The President's Daughter (51 page)

“That would mean that a slave master could bring his ‘movable' property into any state in the North against our will,” I said.

“The Scott decision, my dear, has already put slavery in all the territories. I'm afraid the next step
is
to establish it in all the northern states,” retorted Thor. “In the name of social concord, we are asked to swallow the idea that whoever wants slavery has the right to have it—that the Negro has no share, humble or not, in the Declaration of Independence,” continued Thor. “This notion is blowing out the moral lights around us and preparing us for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.”

“It is never treated as a wrong,” I added petulantly. “What other thing that you consider as a wrong do you deal with like that? Perhaps you
say
it is wrong,
but
President Buchanan never does. You quarrel with anybody who says it is wrong. One must say nothing about slavery
here,
because it is not
here.
You must say nothing about it
there
because it
is
there. I personally cannot live that way.”

“What, then,” said Thor in anguish, “becomes of the Union?”

“The Union splits,” I said.

“Let the division come with violence if necessary, rather than submit to slave power,” Thor added with such vibrato that his voice hung suspended in the air.

“Who made you a Black Republican?” I asked, laughing.

“You,” he said tenderly.

That's why I always count the beginning of the war with Dred Scott. It was Dred Scott who forced white people to admit they considered all Negroes, free or unfree, a fugitive population. A population without a country and without rights. The very definition of black in America was “fugitive.” All blacks in America were fugitive. They themselves made up a fugitive population, ready for oblivion, for invisibility, always running away, crossing borders, frontiers, color bars: a race who couldn't fix themselves anywhere that wasn't a place where they were apt to be gotten rid of, hunted, maltreated, hidden; to be ignored, refused, and unrecognized. And perhaps because I lived in enemy territory, I saw it clearer than darker Negroes—than Thenia or Raphael—or white Americans like Thor or my children.

The dichotomy of my life made clear to me what my white family couldn't
see—we were a nation of fugitives: Irish, Germans, Italians, and Swedes. All in flight from one thing or another, all in quest of my father's idea. Yet only fugitive blacks were considered aliens in their own country. These fugitive Europeans became true-blue Americans in one generation, yet two hundred years of residence had not produced one true-blue American black, as far as they were concerned.

But then the event that truly galvanized the country occurred: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. John Brown was a white radical and Free Soiler, a dedicated abolitionist who heard “voices” and followed them. He had already waged a notorious guerrilla war in Kansas in the cause of Free Soil. And his plan had been to seize government property and incite the slaves in the area to insurrection and the establishment of a stronghold in the southern mountains of Kansas.

On the night of October 14, 1859, with his sons and a small group of followers, he went ahead with his plan and occupied the town. The insurgent army of slaves never appeared simply because he had given them no previous notice—no plan of battle, no provisions, no escape routes. Brown was attacked and defeated by a colonel named Robert E. Lee, who killed ten of the band including three of Brown's sons, but John Brown was taken alive and hanged on December 2, 1859. When I reached my bed, entered, and pulled the covers up over my head, I turned my back to Thor, who slept the sleep of the just. In moments his hand slipped around my waist and pulled me into his embrace. He sighed contentedly, his head nestled in the nape of my neck and my long braid. His gesture was tender, possessive, trusting, and innocent. All the things I felt none of, that night.

Civil war was almost upon us. One could feel it in the tense, suffocating atmosphere of the country. One could hear it in the hysterical shouts and cries of the crowds at political rallies. The war was like a tidal wave held back by a wall of crystal; so much as a whisper would shatter everything. Something bigger, greater, more momentous would take its place.

Lincoln's election convinced the South that it would have to remove the authority of the federal government from its soil by force. Less than three months after the inauguration, the Confederate States of America organized itself, drafted a constitution, and established itself in Montgomery, Alabama. First South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, then Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded from the Union.

Through the long, weary months while Lincoln vacillated over the border
states, the northern pro-slavery press and the merchant and industrial class tried to buy peace for the North by granting concession after concession to the South. The South confined its war efforts to threats and declarations, wearing cockades, and displaying palmettos and rattlesnake flags and their thousands of cannon. Until one day, President Lincoln decided to resupply Major Anderson and his beleaguered garrison at Fort Sumter and the rebel states used their firepower against the flag. That day everything and everyone changed.

Madison and James had come bursting into the Freedman's Protection Committee's office like cannons themselves with the news. “The Rebs have fired on Fort Sumter! Lincoln's declared war! It's in all the papers!” It was April 12, 1861.

Thank God, I thought. The slaveholders themselves had finally saved the cause of abolition from ruin. Our greatest danger had been the monstrous concessions Lincoln had accorded the slave states and the border states in exchange for peace. He had practically begged them upon bended knee to return. He promised not to touch slavery in the Confederate states; to leave it be as it was. He promised the border states to keep the Union as it was, that he would protect the institution of slavery as set forth by the Constitution.

“I have no tears to shed over the fall of Fort Sumter,” I said. “They have spiked their own guns. They have shot off the legs of the compromisers and compelled everybody to choose between patriotic loyalty and pro-slavery treason. God be praised,” I told Emily Gluck that day outside the Freedman's Committee offices. “Lincoln cannot sacrifice the slaves to the Union and thus save it, because there is no longer any hope of saving the Union.”

I turned to Emily. “The South wasn't forced to do this,” I continued. “The government stood waiting, praying to be gracious. Kind. It treated the South's treason as some sort of eccentricity that a few months' patience would probably cure. But all that's changed now.” Thank God.

“Oh, Harriet, our national sin has found us out! No foreign power is about to chastise us, no king, offended by our prosperity, has plotted our destruction: slavery has done it all. Our enemies are of our own household. It is civil war, the worst of all wars.”

“Emily is right,” said Thor that night. “The South has lifted its hand against the government of the United States itself and defied its power. For twenty years we did everything we could to conciliate, gain the favor, and secure the loyalty of the slaveholding class. We've persecuted the Negro, swallowed the
Dred Scott decision, hanged John Brown. We've enacted harder Black Codes, let slave hunters hunt humans like beasts all over the North, repealed the laws designed to prevent the spread of slavery, and in a thousand ways given over our strength, our moral and political influence, to increase the power and ascendancy of slave power. And now, this is our reward—the Confederacy comes with sword, musket, and cannon to overthrow the government. The power we used to crush the Negro has overtaken the white man. The republic has put one end of the chain on the ankle of the slave and the other end around its own neck.”

“How long you think it'll take us to whip the Rebs?” said Madison eagerly. But Thor went on as if he were speaking to himself.

“The American people and the government may refuse to recognize it for a time, but the inexorable logic of events will force upon them in the end the fact that the war that has now befallen us is a war for or against slavery, and that it can never be put down until one or the other of these forces is completely destroyed.”

“Well, Ma,” said James, “you got your wish. We're freeing the slaves.”

“We've bound up the fate of the republic and that of the slave in the same bundle, and the one and the other must survive or perish together. To separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government, to attempt a peace for the whites while leaving the blacks in chains, will be labor lost.”

“Goddamn the Confederacy!” interjected Madison.

But the tone of Thor's voice frightened me. It was the voice of a doctor who had just diagnosed a death by cancer. It was firm, slow, full of compassion, but inexorable, precise, weary, even cruel. This was the longest speech he had ever made about slavery. It was the only one he had ever made in the presence of my sons. The twins were twenty-five years old. Old enough to run. Old enough to fight. Old enough to die.

Outside, people were dancing in the streets. The long agony of waiting and indecision was finally over. Homes, stores, and streetcars were bedecked with banners in the wake of Fort Sumter, and Philadelphia would soon turn into a war city. The President's call for troops set men drilling everywhere. Philadelphia's quota was six regiments. There was no way I could keep Madison, James, Beverly, and Sinclair from volunteering. Sinclair joined the navy and Madison, James, and Beverly joined the Twenty-fourth Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment, which was soon incorporated into the Army of the Potomac. Raphael Boss was not allowed to enlist in the army, but the navy
readily accepted him on the schooner
S. J. Waring.
Soon, regiments in dark blue and light gray were drilling in the streets of Philadelphia. Recruiting centers, hospitals, and the Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon of Philadelphia were doing a booming business. The war would be short. Ninety days. The war would be sweet. The South would return to the Union as it was after having been taught a good lesson in Yankee soldiering.

“Let me tell you something, Mrs. Wellington,” Thenia said. “We are going to beat our slaveholding Virginia cousins. Raphael and Sinclair and the twins and Beverly are going to whip those lily-white asses till they cry ‘Uncle.' “

And then she threw back her head and laughed till she cried. She laughed and her laughter was so much like the breezy colored lady in Market Street Square that two pink cabbage roses grew right out of Thenia's topknot.

The booming wartime city of Philadelphia was soon ungovernable, with its welter of tiny jurisdictions that impeded police work and encouraged the reign of hoodlums like the Moyamensing Killers. Fifty-one other known street gangs of adolescents and young men battled each other for territorial rights on streetcorners, terrorized passersby, and covered walls and fences with scrawled slogans. Pitched battles routinely broke out between the fire department and the gangs. Anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-German, anti-southern riots broke out throughout the city. Several lynchings and near lynchings were reported in Moyamensing; one was that of a Negro married to a white woman. The mayor reorganized the police department to give him maximum control over the city, and he began to enforce the Sunday “blue laws” against liquor sales, newspapers, and amusement parks in accordance with the Quaker principle of the sanctity of the Christian Sabbath. The growth of population as the city girded itself for war was so great that the real-estate market was not old enough to have acquired a reservoir of deteriorating older houses into which the poor might move as the better-off departed. The rich still occupied the center of the city between Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine streets, and the poor had to build houses for themselves in the slums of Kingsensing or Richmond just next to them. Bad streets and the absence of transport obliged workers to live as close as they could to the mills and factories that began to turn out Union uniforms. Domestics and menial workers gathered in the alleys and side streets behind the town houses of their employers. Philadelphia became a teeming anthill of small, low, single-family houses as the city's gridiron expanded into the suburbs and even the countryside to infinity.

At first Philadelphias could scarcely believe that the slavery controversy
had embroiled the country in civil war. Everything southern was still exalted and worshiped. Philadelphias had never imagined the North agitating the slavery question to the extremity of war, because they themselves did not like Negroes. Nothing really changed this attitude, even when armed and uniformed colored troops paraded in the streets.

The war brought Thenia and me closer than we had been since Abraham's death. She had continued running the apothecary and working as a midwife. Her only dream was that somehow she would get to Richmond during the war and be able to search for her family. Already runaway slaves were streaming into Union barracks and forts; most of them were promptly returned to their masters under direct orders from President Lincoln. Only General Frémont in Missouri and General Butler in Maryland had attempted any solution to the problem of fugitives crossing military lines. Frémont simply emancipated them and then conscripted them into the army as laborers, and Butler confiscated them as contraband and set them to work as well.

“If they're property,” said Thenia, “then if they fall into the hands of the enemy, they are the booty of war.”

“Except,” I said, “that this is the only booty that can
walk
into the hands of the enemy.”

The President was furious that his generals had taken the issue into their own hands. He, Lincoln, had no intentions of interfering with slavery in the South. He ordered Frémont to revoke his emancipation decree and Butler to return all the contraband he had confiscated. But the name
contraband
stuck.