Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  CALHOUN: You’ll make no concessions?

  RACHEL: None.

  CALHOUN: You, young man. You haven’t said much.

  BARTLEY: I’m looking ahead. There isn’t much I’d want to say. (He indicated that under these circumstances, with Paul Steed listening, he had better remain silent.)

  CALHOUN: By this you want me to understand that you’ve already begun clandestine operations—the spiriting away of slaves belonging to other people.

  BARTLEY: If a runaway comes to my door, I shall always assist him.

  CALHOUN: (to Elizabeth): Surely, if you follow the principles you’ve stated, you would not encourage runaways ... or aid them?

  ELIZABETH: My religion would not allow me to steal another man’s property. But I would educate the slave so that he can gain his own freedom.

  CALHOUN: I’m glad to hear someone who defends property.

  RACHEL: Does thee really believe, Senator, that thee can perpetually hold millions of Negroes in chattel bondage?

  CALHOUN: It’s the law of nature, ma’am, and the law of this Union.

  RACHEL: Then war is inescapable.

  CALHOUN: Do you, the youngest person here, take it upon yourself to declare war?

  RACHEL: No, sir. Thee did that.

  CALHOUN: What do you mean?

  RACHEL: When thee said that slavery was immutable.

  CALHOUN: It is, my dear young lady. It’s the law of God, the law of any reasonable man. The Negro must be kept, he must be guided, he must have his food and clothing provided by someone.

  ELIZABETH: I can name one Negro right now who would be worthy of sitting with thee in the United States Senate.

  CALHOUN: No such Negro exists or ever will. Tell me, Mr. Paxmore, how do you see the next decade developing?

  GEORGE: I heard at my boatyard in Patamoke that when Daniel Webster was here ...

  CALHOUN: Did he visit you, Steed?

  GEORGE: He’s supposed to have said, in answer to a direct question, that he would support a fugitive slave law with real teeth. He said that. Daniel Webster.

  CALHOUN: For once he showed good sense.

  GEORGE: When I heard this I concluded that there would be such a law, and that it would result in warfare between the sections.

  CALHOUN: Do you think the southern states will secede?

  GEORGE: Everything thee has said today leads to secession.

  CALHOUN: What could the South do, Mr. Paxmore, to alleviate the pressures that seem to be driving all of us in that direction?

  RACHEL: (whose intrusion irritated the Senator): Offer a plan for the assured liberation of all slaves. Not immediately, perhaps, but certain.

  CALHOUN: I take it you read The Liberator.

  RACHEL: When the postmaster allows me to have a copy.

  CALHOUN: Which is not often, I pray. So you want us to surrender our property? Throw away the fruit of our labors? Steed here has nine hundred slaves, which he has paid for in the sweat of his brow. All of them to go?

  RACHEL: There can be no lasting peace until they do.

  CALHOUN: And go to what? To freedom as you and I know it? Never. If they ever do go, which God forbid, it will be to a new definition of slavery—deprivation, ignorance, charity in some new form. (Here he paused. Then he addressed Elizabeth.) If you know so much about the wrestlings of the Quaker conscience with the problem of war, then you must also know how assiduous a minority must always be in defending its rights. By and large, the people of this nation have not liked Quakers. Their pacifism in 1812 when we were striving to protect this Union irritated me considerably. But you have persisted because you knew that a prudent minority must defend itself against the tyranny of a majority. Isn’t that right?

  GEORGE: We have endeavored to exist without irritating others. That may have been our strength.

  CALHOUN: Precisely. The South is a minority striving to defend its rights. Because we have controlled the Senate, we’ve been able to do so. And I can see a time coming when the United States will be a minority among nations, and on that day it will use every device that the South uses now to protect its rights to existence. I fight for the future, Mr. Paxmore. I have a vision which—

  RACHEL: Does it include perpetual slavery for the black man?

  CALHOUN: The Negro will always be in slavery. I prefer the southern version to that which those at the North will impose.

  They ate an early evening meal, listened to the bitter winds blowing in from the Chesapeake, and went to bed. In the morning everyone assembled at the wharf as John Calhoun departed for the Senate, and the great battles which loomed there, and his impending death. As the dark coat and the bushy head disappeared into the cabin, Rachel Starbuck Paxmore said, “One of the finest this nation has produced, and wrong in everything.”

  No authoritative copy of the odious legislation reached “Patamoke until the first week in October 1850, but when it arrived by packet from Baltimore for posting at the courthouse, everyone could see what Daniel Webster had done. George Paxmore, at the boatyard, refused comment until he had a chance to discuss the new law with his wife. At noon he left his desk in charge of his workmen, most of whom favored the bill, and sailed home to Peace Cliff, where he assembled his family in the kitchen.

  “They’ve passed something even worse than we had imagined,” he reported, taking out the notebook on which he had scribbled the main features of the bill.

  “Is it law?” Rachel asked.

  “The law of the nation. Any slaveholder can go anywhere in the United States and recover whatever black man or woman he claims to be a runaway.”

  “Even to cities like Boston?”

  “Everywhere. States, territories, District of Columbia. Or land not yet a territory. All he has to do is state that the Negro is his, and his claim is established. The black man cannot testify on his own behalf. He cannot summon other witnesses.”

  “What can he do?”

  “He can listen attentively as the judge delivers the sentence returning him to slavery. Even manumitted men and women can he dragged back. Every United States marshal is charged with enforcing the law. And a new horror has been introduced. Every citizen must, on pain of going to jail, assist the marshal in capturing the runaway, or arresting the freedman, if the marshal orders him.”

  “Such a law is unthinkable,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head in disbelief as she sat by the stove, hands folded.

  “It’s obviously not unthinkable,” her husband said with unusual anger. “They’ve passed it. But we can make it unworkable.”

  “George! We must not be hasty,” Elizabeth said. “We must pray for counsel.”

  “What did thee have in mind?” Bartley asked his father.

  “We shall oppose it,” Rachel interrupted. “With every power we command, we shall oppose it.”

  “That we shall,” George said, his white hair quivering as his body tensed.

  “I think we should pray,” Elizabeth said, and for some minutes they sat in silence, after which she said, “I must exact a promise from each of thee. There will be no violence. We cannot solve this problem with violence.”

  “But if a slave runs to our door, surely thee will help him escape?” Rachel asked.

  “I will not deprive another man of his lawful property.”

  “But will thee step aside while Bartley and I ...”

  To this, Elizabeth agreed, and their home became a haven for the oppressed. Even in the Deep South word was passed: “You get Choptank, high white bank, Paxmores.” If the slave could reach here, Bartley and Rachel would somehow spirit him to the Starbucks, where young Comly would lead him north to Pennsylvania.

  The attitudes of the five Quakers involved in this escape route varied. Elizabeth, the tireless woman who had been fighting slavery for half a century, believed that moral suasion was sufficient; she would teach slaves at considerable risk to herself; she would feed them at her expense; she would clothe them with shirts she had sewn; and she would medicine them and bind t
heir wounds. But she would not encourage them to quit their masters, for that was deprivation of a legal right. She remained what she had always been: the quiet, traditional Quakeress, the teacher, friend and comforter, but no more.

  George Paxmore would always contribute money; he would hide fugitives; and on occasion he would himself guide them to the Starbucks’. But he abhorred violence and would not even stay overnight with the robust Starbucks, who did not.

  Bartley Paxmore, at thirty-one, was the new-style Quaker, engaged actively in fighting slavery and willing to take great risks with either his own life or that of fugitives. He was excessively daring and had pieced together an escape route right up the peninsula through the heart of the Refuge plantations. He had already made seven trips to the Starbucks’ and supposed that he would be making more, but like his father, he eschewed violence and would not go armed.

  His wife Rachel was quite different. Like all the Starbucks, she saw slavery as the ultimate abomination and would make no concessions. If a slaveowner were to overtake her while she was leading slaves north, she would kill him; consequently, Bartley never allowed her to slip into dangerous situations. She was the goader, the encourager, the unfailing enemy of the slave-catcher, and it was often her unalloyed courage which gave escapees heart to try the last ten miles to the border.

  Comly Starbuck not only refused to reject violence, he expected it, and was always prepared to fight his way clear if slave-catchers moved in. He was a sturdy young man, larger and stronger than Bartley, and dedicated to quite different ends: “When the South secedes, as it will, there must be a vast uprising of the slaves. Then we will tie this evil into knots.” He expected one day to enlist in a northern army.

  The principal opponents of the liberationists fell into three groups. There were the big plantation owners whose wealth was tied up in Negroes and who could always be counted upon to finance a chase. They were not brutal men, but they were deeply perplexed as to why a gang of northern agitators should be so bent upon depriving them of their lawful property. They wanted peace with the North, wanted trade to continue and multiply. The more prudent saw that as the United States stretched westward, the non-slave states must one day outnumber the slave by a large margin, and when that time came they wanted their inherited rights to be respected. On every subject except slavery they were reasonable men; like Paul Steed, their spokesman, they believed that for all men to be free, black men had to accept slavery.

  At the bottom of the pro-slavery men were the professional trackers like Lafe Turlock with his dogs and Herman Cline with his rawhide. They hated blacks. There were not many like these two, but every town on the Eastern Shore provided its quota. One of the easiest recreations to organize along the salty rivers was a nigger chase.

  In between stood the majority, a group difficult to decipher. They were white: they owned little land or other forms of wealth; few had slaves, and then only one or two. But they had been convinced by southern philosophers that their welfare depended upon the perpetuation of slavery, and they took it unkindly when folks at the North spoke ill of their peculiar institution. They were motivated not by a fear of slaves but by their dislike of freed blacks, whom they saw as shiftless, undisciplined and profligate. One farmer spoke for all when he said, “With a slave who knows his place I got no quarrel, but I cannot abide a freed nigger who can read. He means trouble.”

  This middle group was shocked when people actually living in the South, like the Paxmores, spoke against slavery and rejoiced when blacks escaped These people did not hire themselves out as slave-catchers, but if a chase developed, they joined, and when the slave was treed and the dogs were barking, they derived as much enjoyment as when a raccoon was trapped. But if anyone suggested that the Eastern Shore might have to quit the Union in defense of slavery, these men and women grew reflective and said, “We stand with Daniel Webster. The Union must be preserved.”

  In the 1850s, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act under the sponsorship of Senators Clay and Webster—Calhoun felt it was not stringent enough—a subtle, undeclared war erupted between the slave-owners and the enemies of the peculiar institution. It was fought incessantly; a slave would run away from some plantation in South Dorchester, make his way to the Choptank, know from secret instructions where the Paxmores lived, and at dead of night cross the broad river, go ashore at the foot of the white cliffs showing gray in the moonlight, and climb to the kitchen door.

  In later years white men and women would often ask incredulously: Why did the blacks accept slavery? In the decade from 1851 to the end of 1860, some two thousand made their way up the Eastern Shore, fighting against incalculable odds, trying to beat their way to freedom. An old woman in her seventies would say some morning, “I gonna die free.” And off she would go. Children would be told in awesome tones, “You make one sound, we all gonna be killed.” They died in swamps; they drowned in rivers; they were hanged from trees; they were burned at stakes. But on they came, and some stopped briefly at the Paxmores’.

  For the second time in history a Turlock was learning to read. Young Jake, eleven years old, was getting up each morning, washing his face at the bench behind the cabin at the edge of town, and trooping off to school. The existence of this academy, and especially the presence of its remarkable teacher, was one of those accidents which alter the face of history—not big history, like wars and elections, but the little history of a town like Patamoke or a river like the Choptank.

  Paul Steed had become more and more a man of powerful character, and despite the infuriating indifference of the federal government, he persisted in believing that a railroad could be built down the spine of the peninsula, but he wondered how, when the work began, the construction companies would find enough skilled labor to build the tracks. Slaves with mules could do the grading, but it would require a lot more than slaves to do the actual building.

  His problem was solved when the Baltimore newspapers began running stories about the famine in Ireland and of the forced exodus from that starving land. One night in his study he told Susan, “Damn! We could sail to Ireland and pick up a thousand men!” He became so excited by the prospect that he could not sleep. After they retired, she heard him roaming up and down all night, talking to himself.

  In the morning he boarded one of his ships loading wheat, ordered the captain to be ready to sail at noon, regardless of cargo, and by nightfall was at the mouth of the Chesapeake, having left behind orders that huts be erected in Patamoke to receive the immigrants he would import.

  When he landed at Cork he saw a sight which would haunt him for the rest of his days: lines of families near death from starvation waiting hopelessly for food, or transportation to anywhere. “They’d sail to the ports of hell,” the English dockmaster told Steed.

  “I could find places for three hundred men.”

  “Must take families.”

  “I didn’t want women and children.”

  “Nobody does, but if you leave them behind, they die.”

  So Paul stood at the foot of the gangplank and watched as seventy-seven families came past him, glassy-eyed and with an appalling number of emaciated children. He tried to choose families with grown sons, but the dockmaster did not allow much selection, and in the end Steed had a conglomerate mix of some men who might possibly build a railroad and many dependents who might possibly survive on what their fathers were able to earn.

  “Home fast!” Steed told his captain, and when the ship had weighed anchor he started his duties as head feeder of the starving. He worked in the kitchens twelve and fifteen hours a day, helping to prepare food and devising ways of doling it out in proper portions so that no one gorged himself to death. His limp and his twisted neck became the Irishmen’s symbol of salvation, and when Sunday came, he organized prayer services for the three hundred and seven Catholics he was importing to his homeland.

  There was no priest aboard, and Steed was reluctant to lead devotions, but he did find a glib-tongued spindl
e of a man named Michael Caveny to whom praying was as natural as cursing:

  “Almighty God, who sent His plague to Egypt and His famine among the Hebrews, so that the earth trembled with punishment, we know that Thou didst also send the years of plenty so that Thy people flourished. By Thy grace are we embarked upon this holy vessel which will carry us to paradise undreamed of where food is plentiful and where our children can romp in green pastures without fear of want.”

  On and on he prayed, a mellifluous outpouring of imagery and biblical fragments, so filled with hope that Steed could hear sobs from every part of the crowded deck. At the peroration, in which God and babies and lambs and feasts of thanksgiving intermingled, Paul found himself wiping his eyes, and that day released double portions of food.

  Michael Caveny—his name had originally been Cavanaugh, but centuries of abbreviation had shortened it to its present musical form—was an uncommon man. At thirty-nine, with three children, he had known the torment of hunger but never despair. He had done things to feed his children which in later years he would erase from memory, not wishing to saddle his family with such images, and he had forced them to survive in conditions which had exterminated scores of his neighbors.

  He was a lyrical man to whom the slightest manifestation of nature became justification for protracted prose poems: “Look at the fish flying through the air! God sends them aloft with a song, and the Devil pulls them back into his hot frying pan.” The more Steed saw of this man the more he liked him, and by the time the ship reached Patamoke, Michael Caveny had been designated foreman of the railroad crew.

  This proved an empty honor, for there was no railroad. The nation was too preoccupied with building really important lines to the West to allocate any fund for an inconsequential line down the Delmarva Peninsula, as it had been aptly named from the first syllables of the three states which shared it. The railroad did not reach Chicago until 1853, and it had to probe south, too, for despite the apprehension of Senator Calhoun that it might bring northern heresy with it, merchants of the South insisted that they, too, have iron tracks on which to move their goods. So once again the Eastern Shore was ignored. But this was not all loss, for in the resulting isolation, it was able to confirm and deepen its unique patterns of life.