The countryside was pretty: farms with belts of oaks and elms between them. After a moment, Douglass revised his first impression. The countryside had been pretty, and might one day be pretty again. War was rapidly doing what war did-making ugly everything it touched. Shell craters scarred meadows and fields. A couple of farmhouses and barns were already burning, smoke from their pyres staining the morning air. Several small cabins near a farmhouse also burned. For a moment, Douglass simply noted that, as any reporter would. Then he realized what those smaller buildings were.
"Slave shanties," he said through clenched teeth. "Even here, so close to the Ohio and freedom, they had slave shanties. May they all burn, and all the big houses with them."
A few minutes later, a couple of U.S. soldiers with long bayonets on their Springfields led half a dozen or so Confederate prisoners back past him toward the river. A couple of the Rebs were wounded, one with his arm in a sling made from a tunic, the other wearing a bloody bandage wrapped round his head. All of them were skinny and dirty and surprisingly short: rumor made six-foot Confederate soldiers out to be runts. They did not look like invincible conquerors-petty vagrants was more like it.
"May I speak to these men?" Douglass asked their guards.
"Sure, Snowball, go right ahead," one of the men in blue replied. "Can't think of anything liable to make 'em feel worse, not off the top of my head I can't."
Douglass ignored that less than ringing endorsement. "You prisoners," he said sharply, to remind them of their status, "how many of you are slaveowners?"
Two men in gray nodded. The fellow with the bandaged head said, "You wouldn't bring me fifty dollars. You're too damn old and too damn uppity."
"I can't help being old, and I'm proud to be uppity," Douglass said. "How dare you presume to own, to buy and to sell and to ravish, your fellow human beings?"
The captured Confederate laughed hoarsely. "You damn crazy nigger, I'd sooner ravish my mule than ugly old Nero who helps me farm." He spat a stream of tobacco juice. "And you got a lot of damn nerve tellin' me what I can and can't do with my property, which ain't none o' your business to begin with."
"Men and women are not property," Douglass thundered, as if to an audience of twenty thousand. "They are your brothers and sisters in the eyes of God."
"Not where I come from, they ain't," the prisoner said, and spat again. He turned to the U.S. soldiers guarding him. "You done caught us. Ain't that bad enough? We got to put up with this damn mouthy nigger, too? Take us away and put us somewheres, why don't you?"
"You're damn lucky you're breathin', Reb," one of the soldiers in blue answered. "You want to stay lucky, you'll do like you're told."
Douglass had often anticipated interviews with ordinary Confederates. This one wasn't going the way he'd anticipated. The other Rebel who admitted to being a slaveholder said, "What in blazes are the y^w-nited States invadin' us for, anyways? We ain't done nothin' personal to you, nigger. We ain't done nothin' to nobody in the USA. All we done is buy up a chunk o' Mexico wasn't doin' nobody no good nohow. An' you-all start shootin' at us an' blowin' us up on account of that" My pappy always told me they was funny up in Boston and Massachusetts and them places, and] reckon he was right."
"The existence of a nation built on bondage is a stench in the nostrils of the entire civilized world," Douglass said.
"It ain't your business." Both Confederate soldiers spoke as one.
"It is the business of every man who loves liberty," Douglass declared. He threw his hands in the air; he and the slaveholders might have been speaking two different languages. He asked them, "How were you captured?"
The uninjured one said, "Three Yankees yelled at me to throw down my rifle at the same time. Right about then, I reckoned that'd be a plumb good idea."
"What about you?" Douglass asked the other one.
"You really want to know, nigger?" the Reb with the bandaged head answered. "I was squattin' in the bushes with my pants around my ankles, doin' my business, when this motherfucker in a blue coat says he'll blow me out a new asshole to shit through if n I don't put my hands high. So I done it." He gave Douglass a sour stare. "An' looky here-I got me the new asshole anyways."
That set not only the Confederate prisoners but also their guards braying like donkeys. Douglass stomped off. The Rebels' jeers pursued him. He paused to scribble in his notebook: They are now, as they have long been, ignorant, uncouth, and stubbornly indifferent to the sentiments of their fellow men and to the appeals of simple human justice.
Only a brute-like hardiness-ironically, the very trait they impute to their enslaved Negroes-enables them to persist in their infamous course.
A second look told him that was hardly objective. He grunted. "So what?" he said aloud. He put the notebook in his pocket and tramped off toward the southwest.
Chapter 12
G eneral Thomas Jackson looked up from the map. "They are throwing everything they have into this," he observed. "Can we reduce our forces within the city of Louisville to add a core of battle-hardened men to the forces we are deploying against their flanking manoeuvre?"
"I believe so, sir," Major General E. Porter Alexander answered. "They have stepped up their attacks within the city, but their troops there have not the dash and spirit they did when the fighting was new. They know they are likely to gain little and to pay dearly for what they do get. Few men give their best under such circumstances."
"Any men who fail to give their best under any circumstances deserve the sternest treatment from their own superiors," Jackson said. "The old Roman custom of decimation has much to recommend it."
"I wouldn't go so far as that, sir," Alexander said, trying to turn it into a joke.
"I would," replied Jackson, who saw nothing funny in it. Raising one arm above his head, he went on, "But back to the nub of things. What can you do, General, about the Yankees' artillery? Their guns seriously hamper our efforts to move troops to face the attack from the east."
"They have more guns than we do," E. Porter Alexander said unhappily. "They've taken some off the Louisville front to do just as you say: to make shifting soldiers harder for us. It's a good thing you had the forethought to build so many trench lines around the city before the Yankees started moving against our flank. If we had to dig while we were fighting, we'd be in worse trouble than we are already."
"This demonstrates a point I have repeatedly stressed to President Long-street," Jackson said: "namely, that having a servile population upon which we can draw in time of need confers great military advantage on us." He sighed. "The president is of the opinion that other factors militate against our retaining this advantage. Perhaps he is even right. For the sake of the country, I pray he is right."
"Yes, sir." General Alexander hesitated, then said, "Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?"
"By no means, General. Ask what you will."
Despite that generous permission, Alexander hemmed and hawed before he did put the question: "Sir, why do you stick your arm up in the air like that? I've seen you do it many times, and it's always puzzled me."
"Oh. That." Jackson lowered the arm; he'd all but forgotten he'd elevated it in the first place. "One of my legs, it seems to me, is bigger than the other, and one of my arms is likewise unduly heavy. By raising the arm, I let the blood run back into my body and so lighten the limb. It is a habit I have had for many years, and one, I believe, with nothing but beneficial results."