Lee drew from an inside coat pocket a folded sheet of paper which he presented to Seward. “I have taken the liberty of doing so in advance of your gracious acceptance.”
“Er—yes. Of course.” Seeming faintly nonplused, Seward skimmed the paper to make sure it was what Lee had said it was, then nodded and leaned sideways to store it in the carpetbag that sat to the left of his chair.
As he did so, Alexander Stephens put in, “General Lee is too courteous a gentleman to ask you to consider whether you find this proposition of his preferable to the prospect of renewed conflict against repeating rifles, but I would have you remember that possibility and the, from your perspective, unfortunate results of the last such series of meetings.”
“Those results are seldom far from our thoughts, I assure you,” Seward said icily. Stanton ground his teeth. The sound was quite audible. Lee had heard of such a thing, but never before actually heard the thing itself: yet another surprise, if but a tiny one, in a year filled with marvels.
But Ben Butler said, “If you Southerners were so hot to return to the fray, Mr. Vice President, you would have dispensed with these polite conversations and fired your terms at us from the barrel of a gun. As you choose to do otherwise, I will thank you to follow the example of your courteous general and refrain from such threats henceforward.”
Butler was so distinctly homely as to be a caricaturist’s dream; so, in an utterly different way, was his master, Abraham Lincoln. Lee found him thoroughly repulsive. To say he was corrupt weakened the word, though somehow he’d kept anyone from proving he had sticky palms. He made a laughable soldier. But in a battle of wits, he was far from unarmed. And he visibly heartened his fellow commissioners as they took their leave of Benjamin, Stephens, and Lee.
“Now we wait,” Lee said. Having waited for the precise instant so often in the field, having waited for the right day on which to present his proposal, he remained prepared once more to quench his iron will in the tempering bath of patience.
Judah Benjamin said, “With the Federals all factions, Lincoln may find himself too distracted to give us a sensible reply any time soon. Last I heard, McClellan was calling for an invasion of the Canadas, presumably to acquire for the United States territory to recompense them for that which they lost on our achieving independence.”
“The invasion might well succeed, too, with any general save McClellan at its head,” Stephens said.
The three Confederate commissioners laughed, none too kindly. Benjamin said, “Better than any soldier since Quintus Fabius Maximus, he deserves the title Cunctator, but Fabius’ delaying tactics served his own state, while those of McClellan aided only us.”
Lee was by nature charitable. Here his charity stretched no farther than silence, for Benjamin spoke manifest truth. A vigorously conducted campaign up the Peninsula might well have resulted in the fall of Richmond two years before the Rivington men arrived with their AK-47s. For that matter, a vigorously conducted Union assault at Sharpsburg later in 1862 almost surely would have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia. But in matters military, the words vigorous and McClellan did not belong in the same sentence.
“Curious how he’s still a hero to so many Northern soldiers,” Stephens remarked.
“Well, why not?” Benjamin said. “Their war failed to give them a true hero. We were more fortunate.” He was looking straight at Lee.
For his part, Lee looked down at the elaborate floral pattern of the carpet. He had always known respect from within the military community and in the late war had done his best to continue to earn that respect. He had never anticipated the wider admiration that had come his way, admiration which led Jefferson Davis to urge him to run for President, admiration which made a worldly sophisticate like Judah P. Benjamin call him hero without apparent irony. He still did not know what to make of such admiration. The mention of Fabius reminded him of the practice, during a Roman triumph, of having a man stand beside the officer being honored and whisper, “Remember, you are mortal.” The Romans had been a solidly practical people.
He needed no outside reminders of his own mortality. The pain in his chest that sometimes came when he exerted himself too strenuously told him all he needed to know. The white pills from the Rivington men helped keep him in the field, but against the years everyone campaigned in vain.
He rose, bade his colleagues farewell, went downstairs and out into the street. To his relief, the constant steambath heat of summer was beginning to ease. A colored attendant, seeing him emerge, dashed away to the nearby stables and soon returned with Traveller. “Here you is, Marse Robert.”
“Thank you, Lysander,” Lee said. The slave grinned widely at having his name recalled; he, of course, had no way to know such recall was but one of the thousand small tricks by which an officer won his men to him. It was, Lee had heard, also a politician’s trick. The thought vaguely disturbed him. He did not care to become a politician. Yet if that became his duty… Swinging up onto Traveller swept away such profitless musing. He rode west, toward the rented house in which he was living.
Traffic remained busy, but without its wartime urgency. Fewer soldiers, fewer rumbling supply wagons crowded the streets. Ladies had room to stroll without putting their hoop skirts in danger of being crumpled. Gentlemen had the leisure to stop and admire the ladies and to tip hats to them as they passed. Lee smiled, both at the byplay he watched and at the way of life a Confederate victory had preserved. Something precious would have gone out of the world had the South lost.
Angry shouts, the pound of running feet, a yell with words to it: “Get the filthy nigger!” A shabbily dressed black man dashed across Franklin from Eighth Street, almost in front of Traveller’s nose. The horse snorted and reared. Lee had hardly begun to fight him back under control when at least a dozen whites, many waving clubs, came pounding after the Negro.
Nothing will anger a professional soldier faster than the sight of a mob, raw force turned loose on the world without discipline. “Halt!” Lee shouted, tossing his head in a perfect fury of rage. Two of the white men at the head of the baying pack wore pieces of Confederate uniform. The abrupt command and the tone in which it was given brought them up short. Others tumbled into them. But at the very front, a fellow in the overalls and leather apron of a blacksmith brought down the Negro with a flying tackle. Even he, though, did not hit the black man with the hammer he carried in his right hand.
“What-in-God’s-name-is-going-on-here?” Lee demanded, biting off the words one by one. He glared at the men before him. Now they looked sheepish rather than vicious. Several, like the one who had tackled the Negro, were smiths; others, by their clothes, day laborers who hadn’t labored many days lately. But one was a policeman and another, Lee saw with a touch of disquiet, wore the mottled tunic and trousers of the Rivington men. That fellow set hands on hips and insolently stared back at Lee.
Ignoring him for the moment, Lee asked the policeman, “You, sir, were you seeking to quell this unseemly disturbance?”
From the ground, the Negro answered before the policeman could: “He weren’t doin’ no such thing, suh! He leadin’ ‘em on.”
“You deserve everything you’ll get, you—” The white man sitting on the black raised his hammer, as if to strike. Then he met Lee’s eyes. The sword Lee carried was a purely ceremonial side arm, part of his dress uniform; one blow from that hammer would have snapped it in two. In any case, the sword stayed in its sheath. But Lee’s presence was a stronger weapon than any sword. The smith lowered the hammer as carefully as if it were a fused shell.