Chaneysville Incident (57 page)

“He had a detailed plan. It was going to be an expensive one, and he didn’t want to pump any money into the Southern economy, so there was another plan to provide a bankroll. After he had bought his corn futures in July, he headed west across the mountains to Cincinnati, and took passage on a riverboat heading south to New Orleans. He was posing as a Southerner who had gone north to claim an inheritance, a man with lots of money and no sense, and he spent the first part of the trip in the card room, losing every bit of the seed money he had brought with him, about three thousand dollars. By the time they were halfway down the river every man on board knew he was a sucker and practically broke, and they were lining up for chances to take what he had left. But just about then he had a run of luck and won back all of his stake, and about five thousand more. Then he lost that. By that time they were in New Orleans, and he had nothing more than his original three thousand, but he had a reputation for being a dumb cardplayer with streaky luck. And more important, he had a set of acquaintances to go with his fake name. And he had an entree into the best poker games in New Orleans.

“I don’t know where he had learned to play poker, maybe on his first trip up the river, but he knew, and he knew how to catch cheats too. In a month he was well known as a gambler and a dueler, and he was just about even with the money; he hadn’t beaten anybody badly enough to be thought ill of, but he was known. He let that reputation build for a while, and then he promoted a big game and won the fifty thousand dollars he needed. It was a lot of money, but he was careful to take it from a lot of different people, so nobody was bankrupt, and nobody was mad, and everybody thought he was a fine fellow, and thought it was just a great way to spend a lot of found money—”

“What was?”

“His vacation. Two weeks in a rented house in the country near Hammond, Louisiana, with the top fifteen women from the best house in town. He took all the men who had lost money to him, and he let them spend the first weekend enjoying good food and drink and women and probably some more poker. And then he packed them off with a strict injunction not to bother him until the last two days of his vacation, when they were all supposed to come back for another big party. So the top gentry of New Orleans went back to town, laughing and joking and full of liquor and good will, and ten days later they came back, ready for another party, and found an empty house and no women and a letter from C.K. Washington thanking them for showing him such a good time in New Orleans. They put out the alarm, of course, but C.K. and the women had a ten-day head start, and C.K. had disguised the women as a coffle of boys being sold west, with C.K. as the driver, and nobody could imagine fancy women dressed up and made up that way; they made it here by late September. I don’t know what the other trips were like, but C.K. remarked on the lack of adventure in this one.

“The only problem was that it was too late in the year to move them on. C.K. had to take delivery of his corn and get about his whiskey-making. So he taught the women how to build cabins and they set up a little commune in the hills, and helped him cook that year, and I imagine he got his physical release. When spring came he had gotten more than that. Nine of the women moved north to Canada. Five chose to stay with the profession, and C.K. took them to Philadelphia and gave them enough money to buy a house and set themselves up in business….”

She made a face.

“They were free women now,” I said.

“All right,” she said. “But your arithmetic is off.”

“No it isn’t. One of the women stayed with C.K.

“Her name was Bijou, and she was the darkest of the women; that’s all he says about her. He never even mentions the fact that sometime during the winter she became his mistress. I doubt that she was the only one who did, but she was the only one who stayed, although that was probably more her decision than his. All he did was record the fact, and mention her from time to time, and chart the progress of her pregnancy; there’s nothing to indicate that he cared about her, or even thought about her. He didn’t change his activities in any way that I can see. The next year—1856, that would have been—he made the same three trips, and he didn’t get back from the third one until long after she was due; when he did get back she had had the child and named him Lamen—God knows why.

“But he did change shortly after he came back from his first trip in 1857. I don’t know where he went that time; the New Orleans trip seems to have restored some sense of discretion to him, and he started putting things in code again. But wherever he went, he came back wary and…I don’t know. Apprehensive. He became absolutely fanatical about security. He moved Bijou and the child further into the hills, and he started expanding his escape routes, setting up a system of provision caches all the way to the eastern side of the mountains, and another one stretching north as far as Williamsport. And he stopped going to town as frequently as he had; he more or less disappeared—”

“He was afraid,” she said. “He’d already lost one woman and he was obsessed with idea of losing another one.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think so. I think it was something else.”

“What?” she said.

“All right. I have to go back to the beginning again. Another story, about a man named Pettis. F. H. Pettis. Pettis was a lawyer in New York. About 1840, he had seen the lucrative possibilities represented by fugitive slaves, and he had begun to advertise in Southern newspapers, offering to track down and return fugitive property for a flat fee of one hundred and twenty dollars, providing the owner would provide a description and pay twenty dollars in advance. I suspect it was just a scheme, and that Pettis had every intention of taking the twenty dollars and forgetting the whole thing, maybe writing back in a month or so that the slave had reached Canada, and was therefore beyond capture, but that, being a good con man, he decided it would be smart to actually capture a few, just to look reliable. Or maybe he was serious about the business all along. It doesn’t really matter, because either way, he made the attempt to locate a few fugitives, and given the fact that there were relatively few blacks in the North and that the laws governing them were so restrictive, requiring all kinds of registration and bonds and so forth, he discovered that tracking down runaways for a hundred and twenty dollars paid better than not tracking them down for twenty. In a year or two, Pettis was legitimate, and his business was expanding to the point that he no longer relied on slave owners’ contacting him, and had developed informants in the larger black communities who kept him abreast of new arrivals. That wasn’t hard—Philadelphia had the largest black community, and there were less than twenty thousand people in it. If Pettis discovered a black who looked to be a runaway, he would scan the wanted posters and newspaper advertisements and eventually come up with a probable owner. Then he would contact that owner and offer to return the slave for a reasonable fee. A third of the slave’s value was the usual amount at the time; Pettis probably got more, but even if he didn’t, that would have been an average $250 a head. It might have ended there, but there is some evidence that he was irked by the amount of money he spent investigating blacks who turned out to be free, and so he began not only to investigate the identities of legitimate owners but to assess the interest of potential ones. That, he found, was formidable. For some years there had been a subtle imbalance in the slave market, with the breeders failing to keep up with increasing demand. The situation in 1840 was not as bad as it was going to be twenty years later, but it was serious enough for Pettis’ inquiries to meet with enthusiastic responses from slaveholders. And so he had gone into the kidnapping business, carefully selecting blacks who were young and strong, but mostly limiting himself to skilled craftsmen or attractive young women—who could be considered craftsmen of a sort—and sending them south.

“By 1847 Pettis had come to be viewed by many a Southern planter as a genteel and civilized alternative to absorbing losses on runaways, and had begun to be called in on cases of missing and valuable slaves long before the black had a chance to get out of the state, let alone out of the South. Pettis had capitalized on this confidence, and had developed a larger and more efficient organization in other Northern urban centers, and in Southern cities as well. And he had cadres of slave catchers, men and dogs trained in the arts of trailing men and capturing them and bringing them back to their owners more or less undamaged. By 1850 he was installed in the minds of the planters as the man to call on to solve any problem involving slave security, from the capture of runaways to the gathering of intelligence regarding planned insurrections, to the activities of the Abolitionists and the Underground Railroad.

“By this time Pettis had reorganized his business, entrusting everyday operations to lieutenants, while restricting his own activities to policy-making and active involvement in only those cases that were particularly unusual, or highly lucrative, or offered the best opportunities for gaining recognition and political advantage. He was hired by slaveholding interests to operate against Haiti, and he was so successful that they asked him to work on the problem of Cuba, and he orchestrated Narciso Lopez’s third expedition, the one that came closest to success. Then, it seems he got tired of foreign adventures, and turned his attention to uncovering slave insurrections. It was a profitable business, and some of the insurrections he exposed probably even existed; one in Texas, for example, in 1856.

“But the things that really interested him were those cases of escape that involved large bodies of slaves. In 1847 he had personally investigated the escape of nearly fifty slaves in Kentucky, and although he met with only partial success, he had developed contacts which made it possible for him to detect and foil a plot of nearly seventy-five slaves to escape the next year. Pettis’ work resulted in the recapture of all seventy-five, the execution of three of them, and the incarceration, for a sentence of twenty years, of the white man who had planned and led the escape. Five years later he was back in Kentucky, investigating the escape of twenty-five slaves from a plantation near the town of Boone City. In 1855 he purchased a plantation in Kentucky, and more or less retired to drink mint juleps and enjoy the revenue from his various enterprises. It would have been that way, probably, but he had two embarrassments in 1856. The first involved the investigation of an alleged slave insurrection in Tennessee; Pettis took personal charge. The black who had been implicated refused to betray his fellow conspirators, or at least, failed to do so before Pettis had whipped him to death, an outcome which Pettis found both embarrassing and frustrating. The second involved the escape of thirty-one slaves—four young men, fifteen women, and twelve children—from a plantation only a few miles from Pettis’ own. The escape was engineered by C.K. Washington.

“Evidently Pettis had known of C.K. Washington for some years, and had no hatred for him. But C.K.’s incursion into his territory turned Pettis’ attitude into one of flaming hatred, and he vowed, publicly, that he would not rest, or allow anyone in his employ to rest, until C.K. Washington had been taken. Not just taken, but taken legally, caught in the act of transporting slaves or aiding and abetting an escape, or some other legitimate violation. And when that happened, Pettis vowed, he would have C.K. hanged. Not lynched, but brought to a legal trial and given a legal sentence of hanging. The vow made headlines all across the South.

“C.K. probably learned about Pettis’ interest in him—he probably knew about Pettis already—on that first trip in 1857. And at the same time he learned how good Pettis’ organization was. Because the handbills that were out, offering a reward for information about him, didn’t just call him C.K. Washington; they described a Negro slave named Brobdingnag, calling himself ‘C.K.,’ escaped from the plantation of one Hammond Washington in 1823, now aged fifty-two years, having light skin and a brand on his shoulder in the shape of the letters
C
and
K.
Pettis had tracked down C.K.’s past. And most important, he had come up with a legal reason to hold C.K. if he was captured. So C.K. probably was more than slightly worried when, in the summer of 1857, the local paper listed F. H. Pettis among the prominent men vacationing at the Springs….”

“He’d found C.K.,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Probably not. Most likely Pettis’ presence was largely a matter of fortune, call it good or bad. While Pettis was dedicated to tracking down C.K., he was also an aging man, plagued by aches and pains. He was also one of the
nouveau riche
, and probably had the usual love of hobnobbing with the rich and the famous. He probably came to the Springs Hotel to take the medicinal waters and swap cigars and brandy with the most powerful men in America—the Supreme Court and President Buchanan and the rest of them. And C.K. probably saw that. But he couldn’t be sure. And maybe he was right not to be. Because if Pettis’ people could nose around the black community and pick up rumors about runaway slaves, they probably had managed to locate a few of the people C.K. had helped to freedom, had managed to figure out the routes they had taken, and had come up with the fact that this area, or western Pennsylvania, anyway, was a common denominator in all that activity. So maybe Pettis was combining business with pleasure. I don’t know. I do know that it had an effect on C.K. He canceled the second and third trips in 1857, and spent his time mapping trails and building redoubts. And he took Lamen and Bijou over the mountain and set them up in a house in Philadelphia. In 1858 he didn’t even plan any trips. He had cooked an extra measure of whiskey the year before, and he laid that away, and then he just hung around in the hills, watching what went on in the South County. He recorded at least thirty-five different incidents in which slaves were hunted down in the mountains and taken back to the South, usually with the help of local bounty hunters and trackers and dogs. The groups were usually fairly small, about four or five people, but there was one that numbered twenty. So any way you look at it, C.K., personally, saw a hundred and fifty slaves dragged back to bondage. He tried to stop it when he could, especially if the groups included a large proportion of women or children, although child escapees were fairly rare. He doesn’t list too many details, he just notes the number of people whom he helped escape. He kept a running total, debits against credits, and at the end of the year he had watched over a hundred more people taken back than he had helped. I think that bothered him. I think he wished that he could go in and help them all, even when it seemed that he would be taken, too, if he failed. I know why he didn’t, and I know he knew why. It’s there in the diary, the logic of it, but it’s obvious, anyway; he had looked around and seen what was happening and sensed that the time for the kind of actions he was involved in was long past, sensed that the forces moving in the land were too ponderous to be deflected or even much affected by a single man, no matter how daring he was. But while he couldn’t do much against slavery, he could do a lot for it; all he had to do was be captured. Because what he had done was turn himself into a symbol of hope to any slave who heard about him, and if the Southerners could capture him they would kill that hope. And so he was careful when he intervened, for good reasons. But I have it in my mind that he hated those good reasons. Or maybe not. Because there was more to it.