The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  Clarsy Centers’s parents left the county soon after she moved into George Freeman’s cabin. They may have disapproved of the union or found themselves unwelcome among other whites because of it. But Clarsy’s younger sister Malinda stayed behind, suggesting that Freeman’s family was better able than her parents to provide for her.35

  THE JOURNEY WEST WOULD have been the easy one—macadam-paved highways that led to rambling farms for Thoroughbred horses, bustling cities and anonymous crowds, the Ohio River flowing into the horizon. But Jordan Spencer and Malinda Centers chose to head northeast, deeper into the wilderness, through rivers and over hills, along Indian traces, creek beds, and mountain paths, along mud ruts deeper than wagon wheels and steep deadly falls. They had to brave poison snakes, wild animals, and a whole range of human predators—desperate men as well as perfectly respectable people who could choose to give them trouble. They may have had a cart, or they may simply have loaded up a couple of mules or horses with their three babies and everything they owned.

  When Clarsy Centers started having George Freeman’s children, Malinda had been as young as ten years old. Four years later, in 1845, she was pregnant by Jordan Spencer, who was about a decade her senior. In three years they had three children: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Elizabeth. Two presidents and a queen. Proud names.36

  When Elizabeth was born, there were close to twenty people living on George Freeman’s land—three generations, too many for fifty acres to sustain, too many for the neighbors to ignore, in an unsettling progression from dark to light to white. Hot-tempered and fond of whiskey, Spencer may have fought with Freeman or, worse, with someone else in the community. After years of giving Freeman and his family some breathing room, the local authorities again took an interest in them. If Spencer wanted to be left alone, he had to find another hollow in a different set of hills.37

  In 1852 Freeman was prosecuted for fornication. Because he could not marry Clarsy Centers, having children with her was a crime. Again, he hired an attorney and mounted a vigorous defense. But fighting back cost money. To afford the legal fees, Freeman had to mortgage everything he owned. He paid off his creditors, and when he died soon afterward, he left property to Clarsy and to his daughter Alice. But a few years later Alice was prosecuted for hog stealing, an easy charge to make where pigs ranged freely in the hills. She had to give up her land to pay her lawyer.38

  Jordan Spencer, Malinda Centers, and their children were gone by then. They made their way north and east through five counties and did not stop until they were a hundred miles away. Malinda managed to stay in contact with Clarsy—no small feat for two illiterate sisters. But they lived in different worlds.

  No matter how long or how hard the Freemans worked to find a foothold in Clay County, it could always be taken away in an instant. County officials had near complete authority to make life costly and difficult for the Freemans. Kentucky’s laws drew an unambiguous line between white and black. One side was defined by a series of rights, the other by the denial of rights. Free people of color would always constitute a category of people separate from whites and inferior to them. They would be poor. They would be landless. They would be prosecuted for petty offenses. They would have their children taken away.

  But the law’s reach—the incessant intrusion of authority—did more than keep blacks and whites separate. It pushed Jordan Spencer and Malinda Centers out of Clay County, where they had been an abomination and a threat. As the county disappeared behind them, they became something altogether different: husband and wife. When they finally reached a stopping point, they called themselves Jordan and Malinda Spencer. Their new neighbors welcomed them into their community. As far as they knew, the Spencers were just like them. No matter how hard he fought, Kentucky’s laws kept George Freeman in his place. But they turned Jordan Spencer into a white man.39

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GIBSON

  New Haven, Connecticut, 1850-55

  Fall 1850

  THE TRAIN WHEEZED ITS way north and east along the Connecticut coast, coughing black smoke. Like a dull knife, it slowly punched through fields, salt marshes, and fishing villages. After seven years in operation, the railroad still looked alien alongside the ancient seascape, indifferent to the tidal lap of Long Island Sound, the gulls floating high overhead, almost unmoving. Only as it approached its destination did the strange amalgam of wheels and joints, valves and whistles, appear to have a place in the world. Dozens of smokestacks on the horizon welcomed the train home to New Haven, a city of coal fire and steam.

  Only ten years earlier New Haven had been a sprawling village with mills and factories scattered on its remote outskirts, fueled by creeks and rivers. Steam power allowed businesses to move anywhere, but factories clustered near the port. The central location meant cheap delivery of the mountains of coal needed to heat the large boilers that made engines run, and it drastically cut the costs of shipping finished goods. Situated “at the head of a fine bay,” its railroads spidering southwest to New York, northeast to Boston, and straight north to Hartford and Northampton, New Haven was uniquely positioned to profit from the steam revolution. By 1855, the city was aswim in cash and teeming with thousands of new workers. “Nearly every kind of manufactured article known in the market, can here be found and bought direct from the manufactory,” wrote the clockmaker Chauncey Jerome, “such as carriages and all kind of carriage goods, firearms, shirts, locks, furniture, clothing, shoes, hardware, iron castings, daguerrotype-cases, machinery, plated goods, &c., &c.”1

  As the train rolled past Long Wharf into the city, as many as fifty ships could be seen steaming and sailing in the harbor beyond. The docks whirled in steady motion like a factory turbine. Thick gangs of stevedores and roustabouts were unloading hundreds of tons of coal, timber, molasses, rum, and oysters out of merchant vessels from points south. Other men were packing ships with equally vast quantities of manufactured goods. Just north of the wharf, the 140-foot clocktower of the New York and New Haven Railroad depot waited, a beacon of calm after a jarring journey. Passengers who had paid the $1.50 or so to travel from New York arrived at a station that still looked new. With its arches and stonework it resembled a Tuscan villa, a graceful counterpoint to the heat, smell, and racket of the train.2

  In the autumn of 1850, two elegantly appointed young men arrived in New Haven. They were just getting used to being tall and still too young to shave. A well-timed blast of steam could have knocked down the elder of the two. At six feet and 140 pounds, Randall Lee Gibson observed that “there are no hopes of my being a dwarf, but on the contrary, I fear I shall never stop growing.” It had been a long journey, but Randall and his brother Hart had taken some time to rest in New York—“a splendid city,” thought Hart, “though I should not like to reside in it.”3

  Randall was pleased that his younger brother had maintained a sunny disposition. Hart could easily have spent the journey in tears but instead “st[ood] everything manfully.” At fifteen, Hart had never been away from the family for long. Now he found himself nearly a thousand miles away from the family home in Lexington, Kentucky, and even farther from the Gibson sugar plantations in the bayous southwest of New Orleans. He had left behind his beloved mother—“the most attentive, thoughtful + kindest of mothers,” in Randall’s words—knowing full well that he might never see her again. For more than a year, the family had moved back and forth between Kentucky and Louisiana for her health, even contemplating a voyage to the West Indies, while the best medical minds of the South tried to restore her “sanguine . . . temperament.” Although Dr. Samuel Cartwright of New Orleans believed she had fallen prey to a host of ailments due to “the uterus ceasing eliminating function abruptly & at too early a period,” it was clear that within months she would die from consumption. Back home, her coughing kept Hart and Randall’s older sister Sarah “awake all night,” “heart sick” and horrified at their mother’s fate.4

  Far from the impending family tragedy, Hart could focus
on the new world around him. Walking with his brother along Chapel Street into downtown, Hart was amazed at the blocks of banks, concert halls, and office buildings. The street was lined with tall lamps recently installed by the New Haven Gas Company. After two blocks Chapel formed the southern side of the New Haven Green, a sixteen-acre fenced preserve where contemplative pathways crisscrossed past a Greek Revival statehouse, two clean brick Congregational chapels, and the Gothic tower of the Trinity Episcopal Church. The Chapel Street side below the Green boasted a series of shops—dry goods, millinery, groceries—leading up to the hundred splendid rooms of the just-built New Haven House at the corner of College Street. East of the Green were the jail, courthouse, and another grand hotel. Bounding the north side was “Quality Row,” where New Haven’s old families lived in porticoed mansions. Hart was sure to check himself, lest he be too impressed. As grand as the city was, it was nonetheless full of Yankees. In his older brother’s experience, they were an unmannered and unpleasant people. They imposed their own views on people instead of engaging them. They worshipped money instead of God. “I must confess that I do not admire the customs of these Northern people,” Randall wrote, “and therefore I do not admire them.”5

  Despite the Gibson brothers’ distaste for anything “Yankee-like,” Hart had come to New Haven to live, just as his brother had two years earlier. Facing the Green from the west was a block of austere dormitories known as Brick Row, veiled by a copse of towering elms. In front of the trees at the corner of Chapel and College streets was a long wooden fence on which dozens of young men sat lounging, laughing, shouting, and singing. Their top hats at jaunty angles, puffing away on long cigars, they resembled a decidedly more leisured version of the smokestacks that filled their city. In their view New Haven was a town best seen through a cloud of cigar smoke. A nice Connecticut cigar, blending fine Cuban leaf with local South Windsor tobacco, could perfume even the foulest industrial winds. The Gibson brothers had reached their destination, Yale College, where Hart would be prepping for admission and where Randall, at the start of his sophomore year, was already acquitting himself brilliantly.6

  On the fence at College and Chapel, the Gibsons’ schoolmates sat facing away from their “Mecca of the learned.” Yale College was supposed to be where the “literary crowd” and “savans of science” turned the flower of New England’s youth into leaders of men. But every day in class seemed to embody the words inscribed in the brownstone gateway to the cemetery two blocks north on Grove Street: “The Dead Shall Be Raised.” The beautiful texts of Xenophon, Cicero, and Tacitus became workaday grist for dull, “gerund-grinding” recitations. During instruction in natural philosophy, students were asked to repeat the assigned reading by rote until it “disgusted the class with the whole subject.” History classes consisted solely of memorizing the dates in The Manual of Ancient History and Geography by the German scholar Wilhelm Pütz. Even senior coursework with university president Theodore Dwight Woolsey followed the “Yale system” of “hearing men recite the words of a text-book.” The students occasionally had “very round expletive[s],” but more usually felt “general indifference . . . toward all this instruction,” lamented a member of the class of 1853. “It was listlessly heard, and grievously neglected.”7

  Hart Gibson would soon learn that Yale men saved their energy for the hours outside class. With no formal instruction in literature, students absorbed the great cultural movements of the day from visiting lectures by eminences such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Exiles from the failed revolutions that had swept Europe in 1848 pushed Yalies to think about the future of democracy and, as one student poet wrote in 1853, “trace / With joy o’er Europe’s burning palaces / The path of Freedom.” From brass band concerts and book auctions to riding, sailing, and fencing, life in New Haven could be “as stupid and delightful as [the] heart could wish,” one student wrote home in 1851. On the green Yale students played brutal football contests as well as a game called “rush,” described by a university historian as “football without a ball.” Yalies relished a good prank, or “scrape,” like the occasional unauthorized “perform[ance] on the college Bell.” A professor might enter his classroom to find, much to Randall’s delight, “an old grey horse standing on the rostrum with an immense pair of specks on.”8

  Mostly the students educated one another, in dorm room chats and student society debates, on cold walks to their daily six a.m. prayers, and while sitting on the fence at College and Chapel. Every day was a continuing conversation about issues big and small. The debate topics of one student society were typical: Ought legislators to be bound by the will of their constituents? Is the maxim “our country right or wrong” worthy of adoption? Should capital punishment be abolished? Will China probably ever become a commercial nation? Has Chivalry exercised a beneficial effect upon Society? Has the Mohammedan religion exercised an evil effect upon the world? Should the policy of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries be in all cases adhered to by the United States? Is energy or talent more conducive to fame as shown by historical experience? Some of the student arguments were cogent and forceful. Others, in the opinion of one professor, were “ill hung” and “splurgy.” Regardless of quality, debates were endless and earnest, as students struggled to figure out the world as it was and their place in it.9

  By the fall of 1850 Randall Gibson’s place at Yale was already assured. As a debater, Gibson made some of the best speeches that his fellow Yalies had “ever heard delivered by anyone”—there was “not a better [speaker] in College,” a classmate recorded in a diary. During his first year Gibson’s classmates entrusted him with writing the formal challenge and drawing up the rules for the annual freshman-sophomore football game. Later he rowed on Yale’s first competitive crew team and was elected to Delta Kappa Epsilon and the Scroll and Key secret society. From his freshman year until he gave the class of 1853’s valedictory address, Randall was lionized as a “revelation,” wrote a classmate, “the flower of the small company of Southerners” who were following in the footsteps of South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, class of 1804, and Louisiana senator Judah Benjamin, class of 1828. “We were of an age to be fascinated; of the hero-worshipping age,” the classmate wrote, “and a good many of us, boylike, thought Randall Gibson was a hero.” He would be a role model and a font of sage, if at times unwanted, advice to his younger brother.10

  It was no small task for the sons of a wealthy sugar planter to find success at Yale in the 1850s. “Southerner to us meant first of all slaveholder, and then perhaps aristocrat,” wrote one member of the class of 1853. “We liked neither in New England.” The escalating national crisis over slavery set the differences between Northern and Southern students in stark relief. In 1850 Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, putting the federal government in the service of slaveowners pursuing their runaways. In response, abolitionists moved from debating the morality or legality of slavery to contemplating armed resistance to it. Even as the antislavery position grew more radical, it was entering the mainstream of Northern politics. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, instilled in countless readers a powerful sympathy for slaves and a visceral disgust for slavery and slaveowners. The drumbeat intensified with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which allowed settlers to vote to determine whether Kansas would be a slave or free state. It promised to cast slavery and anti-slavery forces in pitched battles.11

  Of all the subjects that the Yale men liked to debate, the biggest issue by far was “the tremendous political struggle” raging over slavery. Students and professors alike were drawn into controversies over the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas question. Although by 1854 several prominent members of the faculty were publicly supporting the abolitionists in Kansas—even raising money to buy rifles—the campus was more moderate regarding slavery than its rival in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Compromise to preserve the Union had long held the middle ground at Yale, but with every passing day it seemed less possible to accede to t
he “Slave Power.” In their formal debate topics, students knew what was at stake: Has a State the right to nullify any Act of Congress? Has a state the right to secede from the Union? Do the present circumstances portend the dissolution of the Union?12

  Confronted “with the imputation of iniquity and immorality which had begun to fasten on the slaveholder as a class,” Southerners parried with insistent defenses of the way things were, marshaling arguments from religion, politics, and law, anthropology, statistics, and medical science. As one Virginian described it, educated Southerners were “rising up to promulgate the philosophical, sociological, and ethnical excellence of slavery.” As much as slavery was right, freedom was wrong. The proslavery position increasingly expressed itself as a belief in absolute racial difference, the genetic inferiority of blackness, and the disastrous effects of racial mixing. “The preservation and progress of the race,” wrote Henry Hughes in his influential 1854 Treatise on Sociology, “is a moral duty of the races. Degeneration is an evil. It is a sin. That sin is extreme. Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters.” At the mere prospect of freedom and equality for blacks, racial loathing began to incubate among privileged Southern whites.13