Caudell and the rest of the soldiers in gray looked at one another in confusion, wondering what to do next. A black who slew a white had to die; so said generations of law. But if the white was an enemy of the Confederate States, a man who’d led the Rivington fighters, who was wanted in connection with the Richmond Massacre, and who, moreover, had abused the black outrageously? Generations of law said the black still had to die. Generations of custom dictated against bothering with much law.
No one raised a gun against the Negro. After a long pause, Caudell jerked a thumb back toward Rivington. “You’d better get out of here.” The Negro stared, then fled as fast as he’d come.
“But—that kaf—that nigger—he just murdered a blank—a white,” a Rivington man spluttered furiously.
“Shut up, you,” four soldiers growled in the same breath. One added, “Reckon the son of a bitch had it coming, by God.” Caudell thought the same thing, but hadn’t quite had the nerve to say it out loud. That someone did showed the South was indeed different from what it had been in 1861.
* XIX *
The door to the Presidential mansion stood open for the fortnightly levee. Moths got in with the people, but to close the door would have made the place stifling: along with June, summer had come to Richmond. More moths fluttered hopefully against the window screen, looking for their chance to immolate themselves in the gaslights within.
Robert E. Lee and his daughter Mary stood just inside the front hall, greeting visitors as they arrived. “Good evening, sir and madam…How are you today, Senator Magoffin?… Well, Mr. Secretary, what brings you here?”
Jefferson Davis allowed himself a thin, self-deprecating smile. “I just thought I would drop by to see how this house was getting along without me. It seems to be doing quite well.”
“You also expressed a certain small interest in hearing the latest gossip, as I recall,” Varina Davis said with a twinkle in her eye.
“I?” Davis looked at Lee. “Mr. President, I submit myself to your judgment. Can you conceive of my making such a preposterous statement?”
“No, but then I cannot conceive of your lovely wife lying about it, either,” Lee replied.
“I never knew you were such a diplomat,” Jefferson Davis exclaimed, while Varina’s creamy shoulders shook with merriment. The former President went on, “Had you shown this talent previously, I might have sent you to Europe in place of Mason and Slidell.”
“In that case, sir, I am glad I hid my light under a bushel,” Lee said, which won him a small laugh from Davis and a bigger one from his wife.
Mary Lee said, “You both seem happier now that you are out of this house.”
“Happier?” Jefferson Davis soberly considered that, and after a moment shook his head…No, I think not. Easier might be a better word, in that the full weight of responsibility now lies on your father’s broad and capable shoulders.”
“The full weight of thirst now lies on my narrow, parched throat,” Varina Davis said. “With your kind consent, gentleman, Mary, I aim to raid the punch bowl.” Her maroon skins, stiff with crinoline, rustled about her as she sailed grandly toward the refreshment table set against the far wall of the room. With a final bow, Jefferson Davis followed his wife.
Once he was out of earshot, Lee said, “Let him claim what he will, my dear Mary—I am certain you are right. I’ve not seen such spring in his stride since our days back at West Point.”
When the stream of guests slowed, Lee claimed a goblet of punch for himself and drifted through the crowd, listening. That, to him, was what was most valuable about the levees: they let him get a feel for what Richmond thought—or at least talked about—which he could have had in no other way.
Two things seemed to be on people’s minds tonight: the recent surrender of the last America Will Break rebels down in North Carolina and the continuing congressional debate on the bill that weakened slavery. A plump, prosperous-looking man approached Lee and said, “See here, sir! If we are to set about turning our niggers loose, why then did we shed so much blood separating ourselves from Yankeedom? We might as well rejoin the United States as emancipate our slaves.”
“I fear I cannot agree with you, sir,” Lee answered. “We spent our blood to regain the privilege of settling our own affairs as we choose, rather than having such settlements enforced upon us by other sections of the U.S. which chose a way different from ours and which enjoyed a numerical preponderance over us.”
“Bah!” the man said succinctly, and started to stomp off.
“Sir, let me tell you something, if I may,” Lee said. The fellow stopped; however much he disagreed with his President, he recognized an obligation to listen to him. Lee went on, “When I went into Washington City after it fell to our arms, Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States, asked me a question I have never forgotten: as we had made the Confederate States into a nation, what son of nation would it be?”
The man had an answer ready: “The same sort as it was before the war, of course.”
“But we are not the same now as then, nor can we again become so,” Lee said. “As the minister pointed out, commerce demands we playa role in the wider world, and the war was hard on us and harder on our institutions, including that of Negro servitude. I would sooner make some small accommodations now, give the Negro some stake in the South—which is, after all, his country, too—than face, perhaps, servile insurrection in ten years’ time, or twenty.”
“I wouldn’t,” the man snapped. This time, he did leave.
Lee sighed. He’d had similar conversations before at these levees. Every one of them saddened him: how could so many people be unable to see past their own noses? He did not know the answer to that, but it was demonstrably true.
He cheered up when Mississippi Congressman Ethelbert Barksdale came over to him and said, “I heard the last part of your talk with that fat fool, Mr. President. Of course he doesn’t fear fighting in a slave uprising; by the look of him, he probably didn’t fight in the Second American Revolution, either—or don’t you think he’s the kind who would have hired a substitute?”
“I shouldn’t care to impugn the courage or patriotism of a man I do not know, sir—but you may very well be right,” Lee said. Sometimes a small taste of malice was sweet. The pleasure swiftly faded, though. “But there are so many with views like his that I fear for my bill.”
“It will pass, sir,” Barksdale said earnestly. He was a Confederate party man through and through, having backed Jefferson Davis in war and peace and Lee after him (he’d barely kept his own congressional seat in the past election, just riding out Forrest’s Mississippi landslide). Now he lowered his voice: “If you’d told him what the AWB was really working toward, he would have turned up his toes.”
“With men of his stripe, I wonder even about that,” Lee said gloomily. But Barksdale had a point. Without the Richmond Massacre and the books in the AWB’s secret room, no bill limiting slavery in any way would have had a prayer of getting through the Confederate Congress. In the aftermath of the murders and of the revelations from the AWB sanctum, his legislation did have a chance, maybe even a good one.” As often happens with those who would do evil, the Rivington men proved their own worst enemies.”