Perish from the Earth

by Jonathan F. Putnam

  As I moved into the room, I saw many other familiar faces. Devol sat behind his slim Regency desk, shuffling and dealing his cards while affecting a shabby modesty regarding his meager skills. A dozen players clustered around the table and tried to best the hated miscreant. Off to the side sat a glum-looking fellow wearing a battered straw hat. It took me a moment to recognize him as Willie, the long-lost fool, and I only did when he looked over at me and winked.

  At the far end of the room, Gentry stood by his bar stand, ready to pour out a measure of liquid courage to anyone in need. I caught his eye and nodded a greeting. An actress—a different one this year—was displayed becomingly on the couch, talking with apparent great interest and wide eyes to a balding traveler in a coat that had seen better days. Meanwhile, that same traveler was being drawn by an artist in a charcoal-smudged coat standing before an easel. One glance at the portrait made it clear the artist lacked his predecessor’s skill.

  “Is this your first time aboard a steamship too?” came an eager voice from beside me. Turning, I saw a fresh-faced youth with an expensive, newly stitched frockcoat and a shiny black top hat that had surely been taken out of the hatter’s box for the first time that very morning.

  “Joshua Speed of Springfield,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Joseph Brady of Des Moines,” he said, pumping mine excitedly.

  “Where are you headed, Brady?” I asked.

  “I’m steaming all the way down to New Orleans,” said Brady. “I’m establishing a fur store with my father. We’ve done so well up in the Iowa District of the Wisconsin Territory, trapping and trading with the local tribes, that we think we can expand our business. Why not go to the biggest, most fashionable city in the West, we figure?”

  “Why not?” I echoed approvingly.

  “I’m going to set up the business: lease a proper building to display our wares, set up arrangements with stitchers and hatters, establish commercial relationships with the leading banks. When it comes harvest time, my father will ship his pelts downriver to me, and we’ll be in business. We aim to be the leading source of fur hats in New Orleans by the end of the year.”

  “It’s a bold plan. I wish you the best of luck.”

  “Thank you kindly,” he replied, pumping my hand again.

  We stood in companionable silence and watched the players in front of us. Cheers and groans followed one after the other. The pile of coins in front of Devol ebbed and flowed. Not much was yet being won or lost.

  “What do you think?” asked Brady after a bit.

  “About what?”

  “About that damned gambler. He looks a lazy, awkward type. I must have played seven thousand hands of cards against Red Jim last winter. I won nine out of ten of them if I won a single one. There’s not a man in the district whose face I can’t read or whose cards I can’t best.”

  “You sound very practiced at the tables.”

  “I imagine that poor fellow hasn’t seen the likes of me,” Brady boasted.

  “Could be,” I murmured.

  Brady’s face gradually broke into a broad smile, and his thin chest swelled inside his brand-new suit.

  “I reckon you’re right, Mr. Speed.” He nodded confidently and reached a hand into his pocket. “I think I’ll have a go.”

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The first speech of his political career that brought Abraham Lincoln notice beyond the prairie confines of Illinois was his Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, given on January 27, 1838. In his speech, later printed by Simeon Francis’s Sangamo Journal and distributed nationally, the twenty-eight-year-old state legislator used the recent murder of Elijah Lovejoy at the hands of the mob in Alton, as well as the earlier lynching death of Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, to argue about the importance of the rule of law and the dangers of “the wild and furious passions” of the “savage mobs.” In the line most often cited by historians as the political awakening of the future president, the young Lincoln proclaimed, “Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own and his children’s liberty.”

  Lovejoy’s murder in November 1837 stunned the nation and became a rallying point for antislavery sentiment. Former president John Quincy Adams called “the catastrophe of Mr. Lovejoy’s death . . . a shock as of an earthquake throughout this continent.” Over a century later, Senator Paul Simon, in his biography of Lovejoy, called the Abolitionist’s murder “one of the two greatest boosts the antislavery movement had from the day of independence to the outbreak of the Civil War,” the other being the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852.

  No one was ever punished for the murders of Elijah Lovejoy or Francis McIntosh. In Alton, a grand jury in January 1838 indicted eight members of the mob that had killed Lovejoy for “violent riot” as well as twelve defenders of Lovejoy’s press for “violent resistance to riot.” In a series of trials, no one on either side was found guilty. In St. Louis, McIntosh’s lynching was investigated by a slave-owning judge named—in a twist that new author from England, Charles Dickens, surely would have appreciated—Luke Edward Lawless. Judge Lawless directed the grand jury to indict none of the men involved in McIntosh’s lynching on the basis that the root cause of his killing was, in fact, Abolitionist newspapers that “fanaticize the Negro and excite him against the white man.”

  In 1897, Elijah Lovejoy’s remains were exhumed from their unmarked grave and moved to Alton City Cemetery, where a monument was erected to honor the Abolitionist. The inscription on the monument reads, “Historic Alton—Alton that slew him and Alton that defended him. Lovejoy and Alton. Names as inseparable and as dear to the people of Illinois as those of Lincoln and Springfield.”

  The notion advanced by the Lovejoys that all enslaved persons should be freed immediately was a radical one in 1837. Other groups, such as the American Colonization Society, favored sending the slaves back to Africa as free men and women. In his Lyceum speech, Lincoln argued, “Although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.” At the time, slavery was the law of the land in thirteen of the twenty-six states. In a similar vein, when he was one of six Illinois state legislators to vote against a proslavery resolution in early 1837, Lincoln had nonetheless issued a public statement saying that while slavery “is founded both in Injustice and bad policy . . . the promulgation of Abolition Doctrines tends to Increase rather than abate its evils.”

  Spurred by the horror of witnessing his brother’s murder, Owen Lovejoy abandoned his plans to enter the ministry and became an ardent lifelong Abolitionist. He and Lincoln knew each other well. As a fellow Illinois member of Lincoln’s Whig Party (and later Republican Party), Owen Lovejoy was a loud and frequent critic of Lincoln from the radical left, demanding an immediate end to slavery and complaining of Lincoln’s more cautious, incremental approach. But as the two men aged (and the country spiraled toward the Civil War), their views became more aligned, and Lincoln seems to have used Lovejoy as a dependable foil for his own views. Lovejoy served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1856 to his death from cancer in 1864. When he died, Lincoln was heard to remark he had lost his best friend in Congress.

  Owen Lovejoy was also a prominent early promoter of what became known as the underground railroad. Almost from the start of widespread navigation of the nation’s inland waterways by the great steamboats in the 1820s, opponents and proponents of slavery alike realized the potential for steamers to provide enslaved persons with a possible means of escape. (For those numerous slaves who worked along the rivers, these vehicles of potential freedom would literally pass in front of their eyes many times every day.) As the Missouri Supreme Court was heard to warn in 1846, “The facility of escaping on the boats navigating our waters will induce many slaves to leave the service of their masters. Their ingenuity will be exerted to inven
t means of eluding the vigilance of Captains, and many ways will be employed to get off unnoticed.”

  As a result, many southern states passed laws specifically targeted at requiring steamboat captains and steamboat owners to exercise vigilance in preventing slaves from using their ships as a means of flight. Any activities to assist or harbor escaping slaves were also circumscribed by the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. In Illinois, a free state but an overwhelmingly proslavery one at this time, by state law any person found harboring a fugitive slave or interfering with his recapture by his “lawful owner” was subject to fines and imprisonment. The Autobiography of William Wells Brown is one classic account of a slave escape via steamboat; coincidentally, Brown worked for Elijah Lovejoy as a printer’s assistant in St. Louis prior to his escape to freedom.

  Despite the support of white Abolitionists like Lovejoy, especially in its early days, the underground railroad was principally the work of free African Americans and former slaves, like (the fictional) Sary and (the historical) Captain Limus depicted in the novel.

  While Perish from the Earth is a work of imaginative fiction, the people, places, and cases populating it are drawn from Lincoln’s actual life and times. Lincoln and Speed shared a bed in the room atop Speed’s general store in Springfield from 1837 to 1841. Lincoln often left Springfield to ride the circuit through the surrounding counties, and his fellow circuit riders included Judge Jesse B. Thomas, state’s attorney David Prickett, and his fellow Springfield lawyers Stephen Logan and Ninian Edwards. George Devol was a legendary Mississippi riverboat gambler of the mid-nineteenth century, while George Bingham was a noted painter of the great American rivers and the men and women who worked along them.

  Lieutenant (later major) Robert E. Lee spent 1837 and 1838 in St. Louis in charge of a project for the War Department’s Engineering Corps (the precursor to the Army Corps of Engineers), seeking to fix the dire situation along the St. Louis waterfront, where sand and silt were threatening to swallow the wharf and leave it a half mile from the river channel. Despite a cutoff of federal funding in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, Lee and his men were able to save the wharf and with it the commercial importance of the city.

  There are two somewhat conflicting versions from nineteenth-century sources of the 1831 meeting between twenty-two-year-old Lincoln and Colonel William T. Ferguson of Memphis; one suggests Lincoln stopped briefly while going downriver on his flatboat to chop wood for Ferguson, while the other (adopted here) says he was heading back upriver on a steamboat and bereft of funds when he lived for a period in Ferguson’s house while earning enough money from chopping wood to pay for the rest of his return voyage to Illinois. Either way, President Lincoln received his old friend Ferguson in the White House in March 1861. As the Baltimore Sun reported, “They had a chat about old times and the present price of cordwood.”

  In Alton, the Illinois State Prison opened to great fanfare in 1833 but soon fell into disrepair due to poor building methods and inadequate maintenance. In the 1850s, the social reformer Dorothea Dix wrote that it was “badly situated too near the river, undrained and ungraded and generally unsanitary. It is not fit for human habitation.” Nonetheless, it became an infamous Union prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Several thousand soldiers were held in cells designed for no more than several hundred persons, and well over one thousand prisoners died at the prison from the waves of disease that swept through it.

  The ancient painting of the Piasa Bird (pronounced “PIE-a-saw”), whose location on the Alton cliffs was immediately below the prison site, was destroyed by quarrying conducted on the bluff by prison inmates in the 1840s. What little remained was finally ruined by the forced labor of the Confederate inmates in the 1860s. A modern reproduction exists at a nearby site today. But it is the original building that housed Captain Ryder’s shipping offices, where Lincoln tried cases when he came to Alton, that still stands on the same spot. It is, today, a popular lunch shop called My Just Desserts. I recommend the All-Star Sandwich.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This manuscript benefitted greatly from the close and sympathetic readings of my sister Lara Putnam, my college roommate Joshua F. Thorpe, and my writing group partners Michael Bergmann and Christin Brecher. When each of them first agreed, many years ago, to read an early draft of my original story, I’m pretty sure none realized that they had signed up for a lifetime—albeit unpaid—appointment. I am very thankful for their input.

  A number of the chapters of this book were first written as part of a writing group in which I participated at the incomparable New York Society Library. I thank my fellow NYSL writers Jamie Chan, Lillian Clagett, Susan Dudley-Allen, Janet Gilman, Hurd Hutchins, John Koller, Jane Murphy, Alan Siegel, Helena Sokoloff, Victoria Reiter, and Mimi Weisbond for their advice and support. And I am especially grateful to the head librarian of the library, Carolyn Waters, for providing immeasurable resources and support to my writing life from its very inception.

  I conducted substantial original and on-site historical research as part of the development of this story. I want to acknowledge in particular the assistance of my old college pal Jessica Dorman and her colleague Erin Greenwald, both of the Historic New Orleans Collection, for their help in accessing narrative accounts of the lives of African Americans, both free and enslaved, along the Mississippi River in the 1830s. The curatorial staff at Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, provided many insights and resources regarding life on a Southern antebellum plantation. Jana Meyer and Jim Holmberg at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville helped me locate original correspondence from and to Joshua Speed and other members of the Speed family.

  For my research in Alton, Illinois, I am indebted for their assistance to Miriah Haring of the Alton Visitors Center and to Ann Badasch, the owner of My Just Desserts. For the research I conducted in St. Louis, I am grateful for the generous insights provided by Michael Brown at the Lewis & Clark Confluence Tower and Charles E. Brown and Julie Dunn-Morton at the St. Louis Mercantile Library.

  My many friends and colleagues at the international law firm of Kirkland & Ellis LLP continue to be remarkably supportive of my writing career. I am grateful for their support, tolerance and—not least—teaching me everything I know about being a trial lawyer.

  My editor and publisher, Matt Martz of Crooked Lane Books, provided fantastic support for my project as well as invaluable notes that strengthened the manuscript at every level. I am grateful as well to Sarah Poppe and the rest of the crackerjack staff at Crooked Lane. Dana Kaye, Julia Borcherts, and Heather Boak provided superb help on the publicity front. My incomparable agent Scott Miller remains an unerring guiding light.

  I want to thank the following additional people for their support, encouragement, and assistance: Robin Agnew, Nancy Almazar, Shannon Campbell, Joel and Carla Campbell, Adam Carnese, Stephanie Altman Dominus, Andrew Dominus, Eric Dusansky, Steven Everson, Gavin Everson, Shelby Everson, Shiva Farouki, Andrew M. Genser, Donna Gest, Tom and Julie Gest, Marc Goldman, Julie Greenbaum, Erik Gustafson, Atif Khawaja, Laura Kupillas, Laura Lavan, Mario Perez, Miriam Perez-Putnam, Gabriel Perez-Putnam, Alonso Perez-Putnam, Robert and Rosemary Putnam, Mark Pickrell, Jane and Joel Schneider, Joseph Serino Jr., Mark Stein, Ed Steinfeld, Lee Ann Stevenson, David Thorpe, Megan Tingley, Alina Tugend, Caroline Werner, Doug Wible, and Dan Zevin.

  This book is dedicated to my three sons, Gray, Noah, and Gideon Putnam. I am so proud of the young men that Gray and Noah have become and that Gideon is becoming. I can’t imagine making a success of my writing career without their enthusiastic and loving presence at every step along the way.

  Finally, nothing would have been possible without my wife, Christin Putnam. She is the first and last reader of every word I write and remains an endless source of love, understanding, good cheer, and plot points. I am incredibly lucky to have her as my partner and my divine muse.

  erish from the Earth