Confederates (36 page)

‘We're Stuart's boys. But the whole goddam Stonewall army is just up the Bristoe Road.'

Pinder thought about this. It didn't sound to him like the work of humans. ‘What kind of man is your Stonewall Jackson?' he asked in the end. ‘Are his soldiers made of gutta-percha or do they run on goddam wheels?'

The conversation didn't develop, for a train whistle sounded to the south, and soon on a far bend a freight train could be seen. The Federal garrison were locked up in the schoolhouse, and already the Louisiana infantry had arrived at the railroad depot, and had gone a little way south and started piling ties on the rails to halt the engine, while others were trying to tear the rails loose. But the train came barging down on them. They could see
Train No. 6
painted above its cowcatcher. The driver, a Union soldier likely, or else a Virginian with a Union soldier standing over him, opened the throttle as the little depot house of Bristoe Station showed itself. The ties on the track were scattered by the wheels of the engine and
Train No. 6
took in a high freight of bullets. Yet none of them made it pause, and soon its caboose was a small dot, carrying news North.

Now, anyhow, the Louisianans had time to lever out a stretch of track on an embankment just some 300 paces south of the depot. In the twilight a freight train and twenty empty wagons, having run a cargo shuttle to Pope's forces on the Rappahannock, came to the embankment at speed, not intending to stop at the station, and went plunging down the bank, and there were suddenly hundreds of butternut spectators about, waving their hats and yelling like the worst savages, as the engine and the cars lay on their side and the engine hissed. The engineers and their guards crawled out, holding bloody foreheads or cracked knees or elbows.

Then, at first dark, a second engine and further empties clattered up, returning to Alexandria for loading. This one flew off the embankment into the wreckage of the first. The Louisiana boys were chortling and cheering and looking at the wreckage as if it were a work of art.

A little later the last train of the evening came steaming along but paused on the bend before the embankment. By then there were bonfires and the sound of whisky yells all round the wreckage of the two big trains, and this last engineer didn't have to be very canny to know that there was something uncustomary going on in Bristoe Station. He backed off at some thirty miles an hour.

So the word of the capture of Bristoe went north towards Manassas and south towards Warrenton, but General Forno didn't much worry about that. He thought it would be misread, and events would prove him right. When the reports got to Pope about the firing on
Engine No. 6
and the withdrawal of the last engine of the night, he wrote it off to another nuisance raid by Stuart, and Secretary of War Stanton in Washington took the same view.

What they neither knew nor would have believed was that Tom Jackson was just six miles up the Bristoe Road, sleeping in a farmhouse, in a cane-bottomed chair, waiting for boys like Bumpass and Ramseur to catch him up on the downhill grade from Thoroughfare Gap. That the authority of Tom Jackson was there, two days after leaving the Rappahannock, at the end of 54 miles of marching, and thirteen miles behind Pope's headquarters, and straddling his railroad link!

Dark had barely fallen, yet at that headquarters of Jackson's everyone but the sentries was studiously sleeping. Sandie Pendleton's long shape was stretched on a blanket in the hall of the farmhouse and a young cavalry officer called Blackford lay parallel to him. Kyd dozed in a swinging seat on the porch. His bones were tired but his brain was racing with the possibilities of what they had done these past few days. So his snooze was full of images – he was for example addressing Lincoln's cabinet. His speech was very reasonable and they said such things as, ‘Well, when you put it like that, Captain Douglas, your stance seems entirely reasonable.…'

At 9.30 a cavalry officer woke him from dreams of reconciliation and Washington. After he had listened to the man, Kyd wandered into the hall, tripped over Sandie's ankles and woke him as well. ‘Sandie,' Kyd Douglas whispered, ‘that General Holmes didn't put a picket at Manassas crossroads. The two following brigades took the wrong turn. They're headed off north.'

‘Then send a rider after them,' Sandie told him, pretty peevishly.

‘A rider's been sent but …' He nodded to the shape in the cane chair up the hall. ‘… he said to tell him about any units lost or misdirected.'

Sandie grunted and went up the hall and touched Stonewall's shoulder. The General woke with the gentle suddenness of a lizard.

‘Sir, General Holmes in Hill's division failed to post a picket at Manassas crossroads as ordered. Two following brigades took the wrong turn and are headed off north.'

Stonewall said, like a judge passing sentence, ‘Send the cavalry after them.'

‘It's been done, sir.'

‘And put Holmes under arrest and prefer charges.'

‘As you say, sir.'

Then, seemingly hugging his authority to himself, Tom Jackson went back to sleep.

The authority of Tom Jackson, in innocence of which Pope slept the night in a hotel in Warrenton! Johnny Pope, military engineer by trade, lying on his side, his face pointed to the perfidious South. Before sleeping though he ordered General Heintzelman to send a regiment up to Bristoe Station and look at the problem. He thought it was only a regiment-sized problem.

26

Way back on the Rappahannock that evening, the Honourable Horace Searcy sat on the porch of a house just a mile or so up the road from farmer Tilley's place. He was watching what went on beyond the gate – which was that lean battalions were going past on the dirt road in their wide-awake hats. It was Daniel Hill's division of Longstreet's wing of the army and it was already drawing away from the river, quietly, without singing or bands or any yelling. It had left its fires burning.

You could be sure that their drift off to the west was unknown to the army of the Northern Republic, who had spent a drowsy afternoon over there, stretched out round Sulphur Springs and eastwards towards the railway.

Watching this quiet movement of whole brigades with Searcy was his host, a small, plump farmer of about fifty years, not at all like the angular men who were streaming past his gate. He leaned against a porch upright. ‘By hokey, they're heading away, clear out of it. I guess I'll have goddam Yankee cavalry at my front door by this time tomorrow evening.'

‘I don't know about that, sir,' Searcy told him reflectively. ‘I think you might perhaps go unmolested for a while.'

‘Unmolested? I would goddam hope so.'

Searcy could guess what was happening though he hadn't been told. He had learned much general military science in the Crimea and elsewhere and could tell a flank march made in some secrecy when he saw one. He argued with himself whether tonight he would ride down towards one of the fords in the Waterloo direction. If he could get across the river he should meet up with the U.S. cavalry vedettes at the western end of Pope's army and give the warning that Lee was making fools of them.

Even if he could flit across the river tonight, he had small chance of flitting back again, so that he could never expect accreditation to work in the South again. And in that case would not see Mrs Whipple until the war ended. Unlike Usaph Bumpass, Kyd Douglas, Tom Jackson and others, Horace Searcy did not expect the war to end by the autumn of 1862. He was not sure that it would be finished by Christmas of 1864. He did not want to wait two or more years for his next sight of plain but superb Dora Whipple.

He had little doubt that to inform Pope, a mediocre general, of the great flank march that was under way against him was worth sacrificing any journalistic privilege for. The question was whether he was willing to give up Mrs Whipple for the same chancy reason.

It wouldn't bean easy crossing if he tried it. You could be sure there was a strong Confederate picket line down on the river to shield this march which was going on. He would have to creep through that if he could. If he were a better swimmer he would travel on foot, but then he needed a horse in case he had to cross quickly, in a deep place with currents, and in case he was chased by cavalry.

He reflected how if any of these officers passing the gate knew his true opinion and the work he did for Secretary Stanton, they would certainly come up there on the porch, make a grand Southern speech, and shoot him in the head.

They would tell him before putting the bullet in him that he typified Britain in its hypocrisy, that Britain could never have abolished slavery if slavery had been internal to Britain. But slavery had always been
external
to it – had existed in the British colonies, in Africa, in Jamaica. It was easy to destroy and abolish something that was distant from you. What did it matter to Westminster if the economy of Jamaica was destroyed? Well, sah (they would say before shooting him), the economy of the South is not about to be destroyed to suit the hypocritic feelings of London or Washington. The Southern form of slavery, sah, is the best condition to which an African nigger could hope to aspire, sah! Bang, sah!

Searcy supposed that in Southern terms he deserved a bullet, for he had never felt as strong against anything since child labour as he did against the civilisation of the South.

When he first went South in the spring of '61, before the first shot had been fired by South Carolina against the Federal fortress called Sumter, he'd had a vague feeling against slavery but was willing to look on it as he felt an outsider should, as more the business of the Americans than any business for him. He started to get passionate about it with his first sighting of negro field slaves in the coastal lowlands of North Carolina. Their ragged shoeless condition made the house slaves in their mock-Georgian wigs and pantaloons seem even more like some sort of ridiculous human poodles.

Then, on the train from Savannah to Macon, Georgia, he'd had that conversation with the Reverend Mr Elliott, the Bishop of Georgia. Elliott was a big handsome cleric who sat down in the saloon bar with Horace Searcy and set out to prove to him that the Bible and the Constitution of the United States both sanctioned slavery. As the man talked, and Searcy looked at his large open face, it began to appear to the English aristocrat that this urbane and eloquent bishop ought to be fought, that his place in history was beside the witch-hunters of the last century, and with the priests who worked for the Inquisition three hundred years ago, and who could prove from the Bible that God
wanted
people racked and tortured.

The bishop and others argued with him all the way down the line. At every railroad depot where they stretched their legs, on every boat landing that spring, were advertisements offering rewards for the recapture of this or that runaway negro, with a description of the man, the whip and brand marks, the scars that came from Massa's blows, the cuts that came from Massa's malicious riding crop. But still it was all God's will, according to Bishop Elliott.

In every big town you could see the great slave yards with the massive hoardings outside them.

W. C. Mentor – Money advanced on slaves.

Constant supplies of

Virginia negroes

On sale or hire

And behind the sign, a high-walled depot in the middle of the nice white houses of Raleigh or Wilmington, Macon or Savannah, and behind the walls the slave pens where black humans were kept for inspection.

Then Montgomery, Alabama. When Searcy went there that spring it was the Confederacy's first capital. On the eve of his meeting with Judah Benjamin and Jeff Davis and Mr Treasurer Memminger in the Confederate capitol, a mock-Greek pile on one of Montgomery's few low hills, Searcy sat on the hotel porch amongst gentlemen spurting tobacco juice from their mouths with immense accuracy (but missing the spittoons anyhow very often), and from there watched the sale of a young black man.

The salesman stood on the steps by a fountain in a square outside the hotel. In the midst of the plumes of water stood an Athenian statue of a lady, for these Southerners were big on Greek architecture; maybe they thought it went some way towards proving they were cultured gentlemen. On a crate set in front of this stone woman, from whose feet the jets of water burst, stood a wiry young negro in good muscle. Surprising that the sale of a fit young man could be, more than the image of sad-eyed black women and pot-bellied, ‘bare-assed' children, the thing that made Searcy feel he must
do something
. It may well have been the way the negro boy carried his little cloth bundle in his hands. What mementos were therein no one could guess, but he looked exactly as if there was no place on earth he could call home.

In the square itself that afternoon, given the heat, the only spectators were a few Irish labourers in a waggon, some volunteers in grey homespun, and about half a dozen gentlemen in black coats, satin waistcoats and black hats, who were genuine buyers. The gentlemen on the verandah, chewing and spitting and sipping cocktails, might become interested if the bidding proved low.

‘A prime field-hand,' the auctioneer yelled. He was an Irishman and as whimsical as his race. ‘Why, can't you tell jest by looking at him what a good-natured boy he is. There now …' He took hold of the slave's jaw and turned the black head profile-on to the audience. ‘… there's docility in that eye of his'n. No scars on him to speak of – you can verify that – except the few littl'uns that come from the normal conversations atween mastah and slave.'

There was a lazy guffaw from the verandah.

‘This here fella ain't got any problems – nary a taste for licker and no conjugal ties, by which I mean he has no wife, no place to distract his mind from the fitting attachment to a new mastah. Enine hunthred and fiferty! Ah, gentlemen, is your attachment to the divinely-ordained institution of slavery of such a pale nature that you can't do better in the presence of a prime boy such as this than enine hunthred and fiferty. Are we to write to Abe Lincoln and say Mr Lincoln, you're right about us, take our heartland, for our attachment to our birthright tends to peter out at enine hunthred and fifterty dollars.'