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 assembled 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 usefuclass="underline" 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.