The Secrets of Mary Bowser (40 page)

“Soon enough, Richmond will surrender,” she said. “The Union will be reinstated, and everything will return to how it was.” She shook her head, her graying curls swaying like a choir of amen-singers. “This horrid interim will seem nothing but an awful dream.”

I thought of Theodore’s opera glass, and the Music Academy. This fine room decorated over for a white man, the shabby shed from which Papa could barely hobble forth to do his work in the smithy. Bet never so much as mentioned Timothy Webster, though I presumed his execution troubled her just as much as me. I was living proof of her opposition to slavery, yet even she thought of the war only as a matter of preserving the Union.
Everything will return to how it was.
Her words set me wondering what colored Virginians might gain should McClellan take the Confederate capital. And what they stood to lose.

With his family away, Jeff Davis turned the Gray House dining room into his military headquarters. So while the rest of Richmond wondered when the snake of a Union army encircling the city might make its venomous strike, I studied Confederate strategy. Outnumbered and surrounded, with little hope of posting a successful defense of the capital, General Bobby Lee sent word from the front informing Davis he meant to do what only a madman or a genius might try. He would put his troops on the offensive, hoping to bluff McClellan into believing the Confederates had superior manpower and munitions.

“Does Lee really have the audacity to manage it?” a young aide-de-camp asked as Sophronia and I served dinner one mid-June day.

A soldier whose high, broad brow offset the raging bush of his beard nodded. Passing behind him with the serving tray, I smelt the scent of horses that hung about his uniform. “Their forces are larger than ours,” he said. “But not so large I couldn’t ride round them, taking prisoners and supplies where I might.”

“But what surprise can we hope to have, General Stuart?” one of the older men asked. “I don’t sneeze but I expect some damn Yankee off in Washington responds with a God bless you, they have so many spies among us.”

“General Lee knows just what to do with their spies,” the corporal who’d brought Lee’s missive answered. His words set my heart pit-a-patting so, I struggled to keep the serving platter steady. “We will march two brigades through the streets of Richmond with much hullabaloo. Lee will ask the Richmond news-sheets not to mention a word of it, lest the Union learn that he has troops to spare to send to Jackson. Of course they will print it immediately.” Chuckles broke from around the table. “The Federal spies will send word North, and when McClellan receives it, he will never suspect troops are coming to Richmond from the Shenandoah, and not the other way round.”

The sternutatory gentleman remained skeptical. “And are the Union field commanders so blind they won’t notice Stonewall Jackson leading fifteen thousand troops to join Lee?”

“Magruder will feint an attack from the south. As McClellan moves troops to respond, Jackson’s men can slip into place through the gap, then charge from the north.”

That would more than dash all Bet’s certainty of Richmond’s surrender, and the Union’s reinstatement.

Aunt Piss gestured for more whiskey. “A bold plan, if it is successful. But in case it is not, perhaps it would be prudent for some of the key government functions to remove to Charlotte.” Such a move would place the Louisianan hundreds of miles from advancing Union troops.

“We shall not evacuate the government, nor do anything else their spies may report as weakness,” Davis said. “God willing, it will all be over soon.”

“They say the same in Washington,” Aunt Piss muttered, so low that only I heard him, as I refilled his glass.

Back when I was a girl, one of the most astonishing sites in Richmond was the fisher’s stall at First Market, as odiferous as the very depths of the James. It was stocked by a slave as broad as an oak and seeming nearly as tall. His left hand had but a thumb and three fingers, the little pinky gone with not so much as a stump-like remnant left behind. How and where that lost finger went I never knew for sure, though there were whispers his owner made the slave take the saw up in his own right hand to cut it off, punishment for some transgression.

Nine-Fingered Nate, that’s what Lilly and Daisy and I set ourselves to calling him, as we shrieked out stories of where his tiny pinky lay, severed and wriggling and bringing a haint’s worth of harm on whatever creature it could. We’d screw our voices into kitten yowls and puppy yelps and the cries of helpless children, tormented as we imagined them to be by the diabolical wayward digit. Mama caught us at it once, and when she asked what all the fuss was, Daisy told her it was Nine-Fingered Nate’s missing tenth. Mama didn’t know what or who she meant at first, till I put in something about the fisher’s stall. When Mama realized what we were saying, she got sore as she’d ever been at any of us.

“That man is some mother’s son,” Mama lectured me. “When she brought him into this world, he had ten fingers and ten toes, and a name she gave him. Not a person on this earth ought to take any of that from him. Just because some slave-owner did, doesn’t mean any child of mine better try the same.” She made me promise I’d never so much as utter the moniker Nine-Fingered Nate again, nor abide anyone else doing it either. “His name is Shiloh,” she said. “And I expect you’ll not forget it.”

Shiloh was a name no one could forget these days, as stories seeped back from that battle-stead of how high the piles rose of legs and arms hacked off by military surgeons. Pit after pit dug to bury nameless pieces of what had once been whole men, every one of them some mother’s son. Each wasted limb lost over the claimed right to cut off another man’s pinky, the right to call that other man property. No childhood imaginings could have suffered one negro’s pinky to be worth that multitude of pale arms and legs, all that bloody loss.

No one could say what more bloody loss might come if the war continued. Or what might come to negroes especially, if it didn’t.

If McClellan learned what I knew of Bobby Lee’s ruse, he would surely attack as Aunt Piss feared, capturing Richmond and toppling the Confederate government—returning things to how they were before the war, just as Bet predicted. If the Confederacy fell now, slavery would still stand. But if McClellan, lacking this intelligence, fell for the ruse and retreated, Lee might well seize the great and final triumph that Davis’s advisers believed was within his grasp, bringing the war to an altogether different end.

My breath came shallow, as I felt the awful alternatives squeezing in. But still I sensed something deep and near-resolute within me. Some quaverous inkling of another possibility, if I could only determine how it might come to be.

If we want to win the bigger prize, we need be making a gamble or two along the way
. McNiven had uttered the words with confidence, justifying all he did to deceive the Confederates and urging me to do the same. Was I ready to take such a gamble now? Could I trust myself with such a choice, keeping my latest intelligence from the Federals to prevent a decisive, ultimate Union victory, knowing I was risking a decisive, ultimate Confederate victory instead?

If the war came to a close now, there would be no emancipation, no matter which side won. But if the war stretched on—what if I lost my espial wager, as Webster lost his?

“You haven’t heard a word of what I’m saying, have you?” Wilson’s question poked right through my contemplation as he crossed to where I stood by our parlor window.

I gestured toward the panes, pretending it was the latest wagonload of casualties lumbering up Broad Street that had me distracted. “So much suffering and death.”

Wilson and I watched a weeping white woman step forward to embrace a ragged, uniform-clad amputee. “That’s all the violence of slavery, visited right back on them,” he said. “The way you tell it, what gunfire we hear is the very angels singing of liberation.”

“But what if the war ends before Lincoln frees the slaves?”

“I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you entertain the possibility you might have been wrong about anything.” He rapped on the window frame to mark the rarity of the occasion. “You know I’m still not sure secession can do the slaves much good. But if this war is meant to bring emancipation, I suppose it’s bound to last until it does.”

The war might indeed last, if I let it. And so I pressed my lips tight and held his words dear for the next quarter hour as I picked over what trifles I might put into the evening’s cipher, resolved not to give any of Lee’s plan away.

The Confederate ploy succeeded, and in the weeks that followed, the sounds of battle drew farther and farther off, until by summer’s end Richmond heard them only in her dreams. The Federals retreated from Drewry’s Bluff. The tocsin bells no longer tolled. Queen Varina and her children returned to the Gray House. Union prisoners swelled the population of the city between flag-of-truce exchanges, Bet tending them as best a woman playing at dementia might. And I kept my role in what I’d wrought secret, even from my husband.

On the thirtieth August, McNiven brought me a tattered clipping from the
New York Tribune,
already a week old and obtained the devil only knows how. He was sitting with Wilson in our parlor when I came home from the Gray House, and he pulled the slip of news-sheet from his pocket before saying so much as good evening to me.

It was a letter Lincoln had written to Horace Greeley, the editor of the
Tribune,
who published it for all the world to see.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

As I read aloud, Wilson sank deeper into his chair. “We best accept what this means.”

“It means we have to make certain the Union cannot be saved unless the slaves are freed.” I made my voice as sure as I could.

“Ay, we maun, and I do believe the lass has awready been seeing to that.”

I searched McNiven’s face to see what hint he might have that I’d withheld what I knew of General Lee’s plan. But his pasty features revealed nothing.

“Plenty of hubbub in the Gray House today,” I said, to distract him and Wilson both. “The Confederates have beaten the Federals at Manassas, same as they did last summer. This time, Lee will ride the army into Maryland. He means to invade the Union.”

McNiven weighed the threat. “ ’Tis a ragged force Lee leads, after all this summer’s fighting.”

I nodded. “Half of Lee’s motivation to invade is to raid the farms and shops of Frederick County, to feed and clothe his troops.”

“And the other half?” McNiven asked.

“According to Aunt Piss, the Confederate victories of late have impressed Great Britain. He has persuaded Jeff Davis that taking the offensive may yet convince Queen Victoria to recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign nation.”

McNiven swatted at the idea like it was a gnat aflight in the late summer evening. “England canna support a war to preserve slavery.”

Wilson pointed at the
Tribune
clipping. “Lincoln says the war is for the Union, not for slavery.”

“Lincoln will make it a war to end slavery, to keep England from aiding the destruction o’ the Union.”

I hummed out my hope that McNiven was right, as I set the latest message between the Confederates and Queen Victoria’s envoy down in Bet’s cipher. I chose each word with especial care, meaning to show Lincoln just what he need do to save his precious Union.

When next I saw McNiven, only ten days later, what he had to tell me wasn’t in any newspaper. It was something Lincoln hadn’t yet made public knowledge. Even McNiven seemed anxious to hold it secret, intercepting me on my way to the Gray House early one morning.

“He has it writ awready, and gotten his cabinet to agree. A proclamation emancipating all the slaves in the territories in rebellion.”

“When?” My heart quickened so, I barely heard my own words over it. “When will they be free?”

“It becomes law the first o’ the new year. But Lincoln means to be announcing his plan far sooner than that, for all the world and Queen Victoria especially to hear. All he is awaiting is a Union battle victory, so it seems a move o’ strength and not a desperation.”

With emancipation at last hanging in the balance, such a victory was just what I would give him.

I was laying the supper table when the telegram arrived at the Gray House on the afternoon of the eighteenth September. Just after the messenger’s heavy boots thudded up the curving stairs, Burton Harrison, Davis’s secretary, called down for whiskey.

I’d served plenty of liquor at the Davises’ dinners and receptions, and during Queen Varina’s near daily tête-à-têtes with Aunt Piss. But I’d never known Jeff Davis to take a mid-day tipple. I rushed to fetch the crystal decanter, then hurried up the servants’ stairs, anxious to learn whether he wanted the drink to mourn or to celebrate.

When I entered the office, Davis sat ramrod straight, tall even in his desk chair. His bad eye was filmed over, and the steely gray good one stared into space. His face had gone so pale, his high cheekbones might have been chiseled from white marble. I poured out a measure of whiskey, and he drank it in one swallow.

“Read it again,” he ordered.

I refilled Davis’s glass as the messenger shifted under the weight of his butternut uniform. “
Sharpsburg, Maryland. Mr. President. I have lost well over ten thousand men, dead, wounded, or captured in yesterday’s fighting above Antietam Creek. We retreat tonight under cover of dark. General Lee.
”

“Ten thousand men,” Davis repeated, once he swallowed the second glass of whiskey. “One quarter of Lee’s entire army. McClellan couldn’t have done much more damage if he’d authored Lee’s attack himself.”