He walked up the slate pathway to the front door, rapped once on the polished brass knocker, and waited. Over the British ministry, he had not even the rights of a conqueror. His staff officers dismounted from their horses but did not presume to follow him, not here.
The door opened. An elderly, very bald man in formal attire peered out at him. “You would be General Lee?” he asked. His accent was soft in a way different from Lee’s Virginia speech.
“I am he,” Lee said, bowing. “I should like to pay my respects to Lord Lyons, if I may.”
“He has been expecting you, sir,” the elderly man said. “If you will come with me—?”
He led Lee down a long hall, past several chambers where clerks’ heads came up from their papers so they could stare at him, then into a sitting room. “Your excellency, the famous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. General, Lord Richard Lyons.”
“Thank you, Hignett. You may go.” The British Minister to the United States got up from his overstuffed armchair.
Lee already had his hand out. “I am delighted to meet you at last, your excellency,” he said sincerely. The South had been struggling to win British recognition since before the war with the Union began.
“General Lee,” Lord Lyons murmured. He was in his late forties, with a round, very red face, dark hair and side whiskers, and almost equally dark circles under his eyes. An elegantly tailored suit came close to disguising his plumpness. “Please make yourself comfortable, General. You are indeed the man of the moment.”
“Thank you, your excellency.” Lee sat in a chair not far from the one from which Lord Lyons had risen. “As I have, ah, come to Washington City, I thought it fitting that I pay my respects to you, since your government has no present minister in Richmond.”
Lord Lyons steepled his fingertips.” A state of affairs you hope will change.”
“I do, your excellency. Either the Confederate States of America are an independent nation, or they are but a dependency of the United States. No other earthly power claims the right to govern us, and my presence here argues against the second interpretation of our status that I mentioned.”
“Argues powerfully, you are too discreet to say. Am I correctly informed that you visited President Lincoln before you came here?”
“Yes, your excellency.” Lee concealed his surprise, and after a moment realized surprise was foolish. It was the business of the British minister to be well informed.
“May I enquire as to the results of that meeting?” Lord Lyons said. Lee briefly sketched the terms of the armistice agreement with Lincoln. Lord Lyons listened intently. When Lee was done, the minister gave a slow nod. “He has in effect, then, conceded the independence of the Confederacy.”
“In effect, yes. What choice had he, sir? Our armies have in the current campaigning season been uniformly victorious”
“This due in no small measure to the new repeaters with which you have equipped yourselves,” Lord Lyons interrupted. He could not hide the keen interest in his voice. Behind a calm exterior, Lee smiled. Everyone was keen to find out where those repeaters came from. He wondered what Lord Lyons would have made of the true answer. He remained unsure just what to make of it himself.
But that was by the way. “Yes, your excellency, with the aid of our new rifles, we have halted or driven back the Federals on all fronts—else I should not be here conversing with you. President Lincoln rightly recognized”—he chose the word with deliberation—”that it would be only a matter of time before we freed our territory and wisely chose to spare his soldiers the suffering they would have to undergo in struggles bound to be futile.”
“With these victories to which you refer, the Confederate States do seem to have retrieved their falling fortunes,” Lord Lyons said. “I have no reason to doubt that Her Majesty’s government will before long recognize that fact.”
“Thank you, your excellency,” Lee said quietly. Even had Lincoln refused to give up the war—not impossible, with the Mississippi valley and many coastal pockets held by virtue of Northern naval power and hence relatively secure from rebel AK-47s—recognition by the greatest empire on earth would have assured Confederate independence.
Lord Lyons held up a hand. “Many among our upper classes will be glad enough to welcome you to the family of nations, both as a result of your successful fight for self-government and because you have given a black eye to the often vulgar democracy of the United States. Others, however, will judge your republic a sham, with its freedom for white men based upon Negro slavery, a notion loathsome to the civilized world. I should be less than candid if I failed to number myself among the latter group.”
“Slavery was not the reason the Southern states chose to leave the Union,” Lee said. He was aware he sounded uncomfortable, but went on, “We sought only to enjoy the sovereignty guaranteed us under the Constitution, a right the North wrongly denied us. Our watchword all along has been, we wish but to be left alone.”
“And what sort of country shall you build upon that watchword, General?” Lord Lyons asked. “You cannot be left entirely alone; you are become, as I said, a member of the family ‘of nations. Further, this war has been hard on you. Much of your land has been ravaged or overrun, and, in those places where the Federal army has been, slavery lies dying. Shall you restore it there at the point of a bayonet? Gladstone said October before last, perhaps a bit prematurely, that your Jefferson Davis had made an army, the beginnings of a navy, and, more important than either, a nation. You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?”
Lee did not answer for most of a minute. This pudgy little man in his comfortable chair had put into a nutshell all of his own worries and fears. He’d had scant time to dwell on them, not with the war always uppermost in his thoughts. But the war had not invalidated any of the British minister’s questions—some of which Lincoln had also asked—only put off the time at which they would have to be answered. Now that time drew near. Now that the Confederacy was a nation, what sort of nation would it be?
At last he said, “Your excellency, at this precise instant I cannot fully answer you, save to say that, whatever sort of nation we become, it shall be one of our own choosing.”
It was a good answer. Lord Lyons nodded, as if in thoughtful approval. Then Lee remembered the Rivington men. They too had their ideas on what the Confederate States of America should become.
* VIII *
Mollie Bean’s eyes flashed when she saw Caudell. “You hear the latest of what that rascal Forrest done?”
“No. Tell me,” he said eagerly. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s exploits were usually worth hearing, and Mollie, being who she was, usually—as now—found out about them before most people.
She said, “When the telegraph for the armistice got to him, he made like it never did, and took his boys hell-for-leather up into Tennessee—wrecked a big long stretch of the railroad that was feedin’ General Sherman’s army. Some o’ them bluecoats is nearly starvin’, I hear tell.”
“After this past winter, I know more about starving than those Yankees are ever likely to,” Caudell said. “But what did Lincoln and the other Federal bigwigs have to say about him breaking the armistice that way?”