Davis tried to make light of what he’d said: “Don’t tell me you are turning abolitionist, sir?”
“That is not a word to use lightly to a Southern man, Mr. President,” Lee said, biting his lip. Thinking of General Cleburne’s memorial that had urged the arming and emancipation of certain black men, and also of General Hill’s loathing of the institution of slavery, he felt he had to add, “If I were, I should hardly be the only Confederate officer to hold such sentiments.” Davis’s mouth twisted, but after a few seconds he had to nod.
Judah Benjamin sighed loudly. “We left the United States not least in the hope that the Negro problem would vex us no further once we were free and independent. And yet we have it with us still, and now no one to blame for it but ourselves—and the Negro, of course.” That gnomic observation effectively ended the meeting.
* X *
When Lee returned to the rented house on Franklin Street that evening, he was in a dark and thoughtful mood. The sight of the black serving woman, Julia, who opened the door for him did nothing to ease his mind. “Evenin’, Marse Robert.’ she said, “Yo’ wife and daughters, they already eat—they don’ expec’ you be so late. Plenty o’ chicken ‘n’ dumplings left over, though.”
“Thank you, Julia.” He stepped into the front hall, took off his hat, hung it on the hat rack. Then, after taking a couple of steps toward the dining room, he paused and turned back.
“Somethin’ wrong, Marse Robert?” Julia asked. The candle she held highlighted the frown lines on her face. She said quickly, “Hope I ain’t done nothin’ to displease you.”
He hastened to reassure her: “No, Julia, not at all.” But he still did not go in to have supper. When he spoke again, he was as cautious as he had been while addressing President Davis: “Julia, have you ever thought you would like to be free?”
The candlelight, with its exaggerated shadows, played up her shift of expression, or rather her shift to the lack of expression slaves used to conceal themselves from their masters. “Reckon everybody—everybody colored, I mean—think about that now and again, suh.” Her voice likewise yielded him nothing.
He persisted: “What would you do if you were free?”
“Don’t rightly know what I could do, Marse Robert. Don’t have much book learnin’. Much? Don’t have none.” Julia kept studying Lee from behind the cautious mask her face wore. She must have decided he meant what he said, for after a moment she went on, “Wouldn’t mind findin’ out what free was like, I tell you that, suh.”
“I thought as much.” It was the answer Lee would have given, were he in Julia’s shoes; it was, he thought, the answer anyone with spirit, black or white, man or woman, would give. “If you were free, would you be willing to stay on here with my family and work for wages?”
“That’s what I got to do to be free, that’s what I do,” Julia answered at once.
Lee saw he had made a mistake. “No, no, Julia, you misunderstand. I aim to free you, and will whether you say yes or no. But as you have no other situation, I wanted you to know you could continue to find employment in this house.”
“God bless you, Marse Robert.” The candle flame reflected from the tears in Julia’s eyes. Then, as the reality of what he’d promised sank in, she began to think aloud: “If I be free soon, maybe I learn to read. Who knows what I do, if I be free?”
Learning their letters was against the law for blacks in Virginia, as it was in most of the Confederate States. Lee forbore to mention that. For one thing, the law was observed less rigidly for free Negroes than for slaves. For another, Julia’s desire to learn bespoke the sort of drive she would need as a freedwoman. What he did say was a commonplace: “I gather my ladies are still in the dining room?”
“Yes, suh, Marse Robert. I go tell them you here.” Julia turned and fairly raced toward the back part of the house, her shoes clattering against the oak floorboards. Lee followed more slowly.
His wife and daughters were chatting around the dining room table when he came in. Julia had already hurried in and then out past him once more. Mischief in her voice, his youngest daughter Mildred said, “Good heavens, Father, what did you tell her: that you’d sell her South if she didn’t move quicker?” His daughter Mary and his wife smiled. Agnes did not, but then Agnes seldom smiled.
Normally, Lee would also have smiled; he had trouble imagining the enormity Julia would have to commit to make him even imagine selling her South. Good servants who worked for good masters—which, without false modesty, he knew himself to be—did not have to worry about such things. But that the joke could be made at all spoke volumes about the institution of slavery.
Now he answered seriously, “Precious life, I told her I intended to free her.”
Like her daughters, Mary Custis Lee stared at him. “Did you?” she said. Her voice was sharp, and with some reason. The money to buy Julia had been hers, income from the estates currently in such disarray. Before the war, that income had been vastly more than his own. Moreover, in her invalid state she required near constant care.
“Why on earth did you decide to do that, Father?” Mary Lee echoed her mother.
“What shall I do without her?” Mary Custis Lee added.
Lee chose to respond to his daughter’s question first: “Because, my dear, I have seen that, try as we may, we cannot escape the conclusion that the day for slavery is past. We fought our great war for independence just completed so that our states could govern themselves as they thought best. And we have won it, and so brook no interference in our institutions from the North or Washington City. Well enough. But the world beyond our borders has not ceased to be, nor to despise us, despite that independence.” He mentioned Lord Russell’s remark to James Mason.
His eldest daughter bristled. “If Washington has no business meddling in our affairs, still less does England.”
“That may be so. Yet when virtually all the world abhors one’s practices, one has to wonder at the propriety of those practices. And the bravery the Northern colored troops displayed made me wonder at the justice of continuing to hold their race in bondage. But the final straw for me is the struggle the former Yankee Negro regiments of Louisiana and the other states of the Mississippi valley continue to wage against General Forrest.”
“But Father, so many people think Forrest a hero for putting those black men down,” Agnes said.
“Let them think so who will. But the Negroes still under arms in Mississippi and Louisiana must surely know their cause is doomed: General Forrest is a most able commander and has behind him the full weight of the Confederacy. Yet the Negroes continue to fight—as would I, in their place. To show such spirit, they must be men like any others, from which it can only follow that enslaving whites were as proper as doing so to blacks.”
“No one would uphold that proposition,” Mary Lee said.
“This is all very pretty and all very logical, Robert, but who shall care for me if Julia is set at liberty?” Mary Custis Lee said.
“I expect she will, but for wages,” he answered. “Perry has served me so for years.”
His wife sniffed, but said, “If your mind is quite made up—”
“It is,” he said firmly. “I do not presume to judge others, but I find I cannot in good conscience continue to own human beings who, I am become convinced, are inferior to me by circumstance alone, rather than by birth.”
“Very well.” Mary Custis Lee surprised him with a smile. “My father would have approved.”
“I suppose he would.” Lee reflected that his father-in-law had enjoyed the services of a couple of hundred slaves while alive and emancipated them only in his will, when he could make use of them no more. It was magnanimity of a sort, but to Lee’s mind not enough.