House Divided (21 page)

Streean took issue with him. “It's right economically, Faunt.”

Trav, surprising them all, argued the point. “I don't believe so, Mister Streean,” he declared. Enid realized that none of them ever addressed Streean less formally than this. Trav went on, faintly uneasy at having entered the discussion, yet standing to his guns: “When they had that fight in Congress last winter over the speakership, because Mr. Sherman and a lot of other Republicans had endorsed Helper's book, I sent to New York for a copy and read it. It's full of statistics. You know I like figures. Of course the book is silly, violent, and—well, silly; but the figures are hard to get around.” He hesitated, then went steadily on: “With free labor in the North and slave labor in the South, the North has gone ahead a lot faster than we have. We send North for just about everything we buy: clothes, furniture, carriages, books. And even in farming, the North is way ahead of us. They grow more per acre than we do, a third more wheat, almost twice as many bushels of oats, twice as much rye, half again as much corn. The North's hay crop is worth more than all our cotton and tobacco and rice and hemp and hay put together. Their crops are worth more and their land is worth more. No, Mister Streean, slavery isn't economically sound.” He added, embarrassed at his own loquacity: “Slavery may be a good thing in other ways—I don't know; but I do know it's not a good thing for the farmer.”

Streean said angrily: “White men can't work in the heat, Trav. They can't stand the sun in the cotton fields; they get malaria, yellow fever, all sorts of diseases.”

Trav shook his head. “You're mistaken, Mister Streean. I know not only white men but white women who work in the fields. I know
some women who even hire out to do field work; and thousands of white men, brought down from the North, work on railroad building and construction and stand the heat better than negroes do.”

Enid thought Trav was simply exasperating. “I suppose you'd like to see ladies picking cotton,” she said sharply; and there was a moment's silence, Trav not replying. Then Faunt said:

“No, Mister Streean, it's not easy to defend slavery. Colonel Lee has emancipated his slaves. I've considered doing the same. If the whole South did it, we'd stand on firmer moral ground.”

“Throw a billion dollars' worth of property away?” Streean spoke in angry challenge.

Trav said earnestly: “You'd enrich the South if you did. Not the planters, of course; but the whole South, yes.” He hesitated. “Well, I'm getting into figures again,” he said apologetically. “But you know mighty few of us own slaves. Only about twenty-five hundred men in the South have over a hundred slaves apiece. You're one of them, Brett, at the Plains; and we have about a hundred and thirty at Great Oak. But only about a third of the families in the South have any slaves at all.”

“They're the families that matter!” Cinda protested.

“Well, we think so,” Trav assented. “We think of ourselves as the South, but we're not. There aren't many of us. There aren't as many of us as there are of the kind of people we call white trash. And in between us and the white trash are people like the men who live around Chimneys, poor as dirt, owning no slaves, working hard, but with mighty little chance to get along.” He flushed awkwardly. “And it's we slave owners who keep them so. They can't compete with us. If it weren't for the slaves, every white man in the South who doesn't own any negroes would be better off—and there are lots more of them than there are of us.”

Enid thought Trav was ridiculous, till Faunt agreed with him. “We exaggerate our own importance. Maybe the real strength of the South lies in the ordinary little people. Individually, they're not much, but there are so many more of them than there are of us.”

“Perhaps that's the trouble, Faunt,” Brett suggested. “There are so many of them they'll take charge and run things if we're not careful. That's the chief reason I mistrust Mr. Lincoln. He wants to let them.”

“I know,” Faunt agreed. “And of course he's wrong. Ordinary men aren't qualified to decide great questions.”

Cinda said sharply: “Well, the politicians haven't been able to decide about slavery, and they've been arguing about it ever since I was a child! Ordinary men couldn't make any worse mess of things.”

Streean spoke to Trav, returning to their difference. “If you think slaves are a losing proposition, why don't you sell them South?” His tone was almost a jeer. “There's a good market for them there.”

Trav did not reply, but Faunt did. “We don't sell our people, Mister Streean.”

Streean laughed. “Why not? Slaves are no different from any other cattle.”

Faunt said mildly: “We don't feel so, Mister Streean. We don't even think of them as slaves. They're our people.”

Enid recognized the rebuke and Streean may have felt it, too, for he retorted: “Names aren't things! Whatever you call them, they're still slaves.” He spoke with a dry rancor. “If you want to quibble, there's mighty little legal difference between a black slave and a white married woman. She and her husband are one person—and he's the person! She can't own property, or bequeath it, without her husband's formal consent; she can't sue or be sued. If her husband whips her she can't testify against him unless he causes her permanent injury! You call them wives, and you call slaves people, but words don't change facts!”

Enid felt cold anger in them all, and Cinda said in a dry tone: “Well, Tilda, you'll have to be careful not to annoy that husband of yours, or he'll take a cowhide to you.” She looked at Brett. “I'm glad you aren't a lawyer, Brett Dewain.”

Brett smiled, spoke to Streean. “From the business point of view, I agree with you,” he said generously. “We can't afford to free our slaves. Taking Great Oak and Belle Vue and Chimneys and the Plains, I suppose the Currain family has half a million dollars or more in—human assets. So abolition would be our ruin.”

Streean nodded. “Of course. Even Abe Lincoln, the greatest fool alive, is willing to leave slavery where it is!”

Faunt said, after a moment: “I've done a lot of thinking, these last two weeks. We have to try to see things straight. What's happened, it
seems to me, is that the frontier has seized political power, North and South. The Gulf States, the Cotton States, are in the saddle here, just as western backwoodsmen like this Lincoln have come to the top in the North. If there is trouble coming, it's because Northerners have been taught to believe they're better than we are, and because we've been taught to believe we're better than they are; and on both sides we're ready to fight to prove it.”

His quiet words left them briefly silent. Tony turned the leaves of the book in his hand. “This fellow Lincoln's ready to fight too, you know,” he said at last. “Here's something he said once, talking to us.” He read: “‘Man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us. If we were fewer in numbers than you, I think that you would whip us; if we were equal, it would likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers, you will make nothing by attempting to master us.' ”

After a moment Brett said quietly: “He's right, of course. Twenty million or so on their side; say six million on ours. No, if it comes to fighting, we'll be beaten.”

Cinda urged: “But, Brett, it isn't just mathematics. You're as bad as Trav about figures. We can whip the North! They're all cowards. All they know is making money.”

Brett said reasonably: “Well, even making money is largely an intelligent balancing of risks. They can beat us. That's a fact. No escaping it.” And after a moment he added: “Unless we can defeat Lincoln.” His voice hardened. “He's a nobody, the hedge-bred son of a squatter and of a woman nobody knows. To nominate such a man for President would be ridiculous if it weren't so damnable! He must be beaten!”

Tony said even the Republicans in Washington were doubtful of success. “And the Democrats think the Northwest will go against him.”

Brett doubted this. “My correspondents in New York don't like Lincoln, but they say he'll carry the Northwest. That region holds a grudge against the South that goes back to Calhoun. He promised to improve navigation on the Mississippi if they'd help admit Texas to the Union, and they did help; but then Mr. Calhoun compromised on the Oregon question, and when President Polk vetoed the Great Lakes
navigation bill Southern Congressmen helped sustain the veto. The Northwest thinks the South betrayed them.”

Streean said cheerfully: “Well, we'll lick Old Abe if we can, Brett; but even if we don't, we'll hold control of Congress. Without Congress there's nothing he can do.”

“Unless—if he's elected—the Gulf States secede,” Brett reminded him. “If they do, their representatives in Congress will have to resign, and there goes our control.”

Cinda rose rebelliously. “We're talking ourselves into a panic. I'm sick of it.” She moved toward the door. Tilda like a shadow followed her, and Enid rose to go with them. As she reached the door, Faunt and Trav spoke both at once, and Faunt yielded.

“Sorry, Trav. Go on.”

So in the hall outside the door Enid, wishing Trav had held his tongue, waited to hear what Faunt had been about to say. Trav, always interested in any point that involved mathematics, explained: “Why, I was just going to say that it's our slaves who give us our strength in Washington. They're counted as population, three-fifths of them. We only have about a third as many voters as the North, but figuring the negroes that way, it's just the same as if every Southerner voted twice. So we've always been strong in Congress. Eleven out of fifteen Presidents have been Southerners.”

Tony remarked: “Lincoln says the same thing in one of his speeches. He claims that because slaves don't vote, they shouldn't be counted.”

Faunt spoke again, in those deep strong tones that Enid had waited to hear. “We had a fight over that same question here in Virginia, in the Constitutional Convention ten years ago.”

“Not on counting the slaves,” Brett objected.

“It amounted to that. Western Virginia wanted representation on the basis of suffrage; and the Piedmont and the Tidewater wanted to base it not only on the number of voters but also on wealth, on taxes paid. Governor Wise was the only prominent eastern man who favored the suffrage basis. We in eastern Virginia called him a ‘modern Jack Cade'; but probably his stand elected him governor.”

Tony commented: “Lincoln will try to make us let the negroes vote—if he's elected.”

Faunt said gravely: “I can't believe even he would want that.”

But Tony stuck to his guns. “You read this book and you'll realize how dangerous he is. He's a nigger-lover, Faunt. He talks about black women in ‘forced concubinage with their masters,' says they ‘become mothers of mulattoes in spite of themselves.'” Enid realized that they did not know she was eavesdropping, and she started to move away, but she heard Tony's casual laugh. “I never had to force a wench. They're so willing they get to be nuisances. I used to send them off from Great Oak to Chimneys, Trav, so Mama wouldn't see too many mulatto babies around and start asking questions.”

On his words a heavy silence fell, and Enid heard someone rise, and she turned to slip away and saw Cinda just descending the stairs. Enid's cheeks burned hot, and she tried to pass, to escape, and Cinda asked sharply:

“Whatever were you doing?”

Enid was so startled that she told the truth. “Listening to something, Faunt——” Then in dismay at her own words she pushed past Cinda and darted upward. From the landing she looked back and saw Cinda watching her with puzzled and uneasy eyes. She closed her door almost in panic, stood with her back against it, her breast rising and falling rapidly. Why had she said that? How much of betrayal was there in her tones?

But then her panic turned to defensive anger. Why should Cinda look at her like that? Hadn't she a right to like Faunt and to admire him if she wanted to? Everyone else liked and admired him; then so would she! Next morning when she and Trav, and Tony who would spend a dutiful day or two with his mother, were ready to depart for Great Oak, she urged Faunt to come with them. She felt Cinda's eyes upon her, and defiantly persisted. Why shouldn't she invite Faunt to Great Oak? Wasn't he Trav's brother? Wasn't Great Oak her home? Let Cinda be horrid if she chose!

Faunt would not come with them; but no matter, she would surely see him soon again.

July–December, 1860

 

T
ONY had enjoyed that discussion with Brett and Faunt and Trav and Streean, when because he was just come from Washington with that biography of Mr. Lincoln he held for a while the center of the stage. There was an intoxication in being listened to, in the fact that these men heard him respectfully; but that intoxication had led him too far, had betrayed him into the remark about Negro women at which the others, in unspoken reprobation, rose and left the room. He saw Streean look back at him in derisive amusement, and Tony damned Streean for grinning, and damned his own loose tongue. When in the past men thus made clear their distaste for something he had said or done, he had pretended he did not care; but at Chimneys he had tasted the respectful attention of his neighbors and liked its flavor. With Brett and Faunt and Trav he would be careful not to offend again.

He paid a brief visit to his mother at Great Oak and then returned to Richmond and spent Sunday with Brett and Cinda there before continuing on his homeward way. After dinner Brett said he must call on Mr. Daniel. “He's the new president of the Fredericksburg railroad,” he explained to Tony. “I've put a good deal of Currain money into that road and I'm thinking of reducing our commitments there. I don't like keeping too many eggs in one basket, so I want to talk things over with him.”

Tony proposed that he go with Brett. “I don't know anything about business, but I might learn.” Brett hesitated, and Tony added almost humbly: “I'll not say anything. You needn't fear I'll embarrass you.”

Brett assented, and they walked together the few blocks to Mr. Dan.
iel's house on Eighth Street near Leigh. Tony, listening to the conversation between these two, felt like a novice admitted to the mysteries of the temple. After the first polite exchanges, Brett came at once to the point. “I'm inclined to think I have too much of an investment in your securities,” he explained. “I bought some of the Ashland land around the hotel for our account when the railroad put it on sale six years ago, but I've disposed of most of that and put the money into the seven percent guaranteed stock; and I did the same thing with the 1857 debt certificates, and I already had some of the London bonds. But if all this talk means anything, if—trouble comes, the company may be in difficulties.”

“If the company finds itself in difficulties, so will Virginia,” Mr. Daniel suggested. “We're thoroughly sound, Mr. Dewain. Operating revenue was a hundred and sixty thousand dollars for the year ending last March. That reduced our London obligations, paid seven percent on all our stock, and left enough to make some needed improvements and to enlarge our equipment. We're laying rail from Fredericksburg to Acquia Creek, we've ten big locomotives and one four-wheeler, twenty-seven cars in good condition to carry passengers and mail, better than a hundred and sixty box cars and flats and stock cars, plenty of cash in the treasury. I don't know where you'll find a better risk.”

Brett said soberly: “War would hit you hard. If Virginia were involved, your territory would be the battle ground.”

“Nonsense! Who looks for war?”

“It may come,” Brett replied. “This presidential campaign isn't just the beginning; it's the culmination of years of accumulated Northern aggression and Southern resentment. It has already destroyed the Democratic party. The South has compromised and yielded and sacrificed; but I doubt whether any concessions we make will satisfy the Republicans in the North. We may have to rely on procedures more stern than compromises and surrenders.”

Mr. Daniel persisted. “I know. I know. The Republicans want to ruin us, and they've picked a good tool in this man Lincoln; a typical border ruffian, a nigger-lover, and a hater of all gentleness and ease and leisure. And the abolition rabble will follow him. But the bank ing interests in the North, the business men, won't let him go too far,
even if he's elected. They have to have our cotton and they know it.”

“You sound like some of my Charleston friends,” Brett admitted. “They say if it comes to a fight, England and France will be on our side—if only to get our cotton. But I tell you they won't, not as long as we cling to slavery. The English are abolitionists too—in spite of the fact that their white laborers are worse off than our black ones.”

“We're crying before we're hurt,” Mr. Daniel argued. “The North hasn't hurt us yet, except with words. Lincoln's election would be a catastrophe, yes; but even if he is elected, Congress will tie his hands.”

“I don't like waiting till we're helpless before we act.” Brett shook his head. “I don't know just what I do think. My emotions get in the way of straight thinking. Politics is strange country to me. But this matter of business——”

So they returned to facts and figures, and Tony watched Brett, seeing the lines of strain and concern around his eyes. He thought Mr. Daniel was not so confident as he pretended; and when at last they walked home again, he suggested this to Brett.

Brett nodded. “Yes, that's true,” he agreed. “There's been so much bitter, passionate talk, we're probably bound to come to blows. I wish more Southerners knew the North as I do, knew its power and capacities. They wouldn't be so ready to believe in our superiority. Nor so ready to hate Northerners. I suppose anyone who begins to be sure that he's a better man than his neighbor is just confessing his own ignorance; and probably it's out of ignorance and the feeling of superiority that goes with it that most wars arise.”

 

When Tony went on his way to Chimneys he looked forward to that homecoming. His neighbors would have many questions; he had much to tell them. In the days after his return, at the mill and the store and the tavern, he found intent listeners for all he had to say; but he quickly realized that there was in these simple men none of that loud belligerence which he had heard in Richmond. Daily achieving by hard toil and careful husbandry a precarious security for themselves and their families, they dreaded change. To challenge the North over slavery, a matter in which they had no personal concern, was a folly they would avoid if they could. Tony, anxious only for their good opinion, readily learned to say the things they wished to hear, putting
into words the thoughts they could not always clearly state themselves.

Here in these quiet mountain coves it was easy to forget, as summer slipped away, the distant tumult of the coming storm. He had a letter from Nell, who said Washington was full of corrupt lobbyists and quarrelling politicians and feverish social gaiety and absurd extravagance. She said one could not, without being ridiculous, appear twice in public in the same gown. Tony smiled understandingly and sent her money. He and Nell had had good years together; she had been completely reasonable about their parting, and to be generous, since Chimneys prospered, was easy. To give Nell money bestowed on him an illusion of magnanimity which he found pleasurable. In Washington he had made no move to get in touch with her, but now he began to regret this.

She wrote again in October to thank him, and she said everyone in Washington was sure, since Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania had gone for Lincoln, that he would be elected. “And the Southern Congressmen all say that means war. If that happens, I shall return to Richmond. My heart and my loyalty are there. Mr. Freedom hasn't sold my house, and I've written him not to do so.”

Tony looked forward to seeing Nell again. She had known how to make him as happy as he had ever been anywhere except here at Chimneys. He might bring her here; might even, for the sake of appearances, marry her. The thought pleased him. If war did come, Chimneys with Nell would be a pleasant haven.

Martinston men so often asked his opinion that he took a conscientious interest in political developments. He went to the great rally of the Constitutional Union party in Salisbury, where Congressman Vance and half a dozen other outstanding men were the morning speakers, and there was a lavish dinner followed by a torchlight procession and more speeches at night. He heard over and over the accusation that such men as Yancey of Alabama and the hotheads of South Carolina were blazing the certain way to ruinous war; and with a developing instinct to take the popular side of any argument, he shouted as loudly as anyone against secession.

Brett, as the business man of the family, always reported to Trav and Faunt and Tony his decisions on matters of finance; and on the news of Lincoln's election he wrote Tony: “So now the uncertainty
is over. I think there's no doubt that the Gulf States will secede. Faunt tells me Colonel Lee says secession is revolution; but most people seem to think peaceful secession will be permitted. I don't. I expect war. So I'm calling in what money we have out at interest, and making no new loans till we see more clearly what is likely to happen.” Tony, reading this, decided to keep ample cash in hand for his own needs before turning over any plantation moneys to Brett. “Now that they've elected Lincoln, the Northern papers seem to be in a panic at what they've done,” Brett continued. “They're all talking peace, all willing to let the South secede if she wants to; but my New York correspondents think Mr. Lincoln will never permit dissolution of the Union if he can help it, and I'm acting on that advice.”

Tony thought Brett's fears were characteristic. Men of business were always cautious, and money was a timid thing. But the solid reality of Chimneys could not be touched by what old Abe Lincoln or any other man did far away. He for a while forgot that distant, angry world in the hilarious activities of the harvest season. For the corn shucking he invited all the neighborhood, and everyone came, men and their wives and their hosts of children. The crisp air was fragrant with the smell of meat cooking over the barbecue pits; there was fiery liquor, enough and to spare; every man with a horse was ready for a race; someone organized a mule race for the Negroes; and at dusk, the day's work done, a fiddle's squeak set every foot tapping. The night was half spent before the last of them departed, and Tony from the big house heard the people still singing, down in the quarter, till pale dawn.

The first hog killing was another saturnalia. Long before day Tony was waked by the glare of many fires, smoke columns glowing red in the dusk of morning; and he heard the whine of grindstones as the knives were sharpened. When he reached the scene he saw huge kettles coming to the boil on every fire; saw the last casks for the scalding being bedded slantwise in the ground; saw the heavy scraping tables ready, and the long racks where hot carcasses would hang to cool.

He and James Fiddler stood clear of the tumult, looking on. Into the pens where the troubled swine, as though scenting death, uneasily milled and grunted, sprang a dozen Negroes. They were naked to the waist, firelight gleaming on their sweating bodies, bright knives in their hands. With an indescribable dexterity they darted to and fro, working
in pairs, catching an ear hold on each victim, driving home with a shrewd twist the long blade, then turning at once to new prey. The stuck pigs, their throats spouting a red fountain, ran at first in panic aimless flight, then slowed to a troubled walk, then stood in stupid bewilderment while their lives drained away; and at first their squeals rose in an ear-splitting crescendo to an intolerable peak of sound, then began to diminish and faded, faded, till the last beast expired. The reek of spilled blood was stifling in the morning air.

Before the last hog was dead, the first of them, dragged by strong hands to the scalding casks, were soused and soused again and thrown upon the tables for the scrape-scrape of the knives. No sooner was one borne away to be hung on the rack than on the tables another took its place. Kerchiefed old women thrust tubs under each hanging carcass; the splitters ripped each open; when the tubs brimmed with shining entrails, fresh tubs were brought. By full day the long racks were heavy with cooling carcasses. Small black boys went to and fro collecting bladders to be dried for Christmas; and by each fire a circle of Negroes squatted, frying pig tails on the blazing coals, thrusting spitted spare ribs into the flames, chewing crisp cracklin'. Every Negro was smeared head to foot with blood or grease; every black face grinned with voracious appetite that hours of gorging would not sate.

Tony went back to the big house, exhausted by the emotional impact of the scene, drained and shaken, vague terror beating like a pulse in his veins. How many hogs had died? Suppose they had been not swine but men? Suppose these lean Negroes, with their red knives, flame-sharp, piercing butter-soft flesh, turned to the butchery of men; yes, even of white men, men like him? He had seen the lust for killing in their gleaming eyes. This was hog-killing time, but suppose from all these years of angry talk came a man-killing time? Would men die as easily as these hogs? How many thousands? How many tens of thousands? The carcasses of these slain hogs would be devoured, but who would eat the carcasses of slain men? Rats? Yes, perhaps even hogs, grunting and gobbling across a stricken battlefield.

 

With the first snows of winter there was a time of leisure and a time for talk; and whenever two men came together this talk was of
the North, of Lincoln and of what when he took office he would do South Carolina was moving toward secession; there was talk of a North Carolina convention to consider the matter. Among his neighbors Tony with all the eloquence he could command opposed it; and when Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, President Buchanan's Secretary of the Interior, came to Raleigh to urge secession, Tony damned the man.

He went from Raleigh to Richmond, on his way to Great Oak for Christmas, and found Vesta and Cinda alone in the house on Fifth Street. Brett and Burr were at the Plains, expected daily. Cinda said Brett was worn out with long anxieties. “He eats and sleeps and talks, but it's just the outside of him that does it. Even when he's here, I feel as though he were a thousand miles away. He never laughs any more.”