A man named Shifterly brought the first taste of war to Washington Farm. A fat man in a check suit and a plug hat, accompanied by two militiamen, he rode sweating into the turning circle before the house, and got down, boots crunching on the yellow gravel, to announce flatly to David Strong that he had come to buy all his horses.
‘Name’s Shifterly, Mr. Strong,’ he said. ‘Tobias Shifterly. I come up from Richmond, specially to visit folks such as yourself, horse-breeders and the like. ‘
He had a florid face and the bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker. His boots were cheap and cracked and his loud-checked suit was mantled with dust. David did not begin to like the look of the man, nor the two scrawny fellows he had brought with him, dressed in hand-me-down uniforms that fitted them where they touched. Shifterly looked like one of the jumped-up crackers who were crawling all over Richmond these days, picking up whatever deals they could wheel, maggots feeding on the flesh of the newborn Confederacy.
‘I don’t do business at the door, Shifterly,’ David said, deliberately offering the man no title. ‘Nor with anybody whose credit I haven’t checked.’
‘You don’t need to check my credit, Mr. Strong,’ Shifterly said heartily. ‘Why, surely my warrant, signed by President Jefferson Davis himself, is guarantee enough of my bona fides?’ He reached into his pocket and brought out a folded document. It was creased and worn from much handling, and stained as though by spilled coffee. David made no move to take it from the man, who held it outstretched for a long moment before frowning and putting it back into his pocket.
‘Well, sir, the way of it is like this,’ he said, the heavily jocular manner failing to conceal the glint of insult taken in the piggy eyes. ‘I’m empowered to buy good horseflesh at a fair price, and I’d like to buy from you.’
‘And what’s your fair price?’ David asked.
‘Ten dollars a head,’ Shifterly said. ‘And I’ll take every animal you’ve got.’
‘You must be crazy. I wouldn’t sell you a dead horse for ten dollars!’ David snapped. ‘If that’s the kind of “fair price” Jeff Davis is offering, you might as well go back and tell him to come and steal the damned horses!’
‘Now, now, Mr. Strong, sir,’ Shifterly said. ‘I don’t think you quite understand the situation. We don’t have to bargain. Ten dollars a head is the set price and there’s no room to argue.’
‘You want any horses off of me,’ David said. ‘You’ll pay me what they’re worth.’
‘I better warn you, Mr. Strong,’ Shifterly said, ‘that if you don’t sell me the horses I want, I’m empowered by this warrant here to confiscate them so as to prevent their falling into enemy hands.’
He made a signal with his hand, and the two militiamen lifted their rifles so that they were pointing in David’s general direction. Shifterly grinned, showing bad teeth.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re going to be reasonable about this.’
‘Excuse me, Mr. Strong,’ said another voice. ‘You mind telling me what “confiscate” means?’
The speaker was David’s overseer, Nathan Steele, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple who had come up silently behind Shifterly and the two militiamen. In his hands, Nathan held a double-barreled shotgun. Beside him stood Cyrus Kendall, the stable manager, and four of the farm-hands, all armed. Shifterly swung around, startled by the unexpected question. His jaw sagged when he saw that he and his militiamen were the center of a ring of fire from which they could not possibly hope to escape.
‘It’s a new word they got, Nathan,’ David said flatly. ‘So they don’t have to call it stealing.’
‘Now see here, Mr. Strong!’ Shifterly blustered. ‘You’re interferin’ with an officer in the execution of his dooty! That’s a mighty serious thing to do in times of war! I’m warnin’ you, sir, not to do anything you may regret!’
‘Shifterly,’ David said. ‘If you and these – scavengers – aren’t off my land in two minutes flat, I am going to give my men permission to start shooting pieces off you! And as for regret, I figure the only thing I’m liable to regret is giving you two minutes instead of one. However, I expect I’ll manage to live with that.’
‘Now just a damned minute, here!’ Shifterly began. Ignoring the man’s protest, David took his watch from his fob pocket. Shifterly looked at him and then bitterly at the ring of guns around him.
‘One and a half minutes,’ David said, not looking up. With a curse, Shifterly swung up into the saddle and jerked the horse’s head around. Kicking it into a run, he clattered up the curving drive towards the turnpike, the militiamen close behind him. David watched them go, his face grim. Shifterly was the first, he thought. It was quite certain he would not be the last.
After the fall of Fort Sumter he had known there was no doubt but that Virginia would join the secession. The name of every voter was registered, the votes cast. David knew that many who might have voted against secession stayed away from the polls, fearing reprisals. Others, like himself, knowing that separation was a fait accompli, cast no vote at all. According to Dan Holmes, several counties did not even make a return. From all of those who did, it transpired that less than a hundred and twenty-six thousand voters wanted Virginia to join the Confederacy, and less than twenty-one thousand preferred to remain part of the Union. The white population of the state was well over a million. Virginia went to war on the will of one person in eight.
Which leaves me with a problem I can’t figure, David thought. He took his dilemma to the only person he felt he could talk it over with: his son, Andrew. It meant going to Washington, but in many ways David was glad to get away. War fever was running high; a company of militia was being raised at Culpeper court house. Damned fools, David thought. A hundred men with only fifty muskets between them and no ammunition at all. What did they think they were going to do: throw stones at the Federal soldiers?
The journey north was a gloomy one. The train was crowded with soldiers and it was delayed many times to allow troop trains priority passage. Crazy, crazy, David thought. North preparing to make war on South, while the citizens of each move freely between the warring capitals!
‘The hotheads want war at any cost,’ he told his son. ‘Damned jackasses! Don’t they see the ruin they’re going to bring down on all of us?’
‘I don’t think they do, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘They’ve all got patriotism so bad, only fighting will cure it.’
‘They’ll get their fighting,’ David said grimly. ‘You heard about that business in Alexandria?’
Virginia voted for secession on May 23. Before dawn the next day Union troops crossed the Potomac and occupied Arlington Heights and Alexandria. In the latter township, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth of the 11th New York Fire Zouaves espied a Confederate flag flying above the Marshall House. Ellsworth, who had worked in Lincoln’s Illinois law office and come to Washington with the new president, was six weeks past his twenty-fourth birthday and eager to strike a blow for the Union. He dashed into the hotel and up the stairs with two of his Zouaves, cutting the halyards with his sword and wrapping the flag around his body.
‘Come on, lads!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll send this rebel rag to Old Abe!’
He turned and ran down the stairs ahead of his men, but as he reached the second-floor landing, a door burst open and Jesse Jackson, the owner of the hotel, stepped out, a double-barreled shotgun in his hand.
‘I’ll send you to Hell first!’ he shouted and pulled both triggers. The gun went off with a stuttering boom and the force of the shot picked up the transfixed Ellsworth and flung him backwards in a tattered heap, his uniform smoldering.
Jackson turned to flee but got no further than the angle of the stairs. One of Ellsworth’s Zouaves came through the furling gunsmoke and put a bayonet into Jackson’s chest. He shouted with pain as the slicing triangle of steel skewered him to the wall. The soldier, whose name was Francis Brownell, pulled the trigger of his musket and blew a hole the size of a dinner plate in Jackson’s body.
‘They had to take the heights, Pa,’ Andrew explained. ‘If the rebels had gotten mortars up there …’ He did not need to finish the sentence. From the windows of his house on Dent Place, the old Custis mansion on Arlington Heights was clearly visible, no more than a few miles from the Capitol itself.
‘You saw Jed?’ David asked his son. They had eaten a light luncheon. The early July sunlight made the cool dining room seem dark. Once in a while they heard a carriage rattle past on 34th Street. It was impossible to believe they were sitting in a house in the embattled capital of a nation at war with itself, yet it was so.
‘He’s gone south with Lee, Pa,’ Andrew said. He watched his father’s face as he said it, and saw the reaction: pride and anger in about equal parts.
‘I wish he’d come to see me first,’ David said.
‘There was just no time,’ Andrew told him. ‘He was recalled from Texas early in March. When he got here, he was offered a captaincy. He asked them to let him think it over. He wanted to see what Colonel Lee would do. He worships that man. Says he’s the best soldier in the United States Army.’
‘I heard Winfield Scott offered him command of the Union Army.’
‘That’s right, Pa,’ Andrew confirmed. ‘But Lee wouldn’t have any part of an invasion of Virginia and resigned his commission the next day. Soon as Jed heard about it, he did the same thing.’
‘And now he’s gone south?’
‘With Lee,’ David confirmed. ‘Who, I see, the newspapers are now calling another Benedict Arnold.’
‘Newspapers!’ David snapped. ‘Ha! Damned newspapers, screaming for blood. They’d have us go to war just to sell more copies of their damned rags! Look at this!’
He threw a copy of the New York Tribune across the table. ‘Did you read it? Read what they said in there?’ ‘I read it.’
‘“Let us have the Stars and Stripes floating over Richmond before July 20! Forward to Richmond!”. What the devil for?’
‘The Confederate Congress—’
‘They want to commit the country to total war to stop Jeff Davis and his Congress from meeting in Richmond?’
‘I believe they do, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘And I believe they will.’
‘Then God help us all,’ David said, thinking of Jedediah. There must be hundreds of thousands of fathers all thinking the same thing, he pondered, worrying about sons serving with the armies jockeying for position in the rolling Virginia countryside. Lincoln had yielded to political necessity and public opinion. The Union commander, McDowell, had thirty thousand men massed at Centerville, glowering across twenty miles of wooded hills and deep-cut runs to where the Southern General Beauregard’s twenty-two thousand men held the vital railroad junction at Manassas. Further to the northwest, Patterson’s army confronted a Rebel force led by General Johnston. Among the twelve thousand men in his command, riding at the head of a company of’ Jeb’ Stuart’s cavalry, was Captain Jedediah Strong.
‘Said he’d rather carry a musket for Lee than command a battalion for McDowell,’ Andrew said.
‘You know McDowell, Andrew?’
‘Not personally,’ Andrew said. ‘But Sam has met him. Says he’s a big fellow, Ohioan by birth. Class of ’thirty-eight. Sam says he eats like a pig. He’s damned nearly the most unpopular officer in the army.’
‘That takes quite a lot of ground. ‘
‘They say he merits it. He’s not a combat general, and the men he’s commanding aren’t much better than an armed mob,’ Andrew said. ‘Sam says some of them are so green they don’t even know how to fold a blanket, much less fire a musket.’
‘How is Sam?’ David asked.
‘He’s well. He said, and I quote, that he was “busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest”, trying to sell some of his guns to the army. He got an order from the navy for seven hundred rifles and seventy thousand cartridges.’
‘Wasn’t there some talk about setting up a company?’
‘He’s done that. Rented half a piano factory on Tremont Street in Boston. The stockholders are putting up half a million dollars for new plant. ‘
‘That’s a lot of money,’ David said. ‘Who are the majority stockholders?’
‘Sam and a man named Ezra Carver, who’s made a pile in railroad stocks. The way I understand it, the firm pays Sam five thousand for his patent, and fifty cents royalty on each gun sold.’
‘He won’t get rich on the sale of seven hundred,’ David observed.
‘Well, this Carver fellow is confident that they’ll make a fortune. He says if anyone’s likely to make money during a war it’s a gun manufacturer, and he may well be right. Anyway, they’re trying to get an appointment with army ordnance.’
‘Taking ’em long enough,’ David said. Sam had been hawking that repeating rifle idea around for two years, give or take. If he didn’t get some decent contract soon, he was going to go broke.
‘You’ve heard about Henry of course?’ Andrew said, bringing David out of his reverie.
‘Sam wrote he was wounded in the bombardment of Fort Sumter,’ David said. ‘He didn’t say how bad.’
‘They’ve got him on crutches,’ Andrew said. ‘He was damned lucky. They had a good doctor there. Many a man wounded in the leg simply loses the leg.’
‘They’ll invalid him out?’
‘I don’t think it was that serious, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘There’s talk of a desk job in Cincinnati.’
‘Better than at the front,’ David said. ‘Takes a bit of imagining to picture Henry leading a saber charge.’ Andrew grinned. Henry had always been vapid and girlish. His and Jed’s nickname for their cousin was ‘Mary Ann.’
‘What about Travis?’ his father asked.
Travis Strong had gone to Texas and was still there when the territory seceded. Sam had been worried about his son but it was not the kind of worry you could do anything about. Andrew grinned. Hold on to your hat, Pa, he thought.
‘Travis got himself married.’
‘Married?’ David barked. ‘Married to whom?’
‘Some girl he met up with in Dallas,’ Andrew grinned. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘Dallas?’
‘Little place on the Trinity River in Texas.’
‘What the devil was he doing down there?’
Andrew shrugged. ‘You haven’t heard all of it yet,’ he said. ‘Travis enlisted. He’s in the army.’
‘As a private soldier?’
‘That’s what Sam said.’
‘What regiment?’
Andrew shrugged again. ‘He didn’t know.’
They left the table for the servant to clear and went out into the garden. There was a decanter of whiskey and two glasses on a metal table beneath the vine that grew on a trellis at the side of the house. Andrew took the stopper from the decanter and raised his eyebrows at his father.
David nodded: maybe a drink would help. ‘You know, son,’ he said slowly. ‘For the first time in my life I’m not sure what to do.’
Andrew concealed his surprise by lighting another cheroot. It was the first time he had ever heard his father confess to doubt.
‘There are no easy answers any more, Pa,’ he said, conscious as he spoke the words that they were only words, nothing helpful. There had never been any easy answers, ever; probably never would be. He saw his father’s nose wrinkle as the cigar smoke drifted on the still, summer air and concealed a grin. David had always maintained that pipe-smoke was a civilized odor, whereas cigar-smoke stank up the place. It was a delusion which Joanna had long ago convinced him was the truth.
‘How the devil you can puff on one of those damned things and enjoy it, I never will understand,’ he grumbled. ‘Damnedest stinking things I ever did encounter. A pipe, now—’
‘I know, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘But I enjoy a cigar now and again. Relaxes me.’
‘Maybe I ought to try one, then,’ David said. ‘Because I sure could do with some relaxing. Seems to me whichever way I turn these days, it’s the wrong way. Now you tell me, boy, who do you think I ought to sell our horses to, eh? That’s mainly why I come up here to ask you about.’ He stared at the table as if he had laid out the problem on it, the better to take a look at it. ‘You heard what Ed Maxwell did?’
‘No.’
‘Turned over his entire yield to the army. Never asked for a cent. By the way, did I write to you about Paulie and David?’
‘No.’
‘Damme if I’m not gettin’ addle-headed in my old age!’ David grumbled. ‘I could’ve sworn I did. Well, anyway, they both joined the army, couldn’t wait to get into uniform.’
‘It’s hardly a surprise, Pa. You had any more trouble with Maxwell?’
‘Not what you’d call trouble,’ David said. ‘But he’s been blackening my name all over the county. Damned Bible-banger, quoting from the Scriptures to prove that any man who don’t oppose slavery with his life’s blood and everything he owns, is no better than the shit on Satan’s boots.’
‘I always thought he was a little “touched”, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘That whole damned family has a vicious streak.’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ David pondered. ‘I hate to bad-mouth a man behind his back, but Maxwell—’ He took a deep breath. ‘Ah, hell! I reckon I just don’t cotton to being bullied into making up my mind.’
‘You do whatever you feel is right, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘Nobody can call you names for that.’
‘ Jed’s gone to fight for the South,’ David said. ‘I let the army have horses, it’s like I’m giving them a sword to slay my own flesh and blood.’
‘It’s a war, Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘Nobody can control what happens in a war. You just have to do what you think best.’
‘What do you reckon to do, Andrew?’
‘You know how I feel, Pa,’ he replied. ‘I want to keep out of it. The hotheads have had their way and now we’re at war. But the enemy is our own kind, our own people. If it were a war against an invader, against a foreign army, I could see a reason to go and fight. But I have no reason to pick up a rifle and fight other Americans. I will not.’
‘It won’t be easy,’ David said. ‘Likely you’ll be called … names.’
‘Maybe,’ Andrew said grimly. ‘I can be useful in other ways. Building, not destroying.
‘You sound like Jacob.’
‘Do I? Well, perhaps that’s no bad thing,’ Andrew said. ‘He’s a good man, Pa. I’ll be guided in this by him. He wants to set up a hospital, you know. He says we’re going to need a lot of hospitals, and I think he may be right.’
David shook his head. ‘That doesn’t help me a lot,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got to go back to Culpeper and decide what to do.’
‘Take it as it comes, Pa,’ Andrew advised. ‘Adjust to it, day by day.’
‘Easier said than done,’ David grumbled. ‘Nobody wants to give a man time to adjust to anything. They want to tell you what to think, what to believe.’
‘Pa,’ Andrew said with a grin. ‘Promise me something.’
‘What?’
‘The day you start believing what someone else tells you to believe,’ Andrew said. ‘Let me know. I’d like to be around to see it.’
David smiled. He knew what he was going to do, had done all along. Talking about it just clarified his mind a little, that was all.
‘Any of that whiskey left?’ he said.