The Bride of Texas (30 page)

I was visiting my sick aunt in Dayton when Vallandigham arrived, fresh from Congress.

“You say they gave him ovations?” Ambrose asked bitterly. We had run into each other while I was out for a stroll along the river.

“It was a hero’s triumphal return to his home town,” I said. “No one has ever been welcomed in Ohio like that before.
They fired a cannon in front of the hotel in his honour. I counted the number of salutes for a while, then gave up. They couldn’t stop.”

“I hear the Copperheads had an allegorical float,” he said with evident distaste.

“They did indeed.”

“There was apparently a white man in chains and a Negro standing over him with a bullwhip.”

“It was nothing very original. It was supposed to illustrate Vallandigham’s slogan about the war being waged to free the slave and enslave the white man. But it had very little impact,” I said. “There was a banner over the wagon that said EMANCIPATION IN THE SOUTH — STARVATION IN THE NORTH. The Negro was real, but he was so terrified that the white man in chains had to kick him to make him raise the whip and crack it feebly, and it obviously never connected, and many people must have thought, as did I, that plantation overseers would hardly be that ineffectual.”

“How could he have allowed himself to be used like that?” Ambrose said, shaking his head.

“An editor of the
Dayton Journal
who was at my aunt’s house said they held the Negro’s wife hostage at
The Empire
until the parade was over. I heard that he’d already had some trouble with the Copperheads on a farm near Dayton —”

We stopped by an iron railing where there was a nice view of Cincinnati. The April wind played with the tassel on Ambrose’s sword. I had heard the story of the allegorical Negro’s troubles from Jasmine. He had run away from a Georgia plantation with his wife, with the help of the abolitionists and their Underground Railroad, along the same route Jasmine’s footman would have taken if things had gone according to plan. The abolitionists arranged for the man to work for a farmer named Palme, an abolitionist himself and an exception in
Ohio. Word of the black farmhand spread through the district like wildfire, and a few days after he got his first pay, a mob gathered in Palme’s field — some were white workers, most were just white brawlers — and Palme’s assurance that he was paying the black man the same wages he paid his white hands just added fuel to the fire. The workers who had come to protest low wages for the former slave, which could bring down their own wages, thought equal pay was an insult to the white race. It was an interesting clash of two unacceptable opposites, but it didn’t lead to deeper thinking. On the contrary, the labourers drove the Negro off the farm, and the brawlers tried to pick a fight with the farmer, but he brought out a shotgun. The Negro and his wife went on to make their living in Dayton, doing odd jobs provided to them by militant local Republicans. Now and then the couple also hewed wood for militant Democrats, which was supposed to remind the population of Joshua, chapter nine. Finally they made the Negro play another symbolic part, for the greater glory of Clem Vallandigham, and they even paid him to do it. Of course, they paid him less than the piece of white trash they hired to symbolize the enslavement of the white race.

“They had someone on the float representing Lincoln,” said Ambrose. “I heard it was downright insulting.”

“It made even less impact than the Negro with the whip. Lincoln stood behind him, appearing to approve of how the former slave was whipping the white tramp. But the one playing Lincoln was the shortest of the three on the float. Maybe they don’t have enough tall men in Dayton. They put an extra high top hat on his head, but it collapsed and, all told, it was —”

“I heard they also slandered the president,” Ambrose interrupted. “Speaker after speaker. They called him ‘usurper’, ‘tyrant’, ‘demagogue’, ‘fool’ —”

“The one I liked best was ‘the ugliest head of state in the world’. That may well be the truth.”

Ambrose spun round to face me. “Lorraine,” he said intensely, and then he quoted an article he had memorized. His voice was bitter: “ ‘The miserable imbecile that now disgraces the President’s chair … raw boned, shamble-gaited, bow-legged, knock-kneed … one who has no intellect and less moral nature …’ ” His pink face turned red with rage. “That’s what some of them are saying about Lincoln! The man who bears all this superhuman responsibility on his shoulders! The commander of our brave army, bleeding and dying on the battlefronts!”

He spoke in the clichés of a general, but what is a cliché? Perhaps it’s a truth so truthful it has become self-evident. Of course, to those who never knew blood-soaked hillsides like the one at Marye’s Heights, such truths may mean nothing.

“At the very least, it was in poor taste.” I said.

Once when he was having tea at our house Ambrose showed me a pair of shiny cuff-links. One of them depicted the head of the goddess Liberty on an old copper coin, the other a little snake (it looked more like a worm) with a triangular head, which everyone knows conceals poisonous fangs. I thought of the evening at Eunice Jarrett’s. The symbol had inspired some enterprising soul, because Ambrose handed me an advertisement for the strange cuff-links clipped from the Indianapolis
Daily Sentinel:
“Let every white man accept “the insult” and wear the grand old emblem of Liberty — the Copperhead!”

“Since when is a poisonous snake a symbol of liberty?” I asked. “Our American bald eagle eats those creatures for dinner.”

There were rings of fatigue under Ambrose’s eyes, but he laughed aloud. “You should have been a journalist, Lorraine! That would never have occurred to me. Too bad you aren’t a man!”

“Really?”

“Well, you know what I mean,” he said, his face turning a pleasing red.

“I probably do, even though I’m just a woman,” I said. “And you’re welcome to use that line. Maybe you can inscribe it in some lady’s autograph book, or include it in one of your orders —”

He nodded. I knew the military situation was on his mind. He had just returned from Kentucky two days ago; he’d gone on the urgent request of General Rosecrans, who was currently in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He had needed Ambrose’s units in position along the Cumberland River, down in the south of Kentucky. I learned this from the papers. I only prayed that the Northern papers were delayed in getting to the South.

“I just issued an order,” said Ambrose morosely. “Order Number Thirty-eight. It’s a pity I didn’t come to see you first.”

I had already heard about that order. It had been provoked by a firebrand speech delivered in Hamilton by Vallandigham, who had run for governor and was therefore trying to get himself arrested. As a martyr, he could scarcely fail to win the nomination. My husband commented on Burnside’s order with the word “Ouch!” and then read the order aloud: “All persons found within our lines who commit acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country will be tried as spies or traitors and, if convicted, will suffer death.’ ”

“Somewhat bloodthirsty,” I said, “but of course treason is —”

My husband went right on reading: “… Likewise, anyone declaring sympathy for the enemy will be subject to arrest and trial, with conviction carrying the death penalty or expulsion beyond federal lines ‘into the lines of their friends’.”

The evening of May 4, as I was walking past the central telegraph office in Cincinnati, I saw Ambrose’s chestnut mare tied to the railing outside, its shiny coat as brown as the general’s whiskers. I walked up to the door; WESTERN UNION was stencilled on its glass pane. Inside, Ambrose and his aide were leaning over the telegrapher’s desk. I thought I might be able to have a few words with him, but just then they finished what they were doing and hurried towards the door. Ambrose rushed past without noticing me. They jumped on their horses and galloped off.

Something was up.

Three hours later, I was strolling up and down the platform at the railway station, waiting for Humphrey to arrive from Indianapolis on the eleven-fifteen. Just before eleven, a large unit of soldiers marched onto the platform, led by a captain I had met at a party — Hutton was his name. A short while later, Ambrose and his aide came out of the stationmaster’s office and talked to Hutton, apparently giving him some urgent instructions. I was standing in the shadows so again Ambrose didn’t notice me.

A locomotive with two passenger cars pulled in and Hutton and his men got on board. As the train started moving, Hutton appeared on the rear platform and Ambrose and his aide returned his salute.

When the train had gone, I walked out of the shadows and called his name. “I hope your birdie doesn’t fly away!” I sang out, waving a hand with my fingers crossed. I have to admit, though, I wasn’t much in a singing mood.

Ambrose and his aide looked at me in horrified astonishment. Then the train from Indianapolis pulled into the station
and I had to watch for Humphrey. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see the two men still staring at me, though not for the usual reasons.

I knew that I had witnessed a historical moment.

That night Hutton arrested Vallandigham.

“Do you think Ambrose will have Clem shot?” I asked my husband the next day. Vallandigham was safely under lock and key in a well-guarded room in Bennet House, the most famous hotel in the Middle West. Ambrose, always the gentleman, had had him moved there from the cell at the Kemper barracks, where Hutton had put him. He was being held in comfort, but under arrest all the same.

“With cholerics like your Ambrose,” said my husband, “one never knows.”

“Will you have him shot?” I asked Ambrose the next evening, when I arranged an accidental meeting with him on the street.

He replied with unaccustomed venom, “You don’t shoot rats like Vallandigham. You hang them. And a court of law will decide, not I. But he won’t get the death penalty. We’ll lock him up in a fortress till the war is over.” There was regret in his voice now.

“What a shame,” I remarked.

“I agree,” said Ambrose.

“It would have been a more elegant solution to send him to his friends on the other side. Clem ought to have the mark of Cain put on him.”

“For you it would be the mark of Cain. But not for the Copperheads. Did you see how they rejoiced over Hooker’s
defeat at Chancellorsville? They actually celebrated it, Lorraine!”

Less than two months later, General Meade would defeat Lee’s army at Gettysburg and Grant would put an end to the siege of Vicksburg. The Copperheads would be silenced — once and for all, as it turned out. But back then we couldn’t foresee that.

“It was awful,” I said, “but there’s a good side to it. Vallandigham’s arrest didn’t get nearly as many inflammatory headlines as it would have if Lee had waited another week at Chancellorsville.”

That evening my husband was supposed to speak at the Republican Club in Dayton, but it was cancelled because everyone hurried to watch the fire. In the Dayton
Empire
, the editor, Logan, exhausted the entire inventory of English curses (to the best of my knowledge, of course) to condemn the “infernal insult” of Vallandigham’s arrest. He cursed “the cowardly abolitionist scoundrels” and called on the supporters of peace to defend the civil rights that were jeopardized by the general’s action, even at “the cost of blood and massacre”. Storey, of the Chicago
Times
, added, “at any cost.”

That moved the controversy into the streets, and the “potential treason” — as Ambrose called something he sensed was so, but could not logically define — turned into something that looked like rebellion. Of course, the law books would probably call it civil disobedience rather than treason, just as Thoreau had long before the war, though his purposes had been entirely different. But —

I glanced at Jasmine, who stood by the window, ready to
pour the drinks, and I said to my husband, “Ambrose once spoke rather incoherently about unwritten laws.”

“Such laws are usually dangerous,” said my husband.

“More dangerous than written ones?”

He didn’t reply.

Logan’s invective inflamed the Dayton mob, and the Copperheads poured fuel on that metaphoric fire by distributing free whisky in the many taverns along Main Street. On one side of the street was the
Empire
building, the headquarters of the Democrats, and across the street the
Journal
, where the “Republican nigger-lovers” gathered. Several very drunk defenders of the peace took paper and tar and made turpentine balls, and the metaphorical flames became real. By then it was almost night, and the flaming balls started flying across the street in the darkness, bouncing harmlessly off the walls of the
Journal
building and rolling down the street like fallen comets. But finally one flew through a broken window and vanished inside. In a supernaturally short time, the window looked like a view into the first circle of hell, and shortly afterwards the roof was in flames.

“Diabolical!” I said.

“And it was not without bloodshed, either,” said Ambrose. “Some rascal tried to cut the firemen’s hose and Sergeant Liver-side shot him.”

“Dead?” I asked.

“No,” replied Ambrose. “He was shot in the buttocks.”

I smiled at Jasmine, but she merely lowered her eyes and poured my husband some brandy. Then she withdrew to the window again to watch the May stars — a mournful silhouette, broken
by the news from Chancellorsville. In less than two months she would be able to stand straight again. And two years later: “Write to him before you do anything else, Jasmine.”

“He don’t read, Miz Tracy.”

“Then wait. I’m sure he’s already on his way. He does know where you are, doesn’t he?”

“No, ’cause I didn’t come to work for you till after Fort Sumter. By then I couldn’t get word to him.”

“Wait, I’ll ask Ambrose,” I said impetuously. “He’ll arrange it.”

“General Burnside got more important things to do,” Jasmine said. “No, Miz Tracy. You pay me well, and I saved up for the train fare. I’ll go looking myself.”