“I had a wakeful hour late last night, in which I thought over a conversation, or rather several conversations I had with Mr. Key during his visit,” she wrote in her diary. The memory of their talk stirred profound emotions, which she struggled to understand and control. As she often did, Sarah Gayle expressed her feelings in poetry. Addressing Key as a “genius,” she confessed a sense of guilt weighing on her soul like a heavy stone. Illicit feelings of love were not easy to harbor.
Deep is the injury done to things divine
By men unknowing how to work the mine
In which the gems of truth lie all concealed
Waiting for Learning’s light, to bid them be revealed
Not Learning only gathered from the page
Of books—the gift, at once, and the relic of the sage
From high sources comes this purer light,
Which throws within, its radiance keenly bright,
And show that guilt is weighing on the soul—
That stone which Heavenly hands away must roll.
Sarah Gayle’s religious faith shone in her choice of words. For her, books and sages could not expose the “gems of truth.” Only “Learning’s light” could do that. And only “Heavenly hands” could roll away the stone of guilt. Yet, she went on to admit, the human will is weak compared to sin’s attractions:
Our nature’s weak disgust will steele the heart,
And bid the influences from above, depart,
The hearer grovels on the earth again,
And Satan binds him with a stronger chain.
It was a confession of sorts. Sleepless in Tuscaloosa, Sarah felt like a sinner bound by Satan. She wanted to follow the light, yet her human weakness (“nature’s weak disgust”) had rationalized her dismissal of godly influences. She had succumbed by lying down, groveling on the earth. In the end, she chose not to send the poem.
For his part, Frank Key remembered her with unfeigned fondness. “I have often thought of Tuscaloosa and your family circle,” he wrote to Sarah in a letter, “and could I transport myself as easily as my thoughts, I should still be a frequent visitor.”
They had a bond of love.
21
THE EXASPERATED FEELING among white men in the summer of 1835 was not confined to the nation’s capital. On July 29, a steamboat entered the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, carrying a regular shipment of mail from New York that was laden with the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s pamphlet campaign. The postmaster decided to confiscate the publications, and when a Charleston newspaper carried stories on the contents of the cargo the next morning, the news incited an angry mob of white people to break into the post office, seize the mailbags, and heap them onto a bonfire. Effigies of William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan were also burned.
News of a massive slave rebellion in Mississippi created more unease. The Intelligencer cited an uprising near the town of Clinton, ten miles west of Jackson, the state capital. The story, reprinted from the Nashville Republican, described “an intended insurrection of the slaves, assisted by many white men.” The author of the dispatch told of joining a company of volunteers who sought to suppress the rebellion. The group seized a white man named Cotton, supposedly the ringleader, and nine blacks. All were hanged on the Fourth of July.
Two days later, the Intelligencer had more of the story under the headline “Horrible Conspiracy.” Before Cotton’s execution, the Intelligencer reported, he had confessed that he was an accomplice of “the celebrated murrel,” a notorious bandit of the Mississippi Delta. Their scheme was said to be huge and evil, embracing the whole slave region from Maryland to Louisiana, and seeking “the total destruction of the white population of all the Slave States, and the absolute conquest and dominion of the country.” Moreover, they had help. “A large number of bold, enterprising and unprincipled white men are … engaging the aid of … the negro population … the bold, the sagacious, the desperate.”
These headlines revived at a glance the sickening, soul-deadening worry felt after Southampton. Had the long-feared all-out rebellion of the Africans and their white allies against the slave owners finally begun? Suddenly the specter of “servile war” seemed all too plausible, maybe even imminent. Could a Southampton happen right there in Washington City? Who would prevent it? On the next page was a story about “the Vicksburg Tragedy” in which a Mississippi mob had hanged five gamblers, white men, without trial. Some were bewildered by the spread of lawlessness. Others welcomed it.
Edgar Snowden, the editor of the Gazette newspaper in Alexandria, thought a mob was just the instrument needed to stem the flood of antislavery publications into Washington City. In print, he invited William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan to come visit the South, all but promising they would be hanged forthwith. Lynching was a perfectly respectable business in his eyes.
“We would not have these eminent philanthropists to take the trouble to go all the way to Mississippi and especially to Vicksburg; but any spot south of the Potomac would answer,” the editor wrote. “We can assure them they would meet with a warm reception. We hope they will not slight nor neglect this invitation. It is given in much sincerity, and with a perfect knowledge, from recent observation, of the state of Southern feeling.”
Snowden disputed the Boston Courier’s charge that “the state of society in some of our southern and western States is deplorable.” There were mobs in Boston and New York too, he noted. Something had gone wrong all over America.
“There is evidently a bad spirit at work over the whole of this country,” he wrote, “a spirit of insubordination, misrule, fraud and violence. How is this evil spirit to be driven out of the land? Where is the exorcist that can arrest its disturbing and troubled wanderings?”
Epicurus was not in Washington City, not for long.
. . .
Anna Thornton did not know or care what Edgar Snowden was writing that day. She did not read the Gazette, much less care for such grand pronouncements. She read the Intelligencer and the Globe but did not concern herself much with public events, preferring to see friends in the parlor, do her household accounts, and worry about her mother.
On the evening of Tuesday, August 4, she went out for her usual twilight carriage tour of the Avenue, with George driving her past the Centre Market and the Epicurean Eating House on her way to the Capitol. On the way back, George took the carriage up Fourteenth Street and out to the racetrack on Meridian Hill. On the way home, Anna told George she wanted to call on a friend, but the friend was not home. Anna returned to the house on F Street and the company of her mother and Maria. Before retiring, Anna noted in her diary that the thermometer on her porch had not risen above seventy degrees Fahrenheit all day. It had been an unusually cool day for August.
PART IV
THE PERILOUS FIGHT
As rioting spread nationwide in August 1835, a white mob attacked the Charleston Post Office, seeking to destroy pamphlets mailed by the American Anti-Slavery Society. (illustration credit p.4)
22
ARTHUR BOWEN SPENT most of the evening of August 4, 1835, in President’s Square, the park across the street from the executive mansion, quiet ever since General Jackson and his family left for their summer vacation. Gentlemen strolling home that evening hardly noticed the young Negro idling in the shade, save that he seemed to be drinking spirits from a bottle. Those who looked closer could see he was about nineteen years of age, standing five feet nine inches tall with a bushy head of hair. His face looked blistered with cuts from the fistfight at the racetrack. Another young black man, never identified, joined him in talking, sipping, and talking some more. While legally a slave owned by a white woman, Arthur was attending to his primary interests in life: avoiding work and thinking about freedom.
Arthur and his friend had just come from a meeting of John Cook’s talking society at the Union Seminary schoolhouse over on H Street. Cook, and another older colored man, had talked with Arthur and his friends about slave
ry and how they might disenthrall themselves from bondage. This clandestine group met often to talk, read poems aloud, or study articles in the latest issue of The Liberator, the banned antislavery newspaper. Cook’s message was, You have a right to be free. That day the young men had argued about slaves who killed their masters and slaves who betrayed those who dared to rebel. Who was right? Who was wrong? The talk got hot before the elders told them to knock it off and go home.
Arthur and his friend kept the conversation going in President’s Square, a leafy redoubt in the middle of a drab city and an agreeable spot for discussion and dissipation. Growing up in the neighborhood, Arthur had seen the square change from a bumpy pasture to a landscaped park lined with vegetable vendors and fine homes. After the scheduled visit of the great General Lafayette was announced in 1824, workmen had leveled the grounds, filled the gullies, and carved out winding pathways through the trees, all in honor of the French soldier who had come to America’s aid during the War for Independence. When an adoring crowd welcomed Lafayette that summer, eight-year-old Arthur Bowen might have scampered among the spectators. The square was renamed in Lafayette’s honor, but the new name would not catch on for years. Anna Thornton still called it President’s Square, and Arthur probably did too.
He and his pal moseyed along one dirt path through the low-hanging trees and then another, taking care to stay beyond the hearing of any white person. They talked about freedom and human rights and what they could do to escape slavery, excited by new thoughts and the whiskey that warmed their tongues. Did they dare to hope? Arthur could hardly avoid the landscape of his predicament.
On the south side of the square stood the home of President Jackson. The mansion, said one guidebook of the day, resembled “the country seat of an English nobleman in its architecture and size,” except that the surrounding grounds were a mess featuring grazing sheep and mounds of dirt from the construction of a new driveway and stable.
Arthur had actually seen the inside of the President’s House at least once. When he was a boy, Mrs. Thornton had assigned him to serve as a footman for her friend Benjamin Ogle Tayloe when he attended a dinner hosted by President Jackson. Arthur might have recalled the grand East Ballroom where the event took place. Now the mansion looked empty. Jackson and his family had gone for the summer to a seaside retreat in southern Virginia, accompanied by their household slaves.
President’s Square, now almost chilly and lit only by a few streetlamps, turned shadowy in the dusk. A white man named Watson passed through on his way home from work and noticed Arthur Bowen was “much intoxicated.” John Cook, the schoolteacher and leader of the talking society, had warned his young charges that liquor did the devil’s work. “By drinking the sudden passion of the murderer is sharpened,” Cook said. “The cherished revenge of the assassin is made stronger, and he is made ready to plunge the instrument of death into the bosom of the object of his hate, perhaps his own mother, father, brother, sister, wife or child.” Arthur admired Mr. Cook but did not worry about this warning.
When the ten o’clock curfew came Arthur still lingered. With all the talk in the newspapers of abolitionist mischief and slave rebellion, the city’s constables had become more vigilant about enforcing the law that required Negroes to get off the streets by the middle of the evening. But the constables did not look in President’s Square that night. Arthur loitered until after one o’clock in the morning.
When he finally decided to go home, Arthur probably left by way of the south side of the square. The city was now silent and dark, the streets lit only by candles in windows and the galaxy of stars above. At the corner of Fifteenth Street and G Street, Arthur passed the construction site of the grand new Treasury building. At Fourteenth Street, he turned right. No carriages or horses moved on its washboard surface. Halfway down the block to F Street, Arthur turned left into the tree-lined alley and made his unsteady way down the darkened lane.
Arthur passed under the catalpa trees in the back area of Mrs. Thornton’s house, an enclave lush with wisteria and azaleas. A stairway rose up to the back porch. He stepped down to the rear basement door, which, as usual, had been left unlocked by his mother. She wanted him to come in at night without disturbing the sleep of the women of the house. Arthur groped his way through the blackness to the wooden steps and stumbled up to the first floor. At the top of the stairs, he touched the axe, used for chopping firewood, which was stored in its accustomed place inside the doorway. He picked it up and put its polished handle, headed by a four-inch steel blade, in the crook of his arm. He eased his way into the main hallway of the house.
In Arthur’s inebriated mind, the house was tilting like a steamship on the Potomac, not that the feeling was unpleasant. Arthur loved steamships. Up the dimly lit passage one way, he saw the beveled glass door at the front of the house. Down the other way, the stout back door blocked the way to the porch and the garden. Arthur blinked, his eyes getting used to the darkness.
To his immediate left, the main stairway curled around and up to the second floor, and then to his garret on the third. Directly in front of him, Arthur faced a choice of two doors. One led to the dining room and parlor in the front of the house. The other led to Mrs. Thornton’s bedroom in the back.
Did Arthur think he was already on the upper floor about to enter his own room? Or did he have something to say to Mrs. Thornton?
Arthur undid the catch of the lock and entered the room where the three women slept, the axe still hanging on his elbow.
23
THE ORANGE GLOW of a single lamp illuminated the contours of the room. To Arthur’s right lay the tiny figure of Mrs. Brodeau barely visible under her covers. To his left, Anna Thornton slept. His mother’s bed lined the opposite wall.
The noise of the opening door wakened Anna Thornton and Maria Bowen at almost the same time. Mistress and servant registered the same extraordinary and terrifying sight: Arthur in the dim light of the doorway, an axe on his arm. An axe. Anna was not dreaming. This might have been how it began at Southampton four years ago. This is probably how it began in Mississippi the month before. As Maria stirred in the far bed, Anna extracted herself swiftly from her own covers. While keeping her eyes on the boy, she skirted fast around the small table that stood in the center of the room, bolted past Maria’s bed, and ran to a door on the opposite side of the room.
Meanwhile, Maria was climbing out of her bed. Younger than Anna, she was quicker and stronger too. She rushed straight at her son and pushed him back through the doorway as Anna escaped into the front parlor, then through the front door. Bursting onto F Street, Anna screamed, “Dr. Huntt! General Gibson!”
Her friends Henry Huntt and George Gibson lived in the next house. The street was deserted and the windows up and down the block were mostly dark. The sky was clear, the moon almost full. Anna, still dressed in her nightgown, ran to Dr. Huntt’s door.
“She’s killed!” she cried. “She’s killed!”
There was no answer.
“Dr. Huntt, come now,” she called up to the windows. “Don’t put on your clothes. Come directly. General Gibson, come! She’s killed.”
Dr. Huntt soon emerged. At fifty-three years of age, he was a well-known physician, doctor to President Jackson, and a member of the city’s board of health. He was followed by the panting figure of his friend Gibson, a retired general who boarded in his house. The two men ran to Mrs. Thornton’s door with Anna following close behind. Inside they found Maria in the front hall, comforting Anna’s mother, who had not been killed and indeed did not know what the commotion was about. Arthur was nowhere to be seen.
“I’ve got him out,” gasped Maria, still in her night shift, pointing to the back door. “He’s crazy.”
Dr. Huntt and General Gibson hurried down the darkened hallway toward the back door that led outside. From the other side came shouts and thumps, almost wailing. Arthur was outside, pounding on the door.
“He’s crazy,” Maria said.
Genera
l Gibson knew Arthur from his visits to the Thorntons’ house.
“Be quiet, boy,” he said through the door. “Quiet.”
“Damn you to hell,” called Arthur from the other side. “I’ll have the heart’s blood of y’all.”
General Gibson gaped at Dr. Huntt. What did he say?
“Let’s go out there,” said Gibson, an old soldier too ready to charge into battle. “We can overawe him.”
The pounding continued.
“He’s got an axe,” Dr. Huntt observed, “and we are unarmed.”
Gibson gulped, now glad to be inside the locked door. Maria Bowen felt weak with relief that she had gotten him out. Anna Thornton’s mind was still awhirl in disbelief at what was happening in her own home.
“I will have my freedom,” Arthur was shouting now from the other side of the door. “I’ll have my freedom, you hear me? I have as much right to freedom as you do.”
Anna and Maria listened and were mortified. The boy was mad drunk!
“If Philo Parker and the others hadn’t been put in jail, he would’ve made ’em all smell hell,” he was shouting. “We’d have been free by now.”
Anna, Maria, and the two men did not recognize the name “Philo Parker,” but it sounded like he was a slave who had tried to rebel and almost succeeded, someone like Gabriel Prosser, the blacksmith who planned a massive slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. Prosser was arrested and executed after an informant betrayed the rebels, but his story lived on.
As her panic subsided Anna heard the incoherent ravings of a spoiled boy mad at being turned out. Perhaps she felt a sense of failure or anger. Arthur had fallen, first to drink, now to the fiendish ideas of the so-called abolitionists. She had not been able to control him since Dr. Thornton’s death, and he could not control himself.
Snow-Storm in August Page 13
