The Spectator at Robert Smalls' Trial

The Spectator at Trial

The idiots of war. Oh God, I revile them. Patriotism is a cheap, easy emotion. It is the noble name they give their ignorance, prejudice, their basic human drive to pretend they could be murderers (though so very, very few actually act on that drive, given the weapon, the moral permission, the benediction of their countrymen, and even cash payment to do so).

Yet even one of these idiots, when he smells the first blood and shit and piss of his shredded fellows in a real battle, begins to change. He becomes something more like a real soldier. He becomes something like that butcher Grant. In his memoirs (yes, I've read them, keeping them locked in my desk drawer so no neighbor or visitor could see them) Grant called the scythe-like slaughter of war “execution.” “We did much execution,” he says, again and again, to describe the horror he had smelled and heard and waded through so many, many times. The horror that had been his doing. His command. His will. His pride. His strength. His cowardice. His greed. His sin. His horrible, unforgivable sin. So much more than sin. The screaming and mewling of the slaughtered idiots, so shortly before proud in their patriotic imbecility.

Not that the slaughter teaches them anything. They never stop. They never confess. They never prostrate themselves on the floor of the study (well, almost never), their lips moving across the dust of the wooden floor, as they beg the Almighty for forgiveness, for absolution, for some sign of redemption, from some respite from the screaming night terrors, from some break from the faces, the slaughtered, dismembered, shit-splattered idiots they led to their deaths. Rather than face that horrible moment with the Savior, and the even more horrible silence with which He responds, they carry on with the idiocy.

So I remember the idiot's scream from the ramparts of Sumter after I had given the Planter her pass: “BLOW THEM YANKEES TO HELL!”

Oh God, I cringed. To know this fool's future. To think of the ultimate futility.

And now I see the idiocy again, the unbroken pride, the futile patriotism of these men in Small's trial, some thirteen years later. He doesn't know I was the man who let him pass that night, the man who saw him in his captain's uniform and straw hat, with the poise and bearing of a fellow officer steering his own batch of idiots toward the slaughter.

I actually felt for him as I gave him permission to pass. I felt for the poor crew, who would surely be blown to pieces or captured sailing forth in the darkness to meet the blockade ships. I wondered if that captain, that fellow Confederate officer, had ever witnessed the horror before, or if he was one of the puffing idiots like that redneck who shouted from the ramparts.

Seeing Smalls here in court, swollen fatter by the years of politics and plunder, I can see how he pulled off his masquerade that night. There is nothing of the slave in him. He is as bold an idiot as the idiots who are framing him in this show trial. The officers of the Confederate army- holding on to their patriotism and their pride, even in defeat. They dress now in business suits. Smalls looks just like them, except for his black skin and his nappy hair. His suit is a bit finer than theirs, and it does make you wonder. How did a slave become so wealthy so fast? I've heard he lives in his master's former home.

But how do any of them live the way they do? They live off the plunder from the other idiots, I suppose. A whole nation of idiots who, having waded now through the guts of their countrymen, choose pride and power and murder rather than prostrating themselves for forgiveness. For deliverance. For freedom from the idiocy. For salvation. For escape.

After Small had passed in the Planter, when, against the thin line of dawn at the harbor's mouth, I saw the Planter strike the flag of the Confederacy and raise a large white bed sheet in its place, my idiot's eyes, for there was still some of the idiocy left in me, immediately thought this was some ruse to gain advantage on the blockading ships, perhaps to close the distance before the Planter opened fire in their suicide mission.

And then I realized what had happened. My mind thought just a bit beyond the obvious, and the obvious began to dawn on me. I gave the command to fire. My battery officers themselves, confused by the situation, took so long to comprehend. They couldn't wrap their understanding around the complexity of the situation, and then it took the enlisted men at their command an even longer while to find some understanding and to act. And no doubt, the idiot who had enjoined Smalls to “blow them Yankees to hell” was among this bewildered cohort at the guns.

By the time our guns fired, the Planter was out of range. The shells made geysers in her wake, spraying white against the dawn. Smalls, as sharp a wheelman as they say he was, took the unmarked, middle channel across the bar, the shortest way out of range of our guns from Moultrie or Wagner. How he took that steamer out through the mines, nets and shoals in the dark I can't tell you. I'd studied the secret charts of that harbor for hours. I know I couldn't have piloted a ship out in the conditions he ran. He was a clever man, and a bold one.

But now they've got him here in their courtroom, in his fine clothes, with his fat, rich-man's belly, and his ardent and learned attorney, and I wonder if he'll get away so clean this time.