The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  For the rebel veterans who had gathered for the convention, the sectional reunion embodied by Randall and Mary Gibson was accompanied by an “exultant” and unapologetic refusal to compromise on Reconstruction. As Fourth of July fireworks flashed over New York like a bombardment that they had never managed to wage, Southern delegates continued to believe that secession had been legal and constitutional and that the United States was a republic of independent states and “not a consolidation of the whole people into a nation.” Any preconditions to readmitting Southern states to the Union were illegal, and extending the vote to blacks endangered the nation and the purity of the white race. While they may have realized that they were nominating onetime New York governor Horatio Seymour for the privilege of losing to Ulysses S. Grant in the November election, the Southern delegates insisted on shaping a party platform that demanded immediate restoration of all states to the Union, amnesty for all past political offenses, full power to the states to regulate who could vote, and “the abolition of the Freedmen’s Bureau and all political instrumentalities designed to secure negro supremacy.”33

  Southern delegates also secured the vice-presidential nomination of Francis P. Blair, a former Union army officer from Missouri who, days before the convention, had expressed his desire to void the Reconstruction Acts, “compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpetbag State governments, [and] allow the white people to reorganize their own governments and elect senators and representatives.” Under the cloak of the Democratic Party, it had become acceptable to advocate restoring Confederates to power. “It was a rather wild boast of the rebel leader four years ago that he would water his horses in the Delaware,” wrote one of many newspapers that commented on the conspicuous Southern presence at the convention, “but he has more than made good his promise, by sending his men to New York to nominate a President for 1868. It matters not who the Democratic candidate may be, he is the candidate of the rebellion.”34

  After a week of “hurrahing and hat-swinging and standing on benches,” the former rebels retreated south. While their vice-presidential candidate gave speeches describing the Reconstruction governments as “semibarbarous . . . worshippers of fetishes and poligamists” who would “subject the white women to their unbridled lust,” Democrats threatened blacks with firing, loss of credit, and eviction if they voted Republican. Throughout the South whites spent the summer organizing Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary orders, assassinating opponents, rioting through cities like New Orleans, and beating and massacring dozens, even hundreds, of blacks in rural areas.35

  Randall and Mary remained in New York, avoiding the heat, cholera, yellow fever, and assorted man-made pathologies of the Louisiana summer. Randall had little need to return home—the courts had closed on July 1 and would not reconvene until the first week of November. New York was almost pleasant after nearly 100,000 visitors cleared out. Ambling along Broadway, shaded by the brim of his boater, Gibson could feel a light wind, as if the streets were sighing. It had grown increasingly rare to enjoy a moment of ease and anonymity and pleasant drift. His days were now crowded with business, political, and social obligations. Gibson did not even have time to read for pleasure. “This city life keeps one always on the run,” he reflected. “You glance only at everything.”36

  As Gibson slowly walked, a man coming toward him stopped short and blocked his path. Gibson looked dully for a moment at the slight man with a dark full beard and severe part in his wavy hair. The man grabbed Gibson’s hand, triggering a glimmer of recognition. It was Andrew Dickson White, one of Gibson’s college classmates. More than a decade had passed, he exclaimed, but “Randall looked not a day older” than when they had worked together on the Yale Literary Magazine and wandered around Paris’s Left Bank after graduation. Just a year before, he had founded Cornell University and was serving as its first president.37

  White insisted that they dine together. Over lunch he asked if Gibson had come north to attend Yale’s commencement, scheduled for the end of the month. “No,” Gibson said, “I have not expected to go; there will be hardly anybody there who will care to see me.” The response jolted Gibson. “You are just the man they would wish to see,” White said.38

  THE MOMENT GIBSON STEPPED off the train, he knew that the city of his college days was gone. The station no longer resembled a lovely Tuscan villa—after twenty years of hard use, it was well known as “the Black Hole at New Haven.” The enormous elms lining the recently paved streets stared down astonished at what they were shading. New Haven was in full throttle, two and a half times bigger than when Gibson had been a Yalie, well on its way to doubling in size yet again. The war had made the city rich, crisscrossed every few minutes by horse trolleys carrying workers to factories, a never-ending industrial parade.39

  Although some of its buildings were new, Yale remained recognizable, an island of tradition, continuity, and brotherhood. The students, still spending their idle hours sitting on the fence at College and Chapel, could easily have been mistaken for some of Gibson’s old chums. As it happened, his graying classmates were wandering the campus, imagining their younger selves. Just two weeks after the Democratic Convention, Gibson faced another assembly of friends. The events could not have been more different. While the Democrats had been singing anthems like the Seymour and Blair campaign song “The White Man’s Banner” (“Let, then, all free-born patriots join, with a brave intent / To vindicate our Father’s choice ‘A white-man’s Government’ ”), Yale’s ceremonies began and ended with Mendelssohn’s Overture from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Instead of tirades about Reconstruction, college seniors delivered orations on “Henry IV of France” and “Civil Service in the United States.”40

  At the alumni dinner one of Gibson’s classmates asked if he would give a speech. Surrounded by Northerners, he appeared to one observer “shy and rather overwhelmed.” Standing before people he had written off as “the enemy,” Gibson “pledg[ed] his best efforts in the future for the union and harmony of the whole country under the old . . . flag.” He then echoed his college valedictory address about the responsibilities of a national elite, declaring that “every educated man in the country ought to consider himself a missionary to spread abroad knowledge.” To his audience, the former Confederate general seemed to be giving “a strong and earnest Union speech,” showing that he was “wholly, and without one cloud or doubt, back in his old and natural connections.” The reaction was emotional, the applause enthusiastic.41

  Gibson never had to explain that he viewed the end of Reconstruction and the continuation of white rule as essential to the “union and harmony of the whole country”—that the “old national flag” should not wave over everyone. Two years of law practice had taught him that any position could be abstracted out to a principle that had universal support. As a Yalie, he had symbolized the Southern aristocracy. Now he embodied the South’s gracious reconciliation with the North. “He spoke and spoke like a man,” wrote one classmate of Gibson’s address. Specifically, Gibson spoke like a Yale man. He was realizing that his classmates had also lost something in the war. Even if they were not facing immediate poverty or black rule, the modern world—cities teeming with immigrants, an economy dominated by corporations and industry, a social scene flooded with new people—posed a future rife with uncertainty. As long as he resembled one of them, Northerners of his class would look to Gibson as a partner in rebuilding the Republic. “His reception,” the classmate wrote, “was just what it should be.”42

  CHAPTER TEN

  WALL

  Washington, D. C., June 14, 1871

  O.S.B. WALL DID NOT see the man enter his office. When the outside door to the building opened, the sounds of Seventh Street momentarily intruded—the streetcar groaning its way into the city, the coughs and curses of people choked by summer dust, a dull duet of hoofbeats and creaking wooden carts. Then the rap and drag of crutches slowly approaching. The sound of steady breath. The click of metal on metal.
And the blast, deafening in a small space. An acrid wave of burnt powder washed over the room.1

  Wall recognized the man who was steadying himself and raising the revolver a second time. He had only recently met James Davenport, once an army captain, now a clerk in the Second Auditor’s Office at Treasury. The pale Kentuckian had not shot at anyone in seven years, since the day he led a charge into a rebel trench south of Atlanta and lost his leg in the screaming blur. Wall, in all his time in the Union army, had never come under fire. Now he was at war.2

  Nowhere to hide, Wall palmed an old door hinge that he kept close by and ran straight at his attacker. With a swift slice through the air, he connected full force with Davenport’s head, a thump of scalp and skull. A second blast knocked Wall to the floor. Dazed with pain, his shirt starting to soak with blood, he remained conscious as people rushed into the room. He felt the tight grip of strange hands, the heaving lift into the air, and the late-afternoon sun, warm in June. Up and down Seventh Street, people were calling out that Justice O.S.B. Wall had been shot.3

  WHEN WALL FIRST CAME to the District of Columbia in February 1867, the Capitol was under construction. The White House looked dingy and gray in the snow. Winter rains had turned the city’s thoroughfares into fields of stinking muck, in some places ten inches deep. Congressmen complained of “the infinite, abominable nuisance of cows, horses, sheep, and goats, running through all the streets,” regularly knocking down trees. Much of Washington’s garbage was simply fed to “hogs in hog pens in almost every part of the city.” According to John Burroughs, a naturalist who spent his days as a Treasury Department clerk, turkey buzzards circled overhead by the dozen, “sweeping low over some common or open space where, perchance, a dead puppy or pig or fowl ha[d] been thrown.”4

  Wall settled on Seventh Street just above the Boundary, which divided Washington City from the largely rural section of the District known as the County. Downtown, Seventh Street passed midway between the White House and the Capitol. Beyond the Boundary street, it stretched to the Maryland line, skirting the grand wooded estates of Washington’s richest and most powerful people. Down where Wall lived, the army’s Campbell Barracks housed the District’s poorest residents, former slaves who were arriving from Virginia and Maryland by the thousands. On the hill rising above the barracks was farmland that was soon to become the Howard University campus.5

  The five miles of Seventh Street between the Boundary and the Maryland line were virtually impassable. The road was narrow, steep, pocked with “murder-holes” and gulleys, and bounded on each side by gutters so deep and wide that they could swallow up horse and wagon. To get into the city safely, Washington’s elite took elaborate detours over to Fourteenth Street. Farmers who lived just on the Maryland side of the border preferred to ride their crops to market dozens of miles away in Baltimore rather than take their chances with Seventh Street.6

  The District remained haunted by four years of mass slaughter and the murder—still recent—of its most famous resident. The site of the crime, Ford’s Theatre, had been turned into a museum, displaying dozens of “wet specimens” of “injuries done to the human body by shot and shell” during the rebellion—“glass cases of broken bones,” wrote one observer, “cracked and smashed and bulbous and exfoliated in every form of distortion, as poor mother nature had tried to glue them together and splice them again.” Outside, the District’s streets were a living museum of the horrors of war, besieged by a spectral army of shattered veterans. Behind countless desks at every government agency, men were trying to last through a day without remembering their hours in hell. Black-clad widows making pension claims filled their own waiting room in the Senate. Throughout the city “raw and ragged” masses of men, women, and children who had fled slavery were starving, freezing, and dying in plain view.7

  AT O.S.B. WALL’S HOME, the surgeon’s examination was like being slowly bayoneted. The pain turned Wall’s dimly lit bedroom into an unrecognizable, awful place. Robert Reyburn and Patrick Glennan inspected the small hole on the right side of Wall’s stomach, just above the navel, as they had done too often during their days in the Union army. The lead ball had pierced Wall’s gut near his liver, gallbladder, and intestines. Sponging off the blood and flushing the wound with water, they plunged a porcelaintipped wand into Wall’s abdominal cavity. If the probe so much as touched the lead ball, a black mark would stain the white porcelain tip. After a seeming eternity, they pulled it out. Nothing. There would be far worse agonies to come.8

  Lying in his sickbed, Wall told visitors he had no idea why James Davenport had tried to kill him. Weeks ago a woman named Wright had come to his office complaining that a man had sold her a faulty secondhand stove. Wall visited the man, Davenport, at his desk at Treasury and asked whether he intended to give Wright a refund. Davenport initially said that he would, but then changed his mind. Wall said that he “would have no more to do with the case” and that Wright and Davenport “might fight their own battles.” Wall had all but forgotten about Davenport when the man appeared in his doorway, pistol in hand.9

  There was nothing remarkable about the dispute over the stove or Wall’s role in it. In 1869 President Grant had appointed him the District’s first colored justice of the peace, a position that empowered him to hear small claims cases. At the same time, he served as a local police magistrate, the first—and for minor offenders, the only—judicial figure people faced after arrest. For many poor blacks in the District, Wall was the law.

  Even before assuming the title of Justice, Wall was used to people seeking his help. It was the reason he had come to the District in the first place. The mud and dust of a half-formed city, the suffering of tens of thousands of its residents—for Wall, these were not causes for despair. The District of Columbia was not simply an unpleasant place to live. It was a problem that needed solving, a project to be finished. So was the Republic itself, just two years after millions of slaves had become citizens through the brutal alchemy of war.

  SHORTLY AFTER WALL’S ARRIVAL in the District of Columbia, he rode to Harpers Ferry on behalf of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In April 1867 the Potomac River’s rumble and roar echoed through the hills, swollen by snowmelt and spring rain. Just sixty miles downstream its bracing current stagnated in the malarial flats of Washington. But on the border separating Maryland from West Virginia, the river gave no hint of the mire ahead. It flowed in a steady rush of progress and escape.

  In 1859 John Brown had martyred himself on this spot, attempting to spark a massive slave rebellion by raiding the federal armory at the Ferry; three Oberlin men had died fighting at his side. Eight years later O.S.B. Wall walked into town representing the government that had killed them. The town had been shot up, blasted, and emptied out. The only armory building to survive multiple rebel raids during the war was the one-story brick fire-engine and guard house where Brown had barricaded himself against U.S. Marines commanded by a colonel named Robert E. Lee. Most of Harpers Ferry’s three thousand residents before the war had abandoned the place, many to join the rebellion. During the war the Ferry teemed with Union soldiers, guarding this strategic railroad junction and gateway to the Shenandoah Valley. By 1867 the soldiers were gone too. In their place nearly a thousand men, women, and children drifted in from the Shenandoah Valley and the eastern West Virginia panhandle, hoping to find freedom after lives of bondage. Instead, with war’s end, what they found was no jobs. Augustus Ferzard Higgs, a twenty-three-year-old army lieutenant working with the Freedmen’s Bureau, described the town as a “nest of paupers,” a hell of cholera and pox and starving children. Slavery was dead. John Brown’s disciples controlled the government. But the fight was not over.10

  Wall met with Augustus Higgs in April 1867 through his work with the Bureau’s District of Columbia office, which had just been given responsibility for West Virginia. In the company of a “few persons here, white and colored, who are most interested in the welfare of the Freedpeople,” Wall inspected the wretched conditions. �
��A very large population of them are either entirely idle, or get only partial employment,” he wrote. “There are quite a number of families who are so very degraded they take no interest in the education of their own children.”11

  The night after his arrival hundreds crowded the schoolhouse to hear Wall speak. Responding to the squalid destitution of the freedpeople, Lieutenant Higgs had written that “nothing but a revolution or something similar will change this state of affairs.” Looking out at faces flickering with the lantern light, Wall claimed to offer that “something similar”: new homes and jobs in the West, with transportation provided by the government. No more cholera, no more hunger, no more idle want, no more fear of violence. Afterward, people emerged from the shadows to give him their names, and he set up another session, “as the entire meeting desired me to talk to them again.”12

  Wall had left the comforts of Oberlin to devote himself to the cause of integrating newly freed men and women into American life. It was the cause of his country and his race. The Freedmen’s Bureau head, General Oliver Otis Howard, appealed to triumphant abolitionists across the North and West to redirect their holy fervor to perhaps the one task more difficult than destroying slavery: building a new world from its ashes. Wall’s brother-in-law John Mercer Langston, appointed a general inspector in the Bureau, was traveling throughout the South, “arousing, inspiring and encouraging the free people” to educate themselves, save money, build “comfortable necessary homes,” and participate constructively in public life so that “they may win the respect and gain the confidence even of those who formerly held them in bondage.”13