How Few Remain (11 page)

St. Louis sprawled for miles along the riverbank. The riverbank had long been its
raison d’être
. On the Mississippi, close to the joining of that river with the Missouri and not too far above the joining with the Ohio, it was at the center of a commerce stretching from Minnesota to New Orleans, from the Appalachians to the Rockies. Railroads had only added to its importance. Smoke belching from the stack of its locomotive, a loaded train chugged north. The engineer blew a long blast on his whistle, apparently from nothing more than high spirits.

Not even the rupture of the Union had for long interrupted St. Louis’ riverine commerce. Many of the steamers chained up at the landing-stages along the stone-fronted levee—no regular wharves here, not with the Mississippi’s level liable to fluctuate so drastically—were Confederate boats, with names like
Vicksburg

Belle, New Orleans Lightning
, and
Albert Sidney Johnston
. The Stars and Bars fluttered proudly at their steins. As they had in the days before the war, they carried tobacco and cotton and rice and indigo up the river, trading them sometimes for wheat and corn, sometimes for iron ore, and sometimes for the products into which that ore was eventually made. The Confederate States had their own factories these days (some of them, to Douglass’ unending mortification, with Negro slaves as labor), but their demand remained greater than their own industry could meet.

Names were not the only way to tell Confederate steamboats from their U.S. counterparts. None of the boats from the United States posted armed guards on deck to keep parts of their crews from escaping. The welcome newly fled blacks would receive in St. Louis was no warmer than anywhere else in the United States, but that did not keep some from trying their luck.

To Douglass’ mingled pride and chagrin, the
Liberty Bell
pulled in alongside one of those Confederate boats, an immense sidewheeler emblazoned with the name
N.B. Forrest
. The escaped slave wondered how his brethren still trapped felt about sailing in a vessel named for a dealer in human flesh who had also proved a successful officer in the war.

One of the guards aboard the
Forrest
, looking over to watch the
Liberty Bell
tie up at the landing-stage, saw Douglass standing at the upper-deck rail. He gaped at the spectacle of a colored man there rather than on the main deck, where the poor and the engine crew spread their blankets. Douglass sent an unpleasant smile his way. The guard was close enough to recognize it as unpleasant. He scowled back, then spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the equally brown Mississippi.

Berthed on the opposite side of the
Liberty Bell
from the Confederate steamboat was the USS
Shiloh
, one of a number of river monitors that made St. Louis their home port. The gunboat’s dark iron armor plating and starkly functional design made a sharp contrast to the
N.B. Forrest’s
gaudy paint and gilding and gloriously rococo woodwork.

Among the crowd waiting at the top of the gently sloping levee for the
Liberty Bell
to disembark her passengers was a small knot of black men in clothes much like Douglass’: undoubtedly the clergymen he was to meet. He hurried back to his cabin to retrieve his carpetbags. He carried them to the gangplank himself. Though porters—immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of
them—were eager enough to assist the whites traveling with him, they were more often than not reluctant to serve a Negro.
How quickly they learn the ways of the land to which they came seeking freedom
, Douglass thought with a bitterness now dull with scar tissue but no less true and real on account of that.

The ministers, by contrast, were eager to relieve him of his burdens. “Thank you, Deacon Younger,” he said as he shook hands with them. “Thank you, Mr. Towler. Good to see you gentlemen—and you, too, of course, Mr. Bass; I don’t mean to forget you—again. It’s been four or five years since I last had the pleasure, has it not?”

“Fo’ years, Mistuh Douglass,” Deacon Daniel Younger answered. “It sho’ enough is a pleasure to set eyes on you again, suh, I tell you truthfully.” Like his colleagues, Younger was a man of education. He wrote well, as Douglass knew. His grammar and vocabulary were first rate. But he, like Towler and Bass, retained most of the intonations of slavery in his speech.

Douglass’ own Negro accent was much less pronounced; as a boy, he’d learned white ways of speaking from his master’s daughter. Over the years, he had seen many times how that made people both white and black take him more seriously. He found it useful and unfortunate at the same time.

“Come on to the carriage wid us,” Washington Towler said. “We’ll take you over to the Planter’s Hotel on Fo’th Street. They know you’re a-comin’, and they will be ready fo’ you.” By that, he meant the hotel wouldn’t make a fuss about having a Negro use one of its rooms for a few days. Douglass, of course, was not just any Negro, either, but as close to a famous Negro as the United States boasted.

The Reverend Henry Bass drove the buggy. He was younger than his two colleagues, both of whom were not far from Douglass’ age. He said, “Don’t know what all the excitement of the past few weeks will do to your crowds, Mistuh Douglass. What has yo’ experience been in the other towns where you were?”

“It would be hard to state a general rule,” Douglass answered. “Some people—by which I mean white people, of course—”

“Oh, of course,” Bass said. He and the other two ministers rolled their eyes at the never-ending indignities of living on sufferance.

“Some people, I say,” Douglass resumed, “take the threat of renewed war as a chance to punish the Confederate States, which works to our advantage. Others, though, continue to make the
Negro the scapegoat for the dissolution of the Union, and because of that discount every word I say.”

“You will see a deal o’ dat last here, I am afraid.” Deacon Daniel Younger’s broad shoulders—the man was built like a barrel—moved up and down as he sighed. “During the war, there were plenty who fought”—he pronounced it
fit
, as did many, black and white, in the West and in the CSA—”to make Missouri a Confederate state. They have made up their minds to be part o’ de Union now, but they are still not easy about it.”

“I remember how Kentucky fell after Lincoln pulled troops east—too little, too late—to try to halt Lee’s army,” Douglass said. “I remember the talk about partitioning Missouri, too, on the order of what was done with Virginia and West Virginia. I thank God you were preserved entire for the United States.”

“We praise Him every day,” Washington Towler said. “Without His help, we should still be slaves ourselves.” Henry Bass pulled up in front of the Planter’s Hotel. Towler pointed to the entrance. “They bought and sold us, Mr. Douglass, right there, even in the days after the war, till emancipation finally became de law of de land.”

The Planter’s Hotel had a Southern look to it even now. Its arches were of a style old-fashioned in the USA, incised into the façade rather than raised in relief from it. Some of the men going in and out wore the white linen suiting common in the warm, muggy South, too, and spoke with drawls: traders up from New Orleans and Memphis, Douglass supposed. They stared at his companions and him as if a nightmare had come to life before their eyes—and so, Douglass hoped, one had.

He took his bags and went into the hotel. As he had on the steamboat, he carried them himself. Maybe the white porters assumed that, despite his clothes, he was a servant. Or maybe, and more likely, they just refused to lower themselves, as they saw it, by serving one of the Negroes who had served their kind for so many long, sorrowful years.

“I am Frederick Douglass,” he said when he reached the front desk. “A room has been reserved in my name.”

He waited for the clerk to shuffle through papers. The fellow lifted up his eyes now and again to stare at Douglass’ dark countenance. What followed was as inevitable as night following day. “I’m sorry, s—” The clerk could not bring himself to say
sir
to a Negro. He started again: “I’m sorry, but I don’t find that reservation.”

“Young man,” Douglass said coldly, “if you do not find it by the time I count ten, I promise you this hotel will be a stench in the nostrils of the entire United States by a week from Tuesday, when my next newspaper column goes out over the wires. Your superiors will not thank you for that. I commence: one, two, three …”

How the clerk stared! And how quickly the missing reservation appeared, as if by magic. Thoroughly cowed, the clerk even browbeat a white bellboy into taking Douglass’ carpetbags from him and carrying them to the room. It was one of the smaller, darker rooms in the hotel, but Douglass had expected nothing better than that. Daniel Younger and his friends had probably been able to book no better.

After supper—which he ate at a table surrounded by empty ones—Henry Bass came by to take him to the Merchants’ Exchange, where he would speak. St. Louis was a handsome city of gray limestone and a sandstone almost as red as brick, though soot dimmed its color on many buildings. The Merchants’ Exchange proved to take up the whole block between Chestnut and Pine on Third Street. “We’ve got plenty of room for a good house, Mr. Douglass,” Bass said. “President Tilden was nominated in the Grand Hall back in ‘76, he was.”

But, when Douglass went into the hall, he was sadly disappointed. Plainly, every Negro in and around St. Louis who could afford a ticket was there. Somber-suited black men and their wives in fancy dresses filled to overflowing the seats allotted to them. Douglass had long prided himself, though, on his reputation for being able to speak to whites as well as blacks. Tonight, it failed him. The bright gaslights shone down on great empty rows of chairs, with here and there a clump of people.

He went ahead with his address; as a professional, he had no other choice. He sounded his familiar themes: tolerance, education, enlightenment, progress, the appropriateness of giving all their due for what they could do, not for the color of their skins. He drew rapturous applause from the Negroes in the hall, and got a polite hearing from the whites.

It could have been worse. He knew that. He’d started riots with his speeches now and again, sometimes meaning to, sometimes not. Tonight, he would have welcomed a riot in place of the near-indifference his white audience showed him. When U.S. whites had nothing else on their minds, they were sometimes willing to
listen to tales of the Negro’s plight and ways by which it might be alleviated. When they were distracted, they might as well have forgotten the USA still held any Negroes.

Once it was finally over, he stood down from the podium. To his surprise, one of the people who came up to speak with him was a gray-bearded white man, a former Army officer whom Douglass, after a bit, recognized from years gone by. “You must not take it to heart, sir,” he said with touching sincerity. “Do remember, our present concern over the Confederate States is also, in its way, concern for your people.”

Douglass smelled liquor on his breath.
No wonder he is so sincere
, the Negro thought.
And no wonder he is a soldier no more, despite having won a couple of battles against the Rebels
. By his rather worn suit, the fellow had made no great success of civilian life.
Liquor again
. But he had done his best to be kind on a dismal evening, and he did have a point of sorts. Exercising forbearance, Douglass said, “Thank you, General Grant.”

III

“Salt Lake City!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Salt Lake City!” The train gave a convulsive jerk—
like a man letting out his last breath
, Abraham Lincoln thought—and came to a stop.

Wearily, Lincoln heaved himself up out of his seat and grabbed his valise and carpetbag. After speaking in Denver and Colorado Springs, in Greeley and Pueblo, in Canon City and Grand Junction, leaving Colorado and coming into Utah Territory was almost like entering a foreign country.

That impression was strengthened when he got out of the Pullman car. An eastbound train was loading as his was unloading. Most of the men filing aboard wore the blue tunics and trousers and black felt hats of the U.S. Army, and were burdened with the impedimenta of the soldier’s trade. As the crisis with the Confederate States worsened, the regulars were being called to the threatened frontiers.