Charleston (16 page)

From 1793 until the collapse of the worldwide cotton market in 1819, Charleston enjoyed prosperity such as it had not seen before and never would again. Lydia Bell was determined to share it. She would not let widowhood drive her into poverty or diminish her social standing. She taught herself what she needed to know to manage Prosperity Hall.

To do this she spent long, exhausting evenings and Sundays with her overseer at Prosperity Hall, Josef Lessard, who came from the French Santee district, where many Saint-Domingue refugees had settled. She forced herself to be Lessard's diligent pupil. Growing up, she'd been a lazy, indifferent student, gaining no more than a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics. Now she pored over ledgers with the overseer, struggling to add and subtract figures from the pages, and, most important, learn how to attach meaning to them.

The effort rewarded her. As she gained confidence and took control of the plantation, crops of cotton and rice brought in large sums. She kept the money in the Crescent Bank founded by Morris Marburg, son of the Hessian soldier. Lydia scorned Jews as a group but set that aside be
cause, in a relatively short time, Morris had established himself as a shrewd steward of depositors' funds. He hadn't abandoned the family bookstore or his father's principles. His clerks continued to resist pressure to keep literature critical of slavery off the shelves.

With newfound wealth Lydia bought more land and slaves. Other planters agreed privately that Mrs. Bell, who had once seemed no more than a pretty ornament, like so many Charleston women, somehow had acquired a head for business very nearly the equal of a man's. They of course didn't repeat the remark to their docile, unaccomplished wives.

To take full advantage of the cotton market South Carolina needed a larger labor force. State law had stopped the importation of slaves in 1787. In 1803 Lydia traveled to Columbia with a Low Country delegation, joining yeoman farmers from up-country to demand reopening of the trade.

By a narrow margin the legislature voted in favor. After December 1803 fresh cargoes from West Africa began to arrive. During the next four and a half years, until the constitutionally mandated abolition of the trade in 1808, nearly fifty thousand men, women, and children were imported and sold on Charleston's vendue blocks. Lydia steadily bought more of this movable property, as it was called, though her fear of dark skins remained undiminished. Lessard dealt with all but the house servants.

Lydia raised her son, Simms, as a landed aristocrat, one of those privileged young men destined to control not only personal wealth but also the machinery of state politics. Forever pop-eyed, young Simms nevertheless emerged as a slender, graceful youth of manly appearance and polished manners. From his earliest days he heard his mother preach that slavery was necessary and good. South Carolina's economy depended on it, as did personal security. The system maintained order and reduced chances of a bloody revolt in a society dominated by a black majority.

Charleston's population in 1800 numbered roughly nine thousand whites and eleven thousand Africans. New laws and regulations recognized the danger in this imbalance.
Negroes were forbidden from assembling in groups of more than seven, except at funerals or with a white person observing them. Public dancing and displays of merriment were prohibited. A slave or freedman could not carry a stick or cane unless he was feeble or blind. After drums beat a tattoo at nine in the evening, any black person still abroad was subject to arrest, a fine, and a flogging. An enlarged City Guard drilled with muskets and bayonets to intimidate anyone tempted to break the rules.

One of the city's newer freedmen was Capt. Joseph Vesey's man Denmark. In 1799 he'd picked a winning number in the East Bay Lottery. Using $600 of the $1,500 prize, he bought his freedom. He then set up a household and carpentry business on Bull Street, where he studied the Bible and quietly preached rebellion.

 

Simms Bell attended Yale College, where he met a lanky, hazel-eyed South Carolinian, John Calhoun, from the Ninety Six district in the northwest part of the state up along the Savannah River. Calhoun was two years ahead of Simms. He came of a pioneering family that had seen some of its members massacred by marauding Cherokees forty years earlier. He'd grown up a farmer's son, educated by itinerant schoolmasters, then at Reverend Moses Waddel's well-regarded Carmel Academy in Appling, Georgia.

Calhoun made no secret of disliking Charleston and its effete planters who never soiled their hands; he worked family land himself. He informed Simms that the epidemics and hurricanes that periodically decimated Charleston were “a curse for her intemperance and debaucheries.”

Simms was in awe of John Calhoun, whose austere appearance and personality set him apart. At six two, with brown hair standing up stiff as a brush and eyes deeply sunken in a craggy face, he had the look of a primitive. There was nothing primitive about his mind or ambition. What he would be in the future, other than a lawyer, was not yet clear, but Simms expected that Mr. Calhoun would amount to something in their home state, if not the nation.
He was already a dedicated Democratic-Republican, intolerant of the Federalist vision of a strong, expanding central government.

Simms didn't share Calhoun's political ambition or his puritanical attitude. Simms became a regular patron of New Haven's dramshops and brothels, assuring his mother by letter that of course he was too busy with studies to indulge in such behavior. After graduation he planned to go home and devote himself to the family lands whose profits he meant to increase, with a corresponding rise in his own comfort and importance.

 

The backdrop for all of this was the new nation, expanding and changing dramatically.

The Federalists who had shaped and secured the Constitution saw their power threatened by the Democratic-Republican party. Its candidates in the election of 1800, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Burr, ascended to the presidency and vice presidency after a tie in the electoral college threw the vote into the House. Philadelphia was no longer the seat of government; Jefferson and Burr took up their duties in Washington.

Napoleon bestrode Europe. War between France and England prompted British interference with neutral shipping that might aid the French. The issue of harassment of American ships and impressment of American seamen grew from an irritant to a potential cause of conflict, at a time when the young nation felt a burgeoning national power and pride. The American navy had humiliated the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and forced an end to extortion of tribute.

In 1811 members of the Eleventh Congress took their seats. A group known as War Hawks advocated hostilities with Britain. One of the War Hawks was Simms's old classmate, John Calhoun.

 

Lydia ignored the threatened crisis, wrongly assuming it would ignore her and her city. She appeared to have
cleansed her conscience of any guilt connected with Edward's death. It was seldom in her thoughts and never in a troubling way.

Distorted scenes from the river dock did appear occasionally in her dreams. More than once she saw Edward trapped in the alligator's jaws, his eyes horrific fires of accusation. She no longer admitted any love for Edward, only hatred. His stiff-necked righteousness had robbed her of what she'd wanted most in all the world, Edward himself.

Then a curious incident changed everything.

Lydia was fifty-two in 1811. The year brought her two great satisfactions. The first was the natural death of Edward's widow, Joanna. Lydia attended the funeral, thought herself coolly treated, but took pleasure in the passing of a rival she'd failed to defeat.

Even more gratifying was her son's announcement that after the sickly season, he planned to wed Miss Bethel Vanderhorst, a pretty, bland young woman from an impeccable family. Lydia approved of the alliance, indeed had urged Simms to pursue it. She knew she could dominate the simpleminded girl and thereby continue to guide her son.

She traveled to New York to shop for wedding finery. She'd made the journey before. She liked the variety of merchandise available in the grubby, noisy city, though she loathed the rude Yankees, who hadn't the sense to hide their rapacious commercialism behind a smile and a pleasantry, as Charleston people did. In a roundabout way she liked New York for its contrast with her home. Charleston's climate and gracious ways were all the more pleasing after exposure to the crudeness of the North.

Because of the international situation sea travel presented dangers beyond the usual ones of weather. Lydia chose to sail to and from New York anyway. It was that or endure a long trip squeezed in a stagecoach, bumping and banging over wretched roads among low-class strangers who smelled bad. After ten days spent in New York's finest emporiums, she sailed south on the sidewheel steamer
Decatur,
named after the hero of the 1804 battle of Tripoli.

On the third day of the voyage the ship plowed through a heavy green sea. Lightning crackled above the yards. Gale winds howled; waves crashed over the bow. Despite that Lydia managed a nap in the late afternoon. When she woke, the ship's violent rolling and pitching had stopped.

She left her tiny cabin eagerly. One of the ship's six passengers, a Methodist pastor, had suffered attacks of seasickness; the smell in the cabin gangway was vile. She went up into the stormy twilight wearing a fine traveling dress of black pongee with a straight Greco-Roman skirt. Cost in New York, $110. However mean the circumstances in which she found herself, Lydia always wanted to represent the very best of Southern society.

According to the captain they should now be off the coast of North Carolina. It was impossible to see land; a fog had settled.
Decatur
moved ahead dead slow, clanging its bell.

She peered across the port rail, then abruptly rubbed her eyes. In the gray-green murk she saw a shape hovering several feet above the waves. It floated slowly toward the ship. A moment later she identified it.

“Edward?”

Water streamed from his chin, elbows, the hem of his coat. Weeds festooned his hair. Bits of scum speckled his face like marks of some foul disease. As he drifted closer, she saw that his eyes were white, without irises. His face was twisted into malevolence, as though the features once so attractive to her had melted like candle wax, then hardened.

She screamed and fainted.

She was discovered on the wet deck a few minutes later and rushed to her cabin. She awoke sweating and trembling. Edward was
alive
. That is, some part of him was alive, mysteriously and malignantly, and had come back to haunt and possibly harm her.

She couldn't have feared him more if he'd been black.

 

Lydia reached Charleston safely but soon went into a decline. Years of suppressed guilt gave way to a persistent
dread of discovery and punishment. It painted permanent gray semicircles under her eyes. She woke in the night, raving and thrashing. She ate normally but lost weight. Simms summoned the learned Dr. Hippocrates Sapp to Prosperity Hall.

Dr. Sapp appeared with the physician's traditional long black coat and gold-headed cane. He questioned Lydia at length, privately. Afterward he told Simms that his mother was quite obviously disturbed but he was baffled as to the cause. Nor would she reveal it. Sapp wrote an order for a calmative containing opium. Lydia learned to gulp it by the spoonful, several times a day.

 

In 1812 the militant congressional junto carried the day. The United States declared war against Britain.

The navy won stunning victories off Nova Scotia, Brazil, the Madeira Islands, then in Lake Erie in 1813. Charleston remained far from the actual fighting but prepared nonetheless, building fortifications on the Neck similar to those in the Revolution. Fifteen artillery pieces guarded White Point, which people began to refer to as the Battery.

 

During this time Lydia alternated between periods of peaceful lucidity and frenetic anxiety. She became increasingly hostile toward the household slaves, regularly accusing them of plotting to poison her food or set the house on fire while she slept. When a pearl earring disappeared from her jewel box, she blamed a fourteen-year-old girl named Aphrodite. Despite the girl's tearful denial Lydia ordered her earlobes slit with a sharp knife. She calmly read a newspaper in another room while the girl screamed.

Days later Aphrodite ran away. She was never caught. Her replacement found the earring in a dark corner of Lydia's wardrobe.

By default, the management of the family's affairs had fallen to Simms, now settled with the phlegmatic and obedient Bethel in a small house of his own not far from
Malvern. There, a daughter, Ouida, was born in 1813, and a son, Gibbes, four years later.

 

The war dramatically improved the fortunes of another Charlestonian, William Lark's son, Crittenden. Crittenden's late mother had taught him to hate Edward Bell's family. From his father he'd inherited a lack of scruples; he was not remotely acquainted with anything resembling morality.

He organized a syndicate to build and outfit a 140-ton privateer,
Saucy Lady,
at a yard on the Wando River. He controlled only a small number of shares in the syndicate, yet he was its motor and ultimately made all the decisions. This was because he was an abrasive, domineering partner and because he sailed with his vessel as supercargo, the only investor brave enough, or greedy enough, to do so.