All the King's Men (33 page)

Cass declined the assistance of Mr. Simms, pressed a handkerchief over his wound, walked out of the building and toward his lodgings, and collapsed on West Short Street. He was carried home. The next day he was better. He learned that Mrs. Trice had left the city, presumably for Washington. A couple of days later his wound infected, and for some time he lay in delirium between life and death. His recovery was slow, presumably retarded by what he termed in the journal his “will toward darkness.” But his constitution was stronger than his will, and he recovered, to know himself as the “chief of sinners and a plague spot on the body of the human world.” He would have committed suicide except for the fear of damnation for that act, for though “hopeless of Grace I yet clung to the hope of Grace.” But sometimes the very fact of damnation because of suicide seemed to be the very reason for suicide: he had brought his friend to suicide and the friend, by that act, was eternally damned; therefore he, Cass Mastern, should, in justice, insure his own damnation by the same act. “But the Lord preserved me from self-slaughter for ends which are His and beyond my knowledge.”

Mrs. Trice did not come back to Lexington.

He returned to Mississippi. For two years he operated his plantation, read the Bible, prayed, and, strangely enough, prospered greatly, almost as though against his will. In the end he repaid Gilbert his debt, and set free his slaves. He had some notion of operating the plantation with the same force on a wage basis. “You fool,” Gilbert said to him, “be a private fool if you must, but in God’s name don’t be a public one. Do you think you can work them and them free? One day work, one day loaf. Do you think you can have a passel of free niggers next door to a plantation with slaves? If you did have to set them free, you don’t have to spend the rest of your natural life nursing them. Get them out of this country, and take up law or medicine. Or preach the Gospel and at least make a living out of all this praying.” Cass tried for more than a year to operate the plantation with his free Negroes, but was compelled to confess that the project was a failure. “Get them out of this country,” Gilbert said to him. “And why don’t you go with them. Why don’t you go North?”

“I belong here,” Cass replied.

“Well, why don’t you preach Abolition right here?” Gilbert demanded. “Do something, do anything, but stop making a fool of yourself trying to raise cotton with free niggers.”

“Perhaps I shall preach Abolition,” Cass said, “some day. Even here. But not now. I am not worthy to instruct others. Not now. But meanwhile there is my example. If it is good, it is not lost. Nothing is ever lost.”

“Except your mind,” Gilbert said, and flung heavily from the room.

There was a sense of trouble in the air. Only Gilbert’s great wealth and prestige and scarcely concealed humorous contempt for Cass saved Cass from ostracism, or worse. (“His contempt for me is a shield,” Cass wrote. “He treats me like a wayward and silly child who may learn better and who does not have to be taken seriously. Therefore my neighbors do not take me seriously.”) But trouble did come. One of Cass’s Negroes had a broad-wife on a plantation near by. After she had had some minor trouble with the overseer, the husband stole her from the plantation and ran away. Toward the Tennessee border the pair were taken. The man, resisting officers, was shot; the woman was brought back. “See,” Gilbert said, “all you have managed to do is get one nigger killed and one nigger whipped. I offer my congratulations.” So Cass put his free Negroes on a boat bound upriver, and never heard of them again.

“I saw the boat head out into the channel, and watched the wheels churn against the strong current, and my spirit was troubled. I knew that the Negroes were passing from one misery to another, and that the hopes they now carried would be blighted. They had kissed my hands and wept for joy, but I could take no part in their rejoicing. I had not flattered myself that I had done anything for them. What I had done I had done for myself, to relieve my spirit of a burden, the burden of their misery and the eyes upon me. The wife of my dead friend had found the eyes of the girl Phebe upon her and had gone wild and had ceased to be herself and had sold the girl into misery. I had found their eyes upon me and had freed them into misery, lest I should do worse. For many cannot bear their eyes upon them, and enter into evil and cruel ways in their desperation. There was in Lexington a decade and more before my stay in that city, a wealthy lawyer named Fielding L. Turner, who had married a lady of position from Boston. This lady Caroline Turner, who had never had black around her and who had been nurtured in sentiments opposed to the institution of human servitude, quickly became notorious for her abominable cruelties performed in her fits of passion. All persons of the community reprehended her floggings, which she performed with her own hands, uttering meanwhile little cries in her throat, according to report. Once while she was engaged in flogging a servant in an apartment on the second floor of her palatial home, a small Negro boy entered the room and began to whimper. She seized him and bodily hurled him through the window of the apartment so that he fell upon stone below and broke his back to become a cripple for his days. To protect her from the process of law and the wrath of the community, Judge Turner committed her to a lunatic asylum. But later the physicians said her to be of sound mind and released her. Her husband in his will left her no slaves, for to do so would, the will said, be doom them to misery in life and a speedy death. But she procured slaves, among them a yellow coachman named Richard, mild of manner, sensible, and of plausible disposition. One day she had him chained and proceeded to flog him. But he tore himself from the chains that held him to the wall and seized the woman by the throat and strangled her. Later he was captured and hanged for murder, though many wished that his escape had been contrived. This story was told me in Lexington. One lady said to me, ‘Mrs. Turner did not understand Negroes.’ And another, ‘Mrs. Turner did it because she was from Boston where the Abolitionists are.’ But I did not understand. Then, much later, I began to understand. I understood that Mrs. Turner flogged her Negroes for the same reason that the wife of my friend sold Phebe down the river: she could not bear their eyes upon her. I understand, for I can no longer bear their eyes upon me. Perhaps only a man like my brother Gilbert can in the midst of evil remain enough of innocence and strength to bear their eyes upon him and to do a little justice in the terms of the great injustice.”

So Cass, who had a plantation with no one to work it, went to Jackson, the capital of the state, and applied himself to the law. Before he left, Gilbert came to him and offered to take over the plantation and work it with a force of his people from his own great place on a share basis. Apparently he was still trying to make Cass rich. But Cass declined, and Gilbert said, “You object to my working it with slaves, is that it? Well, let me tell you, if you sell it, it will be worked with slaves. It is black land and will be watered with black sweat. Does it make any difference then, which black sweat falls on it? And Cass replied that he was not going to sell the plantation. Then Gilbert, in an apoplectic rage, bellowed, “My God, man, it is land, don’t you understand, it is land, and land cries out for man’s hand!” But Cass did not sell. He installed a caretaker in the house, and rented a little land to a neighbor for pasture.

He went to Jackson, sat late with his books, and watched trouble gathering over the land. For it was the autumn of 1858 when he went to Jackson. On January 9, 1861, Mississippi passed the ordinance of secession. Gilbert had opposed secession, writing to Cass: “The fools, there is not a factory for arms in the state. Fools not to have prepared themselves to strike a blow. I have told responsible men to prepare. All fools.” To which Cass replied: “I pray much for peace.” But later, he wrote: “I have talked with Mr. French, who is, as you know, the Chief of Ordnance, and he says that they have only old muskets for troops, and those but flintlocks. The agents have scraped the state for shotguns, at the behest of Governor Pettus. Shotguns, Mr. French said, and curled his lips. And what shotguns, he added, and then told me of a weapon contributed to the cause, and does one laugh or weep?” After Jefferson Davis had come back to Mississippi, having resigned from the Senate, and had accepted the command of the troops of Mississippi with the rank of Major General, Cass called upon him, at the request of Gilbert. He wrote to Gilbert: “The General says that they have given him 10,000 men, but not a stand of modern rifles. But the General also said, they have given me a very fine coat with fourteen brass buttons in front and a black velvet collar. Perhaps we can use the buttons in our shotguns, he said, and smiled.”

Cass saw Mr. Davis once more, for he was with Gilbert on the steamboat
Natchez
_ which carried the new President of the Confederacy on the first stage of his journey from his plantation, Brierfield, to Montgomery. “We were on old Mr. Tom Leather’s boat,” Cass wrote in the journal, “which had been supposed to pick up the President at a landing a few miles below Brierfield. But Mr. Davis was delayed in leaving his house and was rowed out to us. I leaned on the rail and saw the little black skiff proceeding toward us over the red water. A man waved from the skiff to us. The captain of the
Natchez
_ observed the signal, and gave a great blast of his boat’s whistle which made our ears tingle and shivered out over the expense of waters. The boat stopped and the skiff approached. Mr. Davis was received on board. As the steamboat moved on, Mr. Davis looked back and lifted his hand in salute to the Negro servant (Isaiah Montgomery, whom I had known at Brierfield) who stood in the skiff, which rocked in the wash of the steamboat, and waved his farewell. Later, as we proceeded upriver toward the bluffs of Vicksburg, he approached my brother, with whom I was standing on the deck. We had previously greeted him. My brother again, and more intimately, congratulated Mr. Davis, who replied that he could take no pleasure in the honor. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘always looked upon the Union with a superstitious reverence and have freely risked my life for its dear flag on more than one battlefield, and you, gentlemen, can conceive the sentiment now in me that the object of my attachment for many years has been withdrawn from me.’ And he continued, ‘I have in the present moment only the melancholy pleasure of an easy conscience.’ Then he smiled, as he did rarely. Thereupon he took his leave of us and retired within. I had observed how worn to emaciation was his face by illness and care, and how thin the skin lay over the bone. I remarked to my brother that Mr. David did not look well. He replied, ‘A sick man, it is a fine how-de-do to have a sick man for a president.’ I responded that there might be no war, that Mr. Davis hoped for peace. But my brother said, ‘Make no mistake, the Yankees will fight and they will fight well and Mr. Davis is a fool to hope for peace.’ I replied, ‘All good men hope for peace.’ At this my brother uttered n indistinguishable exclamation, and said, ‘What we want now they’ve got into this is not a good man but a man who can win, and I am not interested in the luxury of Mr. Davis’s conscience.’ Then my brother and I continued our promenade in silence, and I reflected that Mr. Davis was a good man. But the world is full of good men, I now reflect as I write these lines down, and yet the world drives hard into darkness and the blindness of blood, even as now late at night I sit in this hotel room in Vicksburg, and I am moved to ask the meaning of our virtue. May God hear our prayer!”

Gilbert received a commission as colonel in a cavalry regiment. Cass enlisted as a private in the Mississippi Rifles. “You could be a captain,” Gilbert said, “or a major. You’ve got brains enough for that. And,” he added, “damned few of them have.” Cass replied that he preferred to be a private soldier, “marching with other men.” But he could not tell his brother why, or tell his brother that, though he would march with other men and would carry a weapon in his hand, he would never take the life of am enemy. “I must march with these men who march,” he wrote in the journal, “for they are my people and I must partake with them of all bitterness, and that more fully. But I cannot take the life of another man. How can I who have taken the life of my friend, take the life of an enemy, for I have used up my right to blood.” So Cass marched away to war, carrying the musket which was, for him, but a meaningless burden, and wearing on a string, against the flesh of his chest, beneath the fabric of the gray jacket, the ring which had once been Duncan Trice’s wedding ring and which Annabelle Trice, that night in the summerhouse, had slipped into his finger as his hand lay on her bosom.

Cass marched to Shiloh, between the fresh fields, for it was early April, and then into the woods that screened the river. (Dogwood and redbud would have been out then.) He marched into the woods, heard the lead whistle by his head, saw the dead men on the ground, and the next day came out of the woods and moved in the sullen withdrawal toward Corinth. He had been sure that he would not survive the battle. But he had survived, and moved down the crowded road “as in a dream.” And he wrote: “And I felt that henceforward I should live in that dream.” The dream took him into Tennessee again–Chickamauga, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and the nameless skirmishes, and the bullet for which he waited did not find him. At Chickamauga, when his company wavered in the enemy fire and seemed about to break in its attack, he moved steadily up the slope and could not understand his own inviolability. And the men regrouped, and followed. “It seemed strange to me,” he wrote, “that I who in God’s will sought death and could not find it, should in my seeking lead men to it who did not seek.” When Colonel Hickman congratulated him, he could “find no words” for answer.

But if he had put on the gray jacket in anguish of spirit and in hope of expiation, he came to wear it in pride, for it was a jacket like those worn by the men with whom he marched. “I have seen men do brave things,” he wrote, “and they ask for nothing.” And he added, “It is not hard to love men for the things they endure and for the words they do not speak.” More and more, too, there crept in the journal the comments of the professional soldier, between the prayers and scruples–criticism of command (of Bragg after Chickamauga),, satisfaction and an impersonal pride in maneuver or gunnery (“the practice of Marlowe’s battery excellent”), and finally the admiration for the feints and delays executed by Johnston’s virtuosity on the approaches to Atlanta, at Buzzard’s Roost, Snake Creek Gap, New Hope Church, Kenesaw Mountain (“there is always a kind of glory, however stained or obscured, in whatever man’s hand does well, and General Johnston does well”).