Lee also stood, shook hands with Grant. He said, “Kentucky was not ‘wrenched’; it went of its own free will.”
“Small consolation,” Grant said, and left the table. Instead of going upstairs to his room, he walked over to the bar and began to drink. Though he had stayed sober until the day of the election, he was still on his bar stool when Lee went upstairs, and still on it, drunk, asleep, when Lee came down for breakfast the next morning.
“Shall I wake him?” Charles Marshall asked, eyeing Grant’s slumped form with distaste.
“Let him be, Major,” Lee said. Marshall gave him a curious look. He almost added, There but for the grace of God go I, but at the last moment kept silent. Not for the first time, he wondered how his life would have gone after a surrender at Richmond. Not well, he suspected: who would care about the high general of the losing side?
George McClellan should have considered that before he ran his bootless race for President, Lee thought. But then, McClellan’s timing was generally bad. His own humor quite re.: stored by that snide thought, Lee sat down to wait for a breakfast menu.
* XII *
The summer sun beat down on Nashville’s main square. The maples that grew along Washington and Alston streets gave some shade, but could do nothing to cut the heat or the oppressive humidity. When a buggy rattled west down Washington, it kicked up so much dust that it reminded Nate Caudell of his marching days in the army. But despite the beastly weather, a good-sized crowd had assembled in front of the Nash County courthouse.
“What’s going on?” Caudell asked a man who looked about to melt in frock coat, vest, cravat, and stovepipe.
“The nigger auction starts at noon,” the fellow answered.
“Is that today?” Caudell, who could no more afford a slave than he could a private railroad coach and a locomotive to haul it, skirted the edges of the gathering and started into Raeford Liles’s general store. The front door was locked. Caudell scratched his head—but for Sunday, Liles never closed the place. Then he saw the storekeeper among the men waiting for the auction to start. Liles was serious about wanting a servant, then.
Caudell recognized several other potential buyers, among them George Lewis; his former captain had been elected to the state legislature, and lately spent more time down in Raleigh than in Nash County. Lewis saw Caudell, too, and waved to him. Caudell waved back. He had to check himself from coming to attention and saluting.
But the crowd held a good many strangers; too. Caudell heard the soft accents of Alabama and Mississippi, while a couple of men spoke with a Texas twang he remembered from the army. His ears also caught another accent, one that made his head whip around. Sure enough, there stood three Rivington men, talking among themselves. Despite the coming of peace, they still preferred the splotched, muddy-looking clothes they’d worn in camp and into battle. They looked more comfortable in them than most of the Southern gentlemen did in their more formal attire.
The courthouse clock struck twelve. Men with watches took them out to check them against the clock. A minute or so later, the bells of the Baptist church announced the coming of noon. After another brief delay, the bells of the Methodist church, which was farther down Alston Street, also declared the hour. Caudell wondered which clock was right, and whether anyone of them was. It didn’t really matter, not to him; who but a railroad man like Henry Pleasants needed to know the time exact to the minute?
Despite its announced starting time, the slave auction showed no sign of getting under way, By the way they chatted and smoked and dipped snuff, few of the would-be buyers had expected that it would. But the Rivington men began to fidget. One of them pointedly looked at his wrist—Caudell saw he wore a tiny watch there, held on with a leather strap. A few minutes later, the Rivington man looked at his wristwatch again. When nothing happened after a third such irritated glance, the man shouted, “What the bleeding hell are we waiting for?”
His impatience set off the crowd like a percussion cap igniting the charge of a Springfield cartridge. In an instant, a dozen men were yelling for things to get moving. If he’d kept quiet, they likely would have stood around another hour without complaining.
A man in a suit of exaggeratedly dandyish cut hurried out of the courthouse and sprang up onto the platform that had been hastily built in front of it. Pausing only to spit tobacco juice into the dust, he said, “We’ll commence shortly, gentlemen, I promise. And when you see the fine niggers Josiah A. Beard has to sell”—he preened slightly, to show one and all he was the Josiah A. Beard in question—”you’ll be glad you waited, I promise you will.” His broad, beaming face radiated candor. Caudell distrusted him on sight.
He kept up a bright stream of talk for another few minutes. The Rivington men quickly started looking impatient again. Before they started a new round of shouts, though, a black man came out of the courthouse and up to stand beside Josiah Beard. The auctioneer said, “Here we are, gentlemen, the first on the list, a fine field hand and laborer, a Negro named Columbus, aged thirty-two years.”
“Let’s see him,” one of the Texas men called.
Beard turned to Columbus. “Strip off,” he said curtly. The black man pulled his coarse cotton shirt over his head, stepped out of his trousers. “Turn around,” the auctioneer told him. Columbus obeyed. Beard raised his voice, spoke to the audience: “Now you see him. Not a mark on his back, as you’ll note for yourselves. He’s tractable as well as willing. He’s a genuine cotton nigger, by God! Look at his toes, at his fingers. Look at those legs! If you have got the right soil, buy him and put your trust in Providence, my friends. He’s as good for ten bales as I am for a julep at eleven o’clock. So what am I bid for this fine buck nigger?”
The bidding started at five hundred dollars and rose rapidly. The Texas man who’d asked to see all of Columbus ended up buying him for $1,450. Even with prices still high, that was a goodly sum, but he seemed unperturbed. “I could sell him in Houston tomorrow and make four hundred back,” he declared to anyone who cared to listen. “Niggers is still mighty dear anywheres in the trans-Mississippi.”
Another black mounted to the stand. “Second on the list,” Beard said.” An excellent field hand and laborer, gentlemen, named Dock, a Negro aged twenty-six years.” Without waiting for a customer’s request, he added,” Strip off, Dock.”
“Yassuh.” Dock’s Negro patois was thick as molasses. He shed his shirt and trousers, turned before he was told to do so. His back, like Columbus’s, had never known the lash, but an ugly scar seamed the inside of his left thigh, about six inches below his genitals.
Josiah Beard once more started to extol the slave’s docility. Before he was well begun, George Lewis called, “Hold on, there! You, boy! Where did you get that bullet wound?”
Dock’s head lifted. He looked straight at Lewis. “Got this heah outside o’ Water Proof, Louziana, las’ yeah, f’um dat Bedford Forrest. He done cotched me, but my three frens, they gits away.”
The auctioneer did his best to pretend Dock had never been a soldier in arms against the Confederacy. Bidding was slow all the same, and petered out just past eight hundred dollars. One of the Rivington men bought the slave. He paid gold, which did a little to restore Josiah Beard’s spirits.
As Dock came down from the platform toward him, the Rivington man told him, “You do your work and we’ll get on fine, boy. Just don’t put on airs because you used to carry a rifle. I can lick you any way you name: bare hands, axes, whips, guns, any way at all. Any time you want to try, you tell me, but you have your grave picked out beforehand. Do you understand me?”