Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [189]
“Daddy, stop,” Sally cried out from the top of the stairs. “Caroline hasn’t done anything wrong. She helped Mother and me.”
“Helped you! Get down here. Both of you. I’m taking you home.”
“We were terrified yesterday, Daddy,” Sally said as she helped her mother down the stairs. “You left us, and the servants all ran off, and we thought we were going to die. If Caroline hadn’t come and brought us here where it was safe, I don’t know what we would have done.”
“Get in the carriage,” he said coldly. Mr. St. John opened the front door himself and pointed toward the street. Caroline saw his carriage parked at the curb, but it was without a driver.
“Did you even hear a word that Sally just said?” Mrs. St. John asked him.
He glared at her. “Our mill burned to the ground yesterday. You can thank Caroline and her Yankee friends for that. Now get in the carriage.”
They started to leave, but before she reached the door, Sally turned and ran back to take Caroline in her arms. “Thank you,” she whispered as she held her tightly. “I’ll never forget what you did for us yesterday.”
Morning revealed that most of the fires were out. Caroline and Gilbert drove downtown to see what was left of Richmond.
Fifty-four city blocks lay in charred ruins. Nearly the entire business district was gone. More than nine hundred homes and businesses. Nothing remained except skeletal brick walls, or maybe a blackened fireplace and chimney rising from the smoking debris. In some places, the rubble of fallen bricks was piled so high it blocked the streets. The town didn’t even look like Richmond.
The enemy’s occupying forces had moved into President Davis’ Confederate White House. Everywhere that Caroline and Gilbert looked, on every street corner and city block, she saw armed soldiers dressed in blue standing guard. They drove past Capitol Square, where hundreds of Yankee horses grazed, and Caroline remembered sitting on a bench in that square beside Charles the night Virginia had seceded. Four years ago this month, the city had celebrated the birth of the Confederacy. But Charles had looked at her that night, his eyes filled with sorrow, and said, “You deserve to know the truth . . . I don’t think we can possibly win this war.”
If Charles had known just how much he would lose—not only the war itself, but his city, his livelihood, thousands of his fellow soldiers, and worst of all, their love, their future—would he still have fought? If she had known that fighting to abolish slavery would have cost her Charles’ love, would she still have done it?
Her questions had no answers. It was useless to ask them, as useless as trying to pick up the fallen bricks from among the rubble to put the city back together again. It couldn’t be done. “Trust that everything you done for God and everything you gave up for Him has a purpose,” Eli had said. “God will give it all meaning in the end.” Caroline could only pray that it would be so.
When she could no longer stand the sight of her beloved city, she asked Gilbert to take her home.
That day, April 4, President Lincoln arrived to tour the vanquished city. Eli and Gilbert took all of the other servants down to Capitol Square to cheer for the president who had purchased their freedom. Even baby Isaac got a glimpse of the man the Negroes hailed as their Moses.
Not quite a week after Richmond fell, General Lee and his exhausted troops surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Court House. Charles laid down his rifle for the last time in bitter defeat. He and the friends he had fought and starved beside for four long years would finally go home. But when Charles arrived in Richmond, it was to a house of mourning. His father had died on April 9, the day Lee surrendered.
One week after the surrender at Appomattox,