"Middling," he replied. "As travel goes, it went well enough. I should be lying, however, if I said I was eager to leave Louisville with the fight unsettled." He glared at the young officer as if it were his fault. As he'd hoped, that glare suppressed further questions until the carriage had rattled up Shockoe Hill to the presidential mansion.
"Good to see you, General," G. Moxley Sorrel said, as if Jackson had come round from the War Department rather than from Louisville. "Go right in, sir. The president is waiting for you." That was out of the ordinary. Jackson couldn't remember the last time he hadn't had to cool his heels in the anteroom while Longstreet finished dealing with whoever was in his office ahead of the general-in-chief.
This time, Longstreet was going through papers when Jackson came in. "You made good time," he said, rising to shake Jackson 's hand. "Sit down, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Can I shout for coffee?"
"Thank you, Your Excellency. Coffee would be most welcome." As usual, Jackson sat rigidly erect, taking no notice of the chair's soft, almost teasing efforts to seduce him into a more relaxed posture. Longstreet didn't shout for coffee; he rang a bell. The steaming brew appeared with commendable promptness. Jackson spooned sugar into his cup, sipped, nodded, and said, "And now, sir, may I inquire what was so urgent as to require removing me from the sight of my command without the battle's end in sight?"
Longstreet drank some coffee, too, before asking, "Do you expect the Yankees to break through while you're away?"
"I do not expect them to break through at all," Jackson snapped. Longstreet only smiled at him. After a moment, he had the grace to look sheepish. "Very well, Your Excellency: I take your point. Perhaps my absence will not unduly imperil the front. Nevertheless-"
"Nevertheless, I wanted you here, General." Longstreet took a president's privilege and overrode him. "Conferring by telegraph is far too cumbersome. Were the telephone improved to the point where I could remain in Richmond and you in Louisville, that might serve, but we must deal with life as it is, not with life as we wish it were or as it may be ten years or fifty years from now."
"I do take the point, Mr. President, I assure you," Jackson said. When Longstreet said conferring, he often meant lecturing. Like a lot of clever men, he enjoyed hearing himself talk. Jackson had not seen him anywhere near so happy when listening to someone else.
And the president kept right on talking. What came from his lips, though, was praise for Jackson, to which the Confederate general-in-chief was not averse to listening: "You did exactly the right thing when you wired me after Frederick Douglass fell into your hands. Next to holding the Yankees' first assault at Louisville, sending that telegram may well prove your most important action in the entire campaign."
"That's very kind of you, Your Excellency, but surely you exaggerate," Jackson said.
"I do not! In no particular do I overstate the case." Longstreet began ticking off possibilities on his fingers. "Had the soldiers who captured him shot him on realizing who and what he was, we might have claimed he was killed in the fighting. Had they lynched him after realizing who and what he was-"
"A fate he nearly suffered," Jackson broke in.
"I believe that." Longstreet shuddered. "Had they done it, I should have had to punish them and publish to the world that they had done the infamous act without authorization from anyone higher in rank. And had you hanged him, General"-the president of the CSA frowned most severely-"that would have been very bad. I don't know how I could have repaired it."
"Mr. President, you are starting at shadows," Jackson said. "Douglass"-he'd forgotten about saying Mister Douglass-"is a prominent figure in the United States, but his prominence does not translate into popularity."
"What you say is true, so far as it goes," Longstreet agreed, nodding his majestic head. "It does not go far enough. You see over the hill to the battle just ahead, but not to the larger fight three weeks later and half a state away."
"Enlighten me, then," Jackson said, more than a little testily. He knew he was no match for Longstreet as a politician, but did not enjoy having his nose rubbed in the fact.
Almost to his disappointment, Longstreet did enlighten him: "As you say, Douglass is not nearly so popular as he would wish in the USA . He embarrasses his countrymen by reminding them they lost the War of Secession, an unpalatable fact on which they would sooner not dwell. But Douglass is popular in France, and he is extremely popular in England, and has been for upwards of thirty years. We would have had an easier time explaining to the United States how we had killed one of their citizens than explaining to our allies how we had come to kill a man they revere."
"Ah. Now I see it plain." Jackson dipped his head to the president. "I humbly beg your pardon, Your Excellency: in such matters your mind does cast a wider net than mine."
"Each cat his own rat," Longstreet said. That was not quite the same as admitting Jackson made a better soldier than he, but it came close enough to keep the general-in-chief from being offended. Then the president of the CSA leaned forward and asked, "And how did you find Douglass, General?"
He might almost have taken that curiously avid tone had he asked Jackson about a lewd photograph or something else at the same time illicit and attractive. After meeting the Negro agitator, Jackson understood why. "He is a… formidable man, Your Excellency," he answered after a pause spent groping for a word that fit.
"That I believe," Longstreet said.
But Jackson, once begun with his judgment, would not give over until he had completed it: "Were all men of his race endowed with gifts even approaching those he possesses, we should never have succeeded in holding them in bondage."
"I believe that, too, but they are not so endowed. I have read much of his work," Longstreet said. Jackson blinked, startled. The president saw the blink and laughed. "Do you not favor knowing the enemy, General?"
"Mm," Jackson said. "Put that way, yes, sir."
"Having done so, I will say, within the confines of these four walls and these four ears, that few white men are endowed with gifts even approaching his. In any public setting, of course, I should say nothing of the sort."
"I understand, Your Excellency," Jackson said. And he did. The Confederate Constitution mandated free speech, but no one used that mandate to proclaim the Negro's equality to the white man, let alone his superiority over him.
"As I say, you did the nation a good turn by your forbearance," Longstreet said. "I have received cables from both London and Paris thanking and congratulating us for our prompt release of Douglass. I am convinced it has made our allies more willing to play an active part in the fight against the USA."
"They certainly have done that of late," Jackson said with a smile. Now he told of the blows on his fingers: " Boston, New York, the Great Lakes, Los Angeles -nice to find the French doing somethingSan Francisco, that town up in Washington Territory -"
" Seattle." Longstreet supplied the name.
"Thank you, Mr. President. And this invasion of Montana Territory is one more stroke against which the Yankees will be hard pressed to find an effective response."
"Ah. I see you have not heard the latest." A smile broke through Longstreet's beard like the sun breaking through clouds. "No fault of yours, General-you've been on the train. But this morning British and Canadian troops crossed over the border from New Brunswick into Maine ."
" Maine?" Jackson shivered theatrically. "Brr! Why would anyone want it? Give me Mexico any day. Or, seen from Canada, does Maine look warm?"