretary of the Treasury. Reparations from the United States had allowed the Confederacy to payoff most of its wartime debts. That was important. The French had installed Maximilian in Mexico, not least because the previous government owed them money, and he did not want to give any European power a. similar excuse for meddling in Confederate affairs.

  But new debts came every day: the manufactured goods the South bought were worth more and could be produced for less labor than the cotton and corn it gave in exchange for them. Gold kept flowing out of the country. Southern industry had made great strides during the war and Lee wanted to encourage it further, but the Constitution forbade a protective tariff.

  He made a rueful noise, half grunt, half sigh. When the historians of a century hence came to write about his Presidency, he suspected they might call him the Great Circumventor, because the Confederate Constitution stood foursquare against most of what needed doing. All the South had wanted upon secession was to be left alone, but the world and the South itself had changed too much since 1861 for a return to the halcyon antebellum days to be possible, much less practical.

  Or so Lee believed, at any rate. The proof of that belief lay in a draft bill on his desk, a bill with the deliberately innocuous title of “Legislation Regulating the Labor of Certain Inhabitants of the Confederate States.” That word inhabitants brought back his smile, though without much mirth to it: he could not have called the people affected by the legislation citizens, for under existing law slaves were not Confederate citizens. His bill would see to that—if it passed.

  Despite all the startling documents from the captured AWB offices, despite the Richmond Massacre itself, he still worried about that. He thought he had convinced the legislators themselves of the wisdom of his course. But the people back home, despite having elected him, remained unenthusiastic about setting the Negro on the road to freedom. Lawmakers wanted to be reelected, not just to be right and to do right. In their wisdom, the framers of the Confederate Constitution made sure their President would not have to concern himself with that. Lee was pleased to recall a Constitution provision he wholeheartedly endorsed.

  His daughter Mary came into the room. She served as hostess during the fortnightly levees he held, following the custom Jefferson Davis had begun. What with his wife’s infirmity, much of that duty might have fallen to her in any case. After March 4…he deliberately made himself shove that black, red-stained day out of the forefront of his mind, or as far out as he could. “What can I do for you, my deaf!” he asked.

  “I have a parcel here for you, from Colonel Rains in Augusta, Georgia,” She handed him a small box closed with twine.

  He opened it with the enthusiasm of a child getting a birthday treat. “From Colonel Rains, is it? Probably some new munitions.” But the box held, inside a protective layer of cotton wool, a corked bottle of pills and a note: “I am given to understand that the Rivington men, before their descent into vicious and brutal madness, prescribed nitrogenated glycerine as a medicine for you. In the hope that the enclosed may be of benefit, I remain your most ob’t servant. G. W. Rains.”

  “I hope they help your chest pains, Father,” Mary said.

  “They certainly should.” Lee paused, looked up at her over the tops of his spectacles. “How do you know what they are for? For that matter, how did Colonel Rains learn I was taking nitroglycerine? I scent a conspiracy.”

  “I plead guilty. I found one of your old empty bottles and sent it to him, as the label gave the proper dosage to include in each pill. But the idea came originally from Mr. Marshall, who recalled both the nature of your old pills and that Colonel Rains was producing the identical substance. I’m only sorry neither of us thought of it sooner.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself on that account, my dear; I seem to have survived to this point even without the medication,” Lee said, touched by their concern. His expression hardened. “I am not sorry to have a supply from a source other than the Rivington men.”

  Mary nodded, her own face grim. Like her younger sisters, she still wore black to mourn her mother. But for blind luck, she would have been mourning him, too. The new nitroglycerine tablets rattled in the bottle as he picked it up. The Rivington men had been willing, even eager, to help him when they needed him, and help him they had, more than any contemporary could. But when his hopes for the South crossed theirs, they’d tried to discard him as casually as if he were a smeared sheet of foolscap.

  He clicked tongue between teeth. “It is my country, not theirs.”

  “Father?” Mary said. But he’d been talking to himself, not to her.

  Thomas Bocock of Virginia, the Speaker of the House, said, “I now have the distinct honor and high privilege of presenting to you the President of the Confederate States of America, Robert E. Lee.”

  Applause from congressmen and senators filled the House chamber as Lee stepped up to the rostrum. Bocock sat down in back of him. Albert Gallatin Brown should have been beside the Speaker, in his capacity as President of the Senate. But Albert Gallatin Brown was dead, which also meant that, if anything happened to Lee, Bocock would become the Confederacy’s third President.

  Lee dismissed that thought from his mind as he took a few seconds to gather himself before launching into what might prove the most important speech of his administration. He said, “Distinguished Senators, members of the House of Representatives, I am of course aware of how unusual it is for a President to request of you the privilege of speaking to your as
sembled number in support of a particular piece of legislation, but I desire that you have my reasons for requesting of you a favorable vote on the bill now before you regarding the regulation of labor of certain inhabitants of the Confederate States.”

  During the war, the Confederate Congress had usually met in camera, its deliberations secret. The policy carried over into time of peace as well. Lee did not altogether approve of it, but this once found it useful: not all of what he had to say belonged in the Richmond papers.

  He made that clear from the outset: “All of you, by now, have seen the works the AWB brought back to our time. You have seen how with virtual unanimity the twentieth and twenty-first centuries condemn the institution of slavery with the same sort of loathing we might apply to savage tribes who devour their fellow men.”

  Several legislators winced at the harsh comparison. Lee did not care; he aimed to state his case in the strongest possible terms. He went on, “The AWB sought to keep us just as we were, sought to freeze us in place forever so we might join them in defiance of what lies ahead, and sought to overthrow our duly elected government when we gave the slightest sign of contravening their desires. Their armed revolt continues to this day. A vote against this proposed legislation is a vote for the AWB and its methods. You will have seen that for yourselves in the AWB’s secret chambers; I wish to explicitly remind you of it here today so that you may retain no doubt as to the issues involved.”

  He paused for a moment, looked out over his audience. This business of gaining his wishes through persuasion did not come naturally to him, not after a lifetime of simply receiving or giving orders. Save for one or two scribbling notes to themselves, senators and congressmen stared intently back at him. If not persuaded, they were at least fully attentive. That would do. Onward:

  “Yet I believe, gentlemen, we should sooner or later have been compelled to confront this issue, even had we gained our independence by our own exertions, even had the AWB never existed.”

  Had the AWB never existed, the South would not have gained its independence by its own exertions. Lee had known that since he first opened the Picture History of the Civil War. The members of Congress knew it too, intellectually: the books from the AWB sanctum made it abundantly clear. But in their hearts, most of them still surely felt their beloved country would have found some road to freedom without the intervention of the men from the future.

  Lee went on, “The war itself and its aftermath taught us new lessons about the Negro, lessons, I admit, a fair number of us would sooner not have learned. Yet they remain before us, and we ignore them at our peril. We learned from the United States that colored men might make fair soldiers, a possibility we had previously denied. Let me now state what some of you will have gathered from your readings in the secret chamber: at the time when the Rivington men came to us, certain of our officers had already begun to suggest freeing and arming Negro slaves so they might battle the Northern foe at our sides.”

  A murmur ran through the House chamber. Not everyone had noticed that part of the record, nor did everyone care to remember how little hope the war had held only a bit more than four years before.

  “The arrival of the Rivington men and their repeaters obviated the necessity for such desperate expedients, but the Negro has continued to instruct us as to his capacities. Though the insurrections that so long plagued the Mississippi valley have been reduced to small, scattered outbreaks, the tenacity with which colored men maintained them in the face of overwhelming odds must give us pause if we continue to see those colored men only as the docile servants they appeared to be in days past.

  “We have tacitly recognized this change, in that many blacks who escaped from bondage during the upheavals of the Second American Revolution remain at liberty, not least, perhaps, because, once having tasted freedom, they can no longer safely be returned to servitude. Further, during the war several states relaxed restrictions on what the Negro might be taught, the better to benefit from his intelligent exertions. Once having taught him, one may no longer demand that he subsequently forget.

  “Yet if the Negro may learn, if he will take up arms in his own defense; if in our hour of peril we contemplated his taking up arms in our defense, where is the justice in leaving him in chains? To do so but exacerbates the risk of servile rebellion and gives our enemies a dagger pointed straight at our hearts. I submit to you, my friends, that emancipation, however distasteful it may appear, exists de facto in large stretches of our territory; gradually acknowledging it de jure will allow us to control its impact upon our nation and will shield us against the excesses we all fear.

  “Gentlemen of the Congress, rest assured I do not lightly urge upon you the provisions of the legislation whose introduction I have proposed. I truly believe these provisions shall prove to be in the best interest of the Confederate States of America in the long run, and request of you their passage. The world will little note nor long remember what I say here, but it can never forget what you do here. Let our descendants say that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and let them say that it began here today. I thank you.”

  He stepped away from the podium. The applause that followed was more than polite, less than warm. He wondered how much of it he would have kept had the Confederate Congress known he was borrowing words from one of Abraham Lincoln’s memorial addresses. By all accounts, Lincoln’s little speech at Gettysburg had become famous in the world wherein the South’s independence had been crushed. Here in the real world, Lincoln and all he stood for were discredited, his words, no doubt, doomed to obscurity forever. Lee had read through that Gettysburg speech at least a dozen times. He thought it deserved to live.

  Louis T. Wigfall got to his feet. “Mr. Speaker!” he boomed.

  “Senator Wigfall?” Thomas Bocock responded as he resumed his customary place of honor.

  “Mr. Speaker, I desire to say a few words in respectful opposition to—”

  Bocock’s gavel came down on the rostrum with three sharp cracks, cutting through the building spate. “The honorable gentleman is not recognized. He will please recall that we are met in special joint session for the specific purpose of hearing President Lee’s address. He will, I am certain, have adequate opportunity to express his opinion of the measures proposed in that address when in deliberation within the confines of the senate chamber.”

  Wigfall tried to go on with his speech anyhow; the Speaker of the House gaveled him down. At last, red-faced and sullen, he sat. Lee stared stonily at him. He might not have made his speech, but he had made his point.

  Lee’s shoulders shifted slightly as he stifled a sigh. If not even the acknowledged voice of the future convinced some people of the folly of their chosen course, what could? Nothing was the answer that immediately sprang to mind. He hoped with all his heart such stubborn souls made up only a minority of the Congress.

  A deep-toned whistle in the air, not a bird—”Mortar!” Nate Caudell yelled, along with twenty others. He dove into a deep bombproof, a timber-reinforced hole dug into the front wall of the trench. He landed on top of someone. Two more men jumped in on top of him.

  The mortar shell burst less than a hundred yards behind him, hl the second line of trenches. Dirt fountained skyward; a clod found the bombproof opening and hit him in the back of the neck. Half a minute later, another round whistled past overhead, this one, by the sound, destined for some far more distant target.

  The four men who’d taken shelter in the bombproof crawled out—no one could stand inside—made foredoomed efforts to brush themselves clean. Caudell also rubbed bruised ribs. Be glared about a quarter seriously at Dempsey Eure. “That’s the second time you landed on me the past two days. I’m starting to think you’re more dangerous than any damned mortar bomb.”

  “Long as the Rivington men think the same way,” Eure answered with a chuckle.

  “How many of them have you landed on?” Caudell asked darkly.

  His friend said, “Reckon I’ll h
ave my chance soon enough—if Henry ever gets that tunnel of his finished. He diggin’ under them guns up there, or is he headin’ all the way to China?”

  The three weeks to a month Pleasants had promised to Nathan Bedford Forrest had already stretched into a month and a half. Proper tools and experienced diggers were in shorter supply in North Carolina than he’d imagined. Caudell had crawled down the tunnel himself a couple of times, carrying boards through blackness toward a flickering candle flame that gave a man with a pick a tiny dollop of light by which to work. He wanted to kiss the dry wash when he emerged, and marveled that some men endured a lifetime down in the mines.

  Another mortar bomb went sailing off into the Confederates’ rear…Good thing they don’t seem to have a whole lot of shells for that beast,” he said. “It reaches almost all the way back to Nashville.”

  Dempsey Eure nodded. “I was listenin’ to some artillerymen talkin’, and they say it’s got more range’n one of our hundred-pounder coast defense guns. Be switched if I know how the Rivington men do it.”

  “Same way they do the AK-47s, I reckon.”

  “Whatever that is.”

  Caudell shrugged. Same way they get books full of photographs—and colored ones at that, he thought. Same way they get books printed in…was it 1996? He’d never spoken to anyone but Mollie about the Picture History of the Civil War she’d stolen. Who would believe him? He wasn’t always sure he believed himself. But getting back in the trenches against the endless repeater and the long-range mortar had undermined his doubts as surely as Henry Pleasants was undermining the bastion up ahead. He’d come to take the AK-47 for granted, but those other weapons reminded him afresh that they did not belong to 1868. They were also one more reason the tunnel was running late.