Two more whites at the hotel manhandled the luggage into the lobby. Lee watched them with more than a little curiosity; in a Southern town, he would have expected slaves to do the hauling. The driver noticed his repeated glances. “Ain’t many niggers left hereabouts,” he said. “Most of’ em went north with the Yankees when they pulled out, and the ones that’s left, they’re still actin‘ like they was free—eeemancipated, they calls it, an, they won’t work less’n you pay ‘em. A lot of folks, they’d sooner give cash money to whites.”
“You haven’t tried forcing them back into bondage?” Marshall asked. He’d accompanied Lee because, being a lawyer, he was the most politically astute of the general’s aides.
“A couple men what tried that, they ended up dead, and their niggers run off to join the bandits in the hills,” the driver answered morosely. “Makes some folks reckon it’s more trouble’n it’s worth, less’n Hit-’em-Again Forrest’s got his army in town.”
“Once a man has been some while free, it’s hard to take that from him again, even with an army at one’s back,” Lee said. The driver gave him an odd look but finally decided to nod.
From Chattanooga, the railroad crossed the Tennessee River at Bridgeport and swung down briefly into Alabama. At Stevenson, Lee and Marshall switched to a Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad train for the trip northwest to the capital of Tennessee. The farther north and west they got, the longer the land had lain under Federal hands…and the fewer Negroes they saw. Lee wondered how many lurked in the bare-branched forests, clutching Springfields and wondering if this particular train was worth attacking.
Sometimes, when the train would stop at a town, Lee got off and walked about for a few minutes. Whenever he did, men in worn coats of gray or butternut came up to shake his hand or just to stare at him. It made him uneasy. He wondered how politicians so easily went out to press their constituents’ flesh. Then he wondered how, if the Confederate Presidency came his way, he would manage himself.
From Nashville’s station and train shed—which, by contrast to Chattanooga’s, were solid and square, with crenelated walls and with towers at each corner—he rode north into Kentucky. The Stars and Stripes still flew there, not the Stainless Banner. Kentucky’s own blue flag was also prominently displayed, as if to show that the people there thought of their own homes first, ahead of both nations competing for their allegiance. To Lee, who had chosen Virginia over the United States, that was as it should be.
Men in pieces of Confederate uniform still came to see him at every stop. But so did men who wore blue coats: Kentucky’s sons had fought on both sides in the war, more of them, in fact, for the Union than the Confederacy (the North, after all, had held the state through almost the whole of the war). The Federals seemed as curious about him as did their brothers and cousins who had fought for the South.
“You rebs gonna invade us again if we vote to stay in the U.S. of A?” a fellow wearing corporal’s stripes on a blue coat asked at Bowling Green, where Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston had made his headquarters back in the days when the war was young.
Lee shook his head; he tried to put Albert Sidney Johnston, killed at Shiloh, out of his mind. “No, sir, we shall not: we intend to abide by the results of that vote, whatever it may be, so long as it be free and fair.”
“Reckon you can’t say plainer’n that,” the ex-corporal remarked. “I heard tell you was a devil of a fightin’ man, but I never heard you was a liar.”
At Munfordsville, another thirty or forty miles up the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, two groups of former soldiers, one in gray, the other wearing blue, approached Lee at the same time. They glared at each other. Some of them carried pistols on their belts; they all wore knives. Lee was about to turn and go back into his coach, in the hope that that would end the confrontation. Then one of the bluecoats surprised him by starting to laugh.
“Tell us all what amuses you, sir,” Lee said cordially, including himself, the veterans in gray, and the other ex-Federals with a broad wave.
The Union man carried himself like a young officer. He spoke like one, too: “I just happened to remember our lovely state’s motto, General Lee.”
“Which is?” Lee asked, wondering what a motto could have to do with anything.
Then, with relish, the bluecoat quoted it: “‘United we stand, divided we fall.’” He waved too, encompassing the rival groups at the train station and, by extension, all the disunited groups in a most disunited state.
Lee laughed, loud and long. The ex-Confederates followed his lead, as he’d thought they might. Then the men who had fought for the North laughed, too. After that, whatever trouble there might have been evaporated. He chatted with both groups until it was time for the train to pullout. Then, as he turned to leave, he said, “See, here you are, my friends—fraternizing again.”
The men chuckled. One of them, a lean, muscular fellow in ragged butternut, said, “You officers wasn’t supposed to know about that.”
“Oh, we did,” said the former Federal who’d known about Kentucky’s motto, thus confirming Lee’s impression of him. He added,” Sometimes we knew when to look the other way, too,” which drew more chuckles.
“If we fraternized even in the midst of war, as we did, surely we shall contrive to get along with one another now that peace is here,” Lee said. Without waiting for an answer, he returned to the train. As it jerked into motion, he looked out the window at the men who had so recently fought each other. They went on talking together, amiably enough. Lee took that to be a good omen.
Louisville, on the southern bank of the Ohio, was a big city. Before the war, it had held 68,000 people to Richmond’s 38,000, though becoming a national capital was swelling the latter town these days. As Lee got down from the train, a man jumped in front of him, pencil and notebook poised. “Fred Darby, Louisville Journal, General Lee,” the fellow said rapidly. “How does it feel, sir, to enter a town Confederate armies never succeeded in reaching?”
“I am not here as a conqueror,” Lee said. “That the United States and Confederate States went to war once was disastrous; a second conflict would be catastrophic. Rather than fight again, the two nations have agreed the justest course is to let the citizens of Kentucky and Missouri choose which nation they prefer. My role here, like General Grant’s, is to serve as an arbiter of that process, to ensure that it takes place without coercion of any sort.”
“What do you think Kentucky ought to do with its niggers, General?” Darby said.
That question again, Lee thought. Wherever he went, it went with him. “That is for your people to decide,” he answered. “Negroes may be either slave or free in both the U.S.A. and the C.S.A.”
“We’d have to be a slave state if we voted for the South, wouldn’t we?”
“So the Confederate Constitution states, yes,” Lee admitted reluctantly.
“Does that mean the niggers who were freed here during the war—and there were a lot of ‘em—would have to go back to being slaves?” the reporter asked.
“By no means,” Lee said, firmly this time. “Again, barring legislation from Richmond”—he thought of Congressman Oldham—”that would be a matter for your own legislature. As I am sure you are aware”—though sure of no such thing, he was unfailingly polite—”there are free Negroes in every state of the Confederacy, many thousands of them in some states.”
Darby scribbled in his notebook. “General Lee, let me also ask you—”