a secret weapon they swore would bring instant victory to the South, others seeking an officer’s appointment with the Legion. A good number of the latter were professional European soldiers on half pay from their own armies, but all such petitioners were told that the Faulconer Legion would elect only local men to be its company officers and that Faulconer’s appointed aides would all be Virginians too. ‘Except for you, Nate,’ Washington Faulconer told Starbuck, ‘that’s if you’d like to serve me?’
‘I’d be honored, sir.’ And Starbuck felt a warm rush of gratitude for the kindness and trust that Faulconer was showing him.
‘You won’t find it hard to fight against your own kind, Nate?’ Faulconer asked solicitously.
‘I feel more at home here, sir.’
‘And so you should. The South is the real America, Nate, not the North.’
Not ten minutes later Starbuck had to refuse an appointment to a scarred Austrian cavalry officer who claimed to have fought in a half-dozen hard battles in Northern Italy. The man, hearing that only Virginians would be allowed to command in the Legion, sarcastically inquired how he could reach Washington. ‘Because if no one will have me here, then by God I shall fight for the North!’
The beginning of May brought the news that Northern warships had begun a blockade of the Confederate coast. Jefferson Davis, the new president of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America, retaliated by signing a declaration of war against the United States, though the State of Virginia seemed in two minds about waging that war. State troops were withdrawn from Alexandria, a town just across the Potomac River from Washington, an act that Washington Faulconer scathingly condemned as typical of Letcher’s caviling timidity. ‘You know what the governor wants?’ he asked Nate.
‘To take the Legion from you, sir?’
‘He wants the North to invade Virginia, because that’ll ease him off the political fence without tearing his britches. He’s never been fervent for secession. He’s a trimmer, Nate, that’s his trouble, a trimmer.’ Yet the very next day brought news that Letcher, far from waiting supine while the North restored the Union, had ordered Virginian troops to occupy the town of Harper’s Ferry fifty miles upstream of Washington. The North had abandoned the town without a fight, leaving behind tons of gun-making equipment in the Federal arsenal. Richmond celebrated the news, though Washington Faulconer seemed rueful. He had cherished his idea of an attack on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad whose track crossed the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, but now, with the town and its bridge safe in Southern hands, there no longer seemed any need to raid the line farther west. The news of the river town’s occupation also promoted a flurry of speculation that the Confederacy was about to make a preemptive attack across the Potomac, and Faulconer, fearing that his rapidly growing Legion might be denied its proper place in such a victorious invasion, decided his place was at Faulconer Court House, where he could hasten the Legion’s training. ‘I’ll bring you out to Faulconer County as soon as I can,’ Faulconer promised Starbuck as he mounted his horse for the seventy-mile ride to his country estate. ‘Write to Adam for me, will you?’
‘I will, sir, of course.’
‘Tell him to come home.’ Faulconer raised a gloved hand in farewell, then released his tall black horse to the road. ‘Tell him to come home!’ he shouted as he went.
Starbuck dutifully wrote, addressing his letter to the church in Chicago that forwarded Adam’s mail. Adam, just like Starbuck, had abandoned his studies at Yale, but where Starbuck had done it for an obsession with a girl, Adam had gone to Chicago to join the Christian Peace Commission which, by prayer, tracts and witness had been trying to bring the two parts of America back into peaceful amity.
No answer came from Chicago, yet every post brought Starbuck new and urgent demands from Washington Faulconer. ‘How long will it take Shaffer’s to make officers’ uniforms?’ ‘Do we have a determination of officers’ insignia? This is important, Nate! Inquire at Mitchell and Tylers,’ ‘Visit Boyle and Gambles and ask about saber patterns,’ ‘In my bureau, third drawer down, is a revolver made by Le Mat, send it back with Nelson.’ Nelson was one of the two Negro servants who carried the letters between Richmond and Faulconer Court House. ‘The Colonel’s mighty anxious to collect his uniforms,’ Nelson confided to Starbuck. ‘The Colonel’ was Washington Faulconer, who had begun signing his letters ‘Colonel Faulconer,’ and Starbuck took good care to address Faulconer with the self-bestowed rank. The Colonel had ordered notepaper printed with the legend ‘The Faulconer Legion, Campaign Headquarters, Colonel Washington Faulconer, State of Virginia, Commanding,’ and Starbuck used the proof sheet to write the Colonel the happy news that his new uniforms were expected to be ready by Friday and promising he would have them sent out to Faulconer County immediately.
On that Friday morning Starbuck was sitting down to bring his account books up-to-date when the door to the music room banged open and a tall stranger glowered angrily from the threshold. He was a tall thin man, all bony elbows, long shanks and protruding knees. He looked to be in early middle age, had a black beard streaked with gray, a sharp nose, slanted cheekbones and tousled black hair, and was wearing a threadbare black suit over scuffed brown work boots; altogether a scarecrow figure whose sudden appearance had made Starbuck jump.
‘You must be Starbuck, ah-ha?’
‘I am, sir.’
‘I heard your father preach once.’ The curious man bustled into the room, looking for somewhere to drop his bag and umbrella and walking stick and coat and hat and book bag, and, finding no place suitable, clung to them. ‘He was impassioned, yes, but he tortured his logic. Does he always?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean. You, sir, are?’
‘It was in Cincinatti. At the old Presbyterian Hall, the one on Fourth Avenue, or was it Fifth? It was in ’56, anyway, or maybe it was ’55? The hall has since burned down, but is no loss to the architecture of what is left of the Republic. Not a fine building in my opinion. Of course none of the fools in the audience noted your father’s logic. They just wanted to cheer his every word. Down with the slavocracy! Up with our sable brethren! Hallelujah! Evil in our midst! Slur on a great nation! Bah!’
Starbuck, even though he disliked his father, felt pressed to defend him. ‘You made your opposition known to my father, sir? Or do you just start quarrels with his son?’
‘Quarrels? Opposition? I hold no opposition to your father’s views! I agree with them, each and every one. Slavery, Starbuck, is a menace to our society. I simply disagree with your father’s contemptible logic! It is not enough to pray for an end to the peculiar institution, we have to propose practical arrangements for its abolition. Are the slaveholders to be recompensed for their pecuniary loss? And if so, by whom? By the Federal government? By a sale of bonds? And what of the Negroes themselves? Are we to repatriate them to Africa? Settle them in South America? Or are we to breed the darkness out of them by forcible miscegenation, a process, I might say, which has been well begun by our slave owners. Your father made no mention of these matters, but merely had recourse to indignation and prayer, as if prayer has ever settled anything!’
‘You do not believe in prayer, sir?’
‘Believe in prayer!’ The thin man was scandalized by the very thought of such a belief. ‘If prayer solved anything there’d be no unhappiness in this world, would there? All the moaning women would be smiling! There would be no more disease, no more hunger, no more appalling children picking their snot-filled nostrils in our schoolrooms, no more sniveling infants brought for my admiration. Why should I admire their mewling, puking, whimpering, filthy-faced offspring? I do not like children! I have been telling Washington Faulconer
