Albert Gallatin Brown pursed his lips. “You might get by with that, not least because it is so much less radical than what hotheads on the other side say you want.”
“I have not finished,” Lee warned. Brown sat back and composed himself to listen further. “If a slave or someone who wished to buy his freedom could not pay the whole price at once, I would let them pay one sixth, the master again being compelled to accept, to give the slave one day to work for himself each week, another free day being added for each sixth paid, until the slave’s labor is entirely his own.”
“That goes farther, but is again reasonable, and certainly not confiscatory,” Brown said.
“The plan is modeled after one proposed but unfortunately not accepted some years ago in the Empire of Brazil,” Lee said. “Since I became convinced of the necessity of this change, I have sought intently for ways to facilitate it. My former aide Charles Marshall, whose training is in the law, recently brought the Brazilian proposal to my notice. To it I would add a couple of additional features.”
“Which are?” Brown asked.
“First, I would take a small percentage of the property tax paid into the Treasury on slaves each year and use it to establish an emancipation fund to free or begin freeing as many Negroes as this revenue would permit. And second, I would propose a law to the effect that all Negroes born after a certain date should be reckoned freeborn, though owing service to their mothers, masters for the first twenty-one years of their lives, in which time they should also be prepared to live free. I have in mind, you see, not to murder slavery, but to let it peacefully die of old age.”
“Ten years ago, in Charleston or Mobile or Vicksburg, they’d have hanged you from a lamp post for putting forward a scheme like that,” Brown remarked. He ran a finger along the bottom edge of a side-whisker as he thought. Finally he said, “We’ve all seen a great many surprising things these past ten years, haven’t we? All right, General Lee, I’m with you.”
“Splendid!” Lee stuck out his hand. “Sir, we are confederates.”
Brown’s gaze suddenly turned inward. “Not just confederates,” he said quietly, “but Confederates.” Lee could hear the capital letter falling into place. Brown went on, “I think you’ve just named our party.”
“Confederates.” Lee tasted the word on his tongue. He said it again, firmly, and nodded. “Confederates we are.”
The fiddler and banjo player swung from “Ye Cavaliers of Dixie” to “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” to “Mister, Here’s Your Mule.” Hearing the old war songs again took Nate Caudell back to campfires and sore feet and the smell of powder. Nothing made a man feel so intensely alive as knowing he might not be alive much longer.
When the musicians played “Dixie,” that remembered intensity—cherished all the more now that it was gone—filled him too full to let him keep on singing as he had been doing. From somewhere deep inside him, a rebel yell clawed its way up his throat and out between his teeth. It was not a sound that properly belonged in the sleepy, peaceful Nashville town square, but he did not care, He had to let it loose or burst.
Nor was his the only yell that ripped through the afternoon. Most of the men in the crowd—almost an the men under forty-five in the crowd—were veterans of the Second American Revolution, and most of them, by their faces, by their shouts, were as caught up in their memories as he was. A hat sailed through the air, then another.
The last sweet notes of “Dixie” died away. The banjo man and fiddler got down from the flag-draped platform. George Lewis climbed up onto it. Caudell found himself coming to attention and had to fight back a sudden, sharp order to the people around him to straighten their ranks. Then he saw a good many other men, especially those who had fought in the Castalia Invincibles under Captain Lewis, were also squaring their shoulders and bringing their feet together.
But Lewis was not wearing a captain’s three bars these days, only the wing collar and cravat that befit a prosperous civilian and legislator. The collar fit snugly, too; he had to have gained twenty or thirty pounds in his time down in Raleigh. Noticing that made Caudell smile; anyone who hadn’t put on weight since his army days wasn’t half trying.
Lewis said, “My friends, I don’t even know that we needed to get together here today. So many of us marched under Marse Robert, fought under Marse Robert—we an know what he’s like. Is there anybody here from the Army of Northern Virginia who’s such a big fool that he doesn’t aim to vote for Robert E. Lee come November?”
“No!” Caudell shouted. So did most of the men around him. Carried away by the moment, several women called “No!” too.
But most was not all. Just as Caudell had heckled Isaac Cockrell at the Forrest rally, so now someone bellowed, “I ain’t gonna vote for nobody who wants to take my niggers away!”
Cockrell had tried to go on as if no one were harassing him. George Lewis met his challenger head-on. Peering into the crowd to see who had shouted at him, he said, “Jonas Perry, you are a big fool.” That raised a laugh. Lewis went on, “For one thing, everybody here knows those three niggers of yours don’t do a lick of work anyway, so they’d be no great loss to you.” The laugh got louder; whenever he was in town, Perry spent most of his time complaining about how lazy his slaves were. Lewis grew serious: “Anyhow, Lee doesn’t aim to take away anybody’s niggers. That’s a damned lie.”
“He don’t want us to keep ‘em no more, neither,” Jonas Perry yelled back. “How we gonna get our crops in without ‘em? You, Mr. Big Assemblyman George Lewis, sir, you got a lot more niggers’n me. How you aim to get your crops in without ‘em?”
Lewis hesitated. The crowd muttered. Caudell started to worry. If a rally went wrong, a lot of votes could go wrong, too. He looked around. Like him, a lot of people stood tensely, waiting to hear what George Lewis would say. Along with the whites, he also saw several colored men and women in the square. They were not part of the rally; they had work to do. But whatever they were doing, they had their heads turned toward the platform OR which some of them had been sold. All at once, Caudell realized the election in which they could not take part mattered more to them than to him or George Lewis or any white man. He would merely be dissatisfied with the results if Lee lost, while they would have any hope of liberty dashed for at least six years.
Almost too late, Lewis answered Jonas Perry: “Jonas, if I said I liked the whole of Lee’s plan, I’d be a liar. But the way I look at it is this: Sometimes holding on to a thing just for the sake of holding on to it gets to be more trouble than it’s worth. Bedford Forrest did everything he could to whip the niggers in arms and make them Stop fighting, but you still read about bush. whackings and murders in Louisiana and Arkansas and Mississippi in the papers all the time. And Tennessee—the Yankees sat on Tennessee for two years and turned every nigger in the state loose, near enough. There’s not a prayer of getting them all back with their proper masters there. Hell’s bells, man, you know half the free niggers, and then some right here in North Carolina were slaves before the Yankees came down on the coast. I’m not asking you to like it. I’m asking you if it’s true. Is it?”