The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  The man from the Richmond Dispatch laughed, which meant Rex Van Lew of the Examiner got to tell Lee what he needed to know: “Fourteen to ten/or, Mr. President!”

  Lee’s breath whooshed out in one long, happy sigh. He’d had remarks ready for this occasion (and another set ready in case he lost), but they all flew straight out of his head. He spoke the first thought he had: “Gentlemen, we are on our way.”

  “On our way where, Mr. President?” asked Virgil Quincy of the Whig.

  “That we shall all discover in due course,” Lee answered. “But I am heartily glad we have begun the journey.”

  “You’ve given up owning slaves yourself, President Lee,” Quincy said. “How will the passage of this bill affect you personally?”

  “Aside from making me the most relieved man in Richmond, do you mean?” Lee said, which raised more laughter among the reporters. Through it, he went on,” As you may know, the Constitution sets my salary at $25,000 per annum. I aim to contribute the tenth part of that sum each year into the emancipation fund this legislation establishes, to show I favor it with more than words alone.”

  That quieted the reporters, who bent over their pads to write down his reply. After a moment, Edwin Helper said, “How do you feel about the prospect of no more niggers being born into slavery after December 31, 1872?”

  “The date I proposed originally to Congress as the terminus ad quem was December 31, 1870,” Lee said. “I accept, with a certain amount of reluctance, its decision to delay that day two years further, but I am forced to concede that the additional period will let us prepare more adequately. I am pleased that Negroes will begin to be freeborn during my term in office, and even more pleased that they shall begin to enjoy their full liberty before the commencement of the twentieth century.”

  Rex Van Lew stiffened. at that, like a bird dog corning to point. “There’s been a good deal of talk about the twentieth century all through the debate of this bill, sir. Why worry so much about it now—why talk so much about it now—when it’s still more than thirty years away?”

  “Any conscientious legislator naturally has in mind the future of his country, Mr. Van Lew, and speaking of the twentieth century is a convenient way to indicate our course toward that future.” It was, Lee knew, less than half an answer. The twentieth century—and the twenty-first—loomed large in the debate because senators and congressmen were actually able to judge their views, not merely guess at them. But that was a story which ought not to appear in the newspapers.

  Van Lew, both clever and persistent, recognized that Lee had been imperfectly frank. He waved his hand again, but Lee pretended not to see him. He pointed instead to Virgil Quincy, who asked, “What will you do with masters who refuse to accept part payment so their slaves can start working to buy themselves free?”

  “Congress has passed this bill, I will sign it, and it shall be enforced,” Lee said. “I might add that a majority of our citizens, knowing my views on the matter, chose to invest me with Presidential authority. I construe this to mean they will comply with the law.”

  “Don’t you think they voted for you because of who you are rather than your views about slavery?” Quincy asked.

  “Who I am includes my views on slavery,” Lee answered. “With that, gentlemen, I fear you will have to rest content.” He went back into the Presidential mansion.

  “What about the Constitution, President Lee?” someone shouted after him.

  By then, Lee had already closed the door. He could pretend not to hear the question, and he did. He felt brief shame at using a politician’s trick, but stifled it. The plain truth was that his bill violated the spirit of the Confederate Constitution and very likely its letter as well. Opponents of the law had been saying—bellowing—as much for months. He did not care to admit publicly that they were right.

  Before he took office, he’d hoped to see Congress get around to establishing a Supreme Court during his term. Now, all at once, he wondered if that was a good idea. Justices would probably overturn the law, or important sections of it, if it came before them for review—and it would. They’d have a harder time doing that if the legislation was well established and working smoothly before they ever got a chance to examine it.

  Another politician’s trick, he thought; his mouth twisted in distaste. But however much he hated the idea, he was a politician now, maneuvering against his foes in Congress as he had against the Union army. Deception and misdirection had served his strategy then; no reason not to employ them now.

  His servant Julia came into the reception room, a feather duster in her hand. She must have heard the reporters: when she saw Lee, she dropped him a curtsy as elegant as any he’d ever received from a highborn white lady. Without a word, she turned and began dusting the bric-a-brac on a table.

  Thus she did not see the deep bow Lee gave in return. Most of the nearly four million blacks in the Confederacy remained slaves; that would be so for many years to come. But Lee tried to look into the misty future, to see how his country would change as more and more Negroes gained their freedom.

  He was, at bottom, a deeply conservative man; the principal reason he’d supported the slow beginning of emancipation was in the hope that gradual change would lead to less long-range disruption than the periodic explosions of hatred that had to follow any effort to pretend the time from 1862 to 1866 had never happened. He hoped that blacks, once free, would come to be, and be recognized as, good Southerners like any other.

  But just what even so simple a phrase as “good Southerners like any others” meant would have to be redefined in the years ahead. Would free Negroes be able to join the army? How would that look, black faces in Confederate gray? In 1864 it had been a counsel of desperation, and averted by victory. Now it would have to be seriously considered.

  Would free blacks be able to testify against whites in court? For that matter, would they be able to gain the right to vote? Looking ahead, he suspected those things; unthinkable now, might well come with the passage of time. He wondered how many of the congressmen and senators who had voted with him believed they or their successors would ever have to worry about black voters. Few, he was sure: most thought they were giving the Negro just a little freedom.

  “But there is no such thing as possessing just a little freedom,” Lee mused. “Once one enjoys any whatsoever, he will seek it all.”

  “You got that right, Marse Robert,” Julia said. He started slightly; he hadn’t noticed he was speaking aloud.

  He wondered how much change he would get to see himself. When Andries Rhoodie asked if he wanted to learn on what day he would die, he’d answered no without thinking twice. But the Picture History of the Civil War and other volumes from the AWB hoard let him know he ought to have only a little more than two years left: not even enough time to see the first black babies freeborn.

  Yet he still had hopes of proving the volumes from the future wrong. The world to which they referred was no longer the one in which he lived. Here and now, he had nitroglycerine pills to lend his heart strength; his hand went to the jar in his waistcoat pocket. That hadn’t been so in the other world, the vanished world, the world where the Confederacy went down to defeat.

  Watching his beloved South beaten had probably also helped break his heart in the more usual sense of the phrase. He remembered that unbearably somber photograph of him in the Picture History. What point could his life have had, lived out among the ruins of everything he’d held dear? Even losing Mary could not be a greater grief.

  In truth, though, he had purpose as well as medication. If he took care of himself, why shouldn’t he live longer than the vanquished Lee of that vanished world? If God was kind to him, he might yet see Negroes start growing up toward freedom, might even see the end of his term in 1874.

  And if not—not. It lay in God’s hands, not his own; God would do as He willed, and against God’s judgments there was no appeal. Lee would go on doing his best for as many days as the Lord chose to grant him.
A man could do no more. When he was gone, however far ahead that might be, others would carry on after him.

  He looked over his shoulder toward the doorway in which he’d stood when the reporters brought word his bill had passed. “I shall have given those others a fair foundation upon which to build,” he said quietly. Then he started back to his office. Despite the happy nature of the interruption, that letter to the British minister remained to be written.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Guns of the South would never have been written had Judith Tarr not complained in a letter to me that the cover art for an upcoming book of hers was as anachronistic as Robert E. Lee holding an UZI. That set me wondering how and why he might get his hands on such a weapon. The Guns of the South is the result. Thanks, Judy.

  Special thanks go to Chris Bunch, formerly of the U.S. Special Forces, for advice on the care and feeding of the AK-47. Any inaccuracies that may have crept in are purely my own.

  This would have been a different, and I think a poorer, book were it not for the exceedingly kind assistance of W. T. Jordan of the North Carolina Department of Archives and History. Responding to a letter from a writer of whom he’d never heard, Mr. Jordan graciously sent me a photocopy of the rare, long-out-of-print regimental history of the 47th North Carolina, which was written by Captain John Thorp of Company A, with an additional sketch by Lieutenant J. Rowan Rogers of Company I.

  Moreover, Mr. Jordan is the current editor of the series of volumes entitled North Carolina Troops, 1861–1865: A Roster, volume XI of which contains the detailed roster of the 47th North Carolina. The information contained therein has proved beyond price and given me a great many of my characters.

  Thanks to Nashville town manager Tony Robertson for sending me a beautifully detailed map of Nashville. Again, I appreciate the kindness strangers so often show to writers.

  Two highly intelligent and well-informed readers, Dan Cragg and Anne Chapman, carefully went over this manuscript after it was submitted. It is considerably improved because of their thoughtful suggestions. Thanks also to Mr. Cragg for the two Minié balls from Fairfax County, Virginia.

  And finally, thanks to my wife Laura for her usual thoughtful first reading, fortelling me where I’d gone wrong, for suggesting ways to make things better, for splendid help with the research, and just for being who she is.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  If my portrayal of Robert E. Lee seems to bear only a small resemblance to the revisionist one offered by Thomas Connelly in The Marble Man, it is not because I am ignorant of the latter but simply because, in most instances, I disagree with Connelly’s interpretation. Lee’s own writings, I think, show clearly enough what sort of man he was. The fragment of a letter which opens this book is from letter number 610 in the collection The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, edited by Clifford Downey and Louis H. Manarin.

  All persons stated to have served with the 47th North Carolina in early 1864 actually did so at that time, in the companies noted and with their proper ranks. There are only two partial exceptions to this rule: I do not know whether the slave George Ballentine still remained with the regiment then, and I do not know the actual company with which Mollie Bean served.

  Mollie Bean did serve with the 47th North Carolina. She was, the Richmond Whig of February 20, 1865, tells us (as cited in North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster), picked up in uniform not far from Richmond on the night of February 17 and sent into the city for questioning. At the provost marshal’s office, she said she had been with the regiment for two years and had been wounded twice. The Whig story ends, “It will not, we presume, be pretended that she had served so long in the army without her sex being discovered.” But such cases, the Whig notwithstanding, were far from unknown among both the gray and the blue. I have taken a novelist’s liberty in imagining why she joined in the first place.

  I have taken similar liberties in inventing occupations for a few minor characters from the 47th when those are not known, but the jobs of most of those who served in that regiment, along with their ages, home counties, and wounds suffered up to the time at which The Guns of the South begins, are authentic. The character I have ascribed to each man is a product of those factors and of my imagination (Billie Beddingfield’s nature is inferred from his habit of repeatedly gaining noncommissioned rank and then being demoted again).

  The town of Rivington, North Carolina, is entirely fictitious, as is everything connected with it, including Mollie Bean’s residing there.

  The men of the 47th North Carolina could not actually have looked across Washington to see the burning Long Bridge from the position in which I have them doing so. Geography occasionally has to bend just a little to serve the novelist’s needs.

  The terms of peace between the United States and Confederate States are based upon those. set forth in a letter of February 8, 1862, from Confederate Secretary of State R. M. T. Hunter to his European commissioners James Mason and John Slidell, as modified by subsequent events both real and imaginary. Lee’s plans for measures limiting slavery are derived from Brazilian constitutional proposals (unfortunately not adopted) of 1823 and from Brazil’s free-birth law of 1871 (I concede the anachronism). Brazil’s Parliament finally adopted full emancipation in 1888.

  For those who are interested in such things, I append detailed returns of the fictitious U.S. Presidential election of 1864 and Confederate Presidential election of 1867. The returns of the U.S. election in particular seem to require some further explanation. The two-party system was not so well established in the 1860s as now, as witness the four-cornered electoral struggle of 1860. Starting a new party and hoping for success was perfectly possible; the Republicans, indeed, had run their first national ticket as recently as 1856. In a country stunned by defeat, as the U.S. was here, new movements would naturally arise.

  I might also note that, before I worked out the final tally, I did not know myself who was going to win this election. State-by-state returns were determined as follows: McClellan, the most conservative candidate, was given a percentage equal to half the total Bell and Breckinridge received in each state in the real election of 1860. In states where they had not appeared on the ballot, he was assigned a small, arbitrary percentage. The exception here is his home state of New Jersey, which seems reasonable, as he carried it in the real 1864 election (one of the two states, Kentucky being the other, which he did carry) and later served as its governor.

  Lincoln and Fremont are considered to have split a vote percentage equal to the average of Lincoln’s 1860 and 1864 actual percentages. This method was designed to reduce the Republican total from what it actually was in 1864 with the war almost won, and in most states worked well. In Pennsylvania, however, where Lincoln’s actual percentage increased from 1860 to 1864, I reduced the percentage to be divided between Lincoln and Fremont. Fremont’s share of the total Republican vote varies by how “radical” I judged the Republicans of each state to be: he scores better in Kansas and New England than in the Midwest.

  Horatio Seymour got whatever percentage was left in each state. The percentages for all candidates were turned into popular vote figures by using actual 1864 vote totals. While The Guns of the South is, of course, a work of fiction in every respect, I think these imaginary returns do reflect the confused political situation that would surely have existed in a United States that lost the Civil War.

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