His son nodded approvingly. That pleased him, but only in an abstracted way; his mind was full of what he would have to do to win. Up until a few minutes before, he had been doing his best to think like a politician. As that was not his forte, no wonder he’d had little luck. Now he resolved to do what he did best: think like a soldier, and treat Forrest as an adversary like McClellan or Grant.
His hand went up to the collar of his jacket. It was a plain civilian coat of black wool, but he imagined he felt the familiar wreathed stars of a general once more. He got up from his chair. “Back to Richmond,” he said. “I have work to do.”
Early fireflies winked on and off, like shooting stars brought down to earth. Nate Caudell tried to recapture his childhood glee at seeing them. He did his best, but could not quite manage it. The little bugs reminded him too much of muzzle flashes in the dark.
In any case, the fireflies were not the only beacons in the night. Caudell stood on Washington Street, watching the torchlight parade stream into the Nashville town square. Decked out in gray hoods, the paraders sang the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep” as loud as they could: “He chased the niggers and they did run; He chased the niggers and he gave ‘em the gun! Hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again—Forrest!”
Henry Pleasants stood beside Caudell. He said, “You know what these Trees of Forrest remind me of Nate?”
“What’s that?”
“You won’t like it,” Pleasants warned. Caudell gestured impatiently. Pleasants said, “They remind me of Lincoln’s Wide-Awakes in 1860: all dressed up in what’s almost a uniform, all full of piss and vinegar for their man, and all ready to stomp on anyone who doesn’t like him. And because they’re excited, they make other people excited, too.”
“We didn’t have any of those Wide-Awakes down here,” Caudell said. “Come to that, Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot down here.”
“Maybe not, but somebody in the Patriot camp must have been paying attention to the way he ran his campaign. Remember, he won that race, too, even if he wasn’t on the ballot anywhere in the South.”
“Are you saying that means Forrest will win, too? It’d take more than a fancy parade to get me to vote for anybody but Robert E. Lee, and that goes for anybody who served in the Army of Northern Virginia.”
“But not everybody in the country did serve in the Army of Northern Virginia. Me, I’d sooner vote for Lee than Forrest any day, but what do I know? I’m just a damnyankee—ask my neighbors.”
At the tail end of the parade marched a big man thumping a bigger drum. The watching crowd spilled into the street and followed him into the square. In front of the courthouse, the same platform that had served for the slave auction was up again. Three or four of Forrest’s Trees stood atop it, torches held on high. More crowded close, so the platform was far and away the brightest place in the square.
One of the hooded Trees shouted, “Here’s his honor the mayor!” The rest of the group hollered and clapped as Isaac Cockrell clambered to the top of the platform. He was not an old man; he was, in fact, several years younger than Caudell. But he was short and fat and rather wheezy. Among the stalwart Trees, he cut an unprepossessing figure.
“My friends,” he said, and then again, louder: “My friends!” The crowd kept right on chattering.
Caudell cupped hands to his mouth, yelled, “Hire a substitute, Cockrell!” The mayor had bought his way out of the 47th North Carolina a couple of months before Gettysburg. and stayed prosperously at home while the regiment did its desperate work. Caudell was not the only man who remembered. Several other veterans whooped in gleeful derision at his cry.
Isaac Cockrell flinched but quickly gathered himself. “My friends,” he said yet again, and this time was able to go on from there: “My friends, we’re here tonight to show we all want Nathan Bedford Forrest to be the next President of our Confederate States of America.”
Forrest’s Trees raised a cheer. So did a good many men and women in the crowd; the women, of course, could not vote, but they enjoyed a rousing political spectacle no less than their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons. But Caudell’s was not the only voice that shouted “No!”—far from it. To drown out their opponents, the Trees started singing the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep” again.
Henry Pleasants knew the answer to that. “Lee!” he boomed, making his voice as deep as he could. “Lee! Lee! Lee!” Caudell joined the one-word chant. So did the other Lee men—most of them veterans like him. Their cry rose to rival the bawled out “Quickstep.”
Raeford Liles was singing Forrest’s anthem at the top of his lungs. He saw that Caudell belonged to the other camp. “You look like nothin’ but a stupid damn tree frog, Nate, hunchin’ up your shoulders every time you chirp out ‘Lee!’”
“I’d sooner look like a tree frog than have the brains of one,” Caudell retorted. Liles stuck out his tongue. Caudell said, “Who looks froggy now?”
Having launched into his speech, Mayor Cockrell kept on with it through the hubbub, though for some time no one except perhaps the Trees up on the platform with him could hear a word he was saying. Just as well, Caudell thought. But gradually, backers of Forrest and Lee both quieted down enough to get bits of the mayor’s speech: “Do you want your niggers taken away from you? If you do, vote for Lee, sure enough. Vote for Forrest, though, and your children’ll still keep ‘em, and your grandchildren, too.”
“What niggers?” a heckler yelled from the back of the crowd. “I ain’t got no niggers. Most of us ain’t got no niggers—ain’t got the money for it. How many niggers you got, Cockrell?”
That hit home hard enough to make the mayor draw back a pace. He owned about half a dozen Negroes, which, while it did not make him a planter, certainly established him as well-to-do. He rallied gamely, though: “Even if you don’t own any niggers, do you want them free to work for low wages, lower than a white man would take?”
The heckler—Caudell suddenly grinned, recognizing Dempsey Eure’s voice—would not be stilled: “Can’t hardly work for less’n I make, farmin’ —the place I farm.”
Cockrell’s argument might have carried more force in a bigger town, a place where more people did in fact work for wages. But Nash County was overwhelmingly rural, even by the standards of North Carolina. Tied to the soil as they were, its people had scant experience with wages of any sort, high or low.
Seeing their speaker falter, Forrest’s Trees started singing again. By then their torches were guttering out, letting the square return to night. Caudell and the other Lee backers answered the “Quickstep” with their own call. Both groups, though, were running out of steam. By ones and twos, people began drifting away. Sometimes, in low voices, they carried on their arguments. Sometimes, away from the heat of the rally, they found themselves able to laugh at how stirred they’d gotten.
Caudell said, “It’s still early spring. We’ll all be done to a turn if this kind of thing keeps up till November.”
“Keeps life from getting dull, doesn’t it?” Pleasants answered as he walked back toward the stable to get his horse.
“I suppose so.” Caudell walked on another few steps with his friend, then added wistfully, “I remember when life was dull, or I thought it was, anyway. You know what? Looking back, it doesn’t seem so bad.”
Lee had been waiting for the knock on the door of the suite at the Powhatan House. He got up and opened the door. “Senator Brown!” he said, extending his hand. “Thank you for doing me the honor of coming here.”