by John Jakes
“But we’ll be in Baltimore in just—”
The woman paid no attention. As she hurried away, Phelps took off his cap and scratched his head.
Orry felt drained—and convinced for the first time that only armed force could meet the threat of Yankees such as John Brown. Suppose you granted that slavery ought to be ended—and in his most private thoughts he sometimes granted exactly that—even so, violent revolution wasn’t the way. Revolution had to be resisted.
That was his conviction as he watched scraps of paper blow past the window. Messages thrown from the cars by the passengers who had survived the night. Messages carrying the news of Harpers Ferry to the world.
Three evenings later, Orry bought a paper at their Baltimore hotel. In the lobby, in restaurants, and in the streets, people were talking of nothing but the raid, which had ended with only two of the insurrectionists left uninjured. Brown’s men had killed four townsfolk. One was the Negro baggage handler Orry had seen lying on the platform. For a time a great-grandnephew of President Washington had been held hostage.
The insurrectionists had finally been overcome by a detachment of Marines rushed from Washington. The commander of the detachment was Lee, and he had been accompanied by Charles’s old friend Stuart. Brown himself had been wounded defending an engine house in which he had taken refuge. He was now in jail at Charles Town, Virginia.
Orry took the paper up to the suite. “They list Brown’s men who were killed,” he said when Brett entered the sitting room. “One is a Grady Garrison, Negro.”
“Garrison?” she repeated.
Orry shrugged. “He must have adopted the last name of that Boston rabble rouser.”
Brett’s face was nearly as melancholy as his. “Is there a mention of Virgilia?”
“No, not a word. It’s presumed that any of the conspirators who didn’t take part in the raid fled after the shooting started. The farm isn’t so far from Harpers Ferry that they couldn’t hear the gunfire.”
“Well, much as I dislike Virgilia, I hope she got away.”
“I do too. For George’s sake.”
Frightening as it had seemed when Orry was in the middle of it, the raid, it was now clear, had been a pathetic doomed affair. A conspiracy organized by madmen, executed by misfits. Even so, it was sending shock waves through the country and around the world. If the North and the South had not been irreparably split by the events of the last few years, they would be split now, he thought.
So it proved in the days that followed. Not even bleeding Kansas had divided the nation quite so completely. Late in October, Brown went on trial for conspiracy to incite a slave revolt and treason against the state of Virginia.
Influential Northerners praised him and spoke out in his defense. Emerson called him a new saint. In the South, Huntoon’s reaction was typical. He denounced Brown as a homicidal maniac and his scheme as “our homeland’s deepest fears made manifest.” With that Orry sadly agreed. Although Brown’s raid didn’t propel Orry into the camp of the fire eaters, he found himself a good deal closer to it.
Fear of further uprisings spread like a plague. Along the Ashley, planters and their wives spoke of little else. The LaMotte brothers formed a militia-style marching organization of like-minded men, the Ashley Guards. Huntoon was named an honorary captain.
George wrote Orry to apologize for his behavior at Lehigh Station. He made no reference to Virgilia or to her presence at the Maryland farm. George found it deplorable that some Southerners were blaming Brown’s raid on the so-called Black Republicans. He said Brown was clearly in the wrong, except perhaps in the matter of his original motivation. The desire to see all slaves freed was, in George’s opinion, laudable.
“Laudable!” Orry crushed the note and flung it into a corner.
On the night of December 1, church bells pealed across the North from Maine to Wisconsin. It was a night of mourning for John Brown. Next day he ascended a scaffold in Charles Town and gazed peacefully at the bleak and wintry sky as the hangman settled the noose around his neck.
That evening Cooper dined at Mont Royal. He expressed regret over the day’s events. “They shouldn’t have hung him. While he lived he was just a poor lunatic. Now they’ve turned him into a holy martyr.”
A few days before Christmas, Orry had confirmation of that in another letter from George. The letter concluded:
People still speak passionately about the raid. Do you know Grady took part in it and died at Harpers Ferry? I have been told that Virgilia also spent some time at the farm, but this I cannot confirm. She has disappeared; I have neither seen nor heard from her since the night of our quarrel—for which I once more tender profound apologies. Will you not break your silence, old friend, and write and tell me that you accept them?
Orry did so—grudgingly. An hour later, he tore up the letter.
The events at Harpers Ferry stayed with him in an obsessive way. They were responsible for the decision he reached about Brett in late December.
53
CLARISSA HAD EARLIER INDICATED her delight with the candle-bedecked Christmas tree, so Orry had moved her drawing board downstairs to a corner close to it. She sat at the board now, alternately gazing at the flame of a candle for five or ten minutes at a time and cheerily nattering as she worked on the latest version of the family tree.
Clarissa’s hair was pure white and her smile as ingenuous as a baby’s. Orry sometimes envied his mother’s separation from reality. He seldom liked anything in the world these days. He especially disliked the responsibility he was about to discharge.
Brett entered, sliding the doors shut behind her.
“One of the girls said you wanted to see me.”
He nodded, standing wide-legged before the bright hearth. Brett frowned; she sensed tension. She tried to relieve it with banter.
“Your beard is showing some very becoming touches of white. In another year or so you’ll be able to play Saint Nicholas.”
He didn’t smile. “At the moment I have another role, that of your guardian. I thought we should discuss the matter of you and Billy.”
“His letter was the grandest present I could have hoped for!” Billy had written to say there was an excellent chance he’d be assigned to a group of engineers who were soon to start repairs on Fort Moultrie, located on Sullivan’s Island near the entrance to Charleston harbor.
She studied her brother. “I hope you can make Christmas perfect and give me the other gift I want.”
“I can’t give you permission to marry him. Not now, anyway.”
He said it so bluntly she wanted to cry. But she considered that kind of behavior unworthy of a lady and quickly got herself under control. In the corner, Clarissa hummed “Silent Night.”
“Pray be kind enough to state your reasons.”
Brett’s arch tone antagonized him, “They are the same as before. We are on a collision course with the Yankees. Reasonable men discuss the need for compromise, but nothing is done. And if anyone has been responsible for pushing the South toward an independent government—”
“Are you saying you want that?”
“No. I am saying it’s coming. Please let me finish. If anyone helped to promote secession, it was John Brown. Men on the other side share the feeling. In the Mercury last Saturday, Professor Longfellow was quoted on the subject of the hanging—which he of course opposed. Do you know what he said, this great poet, this humanitarian? “This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.’” Orry shook his finger like an evangelist. “Soon. That was his word.”
“Orry, why can’t you understand? Billy and I know the sad state of affairs in this country. It doesn’t matter. We love each other. We can survive the worst.”
“You think so, but I continue to believe the pressures on your marriage could be ruinous.”
Secretly, he had been influenced not only by Brown’s raid and its aftermath but by contemplation of Madeline’s unhappy marriage and the terrible toll it had t
aken on her. He honestly thought his sister might be equally unhappy, though for completely different reasons. He wanted to end the discussion.
“I’m sorry, Brett. I can’t allow you to do it. Please convey my regrets to Billy.”
She answered quietly. “I’ll do no such thing.”
He blinked. “Explain that remark, if you please.”
“It’s very simple. If I don’t have your blessing to marry, I’ll marry without it.”
His voice hardened. “The approval of your family no longer matters?”
“Of course it matters. I’d prefer to have it. I’d much rather keep peace between us. But if keeping peace means I can’t have Billy, peace can go to the devil.”
“Hold your tongue. You’re not entitled to make pronouncements—to say what you will and won’t do. You’re just a girl. A foolish one at that!”
Orry’s shout caused Clarissa to glance up with a slight frown. She stared at the bearded man and the young woman confronting each other, then shook her head, failing to recognize them.
Brett’s voice shook as she whispered, “Better to be foolish than what you’ve become.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you aren’t fit to tell anyone how to behave. You never smile. You’re angry with everything. I’m sorry you have to live alone. I’m sorry it makes you so miserable. But I refuse to live that way.”
Orry was stunned by his desire to strike her. He managed to restrain himself, pointed toward the front hall. “Go to your room.” With one last, venomous look, she picked up her skirts and fled.
In his bedroom an hour later, Orry lurched to the old pier glass he used for dressing. The empty sour-mash bottle dropped from his hand, thumped on the carpet, and rolled.
He peered into the glass, searching for something to disprove his sister’s accusation. He couldn’t find it. He seized the mirror with his hand and tipped it over. It fell not on the carpet but on the polished pegged floor beyond, shattering with a huge crash. He staggered toward the door, his waistcoat hanging open and his collar and the buttons of his right sleeve undone. His speech was a slurry mumble.
“It was many—and many—a year ago, in a kingdom by—in a kingdom—”
He couldn’t go on. His drink-dulled memory had failed him. He picked up a fragile chair and swung it against the wall, reducing it to kindling. In the hall he spied a small gilt mirror, jerked it from its peg, and trampled on it. Then he staggered to the staircase.
Alarmed black faces peeped at him from doorways below. He clutched the banister with his hand and somehow stumbled all the way to the bottom without breaking his neck. Another mirror loomed on his left, an ornate one Ashton had purchased in Charleston long ago. He had never realized there were so many mirrors in the house. Mirrors to show him what he was: a failure as a man, a failure in everything he had ever tried to do.
He ripped the mirror off the wall, carried it outside into the frosty dark, and hurled it against the nearest tree. Shards of glass fell like a silvery rain.
He ran back into the house, found another full bottle of sour mash, and dragged himself up the stairs again, shouting gibberish in an angry voice.
At her drawing board, Clarissa listened with a look of puzzlement. After a moment she sighed and returned to her work.
“To Charleston? In the middle of the night?” Downstairs next morning, Orry slitted his eyes against the harsh daylight. “Where was she going, a hotel?”
“No, sir,” the nervous house man responded. “To Mr. Cooper’s. She had four trunks with her. Said she planned to be there awhile.”
“Christ,” he muttered.
His intestines churned, his head hammered. Brett had run away while he lay passed out in the wreckage of his bedroom. He had never behaved like that before, never in his entire life. His shame was worse than his physical misery, and his pride was shattered. His own sister had beaten him. It might have been possible to drag her back from the Mills House or some other hotel, but she had cleverly chosen Tradd Street. She knew, and so did he, that Cooper would give her sanctuary as long as she needed it.
He kicked tinkling bits of mirror with the toe of his boot. “Clean this up.” Feeling sickness and defeat in every bone, he slowly climbed the stairs again.
On New Year’s Day, 1860, Orry wrote a letter to his sister. It was couched in vaguely threatening language, employing words such as defiance, duty, and authority. It asked for her immediate return to Mont Royal.
He sent the letter to Charleston with a slave. But even as he was writing the pass, he felt a sense of futility. It turned out to be justified. He received no answer.
A couple of days later Cooper paid a visit. Orry accused him:
“You’re abetting a family quarrel by permitting her to stay with you.”
“Don’t be an ass,” his brother retorted. “It’s better that she live with Judith and me than in some public lodging house. Brett’s perfectly all right—which is what I came to tell you. As to the rest, I am abetting nothing, unless it might be her long-overdue effort to assert her independence. It is her life, after all. She’s not some nigra girl to be married to whomever you think will produce the best offspring.”
“You son of a bitch.”
Cooper reached for his hat. “I had heard you were acting like a drunken boor. I’m sorry to discover it’s true. Good-bye.”
“Cooper, wait. I apologize. I haven’t been feeling mysel—”
His brother had already left the room.
54
WITH EVERY MONTH THAT passed, the storm winds blew harder. Late in the spring the Democratic party convened its national nominating convention in Charleston. From the start the Douglas candidacy—Cooper’s cause—was in trouble.
In the aisles of Institute Hall on Meeting Street, in caucus rooms and on curbstones, Cooper and others argued that unless the party chose a man who could appeal to voters in other regions, the South would suffer. The Black Republicans could be worse medicine than Douglas, he insisted. Few listened. Douglas men were a rapidly shrinking minority.
Then came a critical test of principle. Douglas’s floor operatives refused to support a black code protecting slavery in the territories. Infuriated, delegates from six Southern states walked out of the hall to plan a rump convention. Huntoon proudly left with the others from South Carolina. In the joyous crowd in the gallery, Cooper spied Ashton, flushed and applauding wildly.
It was all over. After fifty-seven ballots, the convention adjourned without naming a candidate. The party was hopelessly sundered.
In early summer the regulars, or National Democrats, assembled in Baltimore and nominated Douglas. The dissidents, calling themselves Constitutional Democrats, gathered at Richmond to endorse unrestricted slavery in the territories and to nominate Kentucky’s John Breckinridge. A third splinter group tried to rally concerned citizens behind unswerving support of the Constitution, but the effort was considered a straw in a windstorm.
At the Wigwam in Chicago, Lincoln’s managers defeated Seward and won the nomination for their candidate. One statement in the platform adopted by the convention was explosive. It said Congress had no authority to condone or promote slavery by permitting its expansion into the territories. Slavery could be allowed to exist wherever it had in the past, but the Republicans stood squarely against its spread.
“Their platform is an abomination,” Huntoon declared to Cooper. “It virtually guarantees the South will fight if that ape is elected.”
“Since a fight is what you want, I’m surprised you don’t campaign for Lincoln.”
“Why, Cooper, I surely don’t know what you mean,” Huntoon said with a bland expression.
But there was a merry light in his bespectacled eyes.
In steady rain the Wide-Awakes marched in Lehigh Station.
George stood in front of the apothecary’s, watching them. The cigar clenched in his teeth had been extinguished by the rain, and the torches of the marchers fared only a little better.
It was a foul night, too damp and raw for August.
The young men passed, twenty in all, wearing oilcloth capes and kepis. On their shoulders they carried brooms, ax handles, or dummy muskets. As the head of the column vanished into darkness, a small band appeared, the drums pounding, the horns blaring “Dixie’s Land,” a minstrel song that had been adopted as the anthem of all the new Republican marching clubs. An Ohioan had written the song; George had first heard it when Bryant’s Minstrels played Bethlehem last year.
Bobbing torches cast sullen light and flung long, sinister shadows. The drums woke memories of Mexico. George saw his son’s face pass in the band. Even though William’s cheeks were puffing in and out—he played a cornet—he somehow managed to smile.
All the Wide-Awakes were smiling. Why, then, did they remind him of soldiers off to war? Why did this parade, with its jaunty marchers confident of a Republican victory, fill him with thoughts of gunfire, and blood, and formless feelings of dread?
Ashton called at Tradd Street in mid-August.
“Land sakes, Brett, I thought your intended would surely be in Charleston by now!”
“I thought so too,” Brett replied. “It’s taken months for them to prepare his orders.”
“The Army always did move like an elephant,” Cooper remarked. He looked thinner than usual these days. Fatigue circles showed under his eyes. The Star of Carolina project was going badly, and Cooper was not encouraged by the calamitous accident which had befallen Brunel’s great Trincomalee freighter the preceding year. It had left the mouth of the Thames in September, only to be ripped apart by a huge explosion. The ship had survived, but Brunel never knew it; the report of the disaster was the last news he heard before he died on the fifteenth of September.
Ashton, of course, never paid attention to such things. With her lower lip stuck out, she patted her sister’s hand. “I surely do feel sorry for you. Is there any definite word about Billy’s arrival?”
“Yes, fortunately,” Judith put in. “It came the day before last.”
