The Tempest--Commander Putnam and Mr. Madison's War

by James L. Haley

  “Yes, suh.”

  “Well, let me just clear this with the commandant, and I should join you presently.” He started to leave but turned back. “Have you ever been on a ship before?”

  “No, suh.”

  “Would you like to see one?”

  “Oh, thank you, no, suh, I’s jes’ fine with good ol’ dirt under my feet.”

  It took only moments to pack clothes and Clarity’s captain’s box in a trunk and arrange himself in the carriage beside the driver. “Is it a difficult journey?”

  “Oh, no, suh. We jes’ follow the main road up the river and the canal to Columbia, then west another day. Got nice places for you to stop nights. Walk on, hosses.” He flicked the reins lightly on their backs.

  “Well, then, shall I call you Mr. Mose?”

  He chuckled. “Oh, no, suh. That would never do. The white folk would think I am puttin’ on airs. Now, further out, we get among them free colored folk, you want to call me Mr. Mose, that would be fine.”

  “Are there many free coloreds around Charleston?”

  “Oh, yes, suh, hundreds of ’em. We don’t have to go by that way, though. Some of them I don’t care fo’.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “’Cause lots of them own slaves of they own.”

  “What! I had no idea. Do they really?”

  “Oh, I’m here to tell you, ain’t no nation so hard a masta as them free coloreds. You’d think they have some pity on others, but Law have mercy!”

  Bliven wondered how freely he might converse with this servant. He seemed genial and intelligent. “How long have you—” He hesitated. He did not want to say “worked for” the Bandy family, as it seemed to avoid acknowledging his servitude, but his own inclination balked at saying “belonged to” to another human being. Yet he must not say anything to arouse discontent. “How long have you been with the Bandy family? Were you born here or brought from Africa?”

  “Heh. I was born and raised on the very place. I served Masta Sam’s father and grandfather.”

  “Did you, indeed?”

  After a silence Mose said, “Masta Putnam, may I speak up?”

  Those were two words that Bliven had never imagined he would hear together, and their effect on him approached alarm, but he could not sort out everything about this strange place at once. “Of course.”

  “My mistress done tol’ me you have never been at the South befo’. She said you would be uncertain ’bout how to talk and behave ’round slaves. Well, suh, my mistress said, you are free to ask me whatever you like.”

  “Well!” Bliven thought he should have known Rebecca would anticipate this. “This is not my part of the country, that is true. And certainly no one made me judge over Israel.”

  Mose chuckled. “Yes, suh. Exodus, chapter two.”

  Bliven stared at him, blasted.

  “Yes, suh, we goes to church. Sometimes we even believe what they preach.”

  “Ha! Well! So you are . . . well looked-after, then?”

  Mose shrugged. “I ain’t never been naked, ain’t never been hongry. That’s mo’ than I can say for some free folks. Law, Masta Putnam, askin’ me ’bout freedom be like askin’ a man who never drink whether he prefer rum or whiskey. I can’t imagine.”

  “Yes, I think I can see that.”

  “Where would I go?”

  Bliven wondered whether the affection he had begun feeling for this old Negro might be like the moss that covered the jaggedness of the rocks, that it obscured the brutality of his condition, and it had overgrown the South and prevented them from recognizing the inhumanity of what they were doing.

  Their road followed north and west along the Cooper River, and then the Congaree, and then the Santee Canal, which Bliven had always been curious to see. The South had always been vocal in desiring internal improvements, and the Santee was one of the very first canals in the United States. For all that, it was a modest affair, thirty-five feet wide and only four feet deep, but there were modern locks to raise and lower the flatboats laden with rice and cotton. With a city the size and heft of Charleston on the coast, some in the North had thought it extravagant of the Carolinians to desire a new capital city deep in the interior, but at least construction of the canal made it plain that the region was not as neglected as they perennially claimed.

  As soon as they reached the open lowlands the road passed slaves laboring in cotton fields and rice paddies, stooped and silent. Mose caught Bliven looking at them with unutterable sadness. “Is that your life, then, Mose?”

  “Oh, no, suh. I’s the blacksmith and the ferrier. I keep the hosses shod and the hoes sharp, fix wagon wheels. Law, you give me a hammer and the anvil, I can fix jes’ about anything.”

  Bliven nodded. “I am glad to hear it.”

  “Thank you, though”—Mose inclined his head toward the side of the road—“for feelin’ sorry for them po’ folk.”

  Early afternoon on the fourth day they turned up a road that followed a strong, tumbling stream. “That’s the Lone Cane,” said Mose. “Won’t be long now.”

  Much of the country was rolling, even rugged, with dense forests falling away into rocky defiles. “I am surprised,” said Bliven. “How can you farm in such rocky country?”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of level places. You’ll see. But you are right, clearin’ this land took a lot of work.”

  The Bandy house fairly struck him when he saw it on a low rise, of two stories, with deep dim verandas behind a thick file of Doric columns, and behind it the outbuildings of a working plantation. So this was what gave rise to Sam Bandy. To the south the lawn descended to a stream that had been dammed into a pond edged with reeds. Just above it a terrace had been paved in a grove of great arching trees. If the great Capability Brown had worked in the tropics, thought Bliven, this is what he would have wrought. Within the shaded grove were a table and chairs, and from the shade Rebecca emerged to greet him as Mose stopped the carriage.

  “Commander Putnam, how very good of you to come all this way to visit us. Hello, Mose.”

  Bliven leapt from the carriage and took both her hands. “Well, Mrs. Bandy, it has been far too long.”

  “Mose, will you send Dicey down with some lemonade?”

  “Yes’m. Masta Putnam, it has been a pleasure, thank you for your kind attentions.”

  “And thank you, Mose, for such a pleasant journey.”

  Mose started the horses up the rise to the house and its outbuildings.

  “Oh, Bliven, if you aren’t a sight for sore eyes. Come sit down. Do you have any news of Sam?”

  “No, I am so sorry. We only know that he was pressed and taken off his ship, and his ship was seized and is probably in the British Navy by now.”

  “Damn the ship,” she said quickly. “I can do without the ship, but I want my husband back.”

  “Well, we can be reasonably certain that he will be taken care of; he possesses valuable skills.”

  “Yes, I pray that may be the case.”

  “Look at you, you have hardly changed!” He spoke truly; her body still filled an ample frame, but she was slimmer than he remembered, tan and fit.

  “Thank you. You know, there are two ways a woman can live this life. Some never leave the house and wait to be worshipped, and become these magnolia flowers that will spoil if you touch them. Others pitch in and take part, and I enjoy to be useful. We are a minority, to be sure, and in the very richest families this would be taken as a sign of poor breeding. I think they are full of themselves.”

  Bliven gazed at her with admiration; he might have predicted this is how she would mature. “So, like England, you have your aristocracy here.”

  “Ironic, is it not? South Carolina has perhaps a hundred families that control most of the land and the wealth. Despite what you see looking around you, Sam’s family is not amo
ng them. They are considered on the cusp, aspiring to the golden circle. Sam’s mother, you will meet her, she very much acts the part. I am afraid I have not enhanced their prospect for social advancement, but I’ll wager I have helped put this place on a better footing than ever it was before. Why are you smiling?”

  “Because I am guessing that Sam would not have you any other way.”

  She smiled at their good beginning. “Do you ever think of us, in Naples?”

  She was as direct as ever, which put him off his guard, but he knew that it was her directness only, and that she intended nothing more. “Yes,” he said, “I have thought of you often, in wishing that you have made a happy life for yourself.” He raised his brow at the end of the sentence, making it a gentle question.

  “Yes, I have. More than I imagined that I could. I was unhappy when I was a girl, but now? Sam is—” She shook her head wistfully. “He is everything a woman could wish for. Ah, here comes some lemonade, the fruit grown in our very own greenhouse, thank you.”

  “Dr. Cutbush would be very proud of you.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Cutbush, he is the ship’s surgeon in the Constitution. Brilliant and famous doctor, he’s written a book about medical care of soldiers and sailors, and he is manic about lemons and their benefits to health.”

  “Really? I am glad to hear it. Thank you, Dicey, just set it on the table. Dicey, would you say good afternoon to Commander Putnam?”

  She curtsied shyly, a thin, light-skinned mulatto girl who seemed barely big enough to carry the silver platter with its pitcher and glasses. “Good afternoon, suh.”

  “Dicey,” repeated Bliven. “What an interesting name. How did you come by it?”

  The girl twisted bashfully from the waist without moving her feet, after the fashion of her class. “Law, Masta Putnam, Masta Sam won me rollin’ crapaud, and that’s a fact.”

  “What? Oh my goodness!” he stammered for something to say. “Well! Well, he must have liked you very much to have gambled to have you.”

  “Yes, sir, I specks he did, m-hm.”

  “Dicey,” Rebecca broke in, “why don’t you go up to the house now, see if you can find my boys and send them down to me, and then see if your Aunt Liza needs some help with the dinner?”

  “Yes’m.” She departed in no particular hurry, humming.

  Bliven and Rebecca looked at each other a long time, their eyes fond and merry. “He won her shooting dice?” he asked at last.

  She smiled gently. “No. That is what we have told her.” She sipped some lemonade and drew his attention to his own glass. “Try it, an extra measure of sugar performs miracles. Children are much in demand now,” she explained. “Since the African trade was banned four years ago, we must depend upon their natural increase. Six years ago that was not the case at all. Sam and I were in Charleston on business, and we happened by the slave market when an auction was in progress. A young woman and her child of about two were on the block; the man who bid on her did not want the baby. They were separated, the child was old enough to scream and cling. The woman was too frightened to make any demonstration, but one look was enough—her heart was broken.”

  “Heaven have mercy,” whispered Bliven.

  “I did not need to speak a word to Sam. He said he would buy the child, and we took her away. Poor thing, she wept and shrieked till I thought her heart would stop. We bought her a candy and some ribbons to tie in her hair. That calmed her somewhat. As soon as we got home I gave her to our cook and our maid to care for; they had no children of their own.” Rebecca paused for breath, taken aback by her own story. “Dicey has no memory now of any of this, mercifully. Yet I cannot help but think the pain remains deep in her somewhere, for her nature is often melancholy.”

  “I see.”

  Liza and Betsy, she is our maid, could not be more tender with her, and old Tessie, she is the cook for the field hands, has become a sort of grandmother to her. It is the best we could do for her.”

  “Yes.”

  Before the silence could lengthen, Rebecca sat up straighter. “Bliven, I know that you are from a part of the country that, well, lives a very different life. Sam has told me about meeting the girl who became your wife, how virulently she disapproves.”

  He smiled wryly. “Clarity, yes. She tried not to let it show, but she is not one to conceal an honest opinion. She is an abolitionist, there are no two ways about it.”

  “And you?”

  He took a long sip of the lemonade. “Oh, that is good. Shall we be honest with each other?”

  “That is where we parted.” She smiled. “That would be an excellent place to resume.”

  “I tell you, sailing with Sam, and my memories of North Africa, made me well aware that right and wrong are seldom absolute.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Sam was most definite in pointing out that the cotton raised by your slaves is sold to our mills in New England, which make a handsome profit for our Yankee owners. And in North Africa, the chamberlain of the Algerine king—Jonah, you must remember him?”

  “I remember him very well, he was a perfect gentleman in tending to my needs.”

  “He was the one who pointed out to me that the ships that—until as you say four years ago—transported the slaves from Africa were mostly from our northern ports. So it seems to me that if slavery is a sin, and I do tend to believe it is, no one’s hands are clean.”

  Rebecca nodded. “Fair and just—even as I remember you.”

  “There was something else that I learned when I was in the West Indies last year, that I can tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of all the blacks in Africa who were captured, and chained, and loaded onto ships and brought to the Americas, maybe only about one in twenty came to our shores. Nineteen in twenty went to Brazil, or Hispaniola, or Jamaica, or Cuba, or New Spain. Now, that does not in any measure excuse our part in it, but I regarded our Southern states somewhat differently after I learned what a small part of it we truly are.”

  “Indeed, I was not aware of that. What became of Jonah, do you know?”

  “Oh, carry me back, let me see. Commodore Preble docked in Boston after the Barbary War. He contacted one of the African churches in the city and put Jonah in their care. In very short order he found employment as a teacher, and his company was much sought among those people. He adapted readily. Of course, any man would who could go from the coast of Africa to a Virginia plantation, recross the ocean to become chamberlain to a Moorish king, and cross back to a free life in Boston. Last I heard, he was doing very well.”

  “I am glad of it. I can picture him there. And old Commodore Preble, he was an interesting sort. What became of him?”

  “Oh, poor man, his ulcer finally killed him a few years ago. I always felt badly for him. His dismissal from command after reducing Tripoli was thoroughly unjust. He was held responsible for losing the Philadelphia, even though that was plainly Bainbridge’s fault. But he did live long enough to be vindicated, and the Congress awarded him a gold medal.”

  “Good, so there is some justice in the world. Oh, how I hope that if Someone up there does dispense justice, it may protect my Sam. You have no idea how I miss him and worry about him.”

  “I know. Is there anything you need, anything I can do for you?”

  She shook her head. “You are so good to ask, but unless you can get out there on that ocean and find him, no. Plantations are rather self-sustaining entities, life here will go on regardless, but my anxiety for him is rather consuming. I was always an independent girl, but now I find I need my husband, and my children need their father. Oh, look up at the house! Those two little specks you see on the porch are my two sons. Boys!” she called out. “Come down!

  “Quick,” she added to Bliven, “put your hat on, they love uniforms.”

  Her sudden comm
and shook from him a thought that had begun forming, whether Clarity, when left on her own, was really as strong as she seemed to be when he was home. What did she really feel in his absence? he started to wonder, but then rose and assumed his most military bearing.

  Two little boys came tumbling down the slope from the house; they were Sam in small, round, and blond, and giggling.

  “Boys, boys! Straighten up! This is Commander Putnam, who you have heard us speak of as a particular friend of your father’s.

  “Commander, the one you see slightly the larger is Sam Junior, who is six; the only slightly smaller is David, who is just turned five.”

  “What was your name again, young man?” Bliven said to the younger.

  “David, sir.”

  “David! Why, that is my own second name!”

  “Yes,” Rebecca said from behind him. “We did have you in mind, but ‘Bliven’ was a bit too unusual, and would have excited comment.”

  “Oh, oh, I can’t tell you how that pleases me!” It nearly raised a tear from him that they had named a son for him.

  “Sir,” asked the older, “is it true you fought pirates with our father?”

  “Yes, very true. We were in a ship called the Enterprise. The captain trusted your father with the wheel, to keep us on course, and he fought, one hand with a sword and the other steering the ship.”

  “And boys,” interjected Rebecca, “when your father was almost overwhelmed, the commander shot the pirate who was about to strike him down.”

  “We knew it,” they cried. “We knew it! Will you tell us more about it?”

  “He will over dinner, boys. Now run up and tell Grandmama that we will be up to visit her soon.”

  “We’re going to fight pirates!” They departed at a dead run.

  “Lively lads.”

  “You have no idea,” she laughed.

  “What a pleasant bower you have here. I have never seen the like. I have never seen such enormous trees.”

  “Our live oaks, yes.”

  “Wait! These are live oak?”

  “Of course. What did you think?”