by John Jakes
“That became evident first thing this morning.”
Amanda set aside the skirt she’d been about to fold into one of the trunks. “What do you mean?”
Upset, Rothman stamped to the windows. “A banker can be of no use to you if you refuse to follow his suggestions!” He spun around. “You made some remarks about getting rid of a certain anti-Catholic title on the Kent list? Some other comments about wanting to publish an autobiography by a runaway slave—?”
“What if I did? I got angry at what I saw at Kent’s—the decay—the indifference—besides, I only spoke to the general manager, Mr. Payne. In private. He promised not to repeat a word.”
Rothman leaned across the top of a trunk. “Theo Payne is a notorious drunk! An excellent brain—but a loose tongue when he imbibes. And he imbibes constantly.”
A little knot of dread tightened in Amanda’s stomach. “I—I did catch some hint of that,” she admitted.
“Did you also meet a gentleman named Drew?”
“Briefly.”
“Mr. Stovall’s informant within the firm. After you left, Payne was so delighted, he spent all afternoon in an alehouse, celebrating. As I get the story, he returned late in the day, barely able to walk, and boasted to the entire staff about all the changes you intended to make. The entire staff—including Mr. Drew. You should have stayed away—I warned you. More important, you should have avoided political subjects at all costs—that, I didn’t warn you of specifically. So we’re both paying for it.”
“Get to the point, Joshua.”
“This morning, Stovall’s attorneys wired from New York. The negotiations have been broken off. Permanently.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’s my error for not telling you Stovall’s an active member of the Know-Nothings—”
“No, don’t blame yourself. I was aware of it.”
“Then how could you imagine he’d sell out to someone who plans to turn Kent and Son a hundred and eighty degrees politically?” Rothman sighed. “I’m sorry—it’s not my position to speak so frankly—it’s just that I know how much you want the company—”
“I didn’t stop to think about the danger in Payne’s drinking. The blame’s mine, Joshua. I accept it.”
“That won’t make Stovall relent, I’m afraid.”
“If we can’t buy the firm straightforwardly, we’ll have to get control some other way.”
Thunderstruck, he stared at her.
“Are you serious?”
“I am. This is a setback, nothing more—”
But she felt it much more deeply than the words suggested. She hadn’t been all that outspoken at the firm—yet she had realized she shouldn’t be speaking. Her anger had overcome caution.
Stovall’s immediate reaction to her comments spoke volumes about the sort of man he was, the sort her grandfather would have detested—
In a calm voice, she resumed. “I’m sorry you’ve labored so hard, only to have my carelessness undo your efforts.” She touched his arm. “I’ll see you’re well compensated when we finally get control.”
“Mrs. de la Gura, I really think you’d be wiser to abandon any hope of—”
“No,” she said, “I won’t.”
“I can see no open, legal means of—”
“Then we’ll do it secretly if we have to! Illegally! One way or another, Joshua, I am going to own Kent’s.”
Chapter III
The Man Who
Thundered
i
SOME SIXTEEN MONTHS LATER—A Friday evening in February 1852—Amanda and Rose Ludwig were seated in a box at The Bowery Theatre, a structure already twenty-five years old but distinguished among New York’s playhouses because it had been the first to install gas.
The jets throughout most of the auditorium had been turned off for the meeting, which was being held in lieu of a performance of the Bowery’s current attraction. Together with the footlight candles, the gas fixtures flanking the proscenium opening illuminated the half dozen speakers seated behind the podium. The six were paying dutiful attention to the preacher addressing the three thousand people who had packed the main floor, the boxes and the galleries.
A few feet upstage from the half dozen chairs, a drop painted to represent a European drawing room added an incongruous note; the theatre management had declined to remove all the scenery for the comedy now playing six nights a week. But since the comedy was not particularly successful, the management had been happy to rent the theatre for an abolitionist rally.
The preacher, a Congregationalist, had been talking for twenty minutes. His function was the same as that of four of the men behind him—to lengthen the program and build anticipation for the featured address by Frederick Douglass. The guest of honor sat directly behind the podium, motionless and attentive.
Mr. Bryant, who was to introduce him, began consulting his note’s, conscious from the flow of adjectives that the cleric was reaching his conclusion. And so he did, with much arm waving and a shrill burst of oratory devoid of logic but long on heat. He called down divine damnation on the entire south—but drew only perfunctory applause from the restless crowd. They’d heard essentially the same message four times already.
An audible sigh ran through the dark theatre as the preacher sat down, mopping his forehead. William Cullen Bryant, the Massachusetts lawyer turned poet and journalist, straightened his two pages of notes and stood up. A hush settled on the hall. Amanda heard Rose murmur, “Finally! Old Horace has fallen asleep over there. So has my rear end.”
Gazing across the main floor to the front box on the far side, Amanda saw the publisher Greeley straighten up in his chair, roused by the applause that greeted Bryant’s arrival at the podium. She glanced to the box directly behind Greeley’s; it was still a puzzle. No one seemed to be occupying it, though every ticket for the meeting had been sold for weeks. If there were people in the box, they’d seated themselves quite far back, to avoid being seen.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Bryant began, “I shall be brief in my introduction—”
A raucous cry of approval rang down from the gallery. The audience laughed. Bryant smiled. He was in his late fifties, held the editor’s chair at the New York Post, and appeared tonight as one of the city’s most outspoken foes of slavery. In the national election of ’48, Bryant had been a member of the Barnburner faction that had split off from the Democratic Party, enraged because the party adopted a platform containing only one plank of substance: a vague endorsement of the conduct of the Mexican war. Out of the Barnburners—who had offered former president Van Buren to the electorate in ’48—had come the even more militant Free Soil party, ardent reformers unalterably opposed to the extension of slavery into any new United States territories.
But Bryant refrained from comments on the meeting’s theme, confining his remarks to a quick summary of the career of the man everyone had come to hear.
He touched on Douglass’ birth as a slave in Maryland, mentioned his early years in Baltimore, when, through the kindness of an enlightened master, Hugh Auld, he had been able to learn to read and write while serving as a houseboy and a laborer in Auld’s shipyard.
It was Auld’s death, Bryant reminded the audience, that had brought Douglass to St. Michaels, below Baltimore, and confrontation with another Auld, Thomas, who proved less liberal.
Douglass had already begun to feel resentment of his bondage. He was quarrelsome. Auld took steps to correct that. He hired out the young black to a noted slave breaker named Edward Covey.
Covey attempted to apply the whip once too often. Douglass turned on him, and fought. After the struggle, Covey, all but defeated, never again touched the Negro whose spirit he had been paid to destroy—
“And thus,” Bryant said, “in our distinguished guest’s own words, a slave was made a man!”
Applause. Amanda and Rose joined in. Then, as the clapping died away, they heard a startling sound from the darkened box behind Greeley’s.
The rest of the audience heard too. Heads turned. There were scowls. Greeley rose all the way out of his chair and tried to see who had hissed.
It wasn’t uncommon for foes of the abolitionists to attend their programs. Sometimes the unwelcome guests tried to disrupt a meeting. That was evidently the case tonight. Amanda’s vantage point still prevented her from seeing the occupants of the box in question.
Bryant was plainly angered. He lost his place in his notes and took a few moments to resume. Douglass looked unperturbed.
Rapidly, Bryant went through the rest of his introduction, describing the speaker’s first, aborted effort to escape to the north, and his second, successful one in 1838.
With seventeen dollars and an identification paper borrowed from a free Negro seaman, Douglass had boarded a train in Baltimore and waited nervously for the conductor to collect his fare and examine the paper. The conductor gave the paper only a casual glance. After a boat trip from Washington to Philadelphia, then a train ride, Douglass arrived in New York, a free man.
Bryant paid tribute to Douglass’ family, to his long and earnest dedication to freedom for America’s enslaved blacks, to his career as editor and publisher of The North Star at Rochester.
Then, folding away his notes, he said, “It is my great pleasure and high honor to present Mr. Frederick Douglass.”
The audience surged to its feet, applauding wildly. Douglass smiled for the first time, tilted his head to one side to acknowledge the ovation and approached the podium.
ii
The speaker began quietly, using no notes. “Mr. Bryant—ladies and gentlemen—I too shall be brief. My message to you is essentially a simple one. But just let me state that I never stand before an audience like that which I see before me without feeling my incompetence to do justice to the cause which I am here to advocate”—he allowed himself another faint smile—“or to the expectation which is generally created for me by the friends who precede me. Certainly, if the eulogiums bestowed on me this evening were correct, I should be able to entertain this audience for hours by my eloquence. But I claim none of this. While I feel grateful for your generosity, I can certainly claim very little right to your applause—for I was once a slave. I never had a day’s schooling in my life. All that I know, I have stolen—”
The oblique reference to his escape produced a scattering of cheers, which he acknowledged with another of those carefully controlled smiles. As the cheering faded, there was another loud hiss.
This time, a man in the orchestra leaped up and shook his fist. “Shame, shame!”
Others took up the cry. Douglass didn’t dignify the dark box with so much as a glance. He held up his hand, settling the crowd into silence.
“I wish at once to relieve you from all expectation of a great speech. That I am deeply and earnestly engaged in advocating the cause of my brethren is most true, and so, this evening, I hail your kind expressions toward me with the profoundest gratitude. I will make use of those expressions. I will take them home in my memory. They shall be written on my heart, and they will give me courage as I travel throughout this land of boasted liberty and light”—his voice had grown stronger—“yet this land of abject slavery, for the purpose of overthrowing that system and restoring the Negro to his long-lost rights!”
Applause louder than before greeted this first emotional peak in the speech. Amanda watched the dark box. Sure enough, just as the outpouring of sound began to diminish, the hiss was heard again, prolonged and ugly.
More yells of anger burst from the audience. One burly fellow started out of his seat, intending to go up the aisle and on to the box. His two companions restrained him.
Douglass moved quickly to the subject of his address—Section Two of Article IV of the Constitution. He first quoted the Section’s third paragraph verbatim. Then he reminded his audience that the authors of the Constitution had included the paragraph in order to acknowledge the right of slave owners to reclaim runaways in nonslave territory, even though the paragraph carefully avoided the use of the word slave in favor of the more general person.
“Upon the face of this,” Douglass said, “there is nothing of injustice, nothing of inhumanity—it is perfectly in accordance with justice, perfectly humane. But what does it really mean in the United States?
“It means that if any slave shall in the darkness of midnight, thinking himself a man and entitled to the rights of a man, steal away from his hovel or quarter—
“Shall snap the chain that binds his leg—
“Shall break the fetter that links him to slavery—
“It means that if he shall do these things, then by night and by day, on his way from a state where slavery is practiced to one where it is not, he shall also be liable to be hunted down like a felon and dragged back to the bondage from which he has escaped!”
Amanda leaned forward, stirred by the man’s eloquence. Douglass’ forehead showed a light sheen of perspiration. He still had no scrap of text before him. But he obviously needed none. Much more than thought had gone into what he was saying; his life’s fears and angers and hopes had gone into it.
He let go of the podium, his hands clenched.
“This clause of the Constitution,” he thundered, “is one of the greatest safeguards to that slave system which we have met here this evening to express our detestation of!
“This clause of the Constitution—upheld and endorsed by an abominable fugitive slave bill promulgated by misguided men in the Congress—gives to the slave holder the right at any moment to set his bloodhound upon the track of the fugitive, hunt him down and drag him back to the jaws of slavery!
“This clause of the Constitution consecrates every rood of earth in this land over which the star-spangled banner waves as SLAVE-HUNTING GROUND!”
The booming voice was drowned under a roar of “Shame! Shame!” If the unseen antagonist in the box bothered to hiss, no one heard.
Douglass then launched into a ringing demand that all men of conscience disobey the Fugitive Slave Act. While Amanda had applauded during the earlier portions of the speech, here she held back. She wasn’t certain the speaker was right. Congress had passed the law in the hope of mitigating sectional strife and preserving the Union. Douglass rejected such compromise. He said the law was immoral—and perhaps it was. He said it should be overturned—that might be true as well. But when he said that until the law was repealed, it should be ignored, Amanda found herself disagreeing.
“This being the state of things in America”—Douglass’ quieter tone immediately hushed the hall again—“you cannot expect me to stand before you with eloquent outbursts of praise for my country. No, my friends, I must be honest with America—
“Unmask her pretensions to republicanism!
“Unmask her hypocritical pretensions to Christianity!
“Denounce her pretensions to civilization!
“Proclaim in her ear the wrongs of those who cry day and night to heaven—‘HOW LONG, HOW LONG, OH LORD GOD!’”
The Bowery Theatre literally shook from the hand-clapping and foot-stomping. Douglass bowed his head, breathing hard and clinging to the podium for support.
The ovation continued for one minute, two, three. Rose was clapping furiously. Even Amanda cast aside her reservations and joined in, caught up in the spell of the man’s oratory.
Finally, when the tumult died, Douglass resumed.
“Let me say this to you in conclusion. Despite the dark picture I have presented—despite the iniquity of the present law which can only be an abomination in the eyes of all men who consider themselves believers in the principles upon which this nation was founded—no, despite all this, I do not despair of America.
“There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of the unjust law and the entire system of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened.’ The doom of slavery is certain!”
Once more, little by little, he had begun to build volume. Amanda’s spine tingled. The stat
ely figure held every eye in the theatre.
“While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence—from the great principles it contains—and from the genius of American institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age in which we live.
“No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot around in the same old path of its fathers. A change has come over the affairs of mankind!
“Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. The fiat of the Almighty—‘Let there be light!’—has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage can now hide itself from the all-pervading and cleansing light of decency, democracy, and honor.
“Unjust laws shall perish. Unjust men shall die un-mourned and dishonored. There will be universal freedom if we dedicate our hearts, our minds and our mortal souls to its accomplishment—if we resist the tyranny of the law where it must be resisted—and if our prayer of fervent aspiration forever remains that of William Lloyd Garrison—”
Douglass flung his hands high over his head, roaring: “ ‘Godspeed the year of jubilee—the wide world o’er!’ ”
iii
It took Amanda and Rose nearly twenty minutes to work their way through the long line of people filing onto the stage to congratulate Douglass. He was particularly gracious with Amanda, recalling their meeting on the steamer to Boston, and thanking her warmly for the donation she’d sent. She promised to send another, then said, “But I must tell you honestly, Mr. Douglass, I can’t agree with you on one point in your address.”
“Which point is that, Mrs. de la Gura?”
“That the Fugitive Slave Act must be disobeyed. Overturned—perhaps. But as long as it is the law—”
“I can understand your attitude—even though I consider it wrong. The working of that particular law remains an abstraction for you. Something you read about, and consider intellectually. I think you’d change your mind if you were face to face with one of the law’s victims. Or were a victim yourself.”
