“Very well,” she answered. As he drove north toward Capitol Square, she saw plenty of other such expended men on the street: men on crutches with one trouser leg pinned up, men who had no legs in wheelchairs, men with an empty sleeve or a hook doing duty for one hand, men with a patch over one eye, and a couple of men with black silk masks who kept a hand on a companion’s shoulder so they could find their way.
Traffic was appalling, with trucks and heavily laden horse-drawn wagons slowing things to a crawl for everyone else. The air tasted of exhaust fumes and coal smoke and horse manure and chemical stinks Anne could not name. The driver coughed a couple of times when it got particularly ripe, then spoke as if in apology: “Place stinks like one of those miserable U.S. cities, don’t it, ma’am?”
“It had better,” Anne said sharply. “We need weapons and men both, and we have to make the weapons, because the sea war won’t let us import them.”
“You know about these things,” the cabbie said respectfully.
He’d turned left on Canal Street for a block, then gone up Seventh to Grace, where he turned right and went on till he came to Ninth, which abutted Capitol Square. There he waited and waited and waited till he finally found the chance to turn left and go on for half a block, and then to turn right onto Capitol Street. When he got to Eleventh, he-slowly-turned left again, and went past the bulk of Ford’s Hotel to the entrance, which was at the corner of Eleventh and Broad.
A Negro in a uniform fancier than any a general wore took charge of Anne’s luggage. She paid the fare, adding a tip of the same size. The taxi driver took off his cap with his good hand and bowed to her. “Stay well,” she told him.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I used to cuss about traffic till the first time I got shot. Now it don’t worry me none-not even a little bit.”
“No servants, ma’am?” the desk clerk asked.
“Do you see any?” Anne demanded. Julia was not long delivered of a baby girl. No one else who remained at Marshlands seemed suitable as a traveling companion, and she had not wanted to hire a servant. She had enough trouble trusting Negroes she knew-or thought she knew.
Flushing, the clerk gave her a big bronze key with the number 362 stamped onto it. An arthritic elevator took her, the bellman, and her cases upstairs. The room was large and fancy, with thick carpets, landscapes on the walls, elaborately carved tables, and a great profusion of lacework doilies and maroon plush upholstery. It was, no doubt, intended to impress the daylights out of the prosperous businessmen and lobbyists who usually stayed here, and no doubt succeeded. The exhibition of modern art Anne had put together just before the war broke out had been the antithesis of everything the room stood for. “Looks more like a whorehouse than a hotel room,” she remarked as she tipped the bellhop. He let out a scandalized giggle and fled.
Anne unpacked-after living for months in a refugee camp, she could still see having a room to herself as a luxurious waste of space-and went downstairs for supper. The restaurant was as spectacularly overdecorated as the room. But they did a fine job on crab cakes-the boast of “Best in the CSA” on the menu didn’t seem misplaced- so she had little cause for complaint.
The bed was comfortable enough, too. After a Pullman, any bed that didn’t sway and rattle seemed splendid. The next morning, she looked at the gray linen dress she’d intended wearing and shook her head. She hadn’t seen how wrinkled it was the night before, or she would have had it pressed. She chose a maroon silk instead.
After breakfast in the hotel, she hailed a cab. “The Executive Mansion,” she said crisply. The driver, a sensible man, did not bother pointing out that the building was only two blocks north and one east from where she’d got in. What the damnyankees still disparagingly called the Confederate White House also stood near the top of Shockoe Hill; Anne had no intention of arriving there as draggled and sweaty as a housemaid. The cab labored up the hill to the corner of Clay and Twelfth, where the driver let her out. She reckoned the quarter fare and dime tip money well spent.
Armed guards patrolled the grounds of the mansion behind a wrought-iron fence whose points were not only decorative but looked very sharp. A white man who wore formal attire but carried himself with a military bearing examined her letter of invitation and checked her name off on a list before allowing her to proceed. “I am not an assassin,” she remarked, half annoyed, half amused.
“I know that, ma’am-now,” the fellow replied. Anne Colleton seldom yielded anyone else the last word, but made an exception here.
As she’d expected, she had to wait before being admitted to President Semmes’presence. A Negro servant offered her coffee and cakes dusted with powdered sugar. She ate one, then prudently checked her appearance in the mirror of her compact.
After most of an hour-half an hour past the nine-thirty for which her appointment was scheduled-another servant led her into Gabriel Semmes’ office. Since the man who walked out past her was the secretary of war, she did not think the president had delayed meeting her to be inconvenient.
President Semmes certainly received her with every sign of pleasure. “So very good of you to come up from South Carolina,” he said, and moved the chair across from his desk slightly to suggest that she sit in it. “Here, please-make yourself comfortable. Can I have the staff bring you anything?”
“No, thank you,” she answered. “Let’s get straight down to business, shall we?”
“However you like, of course,” he answered. He looked like a Confederate politician, or rather the apotheosis of a Confederate politician: in his early fifties, handsome, ruddy, a little beefy, with a mane of gray hair combed straight back from his forehead, a mustache, and a little chin beard that was almost pure white. The absence of tobacco stains from that beard was enough almost by itself to place him outside the common herd. He went on, “I won’t beat around the bush with you, Miss Colleton-I need your help on this bill to arm our Negroes and use them against the USA.”
Any time a politician said he wouldn’t beat around the bush, you were well advised to keep your hand on your wallet. “You’ll have to show me things are as bad as you said in your letter inviting me here,” she told him. “The press certainly does not make them out to be so desperate.”
“Have you ever heard of any war in the history of the world where the press did not make things out to be better than they were?” Gabriel Semmes returned. “If you look at papers in the USA during the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War, you will see they thought they were winning each time until almost the moment of their overthrow.”
“As may be,” she said. “I am not yet convinced.” She did not tell him what her brother Tom kept saying in his letters. Politicians were not the only ones who learned to hold their cards close-business taught the same lesson.
President Semmes said, “A glance at the map will show you much of the trouble. We have lost ground against the USA almost everywhere, and our remaining gains in Maryland are threatened. Our latest effort to reclaim western Texas failed-there is no other word. They hammer us on every front. We do have some counterstrokes in the offing, and we have thus far managed to avoid losing anything vital, but that cannot continue forever. We are under more pressure than our allies in Europe, and have little prospect of aid from them.”
“We hurt the Yankees worse than they hurt us in every fight, is that not so?” Anne said. “That’s one reason why we stand on the defensive so much.”
“Yes, we do, by a ratio of close to three to two,” Semmes answered. “Each U.S. conscription class, though, outnumbers our corresponding class of whites by about three to one. Add in the Negroes and the deficit shrinks to about two to one. Better, actually, for we would be calling up several conscription classes of blacks at once.”
Anne pursed her lips thoughtfully. “But not all the U.S. soldiers are used against us,” she pointed out. “Many of them go into the fight against Canada. That helps even the numbers somewhat.”
“Somewhat, yes, for now,” President Semmes agreed. “But, even with troops from Britain aiding them-they have the advantage of the northern route-the Canadians, I tell you in confidence, are in a bad way. How long we can rely on them to continue siphoning off Yankee resources, I cannot say.”
Beyond what he asserted, beyond what the papers asserted (which, thanks to censorship, was liable to be the same thing), she didn’t know how things stood with Canada. Would he lie for political advantage alone? Probably. But she could check what he said with her senators and the congressman from her district, the men he wanted her to influence. He would know that. Therefore, he was likely to be telling the truth, or most of it.
“The other question is,” she said, as much to herself as to him, “what will the Confederate States be like with Negroes as citi-zens? Is that better, or is losing as we are?”
