The door swung open. Julia’s smile of greeting for Lee turned to a questioning look when she saw he had a companion. As he handed her his coat, he said, “I’ve brought a guest home, as you see. This is Lieutenant General Forrest, of the Confederate cavalry.”
Julia had been reaching out to take Forrest’s coat and hang it on the tree by Lee’s. The motion froze. So did Julia’s face. For the first time since Lee had manumitted her, he saw her features go blank in the special way Negroes used to hide all feelings from their masters. After a long pause, she did hang up Forrest’s coat. Then she turned and hurried away, long skirts rustling about her.
“You’re too easy on your staff, sir,” Forrest remarked with a tone of professional expertise. “Slaves need to have in mind who the masters are.”
“She’s a freedwoman,” Lee said. “I no longer own any slaves.”
“Oh.” Now Forrest hid whatever his true feelings were behind a mask as impenetrable as Julia’s. Lee remembered he had been a gambler as well as a slave dealer.
Julia returned, followed closely by Lee’s wife and daughters. In an instant, Forrest became, if not a gentleman, then at least a polished simulacrum of one, bowing over the younger women’s hands and bowing even lower over and kissing that of Mary Custis Lee. “We are delighted to welcome such a famous commander… Lee’s wife said.
“Thinking on the commander who lives here, you are much too kind to my own poor self,” Forrest said, bowing yet again. Then he grinned an impish grin. “I’ll take all the flattery I can get; though.”
He proved a lively guest at the supper table, using silverware, a gravy boat, and a heel of bread to show how he had won his victory north of Corinth, Mississippi. “You use your horses, then, merely to transport your troopers, but have them fight dismounted?” Lee said.
“That is my rule,” Forrest agreed. “A horse has use in getting a man from here to there faster than he can march, but what good is it in a fight but to give a choicer target than a man on foot? That was true before; what with the coming of the repeater, it’s doubly so these days.”
“Many others did likewise, both among the enemy and our own horse soldiers,” Lee said, thinking of Jeb Stuart. “How do you account for your greater success with the tactic?”
“From what I’ve seen, sir, most of ‘em did it because circumstances forced it on ‘em. Me, I aimed to fight my men so from the start. I drove ‘em hard, too, and always stayed up at the very front of the pack. With all the guns my own escort party carried, I used it to plug any holes or to break through when I saw the chance.” Forrest grinned again. “Worked right well, too.”
“There I cannot disagree,” Lee said thoughtfully. “Should we style your men dragoons, then?”
“General Lee, I don’t care what you call them, and they don’t care what you call them. But when you do call them, they fight like wildcats with rattlesnake fangs, and that I do care about. Will you pass me the sweet potatoes, sir?”
Lee watched ‘the way Julia acted around Forrest. She was a good enough servant not to ignore him altogether, but she plainly wanted to. Yet even when she was busy at the opposite end of the table, her eyes, big and fearful, kept sliding toward him. He must have seemed the bogeyman incarnate to her; Negroes had been using his name to frighten their children ever since the Fort Pillow massacre, and his campaigns against the black soldiers left behind in the Mississippi valley when Union forces abandoned Confederate soil only made his reputation the more fearsome.
He knew it, too. Every so often, when he spied Julia watching him, he would raise an eyebrow or bare his teeth for a moment. He never did anything overt enough for Lee to call him on it, but Julia finally dropped a silver ladle, picked it up, and fled as ignominiously as the luckless Federal general Sturgis, whom Forrest had smashed though outnumbered better than two to one. Chuckling, Forrest said, “Sturgis moaned to one of his colonels, ‘For God’s sake, if Mr. Forrest will let me alone, I will let him alone.’ But I wouldn’t let him alone; I aimed to whip him out of his boots, and I did it.”
Mildred Lee rose from her chair. “If you men are going to fight your battles across the tablecloth, I will leave you to your sport.”
“If you stay, we won’t fight them,” Forrest said quickly. Hard-bitten as he was, he could also be charming, especially to women.
But Mildred shook her head. “No, I should only spoil your fun, for you know you’d still wish to, and Father did not bring you home so he could listen to me. He can do that any night, after all.”
“He can do that any night, after all, when he is in Richmond,” Mary Custis Lee said, an edge to her voice. Lee sighed silently. Even after nine months without straying from the capital, his wife had not forgiven him his long trip to Kentucky and Missouri. Mildred turned and left the room, followed by Agnes and Mary; Lee’s eldest daughter wheeled Mary Custis Lee ahead of her.
“Well.” Lee rose, took a cigar case off a cabinet shelf, offered Forrest a smoke.
Forrest shook his head. “I never got the habit, but you go on yourself.”
“I don’t use them, either; I keep them for guests.” Lee put the case away, then asked, “Did you also come” to Richmond to see the men from America Will Break?”
“What if I did?” Forrest said. “Those repeaters of theirs made my men five times the fighters they would have been without them.” He gave Lee a measuring stare. “By all accounts, we’d have lost the war without their aid.”
“By all accounts indeed.” Lee studied Nathan Bedford Forrest in return. Cautiously, he said,” Am I to infer that the accounts you mentioned include the one given by the Rivington men themselves?”
“Just so. I gather you’ve also heard this account?” Forrest waited for Lee to nod, then said softly, almost to himself, “I wondered if I was the only one they’d told. Well, no matter.” He gathered himself. “Do you believe what they say, sir?”
“Or do I find it fantastic, you mean? I can imagine nothing more fantastic than men traveling in time as if by railroad.” Forrest started to say something; Lee held up a hand. “But I believe nonetheless. Any madman may claim to come from the future, but madmen do not commonly carry proof for their assertions. Their artifacts convince more strongly than their words.”
“My thought exactly, General Lee.” Forrest drew in along, relieved breath. “But with the artifacts comes the tale, and the tale they tell of the history ahead makes me believe more what I already thought: that the South is the last and brightest hope of the white race, and if we ever turn loose of the niggers here, they’ll ruin everything everywhere.”
“If all the Rivington men say is true, that may be a justifiable conclusion,” Lee said. Maybe that belief explained some of Forrest’s savage conduct in his war against the blacks, although, as he’d said himself, he’d had no use for Negroes—save as a source of income—even before the Rivington men came to help the Confederacy win its independence. Lee went on, “Yet all the trend of the nineteenth century makes me wonder. The nations of Europe almost unanimously find chattel slavery abhorrent, and us on account of it; most of the South American republics have abandoned it; even brutal Russia has freed its serfs. The trend in history seems to be ever toward more liberty, not less.”
“Are you saying you believe the Negroes ought to be freed, sir, after the war we fit to keep them slaves?” Forrest’s voice remained low and polite, but took on an unmistakable note of warning; his rather sallow complexion turned a shade redder.
“We fought the war, as you say, to ensure we would be the only ones with the right to either preserve our institutions or change them, and we have won that right,” Lee answered. “Not only the opinions of the outside world but also the course of the war and of your own gallant efforts after our armistice with the United States have compelled me to alter somewhat my view of the black man.”