deny that inevitability than a devout Christian could the inevitability of the Second Coming.
Trees and bushes began to thin out as the boats full of Reds neared the edge of the swamp. Ahead, across fields once full of tobacco and cotton and rice that now held mostly weeds, the lights of Gadsden shone: a few houses bright with electricity, more showing the softer, yellower light of burning gas. Most of the houses showed no lights at all; most people, like most people all over the world, had to get up and go to work in the morning.
Cassius waved. The men at the oars brought the rowboat up against the bank of the creek that fed into the Congaree. It grounded softly on mud. The other boats came up alongside. Black men with rifles clambered out of them. “Let’s go, comrades,” Cassius said in a low but penetrating voice. “Time fo’ de buckra to learn some more o’de price de ’pressors pay.”
He left one man behind to guard the boats. Scipio wished he could have been that man, but knew better than to show it. The revolutionaries did not trust him enough to let him out of their sight. Cassius might have, but he did not try to override the opinion of the others. Since they were right and he wrong, that was as well for their cause, if not for Scipio’s.
A motorcar chugged along the road toward town. The driver never saw Cassius and his men, for he led them along paths he knew through the overgrown fields. They went past a couple of mansions, both dark and silent and deserted. Few great landowners around the Congaree dared live among the dozens of Negro servants and field hands needed to make a plantation and mansion live, not these days they didn’t.
Militiamen-the too old and the too young-stumped along the streets of Gadsden. One of them was rash enough to carry a kerosene lantern. Cassius let out a soft chuckle. “Look at that damnfool buckra goin’ roun’ like he a night watchman sayin’, ‘Twelve o’clock, an’ all’s well!’ It ain’t no twelve o’clock, an’ it ain’t well, neither.”
He raised his Tredegar to his shoulder in one fluid motion, aimed, and fired. The militiaman dropped the lantern with a shriek. The burning puddle of kerosene set fire to the boards of the sidewalk.
Another militiaman fired at the sound of Cassius’ shot, and perhaps at the muzzle flash. His bullet didn’t come close. Three Negroes fired at the flash from his rifle. He screamed, too; one of those rounds must have struck home. “Come on!” Cassius said. He advanced on Gadsden in long, loping, ground-eating strides.
Black shadows in the black night, the Reds ran after him. Scipio panted along with the rest, doing his best to keep up. The factory work he’d done had hardened him. He wasn’t the swiftest here, nor anywhere close to it, but he wasn’t the slowest, either.
A bell began clanging in the center of town: probably a fire alarm turned to a new purpose. Here and there, lights came on in upper stories as people got ready to come out and fight or simply tried to find out what was going on. The raiders fired whenever those lights gave them targets. More screams rose.
Slower than it should have came a cry that made sense: “Niggers! It’s the Red niggers!”
Militiamen and whoever else could lay hands on a rifle or shotgun or pistol started banging away, sometimes at the Negroes who ran through the streets but as often at one another. The townsfolk had not been raided for a while, and so did not put up the kind of energetic, organized defense the whites of St. Matthews, for instance, might have shown.
Scipio darted along Market Street toward the corner of Williams. A white-bearded militiaman dashed from Williams out onto Market just as Scipio got to the corner. They both stared in horror. Scipio shot first, before the old man’s rifle had quite come to bear on him. The militiaman fired as he fell. The bullet cracked past Scipio’s head.
Seeing the militiaman still trying to work the bolt on his rifle, Scipio shot him again, in the head. He didn’t move after that. He wasn’t the first white man Scipio had killed, but Scipio hadn’t wanted to shoot him. He’d got in the way; that was all. At the corner of Williams and Market stood a cast-iron mailbox. Scipio threw his note to Anne Colleton into it, then ran on.
The men of the Congaree Socialist Republic shot whomever they could shoot, started half a dozen fires, and then, at Cassius’ shouted command, melted away into the night. Some of the younger and more intrepid militiamen and townsfolk tried to pursue, but the Negroes knew where they were going and the whites did not. Escape proved easy enough.
“Don’t lose a man, not one!” Cassius exulted when they got back to the boats. “We tears that town to hell and gone”-he pointed back toward the leaping flames-“and we don’t lose a man. Is that a great raid, or is it ain’t?”
“That a great raid, Cass,” Scipio said solemnly. “A great raid.”
XI
“Nashville is ours, and fairly won!” Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer exulted, standing in front of the badly damaged State Capitol of Tennessee. Correspondents again hung on his every word, and he had plenty of words to keep them hanging. “We smashed their line north of the Cumberland when no one thought we could. We crossed the Cumberland when no one thought we could. And now, more than half a century after an unjust and ignominious peace forced us to evacuate Nashville, the Stars and Stripes wave over it once more.”
As he had on the other side of the Cumberland, Major Abner Dowling listened with mixed emotions to the general commanding First Army. Custer’s bombast always gave him the pip. But now, by God, Custer had plenty to be bombastic about. He’d gained two smashing victories over the Confederates in the space of a month. People with greater reputations had done less.
“Where do we go from here, General?” one of the scribes asked.
“Forward against the foe,” Custer said grandly. Before Dowling could spoil the proceedings by throwing up on his superior’s shoes, Custer did something most unusual for him-he gave a sensible reason for one of his rhetorical flights of fancy: “More than that, I am not at liberty to say, lest the Rebels learn in our papers what their spies could not tell them.”
“How long can the Rebs stand up under this kind of pounding, sir?” another reporter said.
“You need to ask that question in Richmond, Jack, not here,” Custer said. Chuckling, he added, “As long as the Rebs still own Richmond, anyhow. If they start using barrels back East the way we’ve taught them here, the Confederate States may not keep their capital very long.”
“With Russia in revolution, with France tottering and French soldiers throwing down their guns or turning them on their own officers, with England stretched to the breaking point and the CSA hammered on several fronts, how long can the Entente go on? How long can the war go on?” Jack asked.
“Until the United States and Germany win their rightful places in the sun, and until those places are recognized by all the powers in the world,” Custer said. “It could be tomorrow. It could be five years hence. However long it takes, we shall persevere.” He struck one of his poses.
“If the Rebs do throw in their hand, General, what sort of peace would you recommend imposing on them?” somebody asked.
Before Custer could get started on that one, Abner Dowling stepped in: “Boys, that’s not the sort of question you ask a soldier. That’s a question for the president or the secretary of state or for Congress.” Part of his job-no small part of his job-was keeping the general commanding First Army from embarrassing not only himself but his country.
Given General Custer’s nature, it wasn’t an easy job. With a laugh, Custer said, “Don’t worry, Major. They know I’m not one of the boys in the morning coats and striped trousers. All they asked was what I would recommend, and I’m happy to tell them that much.”
“Sir, I don’t really think you-” Dowling began.
It was hopeless. Custer rolled over him like a barrel smashing barbed wire into the mud. “If it were up to me, I would impose upon the Confederate States a peace that would prevent them from ever again threatening the peace and security of the United States. Twice now they have rubbed our faces in the dirt. They came too close to doing it once more in this great war. They should never, ever have another chance.”
On the whole, Dowling agreed with him (which made Custer’s adjutant want to reexamine his own assumptions). But there were dangers with a punitive peace, too, as one of the correspondents recognized: “What if our terms are so harsh, the Confederates would sooner take their chances on the battlefield than accept them?”
