“You've seen all them niggers standing up there on the block,” Ward said. “I'm not talking about the wenches, now – I mean the bucks. You reckon somebody you can buy and sell like a sack of flour… You reckon somebody like that can fight?”

“Not so it matters,” his friend answered without hesitation.“ I tell you this, though – any nigger who tries pointing a gun at me, that's one dead nigger right there.”

“Well, you can sing that in church.” Ward was slimmer and darker than Bartlett, and envied the other trooper his scar. He didn't want to get cut or shot himself. He'd seen wounded men, and dead men, too. He knew bullets and knives hurt. But he wanted a mark to show the world – and maybe show himself – he'd been to war.

All over the Confederacy, whites believed Negroes couldn't fight. They believed the Federals were a pack of monsters for putting Negroes in uniform, giving them guns, and letting them fight. And they maintained elaborate organizations designed to crush slave uprisings before they really got started.

Those organizations worked. Rebellions were suppressed so ruthlessly, they didn't happen very often. But having plans to put down revolts said Negroes might fight after all if they ever got the chance.

Matt Ward didn't recognize the contradiction, not with the top part of his mind. Hardly any white Southerners did. But it was there, inescapably there, and it nagged at him the way a tooth will when it hasn't started to ache yet but isn't quite right, either. He sensed it was there, and he wished he didn't.

McCulloch's brigade got into Brownsville a little past noon, riding in from the west. Brigadier General Bell's brigade had just come into town from the northwest. Between them, the two forces stretched Brownsville to overflowing.

Quite a few Negroes were on the muddy streets. There seemed to be more slaves in this part of Tennessee than anywhere else in the state – and there must have been more still before it started slipping back and forth between the C.S.A. and the U.S.A.