Read Online Confederates by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online Page A

plantations, of the South of the julep and the great slaveholders, of the unbuttoned, rundown, rich, steamy, enticing world of the Carolina lowlands. So the journey he took amazed and upset him some.
    He travelled by railroads that were to become the framework of the war he now – three years later – found himself fighting. The Manassas Gap Railroad, the Orange and Alexandria, the Virginia Central, the Norfolk and Petersburg, the Seaboard and Roanoke, the Wilmington and Weldon, and all the rest. On great trestle bridges he travelled through Dismal Swamp. In the inky waters there were alligators; the coastal jungles were thickened by creepers of Spanish moss. He observed Southern gentlemen drinking cocktails and mint juleps with their breakfasts in the saloon car, and outside the foul water and the swamp thickets blurred past. Here, according to the legends white Southerners tormented themselves with at night, runaway and renegade slaves hid and maybe planned a war against their owners, but the dogs of the slave-hunters and malarial miasmas and the alligators usually broke up those plans. Yet one could never be sure. It looked like the place out of which some nigger king, some unconquerable black man with mad eyes and savage thews and a great manhood that threatened all Southern womankind, might come some day.
    Everyone had a cigar in his teeth on those coastal lines and talked of politics and the fine nature of Southern institutions. In a mean village smelling of turpentine and the pine woods of North Carolina, a Tarheel Congressman left the train and spoke to the crowd of poor whites and to the gentlefolk who had come out of the woods on fine horses in well-cut clothes. The women were wearing crinolines in this balmy Southern winter; and the slaves carried the bandboxes and portmanteaux and babies.
    â€˜We are an agricultural people,’ proclaimed the Congressman, only a little drunk, ‘pursuing our own system, working out our own destiny. We bred up men and women to some better purposes than to make them vulgar and fanatical and cheating Yankees. Let me tell you, my friends, about the Republicans, who have risen in the North like a plague. Their women are only hypocrites if they pretend they have real virtue. Their men are only liars if they pretend to be honest. They’re nice people to have in your home if you don’t mind your littl’uns corrupted, your wife vitiated, your principles compromised. They have no gentry up there as we have, and so they have no order. We have a system that enables us to reap the earth’s fruits through a race which we saved from barbarism in restoring them to their real place in the world as labourers, whilst we are enabled to cultivate the arts, the graces and the accomplishments of life …’
    The poor whites, sallow from malaria and from their trade of extracting resins and turpentine from the forest, looked at him soberly, and the tall planters too, their eyebrows lowered a little. Even then, two and a half years back, the battle lines were being drawn in the winter air by tipsy Southern Democrats and by crazed Republicans.
    The Charleston and Savannah had gotten Usaph to Pocataligo one brisk dawn, and without eating breakfast, he hired a horse at the livery stable and got directions to the Kearsage plantation, where his uncle was said to be dying. The man at the stables talked reverently about the Kearsages. Mr Kearsage had once been a U.S. attaché in London and was even known to have written a book so deep no one in Pocataligo had ever read it.
    Mist sat on the low rice fields and hid all but the stookie tops of the cotton bushes when Usaph rode out of Pocataligo eastwards. Soon he met long lines of slaves moving along the road, shovels on their shoulders, to work on the sluice ditches in the rice fields. They were singing – just like all the books said they did – in a subtle harmony they took for granted.
    â€˜Ah mah soul, ah mah