“Perhaps you will do me the honor of explaining why you have chosen to run wild through the streets of Richmond,” Lee said with ironic courtesy.
The smith flushed, but answered readily enough: “To teach this here nigger a lesson, that’s why. He works so cheap, he takes my customers away. How’s a white man supposed to make a living if he has to work alongside niggers?”
Two or three other blacksmiths growled agreement. So did the day laborers, the policeman, and several members of the crowd that was rapidly gathering to watch the proceedings. The only black face to be seen was that of the fellow the smith was sitting on. “Let him up,” Lee said impatiently. When the smith did, Lee asked the Negro, “What have you to say for yourself?”
“I’se a free man, suh. I done bought myself out jus’ befo’ the war start, spend all my time since down to the Tredegar Iron Works, doin’ what smifs do. Since the shootin’ stop, things get right slow there, an’ they don’ give me ‘nough work to keep busy, so I set up fo’ my own self. Jus’ tryin’ to git along, suh, that’s all I do.”
“Are you willing to work for less than these men here?” Lee asked.
The Negro smith shrugged. “Don’ need much—jus’ tryin’ to git along, like I said.” He showed a flash of spirit: “’Sides, if’n I charge as much as they do, they call me an uppity nigger, say I’s actin’ like I’s as good as they is. That’s how things be, suh.”
Lee knew that was how things were. He turned to the smiths who had tackled the Negro. “Is what this man says true? He’s done you no harm, he aided his country—and yours—all through the war, and you seek to take the law into your own hands against him?”
“Reckon what he says is true enough.” The white man looked down at his feet so he would not have to face Lee’s wrath. But he stubbornly went on, “Who says he’s done me no harm? He’s stealing my livelihood, goddam it. I got my own family to feed. Am I supposed to drop down to nigger wages myself to stay even with this black bastard? Don’t seem right nor fair to me.”
“When has General Lee ever had to worry about what’s fair or right for ordinary whites?” The Rivington man’s half-British, half-harsh accent was as out of place on the Richmond street as his mottled clothes, but he seemed to speak for many in the crowd: “He has more houses, has more land, than he knows what to do with. Not for the likes of him to worry about a kaff—nigger—taking his work away. So where does he get the right to stand up on the mountaintop and tell us we can do nothing about it?”
“That’s the truth, by God,” someone said. “So it is,” somebody else echoed.
What Lee had were more debts and obligations than he knew what to do with. Nobody here would care to listen to that, though, or believe it if he heard it. The Rivington man knew how to swing folk his way, and went about it ruthlessly—no one native to Richmond would have attacked Lee head-on as he did.
Lee knew he had to reply at once, or lose the authority his position brought him: this would be closer to the rough and tumble of the battlefield than to his polite if sometimes savage exchanges with the Federal commissioners. He said, “Poor men have more to fear when the laws go down than the rich, for they are less able to protect themselves without law. You had all better shiver when you see a policeman rioting rather than putting down a riot, for he may well come after you next, or stand aside when someone else does.”
The policeman, a great many eyes suddenly upon him, did his best to sink into the dirt of Franklin Street. Lee continued, “No one, not even the men pursuing him, claims this Negro broke any law or, in fact, did anything wrong. Will they come after you next, sir, if they don’t care for your prices?” He startled a man in the crowd by pointing at him. “Or you? Or you?” He pointed twice more, got no reply.
The Rivington man started to say something. Lee interrupted him, glaring at the men in Confederate gray: “Your comrades gave their lives, and gave them gladly, so we could live under laws of our own choosing. Do you choose now to live without law altogether? I should sooner have surrendered to Abraham Lincoln and lived under Washington City’s rule than subject myself to no rule at all. You make me ashamed to call myself a Virginian and a Southerner.”
His troops had always feared his displeasure more than any Minié ball. One of the former soldiers choked out, “Sorry, Marse Robert.” Another simply turned on his heel and walked away, which seemed to be a signal for the whole crowd to start dispersing.
The Rivington man, still uncowed, said, “I never thought anyone who called himself a Virginian and a Southerner would take the black man’s part over the white’s. People will hear of this, General Lee.”
I shall make sure people hear of this, was what he meant. “Say what you will, sir,” Lee answered. “Being without ambition for any post other than the one I presently hold” —which was true and more than true, no matter what Jefferson Davis had in mind for him—”I fear no lies, while the truth will only do me credit.”
The Rivington man stamped away without replying. The soles of his heavy boots left chevroned patterns in the street. Lee had noticed that before. Absently, he wondered how such gripping soles were made; they were plainly superior to smooth leather or wood. One more trick from the future, he thought. He rather wished the future had been content to take care of itself and leave his own time alone. Wishing did no good. He flicked Traveller’s reins and rode on.
Custis Lee tossed a copy of the Richmond Sentinel on his father’s desk. “What’s all this in aid of?” he asked, pointing to a story most of the way down the right-hand column of the front page. “By the way it reads, you rode with John Brown instead of bringing him to justice.”
“Let me see, my dearboy.” Lee bent close to read the small, sometimes smeared type. When he was finished, he broke out laughing. “From this alone, any man would think me worse than a radical Republican, wouldn’t he? But since people know perfectly well that I am no such creature, I trust they shall not judge me by this alone.”
“I would hope not,” Custis agreed. “But what gave rise to such a—curiosity, shall I say?—in the first place? Something must have, I suppose, besides a reporter’s malice.”
“Malice there was, but not a reporter’s.” Lee briefly explained the germ of truth behind the Sentinel story.
“I didn’t think you’d say Lincoln would have made the Southern Confederacy a better president than Jeff Davis,” his son remarked. “It doesn’t sound like you, somehow.” He laughed too, at the size of his own understatement.
“It doesn’t much, does it? The Rivington man who gave the Sentinel the story laid things on far too thick for anyone of sense to take the piece seriously.” But Lee’s laughter soon dried up. “Had the Rivington man not been present, the affair would have gone unreported, as indeed it should have. For that matter, I wonder if he did not instigate the whole affair. He tried his utmost, to incite the crowd against the free nigger, and against me for taking the poor wretch’s part. It is not the first disagreement on the subject I have had with the men of America Will Break.”
Custis Lee also grew serious. His features, fleshier than his father’s, were well suited to sober consideration. He said, “They are dangerous enemies to have. I’ve watched them ever more closely since you set me the task this past February. For one thing, they spend gold freely, and in a nation as strapped for specie as is ours, that alone grants them influence disproportionate to their numbers.”