He wished he could show the letter to his wife first, to see her expression once she’d read it. After their go-round of the night before, her expression ought to be worth seeing. But that was a diversion he would have to forgo. He picked up the paper, carried it down the hall.
Secretary of War Seddon looked up from the papers that crowded his own desk. Despite those papers, he looked stronger and healthier than he had during the war, when his labors all but consumed him. Even his smile was less cadaverous these days” A good morning to you, General. What can I do for you?”
“I have here a letter which requires your attention, sir. “
“Give it to me, then.” James Seddon read the two-line note, then raised his large head to stare at Lee. “What has occasioned this?”
“If I am to meet my full responsibility to the Confederate States of America, Mr. Secretary, I must necessarily do so in and from a civilian capacity. Proceeding directly from the ranks of the military to any civil office strikes me as more appropriate to ancient Rome than to our present republic.”
“Civil office, you say?” Seddon studied Lee, then slowly nodded. “You will understand, General, that rumors pertaining to your possible plans for the future have been in wide circulation for some time now.”
“As with paper money, so with rumors: the wider the circulation, the less value they retain,” Lee said.
The Secretary of War smiled his rather unnerving smile.” No doubt, no doubt. I certainly did not care to presume on our acquaintance to enquire of you your plans, the more so as they may well have been unclear even to you. I hope you will permit me to say, however, that I should be confident of our nation’s future in your hands.”
“You are gracious, sir, and place more trust in me than I deserve,” Lee said. Seddon shook his head, no doubt taking Lee’s words for a commonplace of polite speech. Lee wished it were so. The—disorderly—quality of civilian life, and especially of civilian administration, worried him. The Rivington men worried him more. In war and peace, he had tested himself against the ablest of his own time, and had prevailed. But how could he know all the resources the men from a distant time held in reserve?
He could not know…and he had made the men of America Will Break his enemies, past hope of reconciliation. As best he could tell, he had earned the right to worry.
Jefferson Davis held a fortnightly levee at the Confederate White House. As Lee rode Traveller up Twelfth Street toward the Presidential mansion, he reflected that one day the place would need a name not derived from one in Washington City. The Confederacy could not go on forever as a mere copy of the United States and its institutions; the South would develop institutions of its own.
His lip quirked. The South had one institution all its own, and he hoped to begin the job of laying that one to rest.
Lamps and candles blazed bright through the broad windows and open door of the Presidential residence, casting a warm golden glow on the walkway outside. Lee dismounted from Traveller, tied the horse to the iron fence outside the mansion, gave him a nose bag full of hay. Traveller snorted appreciatively and began to eat. “I wish some people were so easily pleased,” Lee murmured and went up the stairs and into the house.
Varina Davis met him near the door. “How good of you to join us this evening,” she said with a smile. “You are quite as handsome as ever in your dark civilian suit.”
He bowed over her hand. “You are too kind” to me, Mrs. Davis.” She was a pretty, dark-haired woman, some years younger than her husband—and also a good deal more outgoing. Without her, the President’s levees would have been too austere to be worth visiting. As it was, the gatherings, if not the most intellectual in the city—that distinction surely belonged to Mrs. Stanard’s salon—were the most variegated, with congressmen, judges, soldiers, and officials of the administration mingled promiscuously with merchants, preachers, and simple citizens anxious to conduct business with Jefferson Davis or simply to see him, and with ladies corresponding to all those types.
Lee ran a hand down the sleeve of his black wool formal coat. Being out of military gray still seemed strange and unnatural, as if he were parading through Richmond in his underclothes. He added, “I am also most pleased at how lovely you look out of black.”
Varina Davis’s eyes were shadowed for a moment.” As you will know, what with the sad loss of your Annie, the passing of a child is hard to bear.” A little more than two years before, her little son Joe had fallen from some scaffolding and died the same day. She and Lee shared a few seconds of sad remembrance. Then she went on, “But life also calls to us, and we must continue as best we can. Do come in; I know my husband will be glad to see you.”
The President stood by a table crowded with punch bowls and plates of fried chicken and ham, baked potatoes, and tall cakes with yellow icing. Standing with him, a chicken leg in one hand and a glass in the other, was Stephen R. Mallory, the Secretary of the Navy, a tall, heavily built man who resembled nothing so much as an Anglo-Saxon version of Judah P. Benjamin, save that his jowly, beard-fringed face more usually bore frown than smile.
Jefferson Davis beckoned Lee to him. As Lee approached, the President said loudly, “I am confident that when my term expires, sir, I shall leave the nation in your capable hands.”
Silence spread outward as everyone present turned to stare at Lee. After his resignation, Richmond had buzzed with political rumors. Now, all at once, the gossip acquired solid flesh—a figure of speech almost inevitable when looking toward the rotund frame of Secretary Mallory. Lee knew his answer would gain similar weight. He said, “If that be the will of the people, I shall humbly accept it, though conscious as always of my own shortcomings.”
Still in that public voice, Davis replied, “I am equally confident that the people, observing your manifold virtues, will think as highly of them as do I, and as they assuredly merit.” By then Lee was close by. As he dipped out a glass of lemonade, Davis, reverting to normal tones, said to Mallory, “You see how it is done, Mr. Secretary—no vulgar party politics, such as first forced us to abandon the United States and then left that unhappy nation divided against itself, will mar our republic’s smooth transition from one chief magistrate to the next.”
“Our states do seem more united in purpose than those which claim that title.” Mallory had a big bass voice; Lee, in a moment of irrelevant irreverence, wondered if it was because he was shaped like a big bass fiddle. The Secretary of the Navy went on, “I can see no issue which would divide our happy confederation.” He tossed aside the gnawed chicken bone, piled ham and potatoes onto a plate, and poured gravy over both.
“I see one,” Lee said.
Jefferson Davis’s features, always thin and dyspeptic, pinched further, as if at some sudden new gastric pang. “It will not be an issue if you do not choose to make it one,” he said.
“It will,” Lee answered. “Sooner or later, it will return to haunt us; how could it do otherwise? I would sooner engage the problem at a time of my own choosing than let it grow to crisis strength and overwhelm us.”
“You may wear a simple suit, sir, but you still speak like a soldier,” Mallory said. Though pompous, he was also keen: “You have grown dissatisfied with our treatment of our Negroes, have you not? I recall it was at your urging that we sent the Alabama to join the antislavery patrol off the west African coast.”