Somerset (27 page)

A
tenuous sun continued to shine over the town of Howbutker and the fortunes of the Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts for the next decade. Sunny times of peace and bliss were interspersed with far-off rumblings of war threats and the tragedies natural to the hand of man and nature. The community burgeoned. The region, with Howbutker its hub, continued to draw land-hungry settlers, among them planters from the southern states who believed that if war was declared between the North and the South, its ramifications would not reach Texas. New businesses seemed to spring up monthly in the town and within a few years, the county seat of red-bricked streets and Grecian-columned buildings could boast of having among its professional residents two doctors, three lawyers, an architect, two public school teachers, a steam engineer, and one artist. Other sources of community pride were the three churches, four-room public school, county library, post office, and newspaper building spread along the spoke streets leading to the courthouse circle, but reigning supreme at its commercial axis was the DuMont Emporium.

By force of public demand, the gilt-and-glass, mahogany-and-marble showplace expanded to occupy a city block. In early 1856, prior to Texas's fifth governor, Elisha Marshall Pease, moving into the newly built governor's mansion in Austin, his wife,
Lucadia
, came to visit Henri with hope he could advise her on furnishings for the two-story, buff-colored brick residence of Greek Revival design that she described as a “drafty hull of a place.” The $2,500 allocated by the Texas Legislature for furnishings did not go far, but Henri and Tippy did their best. The amazing results were so admired by those who entered the governor's residence that a society reporter for the
State Gazette
of Austin felt compelled to write that “those embarking on any endeavor of social consequence should first visit the DuMont Emporium in Howbutker, Texas, to consult with its exceptionally astute proprietor and his talented assistant.”

Such remarks added to the store's growing reputation as the final stop and say before purchasing anything from women's undergarments to cutlery for the dining room table. By the end of the decade, Henri's once-upon-a-time two-room general store had become Texas's leading arbiter in fashion apparel and home décor.

The Warwick Lumber Company saw its business expand as well, though its full coffers were due partly to Jeremy's quiet investments in commercial enterprises beyond his first love of mining timber. In 1843, while on a visit to New Orleans where he had taken his wife and brood to visit her parents, he met a New York University professor named Samuel B. Morse. The portrait painter was on a stump to raise money to fund the production of a machine he'd invented, called a telegraph, that could successfully send messages across wires utilizing electricity. Jeremy understood its potential, liked what he heard, and invested in the Morse Telegraph Company. Within six years, his investment had quadrupled and the price of his stock in the company had soared.

Beginning in 1858, Jeremy experienced similar financial rewards when he joined a team of New York financiers to invest in a factory that produced a long-lasting canned milk derivative that needed no refrigeration. The process was developed and patented by a one-time resident of Texas named Gail Borden, who had created the state's first topographical map. The sales of Borden's condensed milk took off and led to the opening of other condensed milk factories in New York and Illinois that generated enormous revenues for the company's initial investors. While the results of these financial risks provided the luxuries his wife so enjoyed, Jeremy considered himself first and foremost a lumberman with continuing faith that one day his company would stand in the forefront of one of the greatest industries in Texas.

Cotton production, and subsequently Somerset and the planter culture, flourished in the 1850s, despite the Panic of 1857 when the era of prosperity in the western and northern parts of the country came to an abrupt if temporary end. Demand for cotton in the United States, Mexico, and Great Britain was at an all-time high, ushering in the golden age of the plantation system and sparing the South and East Texas from the recession that affected other unrelated industries. Somerset led the region in feeding the jaws of the ever-increasing number of northern factories and textile mills that chewed up the raw bales of “white gold” and spun them into cloth. The phrase “Cotton is king” was coined in the middle of the decade, an apt description of a cash crop that accounted for one-half of all U.S. exports and strengthened Silas Toliver's belief that war would never come.

“The North needs the South to keep a stabilized economy, and how in the world can it do that if slavery is abolished?” he would ask to wave away the argument of those who debated otherwise.

While some of the town's leaders and the Tolivers' friends took heart from Silas's confidence, the majority did not. Throughout the decade, the South—to which Texas was aligned tight as a hipbone—endured what the region considered a glove constantly slapped in its face. Books and articles attacking slavery appeared in increasing numbers. The most inflammatory of these was the 1852 publication of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, an anti-slavery novel taken by the free states as a true and accurate depiction of the brutal system on which the South's economy and planter class were built. Harriet Beecher Stowe's work of fiction enraged the pro-​s
lavery
states, which the
Democratic Telegraph and Register
denounced as “flagrantly biased and totally untrue” and further diminished Southern desire for a peaceful settlement of their differences with the North.

Ongoing troubles resulting from the refusal of the free states to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act, enacted in 1850, were another major source of conflict and rubbed raw the South's growing frustration with its Northern neighbors. The new law created a force of federal commissioners empowered to pursue runaway slaves in any state in the U.S. and mandated citizens to assist in their capture. To protect the fugitives, some Northern states reacted by passing Personal Liberty Laws that nullified the federal act and infuriated Southerners who regarded their passage as unconstitutional.

In its state legislatures, the South pondered how it could remain part of a union that blatantly made a mockery of the Constitution's preamble, which clearly stated that the role of government was to “insure domestic tranquility” and “promote the general welfare” when Northern political leaders encouraged the harboring of fugitives, slave insurrections, anti-slavery riots, the spread of biased propaganda, and the undermining of Southern laws. In other words, how could the South continue to abide the North's elected representatives doing everything in their granted powers to destroy its domestic tranquility and general welfare? How could the homeland not stand by the doctrine expressed in the Declaration of Independence that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government”?

The general opinion was that eventually the slave states would have had enough of the high-handed practices of the North and secede from the Union. On Houston Avenue, dubbed “Founders' Row” by residents of lesser distinction, such discussions raised chills along the backbones of mothers, and some fathers, whose sons, should the bugle sound, would be of age and have more reason than any to fight for their heritage and way of life.

But the threat of secession and war talk remained only that, and while the citizens of Howbutker kept an eye on the horizon for clouds of the gathering conflict, they continued to bask in the benevolent sun of prosperity, progress, and relative peace.

There were deaths. In 1853, New Orleans was struck by an epidemic of yellow fever in which over five thousand residents died. Of their number were Camellia Warwick's parents. Attending the funeral, the Warwicks learned that Henry and Giselle Morgan, proprietors of the Winthorp Hotel who had remained friends with Henri's family, had also died from the mosquito-spread virus. In February of 1854, a letter arrived from Eunice Wyndham to inform Jessica that Willie May had “passed away peacefully in her sleep.” Jessica was never to forgive her mother for not telegraphing the news immediately upon Willie May's death so that Tippy could attend the funeral.

On August tenth, 1856, while attending a debutante ball at a Gulf Coast resort on Last Island off southern Louisiana, fifteen-year-old Nanette DuMont was swept out to sea when an Atlantic hurricane engulfed the island. Her body was never recovered. The families were devastated at the loss of the beautiful girl who had been like a daughter to all of them. In honor of her memory, Henri and Bess turned out to pasture her horse Flight O' Fancy that Nanette had ridden in English side-saddle competitions, never to be ridden again.

Tomahawk Lacy rode off to hunt deer in the late fall of 1858 and did not return. Two weeks later, Jeremy headed a search party to scour the woods of the Creek's favorite hunting grounds and found the bloody remains of his body, identified only by his boots and rifle. It was assumed the faithful scout had come to sorrow in the powerful arms and jaws of a grizzly bear.

The founders of Howbutker grieved their losses but rejoiced in the treasures of children and family and friends remaining to them in an age of cholera and malaria and yellow fever, of the still-prevalent threat of Indian attacks and the constant danger of slave uprisings. They took pleasure in the diversions of arranging art shows and musical festivals and theater productions that their fortunes and status required they bring to the community. They had the means and leisure to enjoy books and magazines, reading and poker clubs, parties, dances, and masquerade balls typical of their class. They had the luxury of traveling by improved steam boat and railroad to social events in New Orleans, Houston, and Galveston in a fraction of the time it took to go by horse and coach.

As the 1850s advanced, startling announcements of new inventions such as the sewing machine, the pasteurization of milk, and the rotary washing machine appeared in Howbutker's newspaper, leaving the residents shaking their heads over the marvels of the age in which they were living. Surely no rational country with so brilliant a future would ruin its progress with the outbreak of war, voices of reason maintained.

But as the decade grew to a close, in December of 1859 a firebrand abolitionist who had led a raid on the United States Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was hanged for his intent to provide arms to slaves to mount an armed resistance against their white masters. John Brown had been found guilty of treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five pro-slavery advocates, and instigating a slave rebellion. In the North he was praised as a martyr for the cause of freedom; in the South he was vilified as a madman and a murderer deserving of the hangman's noose. Many important writers of the day—from the South, William Gilmore, Mary Eastman, and John Pendleton Kennedy; and from the North, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman—weighed in with their opinions in defense of or against the hanging, but it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's comments that raised goose pimples over Jessica Toliver's skin. The famous poet predicted of the execution: “This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will soon come.”

I
n August of 1860, a stranger emerged from around the carriage house of the Toliver mansion and addressed Maddie as she was hanging wash on a clothesline. “Mornin', aunty,” he said. “Is the lady of the house at home?”

Maddie had never experienced a white man tipping his hat to her. She had the feeling the man had been hanging around the outbuildings of the grounds for some time watching her and the maids at work on washing day. A thread of suspicion wove through her. There was something not quite proper about him, though she couldn't have put her finger on it. He was a handsome man, presentably dressed in a suit and clean shirt, and had a pleasing manner, perhaps too much so to a black woman. Why had he entered the grounds from the pasture road in back of the house rather than from Houston Avenue?

Maddie responded on impulse, hoping the maids, who had ceased work to give the tall, red-haired stranger their attention, would not dispute her lie. Miss Jessica was alone in the house. “No, suh, she isn't. I be happy to take a message for her.”

“When will she be in?”

“Not for some time, suh.”

The man cast a furtive look at the gazebo, and, alarmed, Maddie wondered if he was considering waiting there for her mistress to return. “Then I suppose I'll have to call again,” he said.

“Your name, suh?”

“It doesn't matter,” he said, moving off quickly.

Maddie waited until she heard the gate creak before returning to the washtubs.

She would have reported the incident to Jessica, but not long after the man had left, she felt faint of heart and sat down in a back porch chair to fan herself. She closed her eyes and released a sigh. One of the maids found her a short while later, her hand still clutching the straw fan, caught in its final movement upon the earth.

In the cries that went up and the hubbub following her death, the man who had appeared mysteriously in the backyard that morning was forgotten, but a store clerk making a delivery by way of the pasture and service road behind the row of mansions spotted him leaving the Toliver property. The clerk, who knew everybody in town, had never seen him before, a position dangerous for strangers in Howbutker at that time. Local forces were about that did not take kindly to persons of unknown identity traveling around the countryside.

In July, a blaze had started in a small drugstore in Dallas and quickly spread to burn down most of the town's business district. In the already charged political atmosphere of secession and war talk, exacerbated by a prolonged heat wave that had tempers soaring, suspicions flared that the fire had been set by abolitionists. Similar fires had already destroyed parts of several Texas towns, and a document had been found and interpreted as proof that their cause was the work of roving bands of radical anti-slavery groups bent on using fire, assassination, and destruction of personal property to influence public opinion against Texas remaining a slave state. The groups were suspected of arranging slave escapes, stealing livestock, burning gins, barns, and fields, and poisoning wells. Fear was rampant that a plot had been hatched for a full-scale slave uprising. The match that had lit the powder keg was the conflagration in Dallas. Paranoia spread, whipped up by newspaper headlines screaming of acts of outrageous vandalism, whether accurate or not, and articles written by excitable editors calling for immediate and merciless punishment of the perpetrators. Overnight, secretive bodies and vigilante groups, acting without jurisprudence, formed to investigate and interrogate anyone suspected of being a slave agitator or supporter of the Northern cause. Hapless parties were subjected to terrifying treatment, and if they were not convincing of their innocence, more times than not they were hanged from the most convenient tree.

The clerk slowed his wagon to take a long look as the man mounted his horse, noting how he pulled his hat farther down on the exposed side of his face as they passed. The wagon driver was little more than a boy and riding alone. He was punier in size than the rider. Otherwise, the clerk would have stopped and questioned him. He must be satisfied with the report he'd take to the leader of the vigilance patrol of which he was a proud member. At the meeting tonight, he would tell Mr. Lorimer Davis about seeing a stranger on the road outside the Tolivers' mansion and keep the fuzzy picture of him clearly inside his head for future identification.

A few weeks later, Jessica joined her reading club in Bess DuMont's Louis XIV–influenced drawing room, her first outing since Maddie's death. In meetings during happier years, social-hour conversation preceding the book discussion revolved around lighthearted subjects. A tacit rule of the club was that depressing topics such as death, health and political issues, complaints of children, husbands, and in-laws be left at home. But today talk of the merits of the fashionable hooped petticoat over heavier, hotter, multiple crinolines could not keep at bay an anxious discussion of rumors that a conspiracy was in the works to arm slaves for a statewide revolt. Unspoken but deeply felt and shared among the planters' wives, the majority in the room, was the terror of sexual assault by black men seeking revenge against their husbands. It was a fear they and their daughters had lived with since marrying into the planter society, and it explained why some of them chose to live in town away from their plantations.

“Lorimer has taken to mandating that all our slaves learn the ten commandments,” Stephanie Davis announced. “He has them recite each one every Sunday morning with stress on ‘Thou shalt not kill.'”

“I'm sure that's very effective,” Bess DuMont commented, winking at Jessica over the rim of her tea glass.

“And more powerful than the example he sets, I'm sure,” Jessica could not resist remarking, but regretted her outburst immediately. She should not have come today. She was in no frame of mind to be sociable. Many concerns weighed heavily upon her heart, and a series of sleepless nights had left her irritable. She felt the pinch of her corset, which she'd taken to discarding when at home, and the wire cage of her new hoop skirt made it impossible to find a comfortable sitting position. The heat in the room was stifling, unrelieved by the constant motion of her fan and the waft from the rotation of the DuMonts' newfangled ceiling units that were somehow driven by a water system that turned the two blades.

“What do you mean?” Stephanie demanded.

“We're all aware of how handy Lorimer is with whip and rope, Stephanie. That's all I'm saying.”

“But implying so much more,” Stephanie rejoined, her eyes snapping. “Most people around here consider the whip and rope tools of justice which we're all aware
your
husband seems opposed to using. Lorimer was so disappointed when Silas refused to join his vigilance patrol. Perhaps he has no interest in keeping peace and order.”

“Perhaps he has no interest in circumventing the law,” Jessica returned.

A shocked silence filled the room. All eyes were upon the two women, who, metaphorically speaking, looked to have removed their dainty gloves for bare-knuckled combat. Not an ice chip tinkled; not a silk skirt rustled.

“I've been meaning to ask, if you'd be so kind to answer, Jessica,” Stephanie continued with no apparent intention of letting the matter drop, “who was your male visitor of a couple of weeks ago? He was not one of us. He was quite unknown to our delivery boy when he saw him skulking out your back fence gate. My husband would like to know. He's interested in strangers in town, especially those who call at the Toliver residence in times like these.”

Jessica set down her tea glass and laid to rest her accordion fan. “Perhaps you'd be kind enough to tell me what you're talking about, Stephanie. There has been no stranger call at our house.”

“Apparently not at the front door. Otherwise, why would he leave from the back gate?”

“I'm sure I couldn't say. Maddie would know, but she has left us.”

“How very convenient.”

“Ladies!” Bess DuMont popped up. “Shall we begin the discussion of
The Mill on the Floss
? I can relate the most divine information about the author, George Eliot.
He
is really a
she
. The author's name is Mary Anne Evans.…”

Jessica wasn't listening. Stephanie may spread gossip, but she didn't create it. Now she recalled that one of the maids had mentioned Maddie having died “right after she talked to a white, red-haired man in the backyard.” In the shock of her grief, Jessica had dismissed the man as probably a vagrant looking for a handout and thought no more about it. Lorimer saw potential abolitionists lurking behind every shrub and tree, and, as Stephanie had not so subtly hinted, must have speculated the worst about the Tolivers' backyard visitor. Jessica would question the maid when she returned home, but good heavens! Had Guy Handley, from wherever he was based now, sent an emissary to enlist her aid for the Northern cause?