Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
Then they turned a corner and through the trees caught their first glimpse of the Capitol building, and they halted, insensible to the crowds milling about them. The flag of the Confederate States of America that Lizzie had glimpsed through the carriage window on Mary Jane’s wedding night was no longer flying atop the dome, replaced by the state flag of Virginia. Lizzie gazed up at the state seal upon the field of bold blue, the Roman goddess Virtus standing with spear and sword above a defeated enemy. The flag was too far away for her to read the motto emblazoned beneath the figures, but Lizzie knew it by heart. “
Sic semper tyrannis
,” she said quietly, watching the flag of her beloved Virginia snap and wave in the breeze. It was a small comfort that the flag of treason had been taken down, but Lizzie did not doubt that it would fly there again soon.
“Oh, what will become of our city?” Eliza whispered, her voice breaking. “What will become of us?”
“Don’t lose heart.” Perhaps it was the sight of the flag of Virginia, but suddenly Lizzie was filled with a sense of calm determination and resolve, stronger than she had ever felt. “We will endure. Whether it takes weeks or months, whatever comes, we will endure.”
Eliza choked out a nervous laugh. “I wish I could be as brave as you. The sight of that flag makes me want to scurry home and draw the curtains.”
“Well, then, that is precisely what we must
not
do.” Lizzie led her friend on at a brisker pace, head held high. “We cannot cower at home. Let us see what we’re up against.”
Eliza nodded, assumed an air of confidence, and strode along beside her. As they approached the Capitol, the crowds swelled, the air shifted, and voices rose in jubilation. Young ladies and their beaux linked arms and sang “The Marseillaise” while cheerful, whistling clerks adorned shop windows with bunting and banners. People thronged around the bulletin boards posted outside the newspaper offices, jostling one another as they pressed forward, some exclaiming aloud at whatever it was they read there. On street corners and in front of hotels, officious gentlemen took down the names of younger fellows in small leather books, calling out for other volunteers to enlist, warning them that now was the time to choose their company rather than await a possible draft later and risk being stuck in an undesirable post. Lizzie shuddered and said a silent prayer of thanksgiving that John would surely be too old for a draft, if the rebel government decided to implement one. Elsewhere, she spotted other men, pale and silent, walking alone with their hands in their pockets and shoulders hunched, while others gathered in small groups, speaking quietly and exchanging furtive glances. She recognized a few—the red-haired, stocky Scottish baker; a tall, black-bearded man in a railroad engineer’s suit and cap—but most were strangers to her. The guarded anger in their eyes reminded her of John’s warning to conceal her feelings, and with great effort she relaxed her strained features and put on a vaguely pleasant smile.
A block away from the Capitol, newsboys hawked extra editions of the
Examiner,
the
Dispatch,
and the
Enquirer,
and as eager customers flocked around them, Lizzie hesitated before joining the queue for the
Examiner
. She was reluctant to give a single penny to any of them, the
Dispatch
and the
Enquirer
least of all because of their annoying habit of referring to President Lincoln as a baboon or “the Illinois Ape.” Just as she was taking a coin from her pocket, a bright-eyed, beaming girl of about fourteen dashed their way, her long, brown locks slipping free from a pink ribbon. “Maria, oh, Maria,” she cried out to someone behind them, waving her hand. “The New York Seventh Regiment is all cut to pieces!”
Something in her accent reminded Lizzie of her Philadelphia relations, and without thinking, she spun away from the newsboy and caught the girl by the elbow. “Little girl, where were you born?”
“In the North,” she replied, surprised, “but I can’t help that.” She wrenched herself free and ran off.
“Cut to pieces,” Eliza echoed faintly. “She said they were cut to pieces.”
Quickly Lizzie bought a paper, nearly tearing it in her haste to unfold it. With Eliza reading over her shoulder, she went as cold and rigid as stone as she learned that federal troops traveling from Northern states to Washington City had been attacked as they passed through Baltimore. The first train cars carrying several companies of the Sixth Massachusetts had been towed through the city without incident, but word of the soldiers’ presence had spread quickly, and soon a hostile crowd had massed in the streets, shouting insults and threats. They had torn up the train tracks, forcing the last four companies of the Sixth to abandon their railcars and march through the city. Almost immediately, several thousand men and boys had swarmed them, hurling bricks and paving stones and bottles. The companies had pushed onward at quick time, but when the furious mob blocked the streets ahead, the soldiers opened fire. The crowd had fallen back and the soldiers had managed to fight their way to the Camden Street station, and after other sabotaged tracks were repaired, the train and its battered and bloodied passengers sped off to Washington. Four soldiers and at least nine civilians had been killed and scores more injured in the melee, railway lines had been destroyed, bridges burned, and telegraph lines severed. Worst of all, Washington City had been cut off from the North.
Beside her, Eliza muffled a low moan and began to tremble uncontrollably. As word swiftly spread through the crowd, exultant cheers rang out, pistols were fired into the air, and bands scrambled together and struck up the merry notes of “Dixie.” Numbly, Lizzie folded the paper and held it out to the newsboy, who stared up at her uncomprehendingly and made no move to take it. A man whooped and snatched it from her hand; relieved of her burden, she tucked her arm through Eliza’s again and they resumed their tour of the block. Certain voices cut through the din and the fog of Lizzie’s thoughts: A shriveled, silver-haired gentleman brandished his cane and declared that any single Southern man could whip five Yankees single-handedly. “One Southern man could whip five
hundred
Yankees,” a portly fellow with flushed cheeks joined in, raising a silver flask into the air, “a race whose extermination, even of women and children, would be a blessing.” The crowd roared its approval with such vehemence that it left Lizzie breathless and light-headed.
“I feel ill,” said Eliza, swaying in her tracks. “I need to sit down.”
“Not here,” said Lizzie, looking about her for a sheltered nook and finding none. “We’ll go to the hardware store and wait there with my brother until the crowd disperses.”
Eliza nodded, gulped air, and resumed walking.
“I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet,” a man Lizzie recognized as a member of the Virginia legislature shouted from the high portico of the Capitol as they passed. “Yet I predict that in less than sixty days, the flag of the Confederacy will be waving over the White House!”
“In less than
thirty
days,” someone shouted back, and the crowd broke into raucous cheers. The pale, solemn men Lizzie had glimpsed before had vanished, and the air fairly crackled with the electricity of celebration.
“Let’s go home,” Eliza begged. “This is getting quite out of hand.”
Lizzie agreed. They hardly spoke as they fled the downtown for Church Hill, but although the commotion diminished behind them, Lizzie suspected it would not be long before their peaceful serenity was disrupted as news of the bloodshed in Baltimore swept through the city.
After parting with Eliza at her doorstep, Lizzie hurried home, where she found her mother and sister-in-law sewing in the parlor. When she told them all she had learned, Mother sat in grave silence, but Mary beamed and laughed aloud. “This is all for the best. You will see,” she proclaimed. “Oh, it’s regrettable that people were hurt, of course, but their noble sacrifice will drive Virginia into the welcoming arms of the Confederacy, and that is for the greater good.”
“I strongly disagree,” said Lizzie flatly.
“That’s only because you’re stubborn,” Mary replied lightly, too cheerful to take offense. “Mr. Lincoln will let the South go willingly now that he’s seen we’ll put up a fight if he tries to prevent it. He’s no general, just a country lawyer turned politician. He doesn’t want a war.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Mother, with a warning look for Lizzie, “but I fear that you are terribly, terribly wrong.”
Mary, habitually reluctant to contradict her gentle mother-in-law, offered a little shrug and thrust out her lower lip as if she were willing to consider that possibility, but she soon resumed sewing with a new liveliness and a secret smile toying with the corners of her mouth. Lizzie held back a sharp rebuke and stiffly announced that she meant to find her nieces and distract herself with a bit of play and a fairy tale. She managed not to add that when it came to fanciful stories, she preferred Hans Christian Andersen’s to Mary Carter West Van Lew’s.
But escaping the Confederate jubilation was not as easy as that. The celebration that had begun at the Capitol grew as the hours passed, grew and spread, so that by dusk it had invaded even the sanctuary of Church Hill. Tin-pan music and flickering lights drew Lizzie and John outdoors and to the foot of the garden, where they watched in apprehensive silence as a torchlit parade marched by with the joyful fierceness of a surging, swelling revolution. Men’s faces, reddened and shadowed by the fiery torches, turned monstrous and ugly as they shouted traitorous slogans. Women, hand in hand, marched and sang and threw flower petals into the air.
“My country,” Lizzie murmured, her eyes filling with bitter, blinding tears. “Oh, my country!”
She felt her brother’s hand on her shoulder, but she took no comfort from his steadfast presence. All around her, the people of Richmond were rushing headlong and heedless into the gaping maw of war. Did they not understand that only carnage would meet them? Had they forgotten their fathers’ harrowing tales of the Mexican War, their grandfathers’ of the War of 1812?
The procession seemed endless, the flags of rebellion without number, the painted slogans on their banners increasingly shocking and defiant. Lizzie thought of France, and of the bloodshed on the streets of Paris, and suddenly felt herself staggered by the nearly tangible power of the thousands of people united in anger. She dropped to her knees in the soft earth beneath the magnolia tree, clasped her hands in prayer, and called out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
Several heads turned her way, a few men scowled darkly, a little boy pointed and jeered. Mostly the mob ignored her and marched on by, but one man paused long enough to shake a fist at her and shout, “Hold your tongue, Madam! That fine house of yours can burn!”
John seized her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet. Heartsick, Lizzie prayed on silently until the last spectral figure disappeared down the street and around the corner. As the harsh torchlight and dizzying cacophony faded into the distance, she clung to her brother’s arm, gathered her long skirts in one hand, and unsteadily climbed the path through the garden terraces back to the house, the only sanctuary that remained.
Chapter Three
APRIL 1861
L
izzie slept restlessly the night of the torchlight parade, but she woke in the morning preternaturally calm and resolute.
“It is strange to think that Virginia is a sovereign state, separate from both Union and Confederacy,” she mused to her mother as they played with the girls in the garden after breakfast.
“Only for the moment,” said Mother, plucking an errant dandelion and tickling Annie beneath the chin with the butter-yellow blossom. “Virginia will join the Confederacy, and Richmond will become its capital. I foresee no other course for us now.”
Lizzie folded her thin arms over her chest and shivered, chilled by her mother’s quiet fatalism. “I still cannot believe it, though I’ve seen it with my own eyes—our city, our friends and neighbors, hurtling themselves gladly, unrestrainedly, eagerly, into a bloody civil war.”
Mother sighed and regarded her with fond compassion, but before she could speak, they caught sight of William descending the back stairs of the grand piazza and crossing the dew-damp lawn toward them. For the first time in the many years Lizzie had known him, his straight back and proud carriage struck her as an almost military bearing. “Ma’am,” he said to Mother when he reached them, “you have a visitor.”
Mother picked up Eliza and made her way back to the house. “I wasn’t expecting any callers today.”
“The lady gave her name as Mrs. Matthew Lodge.” William fell in step beside Mother and Lizzie followed along behind. “She said she knows you through the Bible Society, so I showed her to the parlor.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Mrs. Lodge.” When Mother passed Mary dozing in her chair on the piazza, she placed Eliza on her lap, startling her awake. “Take Eliza, dear. I have a caller.”
“A caller?” Eager for distraction, Mary scrambled to her feet, but she sighed and acquiesced when Eliza held up her arms and asked to be carried. Perhaps sensing that she might be left behind, Annie seized Lizzie’s hand, so it was a curious quintet of three generations of Van Lews who met the unexpected visitor in the parlor.
Mrs. Lodge sat in the best chair near the window, gazing outside at a pair of robins twittering in the low branches of an olive tree. Her dress was of sprigged lavender calico, her face mousy and pinched, her brown hair thinning along the center part and pulled back tightly into a broad bun at the nape of her neck. She seemed both plain and fussy, and, muffling a sigh, Lizzie promptly abandoned all hope of interesting conversation.
“Why, Mrs. Lodge,” Mother greeted her pleasantly. “What an unexpected pleasure. Would you care for some tea?”
“That’s very kind, but no, thank you.” Mrs. Lodge’s voice was sweet but her gaze was sharp. “I have to visit all the ladies on both sides of the street before luncheon.”