O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [8]
By the time the Civil War loomed, Scott was ill and exhausted and broken by time. He realized he was too old and without the energy to command such a conflict. He set about feverishly to create a grand strategy for the Union, if Lincoln were elected. Ben Boone, still a brevet second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, was ordered back to Washington.
1861—Washington—the United States War Department
By the time Ben’s ship docked in Baltimore, Lincoln was inaugurated and the Confederacy had fired on Fort Sumter. War was inevitable.
General Scott wore his years badly now. He was saggy and saddened when Lieutenant Boone reported.
There were two or three sentences of small talk. He tapped Ben’s record book on his desk and Ben nodded that he understood.
“I can no longer give my best,” the general said, “and I doubt if I’ll live through this war.”
“I understand, sir,” Ben said.
“You’re losing your goddamn accent. You been reading?”
“Two years in London and lots of time aboard ship, sir.”
“We are both Virginians, Ben. How is this going to sit with you? Many of our finest officers are heading south. Longstreet, Pickett, Jeb Stuart, Tom Jackson, Robert E. Lee. It was Beauregard who ordered the bombardment of Sumter.”
“I do not choose to be among them,” Ben answered.
“Nor I,” Scott replied. “I’m glad to hear you feel the same.”
“It took mighty courage for my grandfather to be an abolitionist in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I heard him preaching, but it was those times I got to sit on his lap and feel his big hand stroke my head. ‘Slavery is evil, it’s wrong, boy. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to the human race.’ “
“And that’s still your feeling?”
“My family still has a station on the underground railway, sir. And I am rather disgusted with the British. They gave up slavery, but they want us to continue on and on to supply cotton for their mills. Maybe not openly, but they’ll support the Confederacy.”
“Then we agree that the curse of slavery must be eradicated.”
“General, I was born with a squirrel gun in my hand. By the time I was ten, I was helping runaway slaves. Our job was to get them to the Allegheny stations in West Virginia. From there they had a shot at Ohio.”
“No wonder you’re such a good tactician.”
“Not quite good enough, sir. I would make one or two, maybe three, runs a year. One time we got ambushed by the Virginia militia. They lynched all six of the slaves, two men, two women, two kids. My uncle Hackett was strung up in Roanoke with a ‘nigger lover’ sign on him. My kin rescued me.”
“I know your grandfather was a powerful shadow over you, but tell me why? Why did you do it?”
Ben Boone, who had the best poker face in the Corps, bit his lip.
“I saw how much black men loved their kids and women, as fiercely as we did. And, I know, sir . . . in their agony they was speaking to God.
“General Scott, you know my hills and my county. When you’re indentured to your pitiful acres of tobacco, you’re no more than a half step better than a slave. I was born hungry, lived hungry, and when I hunted, I hunted hungry. Shoot straight or eat collards. It was damned near famine year-round with us and never a year passed that we didn’t bury some kid, died of pellagra. In some ways we were worse off than slaves. A slave was fed enough to be kept alive. Greed knows no color. It was the same system keeping us crushed, but as woebegone as we were, no one would change places with a slave, even one who ate chicken every day.”
That was a lot of talk in one breath for a man from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ben patted his jacket pocket, feeling for his pipe, looked at the general, who nodded that the smoking lamp was lit.
“After this war is done—well, I don’t expect to be here, but, Ben, you will. The South will be very sick. I hope you’ll return home and help govern them. Many Southerners detest slavery, but not enough of them. It is going to take decades, generations, maybe a century for them to even come