“You know I never had a bad thing to say about Robert E. Lee,” Liles answered, and Caudell had to nod, for that was true. The storekeeper continued, “But from what I hear, Lee is makin’ noises about lettin’ all the niggers go free, an’ if the war wasn’t about slavery, then just what the hell was it about?”
“Slavery was a big part of it, sure enough,” Caudell admitted, “but it wasn’t the whole reason for the war. Besides, from all I’ve read, Lee’s not talking about freeing all the slaves at once. I agree with you, anybody who did that would be out of his mind. But the Yankees turned too many niggers loose for us ever to get ‘em all back. You’ve said as much yourself. It makes me think we can’t keep ‘em all in bonds forever.”
Raeford Liles grunted. “You been listenin’ to that damnfool Yankee friend o’ yours too much. Might could be you ought to go North your own self.”
“Don’t you call me a Yankee,” Caudell said hotly. “You’d better not call Henry a damnfool, either, not when you look at the crop his farm brought in.” What with too little water and then too much, 1866 had been a hard year all through the South. But Pleasants, with his engineering knowledge, got his crops enough water in the dry times and not too much in the wet, and sent enough tobacco and corn to market to make himself the envy of his neighbors.
Liles grunted again. “Well, all right, maybe he ain’t a damnfool. But I ain’t fond o’ no smart Yankees, neither—what business does he have down here, anyways?”
“Making a living, same as you or me.” Caudell could not quite keep from remembering that Henry Pleasants was making a much better living than he was, and a better living than Raeford Liles, too. But Pleasants was his friend, so he went on stoutly, “He could have gone back to Pennsylvania after the war was over, but he chose to stay down here and become part of our new country instead.”
“If he was as fine as you make him out to be, Nate, he’d walk across Stony Creek outen gettin’ his feet wet.”
“Oh, horseshit. He’s no more the Second Coming than he is a devil with a pointy tail, the way you paint him.” Caudell tossed coins, some Federal, some Confederate, down on the counter, stuck the comb in his pocket, and walked out of the general store with the newspaper. The closing door cut off Liles’s reply in midword.
He suspected Henry Pleasants would remain a Yankee in the eyes of Nash County until the sexton shoveled dirt down onto his coffin; if he ever married again, whatever offspring he had would likely be labeled “the Yankee’s brats.” Their children might escape the taint of Northern origin,—or might not. Nash County was a clannish place.
One column of the Raleigh Constitution was labeled “events of interest from foreign parts.” He read a report from Montevideo dated October 29 (six weeks old now, he thought) on the South American war between Paraguay and all its neighbors. Closer to home, the Mexican forces of the Emperor Maximilian, stiffened by a couple of brigades of French troops, had inflicted another defeat on the republican army led by Juarez. Caudell nodded in some satisfaction at that—Maximilian’s government remained friendly to the Confederacy.
The next foreign item came from Washington. That still sometimes struck him as odd. He half expected it to be a protest from President Seymour against the aid the French were giving Maximilian, but it was just the opposite: the report said that most of the U.S. troops in the New Mexico and Arizona territories were being withdrawn. Seymour had in fact issued a protest, but to the government of Great Britain for increasing its garrisons in the Canadas. Adding those two items together, Caudell smelled war brewing. He wondered when it would boil over. From his own experience against the Yankees, he thought England was about to get a nasty surprise.
A drop of rain smacked the dirt street in front of him, then another one. Still another hit the brim of his black felt hat. He hurried back toward the widow Bissett’s, glad the rain wasn’t snow. His head turned at a colorful broadside, freshly pasted—it hadn’t been there when he went to the general store—on a fence along Alston Street. SAVE THE CONFEDERACY—VOTE FOR FORREST! the poster exclaimed in big letters. Below that legend was a picture of the stalwart cavalry leader.
Rain or no, he paused to stare at the broadside. The election was eleven months away. He’d never heard of starting a campaign so early. He trotted on, scratching his head. A couple of houses farther down the street, he discovered another political poster. This one, besides Forrest’s picture, bore a four-word slogan: FORREST—HIT ‘EM AGAIN!
He passed several more such sheets by the time he got to his room. He wondered how many he had not seen, how many had been stuck up all over town to make sure everybody saw at least one. He wondered how many towns like Nashville the Confederacy held, and how many of those had been similarly broadsided. He wondered how much all that had cost. Nathan Bedford Forrest was supposed to be rich. If he campaigned on this scale till November, he would need to be richer than Caudell thought he was.
When he passed a broadside partly protected by an overhanging roof, he paused for a closer look. Under Forrest’s hard but handsome features appeared a line of small type: Prepared by van Pelt Printers, Rivington, North Carolina. Caudell studied that for a couple of minutes before he went on. If the Rivington men were working with Forrest, he would have all the money he needed.
From an upstairs window in Arlington, Lee looked across the Potomac toward Washington, D.C. Smoke curled up from hundreds, from thousands of chimneys, rising to the true clouds and also turning to a dirty gray the smoke that blanketed the city.
Lee’s mood was a dirty gray, too. “Bedford Forrest is a very devil,” he said, throwing a copy of the Richmond Examiner down onto a tabletop. “He makes political hay merely by noting where this place is.” He picked up the paper again, read, “No wonder General Lee chooses to reside only a stone’s throw from the heart of Yankeedom. His ideas show him to be a Yankee himself, in gray clothing.”
“Let him say whatever he wants,” Mary Custis Lee answered. “Now that my dear home has been made habitable once more, I would live nowhere else. I always felt myself an uprooted plant in Richmond,”
“I know that, my dear, nor did I protest when you wanted to remove here,” Lee answered. For one thing, he knew such protest would have done no good; with her mind once made up, his wife was harder to drive from a position than any Federal general. For another, he had not imagined Nathan Bedford Forrest could turn his choice of residence against him.
Union commanders had underestimated Forrest throughout the war, and paid for it again and again. Lee was beginning to wonder if he and all of official Richmond had not made the same mistake. Who would have thought a rough-and-ready planter, with no education to speak of, would prove so effective on the stump? And who would have imagined he would prove as energetic in political campaigning as in military? He fairly flew from town to town, made his speeches, and was. gone on the next train to make another one seventy-five miles down the track. Lee thought of the shock Andrew Jackson had created in Washington after almost half a century of well-bred Presidents from Virginia and Massachusetts. The frontier might seize the Confederate capital much sooner.
Mary Lee said, “Help me up, please, Robert.” He got her to her feet. On his arm, she went over to the window, too. She, however, looked not across the Potomac toward Washington but down at the grounds of Arlington. She nodded, as if pleased with herself. “The snow hides them, and it is not all.”