Charleston (31 page)

Armed volunteers traveled to Kansas to join the fight. Alex read of a Beaufort contingent, the South Carolina Bloodhounds, taking part in the looting and burning of Lawrence, the territory's free-soil capital. An antislavery broadside carried a sketch of the palmetto flag flying on a Lawrence hotel.

In May 1856 Charles Sumner of Massachusetts rose in the Senate to condemn the situation in “bleeding Kansas.” His oration included an attack on Senator A. P. Butler of South Carolina, full of sexual references. Sumner accused Butler of taking as his mistress “the harlot, slavery.”

A relative of Butler's, Congressman Preston Brooks of the Edgefield district, reacted by stalking into the Senate with cane in hand. He fell on Sumner and beat him senseless at his desk.

Northern papers called Brooks a monster. The South hailed him. Ouida sent a draft of a hundred dollars for the congressman's legal defense fund and contributed to a group of women who commissioned a silver loving cup engraved with Brooks's name and the words
Heros et Martyr
. She came home one afternoon with a scrap of lacquered
wood wrapped in her handkerchief. Breathlessly, she showed it to her husband and her son.

“It's a piece of the cane Congressman Brooks used on Sumner. Folsey Lark's friend Marvin Rayburn sold it to me for ten dollars. His relative in Washington guaranteed its authenticity.”

Xeno Hayward struggled to be patient with her. “Ouida, Marvin Rayburn is a charlatan. A wood shop in Summerville makes those ‘authentic souvenirs.' Rayburn is profiting by duping people.”

“Liar.
Liar
.” She threw the wood at Hayward and ran up the stairs, sobbing. In her haste she dropped her glasses and broke them under her shoe.

Hayward and his son exchanged looks of defeat. They heard Ouida crying and ranting for an hour.

 

In 1857 Chief Justice Taney of the Supreme Court issued his decision in the case of a slave named Dred Scott. Scott had followed his owner, an army officer, from Missouri to free soil in Illinois and then Wisconsin. When Scott's owner died without manumitting his slave, Scott sued to gain his freedom.

Taney's decision said Scott could not seek redress in Federal courts because slaves weren't citizens, nor had they ever been. A slave was property, no different from a milk cow or a hunting dog.

Alex threw the newspaper in the fireplace of the Washington flat she'd shared with Drew. Slavery was destroying the country. Some months later an obscure former congressman and army veteran named Lincoln expressed it tellingly in a widely reprinted speech. He said that a government half slave and half free could not endure, a house divided against itself could not stand.

 

In 1859 John Brown of Kansas raided the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry with the announced purpose of arming a slave revolt. The nation's foremost soldier, Robert E. Lee of Virginia, led troops from Washington to
capture Brown, who was tried and hanged that December. The North had its own hero and martyr.

Brown's failed uprising raised ghosts of Saint-Dominque and Denmark Vesey in Charleston, where Democrats met in April 1860 to choose a national slate. The hotspurs, Gibbes prominent among them, demanded a platform endorsing protection of slavery in new territories. The favored candidate, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, would have none of it. The rancorous convention adjourned after fifty-seven ballots and no decision.

Party regulars reconvened in Baltimore two months later and there nominated Douglas. The separatist radicals put up John Breckinridge of Kentucky on a platform incorporating their demands. Republicans met in Chicago and named Abraham Lincoln as their candidate. Lincoln's views on slavery were not widely known, making him the least controversial candidate.

With the Democratic vote divided Breckinridge had no chance, Douglas only a slightly better one. Gibbes and his crowd saw Lincoln's victory as a signal. With “the black Republican” in the White House there would be no accommodation. The time had come for the action proposed and argued about for two decades.

In December 1860 new rumors of Negro unrest swept the city. Gibbes locked his town house and took Snoo to Prosperity Hall. Ouida followed with her son after Dr. Hayward refused to go. Gibbes then rode up to Columbia, joining twenty-two other Charleston men, the largest delegation at the recently called secession convention.

A smallpox outbreak drove the delegates back down to the coast. On December 20 Gibbes sat in the hall of the St. Andrew's Benevolent Society on Broad Street. The vote for the Ordinance of Secession was unanimous. The delegates adjourned to Institute Hall that evening, to sign the document. Charleston celebrated with bells and horns, music and torchlight parading. The national flag came down, replaced by the palmetto flag.

Six other states quickly followed South Carolina out of the Union. The Confederacy established its capital at Montgomery. The new government demanded the surren
der of all Federal arsenals and forts in the South, most particularly Fort Sumter. In March 1861 a new military commander arrived in the city. General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was one of the many West Point graduates who resigned regular army commissions to serve the Confederacy. A handsome, vain Louisiana Creole, Beauregard charmed the ladies and assured the gentlemen that Sumter would soon be theirs.

Lincoln refused to surrender the harbor fort. He warned that the fate of the nation was not in his hands but in those of his fellow countrymen. Gibbes insisted that Abe the Ape was maneuvering the South into the role of the aggressor, but he welcomed it. Weeks of tense standoff culminated at 4:30
A.M.
on April 12, when Beauregard's shore batteries opened fire on Sumter. After a thirty-four-hour bombardment Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered and prepared to evacuate his garrison. The riven Union was at war.

Charlestonians were jubilant, as they had been on secession night. A tiny minority, including Petigru and Ham Bell, muttered about the folly of taking up arms against the more populous, industrialized North. Most of their contemporaries saw a bright vision of plumed cavaliers galloping off to a short war, ninety days or less. The North had its smoky factories and foundries, its plodding masses of white wage slaves, but the South had cotton on its docks and in its fields—cotton needed by mills across the Atlantic. King Cotton would force diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy in England and Europe. Gibbes was confident of it, Folsey less so.

“I advise you to put your money in gold and bank it in the Bahamas. What do we owe the bastards in Montgomery anyway? You see how they snubbed us. There's not a single Carolina man in the Davis cabinet. Jeff Davis is arrogant and bullheaded. Because he went to the Point and served in Mexico, he thinks he knows more about soldiering than anybody else. He'll drive us down, you mark me.”

Testy, Gibbes said, “I thought you supported a war.”

“I do, absolutely. Because a smart man can use it for profit.”

Gibbes resisted a sally about Folsey's hypocrisy. Later he decided there might be something in the remark about Jeff Davis of Mississippi. The former United States senator and secretary of defense was not well thought of in Carolina. General Beauregard despised him. Gibbes would watch and await developments.

 

Wade Hampton of Millwood Plantation on the Congaree was the third in his family to bear the same illustrious name. He was a state senator from the Richland district and a planter who worked three thousand slaves. After Sumter, Hampton resigned his seat and rapidly raised a mixed force of voltigeurs, cavalry, and horse artillery, the Hampton Legion. Dr. Hayward volunteered as a medical officer, hurried north, and tended the wounded at Manassas, the first battle of the war. The Legion distinguished itself in the rout of Irvin McDowell and his army.

Ouida was indifferent to her husband's patriotism because she'd long ago become indifferent to him. She wasn't so indifferent to their son when he put on a uniform. Cal was a strong, forthright young man with sandy hair and Ouida's pale blue eyes. He seemed blessed with the best traits of his father and, happily, few if any of Ouida's.

Ouida adored her boy. She fell on her knees in prayer the night he announced he was joining up, full of zeal for the fight. “It's like being filled with the Holy Ghost the black folks preach about in their churches,” he told her.

 

The Union blockade of Southern ports presented a rare business opportunity. Among the first to seize it was George Trenholm, who had risen from clerk to senior partner of John Fraser & Company. The firm was one of three interlocked trading houses based in Charleston, New York, and Liverpool. Trenholm offered the services of Fraser, Trenholm of Liverpool as financial agents and underwriters for the Confederacy.

While the Confederate ordnance department rushed to buy arms in England and Europe, Trenholm's Liverpool
branch bought and shipped blankets and bolts of cloth, shoes and medicines—things formerly obtained from the North. Once through the blockade at Charleston, the cargoes were auctioned for sums that more than offset the risk of losing a ship to a Union broadside.

Folsey and others saw the opportunity. Folsey organized Palmetto Traders, sold shares to raise $200,000, and sent a man to Hamilton, Bermuda, to buy an old schooner. “As soon as we auction our first shipment,” he explained to Gibbes, “we'll have credit we can use to borrow more money and build a better, faster ship.” Gibbes had taken Folsey's advice and sequestered funds offshore. He invested $40,000 in Palmetto Traders, becoming the second largest shareholder.

The schooner
Caribe
eluded blockading frigates and gunboats and darted into Charleston under a pale new moon. Her captain brought her through Moffit's Channel with Sullivan's Island lying close on the starboard side. Moffit's was one of two harbor channels navigable by heavy shipping. Continually shifting sandbars that defied charting ruled out entry any other way.

As Folsey prophesied, the auction of
Caribe
's cargo brought Palmetto Traders a profit of forty percent on its investment. Folsey rushed to Richmond, where the Confederate capital had moved in May of 1861, there to romance the ordnance department and secure government shipping contracts.

 

Unlike his partner, Gibbes remained a sincere and ardent secesh. Even so, he didn't step forward as Dr. Hayward and Cal had. He pleaded pressures of business and his age, forty-four. A female friend of Ouida's insulted him by reminding him that Wade Hampton was nearly as old. “Are you a slacker, sir?”

Gibbes heard the canard indirectly as well, more than once. Although the thought of combat terrified him—it terrified any sensible man—he wrote Colonel Hampton, who was accepting replacements for those killed and wounded at Manassas. The Legion, already South Car
olina's elite unit, was the only place Gibbes felt he could serve.

Confident of a favorable response, he bought two smartly tailored uniforms, kissed Snoo good-bye, and caught a train for Virginia. He took with him an elderly house Negro named Oliver to be his valet in the field. Many in the Legion had done the same.

At Petersburg he bought a fine stallion. He searched out the Legion's winter camp, presented himself to the commander, and received a captain's commission. By then he found his valet an encumbrance, so he sent Oliver home. The man ran off to the Union lines, he heard later.

Some in Charleston expressed surprise when Gibbes distinguished himself on the Peninsula in the spring of 1862. In a series of battles Joe Johnston and Bob Lee drove McClellan's army back from within six miles of Richmond. Gibbes fell at Seven Pines, grievously wounded. Infection set in. Surgeons sawed off his left leg below the hip. He survived and was discharged honorably, though he hobbled about with a clumsy wooden limb hinged at the knee.

He received a hero's welcome—banquets, parties, a citation from the mayor. Ouida hated Yankees all the more for what they'd done to her beloved brother, but she was wildly proud of him.

Dr. Xeno Hayward had met an inglorious end on the Peninsula. During the Seven Days, with his orderly shot dead by a sniper, he took over a field ambulance carrying three Confederate wounded. He was driving to the rear on a desolate road when he heard someone cry out in the underbrush. He pulled off and hunted until he found the wounded man—a boy, actually, wearing the bloodied uniform of a Union regiment.

Hayward lifted the boy and carried him back to the sandy road. He approached the ambulance from behind, the boy heavy in his arms. Their combined weight detonated a buried Yankee torpedo. One of the wounded inside the ambulance reported the incident.

When Ouida heard, she refused to grieve or even shed a tear. “It was his fault. He should have let the Yankee die.”

She was far more concerned about Cal, from whom she heard nothing. But he'd never been one to write letters. In the midst of news of titanic battles and appalling loss of life, Cal's silence filled Ouida's days and nights with worry and fear.

 

In the autumn of 1862 the North had a new anthem to replace “John Brown's Body.” People sang and marched to verses by Julia Ward Howe set to an old hymn tune Alex had first heard when she was a child. The melody, played on a wheezy pump organ, had issued from a tiny Negro chapel she and her father were passing on the Savannah highway.